Chapter Text
Disclaimer: I don't own Sword Art Online or any of its characters. They are all owned by A-1 Pictures, Aniplex USA, and Reki Kawahara.
Discord: A3dTszc
(See A/N at the top of Chapter 1 for context)
It took him three days before he was comfortable enough with his new style to start grinding again.
In terms of levels, he expected that the second-highest player in the game was nearly even with him now, because of his temporary break from grinding. But hopefully, that would all change today.
He was ready to go again.
He had learned so much about the mechanics of the game during his training.
He had found out that there were tiny windows of time, for instance, where one of his sword skills could be interrupted by initiating a skill from his other sword.
He had discovered it accidentally, but it was something that he intended to make use of in the future.
The timing was so hard to get right, but it was possible. And when he succeeded in getting the timing right, on those rare occasions that he did, the first skill would often skip its cooldown entirely.
The result was, essentially, a dual-wielding sword skill.
He needed a lot more practice to get that particular concept down, however, because he was nowhere close to being good at it yet. He'd only succeed maybe one in a hundred attempts.
He was going to need to spend a lot of time in the future practicing it. But he was certain that this type of training would be worthwhile in the end. He already had a couple of ideas for how he could use those types of techniques when he finally had them mastered.
It'd be just like his spins. It would completely change the way he fought. But that was all for future Kirito to figure out. For now, he needed to start training again.
He was pretty sure that he had his spin attacks ready enough for combat, and he was ready to test them out for real.
So there he stood, in the clearing in front of his cave once more, observing as the wave of Nepenthe cursors rushed towards him from the forest.
They had reverted from red to pink long ago, indicating that he was now a higher level than these monsters.
He readied his swords and settled into his stance. It was time to see what he could do.
Eight minutes.
He had shaved off almost three minutes from his old record on his first attempt.
He was able to determine this after killing his fifty-second Nepenthe and glancing at his in-game clock.
Fifty-two Nepenthes was what he referred to as a 'standard loop.' That was the number that would arrive upon bursting a single exploding fruit from the forest. And a standard loop of Nepenthes had been the amount of Nepenthes he had been trying to kill in under 10 minutes all this time. Which meant that he had succeeded, surpassing his own expectations in the process.
The clearing was far from empty now, however. He was at Nepenthe escape velocity after all. Which meant that every swarm had at least one fruited Nepenthe inside it.
And it would always burst from a stray vine or acid attack from a different Nepenthe, even if he didn't try to burst it himself. A process that generated the endless wave of walking plants that was now swarming him.
Thankfully, due to the thickness of the trees on the higher ground above his cave, no Nepenthes spawned from up there. Which meant that he was never attacked from behind. They all arrived from the forest in front of him.
And that meant that he could manage the waves a lot easier.
Whenever he found himself in a tight spot, he'd initiate a spin which, due to his recent practice, could one-shot multiple targets at once. And whenever he did use a spin on a line of targets like that, he was even able to steer himself to some degree during the middle of it. His sword would be impaled into his targets for just long enough before they shattered that he could push or pull on his weapons to redirect his momentum enough to target the next Nepenthe in the line, which allowed him to control the direction of the spin dynamically.
Whenever another fruit would burst he'd let the new swarm arrive while he was still fighting the old one, then he would rip through one of the flanks as the new swarm tried to surround him, with a couple of back to backspins. Then the new swarm would merge with the old one, and the process would begin again. He'd start looping and looping, kiting the swarm along as he slowly whittled it down.
And just like before, he was constantly finding these tiny efficiency improvements everywhere.
He could almost determine to the second, how long it would take between a fruit popping, and another swarm arriving.
So he barely even needed to pay attention to the oncoming Nepenthes anymore.
He'd simply glance up when he expected the next wave to show up, rip through the appropriate flank with a spin, and then he'd continue.
He had also discovered that there were small windows of time for him to use his spin while fighting the swarm itself.
There were small opportunities that allowed him to temporarily disengage, do a quick flip, and execute a spin across the entire front line of Nepenthes before they could counterattack. And this particular improvement was what was causing him to get such a high rate of xp per hour.
He was almost at double what he had been making before, now, which put this training method on par with dungeons on the second floor. But then again, those rates were outdated. There may be ways to further improve them with some of the same tactics he was using now. He was comparing this training method to the estimated rates of a typical player in a party of six. Which might not be all that useful, or accurate.
He could safely say now that he was no longer a typical player. People in the beta hadn't tried to do anything like this, as far as he knew. And it just worked so well, now that he had taken the time to figure it all out.
He was so happy that he had put in the effort to learn how to do this. But he could still do better. He wanted to push the limits even further.
What was the maximum rate of xp per hour that he could squeeze out, here? Would there eventually be a point where every Nepenthe was a fruited one? Their spawn rate was still increasing, after all.
He had no idea. He would find out though.
He wasn't going to leave this spot until he had to. Not with the xp, he was currently getting.
He had been wrong earlier when he had thought that he'd never level up twice in one day again.
He blew right past 10 and made it to 11 that day. Granted, he had nearly been at level 10 when he started grinding again after his break, so it hardly counted as two levels, but it was still nice to see.
He continued grinding.
Two days later, he had made it to level twelve.
With that level up, he had unlocked a fourth skill slot. A slot that he intended to leave empty for a while. He had originally wanted the Searching skill, but he quickly decided that he wouldn't pick it yet, as it may be the case that another event would come up just like the one that had made him decide to take up the acrobatics skill.
He might just need to take up another specific skill in the future to further increase the strength of his character, and while Searching was useful, he didn't need it in this forest.
He didn't need it at all, yet.
Later, he decided. Not now.
The days continued to pass by as he shredded through the Nepenthes.
Every day was the same.
Wake up. Grind. Eat. Grind. Sleep. Repeat.
He needed to make up for lost time.
His Anneal Blade had served a single purpose.
To bridge the gap between him being too weak to be able to one-shot a Nepenthe with a basic sword, and being strong enough to do exactly that.
It served its purpose well, and then it finally broke.
But he was now level 15.
Coincidentally, it was also the 15th day of the death game.
But, now that he was level 15, he was capable of one-shotting the Nepenthes in the forests with a spin attack, using nothing but a pair of basic swords.
He had burned through a ton of them already like that, but he had a stockpile in reserve.
Basic swords were a pretty common uncommon drop to get. And with the sheer quantity of Nepenthes he had killed over the last two weeks, he had a lot of them stacked up in reserve.
He no longer had a decent weapon anymore, but he had gotten strong enough to not need a good one anymore, against these monsters.
He had already been one-shotting the Nepenthes with his Anneal Blade earlier, and he could one-shot them again now, just as easily without it. He wasn't missing out on any xp despite its loss. He was getting kills just as fast as he had before with a pair of basic swords.
He had something like forty of them in his inventory too, now. Plus the two he was holding.
Each pair would last about eight hours of grinding at this intensity before they would break, which meant that he had something like 20 days of weapons left. Ignoring any other potential weapons he may pick up during that time.
It was interesting to see how he had to adapt his fighting style with each pair of new weapons, too.
Not all basic swords were the same. A basic sword wasn't even an item in the game, technically speaking. That had just been a term colloquially used by the beta testers to refer to the collection of all swords in the game that had roughly the same stats as the ones you could buy in the Town of Beginnings.
Each one still had their own stats, their own name, their own price, colour, you name it. They were all technically unique, despite being lumped together under the label 'basic sword'. But they were all also pretty much useless to even a mid-levelled player unless they were willing to put in a vast amount of resources to upgrade it repeatedly and to the maximum.
Which was only rarely a good idea. A case could be made for doing that, instead of buying a better sword, but it depended on the player. Everyone had different playstyles and had different opinions on what the best practices were.
Kirito abruptly backflipped, activated Sonic Leap, and launched it while twisting towards another target.
The skill fired, and at the last moment, he directed it downwards, putting himself into what he referred to as a death spin. If it wasn't executed correctly, or if he lost track of his orientation, he'd miss his target and probably die, hence the name. And if he succeeded with it, all of his targets would die rapidly in single hits. Lots of death happened either way, so he thought the name was fitting.
He would typically do about eight rotations with one before he struck his first target, and one more rotation for each additional target in the line before landing on his feet again, but those numbers varied a lot depending on the situation.
He had this move pretty much mastered at the moment. Both versions of it. He had had to learn how to spin from both directions after all, so there were two versions of the spin. In the first one, he initiated the spin with his left sword, and in the off-hand version, he initiated it with his right.
It was the same difference as comparing doing a cartwheel where your left hand touches the ground first, with doing one with your right touching the ground first. The leading arm would control which direction you faced, and what your orientation was.
It was the same thing for his spins. He couldn't always depend on his normal variant, as sometimes he wouldn't have enough time or space to shift himself into the proper position for it when he was in the middle of combat.
Sometimes, the instant he landed, he would have to immediately spin again but would not be in the proper starting position for the normal variant, or his targets would not be where he wanted them to be for a normal spin to be the right move to take them out. In those cases, he'd have to spin in a different direction, and that was where the off-hand variant would come in.
He was ambidextrous, but he had still initially learned how to spin while leading with his left sword, so that was the version he felt more comfortable with, and the one he used most often.
If he had to guess, he'd say that he probably only used the off-hand variant about 30% of the time he needed to spin. And he might have used it even less often than that.
But it was often enough to be important. He had already run into a couple of situations where he had needed to choose to either use the off-hand variant spin or have to use his teleport crystal to escape the area.
There had been a couple of close calls during his training, mostly due to brief bouts of his own stupidity while he was running the loop, but he had managed to make his way through them, for the most part, due to that ability.
The off-hand variant had saved his life a few times, essentially.
There had also been a few other modifications he had been able to make to those spins over the past couple of days. They became so much more effective once he started throwing in multi-hit sword skills to them, for instance.
He almost always used Sonic Leap to put himself into the spin and to generate the momentum he needed, and he attacked his targets with his other sword for the most part. Sometimes he'd get an additional swing in with his first sword, but it was usually on cooldown still after initiating the spin in the first place, so he typically couldn't use another skill with it. But he was able to take advantage of the fact that sword skills were relative to the player initiating them, to create some interesting modifications.
Sword skills were relative. If he were standing on a rotating disk, for instance, one that spun at one revolution every second, he could still activate sword skills despite his field of view constantly changing and having no target.
If he fired off a sword skill that did nothing more than thrust forward twice, once every half second while he was standing on that hypothetical disk, for example, to an observer not on the spinning disk, the two strikes would be in opposite directions because the disk had rotated him 180 degrees in the middle of the skill.
The strikes would be in opposite directions even though to Kirito's perspective, he'd be thrusting twice, exactly in front of him each time.
Which meant that sword skills like those, ones that were typically meant to be used on a stationary target in front of the user, suddenly had a new variety of uses while he was in the rotating reference frame of his death spin, and he had started experimenting with these types of skills a few days ago.
Vertical Arc, for example, was a two-hit sword skill that typically targeted whatever was exactly in front of him. But while he was spinning, it could be used to take out two different targets, one on either side of him.
In the tiny delay between the two strikes of that skill, his reference frame will have rotated just enough for a new target to be in his sights. So after the second strike of the skill executed, two enemies would have been defeated by that single skill instead of just one, which created a whole new set of ways to use sword skills, and a whole new set of problems to solve.
A skill meant for thrusting to deal piercing damage when standing firmly on the ground would translate into a slashing skill while he was spinning, and had to be used differently as a result.
Certain slashing skills were outright useless while he was spinning, as sometimes, he'd be slashing in one direction while rotating in the other, which meant that his sword would be stationary in the air as their angular velocities cancelled, or the strike would at the very least be much weaker than if he had executed it while standing on his feet.
But on the contrary, if he slashed in the same direction of his spin, the speed of his slash would effectively double.
So there were these seemingly arbitrary limitations that he now had to account for.
Certain slashing skills would work very well while he was spinning in his off-hand variant, but wouldn't work at all while he was spinning normally, precisely due to this reason.
A slashing skill that had its velocity cancelled when spinning in one direction, would have its velocity increased when spinning in the other, and that would determine what skills he used to attack with during his spin.
Three-hit skills while spinning were even trickier to deal with.
While still in the air from his spin, Kirito's second sword activated the skill Sharp Nail. It was the only three-hit sword skill he was capable of using at his level.
Due to his spin, each of the three hits struck and shattered a different Nepenthe.
If he had used that skill on solid ground, it wouldn't have been possible to hit more than one target with it. The spin just changed everything.
Due to the nature of the Sharp Nail skill, and the directions and angles that the system would force his hands in while the skill was being used, it was perfect for being the first skill he attacked with mid-spin. Despite it being a three-hit skill, it worked in perfect sync with his spin. They just meshed perfectly together.
Kayaba probably hadn't designed it to be used that way at all, but it worked perfectly when Kirito did use it like that. Likely, totally coincidentally.
Before landing, his first sword was finally off cooldown, so he managed to get another Vertical off with it, destroying a fourth Nepenthe.
If there had been a fifth target, he would have instead used a Vertical Arc as the final skill with it to be able to kill all five targets in one spin.
Five targets was his current record for 'number of kills during one spin'.
He landed on his feet and continued fighting.
A lot had happened in the past few days. He had reached another milestone that he hadn't anticipated ever reaching. The Nepenthes were no longer piling up. He no longer had to pool them together and run loops to fight them effectively. He had trained extensively enough, and killed so many Nepenthes recently, that the forest was essentially his.
He could kill a wave of Nepenthes faster than they could gather. Which meant he had to travel into the forest to hunt them down as they were spawning. But today was probably the last time he would do so for a while. He had been rationing his food out for as long as he could, but tomorrow he was going to have to stock up again.
He had roughly one day of food left on him now, and he needed to hunt some more.
And he would do so tomorrow. He was just finishing up his last training session now.
The Nepenthes couldn't touch him anymore. He didn't have to run anymore either. He could walk into the forest, burst a fruit, and mow them all down as they arrived.
It was almost like a dance, as weird as that sounded. He'd weave his way through the crowd of Nepenthes, and he'd spin whenever he needed to take out a line of them.
He had been fighting Nepenthes for so long that he no longer even had to pay attention to them. It all happened automatically, and it felt as if his body just went off on its own.
But he was reaching a plateau. He had grinded and grinded for almost 16 hours a day for two weeks in the area, and it was no longer useful to do so. It was inefficient now.
He could continue for a while if he really wanted to, but he was something like five days away from his next level at the rate he was going. And there was no more room for further optimizing that rate of xp. He had essentially maxed it out.
If he simply waited for the next floor to open up, his training time would be better put to use on the better hunting grounds that would open up then.
Instead, he decided that he should be using this time in the early game to better round out his character. He needed to choose a fourth skill and power level his Hiding ability again.
Since he had nobody to talk to these past two weeks, he hadn't done very much aside from grinding and thinking. And he had thought a lot about what he truly needed to survive in this game.
Time was a resource, and he needed to spend it like one.
Sure he could allocate a few hours to grinding on these Nepenthes now, but if he instead allocated those hours to grinding in better spots later, his time would have been used more efficiently.
Since he was so high levelled now, training on these monsters was turning into a waste of time, and he had other things that he still needed to do.
Like his Hiding skill, for example.
If he could keep it on constantly for days at a time, he might be able to max it out entirely, due to the way that it was levelled.
At the end of the first day of doing nothing but keeping the Hide modifier of the Hiding skill active, he would be getting a very high rate of Hiding experience. But if he kept it on even after that point, at the end of the second day, he would be getting a ridiculous rate of experience per hour.
If he kept up that process, he might even have a shot of maxing out the skill entirely in just a few days, something that no beta had ever done throughout the entire beta test.
It was another seemingly insane idea.
Because very few players would decide, in his situation, that it would be a good idea to just stop hunting monsters entirely for potentially days at a time so that they could power level a skill that would have just gradually levelled up naturally over a couple of months without having to pay any direct attention to it.
But he wasn't a typical player anymore. He was orange. And since everyone, NPC or otherwise, was against him now, he needed to prepare for battles against other players just as much as he needed to prepare against floor bosses.
He needed to learn how to disappear.
And due to that power levelling method he had learned about accidentally, earlier, he had a way to do that quickly.
He would stay inside his cave with Hide activated.
He would make sure that no monsters could see him in that time so that the skill wouldn't ever cancel, and he'd make sure that the surrounding light was not intense enough to break his camouflage.
He wouldn't be able to fight or do much else other than interact with his menu during that time, but it would be worth it in the end, he figured, despite how mind-numbingly boring it would be.
He didn't know what level he unlocked it at, because he had never gotten that far in the beta, but he knew that it was possible to hide a cursor with that skill, without having to activate the Hide modifier, allowing him to essentially fight without his cursor ever appearing.
Orange players in the beta had taken advantage of that particular ability all the time, and he would likely need to as well.
He may even be able to walk around in crowds with that. He'd be the only player without a cursor, but when there was a swarm of green cursors in the area, it would take a very observant player to notice something like that.
And walking around without any cursor at all was much better than walking around with an orange one. Orange was just such a contrast that everyone would notice the colour when he was in a crowd. A missing cursor was much more subtle.
He would be able to hide his cursor from anyone that didn't have a high levelled Searching skill with that ability. He would also get a whole host of other benefits from having a Hiding skill that was that highly levelled. Most of which he didn't even know about yet. He didn't know what the higher levelled unlocks in Hiding were, but they could turn out to be very useful to someone like him.
But in the meantime, he was going to finish up this last grinding session and then go to sleep. Then he'd work on his food problem. Then, when he had enough for another few weeks, he'd work on his Hiding skill.
Maybe somewhere along the way, he'd choose his fourth skill too. He still had an empty skill slot to allocate.
The next morning, he decided to venture further into the forest.
He hadn't explored this area all that much, preferring to just fight the Nepenthes near his cave. But now that he was immune to them, he decided to see what else was out here and continued towards the western edge of the floor.
He had his cave marked on his map, so he wouldn't get lost.
He was keeping an eye out for anything unusual and for any potential food sources. He'd much rather find something way out here in the middle of nowhere than have to go back towards the center of the floor to fight some wolves or boars.
It would be very difficult navigating around all of the other players there without being noticed if he had to do that, and it was quite likely that all of the Dire Wolf spawns had multiple parties of players competing for them.
But he would go there if he had to. He really didn't want to, though.
Ideally, he was looking for some Rabbit spawns. They spawned quite commonly in forests, and he had even seen a few rabbits here and there over the past few days.
But they typically didn't spawn very often near other monsters. Which meant that they were likely in a secluded area.
Each Rabbit essentially equated to one day worth of food if he wanted to be frugal, so if he could even find a dozen or so, he would be good for a while.
Without the Cooking skill, most of them would burn if he tried cooking them, but if he allocated his fourth, still-empty skill slot to cooking temporarily, a simple rabbit would burn only about 10 percent of the time at level 1.
That was his current plan. Hopefully, it wouldn't take too long.
Luck had been on his side that day.
He had spotted a Rabbit only a few minutes into his search, activated his Hide ability, and followed it right back to a clearing where he could see a few others.
He had found a spawn point for them. It had only taken him about an hour after that point to collect all the food he would need for the next few weeks.
First floor rabbits were slow enough that he could catch them on foot without too much effort. He had picked up forty-one of them during that time, which was a lot of rabbits actually, now that he thought about it. But it wasn't like he was going to complain. MMOs didn't typically have realistic animal spawn rates anyway.
He had decided to gather more than he needed to prevent himself from having to go looking for food again any time soon.
Food items didn't spoil while in a player's inventory, so he could stock up for months at a time if he wanted. And he did want to. Because as far as he knew, a player could find his cave tomorrow and force him to leave. So he wanted to have an emergency supply in his inventory.
He had cooked all the rabbits right there in the clearing over a fire and burned seven of them, which gave him 34 cooked Rabbits in the end.
Kirito filled up his waterskin at a stream.
Water had been something he hadn't anticipated being a problem initially. But the NerveGear did cause players to feel thirsty, just as it caused them to feel hungry.
After he had crafted those waterproof containers out of the Boar Stomachs, he'd allocated one of them to serve as a makeshift water bottle.
Thankfully, rivers, ponds, and lakes were quite common on this floor, and he didn't have to worry about diseases or anything like that, because players couldn't get sick from drinking water from a natural source.
Germs and bacteria weren't a thing in this world, so sickness could only be inflicted as a status effect from certain poisons and monsters.
This particular stream wasn't too far from his cave, and thankfully, on the map that all players had been given of the floor, natural obstacles like mountains, forests, and bodies of water were already mapped out. Not in very much detail, but the outline was there. Finding water was about as hard as navigating yourself to the nearest blue patch on your floor map.
How long had this guy been here?
After finishing off all of the things he had needed to do for the day, Kirito had decided to walk the last few kilometres to the edge of the floor, just to see if there was anything out there.
But he had run into someone. He had thought that it had been a player at first and had immediately hidden. But upon closer inspection, he noticed that it was an NPC. One with an exclamation mark over his head.
A quest NPC.
Beta testers had never gone this far out into the woods because it was so far away from the closest village and there was supposed to be nothing over here, so he was quite possibly the first player to ever know about this quest.
Curious, Kirito decided to try it out. This led to a pretty bizarre conversation. To summarize, the NPC had been tasked to deal with the surge of Nepenthes in this forest, but had been totally unprepared for the sheer number in the area and had needed Kirito's help.
Kirito didn't really care all that much about the backstory of the quest, so didn't pay it much attention. He just wanted to know what the guy needed him to do, and what he was getting for it. The guy had promised to 'reward him handsomely,' whatever that meant, if he helped him out, so Kirito had decided to play along.
Kirito was tasked to kill 100 Nepenthes in the area and had been given a piece of paper to track his progress. There was a number on the paper that would decrease automatically as he killed nepenthes. So the number represented how many more he needed to kill.
As soon as it left the NPC's hands, however, and Kirito had received it, the amount that he had left to kill, immediately changed from 100 to 0. Because Kirito had killed thousands of them already, and thankfully, this quest seemed to keep track of the ones he had already killed.
So Kirito immediately handed the completed paper back to the man, expecting the quest to be over. It had only been a hundred Nepenthes, so the quest reward likely wouldn't be all that much. That's what he had thought at the time, anyway. But that hadn't been the end.
The man received the paper gratefully, thanked him for his hard work, but then exclaimed that another batch of Nepenthes had shown up unexpectedly. So he handed Kirito another note, telling him he needed to kill 500 more.
Once again, however, the counter reset to zero when Kirito received the note, so he immediately handed it back. But Kirito was starting to see the pattern.
The man, again, complained that another even larger army of them had shown up, and now he had to kill 1,000 of them.
This process was repeated again and the number reset immediately, as Kirito had probably killed that many on his first day of running his loops. The man thanked him again, and then suddenly, the ground behind him started to shake.
Kirito got a bad feeling. When he had been tasked to kill 1,000 Nepenthes, he had gotten a little worried. It told him that this quest was likely not intended to be completed by a single player, and especially not so early on in the game. It was a quest that only a party of five or six players would be tasked to do. Kirito had only managed it by himself because he had shamelessly exploited a game mechanic to do so. This quest wasn't even supposed to be found until later in the game, in all likelihood.
When he took a moment to consider just how far this NPC was from the center of the floor, and just how hard it was to get there, that was the only conclusion he could reach. It wasn't impossible that this quest was meant for players that were level 40 or beyond. A thousand Nepenthes took a long time to kill when fighting them how he used to. With just a single sword, hacking away at one at a time, with both feet firmly on the ground. It would take days like that.
But if this quest was meant for a party, and if it was combat-oriented, it would likely have some sort of mini-boss at the end of it. A lot of quests like that did.
'I might even have to retreat here,' he realized.
The ground continued to shake, and then a giant Nepenthe sprouted out of the ground and roared.
The imagery of a giant, roaring plant actually made him crack a grin, despite the situation. The noise was loud, but not debilitating. He had heard louder roars from floor bosses before.
Kirito leaped backwards, facing the beast, and immediately started to analyze it. It was literally just a scaled-up Nepenthe. Probably 10 times bigger. So it had vines on it, and would likely have an acid attack of some sort. Also, since it was a boss monster, it would likely have at least one special attack.
Due to its size, the special attack could possibly be some sort of earthquake generator or perhaps a much more potent and dangerous acid attack. He would have to be on the lookout for those possibilities. The cursor was also a bit concerning. It was a crimson colour, indicating that this monster had a level much higher than his own.
But most minibosses would be like that. And it was often the case that a boss's level was considerably higher than it had any right to be. So Kirito was not ready to retreat just yet. He'd test out its strength first.
The first few attacks sent his way were vine whips. They were large, sweeping motions that were very easy to predict, and very easy to dodge.
Easier in fact, than the vine attacks of the smaller Nepenthes he had been fighting all this time.
He patiently dodged each swipe, and carefully observed the attack patterns. He wanted this boss to cycle through each of its attacks, and any special attacks before engaging with it directly. He did not want to be caught off guard by some crazy, surprise attack at close range.
Kirito purposely remained still so that the boss would target him with its vines, then he'd dodge when the vine was on its way.
It couldn't change directions midway through the attack, he had noticed. So constantly moving around wasn't the best strategy. It was much better to stand still, and dodge at the last moment.
About 15 seconds or so after the fight began, the boss leaned its head back, and started going through the acid attack animation that its smaller counterparts did all the time.
Kirito watched it carefully and dodged only a moment before the attack went off.
A normal Nepenthe's acid attack was comparable to spit. A small amount would come out in a short burst.
This boss's acid attack was more like a fire hose.
It started, and it kept going.
The boss was also capable of following him around with the stream.
Kirito had dodged the first blast but then had to immediately start moving again, as the boss tilted its head to follow him around with the attack.
He had to keep moving for about 10 seconds before the attack finished, and opted to just run in a wide circle around the boss.
Just like the other Nepenthes, it would always aim directly at him, ignoring his forward motion. So as long as he kept moving, the blast would never hit him.
When the blast stopped, Kirito was facing the back of the boss, and he carefully began observing its roots. It hadn't moved since the start of the fight, and he was trying to find out if this boss was a stationary one or not.
Its roots immediately sprung out of the ground, and the boss turned to face him.
Then it started walking.
So the boss could move. That made things a little trickier.
Then it started reaching into its mouth, which initially confused him.
But it clicked when he saw the familiar sight of an exploding fruit. Only, it was a lot bigger.
So, this boss would likely summon minions to aid it, he figured.
The boss popped its own fruit, and Kirito immediately noticed that another swarm of Nepenthes was on the way.
Due to the size of the fruit, he also expected the swarm to be larger than normal, and it may in fact contain other special versions of Nepenthes that only spawn in for this specific boss fight.
Ones with potentially weird abilities he hadn't seen before.
Also, since Kirito was at Nepenthe escape velocity, he would probably have to deal with a continuous swarm of them for the rest of the boss fight.
He still saw nothing truly dangerous yet, though. The swarm would be more of a nuisance than anything.
He continued to observe carefully as the boss approached him.
Kirito deliberately stayed where he was, to see if the boss would try to trample him.
It stopped before trying to crush him and started using its vines instead.
So this boss, despite its ability to move, did not seem to like close-range combat very much. Preferring to stay a distance away to just use its vines.
He was at no risk of being trampled, he realized.
Kirito quickly decided to wait for the swarm of Nepenthes to arrive before beginning his assault. He didn't want to get surrounded while he was attacking the boss at close range, so he figured that it was best to wait for now.
He needed to see if there was anything in the incoming swarm that he needed to worry about first.
It only took another few seconds for the swarm to make it to the clearing.
The quest NPC had run off long ago, Kirito noted, after taking a quick glance around the clearing.
It was a little irritating, in his opinion, when he had to do quests like this. Ones that involved 'helping someone defeat a group of monsters,' just for Kirito to have to do all the work and for the NPCs to run off somewhere.
Was it so hard to just say 'I want you to defeat these monsters,' instead of implying that you would actually help out?
When the Nepenthes finally arrived, Kirito began attacking them immediately, leaving the boss alone for the moment.
He had already reached the point at which he no longer needed to pool a swarm together to fight it, so he was able to keep up with the spawn rate easily enough.
As soon as they were close enough, Kirito flipped, and Sonic Leaped into a death spin.
Five died in about two seconds from that alone.
Landing, Kirito carried his momentum forward into another spin, ending another three there.
He had learned how to chain multiple spins in a row a while ago in a process he referred to as 'spin chaining,' which was unbelievably effective when fighting large numbers of weak enemies, as he was now. He had gotten so used to spinning and one-shotting Nepenthes that were grouped up that he could mostly keep his attention on the boss itself during his battle rather than on the boss's swarm of minions.
It felt a lot like mowing a lawn actually, now that he thought about it. He was just cutting the grass with his swords instead. Weeding.
Kirito watched as the boss looped through its attacks again. First its vines, then its acid, then it pulled out the exploding fruit, popped it, then it walked over to get into range of him again and then repeated the cycle again.
There was nothing truly dangerous during any of that, so Kirito had dropped almost all of his lingering concerns and started fighting seriously.
Not for the first time, Kirito wondered what he looked like when he started fighting like this. He was upside down almost as often as he was right side up, due to the ease that the acrobatics skill allowed him to flip and spin.
The lack of dizziness experienced in-game allowed him free access to essentially do whatever crazy maneuvers that he wanted without repercussions.
What would that look like?
He tried imagining another player doing what he was, but he couldn't quite visualize it.
It must look so weird to a spectator, he thought.
He was spinning about as often as usual. Which equated to whenever he had the chance to, or pretty much every time his feet touched the ground.
After completing the first spin in a chain, he typically had a lot of rotational momentum left over when his feet hit the ground again, which made it very easy to simply jump into another spin.
Sometimes, he didn't even need to use another Sonic Leap to initiate it either. He would have enough residual momentum to spin again without having to use another skill to initiate it. And it did not escape his notice that, if he had not learned how to fight like this, if he had not developed his death spin, this swarm and boss would have probably killed him by now, surrounded as he was.
Fighting with one sword and with both feet on the ground severely limited what he was capable of and he didn't even notice it back when he did it all the time.
But with his new style, he was basically doing the work of an entire party, himself.
He was drawing the attention of the boss, keeping the minions at bay, and soon, he'd be responsible for the DPS on the boss as well.
That took multiple people to pull off in a normal party.
He didn't need one.
He no longer needed to form a party to fight bosses effectively, he realized.
He wouldn't want to either, even if his cursor suddenly turned green right that second and stayed that way permanently.
He had been a solo player before all of this, and he had understood that it could be very limiting. But now, as he initiated another sequence of death spins, he realized just how liberating it could be.
There was no way that he could work effectively with a party anymore. Any attempt on his part to restrict himself into one task would severely hamper his own effectiveness. He would have to hold back a lot, all the time, no matter his role.
He hated holding back.
He was a party on his own.
He was more effective on his own than an entire party of six that he was a member of would be.
It was quite possible that in the future, he might even be able to solo floor bosses like this.
Wouldn't that be something?
The boss's exploding fruits were larger than normal, which, as he had anticipated, meant that the swarm it had called in would be larger. And since the swarm itself contained even more fruited Nepenthes, there was an endless feedback loop of dozens and dozens of Nepenthes constantly arriving in the clearing.
The explosions from the fruit happened every thirty seconds or so now, and the air was filled with the sounds of flailing vines, and the machine-gun rate of acid attacks splatting on the ground.
The cacophony of noise was so familiar to him however, after hearing it for so long, that it was basically white noise to him now.
Due to the larger swarm, however, he wasn't quite able to clear them all out before the next wave spawned in, so he was going to have to fight the boss, he realized, while he was fighting the swarm itself.
Which could take a while, he thought.
But he had spent hours at a time fighting at this pace before, so he was used to it, and he could do it again. If he somehow couldn't, then he still had that teleport crystal on him.
He was about 30 minutes into the fight now, and after getting used to the boss's attack patterns, the fight turned into one of his typical grinding sessions. Whenever there was an opening, however, he'd spin into the boss's roots, and then re-engage the surrounding swarm.
That swarm was actually the most dangerous part of this whole battle. If he stopped whittling it down for even a few seconds, it would start restricting the space he was using to move around in.
At the moment, he was at the center of the swarm, and so was the boss. The swarm was arranged in a ring that was trying to close in on all sides, and he was having to zig-zag to keep the center of the ring as clear as possible.
And every time he switched sides, he'd strike the boss a few times.
Usually, he would have to allow the swarm on one side to advance while he ripped through the other side, allowing him to escape the ring, at least until the next swarms started arriving.
But the fight was actually surprisingly easy so far. It was really just tedious.
The boss's attacks would always miss him, and would usually take out a group of its own minions.
Friendly fire was a very common occurrence amongst Nepenthes, apparently. And that was another thing that Kirito took shameless advantage of. He would deliberately kite the Nepenthes he was too busy to kill in a specific way, so that the boss would take them out with its own attacks.
The battle proceeded just like every one of his previous ones, and he slowly lowered the mini-boss's health.
It took him just over an hour to finally kill it, which left him with just the swarm of Nepenthes. A swarm that would no longer be as large as it had been previously, due to the boss not using its larger exploding fruit to summon any more super swarms to add in to the mix.
The fight was now no different than the end of one of his typical Nepenthe hunting sessions, which meant that he was near the end. He just had to clear out the rest.
The thought reinvigorated him, so Kirito radically sped up his attacks. He spun faster, hit harder, and the swarm thinned out. Eventually, it was gone. All that was left at that point, was the new Nepenthe swarm currently inbound from the last fruit, which Kirito left the clearing entirely to deal with.
He would come to them.
He deliberately ignored the fruited Nepenthes until the end. Killing all others leaving only those ones remaining. This was the only way he knew of to stop the endless loop, and it was the way he had to end all of his grinding sessions ever since hitting Nepenthe escape velocity.
An exploding fruit would not go off if he insta-killed the Nepenthe carrying it. The problem had always been other Nepenthes accidentally smacking them with a stray vine, so he got rid of all of those first, and didn't let the remaining Nepenthes pile up.
And since there were no more ordinary ones at that point, he was able to kill each of the fruited Nepenthes in one shot, preventing any of the fruits from bursting.
And after that was done, there were no more Nepenthes and the battle was over.
The sheer number of Nepenthes he had killed before starting the quest had significantly raised the difficulty of it, he was pretty sure.
With each kill under his belt, he had increased the spawn rate of a fruited Nepenthe. So in that last swarm, if he hadn't had over 10,000 nepenthe kills, there would have been much fewer minions to deal with, making the quest a lot easier.
Or at least shorter, anyways.
Kirito found the quest NPC again after a short time and spoke to him. The man thanked him profusely, and gave Kirito his reward.
A lot of experience. A surprising amount actually. Which sort of confirmed his suspicion that this quest was meant for a much higher levelled player than him.
The quest had given him a level, after all. Which was crazy when he considered how high leveled he already was.
He was level 16 now. That amount of xp had been the equivalent of about four days of Nepenthe grinding. A crazy amount, and enough to confirm Kirito's earlier suspicions that it was meant to be shared amongst multiple players. There was no way that this quest was meant to be soloed, but it rewarded handsomely anyone who could do so.
He got a lot of cor for completing it, too. Which was pretty much useless to him since he couldn't trade or buy anything from shops,
He also got a ring. It was called the Ring of Acid. An item he had never even heard of before, so he was probably the first to ever get it.
It had a strange set of abilities. It gave a simple STR and AGI boost, like most rings, but it also had an ability to teleport the holder to the location of the Nepenthe boss he had just killed. There were pretty severe restrictions on when it could be used, however. It would have been a pretty broken item if he could just teleport there at any time, as that would make emergency teleport crystals useless.
So there were some restrictions. Teleporting with it took time, for one. A lot of time, actually. Kirito had never seen an ability delay as long as this one before. After activating the effect, there was a five minute activation time during which he couldn't move at all. If he were attacked in that time, or if he moved, the effect would cancel immediately.
So all it really did was remove the inconvenience that walking all the way here from the closest inn provided. Still useful, especially since the location of the boss was only a few minutes away from his cave, but the effect was useless as a means to quickly escape in an emergency, or any other dangerous situation.
Teleport crystals were still the only option for that.
Five minutes was a long time when in an emergency severe enough to require teleporting. Thirty seconds was a long time in those situations. Was a five minute timer really necessary? It was actually kind of annoying how long that was. Kirito understood the purpose behind it, but two minutes could have accomplished the same task, in his opinion. Why drag it out for five?
It was irritating, especially now that he realized that he would still be using it in the future regardless. That waiting five minutes was still better than walking all the way over here from the center of the floor.
He could already foresee himself sitting around with nothing to do for five minutes somewhere, patiently waiting for the effect to finally activate.
That would get old, fast.
There was another restriction on the ring, too. It had charges. The boss nepenthe dropped a vial of acid that, when used on the ring, would give it one charge. This meant that every time he used the ring to teleport, he would have to kill the boss nepenthe again to get another charge for it, because the ring had started out with zero charges.
He had applied the acid he had just received to the ring however, as the quest NPC had guided him to, so the ring now had one charge in it.
He couldn't farm any more, though. He could fight that Nepenthe boss no more than once per day. It just wouldn't show up if he tried to fight it more often than that. It was a repeatable encounter. He could return to the location to fight the boss again if he wanted to, but only once every day.
He wouldn't get that crazy amount of xp next time, either. That had been a one time thing. He'd just get some decent drops, including at least one guaranteed rare drop, and a typical amount of xp for killing a repeatable miniboss.
It was still a significant step up from his typical Nepenthe grinding however, that was for sure. But still not enough to level up in a single day.
He'd be surprised if he made it to level 17 before the next floor opened up, in fact. He was something like eight days away from it, using his typical Nepenthe strategy.
He might be able to cut that down to seven days, or maybe even six with this new repeatable mini boss added to his daily training, but he was clearly over leveled for this floor. Possibly over levelled for the next floor, too. And that was six days of hard grinding, which he had already decided to take a break from. He wanted to max out his Hiding skill first, and the days that he took to max out that skill wouldn't count towards his total towards leveling up in general, since he couldn't grind during them.
So it was looking pretty unlikely that he would reach 17 by the time the next floor opened up. Surely the other players had to be close to defeating the floor boss by now. They had to be. When he had reached level 17 in the beta, the test had been almost over. His highest level had been 18 back then, and he had been on floor 9 when he reached it.
Now he was level 16 and still stuck on the first floor. It was crazy how much things had changed.
Improvements:
Keepie, Gabriella Gadfly