5

The fact that the man actually showed up thirty minutes after Asuna sent the message was somewhat of a surprise. I doubted it was because of my insistence that I would buy lunch.

The moment his silent, tall figure strode through the center square of Algade, the passing players in the crowd burst into murmurs. His long blond hair was tied to spill neatly across the back of his dark red robe, and he wore no weapon on his waist or back. His sheer presence alone gave him the image of an imperious mage—a class that didn’t actually exist in SAO. Heathcliff the Holy Sword, leader of the Knights of the Blood and Aincrad’s greatest swordsman, smoothly approached us, his only reaction a raised eyebrow.

Asuna gave him an audibly crisp salute and quickly explained. “Forgive me for the sudden summons, Commander! This id… Er, this man has some questions that he refuses to back down from…”

“Well, I was just planning to eat lunch, myself. It’s not often I get the opportunity to receive a treat courtesy of Kirito, the Black Swordsman. I have a meeting with our gear managers this evening, but I have time until then,” Heathcliff said in a smooth, steely tenor. I looked up at his looming face and shrugged.

“Well, I haven’t thanked you yet for drawing aggro for so long in the last boss fight. In exchange, I’ll tell you a very interesting story.”

I guided the top two members of the strongest guild in the game to the sleaziest, scummiest NPC-run restaurant I knew of in Algade. It wasn’t because I liked the taste there, just that the overall aesthetic of the place somehow struck a chord in me.

For five minutes I walked them through a maze of alleys, turning right, ducking down, spinning left, climbing up, and so on, until we finally reached the dingy-looking restaurant. Asuna looked at it and said, “You’d better guide us on the return trip. I don’t think I can find my way back to the square.”

“From what I hear, there are dozens of players who got lost and didn’t have a teleport crystal, still wandering the alleys to this day,” I joked with a macabre leer.

Heathcliff flatly pointed out, “You can pay ten col to an NPC on the side of the road to guide you back. And if you don’t have that much…”

He lifted the palms of his hands in a shrug and walked into the building. Asuna made a face and joined me in following him.

As I had hoped, the cramped interior was totally empty. We sat at a cheap four-seat table and ordered three servings of “Algade soba noodles” from the suspect-looking owner, then sipped ice water from cloudy cups. On my right, Asuna grimaced and said, “It feels like we’re having a consolation party…”

“Just your imagination. Anyway, let’s cut your busy commander a break and get to business,” I said, glancing across the table at the cool-faced Heathcliff.

His expression did not change the tiniest bit as Asuna offered an efficient explanation of the events of last night. The only reaction he gave was a twitch of an eyebrow at the scene of Kains’s death.

“…So we were hoping, if it’s not too much trouble, to make use of your knowledge, sir,” Asuna finished. Heathcliff took another sip of ice water and grunted.

“First, I’d like to hear Kirito’s conjecture. What do you make of the means of this safe-haven murder?”

I relinquished the hand that was propping up my cheek and lifted three fingers. “Basically…I have three theories. The first is that it was a proper in-town duel. The second is some kind of loophole in the system using a combination of already known methods. And the third…is some kind of unknown skill or item that nullifies the Anti-Criminal Code.”

“You can rule out the third,” he replied immediately. I couldn’t help but stare. Similarly taken aback, Asuna blinked a few times.

“You seem…very certain of that, Commander.”

“Just imagine. If you developed this game, would you insert a skill or weapon with that power?”

“Well…I suppose not,” I said.

“And why do you think that?”

I looked back into those brassy eyes, their gaze full of a magnetic power, and answered, “Because…it wouldn’t be fair. While it pains me to admit it, at its core, the rules of SAO are fair. With the one exception being your Unique Skill.”

I threw in that last comment with a little smirk, which Heathcliff silently returned. That caught me by surprise, but I didn’t show it. Even the commander of the KoB couldn’t possibly know about the secret skill I’d been hiding recently.

Asuna watched the two of us exchanging enigmatic smiles, then sighed, shook her head, and interjected, “At any rate, it would be a waste of time for us to speculate on the third option, since there’s no way to be sure of it. So let’s begin with the first possibility: that it was a duel-based PK.”

“Very well…By the way, this place certainly seems to take its time serving the food,” Heathcliff said peevishly, looking back over to the counter.

I shrugged. “As far as I’ve seen, the guy here is the least motivated NPC in Aincrad. In a way, that’s worth enjoying. And there’s all the ice water you can drink,” I said, filling the commander’s cup to the brim from the cheap pitcher on the table. “If a player dies within a safe haven, then it’s common sense that it was from a duel. But—and I assure you of this—when Kains died, there was no victory display. Have you ever heard of a duel like that?”

Next to me, Asuna wondered, “By the way, it never occurred to me before to ask, but what determines the location of the victory screen?”

“Huh? Umm…”

I hadn’t given that any thought, either. But Heathcliff answered the question immediately.

“It is the median point between the two duelists. If they are over thirty feet apart at the time of the finish, a window will appear in the near vicinity of both players.”

“…I’m surprised you know a rule like that. Which means that, at the very farthest, it would have been within fifteen feet of Kains.”

I replayed the atrocity in my brain and shook my head. “There were no windows in the open space around him. There were dozens of witnesses, so that’s a certainty. Now, if it appeared in the church behind him, that’s a different story, but the killer would have to still be inside, and Asuna would have encountered him when she burst into there before Kains’s death.”

“And I didn’t see any winner’s display inside the church, either,” Asuna added.

I grunted in acknowledgment. “So…I guess it wasn’t a duel…”

It felt as though an even darker shadow had fallen over the gloomy restaurant.

“Are you sure you chose right with this place?” Asuna mumbled, finishing her cup of water and smacking it onto the table. I wasted no time in refilling it. She shot me a look and thanked me, then held up two fingers. “That leaves only the second option: a loophole in the system. I just keep coming back to one thing.”

“Which is?”

“Piercing DOT.”

Asuna picked up one of the toothpicks from the holder on the table—a useless item, as teeth didn’t get dirty here—and jabbed it like a tiny weapon.

“I don’t think that spear was just for a show of public execution. I feel like the damage over time was necessary for the PK to work.”

“Yeah, I’d agree with that,” I said, only to shake my head at another thought. “But remember our experiment? If you’re pierced by a piercing weapon out in the field, then go into town, the damage stops.”

“When you walk back, yes. But what about a corridor crystal? If you had a crystal set up to teleport into that church room, then traveled through it from outside of town…would the damage stop then?”

“It would,” Heathcliff said promptly. “Whether on foot, or through a corridor teleportation, or if thrown by another player, the code works on any player as soon as they enter the town. Without exception.”

“Hang on. Does ‘the town’ only count on the ground and in buildings? What about the air?” I asked, struck by a sudden revelation.

The rope. Could it be possible to hang a rope around Kains’s neck so that he hung out of the church window from a corridor crystal, bleeding out from the spear, as he did not touch any surface of the town?

Even Heathcliff showed a moment of doubt at this thought. But two seconds later, his ponytailed hair shook from side to side.

“No…strictly speaking, the safe-haven zone extends vertically from the borders of the town up until it touches the ‘lid’ of the floor above. As long as a player intersects with that pillar of space, they are under the code’s protection. So even if they set the exit of a corridor crystal to the air hundreds of feet above the town and tossed a victim in from outside its borders, they would suffer no fall damage. Not that the resulting nerve shock would be at all pleasant.”

“Ohhh,” Asuna and I marveled in tandem. Not at learning the shape of the town’s safe-haven zone, but the sheer mental and observational skill of Heathcliff that he knew such a thing. Part of me wondered if that was just the kind of mentality one needed to be a guild leader, but then the scraggly face of a certain katana-warrior floated into my mind, dashing that notion to pieces.

However—that meant that as long as Kains was within the town borders, even that piercing damage-over-time effect would stop. Which meant the source of the damage that eliminated his HP came from outside the Guilty Thorn. Could that be where the loophole was?

I thought hard, and I eventually conjectured, “The Monument of Life included the cause of Kains’s death along with the time. It said ‘piercing damage.’ And the only thing his disappearance left behind was that black spear.”

“Right. I have a hard time imagining that another weapon was secretly involved.”

“Listen,” I said, recalling the stomach-churning feeling of taking a critical hit from a powerful monster, “what happens to your HP bar when you suffer a really nasty critical hit?”

Asuna looked at me as though the answer was obvious and said, “You lose a ton of HP, of course.”

“I mean, the way it happens. It doesn’t just immediately eliminate a huge chunk of the bar. It slides downward from the right. In other words, there’s a small period of lag between suffering the blow and your HP bar reflecting the proper amount.”

She finally understood what I was getting at. Meanwhile, Heathcliff’s face was an emotionless mask, so there was no way to guess what he was thinking. I looked at each in turn and gestured. “Let’s say that Kains’s HP is reduced from full to nothing from a single spear blow outside of town. He looked like a tank based on his armor, so he must have had lots of HP. Someone like that, it might take…let’s say, five seconds to drain all the way. In that time, Kains was sent through the portal and through the church window…”

“W-wait a minute,” Asuna rasped. “He might not have been a front-line fighter, but Kains was an above-average player in the high-volume zone. I don’t have a one-hit sword skill that could wipe out all of his HP…and neither do you!”

“That is true,” I agreed. “Even a critical hit of my Vorpal Strike wouldn’t take down half of his HP. But there are thousands of players in SAO. We can’t deny the possibility of an extremely high-level player unaffiliated with any of the front-line progress, lurking out there somewhere.”

“Meaning, we don’t know if it was Grimlock himself who killed Kains with the spear, or if it was another red player hired to do the job, but whoever it was, they were strong enough to kill a full-armored tank with one hit?”

I shrugged in a sign of affirmation, then turned to the man across the table, awaiting the teacher’s grade. Heathcliff looked down at the table through half-closed lids, then slowly nodded.

“That methodology is not impossible. If you took down a player outside of town with one hit, then instantly teleported them with an already built corridor, you might be able to give the appearance of a PK inside the safe haven.”

For a second, I thought I was actually correct.

“But,” he continued, “as I’m sure you know, piercing weapons are prized primarily for their reach, then their armor-puncturing power. In terms of basic strength, they are weaker than blunt and slashing weapons. Especially when you’re using not a large, heavy lance but a short spear.”

He had hit a sore spot. I pursed my lips like a sulking child. Heathcliff smiled thinly and continued. “Using a non-elite short spear, a one-hit kill of a tank fighter in the volume zone would require…at least level one hundred, in my opinion.”

“A hundred?!” Asuna yelped. The fencer’s hazelnut-brown eyes looked back and forth between Heathcliff and me, and she shook her head rapidly. “N-nobody’s that good. You haven’t forgotten how hard we leveled to get where we are now, have you? Level one hundred…You couldn’t even get there by now if you spent twenty-four hours a day in the latest labyrinth.”

“I agree.”

With the two lead members of the strongest guild in the game both in agreement, there was no way for a simple solo player like me to argue. I was near the very top of the players in the frontier group, and even my level was still barely over 80.

But I just couldn’t give up. “Th…there could be an issue of skill strength, not just statistical strength. For example, someone might have found the thir…The second Unique Skill in the game.”

The commander’s red robe swayed as he chuckled. “If such a player truly existed, I would have laid out the red carpet to the KoB already.”

Something in the way he was gazing at me with those impenetrable eyes made me uncomfortable, so I gave up on that line of logic and leaned back into the cheap chair.

“Hmm, I thought I was on to something. That leaves…”

Before I could come up with a stupid idea like having a boss monster strike him before teleporting, a shadow leaned over my other side.

“…Eat up,” the NPC cook said tonelessly, setting three white bowls down from a square tray. His face was hidden behind the long bangs coming down his grease-stained cook’s hat. He returned to his spot behind the counter as Asuna stared at him in shock—she was clearly used to the clean, polite, and punctual NPCs from other floors.

I took a pair of disposable chopsticks from the table and cracked them apart, pulling one of the bowls closer. Asuna followed my lead and murmured, “What is this…? Ramen?”

“Or something like it,” I replied, pulling curly noodles out of the light-colored broth.

The only sounds in the dingy restaurant were three lonely sets of slurps. A dry breeze budged the cloth that hung in the entranceway, and some kind of bird squawked outside.

A few minutes later, I pushed my empty bowl to the side of the table and looked at the man across from me.

“…So, have you come to any conclusions, Commander?”

“…”

His bowl totally empty, including the broth, Heathcliff stared at the kanji-like pattern at the bottom and said, “This is not ramen. I am certain of that.”

“Yeah, I agree.”

“Then I will give you an answer worthy of this false ramen’s flavor.” He looked up and politely placed the chopsticks on the rim of the bowl. “Based on the information we have now, it cannot be determined what exactly happened. However, I can say this…The only rock-solid information we have about this incident is what you saw and heard firsthand.”

“…What do you mean…?”

“I mean…” Heathcliff fixed me, then Asuna, with a stare from his brass-colored eyes. “That everything you see and hear directly in Aincrad is digital data that can be converted to code. There is no room for phantom visions or auditory signals. On the other hand, that means that all information that doesn’t originate as digital data can be shrouded in mistakes or deceit. If you’re going to track down the truth of this safe-haven murder…then you should only trust the information received directly by your eyes, ears, and brain.”

With one last thanks for the meal, Heathcliff got to his feet. I stood as well, pondering the meaning of the mysterious swordsman’s words, thanked the cook, and walked through the doorway.

I just barely overheard Heathcliff mutter to himself, “Why does this place exist…?”

As the commander melted away into the maze of streets, I turned to look at Asuna and asked, “Did you understand what that meant?”

“…Yes,” she said. I was impressed.

“It was Tokyo-style shoyu ramen, without the soy sauce. No wonder it felt so lonely.”

“Wha—?”

“I’ve made up my mind. I’m going to find a way to make soy sauce. Otherwise I will never recover from this feeling of dissatisfaction.”

“…Uhm, good luck with that?” I muttered, then abruptly shook my head. “No, not that!”

“Huh? What did you mean?”

“Look, I’m sorry about feeding you some weird food. Just forget about it. What I meant was, what did Heathcliff mean with that weird Zen philosophy?”

“Oh…” Asuna said. She nodded firmly this time. “He just meant, don’t take secondhand sources too seriously. In this case, that would be the motive arguments…The whole thing with Golden Apple and the magic ring.”

“What?” I groaned. “You want me to suspect Yolko? I mean, sure, there’s no evidence of anything…but like you said, Asuna, there’s no way to get proof backing up anything anyway, so doubting her is also pointless.”

For some reason, she blinked, nonplussed, then looked away and shook her head a few times.

“W-well, you might be right about that. But like the commander said, we still don’t have enough material to confirm the PK method yet. So let’s go get a story from the other person involved. If we throw the whole ring story in his face, he might just let slip with some answers.”

“Huh? Who?”

“The guy who took the spear from you, of course.”