The Survival Logs || Sword Art Online Fanfic

PK Pandemonia Arc: Chapter 57 - Informant's Wish

16 February 2024

Granzam, 55th Floor

Even as I saw the light shining through the stairs leading up to the roof, the feeling of being outside didn't seem to register in my eyes.

Giant metallic walls seem to fill my vision, as I looked around, and tried to trace my sight up at the top of these towering chunks of steel, which easily surpassed the building in height, so much so that it would take another copy of this building stacked on top of it to barely look over the walls if one stood on top of it.

Behind me, more metallic walls, albeit shorter than the first ones, stood at seemingly random angles, but were positioned to form paths made solely by the walls themselves. Due to that, small gaps between the walls can be found, possibly wide enough for a player without any armour equipped to slide through with relative effort.

The walls I was apparently staring at were the ones that bordered the city of Granzam; in other words, I was now at the edge of the city, although I couldn't tell where exactly I was in this maze-like safe zone.

"I'm glad you read my message." A voice reached my right ear clearly.

I turned at the only other player at the roof of the building, standing by the simple metallic edge that separated him from a 3-storey drop down to the hard, rigid metal below. He was wearing his red and white guild uniform, exactly the same as I had seen him a few days ago.

"Kyozo of the KoB, right?" I strolled towards him."To think you can send me a message. I mean, my username's hard to spell without any context."

Kyozo simply nodded. "Asuna told me. I needed to directly message you for a personal reason."

I sighed a little. It was honestly surprising for a player whom I thought never knew how my username was spelt to be able to send messages to me, but that had cleared my confusion up on that matter.

"Right, I don't want to take long over here, I need to be back in my guild base soon." Kyozo went on. "I'm sure you're interested in what I wrote in my message, don't you?"

It was my turn to nod. "Information about the source of the PKs. I can't ignore that."

Kyozo was the last player I expected to know anything about the PK surge, but he seemed confident in claiming to know something about it. The player whom I once thought was quite reserved turned to face me directly.

"Have you heard of the canyon maze on the 43rd Floor?" He started off with a question.

Ah. My eyes narrowed at him. The moment he mentioned that field dungeon was when I had wanted to anticipate whatever he was going to say next, as I knew all too well about the 43rd Floor to expect anything great from it.

Whenever a Floor was cleared by the Assault Team, I would always make it a point to visit all the areas that the next Floor had to offer, since the map in my system menu never showed the details of an area I had explored before unless I had gone there myself. The map would automatically lay all its details out, including the locations of the field bosses whenever I discovered them.

Whatever I never discovered would still come up blank on the map. Since then, I made it a habit to explore every area on a Floor, even if it would take tons of HP potions for me to encounter them as a solo player (these days I would explore Floors while Drifting with my client parties).

Back then, it would take at least a fortnight of non-stop exploring to completely cover a whole Floor, especially for those below the 30th Floor or so, due to their gargantuan area sizes. After that, the Floors gradually became smaller, and would now take just about under a week to cover, on average.