Progressive Factor II: Lacrimosa Of A Reaper

New Year's Gamble: The Twenty-Two

Jaymes

Party A: Kirito, Jaymes, Asuna, Koharu, Argo, Mito

Party B: Klein and Furinkazan

Party C: Agil, Nezha, and the Bro Squad

Party D: Hafner, Shivata, Liten, Okotan, and Diavel

This is the organization of the twenty-two players based on Diavel, Kirito, and Jaymes' suggestions. After electing Diavel leads the group and Argo beckons them onward through the forest and an easy-to-navigate maze, the gathering arrives at a massive stone wall. Argo claims she knows what to do about the wall and proves it by providing a silver key and injecting it within a particular gap in the wall.

Everyone expected a hidden door to appear as the wall rumbled, but nothing of the sort happened. If anything, a couple of the blocks further sank into the wall, but that's it. As if there's nothing wrong with scaling a sixty-foot wall, Argo begins her ascent up the unconventional rungs of a makeshift ladder, with padding placed at the bottom should someone slip. It took about fifteen minutes to get everyone up to the top, and then the twenty-two continued moving on until they reached the entrance to the fifth labyrinth of the game.

Asuna served the group one of the cakes from the secret shop in Mananarena, and in the meantime, everyone congregated around the observation deck beyond the labyrinth's doors. The Bro Squad and Hafner eat the cake together; Liten and Shivata get cozy in their own little world; Diavel is entertained by Furinkazan; then there are the other three girls huddle up amongst themselves. Kirito and Jaymes are separated from the rest.

"It's almost time..."

"Yeah..." While Kirito pokes at the banana-flavored cake, Jaymes can hardly muster the will to take a bite. He was absent when the others ate the same item almost half a day earlier, and Koharu's retelling made him wish he wasn't hunting ghosts at the time. He's not a fan of cakes that aren't chocolate flavored, but this cake is a delicacy of its own. Yet his hands start to shake when he tries to pick up the fork to slice a piece off.

He can't swallow the cake because his nerves are choking him-and for the first time, it's his life he's afraid for.

This raid is the only option to preserve the peace, fragile as it is. Even if ALS failed to capture the flag, the act itself would further the rift between the two guilds. Their momentum after four successful conquests will dissipate into madness and hopelessness. Players like Liten and Klein, who just caught up, would have their flames of hope extinguished. Koharu and Asuna, people like them who swallowed their fear and moved forward, would sink into despair. And Morte's group would drink that despair like fine wine.

Jaymes takes a deep breath, holds it, and closes his eyes.

The fifth-floor boss will be the hardest they've ever faced. Beyond being a boss on a higher level than the previous four, it is a milestone boss, so there's a degree of further difficulty with that in mind. The beta testers warned their newbie cohorts about that again and again and maybe repeated it for their own sake, but despite it, they coerced less than half a raiding party to the fight.

But Jaymes has seen the impossible made possible before. History is full of fights with the underdogs winning against all odds. The ones that he thinks of now is the Greeks defeating the Trojans in the Trojan War. For ten years, the Greeks couldn't penetrate the walls of Troy, while the Trojans remained secured within those walls. But after the fall of the invincible Achilles, the legendary hero Odysseus instructed the Greeks to build wooden horses and trick the Trojans into thinking the Greeks had retreated and left them gifts.