"…H-hi, Alice. Good evening," I said, lifting my hand in greeting. The
Integrity Knight Alice Synthesis Thirty just snorted, her ears twitching
with displeasure.
"You seem rather disappointed that I'm not Asuna, Kirito"
"N-no, no, noooo! I'm not thinking that. At all!" I protested, shaking
my head, but the knight's glare only grew colder.
I glanced down and realized that, despite the hour, she had golden
armor and a golden longsword equipped over her blue dress.
"Oh…Are you going hunting?" I asked.
Rather than remove her scowl, Alice merely shifted it into a different
permutation. "Yes, I had an agreement with Lisbeth. But…I will
admit, I'm not used to this word hunt."
She pulled out the chair next to me and sat down with a clank. I rose
to a standing position on instinct, then dashed off to the kitchen,
telling her I'd put on some tea. When I came back, I had another
magic tea mug and a tray featuring an unidentified pastry I'd found
in the shared item storage.
I noticed Alice staring intently at my report window, which was still
open over the table. When she noticed me coming, she looked up
and asked, "Is this an assignment for the academy you attend?"
"Er…yeah, that's right."
"Hmm…When I was training at the cathedral, I was given piles of
sacred arts assignments," she murmured. There was a faint smile on
her lips, evoking a look of nostalgia and sadness.
I didn't know any human being who had experienced a fate as
strange and checkered as Alice's.
She had been born in a tiny village in the distant northern reaches of
the Underworld, where she'd lived until she was eleven, when she
violated the Taboo Index's rule against trespassing into the Dark Territory and was summarily taken by an Integrity Knight to the
Axiom Church's stronghold, Central Cathedral.
The all-powerful Administrator had performed the Synthesis Ritual
upon her, causing Alice to lose all her memories. Eugeo and I made
our way to the cathedral intent on taking her back, but she herself
stood in our path as the strongest of the Integrity Knights. But when
she learned of the Axiom Church's hypocrisy and the pontifex's
cruelty, she broke through the seal that had blocked her mind's free
thought and subsequently joined our side and helped defeat
Administrator.
After that, she left the Church and settled into the forest outside
Rulid, where, for half a year, she'd taken care of me while I was in a
mentally comatose state, until word arrived that the ultimate war
with the Dark Territory was beginning. She fought like a demon in
the battle at the Eastern Gate but was ultimately abducted by the
man who led the assault team on the Ocean Turtle. Thanks to the
sacrifice made by Commander Bercouli, however, she was freed, and
with Asuna's guidance, she logged out of the system console—and
now she had a mechanical body developed by Takeru Higa that she
used to live in the real world.
Whether she wanted to be or not, she was the world's first true
general-purpose artificial intelligence. Her current schedule was very
busy, assisting Dr. Koujiro with her mission to win human rights for
AI, but it seemed she was able to log in to ALO frequently when she
needed a break. Most likely, she found the fantasy world of Alfheim
a lot more familiar than the sights of the real world.
"Yeah, I got plenty of assignments at Swordcraft Academy, too. I
even remember the phrases for the sacred arts," I said, shrinking my
homework window down to a corner of the table and setting down
the mug and plate.
Alice's cat ears twitched. "Well, well. And what is the command to
create a small hollow sphere of steel elements, filled with water,
then warmed by heat elements from the outside?"
"Hrrg! W-well…the general rule is to generate elements from the
most stable first, so I'd start with Generate Metallic…er, no, wait. The
steel ball has to surround the water, so does the water element
come first…?"
Alice suddenly made the most exhausted sigh I had ever heard, so I
childishly retorted, "L-listen, it's fine. When you have my abilities,
you don't need to say the words. Incarnation will do the trick
instantly…"
"That's not the point!" she snapped, like a teacher. With complete
familiarity, she tapped the rim of the mug and took a sip of the palepink tea that flooded up from the bottom. "Mmm…this is a good
one."
Based on that reaction, she'd clearly been visiting regularly and
having tea parties with Asuna—or something. God help me, I thought
as I leaned back and tapped my own cup.
The tea that bubbled up was a deep reddish-purple; I tasted it with
some foreboding, and the sourness that struck my tongue was like
pickled plums ground up in a blender. I desperately snatched up the
pastry and took a big bite, and thankfully, it was perfectly normal
fruit pie. Alice approved as well, taking one bite and then another—
with the fork, of course.
I cut through the sugar with another sip of mouth-puckering plum
tea, then asked, "So…you were saying something about the word
hunt?"
"Ah…yes, I was," Alice said with a nod. She turned her blue eyes to
the darkness outside the window. "To me…and probably the rest of the human realm…hunting is the act of killing a wild animal for food,
while thanking Terraria for her blessing. But the people of this
world—these 'players'—kill unfathomable numbers of animals and
monsters solely for the purpose of raising their authority level. I do
not mean to say this is wicked. In the battle at the gate, I slaughtered
hundreds, if not thousands, of demi-humans from the Dark Territory,
after all. But…I do not wish to call it hunting."
"…I see," I said, nodding slowly.
Alice understood that Alfheim was a world created within the real
world. But she was having trouble understanding the concept of a
VRMMORPG…and what playing a "game" meant.
I couldn't blame her for that. In the sense that it was a virtual world,
they were absolutely the same as her old home of the Underworld.
Like the Underworld, Alfheim was just another place to her, and she
could not share the conception among every other VRMMO player
and me that these places were temporary.
So when I had first taken Alice from New Aincrad down to Alfheim,
and we encountered a group of salamander PKers in the ancient
forest near the sylph territory, it had turned into quite a scene. Silica
took damage from a sneak attack, and Alice was so furious that she
swore at the salamanders like some fierce demonic menace, until
they were so intimidated that they apologized to Silica and left some
money for her as recompense. I'd never even heard of such a thing
happening.
Among the small group of players who knew that Alice the cat-eared
knight of ALO was the artificial intelligence A.L.I.C.E. introduced at
the splashy press conference last month, this incident became
known as the Legend of Lady Alice Scolding the PKers Until They
Cried. At any rate, I couldn't help but hope that the day would come
when Alice learned to enjoy ALO for the game it was meant to be.In the meantime, I'd finished my portion of the fruit pie and choked
down about a third of my tea when I finally turned to the proud
knight from another world and said, "I agree that the word hunt you
hear in VRMMOs has drifted quite a distance from its original
meaning. But the truth is, the vast majority of the population of
modern Japan has no experience with real hunting—including me.
When times and places change, so do words. I'm sure that
phenomenon happened in the Underworld, too…"
"..."
Alice was initially silent because she was chewing the last bite of fruit
pie, which she chased with the rest of her tea.
"Well, two hundred years have passed since I lived in the
Underworld," she said, "so I suppose there has been a great change
in not just language, but culture in general. Whatever change that
might be, I must accept it…For one thing, the very existence of that
change is proof that you protected and preserved the Underworld…"
Much to my consternation, Alice stared directly into my eyes and
smiled. I did manage to mount a denial out of sheer habit, however.
"But…it wasn't just me who did that. Asuna, Sugu, Sinon…in fact,
there were thousands of players from ALO who went to the
Underworld to protect it."
"Yes, that's right…In that sense, the use of one measly word seems a
very insignificant thing," Alice said, looking back out the window. She
was not seeing the coniferous forest, however, but the otherworld
that existed far beyond it.
On the Ocean Turtle, which was still out at sea but shut down by the
SDF, the Lightcube Cluster, which was the container for the
Underworld, and its Main Visualizer were still active, but the
situation was fluid, to say the least.
he anti-Rath conservative faction in the Department of Defense had
temporarily lost power because of Kikuoka's sacrificial move, so for
now, the Underworld was not going to be instantly scrapped. But
that situation could change quickly based on how the struggle for
control played out.
Early on the morning of August 18th, Asuna, Alice, and I had dived
into the Underworld from Rath's office in Roppongi. We'd panicked
briefly when we appeared out in space rather than on the ground,
but with the help of the two young Integrity Knights—er, Integrity
Pilots—whom we met flying their dragoncraft, we somehow made it
back to the human realm.
But I was extremely conflicted about the idea of just marching into
Central Cathedral. For one thing, whatever happened in the last two
hundred years, Asuna and I were the Star King and Star Queen now
and had apparently died thirty years ago. If we strolled through the
front door and said "'Sup!" the entire cathedral, and probably the
rest of the world with it, would go into an existential panic.
So the three of us allowed the pilot named Laurannei to guide us to
her home in Centoria. The building was over four hundred years old,
and it felt strangely familiar. There, the two pilots caught us up on
the current state of the Underworld and even fed us a meal.
Before we dived, Dr. Koujiro told us she would wake us up by force
once five hours had passed, so before we hit that point (fortunately,
there were clocks in the Underworld now), we promised to meet the
pilots again, and the three of us logged out.
I wanted to go back right away, to be honest, but Dr. Koujiro and
Higa told us that we were forbidden to dive again until they had
appraised the information we brought back from our trip, so they
could assess the effects on the simulation.
I could understand why the adults were being careful. Whoever it
was that told Alice the IP address she could use to connect to the
Underworld—I had a vague idea—they were still unknown. And the
direction the Underworld took in the times ahead would have a huge
effect on the outcome of the plan to secure the Lightcube Cluster—
and the issue of human rights for AI.
Fortunately, the Underworld was currently running in real time, not
accelerated time. So there was nothing like before, where you might
spend years inside the Underworld from a single login. Even still, a
month had passed. Laurannei and Stica were probably feeling antsy,
and I wanted to hear from them this time. For one thing, I was pretty
sure they were actually—
"…rito. Kirito. Are you listening to me?"
The cat-eared knight jabbed my elbow, and I blinked back to the
present. "Ah! Yes. Sorry, I was thinking about the Underworld…"
That caused Alice's face to soften out of scold mode. "I see. I find
myself thinking about it several times a day."
"Yeah…I want to go back soon."
"Yes," she agreed, then sighed wistfully.
My longing for that place had to be nothing compared to the depth
of Alice's homesickness. And she had two clear goals to achieve.
One was to re-hatch the eggs of her dragon, Amayori, and its
brother, Takiguri—I'd rewound them into their pre-hatched forms
before the final battle with Gabriel Miller.
The other was to awaken her sister, Selka Zuberg, who was in a deep
freeze on the eightieth floor of Central Cathedral.
Neither would be easy—especially the latter. She would have to
convince the current government of the human realm that she was none other than the legendary Integrity Knight Alice Synthesis Thirty,
who had vanished over two hundred years before.
But I knew Alice could do it, and I would do anything I could to help,
of course. I couldn't wait to see Selka again, either.
Before I could mentally travel to the Underworld yet again, Alice's
voice pulled me back. "By the way, Kirito, I have a message from Dr.
Koujiro."
"Uh…a message? Could she not just e-mail me?"
"Apparently, she did not want to leave traces on the network," she
said.
I grimaced. The lines Rath used were safeguarded with very heavy
security. If Dr. Koujiro wanted to avoid e-mail or even a spoken
message, and instead relay her news through word of mouth in ALO,
where there would be no record, it had to be very important
information.
As I tensed, Alice announced, "The twenty-ninth, at fifteen o'clock.
The expensive cake shop."
"...Huh?"
"That's all."
"..."
The twenty-ninth was two days from now. Fifteen o'clock was three
in the afternoon. That part was clear.
But what was the "expensive cake shop"? There were plenty of
places in Tokyo that fit that description. I bet I could even find one or
two in Kawagoe City, Saitama Prefecture, where I lived.
I almost thought about sending Dr. Koujiro a message to doublecheck but stopped myself. If I made contact from this side, it would
ruin the pains she'd taken to keep it secret.
As I mulled this over, rocking my head from side to side, Alice looked
envious. "There are countless varieties of cake in the real world. So
many things I never ate in Centoria. Looking at the pictures of them
makes me hungry."
"Uh…yeah, I guess…But I really liked the sweets I used to buy in
Centoria. Those honey pies? Three for just ten shia, and that filled a
whole bag…"
"Are the cakes here expensive?"
"Well, I always imagined one shia being equivalent to about ten yen,
so a nicer pastry shop might cost…oh, forty shia for one piece?"
"Th-that does sound expensive," she marveled, eyes wide.
I grinned. "And there's much fancier ones. I once had a piece of cake
in Ginza that would be a hundred and sixty shia…"
But I stopped there, realizing something. Dr. Koujiro wasn't the kind
of person who used such mockingly vague code words. Meaning this
message about an "expensive cake shop" was literally just a message
to her. She was relaying it from another person at Rath, and there
was only one I could think of who would write this message.
My shoulders sagged, and I sighed. Alice looked at me with
confusion. "What is it, Kirito?"
"Oh…it's fine. I figured out what the message means. Thanks for
telling me, Alice."
"It was a very easy task…is what I would normally say…but…"
The golden knight's cat ears twitched as she thought, and a
mischievous grin snuck onto her lips "Perhaps you can help me with my training, then," she said.
"Huh? Oh, boosting your skill proficiency…?"
There was only one reason that Alice the proud and regal knight had
chosen to play as a cait sith, with their cat ears and cat tails: It was
the easiest race for reaching the character class of dragoon, the
knights who rode dragons.
But just because they were the easiest didn't mean it was actually
easy. To ride a dragon, you needed very high skill levels in both
taming and swords or spears. To improve at both at once, you
needed to fight and fight, activating the triggers to increase
proficiency in the weapon, while spending the skill points you earned
on the Beast-Taming skill.
I thought it over, then returned the homework window I had pushed
to the corner of the tabletop to its original size.
"Give me thirty minutes, then. Once I've finished this, we can go
meet up with Liz and the gang and work on earning SP for—"
I was cut off by a light swooshing sound.
That was the noise of a player logging in. And there was only one
other person who could appear directly in this log cabin…
I spun around in the chair at warp speed, and Alice followed by
rotating smoothly, just as a slender avatar appeared before the
doorway.
She had long, pale-blue hair, a battle dress that was mainly white,
and a silver rapier at her side. Asuna the undine magician and fencer
recognized Alice and me—and her expression steadily changed into
one of surprise.
"W…welcome back, Asuna," I said, getting to my feet. At last, she
smiled and lifted her hand to wave.