Editing Sword Art Online:Caliber SS (section)

=== Part 1 ===
<!--(TL Note: This part is pretty much the same as the beginning of Caliber: Part 4, except very near the end)-->

The katana user finished off the black Minotaur Deviant God by stabbing it with the ferocity of multiple grudges being released all at once. Not paying any attention to the list of dropped items when it burst into a cloud of glittering polygons, he turned around and yelled, “Hey, Kirito! What did ya do just now?!”

That question obviously referred to my usage of one-handed sword skills while equipped with two swords. Explaining in detail would be very troublesome, so I obeyed my inner thoughts and answered with as troubled a face as I could manage.

“...Do I have to say it?”

“O’course! After seeing something like that!!” It seemed I had pressed Klein’s curiosity button, and figuring it was unavoidable, I answered briefly.

“It was a skill outside the system, Skill Connect.”

“Oooh-” Liz, Silica and Sinon whistled in unison. Suddenly, Asuna pressed her fingertips to her temples and growled.

“Um...somehow, I got a strong feeling of Déjà vu…”

“It’s just your imagination.” I shrugged my shoulders and clapped my hand on our healer’s back, whom despite her support duty in the back row, had sneaked in during the battle with the gold Minotaur to deliver the killing blow. “This is not the time for relaxed talk. Leafa, how much time do we have left?”

“Ah, right.” After sheathing her long katana in its scabbard behind her waist, Leafa held up the medallion hanging from her neck. From a few steps away, I could see that the light within the jewel was almost completely list. “...At the current pace, we still have an hour or two.”

“I see. Yui, this dungeon has four floors, right?” I asked the little fairy sitting atop my head.

“Yes, the third floor is around seventy percent the size of the second, and the fourth floor is essentially the boss room,” she responded clearly.

“Thank you.” Stretching my right hand, my fingertips stroked my hair while I quickly considered the situation. At this moment, in Jotunheim far below us, the players accepting the Frost Giant Tribe’s quest and the hunting of the bestial Deviant Gods had gained momentum. The number of participants taking part would only increase. The remaining time would most likely be around an hour. The battle with the last boss - King Thrym himself - should take about thirty minutes, leaving us with thirty minutes to clear the third floor.

If there was a little more time, we could explain the situation the players on the field, asking for their assistance in stopping the ongoing quest, but at this moment we didn’t have enough time to return to the field and make an announcement. The other alternative was to message the fairy lords requesting reinforcements, but organizing a force in the capital city beyond the mountain range, moving it to the Alne plateau, and reaching Jotunheim from the dungeon stairs could take until sundown.

In other words, with just seven people, we were in a hopeless situation. Or rather, factoring in the failure of Queen Uld’s side quest from the Cardinal System’s automatic quest generator function, Thrymheim castle would surface on Alfheim, triggering the large-scale campaign quest Ragnarok. The fault was obviously with the character who inherited its function from its creator.

“...In that case, I don’t care if it’s the king of the Deviant Gods or not, we’ll just smash him for good,” Lisbeth said with a slap on my back. The rest of the group murmured in agreement. Where did they get that recklessness from? With this thought in mind, I strongly nodded.

“Everyone’s HP and MP fully recovered? Then let’s breeze through the third floor!”

The combined voice echoed once more. Seven people then kicked the floor and started running, aiming for the boss room on the lowest floor, which was just visible through the ice.

Just as Yui said, the third floor was clearly smaller than the second. It was natural for the lower parts of an inverted pyramid, but it was still a rather narrow and complicated passage. For a normal clearing, we would be confused by the gimmicks of the paths, but we had, enshrined on my head, a Navigation Pixie which could give the latest model of an intelligent car’s navigation system a run for its money.

Our trump card accessed the map data, and with her instructions we could run through the winding passage at full speed. Even the puzzles using levers, gears, or stepping switches were cleared without any time used to solve them. If this affair were observed from the outside, there would be no mistake in thinking we were trying to set a record for fastest clearing.

We ran into sub-bosses twice, but we still reached the third floor in only eighteen minutes. What awaited us there was twice the size of the Cyclops and Minotaur from the previous floors. Both sides of its long lower body had ten pairs of centipede-like feet. It was clearly a Deviant God, but it didn’t have much physical resistance. So obviously it had attack power through the roof. Klein and my HP gauges dipped into the red multiple times. The battle, which made my stomach sore at the thought that either of dying would lead to a wipe, went on for nine minutes.

During that time, Liz, Silica, Sinon (and Pina) tried their best to cut down the giant’s feet one by one, at which point I finished it off with Skill Connect. With our high spirits, we rushed into the fourth floor to beat King Thrym and Niflheim. Once we stepped into the passage leading to the boss room, we stopped, staring at the scene in front of our eyes.

It was a cage made of elongated icicles on the wall’s edge.

Behind the fence made of stalactites growing sharply from both the ground and ceiling, was a single figure. It was not a giant. As it was collapsed on the ground, it was hard to guess at an accurate size, but it looked to be about the same height as Asuna’s Undine avatar.

The skin was as white as the thick layer of powdery snow on the ground. The long, flowing hair was a deep golden brown. The volume of the chest covered by the clothing that could be seen from her sorry state could, although it would be best not to say this aloud, could easily overwhelm all of our girl members. Both her hands and feet were shackled in the rugged ice.

The unexpected scene caused us to halt, worried. Then, the captive girl’s shoulders made a sudden but subtle shake as she lifted her face, the blue chains ringing. Her pupils were also of the same tea-gold as her hair. Her face, if it was a player avatar, would surely be the result of overwhelmingly good luck when it was created, or, more likely, of a rather large sum of money; it was sublime with western European beauty, a rarity in this game.

Blinking once, her long eyelashes moved down, then up, and she spoke in a fine voice.

“Please….. Help me….. Out of here….”

Klein the katana user was sucked aimlessly toward the ice cage. I grabbed and pulled the bandana tail dangling from behind his head.

“It’s a trap.”

“Trap.”

“That’s a trap.”

Sinon and Liz chimed in immediately after me. Klein straightened his back and turned around, as he made a subtle expression while scratching his head.

“O-Oh….it’s a trap…..A trap, right?” For the sake of the katana user on his deathbed, I asked in a small voice, “Yui?”

“It’s an NPC,” she promptly replied. “Just like Uld, there is a connection to the language engine module. But, there is one difference. This one has an HP gauge enabled.” Normally, the HP gauge of quest-giving NPCs would be disabled to prevent them from taking damage and dying. The exceptions where when the NPC was an escort quest objective, or the NPC was actually--

“A trap.”

“It’s a trap.”

“I think it’s a trap.”

Asuna, Silica and Leafa commented at the same time. Klein’s eyebrows raised in an upside-down ‘V’, his eyes widened, and his lips pursed. I patted his shoulder.

“Of course, it could be possible that it isn’t a trap, but right now we don’t have time for trial-and-error. We need to reach Thrym’s place as early as possible, even if it is just a second sooner.”

“O….oh, hmm, well, that’s right, yeah…” Klein nodded slightly and moved his gaze from the ice cage. When we were just a few steps from the stairs, the voice came again from behind.

“Please…...anybody……”

To be honest, I also had the urge to help her. I didn’t think NPCs were merely the system’s automatically-generated moving objects, but dwellers living in this world. If this in a normal quest progression, helping that girl, accompanying her, and, as the story was reaching its end, hearing her laugh from behind, “Uhahahahahaha, you fools,” would still be plenty fun. However, we were not in the position to take that unnecessary risk now.