[Progressive manga] Scherzo of Deep Night - Chapter 013

This week's release is a Scherzo manga chapter. We were supposed to release this last week, but that didn't work out so well. I didn't have time to prepare a filler release on the spot, so we'll have to make do with a belated release.

Chapter 13 is the first chapter from volume 3 and it covers the beginning of the Floor 5 boss battle, where Argo and Kirito figure out the mechanics of the boss... if only they could have warned their companions about what they learnt in time...

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 13

Links for the translation files:

• PDF
• Zip Download

Chapter 012

Index

Chapter 014

Translation (choice/nuance) comments:

• Page 01+: Argo has a speech quirk wherein she changes the last kana (usually a sentence ending particle) in her sentence to katakana, when it would normally be written in hiragana. This is accounted for by emphasising the final letter in her sentence in the translation (making it capitalised or look bigger). Argo also speaks in boyish tone, so I made her language more casual.
• Page 01+: Argo nicknames Kirito as Kii-bou (キー坊). -bou is a cutesy suffix/honorific for boys. Of course, since boys don't want to be associated with "cuteness", -bou usually only gets used with very young boys, unlike -chan being used for any relatively young and cute girl.
• Page 03: The spelling for Agil's name is incorrect in the original text of the manga. Argo's name had also been misspelt, but it was corrected in the tankoubon. Agil's was still left as "Egil", even though he's Andrew, not Endrew.
• Page 12: "budge an inch" - normally, I try to avoid using words that that the characters wouldn't be likely to use, such as Imperial measurements, but I ran out of synonyms that would convey the thought properly without resorting to idioms that refer to Imperial measurements.

Adaptation notes:

• The manga didn't explain that Argo was hit with a stun effect when she tumbled at the boss's initial attack.
• In the novel, Kirito remembered to check on his party members' HP bars right away, rather than trying to pry Argo out of the golem hand first.
• Kirito's internal monologues were greatly condensed.
• Some of Kirito's narrations were changed into dialogue lines for either him or other characters.
• Kirito's and Argo's lines about the boss's gimmick were switched. Argo was the one who figured out the gimmick in the novel. Additionally, Kirito's hand wasn't on the floor either.
• Kirito's monologues on page 13 weren't in the novel.
• The manga shows the group all dodging in different directions when Kirito warned them of the boss's attacks, but in the novel, Shivata ended up colliding with Lowbacca due to them being too clustered together. This made them sitting ducks for the attack.
• Liten and Hafner were only preparing to attack the golem, not actually attacking it already in the novel. Also, when pondering the option to retreat in his internal monologue, Kirito mentioned that no one would agree to abandon Shivata's group (Kirito used the pluralising suffix -tachi with Shivata, implying that he was including Lowbacca as well); in the manga however, Kirito dropped the -tachi suffix, implying that he was talking solely about Shivata.
• Various dialogue trimming.