About the players:Kayaba was "nice enough" to send the full list of players — along with their real-world addresses — to the relevant authorities, so that each one could be located and transferred to medical care.
— VI —
Where things went wrong?
Neo held Lisbeth against the cave floor as the last of the dust settled around them, his mind already running the post-mortem.
His old instincts had flagged it. Things were going too smoothly, the rewards too generous for the risk involved: A 1200 Cor + Anneal-tier weapon in exchange for killing a handful of Kobolds and one mid-tier mob.
The numbers didn't make sense… not in a game designed by a man who believed that suffering was your ticket into strength.
He had seen the signs.
Yet [Detection] had returned clean, and as he gave them a "it's clear", his party had walked straight into a trap.
He already had a notion of why. SAO's skill system was deceptively simple on the surface: every skill existed on a progression axis entirely separate from the player's level.
However, a [Searching] skill at level 50 read the world differently than at level 300: the range expanded, the amount of information increased, and what had been a faint flicker became a strong warning on your minimap's vision.
His [Detection] sat at 23.
At 23, the skill flagged standard spawns and basic trigger-plate traps — the kind seeded throughout the cave as tests for noobs. It had found all of those cleanly.
What it couldn't do was read the deep structural mechanics of a trap engineered for players further along the difficulty curve. The ceiling fracture. The fitted floor plate. These weren't standard dungeon elements.
His skill level was too low.
The American had trusted the skill's silence…
So unlike me, he thought, with the particular bitterness of a man who had once bent reality and was now being humbled by a level cap.
He filed the lesson. Set it aside.
After Neo gave instructions to Lisbeth, she crossed to the far wall without question. He turned toward the Trooper.
"Kkhhrr– kkhhrr–"
The Trooper's vertical chop came fast. A cleaving motion aimed to divide him in two.
[Minimal Side Step Defense]
The skill demanded no prescribed input — a fast evading sidestep which the system followed intention rather than preceding it. The risk was in the execution: one miscalculation and he'd trip mid-step, leaving himself fully open. He had drilled it through the night for precisely that failure condition.
He stepped left. The axe divided the air where he'd been.
His right fist went white.
[Counter]
The blow connected at the Trooper's temple as a headshot bonus stacked onto the total damage.
The Trooper shook it off.
"Tsk."
A third of its health bar was gone. A solid hit, and the thing kept standing. Neo expected an instant kill or close.
Fine, he thought. Two more, then.
Neo resumed the rotation — step, bait, [Counter], step — and in a handful of seconds, the health bar bled to zero. The Trooper came apart in blue-white fragments. The loot notification appeared.
Cor. Experience.
No «Tempered Stone Fragment».
"Are– are you okay?" Lisbeth had moved up behind him as he nodded, torch raised, watching the fragments disperse. "Are we safe?"
"For now," he turned. "That wasn't the objective. Standard drops only."
She processed this. "What should we do?"
"We find an exit." His eyes swept the chamber's four dark passages without committing to any of them. "One of these has to connect back to–"
"HRAAAUGH!"
The sound hit the chamber walls and came back before it finished. Not a growl, but a declaration. The kind of sound that communicates bad omen to whoever hears it.
[Detection] flared. The readout came back immediately.
"We have company," Neo said. "Go back."
Lisbeth stepped to the wall. He stepped toward the passage from which the sound had come.
Heavy footsteps filled the dark. A measured, unhurried pace of something that knew the terrain and wasn't troubled by anything ahead of it.
Four shapes descended from the shadows.
Three were Troopers. Identical to the one he'd just eliminated: bulky, bare-chested, axes already raised.
The fourth was different:
Larger. Denser. Reddish-copper skin pulled tight over an entire scarred frame built less like a body and more like a load-bearing structure. A thick, bristling black mane ran from crown to neck. Simple wrapped hide clothing that stopped well short of covering arms the size of a person's torso. A wooden club hung from one hand. A canine face pushed-forward muzzle, exposed fang-line, but the eyes above it were calculating rather than empty.
«Redfang, Ruin Kobold Guardian»
Named. Mobs didn't get names without earning them.
Neo held that information for exactly one second, then set it aside.
Lisbeth's voice reached him from behind, relaying the situation through the rock wall to Mito and Asuna.
The three Troopers close in first, accelerating together, axes raised.
[Counter] and [Minimal Side Step Defense] in rotation as a system feeding each other. He baited the swing, stepped out of it, answered with the counter-hit in the window the creature's own follow-through created. Reset and Repeat.
The Troopers adjusted, varied their timing, attempted to bracket him — but three was a manageable number in a contained space if you controlled the geometry. He kept moving, kept kiting so only one could commit at a time, and the health bars bled down in uneven increments.
The Guardian watched.
As one of the Trooper's HP crept into red, «Redfang» patience has run out.
"GHRAAK–!"
It stepped through its minions and brought the club around in a diagonal arc at Neo's neck.
The American broke fully, no attempt to counter, and the club's impact with the cave floor sent a vibration through the stone he felt in the soles of his feet.
Four at different angles would be a problem…
He settled into a lower stance. Weight to the back foot, hands raised and open rather than fisted — fingers forward, wrists loose. It looked, to anyone watching, like a man who had seen many Bruce Lee films and taken his moves seriously.
«Redfang» and its minions held for a beat, watching.
Neo allowed himself something that wasn't quite a smile.
"It's a good thing," he said, stepping forward into the Guardian's range on his own initiative, "that I still know Kung Fu."
"Those mobs are attacking him all at the same time," Lisbeth said through the rock, her voice a register higher than she intended. "He's– he's holding up. Somehow."
Mito processed this… and didn't find it comforting.
She knew how rock traps resolved in a standard dungeon: the collapse should despawn naturally over time, returning to its pre-triggered state once the internal timer expired. Hours, most likely. Possibly longer if their quest flagged the chamber with non-standard mechanics.
"Lisbeth," Mito said carefully. "Tell me what you see. Not the fight, but the room… the walls, the ceiling. Anything that looks different from the sections we already passed."
A pause. The sound of the fight carried through the stone. The floor rumbling from the Guardian's club against the floor each time it missed.
"It– it doesn't look different from the other rooms." Liz gulped. "Four exits, but they're on the opposite side…"
Mito's grip tightened on her scythe. Those paths could lead anywhere…
If there was no escape through those passages, the only remaining option was to go back into the dungeon and find another way in. It would work only if Neo could resist long enough…
Mito grimaced. If there's nothing… then… she fixed her gaze on Asuna: fighting THE DECISION that could change their way of surviving… not just in this world.
"Wait… I-I see something on my left," the mace-user interrupted her train of thought. "Near the ceiling. There are holes. Three of them. Small. A person could fit, I think. Just barely."
Asuna, who had been silent for the past forty seconds, straightened.
"The side passages." She said it immediately, with the certainty of someone whose memory had just locked onto something. The fencer fixed her gaze on her classmate "From the earlier section of the cave, do you remember? There were openings in the walls. Neo said they weren't worth the risk."
"I remember." Mito ran the geometry. The path they traveled was slightly angled downwards. If those openings connected to the chamber rather than to dead ends or separate spawn areas…
"It's possible," she said. It was their best shot.
"Then it's decided," Asuna said.
She turned to the rock wall. "Liz!" Clear. Direct. "We're going back through the tunnels. There may be another way in." A beat then… the kind that carried weight. "We're coming back. Hold on!"
Silence from the other side.
Then a muffled: "'Kay."
Asuna turned. Mito was already moving — torch forward, retracing the path toward the last intersection at a run.
They had covered half the distance when Lisbeth's voice reached them one more time, thin through the stone and distance:
"Neo–!"
Then a strained: "Just a lucky hit!"
The duo ran faster.