Despite Centoria getting ready for its summer solstice festival in the lands below us, when the sun began sinking, its progress was mercilessly swift. Against the white stone, the orange light of the setting sun quickly progressed from a burning red to violet to deep navy blue, until only fragments of the End Mountains were visible in the last red light of the day, far, far to the west.
Overhead, the stars were twinkling, but they did not bless our progress. An hour earlier, we had come across an unexpected limitation of the system that was proving rather difficult.
The process of our climb was simple: I created a hook with sacred arts, stuck it in the gap between the marble blocks, and climbed on top of it. Then I would lift Alice with the chain so that she stood on the hook below me. Once we did this about ten times, we’d gotten a single repetition down to under three minutes.
The problem was with generating the hooks themselves. There was no statistic in this world that corresponded to what we’d call mana points in ALO. The magic they called sacred arts could be repeated as often as you wanted, as long as the spell was within your system access level.
That did not mean they were usable anywhere and everywhere, however. This world’s rules dictated that all production required magical resources, a fact that applied to sacred arts as much as anything else. In order to execute an art, you needed to expend spatial resources, either in the vicinity of the user or through consuming the life of valuable catalysts or living things—even humans.
Spatial resources were tricky because they couldn’t be measured in numbers. For the most part, this value came from sunlight or the earth. Wherever the ground was fertile and open to the sun, resources would be rich, enough to support continued casting of high-level arts. On the other end, a windowless room in a stone building would run out of resources very quickly and take a long time to recharge.
By those rules, our current situation—stuck at a height of fifteen hundred feet off the ground with the sun sinking over the horizon—was about as bad as it could possibly get. Before long, my hook-generating sacred arts had dried up all of the twilight’s resources, leaving us unable to continue upward.
“System Call! Generate Metallic Element!”
Over my palm, outstretched to catch some last bit of light in vain, a few little motes of silver light floated, then snuffed out with tiny wisps of smoke.
I sighed, and below me, I heard Alice murmur, “Generating containers like that uses much spiritual power. Now that Solus is gone, you’ll be lucky to manage one per hour. How far have we climbed?”
“Err…I think we’re past the eighty-fifth floor now.”
“So there’s a long way to go until ninety-five.”
I gazed longingly at the traces of purple in the sky. “Yeah…and in any case, once it’s dark, it’ll be too dangerous to keep climbing. And if we try to camp out here, getting any rest will be difficult…”
At worst, someone would need to dangle from the chain, but not only could we not create more hooks, they would also disappear after a few dozen minutes, so we’d have no choice but to use our swords as supports again. And I wasn’t sure they could withstand the pressure all night.
I looked up the wall face, stubbornly hoping that there’d be some kind of outcropping we could connect the chain to, using its fastener. And then…
“Oh…”
There was a series of evenly spaced shadows with complex shapes against the wall not much more than twenty feet above us. When the sun went down, the mist around the tower dissipated, revealing these hidden decorations.
“Hey…does that look like something to you?” I asked, pointing. Alice looked up and narrowed her blue eyes.
“You’re right…Statues, perhaps? But why would they be here, so high up, where no one will see them?”
“I don’t care why, as long as we can sit and rest on them. But they’re a good…eight mels above us. We’ll need another three bars in order to climb up there.”
“Three bars…,” she repeated, deep in thought. “All right. I was planning to save this for an emergency…and it looks like the time has come.”
She pushed her back against the wall and removed the gauntlet on her left hand. She stared at the faintly glowing piece of armor and began to chant the command for a sacred art. When she finished her execution (many times smoother than mine), there was a flash, and the gauntlet had turned into three more climbing hooks. Alice’s matter-transforming arts must’ve had better energy efficiency than generating from thin air, given my inability to summon any myself.
“Here, use these,” she said, stretching upward with the hooks in her hand. I crouched down and carefully took the tools.
“Thank you—this is a huge help.”
“If it’s truly necessary, I have more armor…”
I glanced at the fine breastplate that covered her upper half and shook my head. “No…we’ll leave that one to the very end. You never know what we might need…”
I carefully got to my feet, stuck two of the hooks into my belt, and lifted the third.
“Uraa!”
Sure enough, the golden hook was much sturdier than the metallic elements I’d created; it sank deep into the rock’s seam. I did the now-familiar climbing routine and used the chain to pull Alice up. After another repetition, the mysterious objects were half as far away, and much clearer in the darkness.
They were stone statues, as it turned out; large and ornate, a significant number surrounded the cathedral walls on narrow terraces. But these were not the holy statues of goddesses and angels that I’d seen inside the tower. They were human-shaped, true, but bent at the knees into a crouch, with their arms folded menacingly over their legs. Gnarled muscles bulged, and wings as sharp as knives extended from their backs.
Worst of all, the heads of the statues were utterly alien, curved and elongated at the front and ending in a conical mouth. They looked like the heads of some kind of grotesque giant weevils.
“Ugh…that’s such a creepy design,” I groaned.
“Huh…? W-wait…that’s from the Dark Territory…!” Alice exclaimed.
Just then, the head of the statue right above me craned back and forth, its lamprey mouth opening and closing. That was not some decorative statue carved out of stone. It was…alive.
If this were a quest in some ordinary VRMMO back in the real world, a statue attack would be inevitable after a demonstration like that. But in this case, the person writing the scenario was either a total sadist or a green beginner. We were stuck on these foot-long hooks jammed into a sheer wall, with nowhere else to go.
The term certain-defeat event crossed my mind, but I dismissed it just as quick. This wouldn’t be one of those thrill-ride incidents where someone would swoop in and save us if we fell. We had to use our brains to evade danger on our own, or we would die.
While I prepared myself for danger, the winged statue shook itself and began to change color. Its white skin, the same hue as the tower stone, began turning a slick charcoal black, starting from the extremities.
I drew my sword in anticipation of the black wings snapping out into full extension. Without taking my eyes off the former statue, I shouted down to Alice, “Looks like we’ll have to fight here. Not falling off should be the top priority!”
But I didn’t hear the Integrity Knight respond right away. I glanced down and saw her face, pale in the night, a perfect picture of shock. On the updraft of wind I heard the whisper: “No, how is this possible?”
An Integrity Knight should know everything about the Axiom Church. Why would she be so surprised? From what I knew through my secondhand reports about Administrator, she was abnormally cautious. Surely, it wasn’t so unthinkable that she would not only prevent flight to the tower’s upper sections, but also place stone guardians along the walls in case any challengers were persistent and mad enough to climb all the way.
The guardian—which, aside from the head, looked similar to a typical video game gargoyle—gripped the terrace ledge with clawed hands and emitted a whoosh of air from its mouth.
A shiver went down my back as I realized the gargoyles on either side of the animated one were also changing color. If they were placed equally around all four walls of the cathedral, there could be at least a hundred.
“Oh, damn,” I hissed, turning to press my back to the wall and hefting up my sword. Just that was enough to unbalance me, given the tiny bar I was standing on. Even in SAO, I had never tried to fight like this.
But before I could even start planning, I heard the wings flapping overhead. The gargoyle was hovering against the dark-blue sky, the round eyes on either side of its elongated head fixed on me. The monster was bigger than I’d expected, probably more than six feet. Even its dangling tail looked about as long as I was tall.
“Bshaaa!!”
It let out a hiss like steam escaping a valve, then plunged headfirst toward me.
It didn’t seem to have any ranged attacks, fortunately, so I anticipated claws on one of its limbs to appear next. Right or left, top or bottom—
“…Whoa!!”
With a whiplike crack, its tail shot out. I jerked my head away and yelped in surprise; the tip grazed my cheek, as sharp and pointed as a knife.
I’d managed to dodge, but my balance was now a problem. I wobbled atop the hook, attempting to stay upright. Mercilessly, the gargoyle’s tail shot at me again.
With my left hand against the wall to steady myself, I blocked the tail attack with the sword in my right. It was all I could do to hold it up like a shield. There was no way I could actually swing it around to sever the spike.
“Urgh…”
Sensing that this wasn’t the time to be thrifty, I took my left hand off the wall and pulled out one of the two golden hooks in my belt. Envisioning the movements of the Throwing Weapons skill I’d practiced so much in SAO, I hurled the spear at the center of the gargoyle’s body.
I didn’t put that much effort into the throw, but the short spear lived up to its nature as Alice’s gauntlet, shining bright through the gloom to sink deep into the gargoyle’s lower stomach.
“Bshhi!” it hissed, its circular mouth spurting black blood. The monster flapped its wings irregularly, trying to regain altitude. I’d inflicted some good damage, but not enough to vanquish it. The black, insectoid eyes glared at me with rage.
Even knowing there were more important things at hand, I couldn’t help but wonder, Was it just a program controlling that freakish monster? Or, like the people from the Dark Territory, was it an artificial fluctlight…?
“Bshhhuuu!!”
✦ ✦ ✦
