Sword Art Online ー The Cloaked Swordsmen

Chapter 5 - Hollow Realization

"Argo once told me, if we stood here and watched, the petals on the flowering Nepenthes fifty feet away might begin to fall, eventually leaving us with two fruit-bearing monsters on our hands." I explained in an anxious tone.

"Then, what do we do..." Kirito murmured.

I wasn't sure what the reasonable decision was, but even then I couldn't even trust my own sense of reason at this point.

"Well then, let's just go for it. Try not to hit it."

I said as Kirito looked at me with a look of uncertainty, before taking a deep breath and leaping into battle. I had to focus on controlling my sword and avatar.

Upon that, Kirito approached it from behind, while I daringly approached it from the front with my sword raised in the air and brought it down from the top right and brought it down towards the bottom left. It was the sword skill <slant> which I used to get its attention.

It swung its vines towards me, while I dodged and parried them away and countered, while Kirito attacked it from behind.

We brought down its HP to yellow.

I jumped back, dodging its vines as Kirito prepared to eliminate it. As I did a back flip, I landed on one of its vines which then wrapped around my leg and threw me towards a tree, bringing down my HP to about 20%.

It prepared for another attack, but before the Nepenthes could spit acid at me, Kirito's <Horizontal> cut killed it.

It let out a scream that was a bit different from the usual kind. The severed pitcher rolled to the ground and burst into little polygons—but not before the flower on its head fell off.

A faintly glowing orb about the size of a fist rolled out, coming to a stop against my boot just as the monster shattered into particles of blue light.

I crouched down and scooped up the glowing Little Nepenthes Ovule, before putting it away into our shared party inventory.

The sound of crawling was heard and at that moment, with a terrifyingly calm demeanour, I spun around and stared down the charging line of plants.

"You wanna go?"

Kirito gave me a look as if saying 'Let's do it.' as I gripped my sword, despite the knowledge of death breathing down our necks we had a small smile on our faces.

After over a hundred battles, the sword I had was worn down, but not as much as Kiritos whose blade had chips here and there.

Then, looking at the health bars on the top left corner of my vision, I noticed that our Health bars were dangerously low, with Kirito's health bar being at 45% while my health bar was at 20%

I had to aggravate the monster and attack while not letting a single hit pass through. If I couldn't do that then, I'd surely end up dying here.

I took a deep breath, and pointed my sword at the enemy, prompting it to strike me with its vines as I dodged each one of them swiftly, not paying attention to my surroundings.

I tracked the trajectories of its attacks and moved my body fluidly, not even bothering to parry. This is where the extra agility helped as I ran around evading attacks.

It was somewhat of a simple feat for a player like me who had a high-level decision-making and response time to evade almost every single attack. What's more, I even had the agility and reflexes to support me.

The vines coming from all directions brushed past my limbs, as I performed acrobatic skills avoiding each attack and the continuous barrage of corrosive spit put holes in my new white coat and took down my HP bar, bringing death one step closer. 15% health.