The Damn Devs and Their New Expansion

"Why are you so terrible at programming... you even get data structures wrong."

"I'm only fourteen!"

Faced with Akihiko Kayaba's questioning, Wang Shui argued his case without a trace of embarrassment.

What else could he say?

That he was actually twenty-six? That before a dump truck smashed him to pieces, he had been nothing but a low-end code monkey? Or that he had majored in chemistry and chemical engineering, gotten so bored working at a chemical plant that he enrolled in a programming crash course, then happened to slip into a major company, where he barely managed to finish his work under his seniors' protection?

What was the point of saying any of that? Who didn't have a past they couldn't bear to look back on?

Wang Shui, who currently had the gall to call himself fourteen, wasn't entirely without shame. He had already started reading-the classic masterpiece, "C++: From Getting Started to Getting Buried."

Fortunately, Wang Shui's ability to learn was now exceptionally strong. As he studied, Akihiko Kayaba also began teaching him more, including knowledge that couldn't be neatly assigned to any academic discipline.

Whether it involved physics, mathematics, or approaches to algorithms, Kayaba taught whatever came to mind. This kind of disjointed teaching would naturally have worked very poorly for an ordinary student.

But Wang Shui was different. Whenever he encountered something he knew absolutely nothing about, he immediately took notes and recorded Kayaba's words by memorizing them. Then, whenever he had a little free time, he looked up references to fill in that gap in his knowledge.

Time flew by amid this intense, demanding schedule of study and work. By now, the players had long since cleared the second floor and were even preparing to take on the third-floor boss.

The player death count had risen a little more. Both men in the little laboratory glanced indifferently at the casualty figures, then tacitly ignored them.

Starting on the fourth floor, where players had yet to set foot, small numbers of crude bomb items began appearing in NPC hands. The inexplicable appearance of black powder sent both overtime workers' blood pressure through the roof. After Kayaba made time to investigate, he finally discovered that [Autonomous Intelligence] was responsible-or, rather, that it was Wang Shui's fault.

Wang Shui had previously made black powder and used the [Handicraft] skill to record it as a recipe. However, with neither patent restrictions nor a unique skill tag, the [Handicraft] skill had been assigned to some artisan NPCs by the system, and they had inexplicably unlocked the ability to make black powder.

To fill in this piece of history, the system automatically generated a legend. Supposedly, an artisan called [Heavenly Book] had created this item and left behind the [Handicraft] skill and its associated recipes.

Now, large numbers of artisan NPCs had begun singing the praises of this legendary ancient artisan. Some were even preparing to grant him a posthumous title and canonize him.

The crude bombs were something the NPCs had developed themselves while researching black powder. This was progressing far too quickly. Kayaba had no intention of blaming Wang Shui; he simply gave serious consideration to releasing the update early.

So the two of them set aside the more complicated content for now. When the players set foot on the fourth floor, they released the new version-

[The Extinguished Spark]

Every player received a visual window announcing the version update, along with a short CG sequence. The expansion was full of oddly styled steel machinery and specialized firearms, as well as-inexplicable scenes of bullets being loaded into the hilts of swords and blades.

The expansion trailer was very short, but it had still cost Wang Shui two days. He hadn't even drawn it himself; he had found a few models and put together an in-engine demonstration in the test environment.

As for that final scene of bullets being loaded into swords and blades, it was an idea Wang Shui had come up with on the spur of the moment while adding firearms, because he didn't want modern weapons to overshadow the flavor of Sword Art Online-[Sword Skills Blade Bullet]!

By modifying traditional melee weapons and installing a [Blade Bullet Slot] in the hilt, weapons could be loaded with special [Blank Sword Skill Blade Bullets]. As players continued using sword skills, extra sword skill energy would be fed into the blade bullets. When a blade bullet began glowing, it was fully charged.

At that point, firing the blade bullet like a gun,

would feed the sword skill energy back into the weapon, granting it various lasting effects such as "normal attack damage enhancement," "sharpness enhancement," "Body part destruction enhancement," "slashing enhancement," "piercing enhancement," "blocking enhancement," "additional explosive attribute," and "single-use midrange burst." Even more flexibly, if players didn't fire the blade bullets, they could unload them after leaving combat. Charged blade bullets retained their charge for different lengths of time depending on their quality, with high-level blade bullets lasting over a month without any decay. Players could trade charged blade bullets and fire them directly the next time they needed them to obtain their desired enhancement.

Of course, blade bullets couldn't be charged just any way. To prevent players from farming training dummies to stockpile blade bullets, Wang Shui added an extra charging condition-they could only be charged in combat, and their charging speed was tied to the amount of HP monsters lost, so farming low-level monsters would also make it difficult to stockpile them.

For now, the chances of particular blade bullet attributes appearing were random. As for adjusting the odds of different affixes later, Wang Shui, who had already become a damn dev, planned to compile statistics on player preferences. Whatever attributes worked well or were popular, he would lower their odds of appearing to bring smiles to the players' faces.

Kayaba loved the [Sword Skills Blade Bullet] system. Originally deeply opposed to firearms appearing in his world, he had recently become obsessed with the casing-ejection motion after firing blade bullets, and often ran off alone to the test server during breaks to swing flashing blades around. He had even developed a rapid-charging technique before the players did.

It involved ejecting the spent blade bullet immediately after firing it, loading a fresh blank bullet while the blade was still enhanced, and then actively using sword skills. This ensured that the next round was already partially charged by the time the blade enhancement ended.

For this, Kayaba went so far as to change the parameters and add a hidden setting: blade bullets would charge much faster while the blade was enhanced. This created a rapid-fire farming approach for blade bullets with poor attributes.

Wang Shui also wanted to add multiple blade bullet slots-revolver-cylinder blade bullet slots! Rapid fire with multiple attributes! Kayaba approved, but wanted to save that equipment modification technology for the mid-to-late game. He also wanted to design sword skills specifically for blade bullets. All sorts of cool ideas burst forth in the minds of the two game developers.

The aim of this design was to combine gunpowder with the magical elements absent from the floating castle, downplay the presence of firearms, steer ammunition toward becoming a tool that supported sword skills, strengthen melee weapons, and increase monster stats to balance the difficulty.

While the two developers and damn devs were having fun, most players were rather bewildered. Only a handful of surviving beta testers looked as though they had been struck by a bolt from the blue.

Huh? Wasn't the fourth floor a dried-up river valley? How had it turned into a watery realm of rivers and marshes? And what the hell was [The Extinguished Spark]? This damn game had machinery too?!

The most shocked of all were Kirito and the information broker Argo. Somewhere Wang Shui knew nothing about, Asuna was trying to snap Kirito out of it by patting his face.

But what did any of that have to do with Wang Shui? The plot had changed completely. Lord Kirito could only fend for himself now.

Among the more than two hundred thousand players, only one person's thoughts were particularly different.

Having long since prepared himself mentally, Wang Shui was already sitting in the corner of a restaurant on the third floor, wasting his rare vacation waiting. Fortunately, his boss had become engrossed in playing with blade bullets and hadn't specified how long the vacation would last. Kayaba had said he wanted to refine the blade bullet settings a little further.

That familiar ice-blue figure pushed open the restaurant's wooden door. The brass bell on it rang out crisply, as though providing a sound effect for her entrance.

Their conversation only began after dessert arrived.

"Did the new expansion have something to do with you?" Shino asked first.

"I think you can probably guess what happened. I'm a villain boss now, so show some respect when you talk to me. Also, you're paying today. I don't have that much money on me."

Wang Shui's teasing failed to relax Shino, so he soon dropped his grin.

"All right, I got dragged off to do hard labor. An administrator discovered us making black powder before, and that triggered some bad changes, so I have to make up for it."

"Why didn't you take me with you?" Shino pressed.

Why? Because you're really just an ordinary middle school student!

"To put it tactfully, you're too dumb to be of any use. You might as well play the game without a care in the world and help stockpile some resources for me while you're at it. Once I've finished my hard labor, I can play in peace."

Wang Shui didn't go into detail, but some of that information did answer Shino's questions after seeing the expansion trailer. As for his bullshit, she just took it with a grain of salt.

"As long as your life's not in danger."

"It's safer than being on the front lines like you."

Their conversation grew more ordinary after that. Most of it was Shino talking about what had happened on the front lines: the strange things during the third-floor boss raid, the artisan running enhancement scams, how powerful her new partner Mito was, and how the third-floor boss had actually required the [Flying Sword] skill to defeat. Everyone who remembered Wang Shui had regretted his absence from the boss fight.

Wang Shui mostly listened patiently. The recent intensity of his studies and work had left his mind a little rigid, and simply sleeping and resting did nothing to help. Going out was a good chance to relax by switching mental gears.

They chatted for a long time after the meal, but went their separate ways once they left the restaurant. Wang Shui used a crystal to teleport to the first-floor plaza, while Shino simply watched quietly as he scattered into motes of light.

His short vacation passed in a flash.

Wang Shui had thought their work had reached a stopping point, only to discover helplessly that this new expansion was merely the beginning. They had only released a few clues to guide players toward obtaining early firearms and blade bullet slot modifications. That was enough guidance for the player population, but it had changed practically nothing in the NPC world.

"So, do you need me to talk to those big-shot NPCs? I've already put together a script. It's just giving swords to the radicals, shields to the conservatives, and the fallen elves stirring up trouble in the middle a little more capital to work with. Have them start a war over archaeological ruins, then find a few chosen ones and give them powerful blade bullet weapons. Hooks on this level barely even count as a scheme."

Wang Shui made it sound easy, but he really didn't want to face those NPCs. It wasn't that he was afraid of being killed by level seventy or eighty NPCs. He was an administrator now, and although he couldn't slaughter NPCs on a massive scale, he did have immortality.

He simply didn't want to go. Knowing how to act didn't mean he enjoyed acting, especially for an audience of NPCs. It was too boring.

Fortunately, Kayaba had no such plans either.

"I used the materials you wrote to edit several dozen bard-type advanced intelligent NPCs, then scattered them throughout the lower and middle floors, where most NPCs live. I'll monitor what happens next. You'll be responsible for the more important item-entry work."

Fine, fine, fine. Back to being a code monkey. The most mechanical, boring work of organizing and entering data, compiling statistics, testing interaction effects, and checking for bugs.

Fortunately, all the models in SAO had perfect physics-engine calculations. Otherwise, Wang Shui would also have had to adjust polygon structures, collision functions, volume parameters, and so on. Developing a large-scale game was far more than simply writing white code on a black screen.

Time seemed to slow down again. In his spare moments, Wang Shui's thoughts couldn't help drifting back to the core of the infinite world, back to the place where he truly existed.

At some unknown point, a trend of rapidly growing powerful had suddenly appeared in the world. Many "chosen ones" could acquire power that others could never reach in a lifetime within a few years, a few months, or even a few days. Abilities that clearly embodied extremely advanced technology or profound occult knowledge became [skills] they could use effortlessly.

Honestly, Wang Shui wanted that too. He didn't care what knowledge lay behind flashy spells, nor did he want to know that black powder wasn't the most complex chemical technology involved in modern ammunition.

He didn't want to research magic. He didn't want to handle concentrated acids and make mercury fulminate himself for primers, or work on rimfire ammunition. He only wanted to pick up a gun and fire endless bullets, or summon a sky full of fiery rain with a wave of his hand.

But his brain wouldn't allow it, and neither would his talent.

The infinite world, where others could rush in, rush out, and rapidly grow stronger, had become a slow journey through his evasions and choices.

Line after line of code, model after model, set after set of data-vast amounts of information took shape beneath Wang Shui's fingers, then immediately underwent testing and were efficiently turned into hotfixes.

Sometimes, when Akihiko Kayaba's attention wandered and he saw Wang Shui working with mechanical precision for long stretches, he would marvel at the young man's steadiness and patience. A peculiar fondness for talent sprouted in his heart.

Akihiko Kayaba had never felt this before. In his experience, teaching anyone was simply a waste of his time. No one could keep up with him and become his assistant.

Now, at last, his horizons had broadened. In less than a month, he had watched a middle school student who knew only basic programming rapidly grow into a core developer.

Akihiko Kayaba recalculated the labor hours. What had originally amounted to over three hundred person-days had been compressed to under a hundred. The speed at which [Autonomous Intelligence] filled in the gaps couldn't keep up with Wang Shui's ability to invent stories, and Wang Shui even had time left to read and study.

Wang Shui wasn't particularly happy about Akihiko Kayaba's occasional praise. He was merely completing his system mission at an extremely slow pace, and by now, he had more or less gained access to what he needed.

With his current permissions, he could easily extract the more advanced intelligent virtual world from the test environment and bundle it with the development tools into a data package, thereby creating [The World Seed] required by the plot himself. Akihiko Kayaba wouldn't find something as trivial as copying the test environment surprising.

Then what?

Complete the mission and leave this world?

His boss, the [Dream System], would probably give him rewards related to life skills. If he sold some information about the protagonist, those high-level Awakeners would probably pay him quite a bit. Then what?

Then return to that repair shop that looked like a garbage dump and scrape by for another six months, working hard while saving money to buy a ticket for the next mandatory mission, praying in fear that he would once again encounter a fictional world only he knew? Live like a dog... no, like a bug?

Wang Shui didn't care much about his dignity, and he wasn't lazy. He held a simple set of values that had long since taken shape-if he put in the effort, he should receive the reward he deserved. He hoped he could live like a human being through his own labor.

That was an extravagant wish. In a world ruled directly by overwhelming force, the weak didn't deserve to be born human.

So Wang Shui had no intention of going back.

Even if this was only an ordinary world, even if the only things it had to offer were [strong artificial intelligence], which was commonplace in the [Dream System], and inexplicable FullDive technology, Wang Shui was still going to stay.

He wanted to learn. He wanted to learn everything he could gain access to and arm himself as thoroughly as possible.

He didn't want to die in failure and loneliness. He didn't want to spend his whole life underground.