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: Thanks to DutchHorizon for being a beta for this chapter.
I'm trying out a new thing with this story. Anything that I have to say will be contained in an A/N within my most recent chapter. (This one.) All of my old A/N's are being deleted unless they are necessary for some reason, mostly due to the fact that I had almost 7 thousand words that weren't part of the actual story contributing to the word count. Feels a bit like false advertising to me.
Anyway, this chapter took some time due to whole ton of stuff that happened irl. School, work, etc. I won't go into the details, but it took a long time. I also am simultaneously writing multiple stories, some of which I may not ever even publish on this site, including some original stuff.
So, yeah. Sorry for the wait.
This chapter also ended up longer than 20 thousand words, so I decided to split it up.
Finally, since I am not a master of the canon universe, or the progressive novels, there is a decent chance that I will be sticking strictly to what is shown in the anime, and going from there. Meaning, I may decide in the future to take a completely different direction for all of the in-between floors that aren't showcased anywhere except in those progressive novels. Floors 2 and 3 for example. Which would make this story an AU.
I started this story with no knowledge of the progressive novels at all, and I've already made changes to the canon universe anyway, so it would require me to do a huge amount of reading that I frankly don't have the time to do if I want to keep every detail. So I'm going to just keep going forward with my original idea, and see where it goes. So don't be surprised in the future if you've read the progressive novels and notice something amiss in this story.
-LeviTamm
It was so annoying just how much he had to plan in advance to accomplish even basic things in this game.
He had to make sure that he and Timely did not go anywhere together, because he didn't want the guy to know about his cursor. So he could only ever meet with his assistant when they were both indoors, where all cursors were removed.
Kirito could never allow anyone to see him whenever he walked into or out of a building.
An observant player would immediately notice the fact that his cursor was acting weird in either of those situations.
Because of these seemingly arbitrary things that he was not able to do, he had to extensively plan around what should have been a simple meeting with Agil.
He had to know exactly where he and everyone else would be when it took place, so that he could know if he was vulnerable at any time.
Where would the meeting take place? Would it be outside? Even if it was inside, would there ever be a moment where they would have to walk outside for some reason?
He had had to come up with some backup excuses in case things went wrong.
If Timely had mentioned that Agil's shop was outdoors, he would have had to have used one of these excuses to basically say that the meeting had to happen somewhere else. And the excuse had to be good enough to not only make sense, but to not make it obvious that he was avoiding all outdoor interactions.
If they knew he was avoiding these places, they would ask why. And then he would have to scramble for an answer that was believable.
But this was not the end of the inconveniences he was suffering through.
It was good fortune that Agil owned a shop that was indoors. This meant that he didn't have to use any of his made up excuses. But it meant that he still had to travel there.
But he had had to use his ring to leave the market. He would have been followed out had he not.
This however, put him next to the Nepenthe boss nowhere near the city Agil's shop was in, and depleted his only ring charge for the day.
Now, luckily, he had planned for occasions like this in advance.
He had been deliberately killing the Nepenthe boss at the end of every day specifically to allow the possibility of using his ring twice.
And this was just another example of a plan he had needed to implement to get around a tiny detail in the game mechanics that shouldn't have posed a problem for any other player.
His ring could technically be used an infinite number of times per day, but it ran on a charge system. Every time he used it, he would have to kill the boss again to recharge it.
But the boss only spawned once per day.
And because of the difficulty of travelling to his cave from Horunka Village through the forest, he wanted to minimize the number of times he would have to run back and forth between them.
Now, recently, he had been using his ring once per day. He'd wake up, go into the city, do his business for the day, and then teleport back only when he was ready to stay there for the night.
This gave him two options for how he could do this though. And everything right down to the time of day he killed the Nepenthe boss had to be planned out in excruciating detail.
For example, let's say that he chose to use his ring in the evening to return to his cave, and then decide not to recharge it until the following morning for some reason.
He'd go to sleep, wake up, kill the boss, and then he'd have one ring charge for the day.
Sounds great, right?
He'd then be able to go about his day as normal, and he'd be able to use his ring to leave when he was ready to go to bed that evening.
Upon returning however, the boss Nepenthe would not respawn. It would still be dead since he had killed it that morning, and would not return until the next day.
And there was this subtle, but very important problem with doing it this way. And it could be illustrated by looking at the other option.
If instead, he went through his day, and teleported back to his cave one evening, and decided to kill the Nepenthe boss that very same evening to recharge his ring, he would be able to use his ring twice in one day if he ever needed to.
If he ever needed to go to his cave early one day, he'd use up his charge like normal. But then he'd still be able to kill the boss nepenthe immediately to recharge his ring since he hadn't killed it yet. This would allow him to use his ring yet again that very same day.
However, if he used it a second time like this, he would not be able to recharge it until the next day.
The boss respawn timer wasn't actually a timer. It spawned into the game a single time per day. It didn't actually matter at what time he started the boss encounter. As long as it hadn't been killed yet that day, it could be killed again.
This meant that in this example, he would not have to wait 24 hours. He could kill the boss twice in rapid succession, as long as the kills happened on seperate days.
He could kill the boss Nepenthe at 11:59 pm on one day, and kill it again at 12:00 am midnight, literally a single minute later if he wanted to. But this would ensure that he could not kill it again until at least midnight the next day, which would not happen for another 24 hours.
And this was the crucial part of the whole thing.
By deliberately leaving the Nepenthe boss alive until the evening of every day the way he had all this time, he left himself open to the possibility of killing it more than one time in rapid succession if he ever needed to.
He could kill it in the evening, and then again at midnight if he needed to.
And conversely, if he instead killed the boss every morning, he would never be able to do this. He would have had to wait for the next morning every single time he needed a new charge for his ring. And this would always take about 24 hours. There was no opportunity for killing it twice in a row in the event of an emergency.
Kirito had needed to plan even these sorts of things out because of his cursor. All of these tiny subtle details always seemed to come into play whenever he needed to do anything.
But he was thankful that he had, because in this case, this plan of his actually mattered.
He had actually just benefited specifically from the fact that he always killed the boss in the evening, instead of in the morning.
He had used his ring to escape from the player market, quickly killed the boss, and got a new charge on his ring.
So now he could go meet Timely Advice at Agil's, and would be able to leave again later on by teleporting.
He'd just have to walk there one time through the forest.
Because after this meeting occurred, he would be able to safely use his ring again and then kill the Nepenthe boss just after midnight to give himself another charge for the next day.
But then at some point, he'd have to go at least a full 24 hours without being able to use his ring at all in order to sort of reset this strategy of his.
Since he'd kill it in the morning, if he wanted to reset everything, he'd have to go a full 24 hours without using a ring charge, and then another 20 or so hours on top of that before killing the boss again. Killing it in the evening in preparation for another occasion where using his ring two times in a single day was necessary.
Now, technically, he didn't really need to use his ring twice today, but it would just make things so much easier. He absolutely hated having to trudge his way through those thick trees all the time. Even having to do it once every morning was more than enough to annoy him.
It was just such a time waster.
But he had a plan now, and it was pretty clear what he needed to do.
He'd arrive at Agil's with his camouflage active, ensure that Timely and Agil were already there, check to make sure that the coast was clear, enter the building without being spotted, and then deactivate his camoflauge when nobody was looking in his direction.
And then somehow make it look like he hadn't done anything suspicious.
"So you're this merchant I've been hearing so much about?" Agil asked him, as the meeting began.
Kirito had gotten into the building easily enough, and everything had gone according to plan so far.
"Something like that," he replied.
"I gotta say. You've been making a lot of waves."
"I'm aware. Though hopefully, things will go a little more smoothly after this meeting."
"Alright. Well let's get right down to it then. What is it specifically that you're after?"
"I have better things to do then sit around in front of a shop all day. Sure I'm making some decent money, but I have other priorities."
"That's interesting. So you're not a merchant? What might those priorities be?"
"Sorry. I'm afraid those are things I don't intend to speak about with anyone."
"Fair enough. I suppose I should have guessed something like that given the fact that you're playing anonymously."
That was one of the great things about being an anonymous player. You could be super secretive about what you were doing, and what your goals were, and nobody would think of it as suspicious. In fact, it would be weird if he didn't act like that.
So nobody would be accusing him of being orange based on just that.
"So how do you intend to do this then?" Agil asked.
"The usual. I'm sure you've made deals just like it before. I want to set up a contract between you and my assistant Timely Advice here, as a middleman," Kirito explained as he gestured to the player standing next to him. "I give the ovules to him, he gives them to you, you sell them, give the profits back to Timely, who will drop trade them back to me."
"Both of you will naturally get a cut."
There was no way as far as he knew, to set up an anonymous contract. So the extra step here with his assistant was necessary if he wanted to keep his identity hidden.
This was the main reason why people like Timely Advice were needed at all. Anonymous players had to work around the system by getting other people to buy and sell items for them.
It was just another one of those inconveniences that he'd have to live with.
These types of contracts were pretty straightforward.
When in place, trades could happen over long distances, and could even be automated so long as the person who had written it up had the specific skills that Agil did.
They also prevented players from needing to have to make these trades in person.
So, Timely Advice could, at any moment, simply drag and drop any ovule he ever got his hands on into a special menu no matter where he was in the game, and Agil would receive it. And the same worked for the profits that Agil would be sending back.
And it was all overseen by the system itself, to make it impossible for either player to cheat.
"And you are okay with this?" Agil directed his question at Timely Advice.
"Yeah. Why wouldn't I be? I've done this before."
"It's just that I'm surprised is all. Mister merchant here is putting you in a position where you can completely screw him over at any time. If he dumps a bunch of ovules on you, and you just turn around and run with them, that's a lot of money that you'd get away with."
"How is that different from any other deal I've made?" Timely asked. "It's my job to be a middleman for trades like this. I'd never turn and run. Since everyone knows me, I'd never be able to get away with something like that."
"This time it's different, though," Agil replied. "I can safely say that this deal will generate more cor than any other contract made in the game so far by a huge margin. You absolutely could get away with it since you'd have enough money after to live out the rest of your time in this game without ever having to raise a finger. Sure you'd have to be careful about it, but a million cor can last a long time if you carefully budget it out over a few years. But you'd never have to deal with anyone else ever again, so a ruined reputation wouldn't actually set you back all that much."
"I have a way to get more ovules, though," Kirito explained. "Say I give him 200 ovules and he runs off with them. I'll just go and get another 200 and undercut whatever he tries to sell his stolen ones for until he runs out. I actually don't have very many on me at any one time. I have to get more every morning. It's not like I have thousands of them that I'm going to be giving him in a single trade. This will be a longer term arrangement where I will be giving him more and more as time goes on."
"Where can you possibly get so many of those things from?" Agil asked.
"You don't actually expect me to answer that, do you?"
"No, I guess not."
"As far as I know, I'm the only one who has an endless source of them," Kirito continued. "So it wouldn't even really matter to me at all if you did try something like that, Timely. Not that I think you would or anything."
"I definitely wouldn't," Timely said. "But anyways, why are we even having this conversation at all, Agil? As far as I can tell, you aren't the final arbiter on whether or not this deal goes through or not. We don't need your permission. If you have a problem with it, we'll just find someone else who doesn't."
"Alright, alright, fine. Sorry," Agil sheepishly apologized. "I just wanted to make sure you were all aware of the risks is all."
"I appreciate that," Kirito replied. "But we wouldn't be doing this if the risks were insurmountable. I've thought them through pretty extensively already. I've had this deal in mind for a while now."
And at some point, Kirito was going to have to start taking risks trusting other people with his money. Trying to do absolutely everything in the game himself wasted so much time. His wild goose chase across the entire floor for a simple bar glass had proven that.
"Alrighty, then. I guess we should get this thing set up. How do you want to do it?" Agil asked.
"You should have full control over the price, Agil," Timely explained. "We're pretty sure it will start falling pretty rapidly once more people get their hands on the Anneal Blade. So since you will be the one doing all of the selling, you would be in the best position to know what the price should be."
"I've been making… what?" Timely thought aloud. "300 cor per trade currently? What does that work out to as a percentage? We've been selling them at 14,000."
Kirito tried to run the numbers in his head.
300 divided by 14,000.
...But he'd have to multiply by 100 after to convert to percent.
So it'd actually all simplify to 15 / 7 ... percent, once he combined everything and reduced the fraction.
Or rather, 2 + 1/7 as a mixed number.
...Which was something he actually knew how to calculate in his head.
He could just put down the 2, and then slap on the decimal expansion for 1/7 right after to get-
"Something like 2.1 percent, I think," he concluded after about two seconds of thought. Pretending to be far more uncertain than he actually was.
Realistically however, he knew the answer to millions of decimal places. As many as he wanted, actually.
2.1428571… percent.
He could easily rattle off a bunch more digits since they repeated in a predictable way.
He had gotten so bored once in one of his math classes, that memorizing the decimal expansions of all the common fractions had seemed like a good idea at the time. So he was quite familiar with fractions involving 7.
There were super simple tricks to memorize all of them.
"Yeah, that sounds about right," Agil replied, punching in the numbers himself on his menu.
Calculators did exist in SAO, but annoyingly, not everyone could use them. Tools like those could only be accessed if you picked up certain skills related to owning businesses, or being a merchant. And even then, the calculators involved were just simple number crunchers.
There was probably a way to get access to some more advanced software that allowed the creation of spreadsheets, but Kirito wasn't actually sure about that. It probably involved maxing out a merchant skill, or something, if there was.
So he had been having to rely on his slightly above average mental math abilities all this time. Along with SAO's notepad feature that all players could access, and some simple algebra for most of the calculations he had needed to perform since the game began.
"Want to use the same rate with this contract?" Agil asked.
"Sure," Timely agreed. "Two percent is pretty much the standard for expensive items like this, anyways."
"Is that right?" Kirito asked. "That feels low to me."
"It is actually pretty low if you want to get technical. Especially if you try to compare it to anything in the real world, but the important thing to remember is that when this contract is in place, everything is pretty much automated by the system. I'll be getting that money simply for trading with Agil every now and then, and of course, drop trading with you. It requires almost no work."
"I actually already have a few other contracts with other clients like you, and I'm getting crazy amounts of money passively from them since they all add up," Timely continued. "So 2% is actually pretty reasonable. I don't have to do anything and the money just shows up in my inventory whenever something sells."
"That sounds like a pretty good deal, actually," Kirito replied.
And besides. Who was he to complain if Timely wasn't going to be taking as much of his money as he had originally expected?
"Oh, absolutely," Timely agreed. "I would definitely recommend it. I've found a way to monetize anonymous players."
Kirito grinned. His helper was such a greedy bastard.
"And what's the standard for merchants?" Kirito asked.
It was clear that the two other players he was currently with knew a lot more about these sorts of things than he did. And they didn't seem like the type of people to try to rip him off. So he'd defer to them.
"It varies a lot depending on the contract," Timely explained. "But since Agil is going to be controlling the price and doing most of the work, something like 20 percent is probably appropriate."
"Yeah, I'll take 20," Agil agreed.
"Really?" Kirito couldn't help but ask. "That also seems low to me."
"Why's that?" Agil replied.
"You're the one dealing with the customers right? That's pretty much all the work," Kirito explained. "You have to sit here in your shop for huge amounts of time while we run off doing other things."
Kirito had honestly thought that he'd be paying at least 50% to the man. So he was genuinely surprised that the number was so low.
Agil laughed.
"That's exactly what a merchant is."
Well then. If that wasn't the most depressing thing Kirito had heard all day, he didn't know what was.
"Huh. I've never heard an entire profession get reduced to something so menial, before," Kirito replied.
Especially by a merchant.
"It's not so bad," Agil said. "Especially when I spend a lot of time meeting people like yourself, as well. Working my own hours isn't such a bad deal either."
"I guess not. It certainly isn't what I'd consider a good time, though."
It only took a few more minutes for Agil to finish setting up the contract. When they were all finished, and had all agreed on all the details, Kirito and Timely walked over towards the main room of the building after a quick goodbye to Agil.
They had tested everything out, and everything worked as expected. This would take a massive burden off of Kirito's shoulders, and would allow him to actually play the game again.
He now had a source of income, and two people to help him spend it.
Opening up his inventory, Kirito then drop-traded 200 ovules to his assistant to sell for the rest of the evening, and for next day.
He figured that that would probably be enough for the first test of the contract.
"So I've got another deal for you if you're interested," Kirito offered his assistant, as they stood in the doorway of Agil's shop after the meeting concluded.
They were still technically inside the building, so the knowledge of Kirito's cursor was still safe.
"Is that right?" Timely asked, clearly interested.
"Yeah. I need someone to buy some things from the player market. Same setup work for you?"
Since not everyone allowed drop trades when they were selling items, and they were so inconvenient for buying in bulk, he needed to use Timely as a middleman again.
His assistant would buy them conventionally, and then sell them to him at a markup.
"Yeah," Timely agreed. "2% per trade?"
"Yeah."
"Alright. What do you need?"
"Here's a list."
Kirito quickly opened his menu and gave Timely a carefully prepared list containing all of the items he expected to need for his boss fight against Illfang.
"Holy…!"
Timely looked at Kirito in disbelief after seeing it.
It was a pretty lengthy list, after all.
"1,000 health potions? 10 fully upgraded Anneal Blades? 1,000 full sets of combat potions? Are you crazy? Are you trying to build an army or something?"
That wasn't entirely inaccurate.
The boss fight would take hours. Easily. And while he had managed to keep his first Anneal Blade for a very long time without ever needing to maintain or repair it, this was entirely due to the fact that he had been fighting against Nepenthes with it at the time. Monsters that did not use metal tools, weapons, or have any hardened armour, or shell.
All of those things, when present in an enemy, would drastically increase the rate at which a player's weapons would get damaged throughout the battle.
And he was planning on fighting against a floor boss now. One with a giant cleaver that would tear his equipment to pieces with ease every single time he parried or otherwise clashed blades.
This effect usually was too small to matter when in a large raid group with tons of other players, but that was only because the duration of the fight was so short in those cases.
And that was the thing that was making this plan of his so unbelievably costly. The longer the fight went on, the more pronounced this effect would be, of his equipment degrading. It got worse and worse as the duration of the fight increased, until it was so bad that a single weapon would no longer be enough to last.
For this reason, since he couldn't repair his equipment mid-fight, and because he would be dealing all of the damage himself, a single sword, even if it were an Anneal blade with good durability, would likely not be enough to get him through the entire battle.
So he would have to rotate them out. Every time one of his swords was nearly broken, he'd have to switch it out with a different one. He didn't want to completely destroy his weapons in the off-chance that he would find a way to repair them in the future.
He had learned his lesson from losing his first Anneal Blade like this.
This degradation effect was also true for any armour he happened to have on. However, since he expected to dodge most attacks from the boss, his armour would not take nearly the same amount of damage as his weapons would. Since his armour would not be taking direct impacts from anything metallic at all unless he did something wrong.
Honestly, if he burned through the set of armour he intended to use, he would have taken so much damage that he'd either be dead, or would have to teleport out and call off the attempt as a failure.
So he didn't really need too many sets of armour.
Then there was the matter of his health to deal with. His HP.
Because he would be alone, he would need roughly the same amount of HP as the boss in total at the start of the fight. Obviously, his HP bar was too small to compete with a floor boss normally, but this was why he wanted so many health potions.
He could count these potions as a sort of reservoir of HP that effectively extended his own bar. So he wanted this reservoir to roughly equal the amount of damage he expected to be dealing throughout the fight.
Which was significantly greater than the Boss's total HP, actually. Since he also had to account for, in these calculations, the amount of HP the boss would regenerate passively over an 8 hour period.
But he wanted enough health to give himself a very large margin of error.
He expected to screw up a lot during the fight due to stupid mistakes. There were differences between this game and the beta, after all, so he wanted a very large margin of error to account for any surprises.
And even though he could probably avoid most direct hits with his natural speed and acrobatic ability, that wasn't the only source of damage he would be taking.
It was the AOE.
The boss's weapons were so large that whenever they impacted an area near where he was standing, Kirito would be slightly damaged from the shockwave.
It wouldn't be much, and when in a raid party of players, the fight was usually over fast enough for this sort of damage to be ignored, but it would build up over time even if he dodged everything else.
There was no doubt about it. He had estimated that he would be taking at minimum, 100 thousand points of damage before it was over no matter what he did just because of all of this slight damage build up.
For reference, a new player at level 1 started with 250 HP.
And this estimate was in the ideal, perfect scenario where he dodged everything else the boss threw his way. The theoretical lower limit of damage he expected to take given his current capabilities.
1,000 health potions was enough to cover well over 10 times that amount of damage.
It probably was a bit overkill. Especially since he still had his emergency stache in his inventory as well. But the potions he was getting Timely to buy for him were top of the line. The best currently available.
The kind that he should have the ability to make himself with his current Mixing level. But he didn't intend to start seriously looking into making his own until after Illfang was defeated. Mostly due to lack of time.
Then of course, he needed 1,000 sets of combat potions.
There were a ton of varieties of potions that most players could take just before any kind of serious confrontation.
These included defence boosters, STR and AGI enhancers, damage enhancers, anti paralytics, anti poisons, luck potions, regen potions, and a whole bunch of others.
And then depending on the planned confrontation, players would typically try to calculate what the optimal ratio between the types would be, and even whether or not certain potions were even required at all.
For example, you didn't need as many anti poisons as you did STR potions in most cases.
Since you only needed an anti poison if you expected to be poisoned, whereas you needed to be under the effects of an STR potion basically throughout the entire duration of the fight regardless of what you were fighting. So you would use more of those.
And whatever this ratio ended up being at the end, 1 set of potions would be that ratio.
So, as an example, if you had 5 STR for every 1 AGI and 2 anti poisons, and needed no other potions, you would simply multiply each number in this ratio by the number of 'sets' that you wanted to get the total number.
In any case, Kirito had put a good deal of thought into the types of potions he needed, and the ratio of each, and had put it on that list he had just given to his assistant.
He was prioritizing DPS above everything. Though his setup would probably seem a bit unusual to any other elite player since he was pushing so hard into AGI boosts.
STR potions were almost universally considered more important in a boss battle, but due to Kirito's unique fighting style, he was obviously an exception.
An AGI boost would drastically increase the ease with which he could pull off his spins.
Which naturally, would allow him to increase the speed of the tip of his sword during his attacks.
...Which, due to the way the game's physics engine worked, actually provided a greater boost to his damage output than a simple STR boost would.
Kinetic energy equalled (1 / 2) m*v^2 after all. Which meant that the energy of an impact increased faster by scaling up the speed of the strike, when compared to increasing the mass of the weapon.
And since STR potions were analogous to increasing the mass of a player's sword, the conclusion was pretty much inescapable.
AGI provided a greater damage boost, but only when taking advantage of the game's physics engine the way Kirito did with his spins. If you were just fighting normally, it probably wouldn't help you very much at all.
Though to be fair, there was a bit of an asterisk there. This idea greatly oversimplified all the variables involved.
The full truth was much more complicated than this. But the idea itself still held true in principle.
However, since most players fought bosses in parties, each with assigned objectives, there wasn't usually a whole lot of running and flipping across the boss room going on. People were usually far more static when compared to what he would be doing, which meant that nobody else really benefited the way he did when taking an AGI booster.
Which was why most didn't, and why people saw STR as more important
There was also the added effect of possibly putting other people in danger by dodging an attack from a floor boss.
When you were alone, dodging was a pretty good idea.
But when you were in a party, it was usually the case that you had someone behind you that would be completely screwed over if you chose to jump out of the way of an attack instead of tanking it, or blocking it.
So when you were in a raid party, boosting STR was generally more important.
But when you were a solo player with Kirito's specific fighting style, with nobody else to worry about, AGI was more important.
So his list of potions reflected these sorts of situations.
He had put a lot of thought into it.
He would be boosting both either way, but most other players would see that as a waste of money. Instead deciding to just pick one. It doubled supply costs going both directions, after all.
And then of course, there was still the matter of the potion durations to take into account. And this also played a key role in the seemingly ridiculous number he was purchasing.
Generally, potions seemed to come in 2 main categories.
Brushing past most of the details, potions were usually either long lasting, with moderate effects, or they had very short durations, with strong effects.
Obviously, since the fight was a numbers game, and Kirito was filthy rich, he was going for the strongest, most expensive potions he could get his hands on to hopefully make the fight as short as possible.
Which meant he would need to buy a lot more of them since each potion had so short of an effect.
And since he needed to be under all of these effects throughout the entire fight, the short durations meant he would need to buy more potions in total then he would have needed to if he had instead gone the 'poor man's route,' of buying the longer duration potions.
It was actually a pretty interesting and counterintuitive concept.
It was often cheaper in the long run to buy expensive, high quality potions, even when you could get by with bargain bin, long lasting potions just as easily. Mostly due to the fact that, while you would spend more on supplies, it would grant you a higher DPS, which meant the fight would end faster. Which meant you would not need to buy as many health potions, and wouldn't have to do as much equipment maintenance after.
But at the end of all of these internal debates with himself, Kirito had ultimately decided on what he believed to be the optimal potion setup for his fighting style.
And upon scaling up each set of potions to what he expected to be the duration of the fight with Illfang, and adding a good chunk extra to account for any error, he had come up with a nice even number, of 1,000 sets of potions for the fight.
It was going to be pretty rough, having to drink so many potions. He'd probably be burning through a full set every 30 seconds or so. So he'd have to constantly keep an eye on his potion cooldown timer and come with a solid potion rotation to ensure he never lost any of his buffs.
Back in the beta, this had been why the elite party he had participated in every now and then had had a dedicated potion runner. Someone who would keep track of all of this without forcing the front liners to have to.
Things were just so much simpler when you had a party member that knew exactly what potion you needed, just as the buff it would renew was about to expire. Especially when the potion runner was a damn good one. Someone who actually knew what they were doing and had extensively practiced their role.
And this was also why most players opted for the moderate effect potions that had a longer duration.
Having to account for all of these details while in the middle of a fight was challenging. So most elected not to. If you had potion durations of two minutes or more, you barely ever had to renew the effect and could focus on the fight at hand instead. Which was so much easier than dividing your focus to keep up with the rapid decline of the stronger potion effects.
But to get to the absolute pinnacle of DPS, it was necessary to do.
His old party leader had created all sorts of spreadsheets back during the beta to investigate this effect. To compare the loss of DPS from losing one party member outright to this borderline administrative role, in order to allow all other party members to always be under the effects of the best potions available, even if they only had impractical '30 seconds or less,' durations on them.
And it checked out. He had seen the numbers himself, and had noticed a significant increase in his party's overall DPS after inventing and implementing this potion runner role.
They had invented this strategy. And few had been able to replicate it since it was so precisely choreographed.
It was an incredibly complicated strategy that only truly veteran players could keep up with.
And now he would be expected to do all of this himself.
He needed to squeeze out every last drop of DPS that he could because of the boss's passive regeneration that he'd constantly be battling with. And so this was probably the only way to go about it.
If he couldn't damage the boss faster than it healed, he would never be able to win.
But with all that said, it still remained to be seen if Kirito could actually keep up with all of this in an actual boss battle, while he was also performing every other role in the party himself.
To be his own potion runner.
In theory he should be able to do it with all of the newly freed up slots on his hotbar from the abilities he had unlocked with his Hiding skill, but the real test would come when he finally got around to fighting the floor boss on his own.
He was currently working on an idea that would allow him to use that cloak switching idea he had come with a while ago to make all of this easier, but he still needed to work out the details on it yet. Something he intended to do that night just before he went to bed.
But the idea itself looked promising.
It may even be possible for him to store all of his potions in a pair of high quality cloaks, maintain the ability to refill said cloaks as he emptied them out of supplies during the battle, and switch cloaks again using only 2 or 3 total hotbar slots.
But he would have to maintain a razor sharp focus for potentially hours on end, either way. And he'd be spending a huge portion of that focus on the logistics of keeping up with all of his potion timers and cloak switches instead of the actual fight itself.
But he was certainly going to try it out.
At the very least, he needed to know if this idea was viable as a solo player or not.
"Or something," Kirito replied.
There was no way he intended to explain any of the reasons why he was buying so many items out loud.
"I… won't be able to get all of this in one day."
"I understand. I'll give you a huge bonus if you get it all to me before the boss meeting though."
"Before the boss meeting? That's on the second. It's the 30th now, though it won't be for long since it's evening already. So that gives me… what? A day and half? 2 days then? How huge a bonus are we talking?"
Kirito quickly ran the numbers in his head.
He could afford to give the guy a million cor.
He had to beat that boss before anyone else could. It could very well cost him his life if he couldn't. He wouldn't be able to pull ahead of the rest of the player base with that huge lump of experience if he failed. And he wouldn't be able to become strong enough to solo other bosses in the future.
He had to succeed. A million was worth it.
"A million if you get it to me by tomorrow morning. Say, before noon."
"A million…" Timely replied, astonished. "That's a lot of money."
"It is. That's in addition to the 2% rate as well, just to be clear."
…
"I can definitely try, but that'll be cutting it pretty close."
"I'll give you half that if you get it all to me by midnight tomorrow."
Kirito really needed those items.
"That's an enticing offer. I'll do what I can. There's a bit of a problem though. I don't have the money to afford all of that. I'm pretty well off, but not that well off."
Kirito understood. Timely would need a large starting pool of cor to buy everything with.
"Then take this."
Kirito gave him a bag full of a million cor.
It was a pretty big bag.
Thankfully however, most of the details were handled by the system.
There were different denominations of cor, just like there were different denominations for money in the real world. Different coins that were worth different amounts.
So whenever a player materialized a bag of cor into the game, the system would automatically convert it all into the highest denomination coins that it could, in order to minimize the mass of the bag that spawned.
The system also allowed the bag holding the coins to be materialized for free.
It was a strange item, the Bag of Cor. It could be spawned into the game at no cost by any player simply by withdrawing any amount of cor from the inventory and converting it into a physical item.
And then, to prevent a player from spawning in an infinite number of bags by pulling out one coin at a time for example, the cor bag would degrade instantly upon someone else picking it up. Destroying it.
There was also a limit of just one bag allowed per player at one time. Mostly to prevent anyone from making a million cor bags full of just one cor each and flooding the game with a ridiculous amount of bags.
And then any player could tap on any bag of cor, and see a menu screen indicating exactly how much was inside. Even if the money itself didn't belong to them.
"Are you serious?" Timely asked. "You're just going to give this to me?"
"Yeah," Kirito said. "Use it to buy the stuff on that list. I don't care if you have to use every last bit of it, either. I don't care really, how much this ends up costing me in the end. Overpay if you have to. Bribe other players if you need to. Just get me the items on that list. If you run out of money, I'll give you more when we meet up again this evening to see how far along you are."
It may have been a risk to just hand over a million Cor to him just like that, as he could literally just turn around and run with it, but this also served an important purpose.
If his assistant instead used the money as Kirito had told him to, it would essentially prove that Timely was someone he could trust with his money once and for all.
And it would also show his assistant that there was a high chance of even more lucrative deals in the future.
It was a risk that Kirito would have to take eventually. So why not just get it over with now?
"I understand."
"If this works out, I have another few potential deals in mind for the future as well. You know. If you're interested in that sort of thing."
Kirito had a pretty good idea what the other player's response would be, though.
"I think you already know my answer to that. But yeah, alright. I'll see you later then."
"Good luck. I'll meet you at the market at about 10pm tonight."
"Cool."
Kirito made sure that Timely left Agil's shop first in order to prevent the possibility of anyone noticing his still missing cursor as he left the building himself.
Kirito ended up having a little bit of an internal debate with himself after that.
What should he do in the meantime while his assistant is picking up all of that equipment?
He could go back to his cave to go grind some more Nepenthes. Make a little more progress towards that next ring upgrade. But that would involve having to do a lot of running that he wasn't looking forward to. He'd have to come back later, too.
Or he could go and look for the boss room. He did have to find it at some point within the next two days if he wanted to be done before the rest of the players had the meeting. But he still had all of tomorrow for that.
It was a tricky situation. He had no way of knowing if the other players had found the boss room yet. And he couldn't know this until that boss meeting happened.
They had either found it, or they hadn't. So he had to assume the worst case scenario when preparing his timeline.
He had to assume that the boss meeting at noon in a little less than two days would involve revealing the location of the room, and an instant mobilization of all front line players to immediately go out and clear it.
If the meeting happened like that, and everyone moved as quickly as possible, Kirito estimated that they would all be grouped up in front of the boss room, prepared to fight, about two hours after the meeting.
Realistically, since many of the front line players that would be involved in a raid like this would be new and inexperienced, it was far more likely that they would take a few hours to prepare before setting out, but Kirito had to assume that they would move as quickly as possible to give himself the largest margin of error that he could.
He did not want to be interrupted as he was fighting the boss.
It made him hope that the feature that existed in the beta was in this game as well. In the beta, there had been a switch on the inside of the boss room that would lock the instance. Meaning, it would prevent any other player from crashing a party's attempt at defeating the boss. If you were in a party, and wanted to fight the boss alone without any possibility of interference, you could enter the room, hit the switch, and lock yourself inside.
Doing so would make it impossible to leave however, unless you had a teleport crystal on you.
If the switch wasn't flipped like this, then anyone could enter or leave the room freely. Parties could jump into the fight when the boss was almost dead, and there had even been cases of players trying to snipe the last attack bonus like this. By lying in wait until the boss had barely any health left, before suddenly running into the room to try and steal the kill.
In this version of the game, Kirito was pretty sure that this feature wouldn't be used very often though. It was probably seen as a good thing that reinforcements could freely arrive in the middle of a boss battle now because everyone's lives were at stake.
Of course, like most things, Kirito was an exception here as well.
Nothing would suck worse than spending 8 hours whittling down the boss's health only to get crashed during the final minutes by a raid party of players.
Everyone would know of his attempt to solo the boss, and a ton of attention would be immediately placed on him.
So he had to finish the fight before the other players arrived.
But even if that switch did exist to lock the instance, it would still be problematic if the raid party stumbled upon the boss room while he was fighting and found it locked.
They would immediately know that someone was fighting the boss if this happened. This, while not as bad as someone watching him fight the boss himself, was still pretty bad.
In this case, he would be able to hide behind another layer of plausible deniability, though. If they were locked out, they wouldn't be able to tell that he had specifically soloed the boss, if he ended up winning in the end.
When the doors opened after he won in this scenario, and they walked into the empty room, they would likely assume that a secret party of players had taken it down. They wouldn't suddenly start assuming that a single player had done it. This would only happen if his battle was actually seen by someone.
But the ideal situation was obviously that this instance locking switch existed, that he used it, and that he finished his fight with Illfang before the boss meeting even happened.
Finishing up while all the players were in Tolbana having the meeting was also allowed, but it was cutting it pretty close.
So with all this in mind, Kirito could estimate that he had until 2 pm on December 2nd to finish off the boss.
Which meant he had to be in the room early that morning
He had no idea how long the fight would take, but he expected about 8 hours simply due to the boss's passive regeneration. It was still unclear whether or not he could even overcome that. He may not be strong enough.
He intended to try, however.
But for all of this to happen, he needed to find the boss room first.
It would take a lot of time to find it by himself, however. It could easily take another 6-8 hours. Perhaps even longer if he was really unlucky.
Dungeons in Aincrad were pretty strange in how they were built. Some dungeons were procedurally generated. Meaning their layouts could not be determined in advance, and would be different from the way they were in the beta.
Others however, were always the same. Which would allow any beta tester to blindly run through them with ease with their prior knowledge.
And there were even some dungeons built with a weird mix of these two types. Where they would be mostly the same as they had been in the beta, but with a little bit of randomization thrown in just because. Probably in hopes of throwing off overconfident beta testers just enough to get them killed.
So Kirito didn't actually know what to expect when he finally went to the labyrinth at the end of the floor.
It could be totally unfamiliar to him. Or he might get lucky and notice that the dungeon layout was the same as back in the beta. In which case he'd make it to the boss room in less than an hour since he would already know where everything was.
...But that was looking unlikely considering the fact that it had already been a month since the start of the game. If the dungeon was identical to the way it had been before, then surely another beta tester must have found the boss room by now and set up a raid.
But then again, maybe not. Maybe the location of the boss room had been known for a long time by a select few and just kept a secret by the beta testers. Waiting for the rest of the players to finally get their act together so they can set up a raid party to clear it out when the time came.
He didn't know.
So he had to assume the worst.
Which was why a 6 to 8 hour timeframe was probably reasonable.
Which meant that if he left to go looking for it now, he wouldn't be going to sleep until probably 3 am. And he'd also miss out on the meeting with Timely.
He wouldn't wake up on December 1st until about 11 am if he left now.
That was a pretty late start for the day. And he had to account for his sleep schedule.
He wanted to be as refreshed as possible for his attempt at the boss.
He wanted to be fully awake and at the boss room door at about 2 am on the morning of December 2nd. This meant that he had to have had at least 8 hours sleep beforehand. Possibly even 10.
He also had to factor in about 2 hours to travel from his cave to the boss room door.
Subtracting these 12 hours from 2 am, meant that he wanted to be in his cave asleep at 2 pm tomorrow at the latest in the ideal case.
Which gave him the rest of that morning, and even the rest of today, actually, to locate the boss room door.
But… he had a question for himself.
What would he do if he actually found it?
Could he honestly see himself finding the boss room and then just… leaving?
Or would he want to make an immediate attempt?
He just knew that he would have that feeling in his gut if he ever left, of knowing that every second the boss was alive, was another second someone else could try to defeat it.
If he had all the gear that Timely was picking up at the time in his inventory… he'd probably go for it immediately.
So what should he do now?
He had to meet Timely at 10. It was almost 6 now, which gave him 4 hours. He didn't have the time to search for the floor boss now. Not very thoroughly anyway.
But he didn't want to just sit around waiting either.
…
After thinking about it for another moment or two, he decided that now would be a perfect time to power through Argo's guidebook.
He didn't want to teleport to his cave only to have to walk back here. Especially since he could only teleport one more time today.
So, he decided, he'd find a secluded spot somewhere, and just read through as much of the guidebook as possible until it was time to meet up with Timely again.
He was still painfully lacking in information. Particularly about Mixing. He had that skill maxed, but still found himself having to buy potions since he didn't know any recipes.
He could probably make better potions than anyone else in the game if he just knew how.
"I got all of it," Timely said.
Kirito froze in disbelief. His cloak however, and his Mask ability, ensured that his expression was hidden.
"...Are you serious?" Kirito asked.
Because that was fast. Really, really fast.
"Yeah," Timely confirmed.
Kirito opened his menu and looked at his game clock.
"It's only been four hours."
How the hell had he managed that?
"Yeah. I'm pretty awesome like that."
He was going to need to give this guy a raise or something.
"Alright. Drop trade me all of it, and the bonus is yours."
"Cool."
They walked over to the corner of the room, and took a seat at an empty table. Then they started the lengthy process of going through all of the items.
"So how much cor was left over at the end?" Kirito asked. He needed to know how much to pay him, after all.
"About negative 1.5 million."
"Negative?" Kirito asked, confused. "How does that work?"
"Basically, I called in some favours to get a lot of this stuff," Timely explained. "So not all of it is fully paid for at the moment. A lot of it is accumulating interest as we speak. Basically, because I have more than a few connections, I was allowed to purchase all of this without having to pay for it all upfront. So we can pay the rest of it back at any time. You know. Within reason, of course."
Kirito hadn't even considered the possibility of buying items, and paying for them over time like that.
"I see. So I owe you 1.5 million more, then?"
"Yeah, thereabouts."
Timely quickly opened up his menu and started rifling through it.
"Technically I think its 1,461,011, actually," he confirmed, after looking up the actual figure he had calculated, and written down earlier. "Oh, that includes the 2% rate we agreed to, by the way."
That had to have been annoying to calculate out by hand. Unless Timely had access to a skill that provided a calculator, anyways.
"Cool. Here's 1.5 million," Kirito replied, giving his assistant the money. "Pay everything back, and keep the rest. After you finish drop trading the rest of it to me, I'll give you another million. Sound good?"
Kirito didn't really feel like going through the effort of pulling out exactly 1,461,011 cor, so he would just round it up to the nearest hundred thousand. And the extra million was due to the bonus he had agreed to give for getting the items so fast.
"Yeah, sounds good," Timely agreed.
They immediately started going through the mass-drop trading process. It was a pretty common sight to see in a player market, so they didn't really have to worry about anyone else trying to intercept a trade.
There weren't really too many other players in the building, either. Most having headed off to find a place to sleep for the night. But there were still a few others hanging around still. Some had even watched some of the trades between him and his assistant out of curiosity. Surprised by the sheer quantity of items that they were transferring between each other.
But Kirito didn't pay them any mind.
"So it ended up being almost 2 and a half million? That's about what I was expecting, actually," Kirito thought aloud. "Plus another 1 million for the bonus. So 3 and a half."
"Yeah," Timely confirmed. "Those swords were expensive. So was the armour actually. And you bought multiple copies of most of it. It was all state of the art, too. You can probably count the number of weapons currently in this game that are better than them on the fingers of one hand. All from players who had gotten super rare drops."
"However, we can't really be too sure about that," Timely continued. "The true number of super rare items currently in-game can't be known since nobody would want to share that they have one. Anyone who had been lucky enough to get such a drop, wouldn't speak up about it or try to sell it."
"Makes sense," Kirito agreed. "Announcing that you have an ultra rare weapon at this point in the game is just asking to be PKed."
"Yeah."
So Kirito had pretty much bought all of the best swords in the game.
Now that he thought about it a little more, he could understand why it had costed him so much in the end.
For every upgrade attempt of a weapon, there was always a chance that it wouldn't succeed. But the upgrade attempt would still count towards the total number of upgrades allowed, even if it failed.
The Anneal Blade could be enhanced a maximum of 8 times. So the probability of actually succeeding on all of those attempts was pretty low.
A player would be considered extremely lucky to attempt 8 times, and succeed in 6. That had been how it had been in the beta, anyways.
But to get all 8, you had to be on a completely different level of lucky. Especially when you considered the fact that there probably weren't any maxed out Blacksmiths in the game yet.
It was such an expensive skill to power level. Far more expensive than Mixing was, anyway. He'd have to drop somewhere on the order of 200 million cor to get there in any reasonable amount of time.
So instead of paying that, and going from level 1 to 1000 in less than a week, most Blacksmiths worked on other player's weapons so that they could actually make a profit while they were levelling up over time.
Only extremely rich people could front the money for 1000 levels worth of Blacksmithing materials, and burn through them all in a massive grind session.
They'd have to be a lot richer than Kirito currently was to be that highly levelled in the skill so early on in the game.
What this all meant was that there weren't any Blacksmiths yet that could successfully upgrade an Anneal Blade 100% of the time on every attempt. You had to be a very high level to do that. So there was a good to fair chance on every attempt at an upgrade of that weapon, to fail. And that chance compounded the more and more times you tried to upgrade the same sword.
So very, very few players ended up with an Anneal Blade +8 at the end.
Especially considering the fact that not everybody even had the base version of the sword at all, yet.
There were 8,000 players currently in-game. Only some of those had an Anneal Blade at all. And of those players, only some would upgrade it.
And only some of those would upgrade it twice, and so on.
The population of players that had access to any specific level of upgrade on their Anneal Blade would just keep decreasing the higher you went.
Which meant there were probably only a dozen or so +8's currently in existence.
And Kirito had just bought 10 of them.
So he had probably massively overpaid for them to get them so early on in the game.
"But you know, I've got a question for you," Timely said.
"What is it?"
"Just between us, what do you need all of this equipment for? Nobody has ever done anything like what you have yet. There isn't a single player in the game who has spent so much money at once."
"Really?"
"Yeah. Not that I'm aware of anyway. There are some filthy rich players out there, but none of them have thrown their entire fortunes down the drain this quickly."
Kirito grinned under his hood. It seemed that his assistant underestimated how much money he had.
"I'd hardly call that my entire fortune."
He hardly even considered it impressive when compared to what he used to have. Before his Mixing grind, he had had about 50 million Cor worth of ovules alone. Almost 10 times what he had now.
Back before he realized there may have been a way to sell them all.
He still wondered about that every now and then, on whether or not that had been the right decision. That was a lot of money that he had thrown away, and it remained to be seen if it had even been worth it at all.
"Are you serious?" Timely asked. "How much more do you have? You probably just spent more money than the combined wealth of the poorest 2,000 players in the game."
"You alone," Timely emphasized, "are now in the possession of a significant fraction of all the potions currently in existence in this game."
Kirito wasn't really sure about how shocking that statistic was supposed to be, since most of the poorest players were still in the starting town awaiting rescue and living day to day. Barely being able to afford the cost of living.
So being richer than 2,000 of those people was hardly impressive from his point of view.
"Most of my wealth is in the form of rare items currently," Kirito explained. "I've only been selling the ovules so far. I've still got lots of other items that I need to liquidate."
"I take it that that's what some of the other deals you mentioned earlier are about?"
"Yeah."
"Shit. You're easily top ten then."
"Top ten?"
"Yeah. Top ten richest in the game. But you're the only one among them who is doing anything with your money. All the other whales are flipping, investing or merchanting theirs."
"Yeah, I'm not that type of player. Not yet anyways. Maybe eventually I'll do some of that. You know, if that's something you'd be willing to help me with."
"I think you already know my answer to that."
"I think I do too."
"So… what is it all about? Are you seriously building an army or something?"
"Or something, indeed."
"Seriously? You know you can tell me, right? I won't tell anyone else."
"I don't doubt it. The problem is, it's all time sensitive. I'd be willing to tell you about it after it's all over, but for now, it's best if I don't speak about it."
"I see. I guess that makes sense."
"Yeah. Sorry."
"Don't worry about it. I'll bet it's some story, though."
Kirito didn't actually ever intend to tell the full truth. By saying he would however, he was simply giving himself time to either make up a believable story, or to defeat the floor boss and never speak to Timely again. He still wasn't sure which route he was going to take yet.
His assistant was proving himself to be extremely valuable, but Kirito would still avoid him at all costs if he started asking him any nosy questions that he'd prefer to not answer.
Kirito knew what he was going to do.
If he went to sleep tonight, he would not be tired enough to fall asleep at his self appointed deadline of 2 pm tomorrow.
So he would pull an all-nighter.
He'd prepare all of his equipment now that he had it all with him, work out the rest of the details on his idea of storing his potions in his cloaks and implementing his cloak switching strategy to save as many slots on his hotbar as possible. Then he would locate the boss room before finally heading back to his cave and going to sleep.
If he was super tired, he would easily be able to resist the urge to fight the boss upon getting there for the first time.
He would not go to sleep tonight at all.
In fact, he wouldn't even return to his cave at all until after he knew the location of the boss room door.
He had a plan.
First, he'd find a secluded spot to set up his hotbar for the boss battle. Then he'd spend an hour or two practicing all of his switches, building his muscle memory and refining his setup, and then finally he'd go out to find the boss room door.
Then he'd use his ring to teleport back to his cave after he had the location saved on his game map.
...
'Wait a second,' Kirito thought to himself a moment later.
'No, this won't work.'
The ring charges.
He had forgotten about the ring charges.
He needed to use one charge right now to get out of the market safely. Using his teleport crystal sleight of hand trick to fool any observing spectators in the area.
That would bring him to his cave, but the Nepenthe boss wouldn't spawn until after midnight since he had already killed it earlier that day.
So he'd have to wait until midnight then to be able to recharge it.
Which in of it itself wasn't too much of a problem. He had stuff he needed to do anyway while he was waiting.
But since he wouldn't be going to sleep, and still had to make yet another trip to find the boss room, he'd run out of charges and be left without a way back to his cave when a crucial moment arrived.
He'd leave the market, wait till after midnight to recharge his ring, then he'd leave to find the boss room on the morning of December 1st. Tomorrow, technically. Though it was only a few hours away.
Then he'd be leaving for the boss room with one charge on his ring.
After he finds the boss room door and decides to head back so that he can sleep however, he would be using the only ring charge he had for the day to get back, and the Nepenthe boss wouldn't spawn again when he returned since he would have killed it already that day. Just after midnight.
Which meant that when he woke up somewhere between 10pm and midnight later on that very same day, he would immediately be setting out to go take on Illfang without a charge on his ring.
He wouldn't be coming back to his cave, in other words.
Technically, he could wait until midnight after waking up to take on the Nepenthe boss one more time to give himself another ring charge before heading out to take on Illfang, but he wanted to be 100% prepared and refreshed for that battle.
He didn't want to have to fight the boss Nepenthe before fighting Illfang. He wanted to simply wake up and go fight the floor boss immediately.
Which meant he'd lose his ability to get back to his cave.
If he ever wanted to return, he'd literally have to walk all the way across the first floor to Horunka, and then walk all the way through that forest. Just to pick up another charge for his ring.
And worse than that, when he finally got there, the Nepenthe boss wouldn't even spawn until after midnight again.
Since he intended to be done with Illfang no later than 2 pm on December 2nd, if he walked back to his cave after the fight, he'd arrive there at about 3 or 4 pm. About the same time that the rest of the players would be discovering that Illfang had been defeated by an unknown group of players. Then he'd be stuck waiting for almost 8 hours just to finally get his charge while the rest of the players explored the next floor without him.
They would be cashing in on his victory while he was stuck waiting around for a giant plant to spawn.
He couldn't do it.
If he beat Illfang, he could not just... walk back the way he came to go get another ring charge. He'd want to go through to the second floor without delay.
Since he would have been fully refreshed before the battle, he'd probably even have a few hours after the fight to explore the floor on his own, too. Without the interference of the rest of the players.
So he had a bit of a decision to make here.
He had to be in bed at 2 pm tomorrow in order to be ready for a 2 am battle with Illfang.
If he delayed at all after waking up for any reason, like, for example, by deciding to wait until after midnight for the Nepenthe boss to respawn so he can then spend another 30 minutes or so fighting it, he'd arrive later than expected at Illfang's boss room.
Which meant that he increased the chances that he would not be finished before the rest of the players made it there after the boss meeting, some 10 to 12 hours later.
He really had no idea how long it would take for him to defeat that boss by himself. And every second counted. He needed to be done before the rest of the players arrived.
And he also wanted to give himself the opportunity to bail if he needed to. If his first attempt went wrong and he needed to retreat, he wanted to have the option of regrouping and making an immediate second attempt. Which was another reason why he wanted to have an 8 or 10 hour window available for him to fight this boss alone.
He also didn't want to regret anything.
If he waited until after midnight to recharge his ring after waking up on the day of the fight, and ended up getting crashed by a raid party of players just before finishing off Illfang as a result, he'd probably regret that decision for the rest of his life.
He couldn't do it.
There was no reason for him to go back to his cave anyway. Not if the second floor was open.
But what it did mean was that he would be postponing getting his final Ring of Acid upgrade. Possibly indefinitely.
Whenever he would finally decide to return to that forest, however many months it would take for him to decide that, someone else probably would have already stumbled across his old place, and his cave wouldn't be a secret anymore.
He didn't know how good that ring was, or if it was worth getting, either.
Kirito found it strange how this all worked. How all of these tiny details dictated the entire course of his strategy.
If he chose to wait on December 2nd, and decided to kill that Nepenthe boss before fighting Illfang, he'd get his teleport charge, and would be free to teleport to his cave even after arriving on floor 2.
Which meant he could continue freely fighting Nepenthes and working his way towards that ring upgrade. And he wouldn't have to sacrifice much to do it, either. He could easily make the journey to the second floor every single day to explore it, and still work towards the ring upgrade at the same time.
He'd probably have to start using teleport crystals to avoid having to walk through Illfang's empty boss room every single time he wanted to go to the second floor, but he could do that if he truly needed to.
The second floor's main city was way smaller than the Town of Beginnings. Which meant that he would easily be able to outrun the NPC guard's spawn timer and be out of the town before being attacked if he ever teleported to the city's teleport gate with a crystal.
And additionally, choosing to wait would preserve his ability to teleport out of public places without a crystal.
So he wouldn't have to come up with a new method of getting in and out of player markets if he chose to take this route.
But then there was the other option.
If he didn't wait on December 2nd before fighting Illfang, he wouldn't get his teleport charge. And as a result, he wouldn't be returning to his cave anytime soon because there was no way he would ever be able to convince himself to walk back there. It was such a waste of time. Time that he could be making better use of on the second floor.
Which also meant that he would not be getting any more ovules to sell with his new contract.
...But he would have a greater chance of succeeding in the end. Of beating Illfang before the other players arrived to discover the locked boss room door. Or even worse, discovering Kirito himself, soloing the boss.
How was he even supposed to make a decision like this?
It was like there was no right answer.
There was the safe route, that gave him the best possible chance of defeating Illfang and getting away with doing so, but that would definitely sacrifice his new contract with Agil, and his Ring of Acid upgrade, along with few other minor inconveniences as well.
And then there was the riskier route. Which would lower his odds of beating Illfang before being discovered, and would force him to fight a whole second boss beforehand. But if it worked, he'd still have his contract with Agil, and he'd still be working towards his Ring. He wouldn't be sacrificing anything, in this case.
But he didn't know how risky this risky strategy was.
Because of the fact that Illfang had a passive regeneration that was meant to handle combat against a full raid party of 40 or more players, it could very well be the case that Kirito's DPS would not be high enough to overcome it since he was all alone.
If he couldn't overcome it, then it was impossible for him to win at all. Illfang would be healing faster than Kirito could damage him.
But if he could just barely overcome it, then he'd have to spend as long as was necessary to slowly whittle down Illfang's health. And it was possible that it would take 8 to 10 hours to do this, or perhaps even longer than that.
There were so many unknowns, and so much to consider.
And he couldn't determine what the best course of action was.
He had a lot to think about.
AN: Hope you enjoyed the chapter. Have a good day!