Talk about education. Do the math and it had been all of a week—one week ago this Clearing Demon had been at the meeting, loudly insisting they use the NPC as bait.
One week later, over the NPC's "education problem," they'd hauled him straight back down from the new floor he'd just reached.
Truth be told, they'd kept Yimi cooped up in the guild for a full week now. Was it really so strange she wanted to slip out and play?
Kirito glanced back at Asuna, walking at the rear.
"What are you looking at?" Asuna gave Yimi—who was walking ahead of her—a light poke.
Kirito smiled. "I don't know, it kind of feels like a family going on a picnic."
Asuna nodded. "A picnic, huh? True. It's been ages since I went out anywhere just to relax."
"..."
Kirito turned back around and kept walking.
She wasn't going to argue with that?
Boys' minds ran off the rails in all sorts of places, and Kirito understood one thing deeply: the more you told a kid not to do something, the more curious they got about it.
Asuna had never actually grasped what Yimi had been trying to tell her, and Kirito—getting it secondhand from her—had naturally come away thinking Yimi had developed an intense fascination with Mimics.
Right now they stood at the entrance to a cave dungeon out in a low-floor wilderness zone. Chests were actually rarer in a place like this than in the Labyrinth—but the Labyrinth was simply enormous.
To make sure they wouldn't run into anyone, Kirito had deliberately chosen an out-of-the-way floor, and Asuna had made Yimi a little cloak to hide her most recognizable features.
Her small stature, of course, there was no hiding.
Something like this had happened on the very first day the game opened; there were only ten thousand players server-wide to begin with, and with the death toll only a few thousand remained. Naturally more than a few floors had wound up sparsely populated.
Places with unappealing scenery or nothing distinctive to offer went untouched year-round, and this floor was more or less one of them.
"Found it." Walking point, Kirito suddenly stopped.
Yimi slipped around him for a look and saw only an ordinary chest, already opened, with no visible seam anywhere in the surroundings.
She pointed at it, baffled. "That's a normal box."
Asuna looked at Kirito, equally baffled, curious what he meant to do.
Kirito coughed twice and got into character. "This is the corpse of a Mimic."
Asuna's face: "?"
Kirito pressed on. "So really, there's nothing special about it, right?"
"But, um—it isn't like that." Yimi looked left and right, torn.
There was no rift in the wall. And the chest hadn't grown any teeth.
Kirito gave a gentle shake of his head. "It's true. This is what a Mimic turns into after it dies. Don't believe me? Lean in and look inside."
"Mm." Yimi leaned in to peer inside.
Then Kirito abruptly slammed the lid shut—easing off at the last instant so he wouldn't actually hurt her. "Oh no—this Mimic's playing dead! Ah, how could something so terrifying happen? It's got Yimi in its jaws!"
"Meow!" Yimi's little legs kicked frantically.
Kirito shot a meaningful look at Asuna, who was dumbstruck by his performance.
Asuna caught on and grabbed Yimi's legs, tugging her free. "Don't be scared, I'll save you right now!"
At the same time she glared at Kirito.
What was going on in this man's head, what kind of half-baked scheme was this? What if he traumatized the kid? Was he going to take responsibility for that?
"Don't be scared, I'll pry its mouth open in a second."
Even though he was controlling the chest to hold Yimi as gently as possible, Kirito made a show of straining to force the box's "jaws" apart, and Asuna successfully wrenched Yimi out of the "Mimic's" clutches.
Asuna patted her back to comfort her. "There, there. All better. Nothing to be afraid of."
Yimi hissed at the empty chest, tail puffed up like a bottlebrush.
Kirito, the true culprit, braced his hands on his knees and put on an exhausted act. "A dead Mimic, dangerous even so—that's the first I've ever heard of it. See now? A dangerous place like this is no fun at all."
Yimi wriggled out of Asuna's arms, her white-gold Stand manifesting behind her, and studied the chest from every angle with deep suspicion.
Right now she was more interested in the box than in any of those rifts. So the boxes humans used were all corpses left behind by a creature called a Mimic!
Compared to the tangible Famine, The World was a genuine Stand no ordinary person could see, so Kirito and the others hadn't sensed a thing.
But watching the little cat stare so intently, Kirito still felt a twinge of guilt and gave her a tug. "Now that you've seen how dangerous it is out here, let's hurry back."
"Mm." Yimi reached out with great care and gave the empty chest a poke.
Nothing happened. No reaction.
Kirito had just said a dead Mimic biting people was a first for him too—which meant the corpse in front of her was rarer still.
She thought about it, then simply pulled the Mimic she'd stashed away not long ago out of her storage space, and once she'd cleared a spot, tucked the "Mimic corpse" into her storage in its place.
Compared to a chest that bit, a chest that played dead (she didn't know what "playing dead" meant) was rarer, and she wanted to bring it home and study it properly.
"Eh? Did you do something?"
Her hands had moved too fast; Kirito and Asuna only saw a second chest suddenly appear on top of the first, then the lower one vanish, dropping the one that had appeared above.
By some principle no one understood, even the genuine Mimic that had spent a stint in her storage space still made no move to attack Yimi from that close range.
* * *
Player-killing guilds—players who'd directly killed someone could never shed the orange cursor above their heads, so they could only eke out a wretched existence in the handful of "outsider villages," towns with no system protection. Unable to use town resources, they actually grew stronger more slowly than a proper guild.
But Laughing Coffin was an anomaly. A good ninety percent of the game's bizarre murder methods had spread out from them, and even the Clearers didn't dare take them lightly.
Killing an orange-cursor player didn't count as a crime, yet most of the Clearers weren't mentally prepared to kill outright—and with levels close, these players who'd raised their stats by killing might even have the edge in a fight. People used to hunting mobs and people used to PvP had entirely different instincts.
Beyond that, the most maddening thing about Laughing Coffin was their trail. Their hideout had always been a mystery—when in fact it was nothing more than the safe zone of a low-floor wilderness cave dungeon.
The Clearers focused on the Labyrinth; mid-tier players only went to the more crowded labyrinths. This place was tucked away off the beaten path, and the occasional fool who wandered in could simply be dealt with.
A Laughing Coffin member who'd just stepped out of the base stared at the chest in front of him, puzzled.
Since the game launched, there'd been no maintenance to speak of beyond those two occasions, and certain items that used to respawn during the beta had started becoming unique.
He was fairly sure someone had already opened this box. Had somebody closed it back up on purpose?
Puzzled, the Laughing Coffin member reached out to touch it.
And then the level-ninety-five-plus Mimic opened its mouth:
"Rawr——"