“Same order as we used against the sentinels, Asuna! Here we go!”

The fencer shot me a glance when I called her by name, but she looked back ahead just as quickly.

“All right!”

The kobold lord took his left hand off the long katana and put it to his waist. That looked like the animation for—

“… !!”

I held my breath and initiated my own sword skill. My right hand and the sword went across my body to the left side of my waist, and I bent over forward until I might flip over. If the angle wasn’t sharp enough, the game system would not recognize it as the start of the skill. I pounced with my right leg from a starting stance so low I was nearly crawling, my body shining blue. It took only an instant to cross the thirty feet to the boss. This was Rage Spike, a one-handed sword charging skill.

The boss’s katana took on a slick green shine and bit faster than my eye could follow in a direct, long-range katana skill: Tsujikaze, or “Cyclone.” It was an instantaneous attack that struck as soon as it began, so there was no way to react once it started.

“Aaahh!!” I howled, bringing my sword up from the left into the path of Illfang’s blade. Sparks exploded with a high-pitched clanging, and we were both knocked back several feet by the force of the collision.

Asuna, who’d been following close behind my burst of speed, did not miss this opportunity.

“Seyaa!!”

Her Linear landed deep within the kobold lord’s right side. His fourth HP bar shrank—not by much, but it was enough.

Even as I felt the shudder of the impact in my right hand, I tried to calculate the risk of our situation.

When I had faced Illfang’s talwar skills in the beta, I wasn’t strong enough to cancel his attacks with my own. But because this katana was lighter than the talwar, I hadn’t lost any HP in our clash. The tradeoff was that his moves were now much faster. Was it even possible to deflect and parry his ensuing rush without slipping up at any point?

There was one other thing. Asuna’s Linear could dispatch a Kobold Trooper with three hits and a Sentinel with four, but this boss monster’s HP were far, far beyond a simple enemy’s. I couldn’t guess how many hits it would take her to finish off his final HP gauge. One of the advantages to players fighting a boss was that the enemy’s massive size made it easier for many people to attack it at once, so ideally we’d have one more damage-dealer on either side. But all of teams A through G were heavily damaged at the moment. We couldn’t call for assistance until they had healed themselves with potions.

Asuna and I had to hold out on our own. And wasn’t I originally expecting to attempt it all by myself? Well, now I had double the help, so what more could I ask for?

“Here he comes again!” I cried once I was out of my post-skill delay, concentrating with all my willpower on the boss’s massive blade.

In the thousand-man Sword Art Online closed beta test the previous August, I made it as far as the tenth floor of Aincrad but never saw the boss there.

The labyrinth of that floor was nicknamed the Castle of a Thousand Serpents, and I simply couldn’t get past the spot guarded by a particularly tough kind of samurai monster called Orochi Elite Guards. They used bewildering, free-form katana skills that no player could wield. Each attack I suffered added the skill names and descriptions to my reference menu, which I consulted desperately in order to memorize the information. By the time I could finally recognize the initiation of each skill, it was August 31, the end of the test.

The Orochis and Illfang were completely different in shape and size, but they were both humanoid and their attacks were, as far as I could tell, the same. I was able to follow my memory from four months ago to cancel out all of the attacks, even the instant ones.

Needless to say, it was a high-wire act. The boss’s slash attacks had a high enough basic damage that just tossing up Slant or Horizontal with the system assist would get me knocked backward. I needed to use them while pushing my body along the thrust of the skills to boost their power to the point that I could actually stop the blows.

This kind of system-independent technique could be very powerful if successful, but it was not without its risks. One wrong move might interfere with the system’s automatic assistance, perhaps even cancel out the sword skill entirely.

In the two months I’d played SAO, both beta and release, I’d never used so much concentration for so long until now.

And after the fifteenth or sixteenth parry, I finally slipped.

“Damn!” I hissed, and tried to cancel out of my half-initiated Vertical skill. I’d read Illfang’s swing as an overhead slice, but he spun it around in a half-circle to come up from below instead. This was Gengetsu, or “Phantom Moon,” an attack that either landed high or low on a random chance, despite starting with the same animation. I brought back my Anneal Blade in a hurry, but it was too late. An unpleasant shock struck my body and knocked me still.

“Ah!” Asuna shouted next to me, but the striking katana had already caught me directly on the front. There was a sharp shock, cold as ice. My entire body went numb, and my HP bar lost nearly a third of its points.

While I fell to my knees with the impact of the blow, Asuna plunged toward the kobold king. I tried to tell her not to—Gengetsu had a very quick recovery period. The blade ended up high in the air after his attack on me, and now began to glimmer again. It was Hiougi, the three-part combo that had killed Diavel …

“Nnnraaah!!”

A bellow rumbled forth just before the katana hit Asuna. A massive, glowing green weapon swung just barely over her head, utilizing the two-handed axe skill, Whirlwind.

The katana and the whirling axe clashed. Their impact rocked the entire chamber, and Illfang was blasted backward. On the other hand, the attacker had held firm with nothing more than leather sandals and slid back only a few feet.

It was the brawny, brown-skinned leader of team B, Agil. He shot a grin at me over his shoulder while I scrambled in my coat pockets.

“We’ll back you up until you finish your pots. Can’t keep forcing a damage dealer to do a tank’s job.”

“…Thanks, man,” I replied, pushing down the strange feeling that was rising in my chest with a healing potion.

Agil wasn’t the only one who came forward. Several other players, mostly from team B, had finished recovering and were ready to resume combat. I sent Asuna a look that said I was okay, and shouted as loud as I could to the rest of the group.

“If you surround the boss all the way, he’ll unleash his full-circle attack! I’ll warn you about the trajectory of his attack, so whoever’s in front can prepare to block it! You don’t need to cancel it with a sword skill; just deflecting it with a shield or weapon should cut down most of the damage!”

“Okay!” the others roared in response. The Kobold Lord added his own bellow to the fray. It seemed as though there was a hint of irritation to it.

I checked on the rest of the party as I slumped back to the wall and recovered with some low-level healing potions.

As I feared when I noticed the boss’s weapon had been altered, they had added extra Ruin Kobold Sentinels to the battle as well. Kibaou’s team E and the relatively unharmed polearm team G were dealing with four of the creatures now. They hadn’t suffered too much so far, but I had a feeling that groups of four sentinels would continue to pop at regular intervals as long as Illfang was alive. Without any help, the two parties would eventually have their hands full.

Between the back line and the front, the most grievously wounded party members, such as the survivors from team C, were working on healing. Frustratingly, potions in this game worked on a heal-over-time basis. Rather than instantly recovering, the gauge would fill up pixel by pixel. On top of that, once the potion was empty, a cooldown icon appeared at the bottom of the player’s view, meaning that until the effect wore off, any extra potions would provide no benefit. To add insult to injury, the weak potions from the first-floor NPCs tasted disgusting.

Because of that cooldown timer, it took a significant amount of time to recover from heavy damage. The common strategy was therefore to switch with another member once you’d suffered a full potion’s worth of damage—also known as “pot rotation”—but that pattern broke down when there were too many injured to stand in and fight. On higher floors, there would be valuable healing crystals that acted instantaneously as long as you didn’t concern yourself with the astonishing price, but those weren’t an option for us down here.

So the battle would be determined by how long Agil’s group of six could hold out in the face of Illfang’s fierce attacks. And in order to give them a fighting chance, I had to identify his skills as soon as the tell appeared.

I took a knee and focused all of my senses on the boss kobold, shouting out warnings like “flat slice from the right,” or “downward from the left” as soon as I recognized them.

Agil’s group followed my instructions, prioritizing guarding with their shields or large weapons, rather than gambling on a neutralizing counterstrike. As tank builds, they had excellent defense and HP, but not enough to hold the boss’s sword skills to zero damage. Their HP bars shrank bit by bit with every crashing sound effect.

And between them all, one fencer danced spryly here and there: Asuna. She was careful never to pass by Illfang’s front or rear, and whenever there was any delay in his movement, she delivered a powerful Linear. Over time, that would raise his aggro level toward Asuna, but the six tanks regularly performed aggro skills like Howl to draw the enemy’s attention.

For nearly five minutes, this dangerous, delicate game continued, threatening to fall apart as soon as a single step of the process failed. Finally, the boss’s HP fell below 30 percent, and his last bar turned red.

In a moment of relief, one of the tanks lost focus and stumbled. He lurched to the side and only caught himself when he was directly behind Illfang.

“Move!” I screamed, but I was a fraction of a second too late. The boss sensed that he was surrounded, and unleashed a terrible roar.

The large body sank to the ground, then launched itself directly upward into the air. His body and katana spun around and around, becoming a single vortex—the deadly full-circle Tsumuji-guruma …

“Aaah!” I howled, and forgetting that my HP hadn’t been entirely healed yet, leapt from the wall.

I slung my sword over my right shoulder and pushed hard with my left foot. My back was hit with a sense of acceleration that shouldn’t be possible based on my agility as my body flew like a rocket diagonally through the air. The one-handed sword thrust skill Sonic Leap had a shorter range than Rage Spike, but it could be aimed upward into the air as well.

The sword took on a brilliant neon green glow. Ahead of me, Illfang’s katana was a fiery crimson.

“Get there …in … time!!”

I swung, stretching my arm as far as it would go. The tip of my Anneal Blade +6 followed a wide arc and just barely caught Illfang’s waist before he could unleash his Tsumuji-guruma.

There were a heavy, sharp sound and the powerful, unmistakable flash of a critical hit. The kobold’s large body slumped in midair, and he fell to the ground without producing his deadly whirlwind.

“Gruhh!” he growled, and flailed wildly in an attempt to get to his feet. I’d inflicted him with the Tumble status that was unique to humanoid monsters.

Somehow, I managed to land in balance and, without missing a beat, pushed every last ounce of air out of my lungs.

“Full attack, everybody!! Surround him!!”

“Raaahh!!”

Agil’s gang of six unleashed all the frustration of their long defensive shift. They spread out around Illfang and tore into him with Vertical sword skills. Axes, maces, and hammers flashed in a spectrum of color and pounded the kobold’s body. The explosion of light and sound began to bite serious chunks out of the enemy’s HP gauge, which was fixed at the top of every player’s vision.

It was a bet. If we could lower the Kobold Lord’s remaining HP to nothing before he got back to his feet, we won. But if he recovered from his status and instantly performed another Tsumuji-guruma, he would slice everyone for certain this time. My Sonic Leap was on cooldown. I couldn’t attack him in midair again.

Agil’s group finished their skill animations and initiated the preliminary motions for the next round, when suddenly Illfang stopped struggling and abruptly sat up.

“We didn’t make it in time,” I hissed, when I noticed that Asuna was standing right next to me. “Asuna, get ready to do your final Linear with me!”

“Okay!”

I had to grin at how quickly her response echoed my command.

Six weapons snarled at once, and the boss was swallowed by a whirl of flashing lights again. But he did not wait for their onslaught to die down. Illfang roared and got to his feet. There was barely 3 percent left of his HP bar, but there it shone, red and prominent.

Agil was under a delay and couldn’t move. Illfang was impervious to stunning or knockbacks now that he’d recovered from the tumble—he transitioned smoothly into his jumping motion.

“Gooo!!” I screamed. Asuna and I leapt together.

She slipped between the tanks and unleashed a furious Linear directly into the boss’s left flank. A second later, my blue-lit sword ripped from the kobold king’s right shoulder to his belly.

Only a single pixel remained on his HP bar.

The beastman seemed to grin. I returned a ferocious smirk of my own and flipped my wrist back.

“Raaaahh!!”

I raised my sword with a soul-shattering roar. The blade, pitted here and there after the fierce ordeal, tore upward to Illfang’s left shoulder to complete a V shape: a two-part sword combo, Vertical Arc.

The kobold’s great form suddenly shuddered weakly and faltered backward. His wolflike face turned up to the ceiling and emitted a keening wail. Countless tiny cracks appeared all over his body. His grip loosened, and the katana clattered to the floor.

Illfang the Kobold Lord, boss of the first floor of Aincrad, shattered into a million tiny pieces of glass.

As I slumped to the floor beneath some unseen pressure, a silent message in the purple system font read, You got the Last Attack!!