For a player, a Safe Zone didn't mean it was safe just because no monsters spawned; the most crucial point was that players couldn't harm one another—and it didn't necessarily cover the entire town.
On some floors, the safe circle could suddenly drop away the moment you walked through a certain tunnel or up a certain flight of steps.
On this point, it was obviously the orange-guild players—or rather, mostly Laughing Coffin—who'd studied it most deeply; how to kill while keeping a green cursor was something their leader had worked out.
There was still a fair stretch of the village outskirts that didn't count as Safe Zone, and letting someone get close while it was being guarded really was nothing to boast about; it counted as a lapse on their part.
But after all, the other side only needed to use a stealth skill to approach undetected, then seize the moment and, with quick eyes and quicker hands, slam the gate shut. This too was one of the green-cursor killing methods: exploiting monster mechanics to doom people, which, in games without friendly fire, was the most basic griefing maneuver of all.
Of course, if your escape speed wasn't fast enough, you could just wait to meet your end here—but by the looks of it, his luck was still pretty good, and he'd used a Teleport Crystal in time.
The black-clothed man did his best to hold back the urge to laugh wildly, wanting to share this delightful little affair with his comrades.
"Meow."
But because he hadn't clamped down on the sound, a not-so-pleasant-to-hear cat's cry interrupted his train of thought.
A little cat with panda-like coloring lay in the middle of the alley he had to pass through, watching him unblinkingly, tail swishing gently—like a precursor to launching an attack.
It looked like a cat, but this deliberately designed appearance made you reflexively register it as a wild monster from outside; obviously nothing like that should appear inside a Safe Zone.
"A hidden element?" The black-clothed man took two steps forward, only to receive a window notification chime.
Thinking it was a message from an accomplice, he opened the menu, then saw that this particular alert had been placed inside the quest log. When he opened it in bafflement, he was met with an even more baffling quest:
Quest: Go Die
Quest Reward: /
"?"
Sensing something was wrong, the black-clothed man immediately drew his Dagger—only to see the cat before him drop low and suddenly rush him, closing the roughly three-meter (about ten-foot) gap in nearly a single second, raising a paw to swat at him.
He got his sword up and barely blocked; even though the real him could never have reacted to that speed, the game's correction still completed the parry for him the instant he made the motion to raise his arm.
But this weapon of over level 50 was drained of durability at once, like a plastic toy, and split into several pieces by the little claws, dropping to the ground.
After a two-second standoff at his face, a bright-red spear flashed into being and vanished; the system's warning shattered in an instant, and a stabbing pain in his flank seemed to travel straight up his nerves to his brain, leaving the black-clothed man staring in disbelief at his HP bar as it drained to the very bottom.
"You—?"
Safe Zones weren't safe anymore?
Why were Safe Zones not safe anymore!
Amid his incomprehension, the agony and the terror of an unexpected death numbed his thoughts; that span of time as his HP bled away seemed left to a person to face the fear of death head-on, denying anyone the chance to slip away peacefully in the midst of the unexpected.
Yimi scratched her neck with a hind leg and, with elegant strides, walked out of the alley.
A certain information broker who'd accidentally witnessed the whole thing turned his head away, drenched in sweat, pretending to be an innocent NPC.
...
It wasn't until the GeoCrawler charged in through the gate that everyone truly got a direct look at its bulk; even having grown used to facing giant beasts head-on, they still felt a jolt of unease—perhaps because of the bonus lent by its long shape and the broad expanse of armor across its back.
As long as there was the NPC's hint, defeating this boss was child's play. Kayaba Akihiko even wanted to call it a reward boss.
Correspondingly, if you meant to go toe-to-toe with it, everyone would have to feel—off this mere Floor-56 field boss—the pressure of a floor-guardian boss from above Floor 65.
The bug with two great claws, once through the gate, went on a rampage across the area just as Asuna had expected, and showed a fierce aggression toward the NPCs.
But was this their opening? No—that same passage that hid the GeoCrawler's belly likewise restricted its nimble movement.
Just like bosses in certain games that fly into a berserk state once pulled from their environment, it was only now that Asuna realized how idiotic her earlier plan to lure it with NPCs had been.
Seizing the moment, Asuna aimed her rapier at the big worm's belly and thrust—only for it to flip over and block with the shell on its back. That obviously wasn't the worm's reaction speed being too sharp; with that many people attacking, there was no way it could be blocking Asuna's strike specifically.
It had simply lain down flat on purpose, because out of its environment it could unleash wide-range attacks along the ground like a rolling log!
"Asuna!"
Kirito surged into a charge, hauled the mid-swing Asuna over his shoulder, and used his own dashing sword skill to get clear of the big worm's attack range.
Even so, merely being grazed dropped him to yellow HP in an instant; had he stayed there and let it finish a full roll over him, escape would have been utterly impossible. Luckily, only Asuna herself had been at that angle a moment ago.
Only just reached Floor 56, and already a roadblock monster of this caliber turns up?
Kirito took out a potion bottle to restore his HP.
Was this boss's target-locking while rolling based on distance? There were clearly more players on the other side, yet it rolled in this direction of all directions.
"Damn you, Kayaba Akihiko!" Klein hollered a couple of unfiltered lines at the top of his lungs.
"..."
Heathcliff shot him another glance.
A Fuurinkazan guild member hurriedly clapped a hand over Klein's mouth. "Keep it down—that guy might be watching over here! He'll just delete you outright later!"
Klein promptly shut his mouth.
Heathcliff turned his face back around.
The rolling was a skill that triggered outside the passage when someone was at its side. Heathcliff did in fact know a few mechanisms for killing this boss under such conditions—but there was absolutely no need.
As the developer, he naturally would rather have the players discover the real method of beating the monster and arrive at that easy, unburdened feeling of "oh, it was this simple—I misjudged Kayaba Akihiko."
"This kind of monster's difficulty is unreasonable; there has to be another way. No choice—use Teleport Crystals and retreat." Heathcliff issued the order.
Once outside the passage, this thing's movement speed was obviously greater than a player's, but any boss had a sense of territory; once it had no target to attack, it would return to the passage on its own.
"No choice, then."
Heathcliff's authority commanded plenty of trust; since he'd said as much, no other opinions arose, and amid several flashes of light the Clearers who'd been guarding behind the gate teleported back to the Safe Zone one after another.
"Even the most extreme method's a bust now—the old-man NPC who gave me directions yesterday got taken out."
"Asuna, let's head back too."
"Mm." Asuna looked down at Kirito, who was carrying her, opened her mouth, and said nothing.
Good thing Yimi hadn't swiped Asuna's Teleport Crystal early this morning, or she might really have met her end right here.
Heathcliff took out a Teleport Crystal too, but, playing the role of Commander to the hilt, he seemed intent on leaving only after everyone else had gone—so much so that, glancing around, he spotted a black-and-white furball ambling leisurely over this way.
Having offed the bad guy, she'd followed the scent over to find Kirito, because the promised yummy food still hadn't made it into the kitty's mouth.
"Aooo!"
On the scene, apart from Yimi, fewer than ten people had yet to leave, and—going by distance—the GeoCrawler's targeting automatically locked onto Kirito and the others; it gaped its bloody maw wide and bit down.
"Meow!"
Seeing her two meal tickets under attack, the previously leisurely Yimi rushed in and raised her paw.
But her worry was actually needless, because the very instant the GeoCrawler closed in, this man and woman used a Teleport Crystal to warp back to the Safe Zone.
Still, Yimi's motion couldn't be pulled back now. All her actions in this world seemed to carry a correction of their own—this, most likely, was the power of adaptation this world had granted her.
Even a distance of about ten meters (roughly thirty feet) she still crossed in a blink, and as her strike came down, a massive claw suited to the game's visual effects slammed the GeoCrawler into the ground; the immense pressure attacked both the impregnable armor on its back and the weak point on its belly at once, and several HP bars collapsed together.
"H-hey, what is that? A village guard?" The one who hadn't yet left gripped the Teleport Crystal in his hand, shocked.
Towns did have guards; if an orange player entered, they'd be attacked by the guards—this was the main reason orange players couldn't enter towns.
But this was impossible, because the HP bar this cat displayed all but announced to their faces that this was yet another boss!
Yimi, equally puzzled, licked her own paw.
"Are you kidding me? A guy that strong, swatted dead with one paw!" Someone broke down. "Kayaba Akihiko..."
"Teleport out, now!" Heathcliff issued the order a second time, cutting off his breakdown.
His gaze at Yimi held a touch of surprise, yet not an excessive amount of it.
* * *
"This game probably isn't the mindless-difficulty-stacking sort; a field boss like this really should have some other strategy."
Back in the Safe Zone, Kirito looked at his blades.
Dual Blades wasn't something he was all that skilled with, and on top of that boss's headache-inducing mechanics, even having pulled it out at the time, he had no confidence he could have beaten it.
"About yesterday—I'm sorry," Asuna spoke up.
Kirito sheathed his blades. "Which thing?"
The line seemed to remind Asuna that there was more than one thing she needed to apologize for; what Kirito actually meant was lying to him about the bow's origin, as well as the fact that if she'd deliberately lured the boss out, it would have become a case of everyone wasting a crystal because of her—and that stuff really wasn't cheap.
But Asuna's read on it clearly went off the rails. Blushing, she pulled a pair of boxer shorts from her inventory and flung them in Kirito's face.
"I'm sorry for this too, all right!"
"..." Kirito hurriedly peeled them off and put them away.
Couldn't you just selectively overlook this one thing? I never even brought it up again! Would it kill you to just let me have them as a gift?
"A few NPCs got killed," Kirito said, head lowered. "One of them had even traded with me."
Come tomorrow, though, they'd respawn right back here. He really was being overly sentimental, because he was someone who truly lived in this game as a way of life.
Before Asuna could get out a word of comfort, he shook his head and spoke again. "Is that child with you? Can I go see her, just to confirm she's safe?"
"Even if I refused, you wouldn't let it go, would you?" Asuna, resigned, walked ahead to lead the way.
"Thanks."
"No—I'm the one who should say sorry."
So she said, but when Asuna led the way to the room, all the two of them saw was an open window, and an unclosed fairy-tale book.
She ran off? But she'd promised!
If expressions here could be detailed down to the color of one's face, Asuna's little face would surely have gone deathly pale.
"What's wrong?"
"She..."
Asuna rushed out and began searching all through the town.
Couldn't find her. Couldn't find her anywhere.
Such a tiny little thing, with such short legs—where could she possibly have run off to!
Could she have gone to the village's main gate...