The Lugru Corridor

Key Events

As Kirito and Leafa go deeper into the cave, Yui senses 12 players closing in and Leafa receives an ominous message from Recon. Leafa hides them, but they detect a tracer and run for it after destroying it. The tracer was fire, so it’s salamanders are following them.

They try to make it to the nearest city but are caught out before they get in. There are 12 of them and Kirito attacks with Leafa as support. The front three are shields with support and mages at the back.

Kirito can’t break through the defensive until he gets an opening that hides him in a tornado of fire and he changes himself into a monster that scares the opponents out of formation.

Kirito leaves one of them alive and bribes him for information. Seems that they were here for revenge against the first Salamanders Kirito killed when he rescued Leafa. Also Kirito’s been ruining their plan, whatever it is it’s big as a lot of them are heading somewhere.

Later Kirito reminds Leafa of the message from Recon so she logs out to contact him.

We learn that Sigurd’s been working with Salamanders and he was involved in tracking Leafa and Kirito. And also, the leader of the Sylphs is about to sign an alliance with Cait Sith but Sigurd and some Salamanders plan to ambush them. If you kill a leader you get 30% of that Territory’s money, you can also pilfer their towns and levy whatever taxes you want.

Leafa offers Kirito her life so that he can work with Salamanders as if this operation succeeds the best placed race to go for the World Tree are the Salamanders. He refuses saying that he wants to be her friend and then rushes along with Yui leading the way.

Thoughts:

Well, that was rather disappointing, in that it wasn’t related to the laughing coffin but rather just a group of spineless people ganging up to kill 2 people and failed, who get scared easily. However, the huge plot and mission behind it all is rather interesting.

I like how Kirito bribed the guy into giving him information. He knows how to adapt to the situation. Can’t threaten people with death in a game where death to that guy probably doesn’t mean much as from what I saw he can probably lose some experience and not care. So he bribes him, we’re all greedy people who want the best for ourselves after all.

I’m still surprised at how Kirito and Suguha haven’t talked about Alfheim online in real life yet. If Suguha’s such a fan of the game she should have mentioned it at some point. Although I suppose I can understand her for not wanting to talk about VRMMORPGs to her brother/cousin who just spent 2 years in one and who she probably assumes is sick of them. In which case I suppose it’s also reasonable to assume she never thought that he’d play again so quickly, so she’s never thought of the possibility of Kirito being her brother/cousin.

Anyway yeah, as I mentioned first, there seems to be a big plan taking place. Sounds like a lot of fun. Although the thing I was most interested in was the leaders of each race and how that’s decided. I believe they’re human players rather than AI, with the amount of freedom they have to move, issue alliances and start wars at will. In which case a simple question comes to mind, who decides who gets to be the leader? Obviously a hard decision to make because for one thing that person will need to be on the game the majority of the time for managing the race, negotiations and stuff. Unless they are AI and can only do simple actions like go to a place to agree alliances, and the terms are restricted to certain actions and the characters from each race gets to vote. Something along those lines could work, but for a game that emphasises freedom, I don’t think they’d do that as it would be very restrictive.

On the pvp side, the Kirito fight was quite good. A nice show of group pvp in a fantasy world, although that ‘illusionary’ magic really wasn’t illusionary. Slightly overpowered, if it was just an illusion of a massive monster that’s fine, but he actually transformed into that monster… that’s transformation. Maybe some ‘cheating’ from him, but hey, for others it’s just a game, for Kirito, this is a lot more. He’s allowed a bit of not playing by the rules.

Well anyway, he’s abandoned the race for the tree now, but this other plot does seem more interesting. If he’s able to help two races out I’m sure he’ll be able to enlist a lot of help, so this could speed things up.

Note: Sorry I couldn’t return earlier, had to go to the Friday unfortunately. Couldn’t spare any time at all. But everything’s back to normal yet again so I’m back. For how long this’ll last though I don’t know. As always, I’ll let you all know if something comes up.