The 36th floor was a lot like the one before it. Vast expenses of frozen ground, forests covered in snow, rivers of ice-cold water. Nothing particularly special about it.
Which was not the reason the main party of Reaver's Requiem wasn't on that floor. To them, the less interesting a floor was, the better.
No, Drifter, Kirito, Asuna, Yuna, Nautilus, and Sinon weren't on the 36th floor. They were on the one just under it, the dreaded 35th floor, to complete the questline they unlocked by killing the Abyss Leviathan.
Only the six of them, though. Mainly because it would attract too much unwanted attention if all of Reaver's Requiem left the frontlines to strut about the 35th floor.
But those six were more than enough. They were the original Reavers.
Broken Spear Drifter, Black Swordsman Kirito, Lightning Flash Asuna, Songstress Yuna, Indomitable Knight Nautilus, Aero Huntress Sinon. Six titled players. Six of Aincrad's best.
Nowadays, they rarely partied together. It was too much firepower in one group. It left the other Reavers... Understaffed, for lack of better words.
For this, however? It was the best decision they could have come to. Small enough of a group that it didn't hurt their guild to be without them for a while, especially after Drifter left Kizmel in command. And also enough to take on everything that was thrown at them, be it mobs or red players, with the exception of a boss like the Abyss Leviathan, from which they would run.
If they knew what they were getting into... Drifter would still have gone. It was that precious. But he would have brought the rest of the guild.
Still, their adventure started by slaying Drunken Monkeys in the Forest of Wandering. Tall, blue-furred baboon-like mobs, only the size of gorillas, and carrying a wine vat around their necks, which they would occasionally take swings from before unleashing a skill.
They were strong. Elite mobs. And they had killed more than their fair share of middle-level players over the last days.
But to the party from Reaver's Requiem, they were just walking experience. It wasn't even that each player was that much stronger than the mobs - although none of them, perhaps not even Yuna, would have problems taking them one-on-one. It was just that the six Reavers together was blatantly unfair.
Drifter ducked under a fist as big as his head, stabbing the mob's arm from beneath in an almost lazy motion. A shake of his wrist and he had batted away the limb, throwing the Drunken Monkey to the ground by using its own momentum.
It was easy. Not the fight, necessarily. Neither the movements. But just the way he did it. Muscle memory and battle instincts at their finest.
And no sense of honor.
Kirito stabbed the downed mob in the face with both of his swords without hesitating a single second. Nautilus punched it with his shield when it tried to get up, Indomitable Might knocking it back down. Sinon nailed it's limbs to the ground with her arrows.
Drifter stabbed it much like Kirito did, but in the chest, and using Dirty Play. The Drunken Monkey died a pitiful death, face down on the forest ground, attacked on all sides by players with zero pride when it came to killing mobs.
"Are we the bad guys? I feel like we are the bad guys. Oh, Healing Crystal! Nice."
Yuna mumbled the old joke while scrolling through the drops they got from the Drunken Monkey. No one bothered to respond to her.
Even for Reaver's Requiem, who had an actual NPC and two mobs in their ranks, feeling pity for the creatures was not something that ever crossed their minds.
"Two more that way."
Sinon's eyes glowed when she used Searching. Her bow was raised and she let a volley of arrows fly, targeting mobs that Yuna couldn't even see yet.
"Yiiiikkk!!!"
She struck true, like always. SAO's only archer never missed. Sometimes her arrows were defended against, dodged, deflected. But she never missed.
Two Drunken Monkeys burst through the undergrowth, bounding towards the party with all four limbs. Yuna brought her flute to her lips and blew on it.
The shrill tunes of Del Din froze the mobs dead on their tracks. To this day, the melody she had acquired in one of the lower floors was still one of Yuna's most used songs, simply because the 'fear' effect it applied was too good to pass up.
Drifter was there to take advantage of the window his wife provided, his spear swinging in a Horizontal, catching both mobs across the chest.
The spearmaster pivoted as the mobs stumbled, and kicked the one on the left towards Asuna and Nautilus, who locked it down with a series of skills.
The Drunken Monkey on the right Drifter went after himself. His weapon changed into a halberd, which he brought down on the mob's shoulder in a mightyVertical.
It cut clean through the Drunken Monkey's collarbone, only stopping halfway down its chest, intersecting with the line already left there from the previous skill.
Kirito and Sinon were hitting the mob with their own skills while Yuna switched up to an attack-oriented tune. The Drunken Monkey finally recovered from its debuff and reared back a hairy arm to swipe at the players.
Drifter barely slowed down through all that. He retracted his halberd and spun. A polearm pierced the neck of the Drunken Monkey, and then it was a spear slashing across its thighs.
Perhaps only Drifter could achieve this level of versatility in Sword Art Online. In many ways, Infinite Spear was the hardest Unique Skill to master, but he had done so flawlessly.
Still, Drifter always came back to his spear. It was his chosen weapon, his core, the very center of his being. As much a part of him now as his heart or lungs.
A swinging fist stopped centimeters away from his face, the Drunken Monkey's arm extending as far as it would go.
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Drifter's spear reached further, through the open mouth of the mob and out the back of its head as it broke into shards.
The spearmaster nodded once to Kirito before spinning on his heels and throwing his spear at the second Drunken Monkey.
He needn't have. Asuna and Nautilus killed it and his weapon flew right through the space where the mob had been before thudding against a tree.
It would have been cooler if the weapon stayed embedded on the wood, but most trees were [ Immortal Objects ]. So Drifter's weapon just fell to the ground, and he winced - Liz was going to have his head for wasting durability like that.
Or she would have, if his spear had actually hit the ground at any moment. But it didn't. It just disappeared into empty air, a ripple none of them had noticed during the fighting.
The spearmaster felt all the hairs in his body standing up. He tried to recover his spear through his inventory, and it didn't come. You couldn't recall equipment if you were in a different floor.
Or if it was in a hidden map.
Drifter eyed the fracture in the air with suspicion and distate. He had never seen something like it. But then again, hidden map entrances were always weird. Just take the one on the 33rd floor as example. They had to literally jump down a hole in the ice to access it.
"Drifter-"
"Don't tell me. That's where your quest's pointing."
"Yeah. Funny that, huh?"
The spearmaster shook his head and took out another spear from his inventory. This was why they had backups.
"No. Not at all. Crystals in hand, everyone. We are out the moment anything feels off."
Hesitating only for a moment, Drifter stepped through the gap in the air, and appeared in another place entirely.
It looked somewhat like the Forest of Wandering, but it was different at the same time.
He was in huge clearing, the ground full of packed snow, hard under his feet. The trees surrounding the open space were pine, but taller than any he had seen before, with trunks that would take at least 6 or 7 people to encircle them.
Their bark was of a brown so dark it was almost black, creating an illusion of shadows melding against shadows.
Like a barrier. A living wall stopping the players from running around.
Drifter knew right away that they were in a boss room. Of course, the creature in the middle of the clearing was also a pretty good clue.
It looked like a human. Drifter didn't think it was one.
The limbs were too long, the body too small. Despite it having their backs to him, Drifter see the thin neck leading to a misshapen head.
The ashen skin of the boss contrasted with the blood-red coat it was wearing, complete with a furry cap. From this angle, it looked like some kind of monster Santa Claus.
Nicholas the Renegade. Drifter saw the name above the boss' head, and instantly pushed Kirito, who had jumped into the fissure behind him, back.
"Boss. We'll get everyone and come back."
It was what they had promised, after all. To not take any risks. Unnecessary risks, that was.
But Kirito shook his head as Asuna, Nautilus, Yuna, and Sinon appeared behind the two of them. He spoke at the same time that a loud siren blasted through the air, and the boss turned to them.
"Look at the quest menu. There's a 6-player limit to the hidden map."
"Well, crap."
Drifter didn't check his menu as he picked up his spear, eyes glued on the boss. If Kirito said it, then it was true. Which was annoying. But also...
"Might as well take it down, then. This would probably be our raid configuration anyway."
A limitation on the number of players who could enter the map also meant a limitation in the boss' power. SAO was above all else fair. If it said 6 players were enough, then it was enough.
Of course, there was a huge difference between 6 random low-level players, and 6 frontliners. Thankfully, the party was on the extreme high end of the spectrum.
It didn't mean the battle would be easy. They rarely ever were. But Drifter had the confidence to win, although it faltered slightly when Nicholas the Renegade turned to them with blood-red eyes that matched his coat, drool falling out of a mouth full of rotten teeth like some sort of zombie-Santa.
"That's one ugly boss."
Nautilus whistled, readying his shield and setting his stance. When the first set of fingernails bigger than daggers raked across his defense, the ash-haired player took two steps back, not because he was pushed, but on purpose.
Simply twisting his shoulder, Nautilus deflected the attack and chopped down on Nicholas the Renegade's wrist with his blade. The boss let out a scream of rage, still with a maniacal smile in his face.
"Left left right."
The spearmaster spat a bunch of instructions, seemingly disconnected words. To anyone else, it would be nonsense. To the party, it was more than enough.
Kirito and Asuna ducked left, his swords racing across Nicholas the Renegade's side while her rapier left half a dozen holes in his chest.
Drifter went to the right. An arrow careened over his head as the boss swayed from Kirito and Asuna's attack, inadvertently dodging Sinon's, but Drifter wasn't bothered.
His spear flashed, puncturing holes through the boss' thighs. His newest skill, Triple Thrust, seemed simple for one gained after reaching 800 points of mastery in Two-Handed Spear, but it packed quite the punch.
He was ever so close to fully dominating the basic skill, but those 200 points might as well be an insurmountable gap. Drifter wagered he would need at least another 6 months before reaching his goal.
That still put him heads and shoulders ahead of every other spear-user, and most players in general. Only the original frontliners, the ones who had started fighting the very first day of SAO and never stopped, had mastery of any skill even close to his.
His fighting was... Immaculate. The transition between skills and normal attacks, between system data and human factor, seamless. Sometimes he got hit, red lines and gashes appearing over his body, but it was only when he judged it worth it.
That's why people said nothing beats the real thing. And most definitely, no amount of training can surpass betting your life on every move of your spear.
It was exhilarating, in a way. Fighting for your life while trusting only yourself and the people you had come to care about like family. No safety nets, no safeguards, nothing else but the spear in his hands and his companions at his back.
"Tidal Sequence!"
His spear slashed across Nicholas the Renegade's neck, emptying his second to last health bar in exchange for piercing five holes in Drifter's shoulder with his nails.
A worthwhile trade, in the spearmaster's opinion. Nautilus was there to take the aggro away from him, and with a combination of potions and Yuna's Rest, he was soon back to an acceptable amount of HP.
Most battles were like this. Dodging or blocking every blow was exhausting, and deceptively dangerous.
It may seen counterintuitive, but yes, dangerous was the right word. Always blocking or evading tired you out, not to mention it left you in the back foot the entire time, dragging out the battle. And the longer a fight went on, the more likely a player was to make mistakes - mobs didn't have that problem.
No, sometimes it was better to take the blows and counterattack. Losing a few points of HP was worth it if it meant your opponent lost more significantly.
Of course, that only held true in SAO, where the players felt no pain and could recover from the most grievous of injuries with just a potion or Healing Crystal.
And even then, it was a fine line to walk. Make a mistake, misjudge the enemy's strength and how much damage they will do to you, and you could easily find yourself in a perilous, and oftentimes deadly, conundrum.
Drifter had mastered the art of walking that line, one foot after the other, steady as a mountain. Hell, if you wanted to take the metaphor further, the spearmaster was doing flips and trickshots on the line, and landing on his feet every time.
It never ceased to amaze his family and all the people watching from the outside world. That just two years could transform 6 innocent civilians in the tireless machine that was the Reaver's party.
Drifter was just one cog in that mechanism. Together with the other five, they were dismantling the boss hit point by hit point.
Until it died. Just like that.