4

“The DDA?” Asuna repeated suspiciously, when I told her what had happened.

Those three letters were normally a source of fear and consternation, the kind of threat a parent would conjure to shut up a crying child, but as the vice commander of the KoB, Asuna was completely unaffected by them.

On the twenty-third day of the Month of Cherry Blossoms, the weather parameters were in a foul mood, and the morning was shrouded in thick fog and rain. Given that the only thing overhead in Aincrad was just the bottom of the next floor up, it didn’t seem very fair that it could rain on us—but then again, the same thing applied to the ample sunlight we got over the course of a day.

After meeting at nine o’clock on the dot at the fifty-seventh floor’s teleport square—where the previous day’s incident had occurred—Asuna and I headed for a nearby open café for breakfast so that we could reexamine the information. Naturally, the biggest topic of discussion was Schmitt of the DDA, who had ambushed me last night and all but seized the weapon and details from me.

“Oh, yes, I remember him. The big lancer?”

“That’s the one. He looks like the captain of a high school jousting team.”

“That’s not a real thing,” she snapped, ruining my brilliant joke, then picked up her café au lait and considered the information. “I suppose we can rule him out of being the killer?”

“It’s dangerous to make assumptions, but I don’t think it’s him. If he wanted to retrieve the weapon to cover his tracks, he wouldn’t have left it in the square to begin with. If anything, I think that spear was a message from the killer.”

“I see…Good point. The way the murder happened, plus the name of the weapon…It seems less like an extravagant PK than a public execution,” Asuna muttered, looking gloomy. I had to agree.

This was not indiscriminate PKing, but an execution specifically targeting Kains. And something had happened in the past involving Kains, Grimlock, and Schmitt. I delivered my conclusion in hushed tones.

“Meaning the motive was either vengeance or justice. Kains committed some ‘crime’ in the past, and this was his righteous punishment, the killer would have us believe.”

“In which case, Schmitt isn’t the culprit behind the murder, but among the targeted. He did that something with Kains, and when Kains turned up dead, he panicked…”

“If we figure out what that something is, I think we’ll know who the person swearing vengeance is. But it’s also possible that this was all an act by the killer. We’ve got to be careful not to act on assumptions.”

“True. Especially when we talk to Yolko,” Asuna agreed. I checked the time. At ten o’clock, we were going to meet Yolko at a nearby inn to go over more details about the incident.

Even after our simple breakfast of black bread and vegetable soup, we had plenty of time yet, so I sat back and gazed at the figure of the KoB’s vice commander across from me.

Today she wasn’t wearing her usual uniform of red on white, probably because it was a personal matter she was on. She wore a shirt with narrow pink and gray stripes and a black leather vest, a black frilly miniskirt, and shining gray tights.

Her shoes were pink enamel, and her beret was pink as well, which made her whole outfit look very carefully coordinated—but whether this was intentional or just ordinary feminine attention to fashion was something I was sadly unable to determine, what with my own lack of fashion sense. I couldn’t even tell if it were an expensive outfit or not. Though it didn’t track that she would dress up for a murder investigation…

Suddenly, Asuna looked up and met my gaze, only to quickly turn away. “What are you looking at?”

“Uh…er, well…”

I couldn’t just ask her how much her outfit cost, and I could tell that complimenting her on it would just lead to an explosion of anger, so instead I improvised. “Umm…is that thick, drippy stuff good?”

Asuna looked down at the mystery potage she was stirring, looked back at me with a very odd expression on her face, and heaved a deep sigh.

“…It’s not very good,” she mumbled, pushing her dish to the side. She cleared her throat and assumed a more officious tone.

“I was thinking, late last night. About the penetration DOT on that black spear…”

I nodded, suddenly realizing that it might be the first time I’d ever seen her without her usual rapier equipped. “Yeah?”

“Could he have been hit with the piercing weapon out in the field? Do you know what would happen if you moved into a safe haven while the effect was active?”

“Uh…”

I had to think. I’d never experienced that situation; I’d never even thought about it.

“I don’t know. But…DOT from poison or burns disappears the moment you step into the safe-haven zone, right? Wouldn’t piercing damage work the same way?”

“But what happens to the weapon piercing you, in that case? Does it automatically come out?”

“That’s a creepy thought…All right, we’ve got some time to kill; let’s do an experiment,” I suggested. Her eyes bulged.

“E-experiment?!”

“Picture’s worth a thousand words,” I offered ominously, getting to my feet and checking my town map for the nearest gate.

Right outside of Marten, the main city of the fifty-seventh floor, was a field dotted by the occasional gnarled old oak. I’d passed down this road plenty of times just a few weeks ago when this was the front line of our progress, but my memory of it was already dim. Of course, it did look different now with the greenery blooming in the spring, but in general, front-line players didn’t have much use for the wild terrain of floors they’d already beaten.

The moment we walked out of the gate into the drizzling mist, a warning reading OUTSIDE FIELD appeared in my view. It didn’t mean that monsters would immediately begin attacking, but it always caused a part of my mind to automatically tense and grow watchful.

Now that Asuna had her familiar rapier equipped again, she brushed aside the drops collecting on her bangs and asked suspiciously, “So how are you going to do this experiment?”

“Like this.”

I felt around on my belt for the throwing picks I always kept there, three at a time, and pulled out one. Every weapon in Aincrad corresponded to one of four damage types: slashing, thrusting, blunt, and piercing. The one-handed sword I used all the time was a slashing weapon, while Asuna’s rapier was thrusting. Maces and hammers were blunt weapons, while Schmitt’s lance and the spear that killed Kains were piercing.

What was a little harder to tell was how the many throwing weapons fit into this system. Even in the same category, boomerangs and chakrams were slashing, throwing daggers were thrusting, and my throwing picks fell under piercing. It might only look like a foot-long needle, but the throwing pick was a perfectly good piercing weapon capable of inflicting a small damage-over-time effect.

I didn’t mind sacrificing some HP for the experiment, but it would be foolish to lose armor durability over it, so I took off my left glove and aimed the pick at the back of my hand.

“W-wait, stop!” Asuna shrieked, causing me to flinch. To my surprise, she was opening her inventory to pull out a very expensive healing crystal.

“Oh, don’t be dramatic. This pick will only take a percent or two off of my total HP.”

“You idiot! You don’t know what might happen out in the field! Form a party with me so I can see your HP bar!” she thundered, like a sister scolding her little brother, then hit a few buttons to send me a party request. I meekly accepted, and below my HP gauge, a smaller one representing Asuna’s appeared.

I realized it was the first time I’d ever been in a party with her. We’d met many times, owing to our positions among the game’s best players, but she was a senior officer of the game’s most powerful guild, and I was just an outcast solo player. We had hardly ever even spoken before this.

And yet here we were, forming a party of just two. And it wasn’t that long ago that we’d had a one-on-one duel because of an argument about boss tactics. Now she was looking on nervously, a pink crystal clutched in her hand. I couldn’t help but stare at her.

“…What?”

“’S nothing, I just…didn’t think you’d be so worried for my sake…”

To my surprise, as soon as I said it, her white cheeks went the color of the crystal in her hand. She promptly summoned a bolt of angry lightning.

“Th-that’s not true! W-well, it is, but…Just do it already!!”

With a little shiver, I readied the pick again. “A-all right, here goes,” I announced, took a deep breath—and made the motion for the starter throwing weapon skill, Single Shot.

The pick began to glow with a faint effect between my two fingers, and it shot straight forward, piercing the back of my left hand. After the initial shock, I felt an unpleasant numbness and a dull pain.

My HP bar lost more than I expected: about 3 percent off its total. I remembered belatedly that I’d equipped a new, rarer set of picks I’d looted recently.

As the pain continued, I watched the spot where the needle was sticking out of the skin. After five seconds, there was another flash of red light, and I lost about half a percent of HP. This was the same piercing DOT effect that stole Kains’s life.

“Get in the safe zone already!” Asuna snapped nervously. I nodded, glanced at my HP bar and the pick, then headed for the nearby town gate. When my boots crossed from soggy grass to hard stone, the notice reading SAFE HAVEN appeared.

My HP bar stopped decreasing.

The red effect was still flashing every five seconds, but my hit points weren’t decreasing at all. The safe haven ensured that all damage was nullified.

“…It stopped,” Asuna stated, and I nodded.

“Weapon’s still stuck good, but the damage has stopped.”

“Do you feel it?”

“Yeah, the sensation is there. I guess that’s probably to ensure that no idiot can wander around the town without realizing that there’s still a weapon stuck in them…”

“Meaning you?” she asked drily. I shrugged and yanked out the pick, grimacing at the fresh discomfort. There were no external wounds on the back of my hand, but the cold metal sensation was still there. I blew on it a few times.

“So the damage is gone…” I muttered. “But then, why did Kains die? Was it a special effect of that weapon…or some skill we don’t know about ye—Wh-whoa!!”

The shout at the end was because Asuna had grabbed my left hand with both of hers and clenched it tight to her chest.

“What the…What…are you…”

After a few seconds, the vice commander let go and shot me a sideways glance. “That got rid of the sensation, didn’t it?”

“…Uh…yes…it did. Thanks.”

The only reason my heart was racing was the suddenness of it all.

Yes, it definitely wasn’t anything else.

Yolko emerged from her inn at exactly ten o’clock on the dot. She must not have slept much, because she was blinking a lot as she bowed to the two of us.

I bowed back and said, “Sorry to keep dredging this up for you, right when you’re dealing with the passing of a friend…”

“It’s all right,” the slightly older girl mumbled, shaking her blue-black hair. “I just want you to catch whomever did this…”

But the moment she caught sight of Asuna, her eyes widened. “Ooh, wow! Those are all handmade items from Ashley’s store, aren’t they? I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone with an entire outfit!”

I didn’t recognize that name, so I asked, “Who is that?”

“You don’t know?!” Yolko said, stunned, looking at me like I was wasting my life. “Ashley is the first seamstress to completely max out the Sewing skill to one thousand! She won’t even take a request unless you can bring the rarest and most deluxe crafting materials to make it!”

“Ohhh,” I said, impressed. All I ever did was fight and fight like a simpleminded fool, and it wasn’t that long ago that I’d maxed out my One-Handed Sword skill. I gave Asuna another light-speed examination from head to toe. Her cheek twitched.

“It…It’s not what you think!”

But I had no idea what she thought I thought.

With the impressed Yolko and dubious me in tow, Asuna guided us through the door of the restaurant we failed to eat at last night.

Due to the time of day, there were no other players present. We headed for the farthest table back, checking the distance to the door. This far away, our conversation wouldn’t be audible outside unless we screamed it. I used to think the best place for secrets was an inn room behind a locked door, but I’d recently learned that it only made you more vulnerable to someone with the Eavesdropping skill.

Yolko had already eaten breakfast, so we ordered three teas and got right down to business.

“First, a report…Last night we check the Monument of Life in Blackiron Palace. Sure enough, Kains died at that very moment.”

Yolko sucked in a brief breath, shut her eyes, and nodded. “I…I see. Thank you for going to the trouble to check…”

“No, it’s fine. There was another name we wanted to check while we were there,” Asuna said, shaking her head. She asked the first important question: “Yolko, do you recognize these names? The first is Grimlock, most likely a blacksmith. The other is a spearman named…Schmitt.”

Yolko’s downcast head twitched. Slowly, hesitantly, she made a gesture of recognition.

“…Yes, I know them. They were both members of a guild with Kains and me, long ago,” she murmured. Asuna and I shared a glance.

So it was true. In that case, we had to confirm our other suspicion—that something in the past of that guild was the cause of this incident.

I asked the second question: “Yolko, I’m sure this is hard to answer…but in order to solve this incident, I have to ask for the truth. We believe that this murder was either vengeance or judgment. Perhaps because of a past event, Kains may have earned himself someone’s hatred and desire for revenge…As I asked yesterday, I want you to think hard. Is there anything that comes to mind, anything that might shed light on this…?”

Her answer was not immediate this time. Yolko stared downward for a long time, silent, then reached for her tea with trembling fingers. She wet her tongue with a sip and nodded at last.

“…Yes…I do. I’m sorry I couldn’t tell you about it yesterday…I just want to forget it all. I was hoping that it wasn’t related, so I just couldn’t bring myself to mention it right away…but now, I will. That…‘event’ was what caused the breakup of our guild.”

The name of our guild was Golden Apple. We weren’t trying to help beat the game; it was just a small guild of eight, hoping to do some safe hunting so we could earn enough for beds and meals.

But half a year ago, at the start of fall…

We were adventuring in an unremarkable sub-dungeon on one of the middle floors when we encountered a monster we’d never seen before. It was a little lizard, all in black, but extremely fast and hard to spot…We knew it was a rare monster at a glance. We were beside ourselves with excitement, chasing it all over…and someone’s dagger throw got lucky and just so happened to strike true and kill the beast.

The item it dropped was just a simple ring. But we were amazed when we identified it. It raised agility by a whole twenty points. I doubt you can find loot that powerful even on the front line today.

I’m sure you can imagine what happened next.

We were split between using it for the sake of the guild and selling it and splitting the proceeds. The argument got so heated, it nearly resulted in a fight, and we took a vote to determine our plan: five to three in favor of selling. An item that valuable was too much for merchants on the middle floors, so our guild leader went to a big city on the front line to leave it with an auctioneer.

It would take time to research a trustworthy auction house, so our leader was supposed to spend a night there. I remember eagerly awaiting the end of the auction and return of our leader. Even split among eight, we were bound to get a ton of money, so I was thinking about weapons and fancy personal-brand clothes I wanted to buy, poring through catalogs…But I had no idea it was going to turn out like that…

…there was no return.

Over an hour after our scheduled meeting time the following night, there hadn’t been a single update message. We tried to track the leader’s location and got nothing, and there were no responses to any of our messages.

We couldn’t believe that our boss would just take the item and run. This gave us a very bad premonition, so a few of us went to the Monument of Life to check.

And then…

Yolko bit her lip and simply shook her head back and forth.

Asuna and I didn’t know what to say. To our relief, Yolko gave us a reprieve by wiping her eyes and saying in a trembling but firm voice, “The time of death was one hour after taking the ring to the upper floor. The cause of death…piercing damage.”

“…There’s no way you’d take a valuable item like that out of the town. So it must have been…a sleep PK,” I muttered. Asuna’s head bobbed.

“Half a year ago was just before that method started getting around. Back then, there were more than a few people who slept in public spaces, to save the money on an inn room with a locking door.”

“And the lodgings at the front line are expensive. But…I have a hard time thinking that’s a coincidence. Whoever went after your leader had to know about the ring…meaning…”

Yolko nodded, her eyes shut. “One of the other seven members of Golden Apple…We considered that as well, of course. But…there’s no way to go back and look up who was doing what and when…So with everyone suspecting everyone else, it didn’t take long for the guild to fall apart.”

Another heavy silence settled over the table.

It’s a very nasty story. But also very plausible. It all adds up.

It wasn’t that hard to find stories about perfectly friendly guilds with no dramatic storm clouds overhead being thrown into sudden turmoil by the lucky advent of a powerful item. The only reason they didn’t pop up in rumors more often was because the people involved just wanted to forget it ever happened.

But at this point, I had to ask Yolko something.

As the older girl looked down in pain, I took a practical tack. “Just tell me one thing. What were the names of the three people who were against selling that ring?”

Several seconds later, Yolko steeled her resolve and looked up, answering clearly, “Kains, Schmitt…and me.”

The answer took me by surprise. As I blinked, Yolko noted ironically, “But their reason for opposing it was not the same as mine. Kains and Schmitt were both forwards, and they wanted to use it themselves. And I…had just started being involved with Kains at the time. So I prioritized his opinion over the good of the group as a whole. I was a fool.”

She closed her mouth and stared down at the table again. Asuna finally broke her silence to ask softly, “Yolko, are you saying…that you and Kains were still an item from the end of your guild breakup until now…?”

Yolko shook her head almost imperceptibly, without looking up. “When the guild broke up…we did as well. We met from time to time to catch up…but we couldn’t stick around for very long before thinking about the incident with the ring. It was like that yesterday, too. We were only getting dinner…but before then, well…”

“I see…It doesn’t change the fact that it’s a terrible shock. I’m sorry for asking you about these painful things.”

Yolko shook her head briefly again. “No, it’s all right. Now…about Grimlock…”

That name brought me back to my senses. I sat upright.

“He was the sub-leader of Golden Apple. He was also the husband of the guild leader. Husband in SAO only, of course.”

“Oh…your leader was a woman?”

“Yes. She was very strong…for a mid-level player, that is…But good with a one-handed sword, pretty, and smart…I admired her so much. So…it’s still so hard to accept that she was so cruelly PKed in her sleep…”

“I suppose it must have been a terrible shock to Grimlock, too, losing someone you love enough to marry…” Asuna mumbled.

Yolko shivered. “Yes. Until that point, he had been such a kind and cheerful blacksmith…and after the incident, he was a terrible wreck…Once we fell apart, he fell out of touch with everyone. I have no idea where he is now.”

“I see…I hate to ask all these painful questions, but there’s just one more. Do you think it’s possible…that Grimlock killed Kains yesterday? We took that black spear that was stuck in Kains’s chest and appraised it…and it said that Grimlock was the crafter.”

It was tantamount to asking if the true culprit of the ring incident half a year ago was Kains. Yolko looked hesitant for a while, then very briefly nodded.

“…Yes…I think it’s possible. But neither Kains nor I would have PKed our leader to steal that ring. I have nothing to prove my innocence…but if it were Grimlock who did that yesterday…then maybe he ultimately means to murder all three of us who were against selling the ring: Kains, Schmitt, and me…”

We walked Yolko back to her inn, gave her several days’ worth of food items, and told her not to leave under any circumstances. In order to make things more bearable, we paid for a week’s worth of time in a three-room suite, the largest the inn had to offer. But in Aincrad, there were no MMORPGs to play to pass the time, so we promised to solve the case as quickly as we could before we left her behind.

“Actually, I would have felt most secure leaving her at KoB headquarters,” Asuna noted. I recalled the splendor of their new HQ building in Grandzam, the City of Iron on the fifty-fifth floor.

“Good point…but if she insisted she didn’t want to go, there’s no forcing her.”

In order to have Yolko under the KoB’s protection, she’d have to reveal the full details of her situation to the guild—in other words, to make public every sordid detail of the dissolution of Golden Apple six months earlier. She’d probably resisted to protect Kains’s honor.

Right as we reached the teleport gate, the town bell rang eleven o’clock. The rain was finally letting up, only to be replaced with thick mist. Through the haze, I looked at Asuna in her black and ashy pink outfit and said, “So now…”

“…?”

Asuna gave me a curious look, waiting for the rest of my sentence.

It seemed awkward to bring it up now, but late was better than never, so I cleared my throat and said, “Ahem! Well, err. I just was…going to say…you look nice.”

I did it. I was a gentleman.

But no longer had the thought run through my mind than her face crinkled so sharply, it nearly cracked. She thrust her index finger into my chest and growled, “If that was your reaction, then you should have said it the moment you saw me!!”

She spun at light speed and announced that she was going to change outfits. Her red ears had to be from rage.

It made no sense. Truly, I would never understand women.

Asuna emerged from a nearby empty home in her usual knight’s outfit, swinging her long hair behind her back. “So what do we do now?”

“Ah, r-right. Our choices are…One, ask around the middle floors for Grimlock to pin down his location. Two, look for the other members of Golden Apple to get confirmation on Yolko’s story. Three…a more thorough examination of the clues in Kains’s murder.”

“Hrrm,” Asuna mumbled, crossing her arms and thinking hard. “One is too inefficient with just the two of us. If Grimlock is the culprit as we currently suspect, he’ll be hiding out. Two…the other members are the ones involved, so it’s impossible to get an accurate picture…”

“Huh? How so?”

“Well, let’s assume they give us some information that contradicts Yolko’s story. How will we determine which story is the truth and which is a lie? It’ll just confuse us. We need more objective material to go off of…”

“So…three, then?”

We glanced at each other and nodded in agreement. For one thing, hard as it would be to admit to Yolko, the reason we were so interested in solving the case was not to expose the truth of the Golden Apple killings but to identify the method of the safe-haven PK that had killed Kains.

All we’d been able to certify so far about the murder last night was that it was not caused by piercing damage inflicted outside of town and then brought inside. We needed to have a long, thorough discussion about what other ways it could possibly have happened.

“It’s just…I think we need the help of someone with a bit more knowledge,” I mumbled.

Asuna looked at me curiously. “Yes, but it wouldn’t be fair to Yolko to go spilling the details of her story everywhere we go. And there aren’t many people who are absolutely trustworthy and know even more about the SAO game system than us…”

“…Ah.”

A single name popped into my head, and I snapped my fingers.

“That’s it. I know just the person.”

“Who?”

When I told her the name, Asuna’s eyes nearly popped out of her head.