How much difference is there really between a computer program and a living person?
If an artificial construct built from external parts is distinct from a human body, yet can still produce human reactions—or even those of a lesser animal—and can think and learn, does that thing count as alive?
And if you want to split hairs: aren't human cells and tissues themselves just programs and parts too? These were questions Asuna and the others had already turned over as far back as the game's third floor.
The picture book lay open to one night's illustration, which still bore the marks of a mischievous little girl's doodling. In the story, the puppy baking cookies had been given crude fangs by Yimi's pen, the cookie in its paws smeared with a layer of color, and off to the right an arrow with clumsy handwriting: poisoned.
The character for "poison" was even misspelled.
Details like that—were they Kayaba Akihiko's meticulous design, or something the child had done herself after he created her?
At the very least, the way she'd learned from Asuna to eat sweets so daintily—however clumsily she still handled chopsticks—was a genuine memory, or rather, proof of "life."
Before setting out, Asuna had even promised to teach the girl to cook, and the girl had promised in return that she'd stay put in the room. That room was a personal domain no outsider could breach, a Safe Zone within a Safe Zone—and still the little girl hadn't kept her word.
This child was alive.
Please, don't run off to that place... don't let anything happen to you!
And yet only yesterday, hadn't Asuna herself been thinking of using NPCs to draw the monsters' aggro? Wasn't what had happened today exactly what she'd wished for?
It was almost as if she'd caused it.
"Asuna, calm down!" Kirito called, chasing after her.
"No—I didn't want this!" Asuna clutched her head in both hands and ran with everything she had toward the village's main gate.
Mercifully, the world hadn't turned its malice on her for no reason. Yimi, already shifted back to human form, stood there perfectly fine, and the last person left at the scene—Heathcliff—stood in front of her. The two of them seemed to have exchanged a few words.
"Creepy auntie." Yimi waved in greeting.
Asuna's nerves finally went slack.
Was it worry for this one child? Or not wanting a child to become a casualty? Or fear that Kirito would pin all the blame on her? She could no longer tell which of these she was actually anxious about.
Asuna strode forward and pulled Yimi gently into a hug.
"Mmph." Yimi twisted her face to the side, leaving herself room to breathe.
"See, she's fine," Kirito said, letting out a breath.
Thanks to all this he hadn't slept a wink the night before. He'd opened Asuna's friend panel and typed out a message of nearly seven hundred characters, then, after agonizing over it, deleted the whole thing—and deleted Asuna from his friend list along with it.
Bonk! Asuna's quick fingers flicked down onto the top of Yimi's head again.
At the same instant a sting shot through Asuna's own forehead. This time she was certain it was no illusion.
"What was that for?" Yimi rubbed her head and scurried to Kirito's side, grabbing the hem of his shirt.
"You're asking what for? Didn't we agree you'd stay put in the room and not come out? I'm angry." Asuna planted both hands on her hips.
"But I smelled it—the smell of a bad guy!" Yimi raised a fist.
She was going to wipe them all out! This was only the fourth one.
"A bad guy?"
"The one from before, the one that ran into not-dumbass Kirito—"
"You're cursing again!" Asuna went for Yimi's ticklish spots, though it didn't seem to have much effect.
Kirito huffed a small laugh and turned to the other person present. "Commander Heathcliff, did something happen?"
This man rarely attended meetings; before today, Kirito had met him only once.
"That boss is already dead."
Plenty of people had seen it happen; there was no hiding it.
Heathcliff glanced at the little cat who'd just shifted into human form in front of him. "I can't say whether it was a village guardian or a scripted kill—but a boss with the appearance of a panda cub showed up, one-shot it, and then turned into the NPC standing beside you."
"A panda cub? Yimi?" Kirito blinked. He vaguely recalled that, just before he'd been teleported out, some creature like that had come running up.
"A fair number of people witnessed it. It warrants a meeting to talk through in detail. Though in my view, Kayaba Akihiko didn't create this world just to watch us thrash about and die. We're more than fifty floors in; he'd have no reason to plant an overpowered gatekeeping boss here."
He looked at Yimi, thoughtful.
"In my experience—and I've played my share of games—a boss like that usually has a mechanic that's especially easy to exploit. The flesh under the shell tends to be fairly weak."
"While I was stalling for time, I actually tried striking its weak point. Its defense seemed to be no stronger than a boss below Floor 50. In fact, because of its long body, a sword skill that should land a single hit came out as multiple hits, as though every segment of it were an independent object that could trigger a strike, all of them sharing one common HP bar."
A boss everyone had thought absurdly hard, cut down offhand by another boss—the players were about to panic, weren't they?
In truth it was easy enough to manage. Someone just had to discover the lullaby the little NPC girl in the village sang, the one that stripped the GeoCrawler of its oppressive presence.
The GeoCrawler's stats weren't as weak as he'd made them sound, and it had no mechanic of segmented, independent HP bars at all. But if he let people come to believe, even indirectly, that the NPC in front of them was too strong, it would lead somewhere he'd rather it didn't.
The Clearers might just haul the NPC straight to the boss room to force a showdown.
So even as he talked down the NPC's strength, he—the acknowledged de facto leader of the Clearers—raised the idea himself.
"This NPC has a wide-area ranged attack. It struck every segment of the GeoCrawler at once, and the damage stacked across all of them was enough to kill it outright. It doesn't sound like much, but a ranged skill that can actively attack a boss—if we could bring it into the boss room..."
"Is it really all right to gamble like that?"
Unexpectedly, the one who pushed back wasn't Kirito, but his second-in-command, Asuna.
"Commander Heathcliff must know that some quest NPCs can't be revived once they die. This child has an extremely simple quest, and she carries an item that lets her level up while ignoring experience—you're the one who told me that."
"And besides, up to which floor do you mean to use her? NPCs can't gain levels. Until she hits her ceiling and falls off?"
"In a boss fight, none of us can guarantee who lands the finishing blow. You said it yourself just now—a one-shot. Even if each segment had its own HP bar, that's proof enough of her damage; surely it's not unreasonable to call her at least as strong as a Floor 60 monster?"
"If we use an NPC to bring down a boss, will the spoils be voided? Or how do we split the flood of experience it drops? And once we reach the floor where she starts to fall off too—will we really still have the strength to keep clearing?"
Loot dropped by a boss didn't fall to the ground at all; it went straight into the inventory of whoever landed the final blow. That, in its way, also kept a boss's death from touching off PvP on the spot.
Truly the acclaimed Clearing Demon. He'd merely floated a lead-in, and she'd fired back with reasons he hadn't thought of himself in the moment.
Kirito nodded, backing Asuna up. "Besides, how could Kayaba Akihiko ever allow us to cheat with an NPC? The way the GeoCrawler broke out of its range just now already proves it—this has to be a trap Kayaba left for us."
"..."
And the topic had swung right back around to Kayaba Akihiko.
Though he knew he could never expect a kind word, being spoken of like this to his face, day after day, still left something odd sitting in his chest.
He looked at Asuna. "Then, per the earlier plan—we have the Knights of the Blood take her in. No objection to that?"
"Commander Heathcliff should be aware that some NPCs have an affinity system." Kirito suddenly raised the point.
It showed up concretely as discounts when you bought things.
"As it happens, I believe her affinity toward me is still a shade higher than toward Asuna."
Asuna shot him a look.
"Is that so?" Heathcliff didn't press it. He passed by Kirito's side. "Kirito-kun, I look forward to your joining us."
"?"
And he left.
Asuna squeezed Yimi's little hand. "Did you come running all this way because you were worried about us?"
Yimi turned her face away. "Not talking to you. You flicked me just now."