[Re:Aincrad] Chapter 7

Hey everyone. The past two weeks were a little too hectic for me. I spent the previous week going from one shift to another, then went to a conference for a few days and didn't have any spare time left for any translations... and now this week, I managed to catch some sort of respiratory virus and fell down with a fever for a few days and didn't manage to finish my UR summary in time for a release this week. So, I decided to finish up the summary update tomorrow and instead release a Re:Aincrad I had stocked up for a rainy day today.

Chapter 7 continues (re-)adapting the Aria story's boss battle segment from the beginning of the battle, till Illfang deals a fatal blow against Diavel... based on the anime's version of events. As you may have noticed in the past chapter, the manga artist has apparently decided to drop the idea of making "the best of two worlds" manga version of the story using both novel and anime scenes, and is now just redrawing anime scenes into manga form. The same tendency will continue with the following chapters as well.

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: Celest
Translation: Gsimenas
Editing: Gsimenas, Kaantantr
Redrawing: Celest
Typesetting: Celest

Chapter 6

Index

Chapter 8

Chapter 7

Links for the translation files:

• PDF
• Zip Download

Translation (choice/nuance) comments:

• Page 05: "Switch" is a formal term for the player tactic of one player dealing an attack and then giving way to a second player to deal a followup attack while the first one is immobilised after using their Sword Skill.
• Page 06: "G'job" - the original phrase was "グッジョブ" (gujjobu), which is just a Japanese abbreviation of the English words "good job". Kirito's trying to sound cool by using Ingurisshy words, but Asuna doesn't understand what his abbreviation stands for, so she went with a neutral "you too" response. Since the manga didn't focus on the fact that Asuna doesn't understand what Kirito's abbreviating here, I decided to use "g'job" to better match the phonetics of Kirito's phrase, even though it's far less ambiguous what the phrase stands for than "GJ".
• Page 13: "rule of thumb approach" - the original text was "セオリー" (seorī). Technically, this is just the English word "theory" in katakana. However, in Japanese, this English word is used in a rather different sense than it is in English. While it's more akin to "principle", "belief" or "policy" in English, Japanese people use the word in the sense of "standard practice" or "established tactics". Due to this dissonance, we chose to refrain from translating the word literally, and instead chose a phrase that would capture the intended meaning behind Kirito's use of the word.
• Page 17: "Jump backwards as far as you can" - technically, Kirito used the word "全力" (zenryoku), which means "with all you've got", so it can either be interpreted as "jump as fas as you can" or "jump as far as you can". I chose to go with the later version, because the attack is wide-ranged, so I presumed the focus is on distance, rather than speed.

Adaptation notes:

• Page 2 is entirely manga-original.
• The team duties were different in the novel. The battle started with Team E, Kirito and Asuna, and Team G fighting the sentinels, before Team G switched to fighting the boss since Team E with Kirito and Asuna were handling the henchmen well enough on their own.
• Pages 7-9 are ripped straight from the anime (with some minor dialogue changes) and weren't in the novel. In fact, Kibaou wasn't supposed to be fighting the boss - he was on Sentinel duty instead.
• Pages 4-6 were supposed to come after pages 7-9 if following the anime's sequence of events.
• The manga utterly skipped the scene during the Sentinel fight where Kibaou confronted Kirito about being a beta tester and knowing about Kirito hogging Last Attack bonuses back in the beta. Which also means that the manga skipped Kibaou's role as the intermediary for Diavel in his attempt to get Kirito to sell his Annealed Blade.
• The short conversation on page 6 was actually taken from the novel, for a change. The anime didn't have it.
• Page 12 scene was ripped from the anime (with extra diaogue added in the manga). Again, Kibaou wasn't even supposed to be fighting against the boss itself, since his team was in charge of dealing with the Sentinels instead.
• Pages 13-18 are, again, ripped from the anime... and factually inaccurate. Diavel didn't go in to solo the boss in the novel. Instead, his entire party was engaged with the boss at the time it switched its weapons. Upon seeing the pattern change, Diavel ordered his party to surround the boss in a circle, since Diavel was expecting the boss to use a talwar - in the beta, when the boss switched to a talwar, its attacks would change from horizontal swipes to all-vertical long-range slices instead. The encirclement was the optimal way to counter the boss's attack pattern change in the beta... and therein lay the trap. What the manga doesn't make mention of is that Kayaba Akihiko seemed to hate the advantage that beta testers for the game had, so he specifically made subtle changes in the game for the final release that would trip up beta testers by subverting their expectations. In this case, a normal player wouldn't have known about Illfang's talwar switch and all-vertical attacks, so they wouldn't have encircled the boss, but a beta tester would encircle it because of their expectations for the boss to no longer use horizontal attacks. So, instead of Illfang using a talwar, it got a nodachi and a 360° horizontal attack that's triggered when the boss is surrounded. The anime skipped all these nuances and instead made Diavel rush out on his own, and this manga decided to follow the anime's simplistic rendition of events, rather than the novel's more nuanced version.