Why does Kirito hide his duel swords?


On floor 74, Kirito hides his duel swords from Asuna and Clyde and then uses
them at the last second. Why did he hide them?




He hid the skill to avoid the attention and envy of other players.

> Weapon skills that didn’t have clear conditions for appearing are called
> extra skills. They were sometimes even called random conditions. An example
> would be Klein’s «Katana». But «Katana» wasn’t all that rare and appeared
> quite often as long as you kept training the Curved Sword skill.  
>  Most of the ten-plus extra skills that had been found up until now,
> «Katana» included, had at least ten people who used each of them. The only
> exceptions were my «Dual Blades» and one other man’s extra skill.  
>  These two were most likely limited to only one person, so they should be
> called «Unique Skill». I had hidden the existence of my unique skill up
> until now. But from today, the news that I was the second unique skill user
> would spread throughout the world. There was no way I could hide it after
> using it in front of so many people.  
>  ...  
>  Since then, I only trained it when there was nobody around. Even after I
> nearly mastered it, I rarely used it against monsters unless it was an
> emergency. Aside from using it to protect myself in a crisis, I simply
> didn’t like this kind of skill due to the attention it draws.  
>  I even thought that it would be better if another Dual Blades user
> appeared-  
>  I scratched the area around my ear and muttered.  
>  “…if it became known that I had such a rare skill, not only would people
> pester me for information…it might attract other kinds of problems too…”  
>  Klein nodded.  
>  “Online gamers get jealous easily. I wouldn’t since I’m an understanding
> guy, but there sure are plenty of envious People.

As we can see later his fears were wellfounded:

> Somehow they had found out about where I lived. As a result, swordsmen and
> information dealers had crowded around my house since early morning. I ended
> up having to go through the trouble of using a teleport crystal to escape.

Of note is that he wouldn't have hidden the skill if he had known how other
players could unlock it.

> “I’m disappointed Kirito. You didn’t even tell me that you had such an
> awesome skill.”  
>  “I would have told you if I knew the conditions for its appearance. But I
> really couldn’t figure out how it happened.”  
>  I answered Klein’s complaint with a shrug.  
>  There wasn’t a shred of lie in what I said. About a year ago, I opened my
> skills window one day and found the name «Dual Blades» just sitting there. I
> really had no clue on what conditions made it appear.

The excerpts are from chapter 12 of the first light novel Aincrad
(translations by Baka-Tsuki).

