3:1 - Haruka, the Girls, and Neath
Haruka smiled in the most absurd way under the veil she'd crafted herself, feeling thoroughly conscious of the fact she'd finished her [Blue Mage] outfit just in time for their ascent to the third floor. It wasn't really something she should have been smiling about, per se, but she couldn't help but feel a little giddy over wearing the outfit in the sort of climate it was designed for.
The [Blue Mages] of FFXI were designed with a general Middle East aesthetic as a mysterious order that'd look right at home alongside the Assassins of real history. As such, their iconic equipment was designed as a mishmash of artistically reinterpreted clothing grabbed from everywhere from Turkey to Arabia to Central Asia. It was hardly authentic to any one country, but she vibed with it, and for someone who didn't have much confidence in her own face, wearing a veil wasn't such an imposition.
For all that the [Third Floor] being a desert rather than a massive forest was a problem, for all that the revamp of Zumfut from an arboreal settlement among misty woods with near-zero visibility to an oasis trade city in a land of shifting dunes had made trouble for the [Front-Liners] up until about three days ago, she really dug the redecoration. If not for the multilayered Sword of Damocles hovering over everyone's heads, she'd be openly praising the redesign.
Maybe the increased [Thirst Frequency] due to heat and light during the day was a little bit of a pain in the ass, maybe the [Sandstorm Event] was anti-fun incarnate, maybe [Mirages] were bullshit, maybe the intense [Cold Effect] at night for the sake of realism was obnoxious as hell and constrained when anyone with sense could go hunting, but she was loving the place so far in general. It was a shame they'd be moving up to what was already being called the [Slime Floor] in due time - they were aiming to do it before the fifth floor unlocked, under Tabitabi's encouragement that they try to catch up and [Do Their Part].
Haruka personally might have been fine screwing around as a [Mid-Liner] or even [Rear-Liner] if it meant she didn't need to leave this floor.
Just as the group came to the foot of the dune in front of them, the [Thirst] effect kicked in again, and she turned to look at them while retrieving her canteen, signaling a brief break.
For this area, the party scout was ideally either her or Emi, with the other one as the rear guard, since they were the only ones who could efficiently reinforce their own senses to detect the signs of [Desert Antlions] and other ambusher type enemies. Well, it was possible that Yuki could develop a 'dowse for bugs spell if she tried, in order to split the work in more ways, but…
There was no telling how long a spell like that would actually be useful, though. Already, the [Fourth Floor] apparently seemed to offer a break in the fixation the game had shown with creepy crawlies both small and large, if one didn't consider slimes a part of the category, and even on the [Third Floor] not every enemy was a bug. It'd be all too cruel if her element turned out to only be useful for the first few floors, then she fell off hard.
"Ready to keep going?" Tabitabi asked, watching as she stowed the canteen back into her inventory. "We've only got so long to map this area before we've got to deal with [Evening Spawns], so…"
Haruka nodded. It was a fair bit past noon already, with how long they'd been on this expedition, and the [Mob Spawns] on this floor got more dangerous and more aggressive in the early morning and evening, under the logic that both heat adapted and cold adapted monsters were able to come out of hiding at the same time. She hunched over forward to keep from sliding down the dune as she walked up, and made her way up it.
The combination of field effects on the [Third Floor] and the fact that it was still relatively similar to the gargantuan [First Floor] meant that, by comparison to other places, it was still relatively poorly mapped even well after the discovery of the various bosses, and so [Mid-Liners] like they'd self-promoted to had a lot of work to do tracking down quests and hunting grounds opportunities that they could exploit themselves to level up and improve their gear, then sell to Argo-shishou for an admittedly modest sum, since the [Front-Liners] wouldn't pay much for it.
It was slow going, both in general and in terms of climbing this specific dune. If there were familiars in the game, it would have been possible to use them as scouting UAVs to work exponentially faster, but as it stood the players needed to trudge around manually, given that flying with brooms and carpets wasn't really a thing right now, and any other sort of flight spell was something temperamental, inefficient, and altogether cludged like having a projected insect carry you. That meant hiking cross-country over unstable, monster infested ground.
Eventually, though, she reached the crest of the dune, and her eyes immediately went wide as their reinforced visual acuity took in the scene ahead. There was a new oasis where canteens could be filled and a small run-down building out there that'd only just popped onto her map, and the angle she was looking down from guaranteed it wasn't a mirage.
More importantly, though, was what all else she could see down there - two human-shaped figures, one a dark-skinned woman and one somewhat fairer skinned man, neither really dressed for the sun and heat, locked in a pitched sword fight and exchange of what seemed to be fire and earth magecraft outside of the building, surrounded by [Corpses], something that shouldn't actually exist in the world of SAO outside of setpieces, the man dodging away from sandstone pillars periodically as the woman rolled to avoid his fireballs. Both had a type of cursor that you rarely saw outside of towns, the cursor used for [NPCs] that weren't [Mobs] - for NPCs that were [Questgivers], judging by the golden exclamation marks above their arrows. She recognized this scenario, but the two sure as shit didn't have rounded ears or spellcasting abilities in the [Beta].
She threw up her hand, warning the other girls that they were going to want to stop once they reached the top.
"What's up, onee-chan?" Emi asked almost immediately, landing from a hop beside her and almost miraculously not losing her footing. "Danger ahead?"
She pointed out into the oasis valley, indicating where her sister needed to direct her enhanced gaze.
Emi gasped a moment later. "A PK- no, wait, those are both Quest NPCs. What're they doing fighting? What's going on here?"
Tabitabi grunted as she trudged up behind them. "Is one of them brown skinned and the other really pale?"
Good to know she'd come to the same conclusion.
"Yes, but…" Emi began with a frown. "How did you know?"
The older woman nodded as she and Yuki joined them at the crest of the dune. "Well, I can hardly believe it, given how much of a facelift the [Third Floor] has gotten, but I think we must've found the [Elf War] event from the [Beta]."
"Not seeing any of Santa's Helpers down there, chief." Emi shot back with a bemused tone. "Both have round ears just like us."
"Well, all the same." Tabitabi declared with a shrug. "If there's two [Questgivers] having a brawl on the third floor, and they're obviously aesthetically different, I can only think that it's [Elf War]."
Yuki cocked her head to the side. "And the [Elf War] is what, exactly, Tabitabi-san? Why are they both [Questgivers], actually?"
"Well, because you have to pick a side, obviously." Tabitabi replied with a slight frown. "In the [Beta], the third floor was around the point where you started fighting mostly humanoid enemies that could use [Sword Skills] back at you, and the [Elf War] event chain was one of the first tastes of how intense that could get. For people who'd been focused on PVP before that point, it was only natural that you'd explore it a little when you got the chance. Basically, the two sides are fighting over the keys to…uh… something or other, and if you pick a side you get to go on a quest chain that lasts until around the [Ninth Floor] where you support your chosen faction in a rush to claim the six [Plot Rocks] and gain access to the [Mcguffin]. I haven't heard anything about it being carried over to the [Death Game], though - the entire concept of mostly humanoid opponents from this point onwards got scrapped, for starters."
"So in other words," Emi concluded as she watched the pitched battle continue inconclusively. "This is actually pretty prime information, given that it'll be relevant to the [Front-Line] up until the [Ninth Floor]?"
Haruka tapped her foot gently. There was still a major problem with communication in the field, for her. Without sheathing her sword, she couldn't perform any sign that required both hands, and without switching to closed captioning she couldn't access the voice synth function to begin with, which rendered her range of communication effectiveness a bit less than optimal.
"Well, probably. Possibly. Assuming nothing else has changed..." Tabitabi replied, pinching her forehead. "Sure. Let's proceed on the assumption, for now, that Argo's going to give us all the money for finding this and exploring it… we've still got to vet the information ourselves first, at least part way. So, we've got to run the quest to confirm it still works the same way."
"Oh." Emi replied.
Yuki planted her sword in the sand for a second as she considered that. "So, we've got to pick one of these NPCs to kill and one to save?"
Well, Haruka mused, not exactly. If things followed the original quest closely enough, they'd be going up against a way overleveled enemy they shouldn't be able to beat, and once they hit half health, the one they helped would launch a suicide attack and pass the buck to them. Then again, would it really be that convenient and gamelike when the combatants were both [Spellsword] types?
"...Yeah." Tabitabi replied, nodding slowly, evidently not wanting to overcomplicate things. "We've gotta pick one of the two to fight, and one of the two to fight with, in order to initiate the overall questline. I'd joke that I could just throw out an explosion big enough to catch them both, but I'd rather not risk bricking the whole ensemble when there's money riding on it."
Haruka nodded. Actually, considering everything, it was entirely possible that even with a fairly uniform level of 11, they'd be able to take on a level fifteen or sixteen enemy if they had support. After all, [Neko Cafe Nyan*Nyan] could debatably be classified as a sort of [Protagonist Guild] right now - they all had Rare Elements they'd learned to fight with, and three of them were even absurd prana monsters!
"So the question becomes, do we fight the brown-skinned tit lady, or do we fight the pale-skinned pretty boy?" Emi posed, getting into position to slide down the dune. "My vote's for the lady, incidentally."
Haruka rolled her eyes. If Emi was really that self conscious about tits, there were hundreds of ways she could have forced hers to get bigger without it looking suspicious or needing to be actively maintained, even without resorting to something stupid and risky like cursing her classroom to tax the other girls 1% of their bust growth.
"Alternative proposal, in advance of any possible disagreement" the resident breast-haver of the group offered, raising her hand. "We could flip a coin. I genuinely don't give a shit either way, though."
"Me either."
Honestly, if Haruka didn't suspect that both NPCs were doomed, she'd have pushed to save the lady. It was a pretty basic and shallow way to decide things, but even if the NPC wasn't quite her type, she'd rather go with what her own senses could tell her was a hot lady than what she assumed would probably be considered a hot guy. In this case, though, there was no point - the quest giver was doomed, so she didn't care. She sheathed her sword to sign at the group as their eyes fell upon her. "Let's just go with what Jinan wants here."
| | |
As their party approached to within range of the brawl, the two spellswords shot them a brief glance of acknowledgement, their heated exchange dying down for just a second as they switched their cursors to a quest-in-progress question mark. This was the point where it was possible to decide their route.
Tabitabi drew near to Yuki's side, reaching a hand out in front of her as the girl projected a [Sand Wasp]'s stinger in the air. This sort of rehearsed maneuver was rarely practical, but as alpha strikes went, turning a bug part into a bomb offered pretty good efficiency and a high degree of precision, they'd said.
"Killer Queen's First Bomb!" the adult woman cried.
A moment later, as the two combatants separated, Yuki answered with a parallel call of "Nekomata used Pin Missile!" and released the prepared projectile.
It was funny, because that was a real Pokemon move, and they'd turned it into a high explosive missile. Ha ha. Haruka was ready to roll on the ground laughing.
She braced her sword, already imbued with her deadly essence, as the lady mob's cursor went red with the system's realization that she was their target, and she began her pre-programmed spiel about how they were courting death by blah blah blah. Haruka couldn't hear her over the sound of the massive explosion she'd jumped away from at the last second.
Haruka sprung into motion immediately, not waiting for the smoke to clear as she built up speed for a decapitation strike. Versus an enemy who'd exhibited actual physical attack type magecraft, Yuki and Tabitabi would need to actually tank or evade the spells to whatever extent they were targeted over the [Pale Bishonen], rather than simply ignoring them as non-concerns. That meant Emi was a dedicated healer for this fight, rather than healer-DPS, and it meant that Haruka's role as a debuffer was critical, which meant she needed to strike fast to overcome the four or five level difference in raw stats with charge damage and deliver her psychic neurotoxin.
This would be the first test versus a caster mob that wasn't a first floor tutorial on fighting a magus, so she still wasn't entirely sure how long it'd last versus magic resistance at her fairly fledgling skill level of only eighty.
She broke through the smoke cloud and saw the target dodging a gout of flames, her health bar shaved down by an almost inconceivable eighth by that explosion, even though it'd seemed like a glancing blow at best - sasuga prana monsters! Well, she'd probably only get harder to hit now that they were past the programmed fight-start and [Cardinal] could have her execute evasive maneuvers versus the group, so…
Haruka surged forward to slash across the quest-enemy's bare arm, applying some brief Telekinesis to boost her speed by forcing her leg muscles to contract with greater synchronization, drawing out a level of force that invariably harmed the body. In the real world, she'd have shredded muscles in her legs doing that, but in SAO she simply bore the pain as she took a chunk of damage, closing the remaining distance in a second without any subsequent loss of mobility. There weren't many proper ways of emulating a stat buff like this using Nerve Reinforcement, sadly.
Her blade struck true and left a red gash across the beautiful collection of polygons in front of her, the [Non-Elf] freezing mid-chant and losing another chunk of her health to the spell failure.
Surprisingly, fighting with the premise that they'd try seriously to win wasn't seeming to turn out too poorly. They'd already taken out over an eighth of the enemy's [Life Bar] in just a few seconds of combat, and she was crumpling onto the ground under the effects of the neurotoxic curse she'd been afflicted with. If she didn't manage to break it quickly, she might even start to suffer the [Drowning] status effect as the system emulated the effects of lung paralysis.
Haruka drew back rapidly as she heard the cry of "Killer Queen's First Bomb!", rushing to get out of the blast radius of the [Pseudo-Grenade] she knew was coming so Tabitabi could detonate it sooner.
They'd paralyze the foe, bomb her, wrap her in mantis limbs if need be, bomb her again, paralyze her, wail on her, bomb her… it was a fairly simple strategy, but it was far more tactically nuanced than they'd been able to pull off in the past, and it killed enemies with far less risk and expense, seemingly even with a large level gap. It could even be used versus field bosses to a respectable level of effectiveness.
So kind of the devs to place the [Thaumaturgy System] in a position of primacy over the [Stat System], where strong spells could heavily invalidate even a considerable level gap. Well, not that it wasn't accurate to reality.
The simple hunk of fuel coal - iron had turned out to be a bit of a gimmick, apparently - exploded violently as though it were a fuel-air bomb once Haruka was safely relocated away from the enemy. When the smoke cleared, it was clear that she was already more than half-dead, and she hadn't shrugged off the paralysis effect yet.
Haruka dashed back in to reapply it, in case she was getting close, then pulled away as a centipede's jaw clamped down on the mob and flames washed over her, in order to evade the next grenade.
It was against groups of enemies that they actually had to deviate from this simple pattern.
It didn't take a fourth repetition to finish the [Non-Elf], and with a quiet sigh she sheathed her sword and went over to Emi for healing.
"Hmph." the quest NPC they'd helped began, giving them a dubious look as he approached the site of the kill. "I suppose you've given me some aid in dealing with that Lyusula dog, outsiders. Don't think that it makes us allies, however."
She grimaced. That was some prickly ass dialogue writing there! Had they picked the wrong one to kill after all? Would the milf have been any friendlier?
It was too late to say.
"Yeah, yeah." Tabitabi huffed. "We did save your bacon, though."
There was no real reason to speak to an NPC in that much detail - they mostly couldn't handle anything but simple responses - but with edgelord level writing like that it was understandable.
The man paused amid crouching over where the enemy had exploded into a rainbow spray of polygons. "Perhaps, and that may be worthy of some repayment. Hm. With my compatriots slain, there would be some difficulty if I were ambushed on my way back to camp, and I cannot risk the Lyusula taking the key from me..."
"Key?" Yuki asked, perfectly parroting the keyword in a way that'd make anyone who didn't understand the speech system think she'd forgotten their conversation earlier entirely.
"It is not a matter for you outsiders to worry about." he replied, rising from the imaginary corpse with a sigh. "However, I would offer you some payment if you were to act as mercenaries on my way back to my clan. I am Neath. I do not care for your names, but if you are to spend any time among my people you will need to make it known that I have spoken on your behalf."
This was going to be a fun questline. She was so ready to get bitched at by some bland guy for hours.
3:2 - Yuki, the Girls, and Neath
"I will take my leave now to inform the elder of what has occurred, and to argue for an appropriate reward for the aid rendered to my person." Neath-san - part of her was uncertain about giving an NPC an honorific, but she squashed that for propriety's sake - declared as he stepped over to the doorway of the tent he'd led them to. "I suspect I shall be awhile, outsiders, but that is no excuse to creep out and follow me to bask in my magnificence longer. Some matters require discretion and…trust. Trust that I will return, and you will be rewarded accordingly."
As he winked one of his blue eyes shut at them, it seemed almost as though a visible and audible shine effect had been added.
Yuki frowned as he left. What a thoroughly arrogant personality this one had been programmed with. It was less like they were his saviors and more like he was theirs, to hear how he put it.
"What an asshole." Haruka-chan signed. "What an absolute arrogant asshole. Why does he have to be written to treat us like fawning piles of dirt, exactly?"
She frowned at her roommate. She wasn't exactly wrong, but that was a very crude way of putting it, and such gossip behind backs was a very bad habit to get into.
"Hey, Tabi." Emi-chan commented, giving the adult in the room a glance. "He's one of those, isn't he?"
"Oooh~?" came the reply, a hand raised to cover the dyed-haired woman's mouth. "Whatever could you be talking about, Jinan? I'm afraid 'those' doesn't mean anything in particular in my dictionary. It's quite a generic term."
The girl rolled her eyes. "An [Oresama] type character, like in Otome Games. He's written to appeal to people who want an egotistical prince to roll into their life and act like he's doing a favor just by looking at them, no?"
"That cannot possibly be an actual thing." Haruka protested, her hands flying furiously. "No way anyone seriously wants to be treated like a pet by some high society boy."
Speaking as someone who'd met a few young men with those sorts of opinions of themselves in her life, Yuki couldn't exactly fathom that sort of interest either. However… perhaps it was a specifically lower class fantasy?
"Oh sweet summer child." Tabitabi-san declared with a 'tut-tut'. "The [Oresama] is one of the most popular archetypes in Otome Games! He thinks he's perfect, so naturally you must too! He believes there's no better gift to give than himself, so he doesn't give any! He asks nothing of you but that you affirm his glory! Sometimes, it's all genuine, sometimes he's just a very broken boy who struts around like he's all that because it's the only thing he knows!"
Yuki grimaced. That sounded like such a massive pain to put up with. Even if egomaniacs weren't already part of your day to day life, why would you seek that experience out in an escape from reality like a game?
"Eight out of ten, it's pretty good." Jinan-chan commented, giving a thumbs up.
Yuki turned to the girl, aghast. "You can't possibly be spending your time playing that kind of trash, Jinan-chan! What would your parents think? What of the ratings?!"
The girl snorted firmly, cocking her head off to the side with a grin. "Well, if you're buying the console version the options are pretty much all rated B or C by CERO. It's completely safe stuff, believe me."
"There's nothing safe about that kind of relationship dynamic!" Yuki protested, her eyes wide, throwing her arms out to her sides. "Honestly, I can't believe what I'm hearing right now. Aru-chan, you can't believe it either, right?"
"I no longer have a sister." the girl in question replied, her face utterly dead as she talked with her hands. "I can't believe this is what you've been filling your head with while onee-chan has been away from home. Sob sob."
"Incidentally, my ten out of ten is-"
Haruka-chan reached out and covered her sister's mouth with wide eyes, visibly willing her to shut up before she inflicted any more mental harm.
Bit of a blunt method, but Yuki approved in this situation. She really wasn't up to hear any more of that.
The moment the hand was removed, Emi-chan grinned. "Anyways, that's the sort of person he was written for, I guess. I bet that if we'd saved the other one, she'd have been a total ojou-sama type and we'd be having a similar conversation."
"Because of course they would have programmed both sides of this quest around [Weird Proclivities]." Haruka-chan signed with a roll of her eyes. "Gotta be equal opportunity with the creepy shit. Anyways, you wanna bet that part of the quest reward is actually staked on staying in this tent or not?"
"Mmm…" Tabitabi-san began, bobbing her head from side to side in a performative show of thinking as she leaned back against one of the cushions that lined the ground inside the tent. "If you were writing Neath, which route would you say raises the flag? The player listening to him, or the player following him against his orders?"
Haruka-chan shook her head, holding her hands up high for emphasis. "Let's not experiment with that stuff. If Argo wants to verify the [Otoge] subplot or whatever, she can pay someone to handle it for her - or, more likely, one of the people she sells the info to will test it on her behalf. For now, I'd rather just play it conservatively with this quest."
Emi-chan pinned herself to her sister's side a moment later, deliberately blanking her expression and voice as she pressed herself close. "Translation complete: I don't want to spend any more time with the bossy ikemen than necessary. Quest rewards need not apply."
'If you like him so much, you could follow him on your own.' was something Yuki thought of saying, but kept to herself. Firstly, it would be unnecessarily confrontational and rude. Secondly, with them being in a party they were running this quest jointly, so the consequences would probably apply to them equally whether it was one of them or all of them.
Before things could progress any further, though, the tent flap at the front opened dramatically as Neath-san strode in, his programmed expression as insipidly self-assured as ever. "The elder had already retired for the evening, but let it be known that your deeds in my service will not go unrewarded. For now, I will grant the four of you the use of this tent for the night, in honor of your righteous deeds."
"Then this is your tent, Neath-dono?" Emi-chan asked, cupping her cheeks dramatically between her hands.
"Umu." he replied, nodding firmly and brushing his orderly blond hair out of his face. "However, I will be so magnanimous as not to stifle your free use of it with my presence. Were I to be in residence, I fear your delicate hearts would be unable to bear it, let alone find rest."
Yuki hated this so, so very much. This character archetype, if it truly was one, was absolutely deplorable.
| | |
The shrill cry of some manner of horn went out in what felt like fairly early in the morning, followed by a shout of "Enemy attack!"
Yuki sat upright immediately. "Guh!"
Haruka-chan, ever the restless but heavy sleeper, rolled about a meter as she was flung off of her lap, and stirred irritably, rubbing the back of her head as she rose. Her eyes said 'It's too early.'
The others were already dragging themselves back up into alertness, pulling themselves from the confines of the bedrolls and cushions they'd rested on and spawning their weapons. Yuki gave Haruka-chan a firm look. "We're in an [Enemy Assault] phase of the quest, Aru-chan!"
The girl understood immediately once that was said, drawing her sword and cautiously rising to approach the tent entrance.
"Honestly." Tabitabi-san huffed as she joined her fellow beta tester, rapier held before herself and pointed to the ceiling. "If we weren't trapped in the game, how would this quest even work? Would you be required to rest overnight to progress it, or could you just log out for eight hours?"
"There wasn't an ambush phase in the [Beta]?" Emi-chan asked.
"Nah, they'd let you use a tent, but…" the adult replied. "You actually just got sent off on a quest right away once you reached the base. Also, the one you tried to help was dead at this point."
Haruka nodded her head firmly toward the door, as though to say "Talk later, fight now."
Yuki accepted that as reasonable, drawing her greatsword and taking point at the head of the group as they exited the tent, a scene of ongoing carnage unfolding before them as tents burned and numerous NPC on NPC battles unfolded around them.
"Outsiders!" Neath-san's voice called out immediately, as though on a trigger. No, since he was an NPC, it would be on a trigger, wouldn't it? "The cowardly Lyusula have struck with the first light of day, seeking to reclaim the key! Should you offer your aid once again, know that I, and the M'adou, will reward you richly!"
Without the pretense of being about elves or whatever had been used to explain this war questline in the [Beta], Yuki wasn't sure how comfortable she felt participating in a war where all of her opponents were dark skinned and all of her allies were fair skinned - it just felt a bit tasteless with that fantasy element stripped away - but all the same, it was a quest they'd taken.
"Where are we needed?" she asked as she glanced over to the source of the noise, hoping that the AI would be able to recognize a phrase like that properly.
Neath-san threw his opponent to the ground and jammed a flaming sword into his throat, bursting him into pixels. "With me! We must defend the elder's tent!"
She and the others followed him with all due haste, ignoring the set-piece battle behind them in favor of clearing objectives. The elder's tent was unmistakable - less a tent someone would live in and more like a vast circus tent staked in the back of the orderly enclosure the [Not-Elves], or - she supposed, the M'adou - had built around the small watering hole. In the light of day the elaborate dyed patterns of it were far more striking than they'd been when the group had arrived in the evening. It was also on fire, and sending up a vast plume of smoke.
They charged into the initial chamber of the tent all the same, led by Neath-san, and laid eyes on a scene that surely must have belonged in a low-budget drama. An aged man cowered on the ground, shaking and shivering as he twisted his head, glaring up at his assailant. Said assailant was clad in heavy, silver armor that gleamed in the light of the topped braziers and the flames roaring and glowing through the canvas walls of the tent, his spiky purple hair shifting as he turned his own head back to look at them through the smoky room. The title [Aroen, Champion of Lyusula] floated above his mob cursor. "More M'adou wretches come to challenge me? And outsiders, at that? Bah. I shall water these sands in your blood, and claim the rightful inheritance of the Lyusula over your cooling corpses, if you resist me. However, if you are so wise as to give me what I've come for, nobody else needs to die today. Not even this wrinkled old man."
Neath-san's eyes darted to the old man, and his simulated voice quivered. "The key, for his life?" he asked, his sword lowering a bit. "Our inheritance, for one man?"
He worded it as an absurd proposition, but the way he said it made it sound like he was seriously considering it.
The old man's head twisted toward him. "Fool of a boy, what has this brigand planted in your mind? In one or two years, I will be dead and gone either way. Our ancestral master's teachings, though, those are eternal."
"Be mindful of your words, you wrinkled husk." Aroen huffed, glaring back down at the elder. "Or you may void all the mercy I've offered. Today does not need to be the day of your death, nor of that boy's, nor that of those outsiders. You children of M'adou can all live out the rest of your lives in peace, or you can die clutching your foolish dreams to your chest."
"When you cut me down," the old man promised. "It will be my resentment that drags you toward your grave. It will be my love that guides their swords. Lyusula will never grasp that which it seeks."
"The squealing of a foolish rat." Aroen huffed. "As you return to the spiral of origin, gaze down upon your slaughtered tribe and despair."
Having said that, Aroen thrust his sword down to pierce the elder through his back, and even knowing that he was ultimately just a character in the game regurgitating lines from a programmed script, Yuki very nearly closed her eyes as his character model burst and, immediately, was replaced with a [Corpse Type Object]. It took all she could muster not to freeze up as he slowly withdrew that jagged blade and pointed it at them. It took all of her focus to realize that the moment he'd done the deed, he'd started sweating and shivering himself, if only slightly. "Come at me as you will, cowards. I shall send you to your destination in that order."
A guttural roar spilled out of Neath-san as he charged. "Lyusula dog! I will have my revenge for this!"
Yuki moved along with him, one hand off the handle of her sword as she prepared to chant. "N-nekomata used [Horn Flip]!"
The spell was strictly designed for use against quadrupedal enemies, but with some adjustment bipeds should be valid as well. The horn emerged some distance in front of Aroen, swinging up to strike his chest, but he leaned back to avoid it, the phantom appendage passing in front of him as he brought his sword around to cut it away. "A rudimentar-"
His voice line was interrupted as Neath's shout of "Ye unworthy, by fire be purged!" filled the tent, and a wave of inferno washed over him, slightly decrementing his lengthy health bar and succeeding on setting the room even more on fire.
Yuki sucked in an unsteady breath. It felt as though her spell had worked more slowly than it should have - like if it had been any other casting, she would have hit the man dead on and flung him on his back.
Tabitabi-san barked an order a second later. "We've got to finish him before Neath burns this whole place down!"
"You will not live to accomplish anything." the mob challenged, glaring at them even as his whole body trembled faintly. "Breath of the earth, become my spear!"
Yuki swung her blade low on reflex as spikes of rock sprouted from the ground and rose to pierce her, severing the attack before it connected. Glancing around, she saw that the others had each dodged a similar strike.
Emi-chan charged forward, putting her healing role aside for the moment to bash Aroen with the [Double Bash] sword skill associated with one handed hammers, flinging him back toward the fire, albeit with little effect on his life bar. "Tabi!" she cried, pulling back as soon as the momentary stun period ended.
"You got it!"
A sizable chunk of [Fuel Coal] flew into the fire Neath-san had set, exploding vigorously as soon as it made contact and flinging Aroen into a forward roll. It was a far more solid hit than they'd ever managed on the initial enemy, and yet he'd recovered so smoothly from it, with only an eighth of his life bar depleted. He must have been an even higher level enemy - or his armor of remarkable quality - to endure that attack so well.
Haruka-chan remained in the back of the group. Her reasoning was clear - in this confined space, against that armor, she wouldn't be able to harm him to inflict her paralysis effect in the first place without scoring a lucky hit. They'd need to prepare that opportunity for her.
As Aroen's vigorous roll drew toward its end and he began to right himself, Yuki thrust her hand forward. "Nekomata used [Pin Missile]!"
His course of motion already set, the enemy couldn't evade the wasp stinger that rammed into his side and flung him back against the throne in back of the room, nor could he avoid the second gout of flame Neath sent flying at him as he crashed into it. Even still, his life bar remained remarkably full.
Yuki activated [Gather Od], bearing the pain to refill her circuits a bit even in the badly depleted environment of this active magecraft battlefield. This fight might go longer than they'd hope for - the enemy was just too well prepared for their previous tactics to swiftly incapacitate. At the very least, she'd timed her spell properly just now, slower than usual or not.
That chain of thought was interrupted as he fixed his gaze on her for just a moment and his earth spike spell sprung up in front of her again, even though he hadn't chanted anything. As quickly as she could manage, she took a step back and cut off the heads of the spikes again.
The speed with which Tabitabi threw another lump of coal over to Aroen and burst it in the air above him - the blast battering him against the ground - led Yuki to believe that the chantless earth spike spell had been aimed at her alone. The blast, in turn, stripped away another eighth of his health - perhaps a bit more than that. He'd hit the yellow zone soon enough if they kept going like this, but… what happened after that?
Aroen rolled proactively out of the flames and up to his feet, the movement smoother and faster than he'd previously managed. "What foolishness." he chided, a bit of mid fight banter, as he charged directly at Tabitabi, blade held high. "Breath of the earth, confine my foe!"
The ground shifted around the woman, forming into a three-faceted wall that enclosed her on all sides save for the one he was striking from. It wasn't surprising that Yuki had failed to retain his [Hate] under the circumstances, but it was far from desirable.
She charged to intercept as fast as her neglected [Agi] stat would allow, swinging her blade to catch him midway to Tabitabi. "No you don't!"
As her sword met his chest and stopped his charge, he took a quantity of damage
Jinan-chan cried out a vicious roar a moment later, her hammer flying through the air where his undefended face had been a moment later, his charge interrupted with an evasive jump backward… directly into the path of Neath's blazing sword, which buried itself in his side and drove him down to yellow health. "I am your foe!"
Tabitabi-san clicked her tongue as it turned into a melee, unable to throw the coal in her hand.
Aroen kicked Neath in the chest in one smooth motion, sending him flying away to strike the wall. "No, you are a fly. A pathetic speck for me to swat."
Breaking the melee engagement was probably a mistake on his part, even if his gaze immediately darted back to Tabitabi-san.
"Killer Queen's First Bomb!" the woman roared, releasing the lump of coal at the champion.
"Truly predictable." he huffed, jumping backward. "Breath of the earth, shield me from my enemy!"
A wall of rock sprouted from the ground between them, and the coal clattered off of it. Based on previous attack patterns, it was a smart decision on his part, but it meant he'd denied himself a good view of what else was happening as Tabitabi-san charged around the wall with her considerable speed to plant one hand on the wooden sheath at his side.
"What the devil are you up to?" he asked, breathing heavily as he swung his sword down just too late to prevent her from retreating behind the wall he'd created.
Yuki blinked. Had that all just been an elaborate feint?
The explosion directly on his person as Tabitabi-san brought down her thumb flung Aroen back onto the ground and drove his health into the red zone.
Yuki pursed her lips. In theory, getting him down this far ought to have meant they'd already won. He was over three quarters dead and he'd barely managed to achieve anything since the fight won. If he were a rational human actor instead of a programmed enemy, it would have been the time to surrender…
Aroen, though, did not display any loss of composure, nor of resolution, even when reduced to less than a quarter of his health. He picked himself up swiftly and shook his head, one hand dipping into a pouch at his side. "How irksome of you all. If you wish to claim my head, you will need to try a bit harder than that."
"Bastaaaard!" Neath-san shouted, charging him once again.
Yuki's eyes went wide as Aroen drew a small needle from his pouch. She'd heard rumors of these sorts of things from the [Front-Liners]. Mode switches, where bosses on their last legs would change states and become much stronger. Normally, they couldn't be interrupted to any real degree.
They were able to toy with him now, but if he became strong enough to push through their attacks she could tell that they'd be immediately overwhelmed and executed. Their ability to dominate through raw magical force was the only thing keeping them in this fight.
"Breath of the earth!" he cried, bringing the needle toward his neck. "Become my-"
A black bolt flew from the tent's doorway and struck him, and he froze midway through the statement, his health plummeting as spikes of stone burst from the inside of his body in an apparent spell failure penalty. As Neath's burning blade was thrust into his armor, he burst, ending the fight. If he hadn't been paralyzed, just how might he have responded to that attack?
Yuki flicked her gaze back to the doorway. Haruka must have created a projectile version of her paralysis spell at some po-
Haruka's life bar was in the red, if stable, her sword planted into the dirt to support her as she gasped.
She'd gone beyond her limits to deny the enemy his mode switch.
"Father!" Neath cried out behind her, advancing the storyline even as he lost the attention of everyone else in the room. The clatter of his sword hitting the floor, followed by a more typical thump as he, himself, dropped to his knees were noted, but irrelevant right now.
"Onee-chan, are you okay!?" Emi-chan cried.
"Alka!"
The girl shot them a self-satisfied smile as she forced herself back upright and gave a thumbs-up.
Honestly, what was she doing showing off after she'd nearly killed herself with that attack?
3:3 - Tomoe, the Girls, and Neath
The initial rush of panic surrendered to frustration as Tomoe gazed upon Alka's dopey grin. Even if that thumbs up was just meant to be an answer to Jinan's question, the levity was wildly out of place as the followup to a stunt that sent her most of the way to her death.
Sucking in a deep breath, the chemist shook her head as she steeled herself to put on the one face she dreaded most in this world: the mask of a responsible adult. She placed a hand firmly on the girl's shoulder and forced eye contact. "What the hell was that?"
"Excuse me?" Nekomata asked, staring at her like she was insane. "Are we doing this right now, in the flaming tent?"
Neath grunted as he rose, taking his sword back in hand and rising. "An excellent point. Take what you will from Aroen of Lyusula's carcass and remove yourselves from this tent before it collapses." he agreed with a choked, sorrowful note in his voice.
So saying, he shot one last sad look to the corpse on the ground and gave the brief prayer "May the sun above favor your soul as you return to the origin of all." before darting out through the tent flaps.
…It was a good point, yes.
Tomoe let out a stifled growl as she gathered her girls up in her arms and led them out of the tent. She didn't release any of them from her grip until they were fully outside and well away from the burning structure, still fully determined to give the girl a piece of her mind.
Alka pulled away as soon as she was able and released her grip on her sword, letting it fall into the sand before slowly bringing her hands up to sign, but Tomoe didn't give her the time to start talking just yet. "Oh, I know, you came up with a missile-type [Paralysis] effect like the one you put on your sword. And you did it…during the fight, and nearly killed yourself with it. When we were winning. What the hell were you thinking?"
The girl narrowed her eyes and pulled out of the grip, her hands flying like a storm. "Were we winning, or were we just not losing yet? I, for one, didn't want to find out, so I pushed as far as I was comfortable with then shot for a clean, easy finish."
"Were we wi-" Tomoe parroted, struggling to process the question. "We were in the final stretch! One or two more good rounds like we'd had and he'd have been dead! Of all of us, you're the only one who took any real damage in the whole fight, and it was self-inflicted! How is this a real question?"
"That's a dangerous mindset." Alka retorted, her expression giving no ground and her signs remaining shockingly clear in spite of the rapid pace she was throwing them out at. "He was clearly adapting to our tactics as the fight went on, and then there was that [Mode Change] he was starting. He might have only pulled out the [AOE] spell once, but while I was taking watch over everything that happened, it definitely seemed like he was becoming a bigger threat as the fight went on. Maybe you could have finished him easily afterwards, but between his adaptation, his impending stat buff and pattern change, and the fact that our own ally was ticking forward the timer on bringing this place down on our head every time he attacked? I didn't want to take that chance."
Tomoe froze for a second, stuck reckoning with the considerable amount of thought the girl had put into that, before shaking her head. "Even so, why would you think you could just push through a [Last Red] trigger like that? None of the news from the front has ever hinted at anyone managing that, at least as far as I've heard, and if I were a game dev I'd put some i-frames there to ensure you couldn't just nuke straight through the mode swap and ignore the content."
"I haven't heard anything that'd indicate if it's ever been properly tested." the girl retorted, albeit permitting herself an uncertain expression for the first time since she'd started her reply. "The story is usually that they pulled back to avoid getting caught up before they could see what changed, or that they couldn't reach the boss to interfere after it happened, from our sample size of three. Could even be an element of 'executing the kill shot takes too long on a floor boss'. I…" she paused, her hands trembling a bit as she stopped for a moment. "Well, admittedly, it was a little bit of a reflex move. A knee-jerk reaction. I've never been able to sit still and bear it when the main characters just stand around while the big bad powers up. If your best shot is a cheap shot, I think you should go for it - and it's not as though I was accomplishing anything standing there. If all of you were to die while I still had full health.... Well, I'll grant that it would have been better to wait for the powerup scene to end before shooting, just in case."
A few moments after Alka finished signing that, the tent let out a loud creaking sound that stole Tomoe's focus and stopped her from responding properly to that confession. A few moments later, the entire burning structure collapsed loudly in on itself, sending up a vast plume of smoke and spray of sparks. She swallowed heavily. Being inside when that happened wouldn't have been good by any measure.
"Um!" Nekomata squeaked, finding another moment to interject after that bombshell of an interruption. "So, assuming that the tent collapse was set up to happen after we left, and not on a timer or something, while we might have been able to pull it off in the end, I'm not sure it's quite that cut and dry. Aru-chan does have a point; he was getting better at countering our strategy as it went on, and that kept up after he got stronger… well, I might have run out of [Prana], since the mana around here is essentially depleted from the setpiece battle outside, or you might have run out of coal, and then we'd have been down to fighting the conventional way, taking real risks, while the boss would have been at his peak."
On reflex, Tomoe pulled up her inventory to check her stock. It was true that her build had very little strength and hence very little inventory capacity, but she still had enough of the stuff on her for...not that many more volleys, actually. In the heat of the battle, they wouldn't have time for Neko to hand over the extra stock she was carrying, either. Ugh, it was actually a fairly valid point.
She glanced at Jinan in the hopes that she'd back her up, but the girl just… frowned back at her, seemingly resigned to the situation.
Grumbling, the woman withdrew her hand, keeping her gaze off of the one she'd been lecturing. "Well, in the end, it was still a crazy bet that it was possible, anyways. Ugh… listen, we're not going to run this ship on hopes and prayers like that past this point, you hear? And that spell stays locked up until such a time as you can cast it without hurting yourself, okay? Honestly, kid, don't give me a heart attack. As it is? Putting my foot down - we're not going anywhere until you're back in tip-top shape!"
A heavy sigh filled the air behind them. "...An acceptable clause." Neath rumbled, still staring at the wreckage of the burning tent. Had something about that conversation set off his next bit of dialogue. "It would do us no good to march on to the next battle with one of our own on the verge of collapse. I shall permit a period of rest and resupply before we continue."
Tomoe spun, confused. "Continue what?"
There was fire in the NPC's voice as he met her gaze. "It should be only natural at this point. The Lyusula dared to strike so directly at us, to spill so much M'adou blood on these sands, and in the process their very champion has fallen at our hands - at your hands, outsiders. As it stands, they will not launch a second offensive, nor can they mount a proper defense."
He gave them a long glance. "You will be rewarded for your deeds today, as befits any who give me distinguished aid. And then I shall permit you to accompany me on a punitive strike against their own encampment, to seize the key in their possession and grant them the same pain they brought to us."
"You want us to slaughter them back for you?" Jinan asked nonchalantly. Given the context, Tomoe couldn't fault her for that - it was pretty heavy content to stick in this questline, even given that they were in a game designed to kill them. Hell, Neath's dialogue tree was probably even built for a question. It was just a little… well, she wasn't entirely comfortable with the tone of voice it'd been asked in. It was more bored than shocked. "To kill them indiscriminately to avenge that elder of yours - that father of yours, even?"
Neaths gaze flicked to her with a look of irritation. "It is not as though I am calling upon you to slaughter civilians and children. It is not all of Lyusula nor all of M'adou who have come out to this desolate corner of the great desert, but rather only those who truly believe in the will of our ancestral master and are willing to lay their lives down to execute it. I will admit, at least, that the dogs believe in their own way that they walk such a path. Should you do as I require, you will only be putting hardened warriors to the sword, and only to such an extent as they choose to fight you to defend the second key."
Inhaling sharply through her nose, Tomoe gave an exaggerated shrug of disbelief. "That's still a pretty big ask from us, when you still haven't explained what it actually is we'd be fighting for."
Truthfully, she was squashing down an uncomfortable feeling in her gut every second they continued along this questline. Everyone seemed to be holding up fairly well for the moment, but it was a fairly obvious fact that under these circumstances, a quest with humanoid mobs capable of speech and tactical switch-ups felt less like [Playing a Game] and more like [Killing Someone]. At some point, she didn't think they'd be able to keep that thought buried anymore, and it'd come spilling out, and the best they could hope for at that point was a trauma-induced breakdown in proportion to how much of it they'd gone through.
It was probably for the best to drop this quest in the here and now, and leave it for…no-one, really.
In the [Beta] these sorts of humanlike enemies had been a normal, expected, healthy part of the experience; the entire selling point of the game was the fantasy of being a master swordsperson battling your peers, real human or otherwise, without lasting consequences. In this [Death Game] environment, though, the fiction and the fact had been blurred together, and there were very real consequences for everything. In the current atmosphere of tension, trauma, and the terror of death that filled SAO, it was better that they keep the line between human and mob as clear and unambiguous as possible, because one's spells and sword could kill a real person just as easily as they could a pile of bits and bytes; getting used to killing something that looked and acted superficially like a person today was potentially the gateway to thinking nothing of killing an actual person tomorrow. In that sense, the monstrous enemies that'd filled every floor so far were a blessing - a person could kill as many boars, centipedes, wasps, or cows as they wanted, and while they might have some discomfort with that kind of slaughter, none of them were looking back with a human face when they burst into polygons.
She wasn't sure if she should thank Kayaba or whoever had hijacked this wild ride for at least pulling most of the humanoid mobs from the game when they did it, or curse them for leaving this many of them in. She didn't like the idea of a murder epidemic driven by people getting desensitized to cutting something that looked like them any more than she liked the idea of a death game in general. Regardless, the bastard behind this was still owed a cursing for the mere act of setting up the death game at all.
She shivered.
Neath sighed. "I suppose it would be proper of me to inform you of why we fight, at this point. You are…more than simple outsiders, all of you. You have earned wisdom along with gold through your actions thus far. Join me in my tent when you have spoken amongst yourselves to your satisfaction and I shall tell you why I must fight."
"Thanks for that." Tomoe huffed absently, before trying to distract herself from the morose thoughts still floating around her head with a slight change of topic. "Hey, Alka, you get the [Last Hit Bonus], or did Neath there steal the drops off of us?"
Rolling her eyes, the girl began signing. "I got Aroen's sword, the 'Earth Brand'. Stats are pretty good, but none of us uses longsword type equipment, so…"
"It's pretty good to sell off." Jinan summarized, folding her arms behind her head. "But not much else."
| | |
"Fundamentally," Neath declared as they seated themselves around his tent's hearth. "This conflict began some generations prior, with the two disciples of the magus Reuan, M'adou and Lyusula. The ancestors of our two clans got on notoriously poorly, even before the great teacher took them from the ruins of their village, and it only worsened under his teachings. Lyusula, it is said, was a most foul person, who had drawn more tears from others in his day than there are grains of sand in the desert, while our own ancestor, M'adou was…admittedly, something of a pest to him, from the tales. It is said that for all that he raised them into fully fledged practitioners of the art, Lord Reuan could do nothing to raise them into friends, and so eventually abandoned the thought entirely and fanned the fire of their competitiveness to encourage them to redouble their efforts."
He glanced around, as though the algorithm had decided to interest-check everyone. "Some time after he graduated his apprentices and sent them on their way to develop their art and teach their own disciples, he called them back to his side and presented them with a challenge - he, having grown old and soon to die, had hidden two keys in the vastness of this desert, the keys to his secret atelier, which would disable all of the security mechanisms and give their bearer the freedom to claim all of his research and all of his treasures for themself. He told them what the keys would look like, and he told them where they would find the facility's entrance, and then he passed just like that, returning to from whence we all came without any chance to explain further."
"And since then, the followers of M'adou and Lyusula, they've been fighting over who would get the inheritance while hunting for the keys?" Tomoe asked, thinking she knew where this was going.
"Heavens no!" the man denied, shaking his head. "Though their animosity was great, the ancestors were not the ones who brought this conflict to the point of violence. They viewed it as a way to prove, once and for all, who was the superior in their rivalry, not an excuse to shed blood. It was not until some twenty years ago, when we M'adou discovered the first key, that the Lyusula profaned the sanctity of this competition by assaulting the successful explorers killing all but one of them, to send a message. I still remember the day father returned to us in tears, without mother by his side…" he declared, his voice dying down as he shifted his gaze to the coals.
That was some surprisingly intricate story writing there, for something that ultimately amounted to 'no, the other guys are just dishonorable degenerates' once all was said and done. Well, she'd bet actual money that if they'd picked the lady back at the start of the questline, it would have been the M'adou lineage that'd thrown the first stone.
All the same, she shrugged. "Alright then. I can see you've got your reasons for this."
If she was following the story here properly, the Lyusula were supposed to have killed both of his parents at this point. Aside from the part where he was a total oresama character, that explained everything about his personality-as-written: he hated them because of a personal grievance.
Nekomata let out a long hum. "...What it hadn't gotten to the point of violence, though, and each side had successfully recovered a single key? What happens then?"
The obvious answer, unless they were both fixated on whatever material treasures might be in the tomb, was that they'd both be better off agreeing to split the difference and open the atelier together. They could both learn all the spells and whatnot he'd left them, so the treasure was really the only wedge at that point. In fact, even putting aside the fact that she was shipping Lyusula and M'adou pretty hard at the moment, she was fairly certain that was what Reuan was intended to have been hoping for, by the way this was written - that each of his disciples would find one key, and then they'd be forced to cooperate for perhaps the first time ever to achieve their goals together.
Neath hesitated. "...I suppose we would have come up with some alternative competition to settle the score."
"So at the end of the day," Jinan huffed, kicking her legs out in exactly the sort of lazy, gamerlike fashion one wouldn't expect from a rich family's current [Ojou-sama]. "This is a fight over who'll secure the right to unilaterally plunder the lab of a guy who's been dead for about a century and make his secrets their own. Do you even know what you're going to find in there?"
The man sighed. "Surely, it must be something remarkable, or else our efforts all these years will have been for nothing. Surely."
Tomoe was 99% sure this was a situation where if they'd cooperated, the original pair could have cracked the place open in a few weeks, tops. The writing was just leaning way, way too much toward that cliche.
"Surely." Jinan replied with a sarcastic snort. "Well, give us a chance to rest up and think about what we're going to do here, why don't you?"
"Naturally." Neath replied, rising slowly. "When you have recovered, whether you join us or not, the M'adou will launch our strike against the Lyusula and avenge the indignities they have inflicted upon us. I would hope for your support, though - having laid low their champion, the remainder of them should present no significant challenge for you."
Tomoe's stomach churned and twisted. She didn't want to do this.
She didn't want to go through a massive, pointless slaughter of screaming human-shaped entities, even if they were actually just mobs, and think at the end 'wow, that was surprisingly easy!' or anything similar. She didn't want to kill them at all.
This wasn't like in the [Beta].
She opened her mouth, then stopped. Maybe this would be hopeless - she was literally talking to a block of bits and bytes reading off a script - but she truly didn't want to continue the quest this way. So far, they'd killed two person-shaped mobs. The way they were going, they were going to kill dozens.
She spoke up, her voice quivering a bit. "I-If we come with you, the first thing you're going to do is demand their surrender and guarantee the safety of anyone who accepts."
The NPC stopped in the doorway, his back rigid. "They will not surrender, not after this long."
"They might!" she retorted. "We've got the sword of their champion to prove we defeated him. They might give up! If they do, I want you to guarantee that you won't hurt them!"
This was insanity on her part. The role of mobs in a video game was to fight the players and die. She was hunting for a solution that probably wasn't there. However, both as a gamer and as a person, she felt like a peaceful solution should have been there - like the best outcome to this questline should have been a mutual laying down of arms. If there were routes to this, she was convinced that the golden ending was one where nobody else needed to die.
Neath turned back to her, his gaze hot and angry. "You would dictate to my magnificence the terms of engagement? You would demand that I forgive the death of my parents, my siblings, my comrades at the hands of their warriors?"
"You killed the man who took your father's life yourself!" Tomoe pleaded. "The ones who remained at camp didn't murder him!"
Something changed at that moment. The [Oresama] character's face fell from a furious snarl to a contemplative frown. "My father…and my mother. Aroen was behind so very much of this bloodshed, in the end, and now he lies dead by my hand. Perhaps… perhaps with his passing we can attempt your childish path, outsider. It will be hard to convince my comrades, and perhaps harder still to convince the Lyusula, but if all goes as you hope…nobody shall die tomorrow."
Tomoe went to exhale sharply, to let out a breath of relief, but instead she let out a shaky, albeit triumphant chuckle, even as the rest of the party fixed their gazes on her in confusion. She'd threaded the needle! As the [Cool Big Sis] of the group, it probably would have been better to play this off smoothly for the sake of her image, but she didn't care about that. She just didn't want to kill any more of these [Fake Humans]. She didn't want to have that on her hands, or on the girl's hands.
It just felt too wrong to fight something that looked like a person, knowing all the while that there were players dying somewhere else.
3:4 - Emi, the Girls, and Neath
Emi yawned as they strode down the main path of the Lyusula camp. It was a bit interesting that, in a nod to the inhabitant's use of earth magecraft, even a temporary warcamp of theirs was constructed of durable rammed earth. Indeed, it made much more sense than a clan of fire users setting themselves up in a camp composed almost entirely of canvas! However, nothing as simple as a neat bit of set design could salvage the experience at this point. The performative despair from the NPCs on the sidelines as they marched their procession toward the big man's hut was one downer, but another was how obnoxiously cliche this entire plotline was.
The writing of this questline had less to do with the realities of magecraft lineages or with the absurdist, happy-go-lucky approach to the sharing of magecraft the creator of the [Thaumaturgy System] had codified. It was just tropey writing about the cycle of revenge, of forgiveness, and the power of friendship.
If one viewed it from the perspective of a real magus, what was nonsensical was that Reuan had put up a pretense of permitting two potential successors to outlive him to begin with, rather than decisively selecting one and handling the matter of the other's threat to their mysteries afterwards. This became even more absurd when those two founded entire clans bearing the same magecraft with the goal of claiming the overall lineage. The unilineal succession of magecraft was completely ignored for the sake of providing the setpiece battles. She, personally, was very happy her sister had gotten her dream granted in such a fully fledged manner, but if the players had any real survival prospects post-game her having become something like an actual magus rather than an artificial psychic would have been identified as a threat to the lineage by father, owing to how much of the family library she'd had access to over her life, and addressed swiftly - there could only be one inheritor to the tradition, but this storyline stopped paying credence to that idea the moment it became inconvenient.
If she tried to view it as just part of the [Death Game], though, and have fun with it, though? The decision to present the quest for the inheritance as a competition was weak to begin with. If she were writing this quest as a general story, she would have had Reuan present his disciples one last mission: their quest would be to work together, for the first time in their lives, and prove themselves worthy of inheriting his mantle as a pair. If the conservation of mystery wasn't a storyline element to begin with, Kayaba or whoever else was behind this should have made this a story about how, due to their own human failings, Lyusula and M'adou had turned a call for cooperation into a century-long deathmatch between their clans, spoiling what could have been a peaceful learning and growing experience for everyone involved in furtherment of their childish rivalry. Writing it as him continuing to encourage their rivalry through his words right to the end, while secretly hoping they'd outgrow it?
That was a level of naive schlock that she wouldn't rate higher than four out of ten. Even a by-the-numbers [Oresama] character like Neath couldn't salvage this storyline from mediocrity.
She reared back to give another yawn, and Tabitabi nudged her in the side. "Of all the people, I wouldn't think you'd be the one having trouble for lack of sleep, Jinan. You good?"
Emi could read between the lines, there. Even if the woman'd been the one to select the pseudo-pacifist route they were on now for some reason - she supposed it was probably squeamishness - she didn't want to risk the party's most straightforward combatant passing out in the line of fire because of missed rest. She smiled back. "I'm good, I'm good! Just a little bored. The writing of this questline isn't exactly worthy of a literary prize."
Tabitabi gave her a concerned look, which she didn't think too much of as they strode into the stark-white mansion at the end of the path.
Well, mansion wasn't exactly the right word. At the end of the day, the layout was essentially the same as the [Circus Tent] of the M'adou, just made of whitewashed dirt instead of sun-bleached canvas. Definite case of recycled assets there.
She put her game face on as the group approached the throne toward the back of the reception hall all the same. The NPCs probably couldn't read expressions that well, but she didn't want to look distracted during the meeting all the same.
Then her eyes adjusted to the lighting inside the building, and her game face was immediately replaced with a less professional frown. The M'adou leader was some crusty old man, but the Lyusula got this?
"So the whisperings were true." the buxom young woman seated on the throne mused, gazing up at them with one fist supporting her cheek and a long, black braid flopped over in front of her shoulder. "Aroen has found his death upon these sands, and those he offended and their mercenaries have come before me to demand capitulation. [Ara Ara], what a mess."
This was fucking bullshit. Even if logically, given all the evidence that this questline was going to wrap up far sooner than the initially speculated 'from now till the ninth floor' carryover from the [Beta Test], even if logically he wasn't going to matter for anything once they were done here… You could not just throw out a character based on a capture target archetype for your players to salivate over, then introduce a suitor at what felt like the eleventh hour. The questline was practically over, now! She demanded an opportunity to break up this blatantly foreshadowed joining of the houses! It was her sovereign right as an otome gamer!
Neath-sama gave the Lyusula matriarch a long, dubious look of his own as he planted the vanquished Aroen's blade tip-first into the floor. Nice going! Chicks hated when you vandalized their floor on the first meeting. Maybe he'd manage to sink this ship himself - she'd love that kind of comedy twist. "You are the elder of the Lyusula faction?" he asked with naked disbelief.
The young adult lady snorted, sitting up straight with the torchlight of the room sparkling as it reflected off of her purple eyes. The shipping was too intense! "In absence of my father, or in his passing, I am the acting leader of this expedition of the so-called true inheritors of Lyusula's will. You may call me Melitze, or not. I thank you for giving me the chance to introduce myself rather than simply beheading me with his own blade."
Fucking hell, but this was blatant. The two newly promoted leaders of the warring houses meet just after the death of their fathers and predecessors to talk peace? They might as well be married and hyphenating the family names of their children already!
"Wait," Neko squeaked, raising her hand and compromising their professional facade. "Aroen…-san was Melitze-san's father, then? But she didn't use honorifics at first…"
Oh, her poor, melting high society brain. Emi was dealing with much bigger problems than a little bit of confusion about social convention here.
"The man was a fool and a warhawk." Melitze huffed with a shake of his head. "I've found it easier to think of him as an unrelated person whenever able since he started this whole unpleasantness. Oh, my apologies - you and your mercenaries are here for the key in my possession, yes?"
Neath - this basic as hell writing meant he was no longer worthy of being addressed with adoration - frowned as he gazed down at his counterpart. "You… were not party to the violence?"
"I was a girl of only six years when he started this war." she retorted, wrinkling her nose. "Hardly appropriate material for a war council. Even if I only ever saw him with that sword by his side, even if he insisted on training me for battle, ultimately in his eyes I was simply the one who kept the throne warm while he was out. I daresay I spent more time seeing to the management of this camp's affairs than he ever did, but as for the militant side of things? No, never."
"Hm." Neath grunted.
Emi glared at him. No, don't just take that at face value. Doubt it, get mad! The story would be more entertaining to her, specifically, if this went badly!
"The key, you want it?" Melitze interrogated, rising slowly from her throne and gesturing for them to follow. "I assume you must, if you've bothered to come so far out of your way along the emissary's path. Come now, M'adou, the sooner we conduct our business here, the sooner I can lead my people back to civilization as the failures they are."
"My name is Neath." he replied, remaining motionless. "You've given yours, so I will give mine."
His opposite number twisted back to face him in a way that emphasized the cut of her dress, rolling her eyes as she did. "How courteous of you, Neath of M'adou, but I'm truly not sure what it matters. Give me your name if you will, but I remain a defeated figurehead tendering her surrender to a merciful victor. Or will you say otherwise?"
Neath released his grip on the [Earth Brand]'s hilt and shifted his gloved hand down to the blade, jerking the sword out of the floor in one swift motion. To the game's credit, he didn't seem to be taking any damage from the maneuver, which implied that half-swording was coded as a viable maneuver.
In a further offense against Emi's ideal order for this awful storyline, he held up the hilt of the sword to Meltize, practically begging her to take it from him. "You have never known defeat, Melitze, because you never fought for a defeated cause. Now, take your inheritance."
"...I have no intention of fighting some asinine duel against you and your outsider mercenaries to satisfy your twisted craving for a final victory." the woman replied, giving him a look like he was exactly the degree of dumb puppy that he was written as, but in all the wrong ways. At least they were both fools! She could laugh at that, at least?
He shook his head. "You have not been defeated. Take your inheritance."
"I'd rather walk away from this alive." Melitze insisted, turning away rapidly. "Please, stop this."
"Take your inheritance." Neath insisted. "Take it and come along with us, not as a defeated figurehead, but as one of the victors. Let's both, M'adou and Lyusula, win this century old competition together."
That won a vigorous eye roll. Not even fourteen hours ago, this very NPC had been failing to grasp the idea that there could be a peaceful, equitable outcome to this questline, and now he was the one proposing the peaceful solution?
In the first place, that sword belonged to Neko Cafe Nyan*Nyan after the boss fight, and he was just borrowing it from them, so what the hell were they in this equation? Chopped liver?
"Oh." the leader of the Lyusula replied, freezing in place. "Oh. I must admit, I never imagined you might be this much of a fool."
"A fool?!" Neath squeaked, a vigorous blush rendering on his character model.
Yeees, get into a big, pointless fight!
"A fool." she confirmed. "A fool who was captivated by my appearance and my story, and elected to discard the purity of his own victory to save me face for prurient reasons. Ah, but perhaps you are instead a wise man, seeking to forestall any risk of us electing to pursue the vendetta further?"
"Is it working?"
Okay, it was actually fairly clever on the writer's part to not have him specify which of those he was responding to, there.
Melitze chuckled and took the sword by the hilt. "Well played, Neath of M'adou. Let us walk together on this day."
Honestly, the biggest problem here was that, for all that it only took a few minutes, having to literally stand around for what amounted to a cutscene was fucking boring, the result of which being that Emi had far too much time to interrogate the writing of the questline. In that sense, maybe she should be happy that they were shipping out now.
Neath turned to the group a moment after he released the sword into Melitze's grasp, showing his entire back to the woman he'd just armed. Stab, stab, stab! Stab him, girl!
However, Melitze simply let the tip of the blade drift back down to the floor, giving the idiot a wistful look with her other hand raised to her chest. Bleh.
Eventually, the man sighed. "Outsiders, I would ask you to escort me - or, us - one last time. When the combined forces of M'adou and Lysula have collected our inheritance, I will ensure that you receive your deserved reward at long last."
He wasn't even acting like a proper [Oresama] anymore!
"We will gladly support you this one last time." Tabitabi replied, taking the initiative to speak for all of them.
Uuuuuuugh.
| | |
The entrance to the workshop jutted out of the side of a dune looking for all the world like it was a simple, worn down limestone tomb with a solid slab for a door, flanked by two acorn-shaped cutouts for the keys.
Neath and Melitze stepped out ahead of the grand expedition of twenty eight assorted NPCs who'd followed them here, not to mention Emi's party, and gave each-other a quick nod as they withdrew their respective keys from out of absolutely nowhere. Neath's key was an engraved rod of a green stone she assumed to be jade, while Meltize's was a mirror image composed of what she assumed was amber, based on the coloration.
As they each slotted their key into the designated slot, the slab door sunk into the ground with a vigorous grinding sound.
As Tabitabi took a step forward to follow the two NPCs into the tomb, Neath turned and put a hand up, his expression apologetic. "Beg pardon, outsiders, but I ask your trust in this matter. This place is special to our lineages, and so I believe we would both be most at ease if you were to remain outside while we explore our inheritance."
Emi shrugged, shooting Haruka-oneechan a knowing look as the adult of their group froze in place. Not like it was ever a good idea to trespass in an unconnected magus' home territory without extensive proper prior preparation. Though really, this setup felt like the narrative buildup to something other than them being calmly and professionally paid for their services in a few minutes…
"Alright, then," Tabitabi mumbled, standing still as the procession of thirty NPCs marched slowly down the staircase that immediately followed the door. "Shiratori while we wait, anyone?"
Once the last of the quest NPCs was inside the lab, Emi let out a vigorous laugh. "God, we're going to have to go in there and clean up a century old mess soon, aren't we? Honestly, just…fuck this questline."
The adult gave her an irritable look, probably over the pessimism of the statement, while Nekomata just stared at her in confusion. Emi just shrugged back at them. She'd call it how she saw it.
Haruka signed to the group. "Those two did raise about fifteen death flags in the past hour."
"Let's be hopeful." Tabitabi insisted, crossing her arms in front of her chest and frowning.
| | |
"Question one of this quiz on appropriate times to be 'hopeful' about things going well!" Emi roared, bashing the shambling husk of one of the NPCs who'd gone down into the workshop just fifteen minutes ago across the skull and sending the [Fresh Slaver-Fly Host]'s health down to zero and bursting it. With that, there should only be twenty three more of them in this place, assuming that the only mobs down here were the remnants of the NPCs they'd followed to this tomb. "Is it appropriate to feel hopeful about a good outcome when all of your NPC friends go down into a tomb without you and you're still due a questline ending bossfight, huh, hardcore gamer?"
"Okay!" Tabitabi yelled as she withdrew from jabbing another of the evidently parasitized mobs in the chest and detonated it. "I'll admit it, I misjudged where the story was going. Can we cut the chatter and focus on getting to the bottom of this place?"
"Honestly, you two!" Neko yelled, cleaving through a third.
Onee-chan, naturally, said nothing as she gave surface-level cuts to two of the mobs and left them to collapse on the ground for the rest to deal with. It was a small miracle that these mobs had whatever flag made nerve magecraft effective against them enabled, or else it would have taken way more time and effort to finish them off.
Turned this whole process from something dangerous into something boring.
| | |
As the twenty eighth of the hosts burst, marking the last of the non-Neath, non-Melitze NPCs, Emi took stock of the forced-open doorway ahead of them and sighed. "That's definitely related to whatever went wrong here. There is absolutely no way that's not the boss room in there."
The others gathered around, Tabitabi looking a bit queasy as she gazed down the blindingly brightly lit hallway ahead of them. "...we're definitely going to be fighting those two now, aren't we?"
Nekomata shuddered. "This entire questline is in terrible taste. No matter what you do, you can't avoid killing everyone?"
Haruka-oneechan shook her head and signed to the others with her eyes half-lidded. "The condition for saving everyone was probably ignoring what they wanted and diving into this place immediately after they went in, without regard for their hopes and wishes about the place and without waiting for the quest marker to update again. Now, who's ready to kill the happy couple and whatever nasty fly did them in?"
Emi raised her hand rapidly. "It's ikemen hunting season, don't you know?"
The adult in the room shot her a dirty look. "Ugh, really? Fine, whatever. Let's go."
As they marched down the passage in a single file line that went Neko, Emi, Tabitabi, Onee-chan, Emi tapped her hammer against the wall repeatedly, checking for the [Immortal Object] prompt. She had an idea for what the intelligent first move here would be, so long as the chamber wasn't collapsible or something.
"Ugh!"
Her attention was drawn away from that test by Neko's exclamation of disgust, and even she had to admit that the boss chamber wasn't a scene for delicate eyes.
Neath and Meltize, until just a bit ago some of the more intricate [Pretend Humans] that populated the digital landscape of Aincrad, shuffled around, open-mouthed and grunting, with their nametags changed from the NPC labeled [Neath, Elder of M'adou] and [Meltize, Elder of Lyusula] to the mobs labeled [Neath, Parasitized Fire Magus] and [Melitze, Parasitized Earth Magus], while behind them a giant, prismatic-shelled fly that bore a slight resemblance to a wasp or something labeled the [Greater Slaver-Fly] marched around on top of a coffin, three life bars floating above its head with the first almost emptied. As the entirety of the party spread into the wide laboratory space of the boss chamber, the three mobs turned their attention toward them.
As Neath's blade caught fire and rock spread across the surface of Melitze's body, Emi bounced a throwing pick off the ceiling to confirm the chamber's [Immortal Object] status before shouting an instruction to Tabitabi. "Nuke 'em!"
In this circumstance, with three powerful enemies tightly packed in with one another, an explosive first strike was the appropriate start to the fight.
Maybe it was still possible to save these two NPCs - if they were being controlled by a bug, then Neko was better equipped than anyone to try it - but this was a proper boss fight they'd stumbled into, and she wasn't taking any chances on account of the lives of what ultimately weren't even actual people.
No amount of type advantages would convince her not to take this seriously from the word 'go'.
Tabitabi yelped. "W-what?"
Seriously?
"Nuke them! Blow them up!" Emi yelled, but the moment was already passing. The ex-NPCs were fanning out, while the main boss in the back was beginning to beat its wings, seemingly intent on taking off and exploiting the high ceiling of the lab chamber. By the time Tabitabi could shake off her moment of confusion, the window to hit them all would have passed.
Growling, Emi, hefted her hammer onto her shoulder and addressed the others. "Neko, cast versus the bug and make sure it can't do anything to Tabi or the rest of us! Onee-chan, you handle Neath, I'll handle Melitze!"
As divisions of tasks went, if their primary damage dealer was having a moment, this was the most reasonable. Onee-chan didn't have the damage output needed to strike through a rock armor spell like Militze seemed to be using, but she could probably disable Neath fairly well, and Nekomata had a theoretical advantage versus the big nasty, what with her mobility control techniques and all.
And she herself, of course, had the power to hit things with a hammer. She could do more if necessary, but for now… she was going to hit things with a hammer, hard and fast.
"R-right!" Nekomata squeaked, turning her attention to the primary boss and bringing her hand into position. "Nekomata u-used Horn Flip!"
The horn emerged awfully slowly compared to past examples, but Emi had already committed to her own course of action by then, sprinting with all the speed that she could muster after fully reinforcing herself to intercept the [Lady-Type Add].
[Earth Brand] rose in Melitze's hand through a slow, jerky motion, visibly primed to swing down and cut her in two when she drew within range. She could avoid that pretty easily, but what she could also do was… raise her off hand, point, and dump the average player's circuit capacity into the hyper-simplistic Telekinesis spell that'd been provided, projecting a pushing force which ignored the stone armor entirely and directly struck the hand that held the blade underneath.
Melitze took some damage from the shot alone even in spite of her magic resistance blunting it, but more importantly she was left reeling and off balance as Emi swung the flat side of her hammer into the side of her head, cracking the stone covering and throwing her to the ground via the combination of raw strength and accumulated speed.
As the mob lurched, rolled, and groaned out a slow "A…aaaaah!" on the ground, Emi backed off a step and took stock. Onee-chan's fight with Neath was looking to be slow going by comparison, as she was forced to dodge and weave around the man's far more graceful sword swings and flames in pursuit of an opening to inflict paralysis on him. Neko, meanwhile…
Emi hopped over a leg-level swipe of Melitze's blade.
Neko was managing to limit the boss's movement, but she wasn't doing much damage, and she'd need to switch before too long to recover her prana if she kept having to throw out spells at the current rate to control the Slaver-Fly's movements.
Swinging her hammer low to slam her own foe in the face again, Emi called back to Tabitabi. "Tabi, for fuck's sake, blast the bee!"
"Uh!" the adult squeaked, seemingly recovering from whatever fugue had overtaken her. "Right! Killer Queen's First Bomb!"
Emi was fairly certain it'd take more than a few volleys to whittle down a no-shit proper bossfight with those pseudo grenades, as inefficiently as Tabi was currently capable of detonating them, but the force should at least help to keep the insect the side of a juvenile elephant from interfering as they mopped up. That was very important, because what these [Adds] told her was that the boss had an attack that could at least partially sidestep magic resistance and puppet the body and mind of a magus - presumably it was some sort of physical interference along the lines of poisoning, hormone control, and nerve jacking that parasitoid wasps used on the hosts for their larvae.
In theory, that ought to mean that if they knew where the larvae were in someone's body, they could disable the puppeting effect, but she sure as shit didn't know where that would be for the two already under its sway, and she'd rather not have to worry about it with one of them in the first place.
Melitze struggled and rolled to climb back to her feet, using the length of her sword to try and force Emi back out of hammering range. The problem with that, though, was that even if the stone she'd coated herself in was moving under her control, it still made her less flexible, while Emi herself was operating with the highest effective [AGI] available at her level. Slipping past the tip of the blade and delivering another Force Push to the hand to drive it away, she swung the pointed end of her warhammer into Melitze's neck, aiming to crack through the shell and inflict a critical hit.
Another blast rang out, and she heard Tabitabi run past her to more properly join the fight.
The glowing light of Neath's blazing sword was still shifting around the room erratically, so Onee-chan was still struggling to get a good cut in and paralyze her foe, but she also wasn't out of the fight yet.
[Earth Brand] swung back around, and Emi ducked to get below the arc of it, confined by the stuck tip of her hammer until she could fire another Force Push up, this time at the head, and knock Melitze back off of her weapon. Good lesson, there, if she ever needed to fight one of [The Dead] or similar in melee combat - don't get yourself stuck in place by lodging your weapon in an enemy that won't do you the courtesy of letting you get yourself unstuck before it carries on with trying to kill you!
She glanced at Melitze's life bar - mercifully, it was in the red already. The NPC had explained it herself, hadn't she? She wasn't any sort of actual combatant, however much training she may have had, so she was probably the much weaker of the [Adds]...
Emi drew her hammer back to the right, ready to strike, and lunged back up to deliver one last strike, the strength of her legs supplementing the harsh bash against the cracked armor of Melitze's head.
The [Woman-Shaped Object] burst into triangles, and Emi spun to provide support to her sister. All it would take is one good interruption to give her the window she needed to paralyze him, and then finishing him off would be an at-leisure activity.
"Onee-chan, behind!" she yelled, charging with her hammer in the trigger position for [Double Bash]. Her target: his midsection.
Haruka-oneechan dodged a thrust from that flaming sword and then sidestepped, leaving the path open for Emi to launch her attack. The sword skill fired and the system assist took over, her arm lashing out in a predetermined pattern, followed by the head of the hammer a handle's length away.
That flaming sword drew close and blocked both of the swings, ready to punish her while she was paralyzed…
And then froze in the air, Neath himself rendered utterly immobile as the sword he'd evaded so admirably before plunged into his side.
As a result, while Haruka-oneechan pulled away to survey the ongoing melee versus the boss proper, Emi had plenty of time to recover from her paralysis, invoke the Force Push type spell one more time to throw Neath on his back, and clamber on top of the bastard to let out her frustration at the poor writing of his questline, Hammer rising and falling rhythmically on his throat as his life bar emptied further and further.
Eventually he, too, burst, and Emi looked up to check on the progress with the fly.
She was most of the way through her second life bar at this point, which meant they'd need to worry about [Last Red] soon if they managed to inflict much more damage. Nekomata seemed to have gone into melee proper, using her greatsword to deal damage in place of her depleted [Prana Gauge] while Tabitabi and Onee-chan darted around, looking for places where they could attempt to properly pierce the boss's carapace. Tabitabi must have run out of coal again, she realized, because the explosions had stopped a while ago. The room…did not have much in the way of mana, a quick check confirmed, which explained why Nekomata hadn't been able to fully recharge. If she had to rate this chamber on a scale from perfect for formalcraft to perfect for alchemy, it'd be closer to the latter by far.
Emi lifted herself off the ground and readied herself for a running jump against the low-hovering target. The big things to worry about from a parasitoid insect with wasp-like traits was probably the stinger toward the rear, which a wasp would use to stun its prey to more easily plant larvae in them, and the jaws, which would hurt quite a bit to get pinched by. That meant it had very little answer to an enemy on its back - she hoped.
She wound up to leap just as Tabitabi dodged a swipe from the [Greater Slaver-Fly]s stinger, then jammed the tip of her rapier into its open ovipositor - she thought that was probably the right word for it - and triggered an explosion at the very tip, right in what had to be a pretty serious weak point.
Its health fell into the red, to about 75% of the way through the final bar, before she could abort her plan, and it instantly shifted from a strategy of relatively static hovering warfare to a lightning-fast charge targeted at Emi herself, stinger rearing up to catch her mid-jump. Its programming probably told it to target whoever was furthest away, or whoever were most isolated. All the same…
She was fucked if she didn't respond to it, but there were very few responses she could muster under the circumstances. A proper spell would take too long, given the circumstances, and even if she were to wrack her brains for one, her family art was focused not on combat but on the creation of a perfect body, which could support a perfect brain, which could support a perfect soul, which could reach the root. A simple Force Push probably wouldn't work, meanwhile, because of the tremendous mass of the target. She wracked her brain for an answer that was possible within the time remaining, and found only one possibility, as her brain unearthed a joke she'd made several days ago as a possibility.
Psychogenesis supplied the materials, while Telekinesis provided an ever so tiny amount of force, the rest made up for by the boss's own charge attack. At the last second, the boss's strike was intercepted by the conjured flesh of a narwhal corpse, while no such barrier prevented the narwhal's tooth from embedding itself in the underside of the fly's thorax.
She didn't have time to check how much damage that did as the boss rammed straight into her, failing to impale her with its stinger but not to concuss her and send her twirling through the air as she pinged off of its head, narrowly evading the jaws in the process.
She landed a moment later with a third of her health remaining, in incredible pain, and suffering from a bout of extreme dizziness.
"Jinan!" Tabitabi yelled, the sound of frenzied footsteps emerging from the direction of the others in considerable volume. "Ergh… Stray Cat, send it flying!"
Emi just laid there, regaining her bearings as a massive explosion roared its way into being near the door of the chamber, overlaid with the mob death sound effect.
She started laughing as she laid there on the ground. Fucking hell, but she'd almost died there! They'd almost died here!
The first thing she saw aside from the ceiling overhead was Onee-chan's face as she picked her up and cradled her, an expression of abject panic on her face.
She calmed her laughter, trying to present a look of relief and confidence rather than adrenaline-soaked madness. "We're good, Onee-chan. I'm good. I'll be fine in a minute. Ah…but that was fucking close. Let's not make a habit of that."
She had no idea what kind of group size this quest was actually intended for, but it probably wasn't four people. Judging from the number of NPCs, the effect if one had gone in at the same time as the NPCs might have been similar to a half-raid?
She'd know later when she checked her level, just by how much XP they'd gotten…
For now she was just going to…take deep breaths and avoid thinking about her own mortality. That sounded like the plan.
3:5 - Argo and Haruka
"Lyusula, M'adou, your old teacher is truly proud of you for making it this far, and truly sorry for playing such a trick on you to spark it. You have, most assuredly, learned much and overcome hardships together in order to reach this place, to receive my inheritance. Ah, but that it were only a gift of knowledge and wealth that I left to you, and not the rigid shackles of duty."
Argo - her real name was Hosaka Carina Tomo, of course, but thinking of herself as [Argo the Rat] came more naturally in this environment - glanced up at the prospective seller who'd come to visit her at the same inn she'd been staying in since the second floor curiously. It was only the first paragraph of [Reuan's Will] and she was already spotting some pretty bizarre stuff.
She set the book down on the small coffee table between them, one of the few furnishings in the admittedly sparse room the [Sheep Inn] sold. The narrow chamber was a bit less sparse than the typical room at the inn - the bed a bit softer, and with a table, a mirror, and a chest for storage - but it was still quite a spartan place. She stuck to it for precisely that reason: it was nicer than usual, but at the same time it wasn't [Hot Information] like the rarer but far nicer apartments and similar that were out there to be rented. After a moment, she glanced to her guest, who glanced back at her from across the table.
"A-nyaa, just to ask, you wouldn't happen to have found the [Elf War] questline, would you?" she interrogated, narrowing her eyes toward the cosplaying catgirl with her brow furrowed. It was fairly obscure information, because dialogue trees were often quite sparsely written in the [Beta], but to the seasoned eyes of an information broker those were definitely the names of the two elven factions that the multi-floor event concerned. "Because if that's the case, you've got to realize that's hot information in its own right - I'll pay you a fair price for this or help you set up a sale once I've evaluated the goods, but a questline that runs six floors has got to be worth more to the [Front-Liner] than this little book."
The girl shook her head, though, her expression unreadable under that opaque veil she insisted on covering her face up with, then started signing around waist level, obviously not intending for Argo to stand up to get a view of her hands as the software of the [Nervegear] translated the gestures into speech. "The questline hit a dead end almost as soon as it started. I won't lie to you and say the [XP] wasn't good, all four of us jumped about three levels from pushing through it together, but we've agreed that it's best not to encourage ambitious [Mid-Liners] to run it to boost their levels. For one, the danger level is unusually high for the [Third Floor], so our results actually came from bulldozing through with the [Thaumaturgy System]'s help instead of bringing a properly-sized group, and for two, the whole questline runs on the old system for humanoid enemies, and Tabitabi figures it's probably a bad idea to get people used to fighting enemies that look and act like humans, within the limits of the AI."
Argo parsed through that a second time in her head, before nodding. "Yeah, that sounds like it could contribute to the spread of [Red Players] if unstable people-" of which there were many, under the stressful circumstances of living in the [Death Game] "-were to run through it and take the wrong lesson. Even if they were actually elves."
Her instincts as a merchant told her to push for the quest details anyways, but she didn't think she'd actually manage to get them. A-nyaa and Ta-nyaa were particularly stubborn about the things they weren't willing to sell even in the [Beta] days.
"They weren't. No knife ears, just humans." A-nyaa corrected. "Anyways, between the encounter level, the psychological side of things, and the skill mismatch between fighting bugs and fighting people, we agreed that the quest itself shouldn't be for sale. That book, though, we agreed that was worth spreading around, so get back to verifying."
The broker rolled her eyes and got back to reading. "Though you may not have known it of me, I was originally a resident of the fifth floor, before the cataclysm."
Her eyes widened at that line. The raid against [The Slime King] to finish out the [Fourth Floor] was scheduled to begin in about five hours, which meant that anything to do with [Fifth Floor] was beyond even the bleeding edge of the information trade. She started workshopping a price in her head as she glanced up.
"Keep reading." A-nyaa instructed.
"As natives of this parched distant land, I suspect you may know little of what became of my home." the diary continued. "Perhaps you were not aware that anything befel it at all, given your provincial upbringings. For me, though, the outbreak that brought down the greatest city in Aincrad is a nightmare that cannot be escaped, however much I may have run from it in body. Friends and family fallen dead, only to rise again possessed by a mindless hunger. Fires raging from failed attempts at cleansing, barricades hastily erected and abandoned in a quarantine that never seems to hold for more than a few years at a time. I fled from that land a young man, a young magus, and hid myself in the desolation of your home in the hopes that what happened there could never spread this far, but many times I returned to collect samples and conduct research, always in the hopes of finding the means to conclusively stop whatever caused [The Dead] to wander the land."
She nodded along. So the [Fifth Floor] was following from an [Urban Zombie Apocalypse] setting. Well, that in itself was something they would have discovered the moment they set foot on the floor, but it was interesting to learn that the information had been available, with thorough exploration, as far back as almost two weeks ago.
"It was a decade before I came to your village and took the both of you under my wing that I discovered the nature of the pathogen behind the outbreak." the start of the next paragraph declared. "A larval body of remarkably diminutive size, planted in the neck just under the base of the skull by a strange insect, which feeds on the vital energies of the host and seizes control over their faculties of perception and movement, even to the point of reanimating them from apparent death. Even having discovered the existence of what I term the [Slaver-Fly], though, I could not cure anyone. It is possible to remove the larvae before symptoms emerge and prevent infestation in that manner, but once one begins to move under the control of the parasite, once one becomes a host, only death will result from extraction."
Argo hummed at that, furrowing her brow. In principle, that was good information on a weak point, maybe even an instant kill against the common mooks on the floor, but honestly a blow to the neck or head was kind of common sense for killing zombies.
"Knowing that I could not bring back what was lost, I thought instead of saving what yet remained in my homeland - of ending the great contagion's grip and allowing the land to heal. As such, I refocused my research on the larvae, their life cycle, and their destruction, even going so far as to forcibly mature them into their adult form in a controlled environment, to better study their habits and biology. Ultimately, I found it beyond my own capabilities to craft a decisive counteragent which could spread of its own accord to destroy larvae and flies both before they could spread. In the course of a hundred experiments, I was met with a hundred failures as my homeland continued to degenerate. Indeed, as you may have seen from the specimen in my holding chamber, I have only succeeded in creating a more horrific strain of the monster thus far. So it was that I placed my faith in the both of you, who seemed to possess the necessary aptitudes to do what I could not, if properly trained and - eventually - coaxed into discarding your childish rivalry. So I give you now this, my final request for you - bring salvation to my homeland, which you never knew, in repayment for all I have taught you and all that you inherit from me now, and heed my final warning."
That wording grabbed Argo's attention in a way the rest hadn't. If there was any juicy information in this diary, it would be here.
"Firstly, I pass to you the mysteries and [Skills] I have honed through my years of research - the arts of [Dissection], of [Embalming], and of the creation of [Familiars]. Through research on the structure of the [Slaver-Flies] and their larvae, I have found that it is possible to give false life to an unliving [Vessel], through the addition of a [Conduit] for your [Prana] and the implantation of a [Soul]. Firstly, a proper [Vessel] is needed, such as a crafted puppet or a corpse that has been made whole through surgical means, as I shall now explain. Next, you must.."
Just skipping over the whole explanation? Argo snorted. Well, the wording of that paragraph pretty clearly signaled that she should check her [Skills] tab, where she did indeed find two new skills added toward the bottom of the [Inactive Skills] section - [Dissection] and [Embalming]. She'd check the descriptions for those later, but for now she was going to continue reading. Something like a [Pet] system, however grisly, now that sounded like something that might sell!
"Next you must insert an appropriate medium to anchor the soul to the [Familiar] to be, and to channel the [Prana] that will give it the semblance of life. For this, something like blood, hair, or any other part of your body which readily channels [Prana] will suffice."
She frowned. Blood wasn't implemented yet and she wasn't aware of much that could be described as 'readily channeling' magic about one's body. Well, you could go to a cosmetic shop to alter your hair, but would they actually give you a [Hair Item] if you asked?
She hummed. However it was done, it sounded unpleasant, but she'd have to verify it first. "Have you tried this out yet? I can guess that you use monster parts plus [Embalming] to create a body to use, but how do you get the [Conduit], with how basic the [Anatomy System] is? I don't even know if any of those things exist in the game right now!"
"It's a bit of a cludge, Argo-shishou," her technical student signed, giving a casual shrug midway through. "But you can give yourself a haircut with [Dissection]. It does a little damage, weirdly, but you can get a [Your Hair] item that way to try it out with. Maybe it'd be easier to go to a shop, though... Neko and Jinan have had the most success out of us."
Argo nodded. It made sense that [Bug] and [Body] would be most compatible elements out of that group for making familiars. In the first place, A-nyaa just squeaked into the running for magecraft through [Spine Circuits], and [Nerves] didn't seem like the most natural option to try and raise the dead with, given how much else there was in a functioning body. Though…if people with common elements like [Fire] and [Wood] could do it, she didn't see why it'd be impossible with [Nerves]. Meanwhile… she could only imagine Ta-nyaa managing to make a corpse blow up, if she was being honest with herself.
She got back to reading.
"Lastly, the [Soul]. I've had some success with using captured spirits for this, but fundamentally anything which can instill some level of autonomy in the creation will work for this. You will find other ways of preparing this part of a familiar, I am sure, but focus first on simply imbuing your will into your creation - on giving it one simple order which justifies its existence. It will not showcase true independence so much as it will act in accordance with your instructions and that order, but it will suffice to start you on the path." the book explained, before taking a far more concerning turn.
"In the case of the [Slaver-Flies], which the both of you may indeed already have realized are a sort of [Familiar], each ingredient is partially provided by the fly upon infestation and partially plundered from the host from that point on. The larval mass provides a small form of [Vessel], but subverts the host body to provide the rest. In bearing the hemolymph of the original fly, it can channel some of its energy, but moreover it can plunder it from the lifeform it has parasitized. Finally, though it bears the orders to seize a living body, to propagate, and to obey the master above all else, it steals the majority of its reason and competencies from the host by infesting their very spirit. I do not know who fashioned this abomination, but this is a level of craftswork I am wholly unable to replicate, a [Familiar] which propagates on its own without burdening its master, and if there is anything you take from me here it should be this: the master of the [Slaver-Flies] was either a fool beyond measure or evil beyond measure. He either unleashed something far beyond his control and estimation, or he willingly damned an entire floor of this castle to oblivion."
She swallowed hard. That wasn't just a guide on magecraft, it was also a warning. Whether it was just Kayaba saying that they'd better be careful, because you could create a massive disaster by screwing around with magecraft and the system wouldn't stop you, or… No, she shook her head. That was absolutely a warning about the [Fifth Floor Boss].
"Fifty thousand col." she offered, her face firm as she stared the girl down. It was a massive amount of money even for her, but she could afford to make that kind of investment for this kind of big fish. It wasn't even just a matter of profit - she'd charge for it, but she'd make sure it was a price that would let it spread across the entire [Front Line] rapidly.
The catgirl shook her head, and a moment later the synthesized voice filled the air again. "The information about the [Fifth Floor] and the possible lead about the boss, that's free if you hand it out for free. We want the entire [Front Line] to know that part as a matter of course. On the other hand, while you've got a free [Press Copy] to verify the info with, we'd rather set up a deal with you to sell copies of the [Familiar Making] instructions. Set whatever price you want, however you want, but we'll take…"
Argo frowned. It was good that they weren't insisting on payment for the boss info, but the way she saw it they'd misunderstood just what kind of situation her middleman services were useful for. "You do realize that because this comes from a questline, it won't have any [Copy Protection], right? The first person I sell it to could start making unauthorized copies and leaving them on every bookshelf, and then there wouldn't be any more buyers after that."
A-nyaa's ears twitched, and Argo could just about see the girl narrow her eyes at her. "So we should sell to you at some fixed price we haggle over, then, and you'll sell it on for a markup until people stop buying?" she asked, before shaking her head. "No, that way of handling things would probably disproportionately profit you, what we want is for you to figure out what people will pay, and then give us…"
The girl's hands stopped signing for a moment as she counted on her fingers, before she shrugged and resumed signing. "Would you take a 25% commission on every sale, actually?"
It was Argo's turn to shake her head, now. "Make it a third."
The best way to run this would probably be to play to the competitiveness of the [Front Line] guilds, if she was being honest with herself. If it was Ilya versus Diabel in a bidding war over an advance copy of this guide before she released it to the general public in two days or so, that'd have enough heated feelings on the line to drive up the sales price. Well, in a contest of [The Paladins] versus the [Brotherhood of Saint Mark], the overwhelming scale difference should skew a bidding war towards the former, but given that the latter was [Von Ilya], maybe she could pull something off to tip the scales back the other way. Either way, it'd be a lucrative sales strategy.
"Deal." the catgirl announced, before extending a hand for a handshake which, obviously, made her unable to continue speaking.
Argo smiled as she returned the handshake. A quarter would have been perfectly fine by her, actually, given [Neko Cafe Nyan*Nyan] wasn't willing to just sell it to her outright, but a third was even better. It was nice to know her student drove such a soft bargain. "Pleasure doing business. I'll probably be busy for awhile making calls to set up the sale, once I've confirmed a working familiar - I'll be holding onto this copy in the meanwhile, if that's okay-"
A-nyaa pulled her hand free of the handshake to reply, before standing up from the table. "It's a copy of the original quest reward anyways, so I've got no problem with that."
"-but if you'd like to drop by again a bit later." Argo added, having expected that affirmative answer and accounted for it. "I'd appreciate it if you'd work with me on my circuit later. I'd bet I could learn something from it, if you're willing to help."
Al'Qazandir paused for a moment on her way out, before nodding and signing out a brief message. "Call me when you're open, shishou."
Honestly, she felt a little dirty asking favors on learning something she'd taught the girl in the first place, but in a race between herself and someone with the element of [Nerves], Argo had to imagine she was so far behind that she'd be better served making herself a disciple than trying to keep up. She probably wouldn't be able to replicate even a third of what A-nyaa could manage using her element, but when she'd first taught the girl, her own [Transmute Spine to Circuit] skill had jumped by twenty points, and she couldn't think of any other explanation for how that would happen but that she'd leached [JP] from the experience - that she'd learned something from seeing A-nyaa do it. That being the case, she'd been looking for a chance to ask for supplemental lessons.
| | |
Argo peered down at the green slime that was slipping and sliding about the floor of her room at the inn, proudly proclaimed [Lime Flavored] by the icon above its head. In retrospect, the mental image of a roomba cleaning the floor was a bit of a dumb thought to use as the thing's [Soul], given that SAO didn't have a rule like [Your Room Will Get Dirty and Need Cleaning], but after five tries at animating the thing, she'd been just about ready to give up when she'd gotten the success prompt.
In any case, it wasn't as though she needed to worry about making a useless familiar too much - even if by normal standards it was only barely sipping on her [Prana], by the standard of her [Fake Circuit] it was a heavy enough imposition that she needed to top up fairly frequently. More likely than not, when her current circuit faded away the thing would go from [Lime Flavored (Present Tense)] to [Lime Flavored (Past Tense)] and stay that way, since she had no reason to remake it once it starved. What mattered was that she'd confirmed the information she was selling, and the various guild heads had been informed to prepare their bids. It wasn't like it was an actual pet or anything.
She put her arms up and did a long stretch just to feel herself move, even if stiff muscles weren't a thing in the current system. On a normal day, she wouldn't be spending this much time bumming around her room when she could be out meeting informants, verifying info, and hunting for novel finds, but she'd made an arrangement earlier, so what spare time was forcibly wrenched open had gone into drafting the guidebook.
Three loud knocks rang out at the door of her room with a considerable gap between the first and second, and she slipped off of her bed to go open it. Sword Art Online's sound engine was a bit peculiar, in that all of the rooms were almost perfectly soundproofed - with one or two exceptions it was completely impossible for noise from outside of a sealed room to get in or vice versa, which made it easier to focus on the slow work of drafting and editing. Knocking on a door happened to be one of the exceptions, though, and if anything the game actually amplified it. Even if she'd been in the zone, there would have been no missing A-nyaa's arrival.
Her hand found the doorknob and twisted, and she prepped to toss out one of her patented greetings as she pulled it open. "Hey, pretty lady, thanks for dropping b-"
She froze mid-word as her gaze fell on her… friend, customer, informant… guest, guest worked. Her brain was grinding to a bit of a halt in the moment, as she processed the dramatic change in A-nyaa's appearance over just a few short hours. Rather than the loose fitting [Blue Mage Outfit] that covered about 95% of her skin, Al'Qazandir stood before her in a floral-patterned sundress and sandals, her entire round-ish face exposed to the air save for what was covered the black hair of her bob cut.
It was utterly plain to see, as a result, when the girl averted her gaze, the game's emotion engine pressing the cat ears flat against the top of her head, as soon as she'd heard the quip.
After a moment's pause, Argo averted her gaze herself. Granted, the girl was genuinely dressed up pretty nicely, but the entire sleazy air of that joke was predicated on the idea that she'd be dressed hyper-conservatively to the point it'd sound ridiculous. "You, uh… dress up for this?" she asked, not quite sure how to recover her momentum in the moment.
The synthesized voice that represented A-nyaa filled the air a moment later. "My sister saw me heading out again and wouldn't let me leave the room until I changed out of my armor. Even when I told her I was visiting you, she insisted."
Argo's eyes drifted back onto her guest, who wore a vibrant blush as she persisted in looking away. This was a little awkward - she'd been trying to set a light mood, not fill the room with dead air. "Um… it looks nice?" she offered, before stepping away from the door. "Come on in."
She didn't look back, trusting in the sound of footsteps and a closing door to tell her what had happened. "So, I'm already starting to get bids from some of the guilds for your book." she noted, hoping to cut through some of the dodgy vibes the meeting had already accumulated.
No reply came. That much was expected, granted, but… A-nyaa's footsteps also stopped a moment later.
Argo turned, curious about what had happened, and let out a bemused snort as she saw the girl crouched in front of [Lime Flavored], gently poking at the slime as it pushed against her legs, too dumb to path around her on its meaningless patrol of the floor. "It thinks it's a roomba." she explained. "I needed to test the instructions for myself before I started selling them, after all. I don't think I'm going to keep it, though - the [Prana] cost is too high."
Her guest rose with a faint smile and stepped around the blob, her hands a flurry of motion. "I just thought it was a little cute. Neko and Jinan both tested on giant insects, so it's a refreshing change of pace seeing a little slime dude sliding around."
Argo hummed. "That's right, you wouldn't have had any slime bits in your pockets, would you? Being as how you've probably only gone as far as the town in the [Fourth Floor]."
"He's not a bad slime!" A-nyaa quipped, evidently recognizing the question as rhetorical and answering, instead, with a reference.
"Yeah, yeah. If I'd picked a blue slime, that reference might even be topical in the modern day." Argo replied, shaking her head. She really didn't have any use for the little thing, cute or not. Reaching her bedside, she spun and planted herself on the edge of the mattress. There were chairs around the table, but for something long, slow, and uncomfortable like making a circuit, she generally preferred to lay down if she wasn't going to sit directly on the floor.
Her self-proclaimed disciple paused at the bedside for a second before twirling around and joining her, hands already in motion again. "So regarding your circuit, what is it you're wanting to work on, exactly? Do you just want some help with improving its throughput, or…"
Argo bit her lip. "There are a few possibilities I've been considering. At the most basic, it might be nice to improve how I'm making my circuits for better throughput, but the main thing I wanted to consult you on is whether you think it'd be possible to make a second circuit. The topic came up while I was training with Shirou."
A-nyaa looked her way immediately, establishing eye contact with a slight frown on her face. "It's possible. For me, at least, it's totally possible, and I don't see why it'd be impossible for you. I'm not entirely sure if you'll be able to pull it off yet, though. Could you…lay down, with your back facing up? I'm going to climb on top of you."
Argo returned that frown. She could vaguely see where this was going, but the phrasing of that was a little... "E-excuse you?"
Her guest's expression hardened momentarily, before she shifted from a signing posture to a posture for navigating the menu. Argo was promptly assaulted with the [Inherit Teaching Y/N] box as A-nyaa replied. "This won't be the intended usage of the [Inheritance] system, per se, but I'm going to need good access to your back to check something and share the information with you, and I'll need for you to try not to resist this spell."
Yeah, that was what she thought, but she needed to check. "Okay, then." Argo permitted, tapping the confirmation button and enduring the momentary hit of vertigo, before reluctantly drawing herself further onto the bed and rolling to rest her chin on her pillow. "So, you're going to use [Structural Analysis] on my spine or something?"
A-nyaa hesitated, and Argo could feel her guest's body tense up for a moment before the bed creaked and the girl shifted her weight to straddle over her lower back without putting any weight down on her. "Or something. It's a specialized offshoot I made to scan my own spine and judge the safe areas and how much of them my circuits take up. You might be able to learn it, or you might not, but this way I can share the output with you either way."
So saying, the girl opened her circuits, and Argo yelped. The conversation thus far had very clearly signaled that there were going to be two of them in there, but as A-nyaa's spine filled ever so slightly with [Prana] Argo detected three of the things. "You didn't say you'd made three of them!"
"You didn't ask. Two wasn't enough, anyways, so I figured out three." A-nyaa replied, the tone of the synthesized voice lifting into a bemused note through…what, context clues? "Now hold still, I'll be going quiet now."
Argo held a breath as two hands descended on her back as though preparing to give a massage, tracing down slowly from the bottom of her neck and down past her shoulders asa gentle trail of magical energy ran down her back, washing through her nerves and brushing against the outside of her latest circuit, building up a map as it spilled out past her spine to enter her peripheral nervous system - though neither should have been truly modeled by the current system. It was a thoroughly mind-bending experience, but as A-nyaa reached the end and started silently back up toward her neck she started to get a sense of it. It wasn't the clearest picture, but she got the feeling that maybe fifty percent of the safe zone in her spine was currently occupied by her circuit, and she could tell roughly where the rest was.
It was a bit frustrating, realizing that for all that her circuit was taking up more real estate than any one of A-nyaas, which between the three of them only seemed about fifty percent 'bulkier' in total, its actual capacity was less than a ninth of what her nominal student could store between her three. On the other hand…that was just the nature of elemental specialization, she guessed. A [Nerve] protagonist would naturally be better at this than someone like her.
The hands drew back as they reached her neck, and A-nyaa shifted to let Argo roll back upright. "Not the best nor the worst result, but it looks like you're only using about forty-six percent of the safe capacity of your spine right now. No guarantee that you won't exceed fifty-four percent with the next one, though, so either you learn [Neuro-Scan] first, or you're going to have to wait a few more days before I let you try something like making a second on your own. So, how's about this: I'm going to demonstrate it again, on myself this time, and I want you to try and replicate it."
Argo nodded, rolling herself back into a sitting posture and facing A-nyaa, both of their faces feeling about equally warm in a comparison that could only be made through the assistance of the [Inheritance] system.
Then the spell started. From what it felt like, a current of carefully accumulated [Structural Grasp] was running through the nerves of A-nyaa's spine in a series of pulses, always running down the full length of one nerve before drifting across the gap to the next, building an image of the path each one took and evaluating what it ultimately controlled in a way she could only just barely fully process. Then the girl's hands started moving. "The thing you need to keep in mind to apply your element to this spell is that nerves run on the pumped motion of metallic ions into the cell to generate voltage. If you try to go in with my image of 'I am looking at the spine, which bears the property of being nerves' it won't work well, but the same effect can be justified within your element through the lens of 'I am looking at the spine, which bears the property of being full of metals. Well, I won't guarantee that your results will be as good as mine, though. Oh, actually, skin is a subset of the [Metal] element, right? Because nerves are a modified form of skin, biologically speaking, which might help it apply."
Argo nodded, a bit surprised that A-nyaa was that familiar with that kind of lore on an element she couldn't use, even if it was ultimately drawn from real world superstition. So, spines were full of metals, they were a modified form of skin, and… Argo may have been imagining this, but that description of how nerves worked sounded like an [Inward] motion and a [Contracting] energy, which suited the properties of [Metal] perfectly, in context of the wuxing system of Chinese folklore [Eastern Magecraft] was based around. Maybe she was actually unusually compatible with this kind of magecraft?
She took a deep breath, and focused on those three elements as she put her effort into replicating the spell she'd been shown. Gradually, her grasp formed, then shifted from a generalized [Appraisal] spell into something that detected nerves and their state through the properties of the metal element, building a picture of the layout of the part of her spine it rested over and the connected peripheral nerves. The detail level was… well, she was going to admit to herself, for all that metal was evidently a really compatible element for nerve magecraft, it certainly didn't hold a candle to [Nerves] itself for this work. She was sure A-nyaa's skill level in the spell had some part in how much more detailed her scan was compared to Argo's, but there was something else to it as well. The talent multiplier for having a [Rare Element] was just too absurd, as expected.
Still, though, Argo couldn't help but marvel at the lavish detail the system seemed to be pouring into this topic compared to other parts of the body. Even if nerves were a pretty fundamental part of biology, at the end of the day the [Simplified Anatomy Update] didn't even have blood in it. She'd known there was a spine in her avatar ever since she started doing magecraft on it, of course, but why spend so many resources representing it? What reason did Kayaba have to make that specific part of the anatomy so comparatively…un-simplified? It was a bit uncomfortable to think about receiving that much attention, but was it possible that [Transmute Spine to Circuit] and A-nyaa's element had prompted him to up the resolution here?
"Now, if you're ready to continue." A-nyaa declared, her hands moving gradually as she began to shift the spell down the length of her own spine, creating a map several times more detailed than the one she'd managed on Argo herself. "Start moving your 'scan head' down and building your map. I don't expect you to get incredible detail, but if we're working together it should be enough to build a map you can use to measure the image of your circuit and install it safely alongside the last one."
Argo exhaled, focusing everything on the sensation of charting her spine, finding the border between where the pillar of salt that channeled her prana ran and and where the rest of the nerves were, gradually charting her nervous system and identifying the nerves she could and couldn't touch based on where they seemed to lead. It was slow going, but with each successive pass, the image was refined, until a popup emerged in front of her face, announcing her success. [You have joined the magecraft lineage of player [Al'Qazandir] and received the [Extra Spell], [Neuro-Scan]. Congratulations!], it read.
She cleared that one, then the [Inheritance Success] notification, as the feeling of connectedness subsided. Then, she shivered. That had been a weird damned sensation. "You know, now you're my teacher just like I"m yours." she commented. It wasn't an entirely accurate comment, granted; truthfully, she'd probably learned more from A-nyaa than vice versa at this point.
"Maybe so, shishou, but it wouldn't feel right to be called that myself." A-nyaa replied, before giving her an inquisitive look. "So, then, do you want to give making a second one a try with my supervision, now, or would you rather call it for the day? We've been sitting there for…about fifteen minutes now?"
Argo pulled up her own menu to confirm that, her eyes going wide as she spied the number of unread messages in her inbox. "Well, we could go right into it, still, I guess. Now that we're on the topic of the 'width' of circuits, though, do you think it'd be possible to put a circuit somewhere other than the spine?"
The girl tilted her head down for a minute, seemingly deep in thought, before her hands started moving. "There's no reason it should be impossible, and you'd definitely think it would be safer than using the spine, but given the thinner nerve bundles I'd expect the overall capacity to be much lower, which means making narrower circuits with much less capacity. It'd be worth trying some other day, I guess, but for now let's focus on the task at hand."
"Right." Argo replied, before the other girl sent her a second [Inheritance] offer. "This time, it's really just to exploit the effect, right? Making a second circuit isn't a whole other spell?"
"Right." A-nyaa confirmed, before Argo tapped confirmation.
The rush of sensation as the sensations started to be shared was something you could never really get entirely used to. Also, for some reason she got the sense that her guest's heart rate was speeding up an awful lot every time they did this.
"We're going to start by doing another scan." A-nyaa instructed. "In order to really refresh the map in our minds. It's easy enough to safely place the circuit if it's your only one, but the second and subsequent circuits need a lot more care taken, in my experience. After that, we'll practice building images until we've both got one that's thin enough to fit, and high enough capacity to be worth it, and then we'll move on to installing it."
"Wait." Argo asked, giving her a shocked look. "You're going to build yourself a fourth circuit, here and now?"
A-nyaa nodded, her hands flying into a brief fit of action. "Three still isn't enough. Now, barring any further questions… we're going to be here for awhile, so we should probably start scanning."
Argo felt an oncoming sensation of dread. How many messages were going to be piled up in her inbox by the time they finished here?
Then she squashed that sensation, because if she could get a hang of this process, she'd be able to expand her magecraft-based information gathering operations several times faster than she was managing on her own.
All the same, she let her gaze drift down to her own lap. She had no interest in playing a one, maybe two hour long game of Eye-Contact-Chicken on her bed, so it was best just to concede now so she could focus on the magecraft they were doing.
Slowly, she began to scan down her spine, using the methodical, focus-based activity to banish any stray thoughts from her head.
----
AN: That's it for now. New chapter...maybe the week after next? Hard to say with exact certainty.
