Ayanokouji Kiyotaka
Today was quite windy.
I was currently on a steep climb that most players would consider a waste of time. There were no monsters along this southern path of the 2nd Floor. Instead it was mostly just wind and the threat of fall damage for anyone who got careless. Which, in this game, meant almost everyone.
My boots crunched over loose gravel and frost-dusted grass as I scaled the last incline. The summit wasn't particularly dramatic. A small cave loomed over me—the one that Argo told me was supposed to lead down to an underground river, eventually taking me to the hut where the quest for the <
***
My conversation last night with Argo was fruitful, to say the least.
"...You're kidding," she said, eyes still widened. "You're saying you're... X."
"I'm not saying it. I'm showing you."
The Coat of Midnight rustled slightly as I shifted my weight.
In truth, there wasn't exactly a logical reason for me to reveal this. It introduced unnecessary risk. However, building leverage sometimes requires disclosure of your own personal information.
"Even if that's true... What's stopping you from just ditching me when you get bored? You've already got your reputation for beating the boss. Why're ya bothering to babysit me?"
"Having a reliable source of information is better than temporary loot," I answered. "If I turn tail, like you said, then you can reveal my identity to everyone."
She understood this well. Although I was a hero on the surface, there was still a large amount of the player base that wanted me dead because I supposedly monopolised all the loot.
"Alright, Kiyo. Or X. Whatever," she began. "I'll agree to this crazy setup. You get access to my info, quest details, everything. Fine."
I stayed silent. Her posture suggested there was a catch coming.
"But!" she held up a finger. "I'm drawing a line here, Mr. X. I'm not giving you any info about the beta testers. I won't give you anything about who they are and where they are now. Ya?"
Of course, she still had her own code.
I'd predicted that.
I nodded once. "Acceptable."
Her brow furrowed. She had clearly expected more pushback.
"...That easy, huh?"
"I don't need information about the testers themselves," I said. "Your personal loyalties are irrelevant as long as I get what I want."
"Jeez... You're creepy."
She turned to walk away, but I called out to her, stopping her in her tracks.
"Argo."
"What?"
"I want all the hidden quests you know of on this floor."
"You..."
***
Before me was a hut that looked like it had been abandoned during alpha testing. A perfect hiding place for an obscure quest NPC.
I opened my menu, selected the map, and placed a marker at my current location.
'Another unknown confirmed.'
I approached the hut. The wooden door creaked open on its own, probably triggered by proximity, and the NPC inside blinked up at me from a sitting zen position.
"You want to follow my school?" The NPC said.
"Yes."
"The road of training is long and fraught with peril."
"Mhm."
After accepting the quest, the NPC escorted me out of the hut to a massive boulder at the edge of his stone-lined garden.
"Split this rock with your bare hands," the man said. Then, without warning, he pulled out a brush and began painting on my face.
"What are you doing?" I asked.
"Whiskers," he answered. "Custom demands it. They won't come off until you've completed this quest."
I supposed Argo's whiskers had some connection to this quest. It was entirely possible that she stumbled upon this quest by accident, and liked the whiskers so much that she decided to willingly wear them for aesthetic reasons.
Well, it wouldn't hurt to ask her later.
More importantly...
I turned my attention back to the boulder in front of me.
I took on a stance, then I launched a palm strike aimed at the center of the rock.
Bang!
"Hm... This one's tough."
Suddenly, a ping echoed in my mind. Checking the notification menu, I realized that Argo had messaged me.
[How's it going, Kireimon? Or should I say Kiyomon? Bah ha ha ha!]
I thought it was a little strange for her to be laughing in a text message.
Anyway...
***
The rock refused to yield.
It had been hours.
Not that time mattered to me. I had already ruled out physical strikes within the first fifty attempts. Each blow had achieved nothing beyond sore palms and an amusing visual record of futility. Apparently, even though my physical strength stat was higher than most players, it still didn't suffice.
The rock could definitely be destroyed, but the durability was so absurdly high that it might as well have been an Immortal Object. There was only one reason for an object like this to exist in a game like SAO.
You're not meant to break it through conventional means.
A sudden gust of wind blew across the summit. It was later in the afternoon by now, meaning the overall temperature was colder.
I turned toward the eastern slope and faintly saw a lake a few dozen meters down, nestled between a cluster of pine trees.
...That would do.
The answer clicked into place.
Though I wasn't sure if SAO had replicated real-life physics to the degree I was thinking of, it was worth a try.
I stood and opened the system menu. A quick navigation to the camping tab gave me what I needed.
[Yes.]
A blue-white shimmer coalesced on the grass as a small fire pit appeared, fully formed and prepared for ignition.
I placed another.
Then another.
Within ten minutes, I had built a tight perimeter of eight campfires around the rock. The heat was minimal individually, but because they were in close proximity, the combined heat should have been enough to heat up the boulder evenly.
Using a system prompt, I lit up the fire pits, and the area around the boulder turned into a huge bonfire. I didn't have to worry about burning anything since the game had measures in place to prevent griefing.
After waiting for an hour, a reddish hue was forming along the base of the boulder where two flames overlapped.
Using all my strength, I pushed the boulder. The ground scraped as it tipped toward the edge of the slope. The combination of the fires and the pulse gave it just enough momentum to start a gradual roll.
Then gravity took over.
Stone met slope.
I watched it tumble awkwardly, bouncing once before hitting the lake's edge. And then, with a final splash, it crashed into the shallows and submerged halfway into the cold water.
Seconds passed.
Then—
Crack.
A sound like splintering ice echoed across the mountain.
A fracture line appeared down the rock's center.
Usually, submerging a hot object in water causes a gradual temperature exchange—the object cools, and the water warms, equalizing over time. In this game however, the water from natural sources like lakes and rivers didn't obey thermodynamics.
This was just a hypothesis of mine, but the water in SAO is probably system-stabilized 24/7, meaning its temperature isn't affected by external input. No matter what enters it, the system instantly resets the foreign temperature to match the preset constant. That means there's no gradual temperature change, but rather, only an immediate override.
When the heated boulder entered the lake, the system forcibly reset its surface temperature to match the cold water's, creating a violent contraction across its overheated outer layer.
That rapid conflict was enough to fracture the stone on contact.
Thermal shock.
The old man NPC emerged from the hut with surprising speed, squinting down the slope toward the lake.
"...Well, I'll be damned. Never seen it split like that."
He turned to me, one eyebrow raised.
"You didn't even hit it, did you?"
"No," I replied.
"That's a first. I suppose there's more than one way to earn the strength of your own two hands."
I didn't respond.
After wiping the whiskers off of my face with a soft cloth, the NPC wandered back into his hut. A notification had popped up in my vision, indicating that I'd cleared the quest.
[Quest Completed - Obtained Extra Skill: Martial Arts]
I opened my skills tab and tapped the new entry.
"Better than I thought," I muttered.
Unlike sword skills, which activated in strict arcs and timing, martial arts techniques allowed more freedom. They were flexible and closer to real-world combat, allowing it to be chained with normal movement rather than locking the body into a rigid animation.
That opened up possibilities. I could interrupt enemy attacks mid-animation, strike between sword skill recovery windows, and even mislead opponents by blending physical feints.
As expected, a separate list of unarmed techniques had appeared. If I was going to integrate these with sword techniques, I needed to understand them.
[Embracer.]
A one-hit piercing move using the fingers to strike. It looked almost laughable at first, but the precision targeting meant it could ignore light armor and land criticals on weak points, provided the user could read enemy animations. It was ideal for interrupting skill chains or finishing off stunned targets.
[Gengetsu – Crescent Moon.]
A backflip kick. The description was sparse, but it was good for backward evasion while launching a counter-strike. There were possibly high invincibility frames during the flip as well. It wasn't marked with a combo number, which likely meant it wasn't part of an automatic chain.
[Haganeri – Steel Tempering.]
Now this was interesting, although it was greyed out, meaning locked. It was a defensive skill that turned the entire body harder than full plate armor for exactly one second, but it only worked while unarmed and wearing non-metallic armor.
It seemed useless in a standard sword duel... but perfect for baiting a heavy hitter. Time it right, and I could tank a supposedly fatal strike and come out untouched.
[Senda – Flash Blow.]
The basic lunging skill. A short-range, high-speed dash attack with a single unarmed blow. It was useful for opening or closing distance without triggering full sword skill delays.
[Suigetsu – Water Moon.]
A standard roundhouse kick. High lateral range, possibly useful for dealing with multiple enemies or circling targets.
I closed the menu and turned to leave, then I suddenly remembered something.
"I suppose I should thank her," I said to myself.
I opened the socials tab on my menu and messaged Argo.
[Thanks for the quest by the way. I managed to complete it.]
[HUH???]
***
"You seem out of breath. Did you really not believe me when I said I completed the quest?"
Lanterns below swayed gently in the wind with their amber glow cutting through the night like isolated islands of warmth. Above it all, I sat perched on a tavern's rooftop with my legs crossed.
Argo came to a stop beside me, with hands on her hips. "You talk a big game, Kiyo. I had to see for myself."
She leaned over slightly, examining my face.
"Huh. Whisker-free. Guess you're not bluffin'."
I tilted my head just enough to meet her gaze. "Disappointed?"
"Tch. You're insufferable."
I didn't respond. She eventually sat beside me with her knees drawn up. Her short tailcoat flared slightly in the breeze.
I wasn't bothered to fill the sudden silence that stretched between us, so I watched the crowd instead.
"Still playing shadow?" she asked. "Or did you just invite me here to gloat about your new knuckle tricks?"
"Neither," I said. "Though you might want to update your guidebook soon. That NPC's hut won't stay hidden for long."
"You don't find out about it until floor seven unless you're a beta tester. So it's fine," she replied, then followed my gaze down into the plaza.
We watched in silence as a group of players passed by. It was a cluster of five or six. They were decently levelled, and geared in scavenged leathers and mismatched blades.
But I could hear their voices, and I assumed Argo could too. Angry and bitter.
"...bastards knew everything from the start..."
"...betas hoarding info again..."
"...if I see that whisker freak, I'll gut her myself..."
Argo didn't flinch, but her jaw tightened. Though most wouldn't have noticed unless you looked closely.
"I assume this has been escalating," I said
"Yeah," she muttered.
"Because of someone named X?" I asked, though I already knew the answer.
She gave a short, humorless laugh. "Of course. That someone clears the Labyrinth solo and then drops a bomb on my guidebook. People didn't even care if the info was wrong before, but now it's the only thing they can focus on."
"So you're aware that I'm the one who put you into this situation. I'm the one who manipulated the player base just to get you on my side. So you must dislike me, yes?"
"To be real, yep. I don't like you," she replied bluntly, sounding quite resigned. "But what can I do at this point? I have no choice but to follow you."
Silence followed once again.
"You should consider withdrawing," I said.
"Huh?"
"I mean you should go underground and lay low, at least until we figure out how far this is going to spread," I said, opening my menu, going to the socials tab and opening up my direct messages with a specific person. "There are at least three informal groups organizing under the surface. They don't call themselves guilds yet, but it won't be long. Right now, they're just small hunting parties focused on rooting out beta testers."
Argo looked at me, wide-eyed. "So they're already making moves, huh. And where did you get all of this info from?"
I tapped the air with two fingers and opened a message thread. At the top was a name Argo would have probably recognized since she was also a beta tester, but the conversation beneath it was long. Pages of it, in fact.
For the last few days, I had him gather info on the mob of anti-beta players for me.
"I've had eyes on them for a while," I said. "He's a beta tester that I got acquainted with who tipped me off."
Her eyes narrowed. "Acquainted?"
"Yes. Let's call it... a reluctant source. He owed me a favor, you see."
That was putting it generously. It was more like he gave in under pressure when presented with a certain audio recording from a crystal. But Argo didn't need to know that.
"They operate in private parties for now, and they've also already tracked down at least two other beta players," I continued
Argo cursed under her breath. Her hand instinctively went to the dagger strapped to her belt, like it would help her from up here.
"Not just that, but the majority of the people from this...cult, are not only tracking the beta-testers for resources, but a good number of rogues are killing people. Even if they have the slightest suspicion of a person being a beta-tester."
Argo narrowed her eyes in return. Then, probably realizing where I was getting at, her eyes widened.
"That's..."
"I think you understand the bigger picture here," I continued. "Soon the beta-tester man-hunt would become an excuse for them to kill anyone, anywhere for literally no reason."
"So you're saying, they'll become Player Killers... And why are you telling me this?" she asked.
She turned fully toward me now. Her usual snark was gone, and was now replaced by suspicion, maybe even a hint of frustration.
"I thought this is what you wanted," she continued. "You stirred all this up and got the mob foaming at the mouth, then painted a giant target on my back. All so I'd 'cooperate' with you. So what's changed?"
"If chaos takes root, everything becomes unpredictable," I answered. "And the people who could keep others alive will be silenced out of fear or hunted into extinction. Then, the player base will eventually fall into ruin. That's far from ideal."
"Didn't think you were the type to care about ethics. Besides, you're strong. You could put an end to this early on if you wanted."
"I don't, really," I said. "I need someone else to carry the mantle of the hero."
She didn't reply, probably confused by my words.
"So," I said, "I'm going to infiltrate them myself so that I can keep them under control."
Argo didn't move right away. Her gaze lingered on me a little longer, and I could tell she was on guard even though we were in a safe zone.
"If you put this whole anti-beta mess to bed... then I won't have a reason to follow you anymore, you know?"
I didn't respond immediately. I just looked up at her.
"You're right. You won't."
She turned to go, but I spoke, stopping Argo in her tracks. "But don't forget."
She froze.
"I am X, remember?" I said, voice even. "Everyone will listen to me, whether they trust me or hate me. If I wanted to, I could light that fire again and point them wherever I want."
Slowly, she turned her head back toward me.
"It's not a threat. I'm reminding you that as long as I'm the one holding the match, it's better we stay aligned," I clarified.
"You really are insufferable."
*************************
AN:
Hallo. Well, we usually average on about 5K words, but today it's around 2K words less. Honestly, this chapter was supposed to be an interlude to the conversation, but that made it even shorter, so we had to add the trial. That said, the next chapter will compensate for it. Thanks for reading. Tchüss.