4

When our samurai finished taking out all of his pent-up frustrations on the hapless black Minotaur, he ignored the impressive list of dropped loot as its avatar exploded, and he turned to bellow at me.

“’Ey, Kirito! What the hell was that about?!”

He was referring to the combination of sword skills I pulled off by equipping two one-handed swords, but it would be very exhausting to explain it all from the start, so I put as much honest disgust on my face as I could and grumbled, “…Do I have to explain?”

“Bet your ass you do! I’ve never seen anything like that!”

I pushed Klein’s insistent, stubbled face out of my own and reluctantly replied, “It’s a non-system skill of mine. Skill Connection.”

Liz, Silica, and Sinon murmured in admiring surprise, while Asuna pressed her fingertips to her temple and groaned, “Wow…why do I feel like I just got wicked déjà vu?”

“Just your imagination,” I grumbled. I reached over and gave a pat on the back to our healer, whose blazing attack from the back row had saved us in the nick of time. “But there’s no time to sit around and relax. How much time do we have left, Leafa?”

“Oh, right.”

Leafa loudly sheathed her sword and lifted the medallion hanging about her neck. Even from several steps away, it was clear that the gemstone in it had lost most of its light.

“…At this rate, we might have an hour left, but not two.”

“I see. You said this is a four-level dungeon, Yui?”

The little pixie riding on my head promptly answered, “Yes, the third floor is about seventy percent the size of the second, and the fourth is essentially just the boss chamber.”

“Thanks.”

I reached out and rubbed her tiny head with a finger as I considered the situation.

Right now, on the map of Jotunheim far below, the players undertaking the frost-giant-faction quest would be picking up steam in their extermination of the animal-type Deviant Gods. If anything, the number of players involved would only increase over time, not decrease. Factoring that into account, we’d be lucky to still have a full hour. The final boss—likely King Thrym himself—might take thirty minutes to finish, which meant we had another thirty minutes at best to clear out the third and fourth floors.

If we had a bit more time, I might have entertained the idea of explaining the full situation to the players down on the ground, so they would abandon their quest and help us out, but we didn’t have time to go back down there now. I wanted to send messages to friendly leaders like Sakuya and Alicia Rue for backup, but by the time they arranged parties in their distant mountain homes, reached the Alne Highlands, finished the staircase dungeon, and finally reached Jotunheim, it would already be nightfall.

In other words, our only option was for the seven of us to face nearly impossible odds. Otherwise, it was quite possible that Cardinal’s automatic quest-generation system already had a massive quest campaign for Ragnarok prepared, in the event that we failed Queen Urd’s quest and Thrymheim ascended to destroy Alfheim. If that were true, Cardinal had most certainly inherited the twisted personality of its creator.

But in any case…

“Well, I don’t know much about this Deviant God king or whatever, but our only choice is to rush him and win!” Lisbeth shouted, slapping me on the back. The rest of the party chorused in agreement. I had to wonder from where these people got their recklessness.

“Everyone’s HP and MP fully recovered? Let’s go clean out that third floor, then!”

We all roared again and charged for the icy staircase at the very back of the boss chamber.

As Yui said, the third floor was clearly smaller than the one above. That made sense, as we were descending an inverted pyramid, but that meant the halls were smaller and more crowded. In a normal dungeon crawl, we’d get lost and deal with traps here and there, but I had a navigation pixie who would put any other intelligent nav system to shame.

For this one special occasion, we lifted our ban on Yui reading the map data, so she could offer us the fastest possible route through the floor. All of the puzzles with levels, gears, and foot switches were a breeze when you knew exactly what to do. If any impartial observer had been watching us, they’d assume we were doing a speed run.

Even with two minor boss fights on the way, we reached the third-floor boss in just eighteen minutes. The creature was an extremely unpleasant giant, nearly twice the size of the Cyclops and Minotaurs, with dozens of centipede-like legs on its elongated lower half, but its physical resistance was nothing serious. In exchange, it had whopping attack power, and both Klein and I had our HP in the red several times as we kept pulling aggro. Knowing that if either of us died it was the end of our run, the nine minutes of battle were practically ulcer inducing.

But with the help of Liz, Silica, Sinon, and Pina severing the giant’s legs one by one, I was able to use my Skill Connection to do a long combo on the immobilized boss to finish it off. As we headed toward the staircase in the back, ready to barrel onto the fourth floor and pound King Thrym back to Niflheim, one particular feature gave us pause.

It was a cage against the wall, made from narrow icicles.

Beyond the bars of ice that hung from ceiling to floor like stalactites was a humanoid figure. It was not giant-sized. As the person was crumpled on the ground, it was hard to tell, but it seemed to be about Asuna the undine’s height.

The prisoner’s skin was as white as freshly fallen snow. The long, flowing hair was a deep golden-brown. The bust volume peeking out from the meager cloth covering her body was, not to be politically incorrect, on a class far above all five women present. Crude ice shackles bound her soft limbs as well.

As we stopped still, stunned by this sight, the kidnapped woman lying facedown twitched, then raised her head, rattling blue chains.

Like her hair, her eyes were also golden-brown. Assuming she was a player, her facial features were so finely chiseled that she was either astronomically lucky or astronomically rich enough to keep buying accounts until she got a face this beautiful. On top of that, there was a Scandinavian regality to her beauty that was quite rare for this game.

The woman blinked, long lashes trembling, and said in a frail voice, “Please…free me…from this place…”

The samurai lurched toward the ice cage, but I grabbed him by the back of his bandanna and pulled hard.

“It’s a trap.”

“That’s a trap.”

“Totally a trap.”

The latter two comments were from Sinon and Liz.

Klein turned back around, his back arched. He scratched his head with a very doubtful look on his face.

“Y-yeah…it’s a…trap. Um…I guess?” he mumbled reluctantly. I prompted Yui to explain, and the pixie instantly obliged.

“She’s an NPC. She is connected to the same language-engine module as Urd. But there’s one difference. This person has an HP gauge enabled.”

Normally, quest NPCs had no need for an HP gauge and couldn’t be harmed. The only exceptions were the targets of escort quests, or…

“Absolute trap.”

“Definitely a trap.”

“I think it’s a trap,” offered Asuna, Silica, and Leafa in unison.

Klein made a truly bizarre face with his eyebrows hanging, eyes bulging, and mouth puckered. I clapped him on the shoulder.

“Of course, it might not be a trap, but we don’t have the leeway for some trial and error right now. We’ve got to get to Thrym as soon as we can.”

“Y…yeah. Of course. Right. For sure.”

Klein kept nodding rapidly and tore his gaze away from the cage of ice. But after the group took a few more steps toward the stairs in the back, the voice came again.

“…Please…someone…”

In all honesty, I wanted to help her, too. NPCs weren’t just moving objects automatically generated by the game system; they were residents of this world. If we were on a normal quest and we saved her, took her along, then at the climax of the quest story, she turned on us with a “Fwa-ha-ha, you fools!” then that would be part of the fun. But now was not the time to take on needless risks. Klein had to know that.

One of our perfectly synchronized footsteps went sour, scraping on the icy floor.

I turned to see the tall, skinny samurai standing still, his hands clenched, facing downward. A low murmur emerged from his unkempt mouth.

“…It’s a trap. I know it’s a trap. But…even as a trap, even knowing it’s a trap…”

He bolted upright, the liquid pooling in his eyes most definitely not an illusion.

“Even then…I can’t just leave her here! Even if…we fail the quest…and Alne is ruined…saving her here is the right decision, according to my way of life—the samurai code!”

He bolted around and stomped toward the cage of ice. As I watched him go, two conflicting emotions came to my mind.

…What an idiot.

And—

You’re awesome, Klein!

I would probably never know which of the two was stronger.

Klein called out, “I’ll save you now!” to the imprisoned woman, who was propping herself up now. He grabbed the katana at his left side, and in the next moment, his quick-draw sword skill Tsujikaze erupted, severing the icicle bars in one horizontal swipe.

Fortunately, the beautiful woman did not transform into an enormous monster and attack us the moment she was saved.

With four more slices, Klein’s katana cut all of the ice shackles loose. The woman looked up and said weakly, “Thank you…fairy swordsman.”

“Can you stand? Are you hurt?”

He was fully absorbed in the role, kneeling down and offering his hand to her. Of course, we were in the middle of a VRMMO quest, so personal investment in the story was the point. I myself was in the middle of a desperate quest to help Queen Urd by stopping the plot of King Thrym of the giants, so I couldn’t act like Klein’s behavior was beyond the pale. He was within his rights. But still…

“Yes…I’m fine,” the blond woman insisted, but she faltered as soon as she got to her feet.

He put a chivalrous hand on her back to steady her and asked, “It’s a long way to the exit. Can you make it there alone, madam?”

“…”

The beautiful woman looked down, saying nothing.

Put in simple terms, the Cardinal System’s automated conversational language engine module was an extremely complex version of a list of patterns: the player says A, the NPC responds B. With its advanced predictive and learning ability, the engine allowed any NPC calling upon it to have remarkably lifelike—but still artificial—conversations with players.

A breakthrough version of the module that had also gained human emotion and nearly human-level intelligence was riding on my head at this very moment, in the person of Yui the pixie. But the automated-response NPCs were far from Yui’s level at present. It was still a night-and-day difference between them and the fixed-response NPCs who only repeated their written lines, but there were still times where they had trouble identifying player speech, which left the players to search for the “proper” question to elicit the answer they wanted.

I suspected at first that the woman’s silence was one of these pauses, but to my surprise, before Klein could phrase his question a different way, she looked up and said, “I cannot simply escape from this castle right away. I snuck in here to steal back a relic of our people that King Thrym stole from us, but the third guardian spotted me and imprisoned me. I cannot return until I have the treasure. Will you please take me to Thrym’s chamber with you?”

“Uh…um…hmm…”

For some reason, the man who lived by the samurai code mumbled and murmured awkwardly. As we watched from several yards away, Asuna whispered to me, “Something about this doesn’t seem right…”

“Yeah,” I responded.

Meanwhile, Klein turned away from the woman and gave me a pathetic, pleading look.

“Hey, Kiri, my man…”

“…All right, fine, fine. I guess we’re stuck on this story route until the end. And we’re not a hundred percent sure it’s a trap, I suppose,” I said. Klein grinned and turned proudly back to the pretty woman.

“You’ve got a deal, madam! Diversity makes for strange bedfellows! And now, to face Thrym and rip off his balls!”

“Thank you, Sir Swordsman!” she said, squeezing his left arm. Meanwhile, as the party leader, I saw a window pop up asking if I wanted to include the NPC in the party.

“Don’t get your sayings mixed up, or Yui will learn them by accident,” I grumbled, and hit the YES button. At the bottom of the list of HP/MP bars for the whole party on the left side of my vision, an eighth gauge appeared.

The woman’s name was Freyja. The name struck me as familiar for some reason. Both of her numbers were significant, but it was the MP in particular that was astronomical. She had to be a mage type.

If she stays with the party the whole while, that would be really helpful, I thought, glancing at the medallion hanging around Leafa’s neck. The many-faceted gemstone was covered with black over 90 percent of its surface. As we predicted before, that left us with maybe half an hour. I sucked in a deep breath to give a speech.

“Based on the construction of the dungeon, we’ll probably be heading right into the final boss’s chamber once we’re down those stairs. He’s going to be tougher than the others, but we have no choice but to face him without any tricks. At first we’ll focus on defense, until we get a hang of the boss’s attack patterns, and I’ll give the signal to fight back. And be careful, because his attacks are bound to change when his gauge goes yellow, and then again in the red.”

With a look at the rest of the group to make sure they were all on board, I raised my voice and called out, “Let’s blaze our way through this final battle!”

“Yeah!”

The third group cheer of this quest was joined in by Yui, Silica’s pet Pina, and our blond bombshell NPC, Freyja.

The staircase downward widened partway through, giving way to pillars and decorative sculptures. The old Aincrad adage that the more complex the map data became, the closer you were to the boss chamber, still rang true.

At the very end stood doors of thick ice, carved with two wolves. It was the royal chamber of the king of the frost giants, no doubt. Once we were sure there were no tricks or traps around, we approached, still feeling cautious.

Once we got within fifteen feet of the doors, they automatically swung open. An even deeper chill and indescribable sense of pressure emanated. Asuna began to rebuff the party, and Freyja joined in, including a previously unknown buff that greatly boosted our HP.

When the spot under our HP/MP gauges was lined with buff icons, we all made eye contact. With a nod of purpose, we rushed in together.

The interior of the chamber was vast in both width and height. As before, the walls and floor were blue ice. Candleholders of ice featured eerie, rippling purple flames. A line of chandeliers hung from the distant ceiling. But the first thing to catch our eyes was the brilliant shine of countless lights reflecting along both walls.

Gold. Coins, accessories, swords, armor, shields, sculptures, even furniture, every last piece of it made of gold, piled high in countless amounts. The rear of the chamber was shrouded in darkness, making it impossible to estimate the total amount of treasure present.

“…How many yrd would all of this equal?” murmured Lisbeth, the only player present who actually ran a shop. As for me, all I could think was, Why didn’t I completely clear out my entire inventory for extra space first?!

At the far right of our stunned group, Klein was driven by his samurai code (I assumed) to take a few uneasy steps toward the mountain of treasure. But before he got more than a few steps—

“…Little bugs, flitting about.”

A deep, floor-rumbling voice emerged from the darkness in the back of the chamber.

“I can hear the buzzing of their obnoxious wings. I must crush them before they can get into trouble.”

Thud. The floor shook. Thud, thud. As the vibrations came closer, I was almost afraid they were going to shatter the ice floor with their power.

Eventually, a shadow emerged into the light’s range.

“Giant” wasn’t enough to describe it. It was at least twice as tall as the humanoid Deviant Gods prowling the cave floor below, as well as the boss-level Deviant Gods here in the castle. The head was looming so far above us that I didn’t even want to guess its height. Even my strongest jump would be lucky to reach the knee of this monster.

His skin was a dull blue, like lead. His arms and legs were covered in black and brown furs from some impossibly large animal. Around his waist was sheet-metal plated armor, each piece the size of a small boat. His torso was bare, but those rippling muscles looked strong enough to deflect any weapon.

A long blue beard draped over his bulging chest. The head sitting atop it all was unclear, shrouded in shadow. But the gold of his crown and the freezing blue of his eyes shone brilliantly in the darkness.

In the old Aincrad, a single floor was capped at just over three hundred feet high, and the boss chambers of each labyrinth tower weren’t very tall, so every boss monster had a fairly hard height limit. In other words, I couldn’t remember ever looking up this far to see an enemy. How could we fight this monster without being able to fly? The best we could do was prick his shins with our swords.

Meanwhile, the gigantic giant—a redundant description, but the only applicable one—took a step forward and laughed, his voice like a gong.

“Hah…hah…Insects of Alfheim, summoned here by Urd’s pleas. Little ones, if you tell me where she is, you may take all you can carry of my gold. What say you?”

From his off-the-charts size, golden crown, and nature of his offer, there was no room to doubt that this was Thrym, king of the frost giants.

As we faced off against the giant, a fellow AI like Urd and Freyja, it was Klein who responded first.

“…Heh! A samurai would rather go hungry than give in to temptation! If you think I’d jump at a pitiful offer like that, you’ve got another think coming!”

He drew his beloved katana boldly, while the rest of the group sighed behind his back. But as if on signal, the other six of us brandished our weapons.

Although none of them were legendary weapons, they were all either unique-named ancient weapons or masterpieces crafted by Lisbeth herself, a master blacksmith. But the sight of them did not remove the grin from King Thrym’s whiskered mouth. Of course, to him we might as well have been carrying toothpicks.

With a glare from his dark eyes far above, the king eventually settled upon the barehanded eighth member of our group.

“…Oho. Is that you there, Freyja? Since you are out of your cage, I suspect you must have agreed to be my bride at last?” his cracked bell of a voice tolled.

“B-bride?!” Klein yelped.

“Indeed. This girl was brought into the palace to be my bride, but on the night before the ceremony, I caught her sniffing around my treasure. I placed her in an icy cell for punishment. Hah! Hah!”

Things are getting a bit more complicated; I gotta figure this out…

The blond beauty named Freyja claimed earlier that she had snuck into this castle to take back a treasure that he had stolen from her people. But thinking realistically, it would be nearly impossible to sneak into a floating palace with only one entrance. So she pretended she would be Thrym’s bride and passed right through the entrance, then snuck into the royal chamber at night in an attempt to steal the treasure. The guards then spotted her and chained her to that prison cell.

If this was true, it lowered the chance that she would backstab us in the middle of the fight. But something still didn’t add up with the story. It was too complex and tricky for an optional sub-route. And which of the nine fairy races in Alfheim was her “people”? What was the stolen treasure?

I noted that we should have asked these questions when we recruited her to join us, then remembered that we hadn’t had the time for that to start with. Meanwhile, at the front left of the group, Leafa pulled my sleeve and whispered, “Big Brother, I think I read about this in a book…The story of Thrym and Freyja…and a stolen treasure. Let’s see, how did it go…”

But before Leafa could recall the details, Freyja herself stood up and shouted, “Who would ever be your wife?! Instead, I shall battle you with Sir Swordsman and his companions and take back what was stolen!”

“Nwah-hah-hah. How bold you are. There is good reason your beauty and valor have reached all nine realms, Freyja. But it is the proudest flowers that are most tempting to pick…Once I have crushed these flies, I will enjoy showering you with the love you deserve, nwah-hah-hah-hah,” King Thrym intoned, stroking his beard with massive fingers. His threat was toeing the line of acceptable dialogue for an all-ages game, which made me wonder if the quest generator really came up with this scenario.

While all the women present grimaced, Klein stood in front, waving his fist.

“H-h-how dare you! You’ll never have her! The great Klein will ensure that you never lay a stinking finger on Freyja!!”

“I hear the buzzing of little wings. Perhaps I shall flatten you as a pre-celebration to my conquest of all of Jotunheim…”

The giant king took one rumbling step forward as a tremendously large HP gauge appeared in the upper right of my view. And it was a three-stack. It would take an incredible effort to grind that down.

But the menacing floor bosses of New Aincrad didn’t even display HP bars, to break the spirit of those players who challenged them. At least here we could tell how quickly we were grinding him down.

“Here he comes! Listen for Yui’s orders, and remember: dodge-only for this first part!” I shouted. Thrym lifted a fist like a giant boulder up to the ceiling—then brought it down swiftly, his skin wreathed in a storm of frost.

The final battle (I hoped) of Castle Thrymheim was, as expected, a fiercer fight than I could ever remember.

King Thrym’s first round of attacks comprised of downward punches with both fists, a three-part stomp attack with his right foot, a straight line of ice breath, and a summon of ice dwarf adds, twelve at a time, rising from the floor.

The most troublesome of these were the dwarves, but the stunning accuracy of Sinon’s arrows in finding the weak points from the back row cleaned them up in no time. As for the direct attacks, they could be dodged entirely as long as you paid close attention, so with the help of Yui’s countdown, the three of us in front were able to continually evade damage.

Once we had our defense down, it was time to go on the attack, but if anything, this was the hard part. As I feared, our swords could reach no higher than Thrym’s shins, and thanks to his thick fur leggings, they had significant damage resistance, if not as high as the golden Minotaur. I could do a three-part sword skill with perfect timing to get as much HP down as possible, but without going into attacks with longer delays, the damage was piddling. It felt wrong, like I was whacking away fruitlessly at an indestructible game object.

Under these circumstances, Freyja’s lightning attacks were a wonderful boon. I needed to apologize to Klein afterward. As an NPC, her ability to coordinate with us was clumsy, but each time the purple bolt of light rained down, Thrym’s HP took noticeable damage.

After more than ten minutes of battle, the first gauge was finally depleted, and the king of the giants let out a vicious roar.

“Watch out! His pattern’s going to change!” I shouted.

From the side, I could hear Leafa’s worried voice whisper, “This is bad, Big Brother. There are only three lights left on the medallion. We’ve probably got only fifteen minutes.”

“…”

Thrym had three bars. But it took us over ten minutes to eliminate one of them. It was going to be a monumental task to knock out the other two within fifteen minutes.

And worse, spamming the Skill Connection trick I used against the golden Minotaur was not likely to work. Afflicting a monster with knock-back required high-damage blows within a combo. Thrym was not weak to either swords or magic, so putting four sword skills together in a row was not going to do major damage, given his vast total of HP.

As if sensing my moment of panic, Thrym suddenly puffed out his chest like a bellows and sucked in a tremendous breath.

The powerful pull of wind dragged the five of us in the front and middle rows toward the giant. This had to be the precursor to a major wide-area attack. The first trick to evading would be to neutralize the suction with wind magic. Realizing this, Leafa held up her left hand and began chanting a spell.

But I had a feeling that it wouldn’t be in time unless she started from the moment his tell began.

“Leafa, everyone, defensive positions!”

At my command, Leafa canceled the spell, crossed her arms in front of her, and bent her legs. Everyone else assumed the same position.

Right then, Thrym’s mouth emitted a diamond dust across a wide range, not at all like the linear breath attack he’d been using before.

We were enveloped in pale, glowing light. The chill pierced Asuna’s buff and seemed to slice my skin. With sharp tingling noises, our five avatars began to freeze solid. I tried to escape, but the thick sheet of ice kept me in place. Leafa, Klein, Liz, Silica (with Pina held tight in her arms), and I were all turned to blue ice sculptures.

At this stage, my HP bar was still full. But that was little relief. The longer an attack like this took, the worse the damage we would suffer.

Up front, Thrym was gradually lifting his enormous right foot. Oh no, oh crap, oh shoot, I screamed to myself.

“Nrrrn!”

He slammed his foot onto the floor with a bellow. The shock wave swallowed up the ice sculptures, rattling tremendously. With a stomach-dropping craaash! the ice that covered my body split apart. The shock nearly blinded me. I was thrown to the floor, visual damage effects flashing past.

At the top of my view, five of the eight HP bars shot down into the red at once.

Of course, the three in the back outside the range of Thrym’s massive attack were not standing by as the rest of us were immobilized.

Just after we lost about 80 percent of our HP, a gentle blue light shone down, healing our wounds. It was Asuna’s high-level full-party healing spell. The spell was perfectly timed, pre-cast so that it went off right after we took damage.

But most of the major healing spells in this game were heals-over-time, meaning they only healed a portion of the total each second and not all at once. If we took another attack now, it could easily wipe us out, even as the heal spell was working on us.

Thrym proceeded forward, ready to deliver the finishing blow as we got to our feet. Suddenly, a series of burning red arrows shot up at the beard covering his throat. They stuck in and burst. That was Exploding Arrows, Sinon’s Two-Handed Longbow skill. The one-part physical, nine-parts flame-damage attack was to the frost giant’s weakness, and his HP loss was visible.

“Mrrrn!” Thrym roared, changing directions. He was targeting Sinon now. It was usually an elementary mistake when low-defense, high-power attackers in the back earned too much hate with a major attack and pulled a boss’s aggro away from the tanks in front, but that was not the case here. Sinon had used herself as bait to give us time to regroup and recover.

“Give us thirty seconds, Sinon!” I shouted, grabbing a healing potion out of my pouch. Nearby, the others were already pouring the red liquid into their mouths. Pina had just barely survived, thanks to her master’s guarding skill. Unlike in Aincrad, there were pet resurrection spells here, but they took so long to cast, they were almost useless in battle.

I looked back and forth between the agonizingly slow refueling of my HP and the light blue cait sith barely evading Thrym’s ferocious attacks. Sinon was new to ALO, but her reflexes were incredible. Since she played a sniper with no defensive skills in GGO, she must have built up a lot of experience darting out of the way when close-range attackers honed in on her.

“…Prepare to attack,” I commanded my partners, seeing that my HP gauge was finally up to 80 percent. But just as I brandished my swords again and started a countdown, I was interrupted by a surprising voice.

“Sir Swordsman.”

It was the eighth member of our party, Freyja, whom I’d assumed was still next to Asuna.

The AI-controlled NPC stared at me with her odd golden-brown eyes and said, “At this rate, we cannot defeat Thrym. Our only hope is the treasure of our people, buried somewhere in this chamber. If I get that back, my true power will return, and I can defeat Thrym.”

“T-true power…”

For the span of an entire breath, I couldn’t decide what to do.

Then my mind was made. There was no point in being afraid of Freyja using her regained power to join Thrym’s side and wipe us out. At this rate, we would enter a battle of attrition and the quest would run out of time, if we didn’t get destroyed first. We had to make use of any possibility we could.

“All right. What’s the treasure?” I said, just slow enough so the NPC would recognize my speech. Freyja spread her hands about a foot apart.

“It is a golden hammer, about this size.”

“…Huh? A h-hammer?”

“A hammer,” she repeated. I stared at her for half a second. Then I noticed that Sinon, trapped in the back right corner of the chamber, finally took some splash damage from one of Thrym’s attacks, losing nearly a fifth of her health. I couldn’t force her to hold his aggro any longer. I turned to Klein, Leafa, and the rest.

“Go and back her up! I’ll catch up with you in no time!”

“You bet!” the samurai responded, then raced off shouting. In seconds, the sound of group battle resumed, and I looked desperately around the vast treasure chamber.

There were piles and piles of shining golden items against the walls of blue ice. And I was supposed to find one little hammer? Sure, finding the hidden item was a classic quest type, but this was like finding a needle in a haystack!

The quest had to have been designed for a raid party of at least thirty members. There was no way to find a single item out of all these without an excess of members like that.

“…Yui,” I said, turning a wishful eye to the navigation pixie, but all she did was shake her head.

“It won’t work, Papa. Map data don’t include the locations of key items. I believe it was probably randomly generated when we entered the room. The only way to determine which one is the key is to give it to Freyja!”

“Great…uhhh…”

I wrung out my brain so hard, steam might as well have shot out of my ears. But this time, no idea was forthcoming. It seemed as though my only hope was to start digging through a nearby pile and hope I hit the jackpot…

Just then, Leafa looked over and shouted from the distant battle.

“Big Brother! Use a lightning-type skill!”

“L-light…?”

I was taken aback for a moment, but the next instant, I swung the sword in my right hand up high.

Since I had only learned the very basics of illusion magic, there was only one way for me to produce lightning damage.

“Seyaaa!”

I launched forward, doing a front flip in the air, and plunged the sword downward as I fell, holding it backhand. It was Lightning Fall, one of the few heavy-hitting area attacks in the One-Handed Sword category: three parts physical, seven parts lightning.

My blade plunged deep into the ground, accompanied by the dry crack of thunder. Purplish sparks raced in every direction from that point. I rose at once and did a quick spin, cutting across all the piles of objects with my eyes…

“…!”

I saw it. Deep in the mountain of gold, a quickly pulsing purple light, answering the call of my blast. I clenched my teeth and raced for the top left corner of the room. With Thrym’s massive throne to my right, I dove completely into the mountain of treasure, ripping aside priceless items and hurling them behind me as I went.

“…Is this it?!”

A few seconds later, I reached out to what was one of the less impressive items in the treasure chamber. It was a small hammer with a golden hilt and a platinum head embedded with jewels. The moment I grabbed and lifted it, my avatar sank with a phenomenal weight. I roared and hoisted it up, turning to shout, “Freyja, here!”

And with that built-up momentum, I hurled it overhand. Then I panicked. What if this was interpreted as my attacking a friendly NPC? Fortunately, the curvaceous blonde simply held up a slender hand and caught the deadly heavy hammer with ease.

But the next moment, she crouched down into a ball, most likely due to the weight. Her long, wavy hair fanned out, and the exposed white skin of her back trembled.

…Wait, was that bad? Did I give her the wrong thing?

At that point, I heard Freyja’s low-pitched murmur.

“…wing…”

There was a little crackle of electricity in the air.

“…flowing…I am overflowing…”

It struck me as an odd thing for a young, beautiful witch to say. Maybe the Cardinal System’s language module made mistakes sometimes? But her voice was off, too. The glazed, husky voice from before was now deeper, cracking.

Bzzp, zapp. The sparks were growing fiercer. Her golden-brown hair rose up into the air, the hem of the thin white dress flapping upward.

“I am overflowing…with POWERRRRR!!”

The third scream no longer belonged to the old Freyja in any way. I was beyond a “fishy feeling” at this point and in full-on open-mouthed shock as the muscles of the beautiful woman’s limbs and back bulged like ropes. Her white dress exploded into shreds and vanished.

No doubt making use of his secret ability Hyper-Senses, Klein turned away from the battle on the other side of the room at that very moment. When he caught sight of his beloved Freyja’s utterly nude form, his eyes bulged. Then his jaw dropped.

I couldn’t blame him. As the lightning crackled all over Freyja, she began to grow. Ten feet…fifteen…It wouldn’t stop. Now her arms and legs were the size of tree trunks, her bust even brawnier than Thrym’s. The hammer in her right hand had grown to match the size of its owner. It was already too large for even a heavy gnome warrior to wield, and it sprayed lightning in all directions.

And then, Klein and I spotted the detail that delivered the greatest, nastiest shock yet.

From the downturned face’s rugged cheeks and chin fell a long, very long, golden—beard.

“She’s…”

“A dude!”

Two male screams echoed on opposite ends of the room.

The captive beauty who had spurred Klein’s samurai code into motion was nowhere to be seen now. The new giant with the stunning, rippling muscles looked like nothing other than a bodybuilder in his forties.

“Raaaaahhhhh!”

The giant dude unleashed a roar that rattled the entire chamber. He took a rumbling step toward the distant King Thrym with a thick leather boot that had appeared out of nowhere.

With dread, I looked over to the left to check the eighth name at the bottom of the list of party members, below all the HP and MP bars.

While it had read Freyja less than a minute ago, there was now a different name in its place.

Our new companion’s name: Thor.