Chapter 7: Chapter 7 – The Rabbit Hole

We didn’t even make it halfway to Tolbana before our journey was interrupted.

“Help!”

This cry was repeated loudly several times within the span of a few seconds, and the moment I saw the determined look in Shizuka’s eyes, I knew that there was no point in arguing with her.

“We have to help them.”

Yeah, I already knew that was coming.

“They’re pretty close.” Jin said, using his «Search» skill to scan our surroundings. “As a beta tester, I can’t just stand by and let someone die.”

I wasn’t feeling particularly heroic, but I really doubted I could change their mind. I mean, it wasn’t as if I really wanted to anyway.

Best case scenario, they’d just be stuck fighting a bunch of boars or something. The three of us were relatively high-leveled and we could just rush in and help ‘em out. I didn’t want to stand by and let someone die either.

“Alright, let’s go!”

The three of us rushed over toward the source of the shouting with Jin leading the way. It wasn’t long until we saw the person who was desperately crying for help.

He had short brown hair and was a few inches shorter than me. The way he was shouting was somewhat comical despite the situation as he jumped up in the air, flailing his arms around as he hollered.

Other than that though, he didn’t look like he was in any trouble at all.

“What’s the matter!?” Shizuka rushed over to him the moment he came into sight.

The boy’s eyes widened in shock as if he wasn’t actually expecting anyone to come to his aid. Then, a flood of words exploded indecipherably from his lips.

“Whoa there, slow down! We aren’t going anywhere!” I said, placing a hand on his shoulder to calm him.

The boy took a deep breath and nodded, his eyes still wide with fear.

“M-My friend’s stuck in a dungeon! I-I don’t know where she is, but I know she’s still alive! Please, you have to help her!”

“A dungeon...?” Jin mused. “I don’t remember there being a sub-dungeon anywhere on the first floor.”

In SAO, there were two main types of dungeons: the labyrinth that led to the next floor, and sub-dungeons. Sub-dungeons were pretty much the type of dungeon that you’d find in any other MMO. They featured a bunch of mobs contained inside a network of connected rooms and a boss in the final room.

According to Jin, sub-dungeons were useful for gathering loot and resources due to some unique monsters only spawning inside of one. Not only that, but the mobs were usually stronger, which meant that they were perfect for grinding.

However, a sub-dungeon on the first floor was news to him.

“How do you know she’s alive?” I asked.

“W-We’re in the same party, so I can see her HP bar! I-It’s yellow right now, but it doesn’t seem to be going down.”

“Maybe she’s found a safe area. That’s good. Send her a message and make sure she doesn’t leave. She can tell if it’s a safe area by looking at the torches. They’ll glow a different color.”

The boy nodded and quickly got down to business and received a reply within a few seconds. Luckily, Jin was right.

“Alright, so where’s the dungeon entrance?”

The boy—who now introduced himself as Rucken—quickly led us to a hill that wasn’t too far from here. It was around a five minute walk from the main road that we were traveling on, so it was still rather out of the way.

I expected that the dungeon entrance would be a cave of some sorts or at least be slightly intimidating, but what I got instead was a large hole in the ground.

It was perfectly circular and tall grass grew around its edges, concealing it from a distance.

“W-We were trying to make our way to the next town while walking through the forest and heading toward the main path, b-but she slipped and she fell into this hole!”

I nodded. It was pretty hard to see from a distance and you wouldn’t have expected such a large hole in the middle of the grassy plains, especially when you were just coming out from the treelines right next to it.

“I t-tried to catch her, but I couldn’t reach her hand in time!”

“It must not be that deep if she survived the fall.” Shizuka said. Without any further warning, she proceeded to jump in.

“Sh—Hinotori!”

I cursed under my breath and immediately followed her down. It was a long fall, and the only thing that surrounded me was darkness.

Since we were in a party, I could keep an eye on Shizuka’s HP bar, but it didn’t look like it was changing, so the drop probably wasn’t dangerous.

Around thirty seconds after I began falling, I saw a light below me and heard a loud splash accompanied by the sloshing of recently disturbed water.

“Gah!”

It was Shizuka’s voice. I uttered a sigh in relief, but that turned out to be a bad idea as I hit the water mere seconds later. With no air in my lungs, I sputtered as I surfaced.

“You alright, Shizuka?”

“You’re the one who looks like they almost drowned.” Shizuka grinned, holding out a hand toward me.

I let her help me out of the water and then looked around. We were currently standing inside a cylindrical tunnel that was lit by the torches which lined the walls.

An alert popped up and I opened my menu. It was a message from Jin.

[Jin: I’m gonna stay up here with Rucken. There might be a few mobs wandering around, so it’s better to play it safe. You two grab his friend and get back here ASAP, yeah?]

I sent him a quick reply and then told Shizuka our game plan to which she nodded. Not only was his level lower than ours, Rucken was currently still in a state of panic, which made leaving him alone a very bad decision.

Besides, we weren’t here to clear the dungeon. Shizuka and I would just need to grab Rucken’s friend and get the hell out of here.

“Awfully quiet in here.” Shizuka’s voice echoed in the underground tunnel only briefly. It turns out that packed dirt was actually pretty good at absorbing sound.

“The mobs were probably cleared out by Rucken’s friend. Let’s get a move on before they respawn.”

We quickly made our way through the dungeon without any of the mobs barring our way. Sub-dungeons like these were pretty dangerous and you usually wanted to tackle them with a party of at least five members, but other than the dead ends that we ended up running into there weren’t many obstacles.

“Whoever Rucken’s friend is, she sure made light work of the mobs down here, huh?”

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Shizuka flashed me a smile. “I’m not so sure she even needs help anymore, actually.”

I was about to respond, but Shizuka stopped in her tracks. I skidded to a halt beside her, intending to ask her what was wrong but a quick look around answered my unasked question.

“...Nevermind.”

Shizuka was strong, but I doubted that even she could handle the wandering mess in front of us right now. In short, we had vastly overestimated Rucken’s friend.

Instead of killing all of the mobs in the dungeon, she had instead simply run past them as fast as she could. Normally, this wouldn’t be a problem in the field seeing as monsters had a limited aggro range.

What that meant was that if you managed to outpace the monster by a certain distance, it would stop attempting to attack you and return to its original position. The spawn area of a mob acted as a “tether” of sorts.

Unfortunately for Rucken’s friend, there was no such mechanic in a sub-dungeon. The “tether” was the entire dungeon, so they’d follow her until she either left the dungeon or made it no longer possible.

In this case, it was the latter. An enormous crowd of mobs were standing around fifty meters in front of us, milling about aimlessly. Their aggro had probably been reset, but since the whole dungeon was essentially their spawn point, they didn’t bother moving away.

Even though we could barely see it through the mass of monsters, the safe room was right ahead of us. The pale blue light of the room’s torches leaked out into the long hall that Shizuka and I were in.

“Y’know, maybe she should look into being a tank. She’s done a real bang-up job of pulling all the mobs.” Shizuka grinned.

“Yeah, well I don’t think there are any mages in this game to take advantage of such an AoE-worthy formation.”

The two of us retreated to a safer portion of the dungeon. Since we were pretty sure that there would be no respawning monsters to catch us off guard, Shizuka decided to take a moment and rack her brains for a solution.

On the other hand, I sent a message to Jin informing him that we’d found the safe room along with an enormous mass of mobs clustered in front of it. There were at least thirty monsters in the group altogether.

[Jin: What kinda mobs are these?]

[Akira: Dunno. They look like humanoid rabbits and they’ve got scimitars. They look kinda creepy, honestly.]

[Jin: Oh, those. I ran into ‘em a few times back in the beta test, but they were on the third floor. I think they were called “Raging Rabbits.”]

[Akira: Yeah, that’s cool and all but did you just say THIRD FLOOR? How the hell are we supposed to beat them!?]

[Jin: Maybe they’re weakened or something? Rucken’s friend got through that mess and only dropped to yellow. You’ll be fine, you’ve got Hinotori with you.]

[Akira: Yeah, yeah.]

I swiped my fingers and closed the message window before turning to Shizuka. Her back was against the wall and her brow was tightly knit together in great concentration. 

It was probably a good idea to let her think uninterrupted, so I made my way back to stare at the crowd of mobs, hoping that they’d somehow give me an idea.

To my surprise, I actually did come up with an idea after a good minute or two of staring at them. It was a pretty obvious tactic now that I think about it, but then again I wasn’t too sure if it’d work.

“Alright, I’ve got a plan!” Shizuka announced, appearing by my side without any prior warning. I nearly jumped from surprise.

“D-Don’t do that!”

“Hm? Do what?” I couldn’t even answer before she continued. “Anyway, here’s the plan. I’m gonna charge straight at them and you’ll watch my back, okay?”

I blinked. “Sorry, what?”

“Well, I’ll take the forward position and you’ll take the rear. I’m better at stringing together combos, so I should be the main damage dealer. You’ve got more combat experience than me, so you can watch our flanks and make sure we’re not getting surrounded. Genius, right?”

The smile on her face right now was practically screaming “Praise me!” but as much as I wanted to, I really couldn’t. Her plan was borderline suicide.

“Uh, before we do that, I’ve got a plan too.”

“Awesome! Let’s hear it!”

I shook my head briefly as I marveled at how well she was taking this seemingly hopeless situation. Ever since we were trapped in this world, she’d gotten brighter and more energetic by the day.

Honestly, the best solution now would be to climb out together and then apologize to Rucken, telling him that it was just too difficult for us low-level players to handle, but that left a bad taste in my mouth. I doubted Shizuka would even consider something so unheroic like that too.

I quickly explained my plan to Shizuka. Right now, we were standing around fifty meters away from the closest monster in the mass of mobs, yet none of them had turned aggressive yet. Our presence might as well have been invisible to them at the moment.

However, what would happen if we launched a ranged attack? The answer was obvious.

The system would override its current passive behavior and make it aggro us even if we were outside of its normal aggro range. I wasn’t sure whether it’d affect the entire group of mobs or not, but I was pretty confident that it’d only affect the one we damaged.

Before deciding to actually go with this plan, I’d asked Jin about sub-dungeons in the beta test. Just like in traditional MMOs, causing one mob to turn aggressive wouldn’t automatically cause the entire dungeon’s mobs to turn aggressive unless you were inside their aggro range.

This was something that I intended to abuse here in SAO, and thankfully, Shizuka was willing to give it a shot, though her parting remark of “If it fails, we’ll be charging into them anyway! Or rather, they’d be charging into us, teehee~!” wasn’t exactly comforting.

In this method, we’d be able to pick off the crowd one by one. Third floor or not, Shizuka’s skills combined with mine would be able to handle them easily. Besides, they didn’t look that strong or fast.

I picked up a nearby pebble and prepared to throw it at one of the mobs. The stone glowed turquoise as it recognized the activation of the Sword Skill «Single Shot». I angled the throw so that the stone wouldn’t bounce off the target and hit another mob by accident before allowing it to shoot off from my fingertips.

The chance of a bounce causing a mob to aggro was pretty slim, but it never hurt to be completely safe.

The pebble hit the side of my target with a thick meaty smack that echoed throughout the dungeon briefly. For a second, I was convinced that the action had ended up pulling the entire crowd thanks to the surprisingly loud sound, but I breathed a sigh of relief as the monster turned to us while its companions remained as docile as before.

“Look alive, Akira! It’s coming!” Shizuka warned me as she took up the front position, hefting her greatsword on her shoulder as if it were the most natural thing.

I drew my sword, keeping my other hand free. Normally, the greatest advantage of using a one-handed sword was the ability to equip a shield like a buckler. Jin was doing just that, allowing him to defend easily whenever his Sword Skills were in the “Cooling” period where they couldn’t be used.

However, I felt pretty naked with both of my hands occupied. It was ironic, but I preferred having the ability to beat the shit out of something with my bare hands on the quickdraw.

The monster that was rapidly closing distance between us was a Raging Rabbit. It looked like a cross between a human and a rabbit, and it was honestly quite terrifying due to its glowing red eyes and sharpened buck teeth. It was also wielding a heavy two-handed scimitar.

Shizuka’s blade glowed a bright orange. “Haaah!”

There was a blinding flash as her blade collided with the Raging Rabbit’s, and the sound of steel splintering shot through the air.

...What!?

“Shizuka!”

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