2 days later, there was a boss meeting which Nira and Akari attended, though they didn't plan on fighting the boss. The person who was going to be leading the raid was a man named Diabel, a small-time guild leader during the beta, though he seemed to be hiding that he was a beta tester.
They sat at the top of the amphitheater and stayed quiet. Nobody payed them much attention.
The meeting went reasonably well until Diabel had people split up into groups, when an orange cactus jumped down and yelled, "My name's Kibaou. Before we continue on, I got something to get off my chest."
Nira whispers, "Bet you it's a beta hater."
"Not taking that bet," Akari answers.
"Some of you here need to apologize to the 2000 players who've died so far!"
"Kibaou, are you talking about the beta testers?" Diabel asks carefully.
"Of course I am! When this whole thing started, the beta testers just up and vanished, leaving the new guys to fend for themselves! They should get down on their knees and apologize AND give up the items and money they stole."
"You two!" he turns towards them. "You're beta testers, right?"
What makes you think that?" Nira asks.
"I'd say you're just a jackass who decided that we'd be easy pickings for bullying out of our stuff. After all, even if we are beta testers, and even if the beta testers are somehow responsible for the deaths of those who have died so far, among whom beta testers are over-represented by a factor of 2, how on Earth does that mean we have to give our stuff to you, a random person not in anyway related to or representing the dead who seems to be pretty well off, better than most beta testers, even," Nira adds, causing Kibaou to tremble with anger.
"So how about this. We duel, and if you win, I give you all my stuff, and if you lose, you shut the fuck up and stop interrupting this meeting. Oh, and, I won't use my weapons," Nira says and jumps down to the bottom of the stadium, which was only slightly painful with their superhuman avatars. She challenges Kibaou to a half-death duel.
An extremely angry Kibaou accepts the duel. The timer starts.
As it reaches 5 seconds remaining, Kibaou says, "Don't cry when you get hurt, little girl."
Nira giggles in the most infuriating manner she can manage. "That's if you can land a hit on me."
The duel starts and Kibaou charges forward with his bastard sword in a horizontal swing.
Nira ducks down and places her palm on the bottom side of his sword, pushing it up and over her head before rolling aside of his body.
She stands straight again, smiling.
Kibaou spins around with his sword out and tries to cut her, only for her to repeat the exact same maneuver again, managing to time her motions perfectly.
She sidesteps a vertical swing and jumps over a low horizontal swing, planting her foot onto the top of the blade and driving it into the ground, jumping off before it hits to maintain her balance.
A few people chuckled or giggled, including Asuna and Kirito. Akari openly laughed.
Nira raises her foot and brings it down in an axe kick on Kibaou's wrist (he'd let go of the 1.5 handed sword with one hand), making him let out a very unmanly scream of pain and drop his sword, hit Nira picks up, with a fairly large but hidden amount of effort.
"You said you weren't going to use weapons," Diabel points out.
"I said I wasn't going to use my weapons. Never said anything about his weapons," Nira says and swings the sword at surprisingly fast speed. A rather amusing and adorable sight in its own way, a short girl swinging around a large, heavy sword.
Kibaou barely manages to avoid the swing, still grasping his wrist with his other hand.
"But whatever, I won't use it either."
Nira finishes a spin and angles the blade's path downwards, smashing it into the ground and letting go just before the impact to avoid recoil, causing the blade to bounce. The impact makes a loud clang before the sword clatters to the ground.
If she repeated the maneuver a few more times, it wouldn't take her long to destroy the sword, not that she planned to.
She runs forward, dodging under a sloppy punch from Kibaou's left hand, since his right wrist was brokenâ€"even though the game didn't actually show gore and anatomy if you got cut, it did simulate itâ€"so he had trouble using it and punching would be extremely painful.
She drives her own fist into Kibaou's solar plexus causing him to double over, gasping for breath. He lost a small portion of his HP.
"You have two options right now. You can keep trying to fight and I literally beat you till you're half dead, which won't take long, but will be pretty painful. Your second option is to surrender now and save yourself a world of pain."
"Go screw yourself!" he gasps out.
"Have it your way, though your stupidity is almost painful," Nira says with a sigh. She didn't particularly fancy actually beating him to death. Or half to death, but that's besides the point.
As he stands to his feet, she spins a full circle with one foot up, driving her heel into his throat. In his unstable position, he gets thrown onto his back. This time his HP drops by about 25% and starts to slowly continue dropping.
She grabs his head by the sides and twists sharply, breaking his neck with a sound that made her slightly sick. Still, it was probably the least painful way to beat him at this point.
Because they were in a safe zone, his HP stopped at half full and then instantly recovered to full, his wounds all healed, and granting her the victory. There was still lingering pain though.
As Nira gets up she fights down the urge to vomit, her mind unhelpfully supplying gross mental images, including his crushed throat or dead body with his broken neck at an odd angle.
As Nira sits down next to Akari, Akari says, "After that obvious display of overwhelming skill, I don't think we can get away with not fighting the boss. Well whatever, we can always be crowd control."
The grouping process puts them in a group with Asuna and Kirito, 2 people short of a full party, not that it mattered, they were certainly the strongest party. And because Diabel was a greedy fuck, they were all put on crowd control so that they wouldn't get a chance to get the LAB. Akari and Nira didn't mind, since they hadn't planned to fight the boss in the first place. Asuna didn't even know about the LAB so she didn't mind and Kirito minded a little.
The boss fight was taking place tomorrow, but the four still walked together since none of them felt like wasting their energy grinding and they wanted to get to know each other.
"That was rather brutal," Asuna comments, referring to Nira literally beating Kibaou.
"There are far more brutal and painful ways I could have done that. For example just knocking his feet out and then repeatedly slamming his face into the floor. Or I could have broken his ribs with repeated blows and then continue hitting him in the chest until the broken ribs puncture his heart or lungs. Or just force him onto his back and repeatedly punch him in the face, which combined with the impacts against the floor by the back of his head would drain his HP fairly quickly."
"Okay, we get it, what you did was relatively not-brutal, but still... did you have a nightmare or something?" Akari asks.
"Yes actually, don't remember it though."
"Why didn't you-"
"Didn't want to bother you."
"I'm going to have nightmares now," Asuna says, causing everybody else to chuckle.
"So how come you two were only getting the [Anneal Blade] recently?" Kirito asks, changing the subject from Nira practically killing a high level, armed player with her bare hands—since while the duel stopped him from dying, he would have otherwise died. Brutally.
"We were too scared to go out..." Akari admits with some embarrassment.
"If not for Kirito, I'd probably have done the same, and I'm at least 5 or 6 older than you and even more older than Nira," Asuna says.
"I'm 13. Akari's 15," Nira supplies.
"Then I'm 8 and 6 years older than you and Akari respectively."
"On a different topic, are you and Kirito, uh, a couple?" Akari asks.
Kirito chuckles, Asuna answers, "We're married. Have been for 2 and a half years, since Kirito turned 18."
"And before you ask, we don't have any children. We wouldn't both be playing video games at the same time if we had a 1-year-old kid," Asuna says.
"I guessed that much," Akari says.
"What about you two? Maybe somebody else one of you likes?" Asuna asks.
"No and no," Nira answers.
"Do you two live together?"
"With my sister and her wife," Akari answers.
"Oh..." Asuna says, deciding not to ask any further since people their age, especially Nira's, tended to live with their parents, so since they didn't, there might be some topics they'd rather not talk/think about there. Especially for Nira, who didn't even live with any members of her own family. Birth family anyway.
"Where did you learn to fight like that? 3 months of SAO isn't nearly enough to learn to fight like you do, bare handed or with swords," Kirito says, once more changing the topic.
"I do kendo, as for bare handed combat, I really don't know. I did a little martial arts but I turned out to be good enough to not need to for just self defense and it didn't really interest me so I dropped it. The thing with Kibaou was just him being sluggish and incompetent. He probably stole his gear, or bullied someone out of it, anyway."
"Your solution probably won't last. He'll just be more pissed and hate beta testers more," Kirito says.
"There's no changing what he thinks anyway."
"We can still discredit what he says. Which is harder if people think we respond with violence to him."
"People don't care about facts, they care about feelings. And he is very good at being very passionate and standing on the graves of the dead, metaphorically. They don't care that beta testers are overrepresented among the dead by a factor of two. As far as they're concerned, we have some advantage and so, automatically, we must have gained it by pushing somebody else down. They want somebody to blame for their problems, instead of trying to solve them, and instead of blaming Kayaba, who is out of their reach, they blame the beta testers, who are right there. Also he pissed me off and wanted to take my hard-earned stuff," Nira says.
"That's probably true, but there are people who don't have a firm opinion and who could be swayed either way," Kirito says.
"Just try not to respond by beating him half to death every time he makes you angry," Kirito says.
"I'll try," Nira says with a smile.
"The raid is tomorrow and there's still plenty of time. Maybe we want to do some fun quest or something?" Asuna suggests.
"I'm up for it, as long as it's nothing too difficult. It'll let us get used to fighting together," Akari says.
The quest they found involved clearing a mine which might have a hidden treasure (it did) from monsters. It wasn't particularly difficult and the only reward was a load of money, no gear, as well as some XP. Still, worthwhile for the XP, col and practicing to fight together.
By the time they finished and left the mines, it was evening. "See you tomorrow?"
"Well, it's not like we will die over night," Nira says with a teasing smile.
"Haha," Kirito says sarcastically, "Very funny."
"I feel like there's a story here," Asuna comments.
"Nope, definitely nothing," Kirito says.
"Right..." Asuna says.
"It's just like what it sounds like. We were doing some quests together, Akari and I logged off for the night with the plan to meet in the morning and do a quest which requires not having died in a week and we left with a message of 'try not to die over night', and, as you can guess since this is a story, Kirito died over night. We ended up doing the quest without him because it was on the last day of the beta."
"And to rub it in my face, you two refused to tell me what the quest was about," Kirito adds.
"Well, to be fair, you still haven't told us how you managed to die either," Akari answers.
"Oh, I see. Wait, why don't you just ask Argo?" Asuna says.
"The mission came as a surprise at the end so only the people who actually hardly died could even attempt it. Which ended up meaning the only people who did the apparently very difficult quest past the very beginning are Nira and Akari... and they refused to sell the information to Argo, even though she offered an outrageous price, probably because the beta was almost over and the money would be worthless and they knew I would be able to buy the info from Argo."
"Seriously?" Asuna asks Nira.
"Yep. By the way, even if there was another month or two of the beta left but the quest wouldn't be available, we wouldn't have sold the info to Argo. As much to rub it in her face that we know something she can't find out as to make sure Kirito doesn't find out."
"You two are horrible," Kirito comments.
"Yep!" Nira says with a smile.
"This is it, huh? The first step out of 100," Nira says.
"I guess so..." Akari says.
"Well... it shouldn't be too hard. Everyone is several levels higher than during the beta and we managed to very gruelingly come pretty close to killing it with just the two of us in the beta. If everyone follows the plan, then we should be able to get through without any casualties-" Nira says and is interrupted by Asuna.
"That's the idea," she says.
"-which means that inevitably someone will get greedy and break from the plan and one of us will need to save them and probably end up getting seriously hurt." Nira finishes.
"That's pretty pessimistic."
"Would you rather I assume that there is no risk?" Nira asks.
"Well, no, but..."
"If there is a decent number of people and a stupid thing to be done, at least one person will probably do it. Though... depending on the type of stupid, it is quite likely to be me."
"Really? What about... I don't know... jumping off a cliff."
"Plenty of people do that, for some reason or another. Have you heard of cliff jumping? It's a real sport."
"Uh... okay, bad example."
"Anyway, try to watch for anyone being stupid."
Diabel finishes his encouragement speech and opens the gates to the boss room.
The groups spread out as he gives orders according to the plan discussed yesterday. And then for around 15 minutes the incomplete party of 4 was killing minions.
As the boss's HP drops to 25%, Diabel runs forward and yells, "I got this!"
"See, greedy idiot," Nira comments. Well, he should be fine if this is like the beta.
"Get back! That's not a tulwar!" Kirito yells as the boss draws his second sword.
Diabel ignores him. Nira runs forward at her top speed and pushes him aside just as the boss came down, causing her to take the hit, partially blocked and partially dodged, herself. The blow sends her flying back the way she came and making her let out a cry of pain.
"Nira!" Akari yells and drops her bow in order to catch Nira, stumbling back. Asuna had already produced a healing potion and Akari fed it to Nira, whose HP had dropped to just several percent.
As the potion takes effect, the pain fades and Nira relaxes and opens her closed eyes.
"That is something I never want to feel again."
"That was way to close," Akari says as Nira stands up from her position leaned against Akari.
"I hope you're grateful, you total retard!" Akari yells at Diabel, who was among a considerable group of people worried for him. She wanted to strangle them. Because of his idiocy and/or greed, Nira very nearly died saving him.
"Computer program or not, I want payback," Nira says.
Akari is about to protest but decides that Nira was considerably less likely to get hurt again.
"Don't worry, I don't plan on experiencing that again. Terrifying and incredibly painful."
Nira silently walks around the busy boss, not making a sound. Illfang pays her no attention.
She walks up behind him. Illfang stills pays no attention to her.
She leaps into the air and drives her swords through the back of his neck and his heart. Illfang has no attention left to pay.
The boss shatters and Nira drops to the ground, sheathing her swords.
"You have no idea how much better that makes me feel," Nira comments as Akari walks up to her.
"What's the LAB?" Akari asks.
"Let me check," Nira says and taps on the tab in the rewards window for beating the boss.
"[Coat of Midnight]. It has amazing stats, at least for this stage of the game," Nira says as she equips it. The black coat appears on her.
"It looks badass."
"It feels badass," Nira responds.
A little ways away, Asuna says to Kirito, "That coat looks like it would look pretty badass on you."
Kirito chuckles. "True. She definitely earned it though."
"To be fair, it also looks pretty badass on her," Asuna says and then adds after a moment, "Aren't girls her age, or at least apparent age, supposed to be cute, not badass?"
"Why not both?" Kirito asks.
The two walk over to where Nira and Akari were standing.
As everybody celebrates, Kibaou yells, "...
Yes, I deliberately left that quote open. Sorry this took a bit longer than the others.
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