As Kirito the spriggan swordsman, I set foot in the living room of a
little log cabin in the forest of the twenty-second floor of New
Aincrad, a floating castle that circled above the realm of Alfheim. A
day in ALO was only sixteen hours long, but it just so happened to be
late afternoon here as well, as golden sunlight was coming through
the window.
Over time, our home had become a hangout spot for our friends, but
at the moment, it was silent and empty. Asuna had said she was
going to be out with her family until the evening, and Suguha hadn't
come home from kendo practice yet. At least Yui should be waiting
for me, I thought—but there was no sign of her in the darkened
living room, either. Instead, all that awaited me was an incoming
message icon blinking on the right side of my field of vision.
It was from the mace-wielding leprechaun warrior, Lisbeth.
As soon as I tapped the icon, a game window full of colorful emojis
appeared.
Silica and I are raising our skill levels on the 45th floor. Come help
us when you're done with homework! Oh, and we're borrowing Yui.
"...That would explain it."
At least I knew why my daughter wasn't around. In ALO, Yui was
classified as a navigation pixie—an in-game helper with advanced
player-assistance abilities. She could tell you what monsters would
appear in an area and how fast they populated, which was very
helpful when you were grinding. According to the game system, she
was classified as my property, so before this, she only appeared if I
was online and called her name, but lately she was showing up of her
own accord as long as one of my friends was online. I was too afraid
to ask her why.
But on the other hand, while Yui's capabilities were surely advanced
enough that she could appear in two places at once—or ten, or a
hundred—if she wanted, she refused to do such a thing. The
tendency to fixate strongly on the singularity of their condition was a
feature shared by all the AIs Akihiko Kayaba designed. Even the AR
idol singer Yuna from the Ordinal Scale incident half a year earlier
was no exception; she had nearly self-destructed because her agency
had tried to copy her program.
"So what now…?" I murmured to myself, closing the message from
Lisbeth.
I had dived into ALO so I could talk to her and Silica and do some sly
research about what Asuna might like to receive as a present, but I
couldn't bother them if they were busy playing. I thought about
joining them for the fun of it, but the line in the message about
"when you're done with homework" was a big mental disincentive. I
still had a mini-report on a computer science experiment due
tomorrow that wasn't finished yet.
I couldn't choose to ignore my homework, of course, but I was also
falling behind in raising my skill levels in the game. Word was that a
big new floor-boss battle was planned soon, and I wanted to get my
combat senses honed again in time.
New Aincrad had been ported into ALO last May, with the first
through tenth floors available to play. A September update had
opened the tenth through twentieth floors, and in January, they'd
made up to the thirtieth floor accessible. Regular updates had
continued, making it possible to reach the fiftieth floor at the start of
this month. You could tell that the development team, Ymir, was
really putting their all into designing the bosses, because they'd
gotten meaner and nastier with each update. As of today, September
27th, the farthest anyone had gotten was still only the forty-sixth
floor.
Lisbeth was very excited about the chance to set up her own shop
with a waterwheel in the town of Lindarth once the forty-eighth floor
opened, like she had back in the original SAO. Agil had announced
that he would have his own general store in Algade on the fiftieth
floor, too. But at this pace, we wouldn't get to the former until next
month—and near the end of the year for the latter. I wanted to
make it up to them for helping me so much in the Underworld, and
that meant I had to get my character stronger…
But it took all my willpower to pull back the foot that started to
swing toward the door. There was no way a guy who was going to be
eighteen years old in ten days should be ditching a school report to
play games. I had the experiment data, so I could have everything
wrapped up in an hour (I hoped). I sat at the virtual dining table and,
from inside the game, accessed my home PC and called up the
unfinished report and all the data related to it. Then, borrowing
Asuna's magic mug—a quest reward that offered a random choice
from among ninety-nine types of tea if you tapped it—I sipped on
what smelled like mint-chocolate tea and began to type at the
keyboard, telling myself "Okay! Let's shoot for finishing it in forty-five
minutes!"
Throughout my life, even at my worst period of online game
addiction, I never let my homework get backed up or overdue. The
toughest part was during this summer vacation, because to the
outside world, I had essentially been in a coma for an entire month.
I had been attacked and injected with succinylcholine by Johnny
Black, a member of Aincrad's most infamous team of assassins,
Laughing Coffin, and one of the architects of the Death Gun incident.
The chemical put me into a state of cardiac arrest, right at the end of
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June, not long after vacation began. While I survived the ordeal, I
didn't wake up again until August, and after a period of physical
rehab, I was finally allowed to go back home on August 16th.
In other words, two-thirds of my forty-day summer vacation passed
before I had time for myself, making a backlog of homework
unavoidable. I probably could've asked for half of it to be forgiven,
but to negotiate that, I'd have to explain to my school why I'd been
in a coma.
They might believe that I was attacked on the street and
hospitalized. But who would believe that I was abducted from the
hospital in a fake ambulance, flown on a helicopter to a marineresearch vessel in the distant southern seas, strapped to a
mysterious machine that accessed the human soul, and sent into a
strange place called the Underworld, where I cut down a giant cedar
tree, went to a swordsmanship school, fought the ruler of the world,
and entered a coma in that world, too…?
In the end, I had no choice but to get through it as best I could with
the help of my friends. As I typed out my report, I thought back on
that hellish final week of summer vacation and exorcised my
frustration by grumbling aloud, "The least you could have done
before you vanished was order them to release me from my
homework obligations…"
No one was around to reply, of course. I was the only one in the
forest cabin, and the man I was talking to hadn't shown up in Alfheim
in ages.
The real-life player behind the undine mage Chrysheight was Seijirou
Kikuoka, of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications'
Virtual Division. He had vanished from both the virtual world and the
real world over a month ago.
Control of Kikuoka's shell company, Rath, was now in the hands of
Dr. Rinko Koujiro, and as the chief technical officer, Takeru Higa was
an even more vital figure than before. I had reason to hope for the
future of the Underworld, bit by bit—but Kikuoka's disappearance
left me with a strange feeling of loss.
If even I felt that way, after all the troubles and danger he put me
through, I was sure the Rath staff were very subdued now. He was a
real pain in the ass, right to the end, I thought…and then had to
remind myself that he wasn't actually dead.
Kikuoka had passed himself off as a dead-end public servant in the
ministry, but in fact, he was a lieutenant colonel in the Ground SelfDefense Force. He vanished from the Ground SDF at the same time
as several senior officers of the Department of Defense, who were
found to be allied with an American defense company responsible
for attacking the Ocean Turtle. He probably wasn't in Japan at all at
this point.
I didn't know if I would ever have the chance to see him again. But
now that I was here in this second home of mine, far from the
Underworld, even Kikuoka's stories about extremely stinky gourmet
delicacies from all over the world were a fond memory.
Perhaps it was because I was indulging in uncharacteristic thoughts
like these that I missed the sound of a character logging in. Only
when the bouncing footsteps were right behind me did I notice
them. I pushed the holo-window with my nearly complete report to
the center of the table and turned around.
"I thought you were asleep, A—"
—suna.
I stopped myself before I could finish. The female avatar standing
behind me was not the blue-haired undine I'd expected, but a feline
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cait sith, with triangular cat ears atop her head. Unlike other cait
siths, she had none of their affectionate cuteness.
The hair that hung down to the middle of her back was dazzlingly
golden. Her skin was so pale you could practically see through it. Her
eyes were sapphire blue. All in all, her stunning beauty was very
similar to her actual features…not in the real world, but in the
Underworld.