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.

A/N: I make it no secret that this is my least favourite chapter so far. It's already been rewritten once, inspired by some suggestions from psychominer. I will likely come back to try and make it a little less tedious in the future.

-LeviTamm


It all came down to his Hide Rate.

...

When a player wanted to use the Hide skill modifier, they had to open up their menu, find the Hiding skill in their list of skills, select it, and then select the mod to turn it on.

That ability turned them completely invisible to everything, even hiding their cursor, and it gave them a new interface.

...And the most important thing that that interface displayed was what was known as a Hide Rate.

It was basically a health bar… sort of.

Environmental factors such as brightness and lack of cover, would inflict damage to this bar, lowering the player's Hide Rate.

And as long as the bar wasn't empty, the hiding player's camouflage wouldn't break.

Kirito however, had managed to get to such an advanced Hiding level that the environment couldn't actually break the camouflage on its own as far as he could tell. Maybe if there was something as bright as a searchlight directed right at him, that would do it, but for the most part, the only way he could think of where his Hide Rate would hit zero was with a player using the Searching skill on him.

...

Being on this end of the Hiding skill was an interesting experience.

Back in the beta, he had picked up the Searching skill and had used it all the time. He had regularly found hidden players with it too, so he knew what the hunt felt like when he was the one trying to find people.

The Searching skill did a lot of things, but one of them was that it 'damaged' the Hide Rate of hidden objects. Players included.

But when he had used it back then on players that had wanted to hide from him, there was this weird game of cat and mouse that would usually ensue, especially when the hidden player was actually really good at utilizing the Hiding skill.

There was a threshold on the Hide Rate bar of the hidden player that, when damaged to that point by a searching player, would give a ding like sound to the searching player, indicating that the place that they had been looking at had something hidden in it.

...But that ding wouldn't happen immediately. There was a delay between hovering over the hidden player and hearing the sound. And the length of that delay was calculated by taking into account both the hidden player's Hiding level, and the searching players Searching level.

The higher the hiding player's Hiding level was, the longer that delay would be, and similarly, the higher the searching player's Searching level, the shorter the delay would be.

So if both players had maxed out skills for their respective roles, the delay would average out to just a couple of seconds.

But... when there was a vast disparity between these levels, the searching player's, and the hiding player's, some pretty unusual things tended to happen.

When someone had a very high Searching level, they could instantly shatter the camouflage of a low leveled Hiding player without warning, for example. Which was so convenient when you were the one searching… and so annoying if you were the one hiding.

...But when the reverse was true, and someone had a very high Hiding level and was hiding from a low levelled Searching player, there were situations where the searching player would know exactly where the hidden player was and was staring straight at them, but due to the monstrous Hide Rate of the hidden player, the camouflage wouldn't be damaged fast enough to deactivate.

It was the same concept as trying to kill a floor boss by throwing rocks at it. It was pretty much useless when the level disparity was too large. The boss would passively heal more damage then it was taking from the rocks, and it could literally just sit there watching you throw rocks at it forever, without the slightest inconvenience.

And it was harder than you might expect, trying to catch someone that was invisible. Even if you knew that they were exactly five feet in front of you.

...Which meant that it was still very easy for the hidden player to escape in those situations, even if they were essentially pinned into a corner.

In cases like those, what had often ended up happening was the searching player, out of frustration, would finally just get some of their friends over to activate their Searching skills as well, so that they could all pile on the damage to the hidden player's Hide Rate, together.

...Because it was possible to stand right in front of a low levelled Searching player, with the camouflage up, even when the hidden player knew that they had been found.

And situations like those were so annoying to deal with, as a searching player.

The hidden player wouldn't even have to put effort into escaping anymore, they could just stand there as if to say:

I'm right here. You know I'm right here. What are you going to do about it?

As long as the hidden player dodged any angry attacks thrown at them by the searching player, the camouflage wouldn't break. And it was very easy to dodge an attack when your opponent couldn't see you, even if they knew your general location.

...Someone had done exactly that to him once, back in the beta test. And having that player escape from him, even after he had by all measures found them, simply because the damn camouflage wouldn't break because he was too low levelled at the time, had been a very powerful motivator to finally start seriously training his Searching skill.

...

But he was on the other end of things now. He was the hidden player with the monstrous Hide Rate.

He could be that guy, now.

The hidden player that everybody had found, but nobody could see.

He had no intentions of doing that though. His life sort of depended on not being found, ever. And as a result, despite his massively overpowered Hide Rate bar, he had mentally selected a threshold, about a quarter way in, that he had determined was dangerous to go below.

In other words, he had arbitrarily decided that he would keep his Hide Rate above 75%, and would act as if hitting that threshold was equivalent to his camouflage breaking entirely.

...Which, despite not being even close to the truth, was not totally without merit.

It was somewhere around there where the threshold required for a searching player to get a ding, was. And that could potentially start one of those cat and mouse games. One he would almost certainly win, but it would still be a needless risk getting into one at all.

That bottom 75% of his bar would act as his insurance.

Walking around in broad daylight without cover, with little care about how noisy his footsteps were, lowered that rate to about 80% when he had Hide active.

Which was quite frankly, absurd, in his opinion. The ability was so overpowered now.

He was basically a walking bubble of invisibility when he wanted to be.

But despite how unfair that was for any searching player trying to find him, he wasn't really complaining about it.

...But it did really make him start to wonder.

He had discovered, by accident, that power levelling method for the Hiding skill. By activating Hide and leaving it on indefinitely, the rate at which he was getting xp slowly increased. And then by leaving it on for days at a time, almost a week straight in fact, he had maxed the skill, outright.

Were other skills like that?

The Searching skill had a modifier as well. It actually had a few.

Tracking was one of them, and it would show the footsteps of players on your friend list. By not having friends, Kirito had mostly avoided ever being found this way, but could it be used to power level like that?

Detection was another modifier of the Searching skill, but it actually referred to two different abilities. The first was the mod used to hunt down hidden players. You'd basically activate it the same way a player with the Hiding skill would activate the Hide modifier. And with it, as long as you were not in combat, your vision would radically increase in both range and quality.

It was actually amazing to experience that first hand too. It was a truly novel experience playing around with telescopic vision.

...And the other Detection ability was a passive one. It didn't have to be activated at all, and simply did its thing in the background no matter what the player was doing at the time.

It was also the main reason why people picked the Searching skill as one of their skill slots, too.

It gave the player a range, basically a circle centered around the player, that would notify the player about anything entering that range.

The game would take the sound made by whatever entered that radius, and amplify it so that the detecting player could hear it, even if it was far away. And naturally, the ability would get better the higher you levelled the skill.

It could also show enemy cursors from a greater distance, and was used for basic trap detection as well.

The Searching skill was so versatile that it was considered as one of the handful of core skills that really everybody should select at some point if they ever intended to travel outside of safe zones.

But that Detection modifier, the one that you had to activate, or even the Tracking one... what would happen if a player left that on for a week straight? Would that max out the skill?

One day, he knew that he would select that skill. It may even be the next one he took up. But even if it wasn't, he'd have to try that out when he did.


Trees, trees, and more trees.

The walk back was so annoying to deal with.

He couldn't even run either, because he had to basically hack his way through the bush since it was so unbelievably dense.

It had its upsides, how difficult the route was. As virtually nobody would want to come this way to explore the area near his cave, and therefore nobody would ever find it. But going back through the other way, back to Horunka was so annoying and time consuming.

There was no path. And he was navigating based on his floor map. But since that wasn't all that precise, he could not simply retrace the exact steps he had taken on his way to his cave in the first place on that first day.

He had tried retracing his steps by starting his journey on top of that giant boulder, but he had quickly found himself in unfamiliar surroundings.

He was close to that path, but he would never be able to find it again when there were just so many trees crammed together.

Instead, he had given up on that and decided to simply point in the direction of the village, and try to make his way there in as close to a straight line as possible.

But after the third dead end, he eventually decided to simply take a seat in a small gap he had found in the forest to take a bit of a break.

There was barely enough room to sit down, and if he looked up… he couldn't even see the bottom of the second floor above him, that he knew was sprawled out across the sky.

The canopy got in the way.

...

Letting out a sigh, he opened up his menu again and started going through it.

He'd start moving again in a couple of minutes, he decided.


...Or not.

Kirito's eyes widened in slight surprise as he noticed the new abilities in his Hiding skill menu.

They hadn't been there before when he was checking out how his camouflage held up against the Nepenthes.

What had changed? Why were they there now?

Kirito started going through his memories, but couldn't find anything really all that important…

'Actually,' he realized, he had put on that cloak he had received as an uncommon drop off a Nepenthe, earlier…

It had almost no bonuses of any kind.

But that was it, really. The only thing he had done.

Glancing at his interface, he noted the names of the abilities.

Mask, and Rigid Cloak.

Seeing the word Cloak in the name of that one though, pretty much confirmed his hunch, even before seeing what they each did.

If it had something to do with cloaks, it made sense that he hadn't unlocked it yet. SAO hid as many abilities that it could from the players. Meaning that even when you had the level requirements for them, if you hadn't actually been introduced to them somehow, or stumbled upon a situation where they revealed themselves, they wouldn't show up in your menu, and you couldn't use them.

In most cases, you wouldn't even know about them, either.

So while he had put a cloak on before now, he hadn't had his maxed Hiding level at the time, so he had missed one of the requirements for it to show up.

He was still wearing that cloak, too. He had figured that he probably should put it on before he got to Horunka since it did a passable job at hiding his face.

And since his face was his face, the face of Kazuto Kirigaya, he had realized that anything that he did in the game that made him recognizable could follow him for the rest of his life.

Good or bad.

And so he had quickly decided to never show his face to anyone, and to prevent his face from becoming recognizable.

But putting on that cloak had been the last requirement apparently, to unlock those abilities.

It'd only take a moment or two to test that out, as well.

If he took the cloak off now, he'd expect to see the abilities grey themselves out, or vanish entirely. That's what would happen if they only worked when he wore the thing, anyways.

So he unequipped it, and sure enough, the abilities vanished.

Putting the cloak back on, they reappeared.

'Interesting,' he thought to himself. He had to be wearing a cloak to use them.

Kirito opened up the ability descriptions to read up on them a little more…


Rigid Cloak… had a complicated explanation for such a seemingly minor ability.

And it was the one he tested out first.

It basically prevented the hood of the cloak from coming down when you didn't want it to. Sort of.

It actually contoured the cloak to the body of the player wearing it so that it always moved around in such a way that it would always maintain its shape.

Really, the entire workings of that ability could be seen from the fact that he was doing a handstand at the moment.

If this were real life, the loosely dangling, fluttery bit at the bottom of the cloak, that he had no idea what to call, would have fallen down over his head.

But that didn't happen.

He could still feel the cloak wrapped snugly around his legs, and his character's base equipment that he had on just underneath.

The hood didn't even come down.

It was such a neat little ability. A quality of life unlock that just removed a small inconvenience from his life.

He wouldn't have to worry about a sudden gust of wind blowing his hood down at an inopportune moment anymore.


Mask was next.

He was standing upright this time, as he activated the ability.

After pressing the button, his vision tinted as if he were wearing a pair of sunglasses.

...Pretty self explanatory what this one did, then.

The description of it had confirmed it either way.

It blacked out his face. Simple as that. Though it did have its own Hide Rate bar which, like any other, could be 'damaged' by a searching player, or by environmental effects.

It was pretty strange, though. The whole experience.

His hood was up, and it was covering his eyes.

If this were real life, he wouldn't be able to see at all like this.

But he could. Which meant that he could actually see through his own cloak from the inside.

And that wasn't a specific part of the ability he just tested, either.

Kirito deactivated Mask just to make sure, either way.

His vision returned to normal, but he could still see through his hood.

Getting a strange idea to test out the extent of it, Kirito grabbed his hood with both hands and twisted it 90 degrees to the side, while he was facing forwards.

In that position, his hood covered his entire face, and the opening of it exposed his right ear and cheek.

...

There was no way he'd be able to see at all like this in real life.

But again… he could.

He could twist the cloak right around if he wanted to, making it so that he literally had the thing on backwards, with the opening of the hood exposing the back of his head, and he could still see through it like that.

It was like some sort of one way invisibility cloak.

But, twisting that cloak around gave him another random thought.

If he had Rigid Cloak active, could he move the cloak around himself like he just had? He didn't have it on just now when he had tested Mask out.

If the cloak maintained its shape, would that mean that nobody could ever pull his hood down, not even him, unless he disabled the ability first? Or did it just work against natural things like gusts of wind, or shockwaves from combat?

Since it was worth knowing, he gave it a try.

He pulled the cloak back around so it was on straight again, and he activated Rigid Cloak.

Then he grabbed the hood and... pulled it down without any resistance.

The ability had disabled itself immediately.

Glancing back at his menu, he opened up the ability description again.

It was different, now.

It had more information on it.

'That was an interesting way to program a game,' he thought. Make it so that as much information about all of your abilities is as hidden from you as possible. Only revealing anything useful after testing out its limitations firsthand.

The old description had expanded now to include some information on how it could be disabled.

Any player could pull his hood down if they physically grabbed it, but it would protect against wind and the like, well enough.

So it was about exactly as he had expected. It would have been strange if it somehow locked onto his character's body.

But it made him wonder about just how many other abilities he had the requirements for, but just hadn't gotten around to testing out yet.

He was going to need to do some extensive experimentation later. He had other skills after all.

What could Acrobatics do? Literally the only thing he knew about that skill was that it improved his flexibility, and gave him a boost to his AGI stat somehow, but in a weird and counter-intuitive way.

AGI was hardly helpful as an indicator, after all. Speed simply couldn't be reduced to a single number. There had to be a bunch of hidden variables about his character that could not be seen by anyone, but that those sorts of skills affected.

Leveling up AGI was probably only part of the picture.

In fact, based on what he had seen so far, he wouldn't be surprised if leveling up AGI did different things for different people.

Two people that had the same AGI stat might have different top speeds depending on how the system had analyzed a characters playstyle.

A ninja was different than an Olympic sprinter, after all. But who was faster? That was a different type of speed.

But players just had a simple AGI stat to sum everything up.

'How did the game distinguish between this?' he asked himself, trying to figure out the paradox.

He'd have to find a way to test that out too, later. In a place where he actually had some room to move around.


Since his description of Rigid Cloak had updated, Kirito had taken to re-reading everything he had gone over days ago, about all of his Hiding abilities just to see if anything else had changed.

Sure, enough, he found out that he had unlocked some passive abilities as well, along the way. All without his knowledge.

The ability to see through anything he had equipped that would otherwise cover his face.

The ability to see wind direction while having Hide active.

A small resistance to outside lights from deactivating his camouflage.

A small decrease to the sound he made while moving around…

...And there were a few others along those lines.

There were a lot of explanations and abilities hidden deep inside his skill guide now that really all could be summed up quite simply by: 'My character is pretty sneaky now, and good at hiding.'

A bunch of info had filled itself out quietly, as he had leveled up the skill and tried new things with it.

He was going to need to try that out later with his Mixing skill as well.

He had maxed that out, but still had basically no information at all about how to use it.

He had 2 potion recipes, basically. Both of which were pretty limited and useless.

He had an explanation on how he could save ingredients every now and then when mixing stuff together, too.

...But that was basically it.

It seemed that he would have to experiment around about how to make Health potions and the like. The game wouldn't give him any answers or hints.

...Another thing that he would have to do in the future.

He didn't have very many unique ingredients on him at the moment, after all. Just a bunch of Nepenthe parts and ovules.

...Some fruits too, actually.

Maybe he'd have to try mixing a few of them together to see what happens…


'So then...' Kirito thought to himself.

He had unlocked some abilities after he had put on his cloak, which meant that some abilities were dependant on items.

Were there any more of them like that that?

He wanted to find out.

Kirito had a lot of items in his inventory now, but he figured that he should probably go through each item, one by one to see if anything else would show up.

So... Kirito opened his inventory and started equipping items one at a time, and then checked to see if any new abilities showed up.


The process was annoying, and long.

At first, he had thought that he could quickly blaze through his entire inventory rapidly, and then just check back to his Hiding skill guide a single time at the very end after he had finished.

If the skill guide updated after all the requirements came together then surely it wouldn't matter if he only happened to be carrying said requirements for a second or two before they went back into his inventory. Then he'd just read up on any unlocked abilities at the end.

...Only that wasn't the case. That would've been too easy, apparently. The descriptions only updated after any new abilities were activated for the first time. And since abilities vanished from the menu when the requirements weren't currently all available, there would be a chance that he would miss any hidden abilities by doing that.

After said abilities were activated for the first time though, a permanent record of them would be put into his skill guide that he could reference at any time. Whether or not he had the requirements for them at hand.

That was what had happened with Mask and Rigid cloak, after all. He could take his cloak off, causing the abilities vanish from his screen, and still read up on them since he had activated each of them once before, causing his guide to permanently update.

..Which wouldn't happen if he hadn't activated them earlier.

Which meant that he would have to equip, or pull out an item, then check his Hiding menu for each item, and repeat. Which made him have to close his inventory and open his skill guide every single time he pulled an item out.

But he was glad that he had done so.

Almost immediately, a text box had shown up.

He had started by pulling out his sword, but nothing had shown up.

Then he had pulled out a dagger… and the window had appeared on his interface.

It had no name or explanation. Just a simple text box saying:

Unlock Ability?

Yes/No.

He had clicked yes… and nothing immediately obvious had changed.

But… since he knew that the skill guide updated upon a new abilities first activation, he navigated back to his Hiding skill guide to see if he could find out what had changed.


Every player had access to a hotbar.

It contained 10 slots that could be hotkeyed with an action or item. By default, this was disabled, but pretty much every single person from the beta had learned how to enable it. You couldn't really fight on the front lines without such a convenient setting, so it was pretty much mandatory if you wanted to do any high level bossing, or PVP.

Since SAO wasn't an MMO that was played behind a keyboard however, the hotkey system actually used gestures instead of buttons.

There were 10 default ones, but a player could overwrite them with new ones if they so desired.

...Kirito stuck with those default ones himself, though.

There were 4 ways you could touch the fingers on each hand individually with your thumb. With 2 hands, that added up to 8 default gestures. The last 2 involved touching your index and middle fingers simultaneously with the thumb on each hand.

That made 10, but to prevent any accidental activation during combat, a final confirmation was needed which required a sort of... mental nudge.

The NerveGear read your brainwaves precisely enough that it knew when you were 'willing' something to happen.

To do the confirmation, you basically had to do... the exact thing that you would try to do if you were trying to telekinetically move an object in front of you in the real world. That… pressure that you would put behind your forehead that came from concentrating on the object really hard, and from trying to 'push' it with your mind somehow, was the same 'pressure' that you would have to put in place when confirming to the system that you were trying to access a hotkey.

It was a bit hard to explain, but it was easy to get used to after trying it out for a while.

That feeling, combined with one of those default hand gestures, would activate the hotkey that that particular gesture had been mapped to, activating whatever action that the player had assigned to it.

Things were made a lot easier by the fact that the gestures did not have to be very precise when a player executed them, as well. As long as the player squeezed the tips of their fingers together, it didn't matter what shape the rest of their hand and fingers were in, or if they made a perfect ring with their fingers or not.

You didn't have to be very accurate as long as you did the mental confirmation properly and were close enough. And a player could activate their hotkeys even while carrying a sword or item in that same hand they were activating the hotkey gesture with.

If that happened, what would happen to that held item would depend entirely on the action that was being activated by the hotkey. Maybe it would be stored into the inventory, or maybe it would be activated in some way, or even dropped onto the ground. Or maybe the hotkey didn't have anything to do with said item, and something else would happen instead.

It all depended on the situation.

As a result of the ease that was involved with the activation of these hotkeys, players could activate them with incredible subtlety. Kirito could easily activate any of his hotkeys without anyone directly observing him even noticing. Well… they would notice when a sword suddenly appeared in his hand, but they wouldn't notice the slight tensing of his fingers, or the fact that he was doing a mental confirmation to the system.

Neither of those things were noticeable on their own. Not unless the player made brand new, sweeping gestures for their hotkeys. Which was typically a pretty stupid idea in Kirito's opinion, but some players did it anyways to make themselves look cool. But since he had already gotten used to the default gestures, and since they were subtle enough to be unnoticeable by other players when he was activating them, Kirito stuck with the default ones.

...But the default gesture for each hotkey could be overwritten by the player if they really wanted to by accessing the Gesture Recording System, and then mapping some newly recorded hand gesture to the hotkey.

And all players had access to these systems at all times. It was not a skill that had to be unlocked, and the settings could be changed at any time.

The set of these 10 hotkeys was known as the hotbar, and all players had a toggle that would show it in their heads up display, if they wanted it to.

In their vision, just below their health bar, if the toggle was on, each of the 10 hotkeys would be visible to the player, along with an image representing whatever item or action that was assigned to each one.

And every player tended to customize theirs, differently. Players that tended to avoid combat, Blacksmith's for example, would usually assign repetitive actions to the hotbar so that they wouldn't have to constantly scroll through the inventory to get whatever they would need every single time the action needed to be performed.

Back when he had been power levelling Mixing in his cave, he had assigned the Mix command to the potions he was making to one of them, and used the others for his ingredients to make selecting them easier. If he hadn't have done that, he would have had to scroll through his inventory each and every time he wanted to mix a potion, which would have made his week long grind way longer than it had been, and frankly, it would have driven him insane.

With his hotbar set up like that though, he had instead just needed to activate his hotkeys over and over again rather than having to repeatedly go through his menu.

Things were a little different for combat oriented players, however.

Players that fought on the front lines would usually reserve their hotkey slots for potions or crystals, or sometimes even other weapons. So that they could be readily accessed in the middle of a fight without having to scroll through their inventory.

It would have been totally unfair if players had routinely died in the game solely because of the fact that they couldn't search through their inventory fast enough for a health potion, after all. Having the option to access one with a quick gesture made things so much easier, and made the game much more fair.

That way, at least now if you died, you could be sure that you at least had a fighting chance with inconveniences like that removed.

Kayaba may have been a mad man, but at least the rules he had implemented made some sense.

If a potion happened to be in the hotbar, it would appear in one of the player's hands if the mapped gesture was performed.

For most items, you could set them to not only appear in the player's hand, but you could even select which hand it would be equipped to as well.

Any item like that, with multiple possible actions that can be mapped to it, could be set to perform any specific one through the use of a slightly more complicated interface.

Take his ring for example. If he set it on his hotbar, he would have to specify that when he activated it through a gesture, that it would activate the teleportation ability specifically, if that's what he wanted to do. Otherwise, the system might think that he wanted to unequip the ring and store it in the inventory instead.

The same applied with a weapon on a hotbar. He needed to specify which of his hands it was to appear in when the gesture was performed. And that could be done in advance, so you didn't have to make that decision in the middle of combat. You could tell the gesture system that, when gesture A is performed, this sword will always be equipped in your left hand slot if that's what you wanted to do.

...And you actually had to do that to remove ambiguity. If you didn't, the game would just guess which could be disastrous.

A shield user that does a two-handed weapon swap for example, could die if this wasn't specified properly.

The player would be using a shield in his left hand, a one handed sword in his right, and then he could activate the hotkey he had set up in advance to switch to a two handed polearm in an instant, to take advantage of the situation. Whether that was a party member that had just done a switch, or even taking advantage of a monster's weakness if one happened to be weak to polearms.

The sword and shield would be sent to the player's inventory, and the two handed weapon would be equipped automatically as it wasn't necessary to first manually put away those previously held items upon activating the hotkey. It would be handled by the system, to make the switch as simple as possible for the player.

But then when activating the hotkey to equip the shield and sword again, after the situation where the polearm was useful had ended, if it wasn't specified in advance which hand the shield needed to be in, the game might put it in the player's other hand. The wrong one, which could easily kill that player in that few second delay that it would take to recover from that.

It was very important to give these details to the game when using the gesture system. It wasn't technically necessary to do so, as the system would try to guess if you didn't… but it also wasn't technically 'necessary' to look both ways before crossing the street.

It really was that type of situation. You were either a moron or a noob if you didn't set up your hotbar properly. It was actually often better to not use the hotbar at all, then to use a poorly organized one.

...And some players didn't even use it at all. Since it was hidden by default and you had to go searching through your settings to make it appear, it was probably the case that a large portion of players in the game didn't even know about it at all, yet.

But as a direct result of this hotbar and gesture system, what would often happen before a large boss battle was that players would spend about 30 minutes or so simply reorganizing their hotkeys.

It just made too huge of a difference to not prepare them in advance. A level 10 player that did not take advantage of that system could be defeated with absolute ease by a skilled level one player with a good hotbar setup because of the sheer speed at which they could switch items, and pull out potions.

Kirito himself, had been saved by that exact mechanic on his first day in the game when he was being chased down by those guards in the starting city. If he hadn't have had his health potions mapped to a hotkey… he wouldn't have been able to pull them out in time.

...And then like a moron, when he had been in the forest near Horunka on that same day, surrounded for the first time by those Little Nepenthes, he had run out of his hotkeyed health potions, having used most of them when he was simply getting used to fighting the walking plants again with such a large level difference.

He had made some mistakes during that time, and used up most of them. That, combined with the fact that he hadn't been thinking clearly enough at the time to really take notice of his depleting stock due to the… stuff that had happened earlier that day, had been the cause of it all. With his hotkeyed potions gone, he had been left with only his un-hotkeyed, higher tiered health potions in his inventory, that took too long to get out in the middle of combat.

He had had two types of them. The low tiered health potions that were dirt cheap in the shop in the Town of Beginnings, and the higher tiered ones that healed a little more that were sold in that same shop, but that in his opinion, hadn't been cost effective enough to buy with the starting Cor he had been given at the start of the game.

He hadn't bought them... but the crasher that he had killed later on, had. And Kirito had acquired them from that PK.

His strategy from then on had been to hotkey his lower tiered health potions, since he had had so many at the time and surely wouldn't run out of them, and then leave the higher tiered ones in reserve.

They were more valuable and he had intended to use them later on since he couldn't use any shops, and didn't know when he'd be able to get any more.

...And he hadn't hotkeyed them because he had still had the muscle memory from his previous hotbar in the beta built up.

Back then, he had had one gesture mapped to whatever healing item he was using at the time, not two. And he had gotten used to fighting like that. In combat, he would have likely forgotten his other health potion gesture if he mapped one for that, or worse, he would have consumed a higher tiered health potion by mistake when a lower tiered one would have been sufficient.

Over healing in the early game was an expensive mistake, after all. Relatively speaking, Cor was more valuable then, than it was now. It took 20% or more of your total wealth to get a good set of potions on day 1 when everyone was poor. Now he could do it, if he were green that is, for probably less than half of one percent of his cash stack.

It was best to conserve those potions in the early game and rely on his own passive healing as often as possible instead, when he could.

And he had wanted to do that by using only his low tiered potions, leaving the higher tiered ones for later on in the game. Potentially even saving them up for the next couple of floors.

And it had worked out great at first.. until he had run out of them entirely back in that forest, leaving only those un-hotkeyed ones left. And since they hadn't been hotkeyed, he hadn't been able to access them quickly enough to use them back when he had flipped over that ring of Little Nepenthes with that skill jump off of that tree, and had started running loops for the first time.

He had been totally surrounded after wiping out that first cluster of them and he had also been in the crimson red zone of his health bar. If he had just had those potions hotkeyed, he could have healed from them much more quickly. Instead, he had had to stay in the crimson red zone of his health bar for way longer than he had felt comfortable with.

...The mistake had nearly killed him. Though it did have the added advantage that he still hadn't used those potions yet, and they were still in his inventory at the moment. But he would have preferred not risking his life just to spare them like that.

It was a mistake that he always made in MMOs. He'd conserve all of his consumable items for so long and to such a degree that he'd never end up using them at all. They'd become obsolete, with better versions becoming available before he ever started running low.

His potions were meant to be used, and he really wanted to avoid taking risks to prevent that.

He hadn't expected to be put into the red zone on that day, and had thought that his trash healing potions would have sustained him.

He had been too careless. Though to be fair, he really hadn't been in a very rational state of mind at the time, having just murdered someone.

...

He had put much more effort into his hotbar now as a result of that mistake, with one gesture mapped to his junk healing items, ones that weren't even worth having at all, the ones that he had been trying to get rid of in fact, by burning through them exclusively... and then he had his emergency potions, his good stash that he hadn't needed to touch yet.

He had gotten good enough with his new style of fighting to survive on trash healing items entirely, using them up at a slower rate than he was accumulating them from drops, even.

Those types of items usually consisted of berries or fruits that when consumed, actually healed the player a small amount. They commonly dropped from monsters that lived in or around a forested area, and had an alright taste in his opinion, but since they healed him when he ate them, he didn't really consider them as food the way he had with those rabbits from earlier.

Not all food healed a player, those rabbits being an example. But since those types of berries and fruits did heal him, he classified them mentally as healing items instead of food, even though he could use them as a substitute for a meal if he really wanted to. But if he did that, it would just feel like dumping out health potions. It was just a giant waste in his view.

So when he had made those basic calculations that determined how many days of food he had left before needing to restock, he almost always left those types of items out of the equation. He'd use them for that purpose if he were starving, but only then.

But he didn't typically hold on to them for too long anyways. While training, it was inevitable that he would accumulate some damage over time from random mistakes and lapses in his attention. Most of the time, the slight amount of damage from them could be recovered passively, even during continued combat, as long as he was careful enough to dodge or block all incoming damage in the meantime while he was recovering.

But when the mistakes were a little more serious, or if he just wasn't recovering from them fast enough before making more of them, he'd be forced to heal, and rather than use his potions, the tiny amounts of health that could be restored from these random berries and fruits were perfect for the job.

They were totally useless in a boss battle where the pace of combat was extremely intense and where on the occasions a player needed to heal, they needed to heal, as in by a lot, and quickly. They barely healed at all individually, but they were perfect for when he had the time to consume large amounts of them at once in the more casual pace of combat that he had settled into with the Nepenthes by his cave.

And after getting used to fighting those Nepenthes on an almost instinctual level and when he got to the point that he could fight them on autopilot, he had reached a convenient milestone where the accumulated damage he would take from those random mistakes would be entirely offset by the random healing fruit and berry drops he would occasionally get. In fact, he actually was building up a stockpile of them over time, getting the drops slightly faster than he was needing to use them.

The only real inconvenience was that all the berries and fruits had different names, and as a result, the game classified them as different items.

A hotkey can only be used for an item with a specific name, so when you had a bunch of items that essentially did the same thing, but that had different names, if you wanted free and instant access to all of them, you would have to set up a different hotkey to each of them.

There were typically 4 different berries that he would get as drops, and 2 different fruits, that pretty much all did the same thing.

They all healed by slightly different amounts. But the rule was, in general, that the fruits healed more than the berries, about twice as much on average in fact, and the fruits healed about one fifth of what the lowest tiered health potion could heal… which was about one third what his good potions in reserve could heal…

In terms of actual numbers, it was typically 10 per berry, 20 per fruit, 100 for the low tiered potion, and 300 for high tiered ones. Though there was a lot of variation in there.

Players started at 250 health at the start of the game, which made those higher tiered ones typically useless until players started levelling up more to get a bigger HP bar. They were used almost exclusively as full health restores in the early game by new players that were uncomfortable healing in short bursts, and who always wanted their health at full. But it was generally considered to be over-healing and a waste of money by anyone with some experience until later in the game.

But for each of these 6 types of berries and fruits, he was stuck rotating his allocated trash item healing gesture between them.

He would map his trash item healing gesture to whichever of these items he had the most of in his inventory at the time in order to minimize the number of times he needed to swap between the types. He'd exclusively focus on one of them, whichever he had the most of, while he continued to accumulate the others in the meantime by random drops. Then when he ran out, he'd have to go through his menu to switch the hotkey to the next type of fruit or berry he had the most of.

It was a bit annoying having to do that all the time, swapping the items he was healing with, as it took about 10 seconds of time to go through his menu, time that he needed to create a break in the otherwise constant combat for, but he had found himself having to do so much less often near the end of his training, and before his Mixing grind.

...But the strategy worked out, and he had built up the muscle memory over time and had gotten used to having a second healing item mapped to his hotbar. One for his emergency potions, the good ones, and the other for whatever trashy berry or fruit he happened to have the most of.

And that trash healing item slot on his bar would likely be overwritten by something else if he ever wanted to start fighting bosses or other high levelled monsters, as it wouldn't be useful for those types of encounters.

...His other hotkey slots were mapped to other things. Typically weapon switches. Though he did occasionally switch to that buckler he had picked up from that player that had ambushed him in the forest occasionally as well. Usually just for experimentation… because it really just wasn't his style to use it. He had one of his slots mapped to it anyways though.

But when he got some more gear that was more worthy of a slot on his bar than that, that buckler would be one of the first of his currently occupied hotkeys to be overwritten, he was pretty sure.

...At least, all of that had been the plan before finding out about this new Hiding ability of his.

Hidden items.

He could store stuff in his cloak now.

Small weapons in particular could be hidden in the sleeves of certain articles of clothing, which was why the ability had revealed itself only after pulling out a dagger, and not his sword. He couldn't put his sword up his sleeve, after all. Just small things.

And they could be drawn and retracted nearly instantly with the flick of a wrist.

...And that had changed everything.

They weren't stored in his hotbar. The hidden items were stored in the piece of clothing he was concealing them inside, not in his inventory. Which meant that he did not have to waste hotkey slots on them.

It was almost like having another, separate hotbar, specifically for interacting with the items he had hidden inside his cloak.

He could effectively extend his hotbar by a few extra slots now, if he put the hooded cloak he was wearing, the one he was concealing items in, itself, on his hotbar.

Then when he wanted a hidden weapon, he'd activate the gesture to put on the cloak, then activate the gesture to take the weapon or item he wanted from inside it.

There was an additional step involved there, but it was a small price to pay as far as he was concerned to extend his primary hotbar like that. Having to perform two gestures instead of one was a very small price to pay for the extra slots.

Though... he would need to get used to the new gestures that his new ability entailed now. When he was wearing his cloak, the 10 default gestures were already all mapped to different things so he was going to have to record and get used to a couple of new ones to specifically access the extra items in his cloak.

At the moment, and due to the low quality of his cloak, he could only store 2 items inside, one in each sleeve, and the default gestures to access them were wrist flicks. But the ability was intertwined with the Gesture Recording System and he could change them later.

...And of course, since his hidden items made use of that mechanic, he also needed to make that mental confirmation to the system to confirm that yes, he wanted to access his hidden items, or that yes, he wanted to store the item in his hand, back inside his cloak.

With those two additional gestures added to the 10 default ones that every player was given, he essentially had a bigger hotbar than the average player now. He had extended it with this new ability.

...And extending a hotbar like that would be so useful, he realized.

Ten primary slots was all you could ever have as far as he knew. And it was quite common that players ran out of space on the bar and wished that they had more slots.

There was a way to set up multiple hotbars using presets, but not in a way that could be used effectively during combat. There was a system that let you set up a hotbar that was very convenient for mixing potions, or doing some other non-combat skill, and saving it so you didn't have to reconstruct it every time you wanted to use a new hotbar setup for something else.

...But it took time to make this switch.

He couldn't make two hotbars and rapidly switch between them to essentially have 20 slots. Kayaba had probably thought that that would have made the game too easy and made it so that players couldn't do that.

It technically could be done in combat, but not very easily. He'd have to go deep into his menu and take something like 30 seconds fiddling around with the settings, though. All while needing someone else to cover him in the meantime.

But since that was basically the Holy Grail of combat, being able to freely swap out hotbars like that, he had every intention of doing some extensive experimentation on that particular mechanic later on.

Maybe there was a way to speed the process up somehow. Or if he learned how to go through those settings while he was running around and dodging attacks, then he could take a quick break from combat to do the switch.

But that all would come after he did the next experiment on his list.

He intended to sit down one day and go through every last setting in his menu, and understand what each of them did in detail.

There were thousands, and the single month of the beta test had not been enough time to figure it all out.

And with all of this skill guide description updating going on as he levelled himself up, he wouldn't be surprised at all if there were actually differences between this game, and the way things worked in the beta.

But he had had too much stuff on his plate in the meantime to actually go through everything like that.

...It was next on his list though.

But he didn't yet have enough items that he wanted hotkeyed to warrant that sort of experiment yet.

His current bar was good enough for now, but that would change later on in the game, no doubt.

...But with this new ability of his, he could still achieve a similar effect.

And it was likely that nobody else could yet, either. It was almost like a unique skill simply because of the fact that the game was still way too early to expect other players to have maxed out anything yet. Not without sacrificing a week of combat training like he had, anyways.

And the other high levelled players in the game wouldn't do that unless they had a reason to.

The people that were most like himself, the players that wanted to be the best, that needed to be the best, and there had to be a few of them out of all the 10,000 players in the game, would be grinding on monsters as often as possible and taking up combat oriented skills.

Hiding wasn't a useful skill for that. If you wanted to be the strongest, and needed to go to a place where you might need to hide from a monster, it was better to just take a party to help protect you and save that skill slot for something else.

You didn't need Hiding yet unless you were a solo player, or a player that was not intending to fight on the front lines.

And those types of players, the ones that weren't on the front line, were not on that cutting edge. They were not players that were truly dangerous to have to fight against, so Kirito could mostly gloss over them as potential threats to him.

Instead, most of the players that he had to worry about wouldn't take up Hiding until later on in the game, and they would take the conventional route to training. Making it so that their numbers were simply bigger than everyone else's.

That was generally considered to be the fastest known way to gain strength, which meant that the majority of people that could try to kill him… that would try to kill him in the future for being orange, would be hard hitters and incredibly strong in one on one combat. Potentially even stronger than he was in terms of numbers.

...But they would also miss all of these game changing niche abilities as a direct result of that.

Kirito himself, would have never discovered half of things that he had so far, if he hadn't been orange.

In terms of effectiveness in combat, Kirito was pretty sure that being forced to be orange on that first day had actually been an advantage overall.

...Because now, Kirito could imagine having multiple cloaks and robes on his primary hotbar, each full of their own hidden weapons and items.

He could have a potions cloak, full of hidden potions, that he'd equip if he were ever in a bind and needed one.

...Another one for throwing knives, if he ever decided to pick up that particular skill. One for daggers, and another one for crystals even, once he got to the floors where those were more common.

It wasn't a perfect solution, as only small weapons and items could be hidden inside a cloak, so he couldn't put his sword up his sleeve with that ability for example, but that was good enough.

Players usually had to place their different types of potions on that primary hotbar which used up a lot of slots. With this new Hiding ability though, he could put his potions in a hooded cloak, and simply put it on in the middle of a fight to access them.

He could even use varied healing items like that. The main reason why he had only ever used one type of healing item at any one time was because it had wasted too many slots to use any more than that.

Each unique item took up one slot on the bar, and that had to do with the way that items were stacked, in the inventory.

If you had 100 health potions that each healed 300 health for example, and they were all named the same thing, the system would classify them as 100 copies of a single item... rather than 100 different items.

And that distinction, subtle as it was... was critical.

You could map a gesture to that stack of 100 potions with the same name and repeatedly activate it until you ran out of those potions. If you had had instead, 50 health potions that healed 300 health each, and 50 that healed 500 health each, two different types of potions with different names in other words, then to have access to both of those types, you would need to use two slots on your bar.

Which was one slot too many.

...And this was why Kirito, during boss battles or for any other serious battle for that matter, always tried to use only one type of healing item, and just have a lot of that one type in his inventory.

To conserve those limited hotbar slots for other things you had to reduce the number of unique items that you made use of as much as possible, and this concept applied to all items, not just health potions.

Different types of swords, or throwing knives, or crystals… whatever you happen to have multiple copies of, if they had different names, they were different items, and would take up different hotbar slots if you wanted quick access to all of them.

And this concept was even harder to deal with when you included different item actions into the mix.

...Because sometimes, a single item had to take up multiple slots in the hotbar.

Again, his ring was a perfect example.

If he wanted to, he could set up one slot on his bar for teleporting, and the second for equipping and de-quipping it.

Both equipping and de-quipping used the same hotkey as it was a boolean action, meaning that if he had the ring on, it would be stored in his inventory upon activating the hotkey, and if he didn't have it on, it would be equipped.

...And he could also even have a third slot on his hotbar that utilized his ring, that dropped it on the ground when activated.

'Dropping' being a slightly misleading term here, as you could drop an item and still maintain control over it, as that player who had stabbed him back in the forest near Horunka Village had done with his sword, impaling Kirito and then summoning it back to his hand later on.

...But then there was the second way to 'drop' an item which relinquished your control over it, which meant that you could no longer summon it back to your hand like that, and anyone could pick it up and claim it as their own, as the system saw the item as unclaimed.

Anyone could pick it up in the meantime when it was in that unclaimed state, though the item would degrade over time like that, losing its durability until it eventually vanished entirely or was finally picked up by someone.

...And this had been how Kirito had managed to pick up all of that player's items after the guy had died from the Nepenthes.

When you died from an entity that did not have an inventory, all of your items dropped onto the ground, and immediately became unclaimed items that were free to be picked up by anyone passing by, which was exactly what Kirito had done back then.

When you die by an entity with an inventory however, usually only happening when you get PKed by someone, though there are certain monsters with strange inventory mechanics that also fit into that category, then your items were directly transferred over to their inventory, never touching the ground at all.

You did not have to pick up items dropped by whatever you happened to kill like in many other MMOs. They were automatically placed into your inventory. But despite this, players still referred to these instantly transferred items as 'dropped,' even though this was technically not the case.

...Which is what had happened to him back when he had PKed that crasher. Kirito had needed to look through his own inventory after that PK to see what he had gotten from the guy. The guy's stuff hadn't ever touched the ground.

But by 'dropping' an item, what was typically meant is deliberately relinquishing your control over the item and putting it into that unclaimed state that lets anyone else pick it up and claim ownership of it freely.

And that action could be assigned to a hotkey, but at the very least, you had to go through your menu to manage it.

So he could assign this as the third hotkey slot in this example that all involved the use of his Ring of Acid.

...He would never do this, as it was a gigantic waste of valuable slots, but it really showed just how limited 10 slots could actually be.

He did have to do something like this for his current hotbar setup though, where a single item took up more than one slot, though it actually served a practical purpose this time, unlike that example with his ring.

It was very rare that players ever found themselves in that sort of situation, but it had become necessary as a direct consequence of Kirito's new dual wielding techniques, and the fact that he needed to hide his use of them from others.

People would start asking questions if they saw him dual wielding like that after all. And rumours would start flying.

...And where there were rumours, there was Argo. And Kirito really didn't want to be the target of her web of spies.

Using multiple slots like that for individual items was also a consequence of his paranoia, and so he could get some peace of mind.

Since hotbar slots were so limited, in order to save every last one of them, what players would almost always do is carry around their primary weapon, in his case a sword, in a sheath of some sort. The main reason being that if it's in a sheathe, its not on the hotbar and the slot that would have been used for it is now free for other things.

...But Kirito also used a second primary weapon. He couldn't keep it in a second sheathe as that would rouse suspicion as to why he was carrying two swords around, so he kept it in a slot on his hotbar instead.

When that particular hotkey was activated, his second sword would be equipped to his left hand, which was his offhand. He used his right as his main sword hand whenever he was using only one sword at a time.

But he had imagined a case where if he were ever taken by surprise somehow, say for example, a player with a poisoned throwing knife hit him from behind one day, or one that paralysed him, or where for some reason he just couldn't actually reach the sword in his sheathe because he was incapacitated in some form, or even if his main sword broke in the middle of combat abruptly and unexpectedly... he also had a hotkey that would equip his offhand sword into his main hand.

That way he wouldn't be caught flat footed in those types of situations and he would still have options.

So he had two separate slots on his hotbar that were both assigned to his second sword. One of them put it into his left hand, and the other one put it into his right.

It served as both his offhand when he was dual wielding, and as his backup main hand sword if for some reason he were incapacitated or his main sword broke somehow.

He had also been randomly experimenting with the possibility of throwing his main hand sword as a sort of distraction, only to immediately have a backup ready to go with that second hotkey... though it was unlikely that he would ever need to do something like that, even if he could summon back his thrown sword immediately no matter how far away it went.

It also wouldn't do very much damage at all, even if it hit them. It would only be useful for the surprise factor.

...Because it certainly would come as a surprise to whoever he did that to. Almost all players stuck to just their main weapons after all, putting all of their effort and money into upgrading and upkeeping just that. Having a backup that was just as good, and ready to go on the hotbar was almost always seen as a waste of a slot unless it was a different type of weapon that was needed for some sort of weapon switch. But those types of situations were unbelievably rare.

But throwing items like that was also on his list of future experiments, as he had barely touched the idea at all so far...

Having two different swords taking up slots on the hotbar was incredibly wasteful, useless, and would be unexpected if he were to make use of it.

But it was kind of necessary for him. It wasn't a waste when you could use both at once.

But other players would almost always want to save every last slot they could spare for potions and other equipment.

Something that Kirito wouldn't have to do anymore. He could access all of these things from one slot, and that changed everything.

His potions could be stored in his cloak. Not his current cloak because it wasn't very high quality, only being able to store two items, but when he got a better one he could do that.

The only real downside to it was that, when he activated the gesture to put on his cloak, even though the game would equip it on to him almost instantly, if it were ever destroyed, he'd lose everything stored inside of it immediately.

The stuff wouldn't get destroyed, but everything that had been inside of it would be sent to his inventory all at once, and he would not have quick access to those items anymore as they would all become un-hotkeyed. Which in a combat situation, was identical to losing them.

...He did not have to switch out any armour though.

The cloaks that he could hide items in were special in the sense that he did not have to take off even a platebody to put one on. Cloaks fit over top of any armour that the player was wearing.

...But it was still a pretty bad idea to leave it on over top of his armour all the time when he was storing items in them during combat for obvious reasons. They were so easy to destroy. Instead, it was best to only have it on in the brief instants when he needed the items inside if he were in a truly dangerous battle.

But this method of extended storage was a game changer, as far as he was concerned.

Cloak switching.

...It would be a very powerful technique if he could get some better ones, too. The better quality cloaks could hold more items in them after all, at least, according to the information he had just finished reading in his Hiding skill menu, so he'd likely need to find a good tailor to get some in the future.


Kirito's mind was still reeling from all of these new implications with this ability, but since he still had stuff to do, he tried his best to allocate it all onto his list of future experiments.

He went through his menu and set up his first hotkey slot to now be dedicated to equipping and removing his one and only cloak.

And inside that cloak, he had decided that he would conceal a rare dagger that he had picked up a long time ago in his sleeve, and use it as an offhand weapon.

He had practiced every now and then using a sword in one hand and a dagger in the other while fighting, and it had taken some getting used to, but it did work.

He could move a little bit faster with the decreased weight he had to carry around, but he could not activate any dagger specific sword skills with it, because he didn't have the Dagger skill selected in his skill slots.

...He could use one handed sword skills with it though. As a dagger technically did count as one. It just wasn't very good at it when used as a substitute. It sacrificed range, was way weaker, and had a bunch of other problems.

But it worked, and it allowed him to dual wield with some subtlety. Not having to use a large and very noticeable second sword...

So if he were attacked by someone, he would use a single sword to defend himself, and quickly draw his dagger whenever he needed it, and quickly conceal it again whenever he didn't.

With this new ability, that dagger suddenly gained a lot of value to him. It was the main reason why he was going to be even using the dagger at all. It was small enough to be concealed in his cloak with that ability.

...And if things got really bad, he had a second sword in his hotbar ready to go, and could switch to it at any time.

There was only one other thing that he had to be careful about with this new ability. And that was that he had to take great care when switching weapons now.

If he wanted his dagger in his offhand, he'd have to put the cloak on, then activate the gesture to equip it.

But then, if he wanted a sword to be in that offhand slot for some reason, replacing that dagger he had just equipped, he would have to put the dagger away in his cloak manually first.

If instead, he simply activated the gesture to equip an offhand sword while he was still holding that dagger, the system would put that dagger into his inventory upon equipping the new weapon. It would not automatically know to put it back into his cloak. And that could mess up his weapon switches if he wasn't careful.

He wouldn't have it in his cloak if he messed up like that even once during a fight, and then he couldn't switch back to it until he fished it out of his inventory and hid it in his cloak again.

Which took time.

Time that he wouldn't have in combat.

The same thing worked with potions. If he had one hidden in his cloak, pulled it out, then decided he didn't need it yet, instead re-equipping his sword in that hand, the system would put that health potion in his inventory in exactly the same way it would with the dagger.

Not back in his cloak where he wanted it.

In general, if you had an item held in your hand, and you activated a hotkey to put a new weapon into that same hand, the system would automatically put that item you were holding away by storing it into the inventory.

But if you didn't want it in your inventory, there was no way to tell the system as far as he was aware, to instead put the item into the sleeve of his cloak.

Maybe he would find a way when he went through all of his settings in detail, but for now, he didn't know of one.

So it added this new layer to his fighting style. If he wanted to use his cloak for convenient weapon switches and to extend his hotbar, he had to carefully put items he wanted to store away, or else face the risk of his items ending up in the wrong spot, and becoming inaccessible until he dug through his inventory to reset everything.

Messing up his hotkey rotations could really set him back, in other words.

If he accidentally activated his cloak hotkey, while it was already on, it would unequip and be stored in his inventory. If he happened to have one of his hidden items in his hand at the time, he wouldn't have a place to store it in that moment until he re-equipped the cloak to hide the item in it again.

...He'd be even further set back if instead of re-equipping the cloak immediately in that same example, he replaced that dagger with a new weapon from his hotbar, as the dagger would then become inaccessible, buried in his inventory somewhere.

So there were a bunch of ways to screw up now simply by activating his hotkeys in the wrong order.

It mattered now, which order he activated things in. Something that wasn't the case before discovering this concealed weapons ability.

Though, to be fair, he wasn't sure how often he intended to do weapon switches at all, even if he theoretically could do them more easily now.

Very few players actually had hybrid combat styles like that. Almost everyone stuck to a single primary weapon all the time. It was really only the most elite of players, with a true understanding of monster weaknesses that did it. But even then, in almost all cases, it was just better to make a party where one of the members used the weapon you were wanting to switch to as their main weapon.

That's what Kirito had done himself in the beta. Any time a weapon switch was needed, he'd be in a party where someone else could do the job. Then all that they would need to do, is do a switch maneuver, where the player with the needed weapon would switch places with the player that was directly engaging the boss.

There had really only been one occasion where he had actually needed to do a weapon switch himself. And that involved pulling out a shield to stop a miniboss's special attack that couldn't be avoided by any other means. And it had also been a race at the time, where finding a party with a shield user would have taken too long.

All of his competitors, that same group of elite players that always competed with him to be the first to defeat various bosses, had been trying to rapidly form a party when that boss had been discovered, and Kirito, seeing the opportunity, had gone off on his own and had gotten there first.

Finding a shield user would have taken too long, so he had soloed the boss himself, using a trashy shield that he hadn't been able to sell off at the time. He hadn't needed any abilities with it or anything, so he hadn't needed to take up any other skill slots beforehand, and the stats on it had been good enough to defeat the boss with only a slight inconvenience due to its poor quality.

Switching weapons was really only useful when you were a solo player who couldn't find a party. Which, from the sounds of it, almost made it uniquely applicable for someone in Kirito's situation.

He hadn't needed to take up another weapon just yet though. Though he had experimented a little in the meantime as he fully expected that he would need to be able to do that in the future, but it remained to be seen how important it would actually be.

If he ended up soloing floor bosses then yeah, he'd definitely need weapon switches. A lot of them in fact. He'd probably be tribridding, using three different primary weapons.

It was simply unavoidable.

He really wasn't comfortable at the moment using anything other than his swords, but there were certain skills that other weapons provided that simply couldn't be replicated with them.

There were important tank abilities that only shields provided, long range abilities that polearms were perfect for, and crushing abilities that maces and warhammers were needed for, and some of the bosses that these abilities were useful at, could not be defeated unless those abilities were present in the party attacking it.

...Which meant that he'd need to unlock those abilities himself if he wanted to ever solo them, and he really wasn't too sure how he'd manage that at the moment.

That would take up so many skill slots to get everything he needed.

Everyone started with two of them. Two skill slots. The third was unlocked at level 6, the fourth at level 12, the fifth at 20, and then a new one every 10 levels after that.

He was level 16 at the moment, and had 4 skill slots. One handed sword, Mixing, Hiding, and Acrobatics.

Having tank abilities unlocked would be so useful, but that required the skill called Shield. If he ever wanted to last for long durations in combat against a boss, he'd need some of those damage reflection and damage nullification abilities that that skill provided as well, or else he'd end up needing way too many health potions.

...And he'd have to make use of those abilities in a weird way.

Typically, Shield was a skill used exclusively by Tanks, players that were specialized builds meant for attracting the boss's attention and 'tanking' the damage while the players more oriented for DPS attacked the boss from behind, or from the flanks.

But in order to do that, Tanks would need heavy amounts of armour, typically needing the Extended Weight Limit skill as well, which made them so unbelievably slow.

Kirito would need his speed to remain high and yet still have those abilities. And he was pretty sure he could do it theoretically, he had an idea for it anyways, but it would be so hard to pull off.

He'd basically need armour switches on his hotbar, making use of his newly freed up slots from his new item concealing ability. He'd be equipping whatever shield or piece of equipment he needed for only the brief instant that it was required, and then de-equipping it immediately afterwards so he could move around again.

How heavy the equipment a player had currently equipped, was what determined how much the player's speed was lowered when wearing or holding it, but if that equipment was in the inventory, it didn't count for that weight. So by rapidly switching like that, he'd only be slowed down in those moments of time where he was actually wearing it.

...Which bypassed his need for the Extended Weight Limit skill, which allowed a player to not be slowed down as much while wearing heavy armour. He could simply decide to not take up that skill and accept the fact that he couldn't move for those instants of time and simply de-equip everything when he wanted to move around again.

But while that bypassed one of the skills he would have otherwise needed, he still needed so many other skill slots, which required him to need his level to be absurdly high to unlock them all.

...And since he was already so over-leveled for the floor, the only way he could really level up any further was by fighting bosses.

There was an opportunity in the near future that would not ever show up again. A window that if he made it through, would make him the strongest in the game without a doubt, and would put him on the path to getting all of those extra slots.

And that window was the fact that they were all on the first floor.

The way that SAO was designed was that floor bosses increased in difficulty as you reached higher floors, which meant that since they were on the first floor at the moment, there would be no other time where the boss would be this easy to beat.

This was doubly so, since Kayaba would have probably anticipated the hesitance that the players were demonstrating at the moment, and would want to make that first boss as easy as possible to encourage everyone that his game was winnable.

But the true window of opportunity was that the boss gave out a fixed amount of experience upon its death, and that xp was then split up and shared amongst all players who had taken part in defeating it.

...Which meant that the fewer players there were, the more experience each of them would get. Each of the shares of XP in other words, would be collectively bigger the fewer players there were.

...But what if he soloed it?

...

Then he'd get all of that experience for himself.

Floor bosses were typically designed to be taken down by a raid party, which usually consisted of 7 parties of 6 players. That was the average anyways.

That meant that he'd get the experience of 42 players then, if he soloed the boss himself.

...And since it was almost guaranteed that every member of a raid party would level up upon defeating a floor boss, just how many times would he level up if he were alone?

Five levels? Maybe as many as 10?

It would put him on a new height of strength, and would make it completely useless to ever grind again, essentially.

If he were over leveled now... after soloing a floor boss, even the one on the first floor, and as a consequence, the weakest of all 100 of them in Aincrad, he would be way too powerful for anything on the second floor, or on the third, or the fourth…

He probably wouldn't see another challenge until floor 10 at least, if he pulled off. And that was assuming that he immediately stopped training until then in the meantime.

But most importantly, getting all of that experience and strength on the first floor, would open him up to the possibility of soloing the second floor boss, and so on.

That's what he meant by saying that this was a brief window of opportunity. If he didn't solo a floor boss by the third or fourth floor, they would start getting too difficult to ever have the chance to try again, and that window would close forever.

...But if he did it before then, then his level would be high enough to solo even more bosses later on, and it would also free up a huge portion of his time.

When you were over-leveled to such a degree that it was totally pointless to even try and grind anymore, those hours you would have spent training, were now open to doing other things.

He would be the strongest player, and wouldn't have to grind any more to stay on top. He could just focus on gathering the supplies and abilities needed to solo the next boss. And he could keep doing that over and over until the game's difficulty finally scaled to the point at which it was no longer possible for him or any player no matter how strong, to solo the bosses anymore.

But it all depended on getting off the ground first. He had to get that first huge lump of experience from soloing a floor boss, and there was no better time than the first floor, especially since he still had Illfang's attack patterns memorized from the beta test.

He had been there when the beta testers had taken it down that day, and he knew what to expect.

But it would still be difficult. Probably the hardest boss fight he had ever done in fact. Since floor bosses were designed to be taken down by 42 players, they could handle a lot of damage. And worse yet, they would heal a huge amount due to their passive regeneration.

If he couldn't damage them faster than they healed, then he'd never win. It would really turn into a numbers game in that respect.

He'd also need a lot of consumables.

Health potions in particular. He'd probably need to bring over a thousand of them for the fight. It could easily take 8 hours to finish it off when going solo even when considering his current strength. He'd easily be investing millions of Cor into his attempt if he made one.

He'd also need the Shield skill by then in all likelihood as well. Unless he figured something else out by then.

He needed to be able to avoid the boss's stuns, and that could really only be done with that skill. It was also possible to stun enemies with it as well, and that would work great on Illfang's minions. There were even skills with a shield that could heal the player in certain situations, reducing the amount that needed to be healed through the use of potions.

...But he'd need a new skill slot for it, and he might not have the levels for one by then.

To even stand a chance, he would need to become incredibly versatile as a player in terms of combat. Far more so than any player had probably ever managed in the game's entire history so far.

And it all stemmed from the fact that there were two main ways that a boss could be taken down. The conventional brute force way that a typical raid party did, where as long as each of the important party members was past the threshold referred to as: 'good enough', the boss would be defeated since there were just so many players in the encounter that could cover up any of the weaker players' mistakes.

...But then there was the second way that only the absolute pinnacle of players, the elite of the elite, could pull off.

And that way involved taking advantage of mechanics and weapon switches in a clever way that had likely not even been anticipated by the boss's creator.

Using the boss's stray attacks to take out its own minions, trapping it behind a pillar in such a way that it couldn't get around it to attack you, switching weapons and shields to outright change your entire role in the party from a tank to a DPS in the middle of a fight...

Advanced tactics that took incredibly precise timing that was not expected of players at such an early floor, and such that early floor bosses were essentially helpless against as a result.

It was possible to substitute quantity of players, for sheer skill. Possible to substitute even as many as 30 other players in the raid party, for just being really really good at the game.

...And parties that were advanced enough to do these things were so much fun to be in. Parties that were so skilled that actually defeating the boss was mostly secondary.

Instead they would often turn the whole affair into one giant challenge. Sometimes they would see if they could do the whole fight with no armour on, or without healing items of any kind. Or with really low quality weapons.

Kirito had actually had a permanent place on one of those types of parties back in the beta. He had been deemed skilled enough by the other members after soloing a particularly difficult miniboss to be offered the position, and he had taken them up on the offer.

They had rarely ever assembled all of their members at once, but on those occasions when they had, the stuff that they had been capable of had been absurd.

Even some of the admins of the old beta server had been floored.

Kayaba hadn't been alone back before turning this whole game into a giant hostage situation, he had only been the Development Director of the game. He had been the leader of a massive team of game developers that had all likely been taken by complete surprise at Kayaba's hostile takeover.

...But back then, during the beta, Kirito's nameless party had become one of the measuring sticks that those developers had used for some of their new content.

That tank that his party had had on board in particular, was ridiculous.

During some of the boss fights, just to see if he could, that man had gone into the fight with only a shield. No weapons, armour, or any other items of any kind. He had wanted to see if he could manage a literal perfect defence with just that, and nullify or deflect every bit of damage sent his way… and he had pulled it off.

Together, they had all been like an elite team of special forces that would assemble whenever one of the developers wanted to introduce a new boss, and they had been so skilled that everyone else would just sit back and watch.

Nobody had wanted to ruin it, and would not only sit back and watch as the six of them pulled off what an entire raid party couldn't, but their attempts at bosses would often be prioritized, where other players lined up to take on that same boss would let them through to the front of the line, just so they could watch the fight.

The sixth floor boss had been the only boss taken down by a single party of six in the game's history so far, because of them.

...It had taken 14 attempts, a couple of days straight of trial and error, and that final fight had itself taken 4 hours, but they had succeeded in the end with just the 6 of them.

Everyone had said it was impossible, but in that moment, they had truly immortalized themselves as the best party in the game in front of thousands of other players, game developers, and even those that had watched that final live stream across the internet.

Those had been the good old days…

The one thing each of them had had in common, the players with a permanent spot anyways, was that they had all had established reputations on their own as unbelievably strong players individually before ever assembling.

As cheesy as it sounded, it was honestly like one of those crossover cartoons where all of the strongest characters from multiple other stories would all get together to solve a new threat, before going their own ways afterwards.

..And on the occasions where they couldn't all make it, there were a dozen or so other players on a back up list that were also ridiculously good at the game that would be called in as substitutes.

But every time one of the permanent members showed up, they'd immediately get their spot back.

...Kirito really hoped that those guys were all still alive, or better yet, he hoped that they hadn't even signed on at all on the first day.

He hadn't gotten any friend requests from any of them yet either way so he couldn't be sure. The only people who had tried to contact him so far were Argo, and a bunch of random people he had never heard of. Likely people who knew of some of his exploits in the beta test, or had heard of his name from somewhere, but he had ignored them all, and they had eventually stopped messaging him. Everyone but Argo had anyways...

He could honestly say that those times that that party had all gathered had been the best times of his gaming life so far. They had been unstoppable.

None of them had truly known each other either, and there had been no strings attached. All of them had been solo players, and they had all understood that despite working together so well, that didn't mean they had to regularly contact each other, or even add each other as friends.

They had all understood that they would all just assemble, get the job done, and go their own ways.

Which had suited him just fine.

...And he had learned so much about the game from those battles.

He truly knew how those other party roles worked now. He had seen what a master Tank looked like, because he had fought alongside one back then, and he was fairly confident that he could replicate some of those advanced tactics he had seen the man do, with some practice.

He was fairly sure that with all of his experience, taking on Illfang should be at least theoretically possible to do solo. He would just have to turn his own character into a speed tank. A role that didn't technically exist, but that his old party's tank did all the time. That man had invented the role. Someone meant to tank all the damage without any loss in speed. And that meant manually switching heavy armour out as the fight was going on.

It involved standing on a metaphorical razor edge, where one mistake in switching at the wrong time meant instant death for the whole party. Where there was no room at all for errors. It took up too many hotbar slots having everything on the hotbar like that and it often sacrificed the health item hotkey, in fact. Making it impossible to heal yourself.

His party had only managed it because they had one of their members as a dedicated potion runner, another role that they had invented, who literally spent most of the fight tossing out all types of potions to the people who needed them, and carefully keeping track of when everyone's potion effects would expire so he could allocate new ones to the people that needed them.

...Which spared everyone else's slots, and gave their tank room on his bar to experiment with all of those armour and weapon switches.

Kirito needed to be able to do that. To do those types of switches. To be a speed tank. But more than that, he needed to perform that role, while also being a DPSer, which was what his specialty had always been. Dealing damage as quickly as possible while the tank drew the boss's attention.

He needed to do both of those roles at once somehow, by switching out his armour and weapons.

Normally, that couldn't even be done with just 10 hotkey slots, which was the main reason why their elite party had never even tried merging roles like that before, where one player did two things, but with this new weapon concealing ability, where all of his health potions, teleport crystals, anti-poisons, STR and AGI boosting potions, anti-paralysis potions, and everything of the like, all of his PVM gear, could all be essentially stored in a single hotbar slot in his cloak, he now had potentially 9 other slots to work with now.

He did need to get a better cloak for that first, but he intended to get one as soon as he could.

A full armour switch typically took up 5 slots if you included a helmet of some of kind, a shield made six, but that only left four other slots for everything else, which made it impossible to include everything important if you were trying to do a complete switch like that under normal conditions. This specific ability of his had been the missing link that his old party's tank had been missing.

'What could that man have done if he had had this ability back then?' Kirito wondered.

He would have turned into an absolute monster.

...But now, Kirito needed to turn into that himself. He wouldn't just be a speed tank, he'd be a speed tank DPSer. And with his spins thrown in, he could turn into something unbelievable in the future. Someone truly worthy of that permanent position in his old party.

He just needed to practice everything.

He needed to get all of those switches mastered, but before that, he needed the Shield skill… and an actual shield for that matter. His buckler wasn't anywhere near good enough.

...But before that, he needed to level up 4 more times to make it to level 20.

Which probably couldn't happen unless he took out a floor boss first…

Which he probably couldn't do without the Shield skill…

...

It was a maddening vicious cycle that he couldn't easily get out of.

The monsters on the rest of the floor were just too weak to grind on for the most part,

...He had a few other options though, that he was considering. There were other dungeons on the floor other than the labyrinth with the floor boss.

There were in fact, huge sections of the floor that were too high levelled for anyone to currently make use of. There were areas with level 40 monsters in them, for example. Known areas. The only reason Kirito hadn't gone there yet was because he hadn't wanted to risk leaving and giving up his Nepenthe Escape Velocity training method until he finally became too over levelled to use it.

...But it might be a good idea now to start fighting some of those higher levelled monsters. The problem was, that as far as he knew, there were no 'in between' monsters on the floor. Players could either fight level 1-10 monsters on most of the floor, or they could fight the level 35-45 monsters in the remaining sections.

And there was no easy way to transition between those two groups. Kirito was pretty sure that he wasn't strong enough to fight a level 40 monster at the moment very efficiently. He could probably kill one, but it would be like fighting a miniboss with a bad reward at the end, and he would take too much damage for it to be worth it. He simply needed a higher level before making use of them effectively.

But there were other dungeons on the floor with minibosses that gave out a lot of experience too, and he was currently throwing around the idea if he needed to kill some of them before making an attempt on the floor boss.

He had already killed one of them, that giant Nepenthe, and that had gotten him a lot of experience, but there were much harder bosses on the floor than that, that he'd need potions for.

That had barely qualified as a boss, honestly. Quest bosses were typically a tier lower than minibosses, which were themselves a couple of tiers lower than floor bosses.

...But there was also a risk that he would run into other parties of players if he decided to fight some of them.

And there was still a lot he had to do though in the meantime before any of that. He needed that info from Argo first before deciding anything.

What she had to say would ultimately determine his strategy going forward.


No other abilities had revealed themselves after going through the rest of his inventory.

Kirito finally stood up after confirming his hotbar setup, and after confirming that his dagger was in his cloak.

He was ready to return.

...

There may be a way for him to buy and sell things now, because of his new abilities.

It would be inconvenient, and he'd be overpaying because he had to go through a middle man, but he had come up with the idea after trying to think of ways to get the information he needed out of Argo without actually needing to see her face to face.

He could pay someone to do that for him, he had realized. And in the same fashion he might also be able to pay someone to buy and sell items for him. As long as he paid the right amount of Cor that is.

But he had a lot of Cor on him. And a lot of additional wealth stocked up in rare drops that he was incapable of using himself.

...And he would even be able to collect Nepenthe ovules from near his cave en mass, and sell them off at rare item prices for even more Cor. Nobody else in the game would know that the item was so easy to get for him, and he could get a lot of money that way because he would have no competition.

Not that he needed any more money really, but it was nice to see the stack of 3,000,000 Cor in his inventory, and having more could only help if he had to keep paying middle men to get things for him in the future.

3,000,000 Cor was more than he had any right to have on such an early floor. If he had grinded monsters normally, he'd probably only have a few hundred thousand by now, if that.

So... he was probably one of the richest players in the game.

...And injecting that money into the economy could help a lot of people.

He could probably also make a fortune by selling off Nepenthe ovules. He'd undercut whatever the going rate was, and make sure that as many people as possible got their hands on that Anneal Blade.

It was a bit of a win-win scenario, there.

The real price of that ovule, what it should be selling at anyways, was a lot less than what he expected it to be actually selling for right now. It was massively over inflated, and he could take advantage of that.

He would take advantage of that.

...And now that he had thought through all of this, and realized that he may have a way to buy and sell items now, he was really starting to regret burning through his old Anneal Blade completely. He might have been able to upgrade it if he hadn't, if he could have gotten another player to do it for him.


AN: Hopefully this wasn't as bad as the last version.