Chapter 12
“...-kun! Kirito-kun!!”
Asuna's calls, which were almost like screams, forced me awake. As I sat up, pain spiked through my head and caused my face to distort.
“Owww...”
I looked around and saw that we were still in the boss room. Blue light fragments were still floating around the room. It seemed like I had only lost consciousness for a few seconds.
Asuna was kneeling on the ground, her face right before my eyes. Her eyebrows were tightened, and she was biting her lip. It looked like she was going to cry.
“You idiot...! Why...!?”
She shouted and then jumped into my arms and hugged me. It shocked me enough to make me forget my pain for a moment. I could only blink in surprise.
“...Don't hug me so tightly. You're going to make my HP disappear.”
I said in a joking tone, but Asuna responded with a really angry expression. She shoved a small bottle into my mouth. The liquid which flowed in was a high-quality potion that tasted like a combination of lemon juice and green tea. It should fully heal my HP within five minutes, but my fatigue was going to last a while.
Asuna checked to confirm that I had drunk all of it. Then, as her face began to scrunch up, she put her forehead on my shoulder to hide it.
I raised my head at the sound of footsteps and saw Klein approach. He seemed a little apologetic for disturbing us, but started speaking nevertheless.
“We've finished healing all the remaining Army members, but Cobert and two of his men had already died...”
“...Yeah. It's the first time since the 67th floor that someone died during a boss fight...”
“That wasn't even a fight. That idiot Cobert... You can't do anything if you're dead...”
Klein spat out. Then he took a deep breath, shook his head, and asked me in an attempt to change the mood.
“But back to the topic, what the hell was that just then!?”
“...Do I really have to explain it to you?”
“Of course! I've never seen something like that before!”
I suddenly noticed that aside from Asuna, everyone in the room was looking at me, waiting for my reply.
“...It's an extra skill: «Dual Blades».”
Expressions of amazement rose throughout Klein's party and the survivors from the Army.
All weapon skills had to be learned in a certain order depending on their type. Take swords for an example; you had to train the one-handed straight sword skill quite a bit before «Rapier» and «Two-Handed Sword» appeared on the list.
Naturally, Klein was interested, and he urged me to tell the rest.
“The conditions that have to be met are?”
“I'd have told everyone if I knew that.”
As I shook my head, Klein sighed and muttered.
“You're right...”
Weapon skills that didn't have clear conditions for appearing are called extra skills. They were sometimes even called random conditions. An example would be Klein's «Katana». But «Katana» wasn't all that rare and appeared quite often as long as you kept training the Curved Sword skill.
Most of the ten-plus extra skills that had been found up until now, «Katana» included, had at least ten people who used each of them. The only exceptions were my «Dual Blades» and one other man's extra skill.
