[Progressive manga] Scherzo of Deep Night - Chapter 012

The past two weeks have been pretty busy for our entire team. I haven't had much time to work on translations due to being swamped in hospital shifts, one of our redrawers/typesetters wasn't feeling well, and Mtt was busy with his own real life work, so we didn't have anything ready for last week's slot. We were hoping to make another double Scherzo release to make up for it, but Nguyen still wasn't feeling well enough to finish up her work on chapter 13. Furthermore, while we did technically have this chapter ready for release yesterday, I got stuck covering for a colleague who called in sick with a fever. Hospital shifts are mostly a lottery: sometimes you finish up your work quick and nothing's going on, so you have plenty of time to yourself; othertimes, you're flooded with so much work that you go 12+ hours without food. Unfortunately, my unplanned shift turned to be one of the latter, so I was too exhausted to go through uploading the files and making a blog post for the release yesterday night. But better late than never, I suppose.

Chapter 12 is the final chapter in the volume 2 of the Scherzo manga compilation. It covers the gang's trek through the Labyrinth up to the boss room.

I'm thinking of making a comparison post for Scherzo V2 Twitter release vs the tankoubon (there were A LOT of changes... like, some-pages-were-literally-redrawn-from-scratch-entirely level of A LOT) to make up for the missing slot, since we're kinda running on empty at the moment. Might release it later today or tomorrow.

I hope you enjoy the release. If you have any suggestions/requests for what to work on, feel free to leave a comment or contact us through Twitter/Discord/Email.

Finally, a standard thank you to all of those who contributed to the SAO Scans project for helping us get the raws.

-Gsimenas

Credits

Raws: SAO Scans
Translation: Gsimenas
Editing: Gsimenas
Redrawing: Nguyen Milk
Typesetting: Nguyen Milk
Quality Assurance: Mttblue2

Scherzo of Deep Night - Chapter 12

Links for the translation files:

• PDF
• Zip Download

Chapter 011

Index

Chapter 013

Translation (choice/nuance) comments:

• Page c12-01: "Mr. Tough Guy" - Argo literally said "tough guy" in katakanised English (タフガイさん = tafu gai-san). I changed "-san" to "Mr." as it would be awkward to leave the honorific in and the demeaning implication is better conveyed through "Mr.".
• Page c12-01: "Front-runners" (フロントランナー = furonto rannnah) is Argo's name for the frontline group. She's the only one who uses this specific name.
• Page c12-01: Agil speaks in slangy masculine tone. Thus, I made his lines more casual by using more slang and slurred words in his speech.
• Page c12-04+: The word "beta" is usually written as β in the original text. I decided to keep it that way.
• Page c12-05: The phrase "guild members" was shortened to "guilmems" (ギルメン) in the original text.
• Page c12-05: Argo used the katakanised English word for shortcut (ショートカット = shohto katto)
• Page c12-11: "That sure strays from standard practice" - the original phrase was "セオリーと違うな", which literally means "sure is different from theory", where the word "theory" is in katakanised Engrish. However, Japanese have coopted this English word to mean "what's most likely to work/be a safe call", so a literal translation wouldn't make much sense. So, I localised it to "standard practice" instead.
• Page c12-12: "POT rotation" - the original phrase was "ＰＯＴローテ", where "POT" is a shorthand for the English word "potion", while ローテ (rohte) is a shorthand for the English word "rotation".
• Page c12-12: "※Short for Area of Effect" is a note present in the original text. "Area of Effect" is written in English in the original.
• Page c12-12: "hate" (ヘイト = heito) - a synonym for aggro
• Page c12-15: "For a hastily assembled team, both squads" - the word "team" was in katakanised English (チーム = chihmu), while "both squads" (両隊 = ryoutai) was in actual Japanese.

Adaptation notes:

• Page 3 - slightly different phrasing for Kirito that ultimately means the same thing.
• Pages 8-9 - Kirito's monologues were re-ordered for simplicity's sake. In the novel, Kirito first thought of the PK gang, then about everyone's motivations, then went back to thinking about the PK gang.
• Kirito's mid-chapter monologue was considerably trimmed down.
• The manga skipped Kirito's assurances that he'll scout the boss before their battle.
• Kirito's monologues from the regular golem battles were skipped.
• Kirito describing what the 10th Floor Labyrinth was like in the beta was skipped.
• Wolfgang's talk about hating snakes and wanting to open up a stakehouse in the game were omitted.
• Hafner took over one of Shivata's lines.
• In the novel, Kirito was the first to volunteer to do the boss room scounting, before Argo came and argued that she'd be better for the job, as she could use her mobility to get out of any traps.
• Various dialogue trimming.