The forests of the 53rd floor were a danger to unsuspecting players in multiple ways. For one, the gryphons that inhabited the canopy, though typically not overly belligerent towards ground creatures, possessed sharp claws and an uncanny ability to fly through the narrow spaces between the tight-knit tree trunks, meaning that should one ever have its eye on you, running was rarely a viable option. Should they develop a taste for human flesh, one's only option was to make a stand and hope to get a blow in whilst the gryphon attacked with lethal diving runs. Deaths by gryphon were uncommon, but not an outright impossibility.
For two, even stronger monsters than gryphons made their home on the ground far below. One of whom now slinked amongst the trees, daggers loaded in the sheathes on his hip, wrist-blade sharpened to perfection.
This was not a floor Caenor was altogether familiar with, though he remembered coming here once or twice to hunt. He'd quickly found that, though the loot was relatively good considering the monsters' levels, the sheer size and density of the forest meant he had his work cut out for him trying to navigate around the area, even if he had a map to help him. As for the mobs themselves, the ones that dropped items of higher value were usually the ones that avoided the human adventurers invading their habitats, meaning that those creatures that did choose to engage players were usually not worth the trouble.
The Labyrinth of this floor was similarly annoying to tackle, a network of ledges and enclaves connected with vines and tree trunks that required more climbing than most players were willing to go through, especially if they were wearing heavier armor. That wouldn't be a problem for Caenor, though the Labyrinth wasn't his destination for today. He was after a special kind of prey.
Technically, neither he nor his teammates were supposed to be fighting yet. All they had to do for today was take note of the terrain, figure out when the sun set on their respective floors, then head home and make their reports to each other. Nothing particularly taxing, even if Caenor could not help but notice the sweat gathering on his palms and the breath that he had inadvertently been holding.
He probably should have chosen some less colorful garb for today, so he could avoid standing out in the forest's green surrounds, but he wanted to get used to the armor Lisbeth had made for him. He would have to thank her properly later, though he wasn't exactly sure how much she wanted to see him right now.
He crossed quickly through the clearings between the trees, making sure not to linger in one spot for longer than a few seconds at a time. By his estimate, he would reach his target within a few minutes – and sure enough, as the forest cleared and the trees made way, he saw a snug little cottage, hidden by vines and tucked away under the shade, but still visible from a distance if one knew what they were looking for.
He edged up towards the hut and eased against it, peeking around the corner to make sure no one was using the door at that very moment. His leg brushed against an unexpected protrusion, and he looked down to see a large bolt hammered into a wide steel strap that wrapped around the base of the house. An unusual feature, not least because the strap prevented the mostly wooden walls of the cottage from being broken down in a location where it was highly likely that anyone would bother trying to do so. Such an emphasis on security could only mean one thing: that there was something inside that warranted such protection.
Having done a brief check of all four sides of the hut, Caenor turned to leave. There were no windows, so he could not get even the slightest of ideas what was inside. Frustrating, but not necessarily fatal to their plans, especially if Laughing Coffin were not expecting an attack.
Then, he heard a scream.
He pressed his ear to the wall. He could not tell if the cry had emanated from within, but it was highly unlikely that anyone else was in the vicinity. This was a relatively remote section of a sparsely-populated level, and it would take a remarkable coincidence for anyone else to have wandered this far into the forest. And from experience, he knew that there were no such things as coincidences.
Another scream, this one much clearer, ringing in his ears, strained with a familiar agony. It was a sound that he knew all too well – he had heard one coming from his own throat just a couple of weeks ago.
He had to act before it was too late.
Unsheathing his wrist-blade, he crept up to the door, which was held shut by a slightly rusted iron latch. A hard shove with his shoulder would likely break the lock open, but he only had one chance. If he didn't apply enough force, he would lose his sole advantage in fighting whoever was inside: the element of surprise.
The scream pierced his ears for a third time. It was now or never.
Gritting his teeth, he stepped a few paces back from the door and, with a loud grunt, ran full pelt into it and crashed straight through.
As his eyes adjusted to the abrupt darkness, the first thing he saw was the three people sat in a circle in the cottage's living room, bent over a pile of items strewn over the floorboards. They were unarmored and wore completely bemused expressions on their faces as they whipped around, but everything Caenor needed to know about them hovered silently above their heads. Three orange rhombuses, gleaming in the sunlight pooling in from behind Caenor's back.
He held his wrist-blade up to shoulder height, while his other hand reached for one of the throwing knives he had stored in the pouch tied to his waist. He'd not had much practice with them, though Silica had given him a few pointers, but he would have to do his best in the circumstances. He slipped the blade of one of the knives between his fingers and, without missing a beat, withdrew it and flung it towards the nearest person.
To Caenor's great surprise, upon departing from his grip, the knife rocketed across the room and landed squarely between the man's eyes, sending him stumbling backwards and onto the heap of items. However, he barely had any time to admire his handiwork when he remembered that there were still two others in the room with him.
They immediately reached for their own weapons, but by then Caenor was already upon them, his legs carrying him forward before his mind could even react, his wrist-blade propelled forwards, sliding through a gap in the ribs of his second victim. Thanks to his time spent practicing, it felt no different from killing one of the many beasts that roamed Aincrad.
Extend, retract, he could hear Silica saying in his head.
The other man raised his sword, but his movements were slow and clumsy, and his swing was errant. Caenor easily weaved past the flight of the blade, as he had done countless times when sparring with Silica and his teammates, and his weapon, on the tip of his outstretched arm, plunged deep into the man's belly. When withdrawn, it was coated in a deep crimson ichor, though that soon dissipated into the air along with the rest of the person from which it had been drawn.
Just when the last vestiges of the three bodies had vanished, the door to the next room was flung open, and a much taller adversary than the previous trio emerged. Caenor, who had been catching his breath, barely had time to straighten himself up before the hulking figure stormed towards him, brandishing a massive iron club, a menacing look in his eyes. Yet the wildness of the giant's swings meant that, despite the very likely possibility of death if he wasn't careful, all Caenor really had to do was pay attention.
The man slammed the mace downwards with all the force he could muster, but that left the rest of his body open to attack. The world seemed to move in slow-motion as Caenor twisted his shoulders around – the flight of the mace missing him by a hair's breadth – before clenching his fist and spearing the wrist-blade into the giant's chest. The man burst into a voluminous stream of red particulates before his body could even hit the ground.
"Help!" yelled a voice. Caenor fought the abrupt feeling of numbness that spread in his limbs as he hurriedly pushed past the door to the next room, where he finally found the source of the screaming.
A boy, little older than he was, strapped to a bed, arms and legs tied tightly to the bedframe. He was almost naked, and Caenor's eyes widened as he realized who the items on the floor in the living room had belonged to – among the scattered belongings had been a full set of leather armor and a short sword. Caenor cut the ropes and eased the boy up, slipping a potion out of his inventory and feeding it to him, watching the many bruises and lacerations on the boy's skin glow faintly as they healed.
"You alright?" Caenor asked.
The boy nodded. "Yeah. Thank you so much. I…" He winced, and Caenor rubbed his back.
"Save your breath. We still have to get out of here." Caenor strained his ears, but he could not hear anyone else approaching – only the hushed whistling of the breeze remained. "Can you stand?"
"I think so." The boy rose to his feet, but his legs buckled underneath him. Caenor caught him and placed the boy's arm around his own shoulder. Together, they limped out of the room and towards the heap of objects, which had been disturbed by the fighting and were now largely scattered about the place.
"This is your stuff, isn't it?"
The boy nodded. Caenor, after leaning the boy against a nearby wall, began picking up the items and handing them to the boy, who stored them back into his inventory and equipped his armor onto himself. Now fully clothed, the boy seemed a lot more invigorated, though he still had some difficulty walking. Having seen the boy dressed in his usual garb, Caenor's eyes suddenly lit up as realization dawned upon him.
"You're a Knights of the Blood member, aren't you?" he noted.
"Yeah… I am. I'm part of Team C. My name's Beni."
"Right, that rings a bell. I'm Caenor. Anyway," Caenor jabbed a thumb towards the door, "let's not stay here too long."
"Yeah." They hobbled out of the cottage and back into the clearing. As they started on their trek back to their floor's teleport stone, Caenor pulled up his menu and typed a message to the three active members of his team.
Anyone who's done scouting, come to Granzam's central plaza. I have an injured guild member with me.
The return trip was a far more straightforward affair, given that Caenor ostensibly did not have to worry too much about being stealthy, and before long they were standing in front of the glowing blue stone that would take them back to safety. Caenor watched as Beni flicked the air in front of him and vanished in a surge of light, before he himself did the same. Upon arriving in Granzam, he was soon greeted by the sight of Cantabile and Altorius running towards him.
"How are you feeling?" asked Cantabile as she and Altorius took Caenor's place by Beni's side. "Need any more healing?"
Beni shook his head. "I'm a little bit woozy, but I'm mostly patched up thanks to Caenor. I just need… some sleep…" His eyes became unfocused, and his arms grew slack.
"Hang in there. We'll take over from here," Cantabile assured Caenor. "You should report to Asuna – I think she's in Giltstein right now, on the 25th floor, for some guild business. She'll be happy to hear that one of her team members is back."
Just as they turned to leave, Beni lifted his head and met Caenor's worried gaze.
"How can I ever thank you?" he asked.
The question, though simple, somehow caught Caenor off-guard. He had never expected to be thanked for anything he did. Though he had formed this team for a seemingly altruistic and noble cause, most of what motivated him was a selfish, one-sided desire to bring justice – of a sort – to those who deserved it. Besides, defeating bosses and strong monsters was what brought all the glory in this game. Killing player killers, on the other hand, was thankless and ugly work, frowned upon by most. In a world where the already scarce number of people dwindled every day, vigilantes were not exactly seen as heroes, much less people to be shown any gratitude towards.
In his haste for an answer, Caenor replied with the first thing that came to mind.
"No need to thank me," he said. "Just… doing what needs to be done."
Beni smiled. It seemed as though that was all he needed to hear. He and the other two walked away, disappearing down the road leading back to headquarters.
Caenor returned to the teleport platform, his head still fuzzy and benumbed from the adrenaline, and from what had just transpired in the past half an hour. With a sigh, he punched in the menu option taking him to the 25th floor.
The eve of the first day of their operations brought an unusual, but nonetheless expected hush over everything that they did. They ate dinner together in relative silence, a meal that felt very much like a last supper of some kind. Even the soothing and luxurious environs of the restaurant – one of the best in Granzam – could not ease the unspeakable tension in the air between them.
Caenor poked at his steak, unsure of whether he was actually hungry enough to eat. As he watched the red juices pour out from the tenderly cooked meat, he was immediately reminded of the liquid that had coated his wrist-blade earlier in the afternoon. There had been blood, and there was blood now. The difference was from what – or whom – the blood had come gushing forth.
Four people had died by his hand. More would inevitably soon follow.
He tried to convince himself that he was doing the right thing. They were murderers, rapists and bandits. They got exactly what they deserved. Yet he had to wonder if, without this prison, this "death game" that warped the minds of all who played it, the people whose lives he took would be the way they were now. Maybe they had families of their own, who were sat by the real-world bedsides of their loved ones, waiting for good news that would never come. Maybe they really had been driven insane by the pressures of having to fight for their lives on a daily basis, and had they received the help they needed, they would have gladly returned to helping, instead of harming, the rest of the community.
Whatever was the case, they had chosen their path, and Caenor had chosen his. There would be no turning back now.
Earlier in the evening, he had told the others of what he had done. Cantabile and Altorius had remained unmoved, and Wing had grimly accepted the necessity of the situation, but Seki had refused to speak to him since then. The friend she thought she knew, the kindly, someone awkward black-haired teenager, was all but gone. In its place was one who seemed to willingly plunge into the darkness, and to sink to the low levels of those he deemed unworthy of life.
Seki caught Caenor's stare from across the table, and quickly glanced away.
Caenor was conflicted about how to react. On the one hand, as with Lisbeth, he understood that Seki might be reluctant to face the brutal reality of what they were about to do. On the other, he felt a strange indignation, one that was fueled by the cynicism and cold-heartedness that had gradually grown within him in recent weeks. This was Seki's problem as much as it was Caenor's own. What right did she have to judge him based on the actions he was taking to remedy it? If she could not deal with having to kill people, then she was better off not coming with them.
Caenor before the incident would have been shocked at what Caenor had now become. But Caenor from before the incident had been naïve. Innocent. Unaware of the singular truth that he now understood: that what happened to him could happen to anyone. And it was down to him to prevent it from happening again, even if no one else would offer any assistance.
"Are you… alright?" Wing queried. "You aren't eating."
Caenor snapped out of his reverie. "Oh, yeah. I was just… thinking about things."
"Aren't we all," quipped Cantabile. "You better eat your fill and get whatever sleep you can get. We may not have that luxury from tomorrow on."
"I know." Cantabile stuffed the chunk of meat on his fork into his mouth. It exploded with flavor as he chewed on it, and on any other day he would have been nothing but grateful for the experience. But today, all he could taste was the bitter, sharp tang of iron.
Not that it was entirely unsavory to him, however.
Night passed, and soon gave way to morning.
Caenor had slept in fits and starts, but the moments in which he had been able to sleep had been filled with obscure, unfocused nightmares, more sensations than images, yet equally potent in their ability to send Caenor crashing awake in a cold sweat. His pajamas were drenched by the time the first vestiges of dawn cracked the night sky, and so Caenor changed into his armor, feeling that it would be pointless to attempt to return to slumber when his body and mind could barely sit still.
He trudged through the corridor towards his office, hoping to seek some semblance of peace before the big day. As it turned out, none was to be forthcoming – he opened the door to find Cantabile sitting at the desk, sifting idly through their plans and blueprints.
"I thought you said we should get all the sleep we needed," he remarked.
Cantabile shrugged. "I'm a light sleeper. I don't need that much."
Caenor plopped into one of the chairs in front of the table and gazed at her. "The bags under your eyes say otherwise."
"They've always been there," Cantabile replied offhandedly. "I get… nightmares."
"You too, huh."
For a while, they sat in silence, the only sound breaking the quiet being the shuffling of paper as Cantabile scanned the documents in her hands.
"You mind if I ask you a personal question?" Caenor abruptly said.
Cantabile shrugged. "We're gonna die soon anyway, so you might as well."
"Remember when you said that you knew how Seki felt? About being raped."
Cantabile froze, letting the papers slip from her grasp and flutter back onto the surface of the table. She looked up at him with a somewhat reticent expression in her eyes. "I… didn't exactly say that."
"You did. In a fashion, anyway. I said you wouldn't know how it felt, and you said-"
"Alright, alright. I get it." Cantabile raised a hand to her forehead and rubbed it vigorously. "God, I don't know why the hell I'm telling you this at six o'clock in the morning."
"You don't have to answer if you don't want to."
"I don't particularly want to. But I feel like I have to. It's… not something that's a lot of fun to keep secret."
"I guess not."
Cantabile paused, her lips squirming as though she were trying to figure out what to say, or how best to say it. "Do you know why I love this game?"
Caenor thought back to the first time he had met Cantabile and Altorius here. When they had told him why they wanted to join him in his quest to eliminate Laughing Coffin, and player killers as a whole. "Because it's… different from your reality?"
"Something like that. Here, I can at least be something. In the real world, I was pretty much nothing. I had no real family to speak of – I ended up changing adoptive parents three or four times. None of them could handle me, or whatever excuse it was that they all used. My current parents – if you could call them that – despise me. My 'father' gets drunk a lot, and when he does, he gets violent… and he gets horny. But his wife won't do it with him, so…"
She trailed off, but Caenor didn't need to hear the rest of her sentence. "I'm sorry," he replied.
"Don't be. They aren't your sins to bear. In any case, the only way I could get away from them was by playing games. Computer games, VR games, whatever. I actually bought my NerveGear from a garage sale, 'cause they never gave me any pocket money." She laughed bitterly. "I had to earn this damn thing, this piece of shit console, with my own body, my own hard work. And the ironic thing is, unlike most people, I don't regret it at all. This past year or so has been the happiest period of my life so far."
She smiled, and Caenor could not help but smile with her. "I'm glad to hear that."
"What about you, Vice-commander?" Cantabile said, a mischievous glint replacing the prior sadness in her eyes. "You haven't told me anything about yourself."
It was now Caenor's turn to shrug. "There's nothing noteworthy for me to talk about. I'm a regular high school student, trapped in a game that's out to kill me. That's about it."
"Lucky you. You're probably the most normal member of the team. But... maybe that's just what we need."
"How so?" Caenor asked.
"Everyone else here has their own problems to deal with, whether real-life or virtual. I have my family; Altorius has his tongue. Wing has her brother, and her former spying mission – which, for the record, means I'm still not a hundred percent sold on her coming with us. Seki has… well, you know. They all wear their emotions on their sleeves, and they make their issues known. But you, of all people, seem totally unaffected by anything."
"I wouldn't say that, really. My two closest friends were either killed or defiled right in front of my eyes. If I look fine, that's because I try to act fine."
"There's a difference between acting fine and actually being fine," Cantabile noted. "I would know. And you're definitely in the latter category. It's almost like you don't really feel depressed or dejected about what happened to you. Losing one or two good friends would break most people in half, but you just keep on plugging as if nothing happened. I'm not saying you're a sociopath, 'cause I know you're still hurting, but you just seem to really have it together."
"Well…" As much as Caenor hated to admit it, Cantabile was closer to the truth than he'd expected. Already the myriad moments of joy he had shared with Ferramo and Seki were fading into the recesses of his memories, replaced by an overwhelming, burning desire to restore the natural order of things. That included going after the ones who had wronged him, but that also included living as placid a life as he could within this game, without letting his fears or worries overcome his determination.
Perhaps when this whole affair was finally over, his heart would allow him to grieve in full. But for now, he was simply numb to it all.
"Maybe you're right," he said. "But I don't like thinking of myself as 'different'. I'm just a nobody who's gotten into something way over their head. I'm taking this chance not because I want to, but because I have to."
Cantabile leaned forward over the desk, staring deeply into Caenor's eyes as she spoke.
"That," she replied solemnly, "is exactly why you're the man for the job."