Chapter 13: Special Reward: Wolfheart Necklace!

A blue glow emanated from Shengzai’s one-handed sword, the visual effect of the skill activation.

As a single icy star appeared at the tip of Shengzai’s blade, the next instant his sword struck like a bolt of lightning, piercing straight into the Wolf Lord’s eyeball.

As crimson pixelated fragments burst from the Wolf Lord’s eye like blood, the Wild Area Boss let out a shrill wolf howl.

Clearly, no matter the creature, the eyeball is always one of its weak points.

As Shengzai’s one-handed sword plunged fully into the Wolf Lord’s eye, the multiplied weak-point damage caused this Wild Area Boss to collapse instantly.

With the death of the Wolf Lord, the last remaining Wolf beside Kirigaya shattered like glass and vanished.

Seeing that Shengzai had already finished the battle and was now “looting the corpse,” Kirigaya was taken aback.

He remembered that when the Wolf Lord’s HP dropped to ten percent, it was supposed to summon a group of minions and enter a berserk state.

But Kirigaya never expected this guy Shengzai would skip that phase entirely, one-shotting the Wolf Lord with multiplied weak-point damage!

“This isn’t what we agreed on! Didn’t we decide that the final blow, to compensate the other person, should be delivered by the one holding off the wolf pack?”

SAO has another mechanic: the player landing the final blow on a boss receives an incredible bonus reward.

According to Shengzai and Kirigaya’s prior agreement, the special reward from the final blow was to be given to the more burdened partner.

But now the result was…

“Come on, didn’t I already apologize? And I didn’t expect the Wild Area Boss to be this weak.”

“Didn’t I give you all the other drops from the Wolf Lord?”

Hearing Shengzai’s words, Kirigaya glanced at the pile of junk in his hand, then at the wolf-tooth necklace around Shengzai’s chest, and felt a surge of injustice.

True, the Wolf Lord’s drops were quite valuable at this stage—but compared to the special reward Shengzai just obtained, they were nothing.

Equipment: Wolfheart Necklace

Type: Accessory

Effect: Increases experience gain by 120%.

Bound to: Shengzai Wen

Undeniably, when Kirigaya saw the special equipment Shengzai obtained, his eyes turned red on the spot.

Most rare equipment in SAO is obtained through boss drops or special rewards.

Even rare equipment, for players whose levels keep rising, is merely a transitional item.

But there exists a category of gear with no level restrictions, whose stats scale as percentages and grow alongside the player’s level and strength.

Such gear is rarer than the rarest!

That’s right—the special reward Shengzai received after slaying the Wolf Lord, the “Wolfheart Necklace,” belongs to this category.

Moreover, the Wolfheart Necklace features an exceptionally rare experience-boosting effect.

In the early game, this effect may seem insignificant, since leveling up is relatively easy.

But by mid-to-late game, as a veteran player, Kirigaya could only say: this thing is absolutely a divine item!

Of course, though the Wolfheart Necklace was top-tier, Kirigaya could do nothing but sigh at Shengzai’s luck—he was his only true friend, and the gear was bound exclusively to him.

——————

Time slipped by like a white colt passing a gap; soon, a month had passed since players were trapped in SAO.

Yet even after this month, players had still not breached the first floor of the Sky Tower to reach the second.

Recall that during SAO’s internal test, players had already reached the eighth floor in the same timeframe.

Logically, beta testers with prior experience should have advanced faster this time—but reality proved otherwise.

The reason was simple.

During the internal test, players advanced quickly because they had no fear.

As gamers, they were immortal; failure meant retrying—second, fifth, even tenth attempts posed no issue.

No matter how invincible the floor boss, it couldn’t withstand their endless wheeling assaults.

But now, the situation was entirely different—they weren’t playing a game anymore, but risking their lives.

Previously immortal, now one death meant true death; with fear taking root, progress naturally slowed drastically.

Due to this sluggish progress, a boss strategy meeting was being held today at Tolbana Square on the first floor.

The organizer was a blue-haired handsome man named Diabel, and the invitees were all the top-ranked known players.

“That Shengzai guy said he had something to do and told me to come ahead—how can he be late to such a crucial strategy meeting? What the hell is he up to?”

During this past month, aside from the initial period when Shengzai and Kirigaya frequently teamed up, after fully understanding the game’s mechanics, Shengzai began acting alone often.

After completing the merchant Messi’s quest, Shengzai and Kirigaya not only received the reward—the Windflower Sword—but Shengzai, thanks to his “noble son” cover identity, also gained a degree of goodwill from Messi.

Leveraging his silver tongue and substantial early-game capital, Shengzai secured some resources and connections from the merchant Messi and has begun forming the Chuxing of his own trading guild.

Originally, knowing the first-floor boss’s details, Kirigaya was confident he and Shengzai could defeat it together.

But his friend had abandoned his duties—instead of focusing on progress, he’d become obsessed with commerce, forcing Kirigaya to attend this boss strategy meeting alone.

The blue-haired organizer, under everyone’s gaze, spoke eloquently, exuding clear leadership.

Just as the crowd nodded in agreement and prepared to follow his battle plan, a spiky-haired player named “Yawang” suddenly leapt from the crowd and slapped the label of “exploiter” onto the beta testers.

According to Yawang, the massive player deaths since the start of the death game were largely due to the selfishness of the “exploiter” players.

(End of chapter)