1

I NEVER EXPECTED THIS DAY TO COME, thought Asuna, the level-16 fencer, as she held up her Chivalric Rapier +5 in a mid-level stance.

Sixteen feet ahead, a swordsman with black hair and a black coat was doing the same with his sword. His stance looked lazy and relaxed, but the sharp point of the blade stayed utterly still, gleaming coldly as it absorbed Asuna’s gaze.

They were facing each other within a square surrounded by mossy, ancient ruins. The area was silent, with no hint of player or monster alike. The light coming through the outer aperture of the floating castle was weak, closing toward the dark purple of twilight moment by moment.

Today was the fifty-second day since the official start of Sword Art Online, the game of death in which the loss of a player’s avatar ended the life of the player. In the real world, it was December 28, 2022. In four more days, a new year would arrive—assuming they lived to see it.

I’ll survive until next year.

When she first ventured out into the wilderness, she’d never even considered that possibility. She had taken store-bought rapiers, not bothered to do maintenance on them—hadn’t even realized that was possible, in fact—and used them up as she fought relentlessly against countless monsters, resigned to eventually run out of strength and die…A part of her had even hoped it would happen, looked forward to that oblivion.

But at some point, that Todestrieb—that death drive—had disappeared. It wasn’t that Asuna had a clear hope for the future now. There was no certainty that they would one day defeat this macabre arena and be free to return to the real world. But she did want to live to see another day…to fight her way through this floor and see the next. That emotion was palpable within her.

And the reason for that change was undoubtedly the black-haired boy before her, holding up his longsword. He had taught her a great deal about the game and how it worked. He had saved her from many perils. And not just that…Despite the soul-crushing danger that surrounded them all, he kept a breezy attitude, never forgot to smile and enjoy himself, and even lightened her heavy heart with the occasional silly mistake. As her constant partner in clearing the game, he gave her hope for tomorrow.

But now, the only thing in the black eyes of Kirito, level-17 swordsman, was sharp, unsentimental concentration. There was no kindness or frivolity there. His sword and mind were one, ready to react to Asuna’s every movement without pause or delay.

Yesterday—December 27—as they’d climbed the circular staircase from the fourth floor to the fifth, Asuna had turned to him and asked, “How long are you planning to work with me?”

She wasn’t expecting to get a concrete answer. Perhaps she’d been led to that sentiment only after parting with the dark elves from the third and fourth floors. Kizmel and Viscount Yofilis were NPCs, but in a certain way, they were closer to her than any player had been.

Kirito stared back into Asuna’s eyes, shrugged, and in his usual aloof manner, said, “Until you’re strong enough to not need me.”

It was a practical response, devoid of emotion in his typical style, but Asuna still couldn’t move that suffocating weight from her heart. On the fifth floor, and likely the next after that, he’d continue to stand beside her as her partner, fighting at her back. She didn’t want to admit it, but the thought made her happy.

And yet…

“…If you’re not going to come at me, I’ll take the first move,” Kirito said suddenly, cutting through her wavering thoughts with a measured voice. The longsword in his right hand began to swing. The vanishing evening sun slid along its edge like a drop of red blood.

Kirito’s Anneal Blade +8, which had served him all the way from the first floor, had broken at last in battle against a forest elf knight on the fourth floor, so now he was using the Elven Stout Sword that his opponent had dropped. The handle and hilt had fittingly delicate decorations for a weapon of elven make, but it was not a particularly elegant weapon. The polished blade gleamed coldly in the dusk.

As a matter of fact, the base specs of the weapon were nearly as good as the Anneal at +8 level. In other words, if Asuna did not block or evade this attack, her HP—the numerical representation of her life—would suffer huge damage.

But the same could be said of Kirito.

The Chivalric Rapier in Asuna’s right hand was an excellent weapon augmented by the NPC blacksmith of the dark elf camp on the third floor. According to Kirito, its stats were abnormally high, which made its single attack strength higher than most longswords—a deadly quality for rapiers, which were meant to have frequent but weak attacks. It was hard to guess how much of Kirito’s HP would be taken if Asuna hit him cleanly with her best skill, the three-part combo Triangular.

Each combatant’s vision narrowed, focusing solely on the moment either sword hit home on its target. Their breaths shortened. The normally unavoidable sound of boots scuffing against the hard stone ground grew distant.

They had fought countless monsters up to this point, and not just nonhuman animals and insects. They’d fought a pitched battle at Yofel Castle on the fourth floor against forest elf soldiers who looked just like any player. Even that experience had not been as frightening as this.

How can fighting another player be so different from that? Is it because…I’m fighting against Kirito?

The tip of the Chivalric Rapier she held wavered. Kirito didn’t miss his chance, lunging forward on his left leg.

The elvish sword was no longer held lazily, but dead still at eye level. He would either unleash a propulsive normal attack…or a leaping sword skill. She had to guess which one and react ahead of time. But her rapier wouldn’t stop trembling.

“…No.”

Another rasping groan escaped her quavering lips before she realized it.

“…No. I don’t want to do this.”

She held down her misbehaving right hand with her left, pushing it toward the ground. Her eyes left Kirito’s face and settled on the stone below, indigo in the darkness.

She knew it was a childish reaction, and there was no guarantee that Kirito would stop. But Asuna kept her face stubbornly pointed down.

With time came the sound of boots scraping on stone. Next, the sound of a blade slicing air. The light ting of metal.

When she looked up again, Kirito had returned his longsword to the sheath on his back and was throwing up his hands in exasperation.

“So now you’ve changed your mind…” he said with a wry smile, checking the duel timer in the upper half of his vision. “You were the one who asked for a PvP lesson, Asuna.”

Five minutes later, Kirito had started up a little campfire in the corner of the ruins that had been their dueling arena. He pulled an iron kettle out of his inventory and set some water to boil.

To her surprise, he even had the branches to burn for the fire. “When did you pick up those?” she asked.

“Hmm? Oh, here and there on the third and fourth floors,” he replied, smug for some reason. He pulled one of the lit sticks out of the fire. “See how the color of the flame is a bit different from your average fire?”

Now that he mentioned it, the flame glowing on the tip of the branch looked a bit greenish.

“This is a harvesting item called a Fossilwood Branch. They burn a lot longer than typical dead branches. I spotted them while walking around on the lower floors, so I picked some up just in case. After all…”

He paused, and gestured with the branch at the stone ruins around them.

“The fifth floor is a floor of ruins. There are very few trees here, so it won’t be easy to come across these supplies.”

“Ohh…If you’d told me, I would have picked up a few of those, too, you know,” Asuna said, which earned her a skeptical smile from Kirito.

“I dunno about that. You can only find Fossilwood half buried in damp soil. I have a hard time imagining fastidious Asuna placing such a muddy item in her storage.”

“I-I wouldn’t mind that. It’s just a digital storage place, so it’s not like the other items would get mud on them.”

“Also, when you pull them out of the ground, they sometimes have gross bugs on them, sooo…”

“…”

Asuna widened the distance between herself and the flaming stick in Kirito’s hand. The swordsman returned it to the campfire with a hearty laugh. By that time, white steam was issuing from the kettle, so Kirito poured the boiling water into the already-packed teapot, waited fifteen seconds, then poured the liquid into two cups.

“Here.”

She took the cup, thanked him, then breathed in its scent. She’d bought those leaves in Rovia, the main city of the fourth floor; they smelled somewhat like a fruit-flavored rooibos tea. With her arm around her knees, she took a sip of the hot liquid and sighed contentedly.

The last bit of sunlight was gone now, and the area was covered in blue darkness. On the lower floors, the moonlight shining in through the outer aperture of Aincrad provided a little illumination to go by, but here on the fifth floor, there was hardly any light at all. If it weren’t for the campfire, Kirito would just be a black silhouette beside her.

Yesterday they’d gone from the exit of the spiral staircase straight to the main town, and by the time night had fallen, they were resting at an inn. All day today, they were busy fulfilling quests, so she hadn’t realized the night was so dark here outside town. As a solo player by trade, Kirito had the Search skill, so he would warn her if a monster or some other danger was approaching, but she couldn’t stop her mind from imagining something lurking out there in the darkness, beyond the stone walls that surrounded the ruined square.

Asuna unconsciously slid her rear an inch and three quarters closer to Kirito, then mumbled, “I’m sorry about earlier.”

“Huh? For what?”

She was expecting that response and immediately continued, “For quitting the duel that I asked you for in the first place.”

“Oh…Well, look, I don’t mind at all…”

Kirito took a huge swig of tea, then grimaced at the heat. He glanced over at her.

“…It just seems a bit rare for you to give up on something you started.”

“Mm…”

She nodded and rested her chin on her knees as she hugged them with her left arm.

“It just…wasn’t quite what I imagined. This duel…but it’s not really a duel because it was in the—what did you call it—first-strike mode? So since the first clean hit wins and it’s basically safe, I thought it would be more like…a match. A sports competition. But…”

Asuna’s mouth worked soundlessly as she tried to come up with the words to describe the fear that snuck into her heart when blade matched blade. But before she succeeded, Kirito muttered, “There’s at least one major difference…between SAO duels and real-life sporting matches.”

She glanced at the swordsman in the black coat sitting cross-legged on the stone. His eyes, blacker than the darkness, were looking into the fire. They were slightly narrowed, staring back into distant memories.

“I think it’s the motive for fighting. In sports—even in competitive fighting—it’s victory you’re hoping to gain, right? The desire to win becomes a huge source of energy. On the surface, duels in this game are a lot like sports. When players of about the same level and gear fight on first-strike-finish mode, there’s absolutely no fear of HP dropping to a dangerous amount. But…”

As Kirito trailed off, the piece of Fossilwood popped and burst. A shower of red sparks shot up, melting into the dark.

Asuna traced the hilt of the Chivalric Rapier equipped on her left hip and picked up where Kirito had left off.

“…But we’re not using bats or rackets or even bamboo shinai swords…They’re real steel. Sure, they’re digital lines of code, but if they touch your opponent, they take away real life…”

“Exactly. The more seriously you take the duel, the less it becomes about seizing simple victory. Those who have no fear of slashing their opponents with steel weapons and taking their HP—those who most purely follow the purpose of ‘killing’ their foe—will get closest to victory. At its core, dueling is not a sport here. It’s just bloodshed for the sake of survival. Winning has nothing to do with it.”

As those last words left his lips, Asuna felt a shiver run through her body. She recognized it as the very sensation that had foiled her hand earlier, in that attempt at a duel.

“…I don’t want to have a fight to the death with you, Kirito,” she blurted out, then hastily clamped her mouth shut. He didn’t tease her, though.

“Yeah. Me too. I don’t want to do that with you, either…Even if it’s just a first-strike-finish duel.”

She looked over in mild surprise and saw that Kirito was looking at her, too. His black eyes reflecting the orange light of the campfire, her temporary partner continued, “But…I still think you ought to have some experience with dueling…with PvP, before we start tackling this floor in earnest.”

“…”

She stared back at him, unsure how to respond.

Their aborted attempt at a duel was Asuna’s idea. But that idea had come from something Kirito had said the previous evening, as they climbed the spiral staircase to this floor.

After they’d defeated Wythege the Hippocampus, boss of the fourth floor, with the help of Kizmel the dark elf knight and Viscount Yofilis, Asuna and Kirito had left the members of the other guilds back in the chamber and continued up the spiral staircase to the fifth floor.

The wall of the staircase hall was carved, as was customary, with reliefs that symbolized the landscape and sights of the new floor, but most striking and memorable was always the one on the large door at the top of every staircase.

The relief was of a large, ancient castle. It was not an elegant manor like Yofel Castle standing in the middle of a lake, but a heavy, imposing fortress. As he’d looked up at the carving, Kirito sighed and said, “Looks like the basic terrain is the same as it was in the beta test…”

Asuna had asked him what kind of terrain that was, and he’d shrugged and explained, “Ruins. Maybe thirty percent of the map is natural ground, and the rest is all mazelike ruins. Meaning the entire six-miles-across terrain is one huge dungeon, in a way…And it’s really dark…There was a lot of PK-ing going on there in the beta…”

PK-ing: player-killing. And one who player-killed was a PKer.

She was familiar with that as a gaming term. Kirito had once said he wanted to buy the same hooded cape she wore, to hide his face in town. When she’d pointed out that he could just as easily wear a burlap sack over his head, he had replied that he would be mistaken for a PKer if he did that.

At the time, it was a lighthearted, silly conversation, so Asuna had essentially ignored and then forgotten the term. After all, there would never be PK-ing in Aincrad in its current state. Every player’s wish was to escape the virtual world, and attacking or, God forbid, actually killing another player could only set the progress through the game back. That was how Asuna always saw things, and she assumed she shared that opinion with Kirito.

But when he’d mentioned the term PK in front of the door to the fifth floor, there was a firmness to his expression she’d never seen before. It had looked as if he was certain that the fifth floor and its ruins would be home to rampant PK-ing in the new, deadly SAO, just as it had been in the beta.

The more she saw that look on his face, the more Asuna was convinced that after they activated the town portal and restocked their items, she should ask for a lesson on the basics of PvP combat.

Their first attempt at a duel had reached a premature, pathetic end, and Asuna wasn’t in the mood to try again very soon. So as she sipped the sweet-smelling tea, she asked, “Kirito…do you really think…there will be PKers on this floor?”

“Hmmm,” he replied, swirling the tea in his cup. He stopped abruptly and looked at her. “Do you remember the player I dueled on the third floor…near the forest elf camp?”

“Yes…His name was Morte, right? The one who was plotting something because he was secretly part of both Lind’s Dragon Knights Brigade and Kibaou’s Aincrad Liberation Squad…”

Kirito had told her about him just before the battle against the boss of the third floor. It was a very intriguing and troubling story, and Asuna had briefly spotted the man himself in the spider queen’s cave, so she’d been on the lookout for him on the fourth floor. That signature metal coif had never appeared, though.

Her partner nodded and returned his gaze to the fire. There was an unusual tension to his features.

“Morte challenged me to a half-finish duel, whittled my HP down to just above half, and tried to hit me with his ax for massive damage. If he’d been successful, he would have wiped out all my HP and killed me…and having won a duel fair and square, he wouldn’t have become an orange player. That would make it just as legal a PK method as a monster PK…A duel PK, I guess. I’m amazed he thought of that.”

“Don’t start being impressed with him,” Asuna snapped. The swordsman wore a strained smile and agreed.

His expression serious again, Kirito murmured, “The problem is why Morte would do such a thing. Based on the way he showed up, I don’t think he’s a pleasure PKer doing it for fun. The reason he challenged me to that duel was because he wanted to prevent me from completing the quest at the forest elf camp. And while I was held up, the DKB and ALS were closing in on the same camp for different questlines. He wanted them to have a showdown…to fight.”

“Yeah…” Asuna murmured, recalling the event. “When Kizmel and I raced to the camp, it looked like they were ready to draw weapons at any second…If she hadn’t stopped it then and there, the whole frontline group could have fallen apart. But…even if he succeeded, how would that help Morte? What could he have possibly gained that would be worth a months-long delay in beating the game—and obtaining everyone’s freedom?” She asked it mostly to herself, but Kirito was contemplating the very same question.

The DKB and ALS were so large that they represented nearly the entirety of the game’s most advanced players. All the last-attack bonuses from the bosses had been seized by the swordsman in black sitting beside Asuna, but at this point, it was essentially impossible to beat the labyrinth tower without those two guilds.

A motive to make the two guilds fight.

Ordinarily, a good reason would be to ride in during the chaos of the squabble and seize control of both guilds, taking command of the leadership: in short, for glory. Or perhaps looting the money and gear of those players who died in battle, for personal gain.

But was it possible that one’s lust for glory or riches could override their desire to survive? No matter your lofty position in this world, no matter how many col you earned or how much elite gear you equipped, it was all worthless if you lost in a fight just once, be it monster or player. You would simply die in this electronic prison, and never return to the real world.

Something didn’t add up about Morte’s motives. It looked like he was trying to interfere with the efforts to clear the game. But no one should actually think that way. Especially if they were risking death by leaving the safety of town and venturing into the dangerous wilderness.

Asuna’s reason for fighting in the danger zone as one of the game’s top players was to someday escape this floating fortress. She would return to the real world, get back to her old life, and forget all the fear and sadness she’d experienced here…

Without realizing it, she glanced to her right. Her black-haired temporary partner was gazing into the crackling campfire. The way he was lost in thought removed his usual tense demeanor and actually made him look quite young.

Escaping this world. That would mean…

She forced herself to stop mid-thought and straightened her head with considerable willpower. Her eyes settled on the strange greenish fire surrounding the Fossilwood Branch. Compared to a real fire, there was a touch of artificiality in the way the tips of the flames moved, but it was real enough for Asuna and beautiful, too.

Yes…the world they lived in was a cruel prison, but at times it could also be breathtakingly gorgeous. The city on the first floor, the plains of the second, the forests of the third, and the canals of the fourth…And the entire reason she was able to appreciate these things was due to the influence of the partner sitting beside her.

She was struggling to keep her mind off that fact by pondering Morte’s motives further—when Kirito broke his long silence to consider, “Maybe…Morte isn’t the same kind of player as us, in the truest sense…”

“Huh? What do you mean?”

Again she looked at Kirito, who was still gazing intently into the campfire.

“If you assume that his motive in interfering with our forward progress itself is an act of sabotage directed by whoever’s running this game of death…it does make a kind of sense.”

“S…sabotage? You’re saying…he’s working with Akihiko Kayaba?”

“Yeah,” Kirito confirmed. However, he quickly shook his head. “But even still, it doesn’t add up. It would be one thing if we were just about to finish the game, but this guy started his activities when we were on the third floor out of a hundred. It’s just too early. No, wait…”

Kirito’s eyes suddenly gleamed.

“…Right now!”

“Huh?! Wh-what?!” Asuna exclaimed, bolting upright at the same moment that Kirito drew his sword.

The sharp tip of the Elven Stout Sword traced a silver line in the darkness. He pierced the campfire with a thrust that was nearly as quick as Asuna’s fencing.

As she watched in bewilderment, a huge storm of sparks floated into the night sky. When he pulled the sword back, something was speared on its tip. It was cooked to a light crisp, emitting savory white steam: a baked yam.

“…Um…Kirito.”

“Yep.”

“When you were staring intently into the fire like that…”

“Yep.”

“…Was it just to monitor how well the yam was cooking?”

“You bet,” he answered, straight-faced. In response, she wavered between yelling at him or punching him.

But before she could put either plan into action, Kirito pulled the tip from the sweet potato and placed the sword in the sheath over his back. He tossed the hot potato from hand to hand and eventually split it into two halves. Another burst of steam issued forth, along with a sweet, fragrant scent.

“Here.”

He offered her one half. Given that six hours had passed since lunch, she decided she was generous enough to shelve her anger for now.

The hot baked yam was not quite the same as a real sweet potato in color and texture, but it was still delicious. Asuna took a bite and let the soft filling melt like cream in her mouth, the flavor rich and sweet.

After a second bite, then a third, she took a drink of tea, sighed in contentment, and finally asked, “When did you buy this? I don’t remember us stopping by a grocer.”

Kirito mumbled and said evasively, “Hmm? I didn’t buy them.”

“…So where did they come from? Don’t tell me you picked this up off the ground in the third-floor forest, too.”

“Ha-ha, no way. These yams are B-level food ingredients—you can’t just find them on low floors like this one.”

“So you got them from someone?”

“Hmm, I suppose you could say that, in a general sense…This is a drop from the half-fish, half-human–looking monsters in the fourth-floor labyrinth.”

“…”

The unexpected answer left her at a loss for how to respond. If he’d said it was “half-fishman meat,” she would have thrown it directly in his face, but a former possession seemed just safe enough to be acceptable. She took another bite quickly, before asking her fourth question:

“…Why would a half-fishman drop sweet potatoes?”

She was counting on one of his usual wry, slippery jokes—but was disappointed.

“Hmmm…”

He groaned, then hummed for three seconds and set down the half-eaten baked potato. He returned her question with another one:

“Do you know where Satsuma sweet potatoes come from?”

“Huh…? Well, Satsuma was the old name for Kagoshima, right? I feel like I learned this in school. Someone named Aoki Konyo brought the seeds from Satsuma province.”

Once she finished answering, she realized with a start that she nearly admitted she had been in middle school back in real life. She’d hardly ever talked to Kirito about life out there—never, in fact. This was probably the second time ever.

Kirito didn’t seem to think much of the revelation. “Yeah. To be precise, they first came over from Okinawa. But that’s only in Japan…What I mean is, where were they first cultivated in the entire world?”

“The world…?” she asked, slightly relieved. “Hmm…I think I heard that potatoes were originally from Latin America…”

“Correct.”

“Huh?”

“Sweet potatoes originate from around there. Technically, potatoes were cultivated in the highlands of South and Central America, while sweet potatoes were raised in the lowlands around the coast.”

“Ohhh…”

She popped the last piece into her mouth, savored the flavor, then brought the topic back around by asking, “What does that have to do with those fishmen?”

“Well, this is just me trying to force the connection into place,” he replied. With a grin, he tossed the last piece of his baked potato up in the air and caught it in his mouth. “But in the mythology of the Aztecs, the world has collapsed four times already. In the first world, people were eaten by packs of jaguars. In the second, people were turned into monkeys. In the third, they were turned into birds. And in the last world, they were turned into fish…”

“…And the people who were turned into fish were the ones fighting us in the fourth-floor labyrinth?” she responded skeptically. Kirito laughed good-naturedly.

“Ha-ha, maybe, maybe not. But remember what Kizmel said? The various floors of Aincrad were separated from the earth long ago and rose into the sky. There were elves and kobolds and minotaurs in those sections…so who’s to say there couldn’t have been monsters from Aztec legends?”

“Hmmm…what I want to know is…”

Asuna paused while she finished the tea in her teacup, then looked at him with both exasperation and admiration.

“…how do you know so much about Aztec legends and the origin of sweet potatoes?”

“Ahh…” he hedged, and she realized what she had done. She’d gone beyond the proper bounds of this world again.

But her temporary partner only glanced at her briefly. “The place I lived…on the other side…was famous for growing sweet potatoes. When I was in elementary school, I did my summer vacation report on the history of sweet potatoes. Funny how I still remember that stuff.”

“Ohhh…” she mumbled, keeping her face straight while her brain worked away furiously at a new subroutine.

If it was famous for sweet potatoes, that meant either Kagoshima or Ibaraki, but Kirito’s vocabulary and intonation were hardly different from Asuna’s Tokyo Japanese. So it could be some area around Tokyo famous for sweet potatoes—but did such a place exist? If anything was likely, it would be Chiba or Saitama—perhaps to the west of Tokyo. If she had a real-life phone, she could do a search instantly…

After half a second of this rapid thought process, she closed her eyes and cut it short.

If the game of death was ever beaten, everything in this world would vanish—all the equipment, items, and personal connections. She didn’t want that to be a bad thing. It would make her lose sight of her reason to keep pushing onward.

“…Thanks for the potato. And for the potato facts,” she said, clapping her hands to drive that lingering thought from her mind. “Now, as for Morte…”

“Hmm? Oh…right,” Kirito said, blinking and getting his mind back to the important topic at hand. “We were wondering if Morte was working with Akihiko Kayaba or not. Well, I know I brought it up, but I don’t think it’s likely. Morte’s just an exception to the rule for now, a player working off motives that don’t line up with our logic or reason. That’s how we should see him for now. There’s just one thing that bothers me…”

He paused, his eyes staring sharply into the quiet blaze of the campfire. This time, he did not pull out another set of potatoes.

“…We’ve already heard a similar story.”

“Huh…?” she blurted out, then remembered. “Oh…from Nezha!”

Asuna held her breath until Kirito silently nodded.

They’d met the player blacksmith Nezha on the second floor. He’d used the Quick Change mod to secretly steal her Wind Fleuret, a choice forced upon him by his guild, the Legend Braves.

But the trick in question wasn’t his own idea.

“The man who spoke to them in the bar and taught them the trick to that scam for free—the one in the black poncho,” Kirito went on, voice low. “I think his true goal was for Nezha to be judged by the rest of the top players. If it weren’t for the rest of the Braves getting down on hands and knees to beg forgiveness after the second-floor boss fight, they might have executed Nezha. In a way, that would be PK-ing. Carefully toying with the thoughts of various players, guiding them into ultimately killing each other…You might call it a provocation PK…”

Asuna felt her features twist at the ugly nastiness of the idea.

Monster PK-ing (MPK) and duel PK-ing (DPK) were bad enough, but they also involved an amount of risk on the part of the person attempting it. In constructing an MPK, any mistake might cause the monsters to attack the PKer, and in a DPK, you could always end up losing instead.

But a provocation PK (if it were a common enough concept to have its own acronym, it would be PPK) completely removed any direct risk from the one orchestrating it. The perpetrator just stayed comfortable in the center, guiding individuals and groups into direct confrontation around him.

The chances of success seemed lower than an MPK or DPK, but in every world, there were people extraordinarily skilled at manipulating others. Even at the all-girls school Asuna attended, there were students who otherwise didn’t stand out, but could use e-mails, texts, and rumors to manipulate the mood of the class and apply pressure wherever they wanted. They were probably doing it without realizing their skill, but this mysterious man in the black poncho tried to have Nezha killed with clear, malicious purpose.

“…Do you suppose Morte and the black poncho could be the same person?” she asked. Kirito traced the spot between his brows with a finger.

“Hrmmm…Nezha described the black poncho as a man who laughed gleefully. And Morte certainly did enjoy his chuckles, so they could be the same person. If that’s the case, then like I said earlier, Morte might just be a unique, solo PKer who refuses to abide by the common logic of Aincrad. But if they’re separate people, then the situation is more dire than that…”

The campfire, which was finally losing fuel and strength, popped in a burst of sparks. Asuna flinched, then hesitantly turned to her partner.

“What do you mean…by ‘dire’…?”

Kirito took a number of breaths, hesitating to answer, before he finally spoke in a low voice.

“…If they’re separate people, we should assume Morte and the black poncho are working together.”

“…!!”

“Meaning they’re working to commit PKs as a duo…or perhaps there’s even more than two. There could be three, four…or an entire gang of PKers out there in Aincrad somewhere…”

The Fossilwood Branch finally reached the end of its durability and crumbled through the middle, disappearing with a large sheet of sparks. As the tiny lights went out, the darkness of their surroundings crept closer, and Asuna unconsciously moved herself a few inches to the right.

“…But if you kill players in SAO right now, they can’t be revived…They’ll die in the real world. Do Morte and his friend not want us to beat the game? Don’t they want to get out of this place…?” she rasped, her voice so hoarse and dry that she had trouble hearing herself.

Nearly ten seconds later, Kirito’s response was just as strained.

“Maybe…they’re not concerned with whether we escape at all…Like you said, when your HP go down to zero, the player dies. So maybe they just want to cause PKs…to commit murder…”

Asuna thought she heard a rustle behind her and spun around.

But the only thing there was a series of dark ruined walls, cold and unfeeling.