3

Asuna and I, with Agil in tow, stepped through the teleport gate in Algade to visit the very bottom floor: The Town of Beginnings.

We needed to check the Monument of Life found in Blackiron Palace. The first step to contacting Grimlock the blacksmith was ensuring that he was alive to speak to us.

For being springtime, the Town of Beginnings was cloaked in dreariness. This was not just due to the weather parameters—few players strolled the wide streets at night, and it seemed as though the NPC musicians providing BGM were all in a minor-key mood.

I’d heard the rumors: Lately, the Aincrad Liberation Front, largest of the guilds and governing force of the lower floors, had supposedly enacted a night curfew. It sounded like a joke, but based on this, it might be true. The only people we saw were ALF guards, all wearing matching gunmetal armor.

Even worse, the way they raced over when they saw us was nerve-wracking—I felt like a middle-schooler being chastened by police officers. One absolute-zero glare from Asuna was usually enough to send them scurrying.

“No wonder Algade is booming, despite the price of living,” Agil murmured, then noted lowly, “I hear the Army intends to start taxing players.”

“Huh? Taxes?! How do they intend to collect them?”

“I don’t know…Maybe they automatically skim off the top from monster drops.”

“Or maybe they’ll confiscate a portion of your sales.”

Agil and I bickered pointlessly for a while, but once we stepped into the interior of Blackiron Palace, we fell silent.

As the name suggested, the building was a massive structure constructed solely of metal beams and plates, filled with an even colder atmosphere than outside. Even Asuna rubbed her bare arms as she walked ahead of us.

There were no other people inside, probably due to the time. In the middle of the day, the cries were endless, as players came to confirm the deaths of friends and lovers, faced with the cruel horizontal lines striking through the names of the deceased. Tomorrow, the friend and witness of Kains’s death, Yolko, would likely pay her own visit. I, too, had done the same thing, not too far in the past. I still wasn’t completely over that bitter memory.

We quickly strode through the empty hall, which was lit by lanterns with bluish flames. Once we reached the Monument of Life, which stretched for dozens of feet side to side, we looked for the G section of the alphabetized list.

Agil kept walking to the right, while Asuna and I examined the rows of player names, finally finding the right one at the same time.

Grimlock—no line.

“…So he’s still alive.”

“Yep.”

We breathed sighs of relief. Meanwhile, Agil came back from the K block and said, “Kains is indeed dead. Died in the Month of Cherry Blossoms, April 22nd, 6:27 PM.”

“…The date and time match up perfectly. That’s just after we left the restaurant tonight,” Asuna noted. She looked away, her long lashes downcast. Agil and I held a short vigil. We also knew it was the right man, because Yolko had told us how to spell “Kains.”

Once everything was done and we promptly exited Blackiron Palace, the three of us let out held-in breaths. The in-town BGM was now in late-night waltz mode. The NPC shops were all shuttered, and the only light on the streets was from the occasional streetlamp. There were no Army patrols at this hour either, it seemed.

We proceeded silently to the teleport square, at which point Asuna turned around and said, “Let’s begin the search for Grimlock tomorrow.”

“Good idea,” I agreed.

Agil’s powerful brows tilted downward. “You two realize that my main occupation isn’t ‘warrior,’ it’s ‘merchant’…”

“Understood. You are hereby laid off from assistant duty here,” I reassured him, patting him on the back. He grunted a relieved thanks.

Thoughtful Agil was not truly prioritizing his business, nor shirking the responsibility to investigate—he just didn’t want to come face-to-face with the person who crafted that wicked-looking spear. Not out of fear, but out of the possibility that the rage he normally reserved for monsters might explode out of his control.

Agil wished us luck and disappeared through the portal. Asuna needed to return to her guild HQ for a minute, so we decided to call it a day.

“Let’s meet at nine o’clock before the fifty-seventh-floor portal tomorrow. No sleeping in!”

She was like a teacher or an older sister—not that I would know, not having one in real life.

“Fine, fine. And you’d better get a proper night’s sleep. If you need it, I could sleep next to—”

“No, thank you!” the vice commander of the KoB snapped, then spun on her heels and leaped into the portal, leaving only a blur of white and red.

All alone now, I stood in front of the wavering blue gateway, reflecting on the day’s events. It started off as a day with very nice weather, but once I got roped into standing guard over Asuna the Flash’s nap, we ended up having dinner, only to leave early when a sudden murder took place within town, thus thrusting me into the role of detective—or assistant.

Naturally, every day I spent within the floating castle Aincrad was “abnormal,” but now that a year and a half had passed since the start of the deadly game on November 6th, 2022, most of the players—at least in the mid-levels or higher—were able to consciously forget their lives from the real world and engage in a “normal” schedule of swords, battle, gold coins, and dungeons.

But today’s incident had once again drawn me to a kind of abnormality. Perhaps it was the harbinger of some kind of perpetual change to our status quo…

I took a few steps forward into the blue portal. I called out “Lindarth,” the city on the forty-eighth floor where my current lodgings were found, and felt a momentary loss of weight as the portal flashed around me.

When my boots touched ground again on stone of a different color, the surrounding scenery was nothing like the place I’d just been. I’d only set up base in Lindarth about a week earlier, but I liked the canals that ran through the town in every direction, dotted with peaceful waterwheels. Of course, after ten o’clock, the curtain of night had descended here, too, with no blacksmith hammers to be heard.

I was just considering whether I should heed the vice commander’s advice, and get to sleep early, or find an NPC pub for a drink first, when, just steps out of the portal, I was rushed by a group of six or seven players.

At first, I nearly drew my sword. The assumption that one was safe in town, even surrounded by dozens of people, had just been shaken to its core in the last few hours.

But I managed to control my instinct, holding it to just the twitch of a finger. I recognized the faces in this group—they were members of the Divine Dragon Alliance, the largest of the front-line guilds. I found the member who seemed to be the leader of the semicircle and said, “Good evening, Schmitt,” with a smile.

The tall lancer paused for a moment, then spoke quickly, his voice troubled. “We were waiting here, hoping to ask you something, Kirito.”

“Oh yeah? I’m guessing it’s not my birthday or blood type…” I joked automatically. Beneath Schmitt’s sports-captain buzz cut, his thick eyebrows trembled.

As fellow front-line fighters, we weren’t exactly enemies, but the Divine Dragon Alliance and I did not generally see eye to eye. I was probably on better terms with Asuna’s Knights of the Blood.

I couldn’t help but feel that while the KoB’s goal was “beating the game as fast as possible,” the DDA’s particular aim was to “bask in the glory of being the strongest guild.” They didn’t form parties with nonmembers, and they never shared their knowledge of game info. They were also unpleasantly fixated on scoring the Last Attack on every boss—the final blow that gave its winner extra item rewards.

In a way, they were enjoying SAO more than anyone else, so I’d never raised a fuss about them, but I had turned down two invitations to join their guild. So we weren’t particularly close, to say the least.

Even now, as I leaned against the stone wall of the teleport square, surrounded by the seven in a half circle, there was an odd sense of distance between us. It wasn’t quite the “boxing in” harassment method of preventing a player from moving; it was more like a “boxed in by manners” state, where the need to make rude physical contact to break out of the circle kept those concerned with etiquette where they were.

I held in a sigh and offered to Schmitt, “I’ll answer any questions you have. What’s up?”

“It’s about the PK that happened on the fifty-seventh floor tonight.”

Obviously, that had been coming. I nodded and folded my arms, still leaning against the wall, then prompted him to continue with a glance.

“Is it true…that it wasn’t a duel?” he asked in a hushed tone. I thought it over and shrugged.

“At the very least, no one witnessed a victory display screen. I suppose we can’t deny the possibility that somehow everyone present missed it.”

“…”

Schmitt’s square jaw clenched hard. The armored plate at the base of his neck creaked. The DDA members all wore silver plate armor with blue highlights. His lance jutted upward to six feet tall, the guild flag hanging from its sharp point.

After a long silence, he spoke again, even softer this time. “I heard the victim’s name was Kains…Is this correct?”

“That’s what the friend who witnessed the incident said. We went to check at Blackiron Palace, and the date and time matched up.”

I noticed his throat twitch and, for the first time, realized that something was going on. “Did you know him?”

“…It’s none of your business.”

“Hey, you asked your questions, you can’t just ignore mine—” I started to protest, but Schmitt’s bellow cut me off.

“You’re not the police! I understand you’ve been working with the KoB’s vice commander, but you don’t have the right to monopolize that information!”

His voice must have carried all the way to the edge of the plaza. The other members there looked at one another in concern. Apparently Schmitt had rustled them up without giving a full explanation.

Which meant that any likely connection to this incident came not from the DDA as a whole, but from Schmitt himself. I tucked that fact away for future reference. Suddenly, a gauntleted hand was pointing directly at my face.

“I know that you collected the weapon that was used in the PK. You’ve had your turn to examine it; now hand it over.”

“…Oh, come on.”

This was an obvious breach of manners. In SAO, weapons that weren’t equipped on one’s figure reverted to having no ownership rights after three hundred seconds of being left on the ground, or handed to someone else, or left stabbed in a monster, or so on. At that point, it was both system protocol and commonly accepted fact that whomever picked it up next owned it. The black short spear had no listed owner by the time it took Kains’s life. So according to the game system, it now belonged to me.

Demanding another player’s weapon was beyond rude, but on the other hand, that spear was a piece of evidence in a crime, more than it was just a weapon. A small part of me did agree that, as I was neither a policeman nor a soldier, it wasn’t right for me to hog that evidence for myself.

So this time I sighed openly and waved a hand to engage my inventory window. Once the black spear had materialized in my hand, I made a show of jamming it down into the cobblestones between us.

Schmitt faltered back half a step at the tremendous clatter and shower of sparks the metal spear produced.

Looking at it again, I was struck by what a wicked-looking weapon it was—not that it should be a surprise, given that it was designed to kill players. I tore my eyes off the drop counter that only I could see and told the lancer, “I’ll save you the trouble of appraising it. The name of this spear is Guilty Thorn. It was crafted by a blacksmith named Grimlock.”

This time his reaction was unmistakable: Schmitt’s narrow eyes bulged, his mouth fell open, and he let out a rasping moan.

The athlete was undoubtedly connected somehow to the blacksmith Grimlock, and possibly to the victim Kains as well. It was clear that he shared some kind of past with them.

If that past was enough to be a motive to murder Kains, then perhaps my fears that the safe-haven killing was the indiscriminate act of a red player were wrong. I wanted to know what had happened in the past, but I knew Schmitt would never freely say.

As I contemplated what to do next, he reached down with his thick gauntlet and awkwardly pulled the spear out of the ground. He practically swung it against his inventory to stash it away, hurling the thing so as not to touch it any longer than necessary. Afterward, he abruptly turned toward me.

Rather predictably, the lanky lancer’s parting comment was: “And don’t go snooping around about this. Let’s go!”

The members of the Divine Dragon Alliance marched through the teleport gate and disappeared.

Very interesting.