"Good evening, Kirito. Welcome, Alice."
"Pardon me for intruding, Asuna," replied Alice with the same smile.
Perhaps it was just my imagination, but it felt like the temperature in
the room had gone up a few degrees…
In any case, I still had to finish my homework. I cleared my throat and
spoke again. "Um, I need to wrap up this report, so if you two don't
mind, you can go ahead and meet with Liz—"
Before I could finish my sentence, there was a violent shaking that
burst through the floor of the log cabin, and a low, deep roar like
thunder drowned out all other noise.
"Eeeek!" the girls screamed. On pure instinct, I leaped, grabbing
Alice with my right hand and Asuna with my left. Once I'd gotten
them down in a crouch on the floor, there was another boom. The
thick beams that crossed the ceiling creaked, and the mugs tumbled
off the table.
There wouldn't be earthquakes in a virtual world, of course, and
even if it did happen in Alfheim, it wouldn't do anything to New
Aincrad, which was floating in the sky. Plus, if New Aincrad were to
somehow shake, it wouldn't mean the cabin's collapse. But even
though the logical part of my brain knew all this, my instincts kicked
in, and I shouted, "Get outside, you two!"
I rushed across the roiling floor, practically dragging the fencer and
cat-eared knight, and made it to the doorway. As soon as I pushed it
open and leaped out onto the porch, the third and largest shock hit
my legs, and the three of us tumbled down the porch steps.
Fortunately, the front yard was just grass, so we didn't lose any HP. I
was about to unfold my fairy wings, thinking that at least if I was
floating, the shaking ground would stop affecting me—when Asuna
grabbed my hand with all her strength.
"Kirito, l-look…!" she gasped.
Her trembling hand was pointing at the blue sky visible through the
outer aperture, which was very close by. A second later, I noticed it,
too.
Alfheim's internal time was not synced to the real world, so it was
still afternoon, far from sundown, but the horizon was blazing red
now. The bloodred color was coming this way at astounding speed
and soon covered New Aincrad's entire sky.
"…That is not a sunset…," said Alice, who was clutching my other
hand. Hardly any of the words were penetrating my consciousness,
but I was screaming the same thing inside my mind anyway.
It wasn't just that the horizon was red—a hexagonal pattern was
rapidly filling the sky. On the hexagons was an alternating array of
the words Warning and System Announcement.
"Kirito," Asuna called again, her voice frail.
I squeezed her delicate hand, but my mind was vividly replaying
memories of the last time I saw a sky like this: a very fateful day,
indeed.
It was nearly four years ago, on November 6th, 2022.
At five thirty PM on the day of the launch of the world's first
VRMMORPG, Sword Art Online, ten thousand players were
automatically teleported to the square of the Town of Beginnings,
where a pattern of crimson hexagons began to fill the sky.
The titanic game master appeared by dripping downward from that
sky and, in a deep and menacing voice, announced, Welcome to my
world, dear players. From that moment on, Asuna and I and nearly
ten thousand others were trapped in a deadly game with no ability
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to log out. It'd taken two whole years of real time for us to finally
escape.
Is that going to happen all over again?
No. It wasn't possible. Asuna and I were wearing AmuSpheres, which
had many layers of security and safety measures, not the old
NerveGear, and Alice did not require an interface machine to log in
to ALO. Even if the LOG OUT button on the menu was gone, we would be
fine as soon as someone in the real world pulled the AmuSpheres off
our heads.
So what did this red sky represent, then?
Some surprise in-game event? That was hard to imagine. There was
no way, in terms of compliance, that they'd mimic the very event in
SAO that led to four thousand deaths—no matter that Ymir, the
company that ran ALO, was a small venture-funded firm.
Was the server hacked from the outside? It wasn't impossible, but
while it was probably easy to overwrite the skybox texture, actually
shaking all of New Aincrad like that had to be impossibly difficult.
There was no magic or item that could produce that kind of effect in
this world.
But no sooner had that thought entered my mind than a fourth
shock hit us.
The ground of the twenty-second floor rippled like liquid, and cracks
appeared in the green grass. The log cabin behind us screamed and
creaked, and Asuna clutched the railing of the porch with both
hands.
"Asuna!" I shouted—but then I figured it out. The blue-haired undine
wasn't trying to keep herself upright; she was trying to prevent the
house from collapsing. I rushed over instantly and pushed against the wall. Alice did her part by pressing on top of the porch to keep it in
place.
But of course, the three of us alone could not outdo the destructive
shaking. A hundred players would have no more luck than us. The
entire six-mile length of the floating castle's floor was rumbling
beneath us.
"Ah…!" Asuna shrieked as a dry bursting sound drowned her out. The
triangular roof over the cabin's porch split in two. If the shaking
persisted, the entire house would suffer similar damage in less than a
minute.
I had a powerful attachment to this cabin, too, if not quite on the
level of Asuna. The log cabin we had lived in as newlyweds for two
happy weeks in the original Aincrad was destroyed when the deadly
game was finished, but this one, which had appeared in New Aincrad
when it was introduced to ALO half a year later, was copied straight
from the SAO server. It was the real thing. Every detail about it was
the same, from the patterns in the floorboards to the knots on the
load-bearing beams.
In fact, even the Aincrad from the old SAO server was secretly
recovered by Akihiko Kayaba's old teacher, Professor Tamotsu
Shigemura…but at this point, that server was something of a grave
marker for the professor's only daughter, Yuna, who had saved many
lives in the Ordinal Scale incident this past April. It was deep in the
fifth basement level of the off-limits Argus building, so it wouldn't be
easy to access—nor did I want to. At this point, the cabin here was
the place Asuna and I called home to our many memories together.
With that thought fueling me, I dug my fingers into the log wall and
used all my strength to try to hold it still.
Then the vibrations stopped, as though they had never happened at
all.
In the moment, I felt relief that the shaking was over at last—but
then I noticed that while the fiercest rumbling was gone, the ground
itself was slowly tilted forward…leaning us toward the outer edge of
the floating castle.
"What's this…?!"
Gripped by an unprecedented sense of foreboding, I spun around.
And then I was rendered speechless.
Just five to ten feet away from the fence line that marked the edge
of the cabin's plot, the ground ended.
The shaking had split the very floor of New Aincrad itself. The ground
we were standing on now was floating in the air—no, falling. That
was why the shaking stopped.
A moment later, Asuna and Alice came to the same realization and
found their voices.
"Kirito…the ground!"
"The house is falling, Kirito!"
I was aware of that, but I had no idea what to do about it. I could
only watch in disbelief as the slice of the twenty-second floor drifted
away. Perhaps our falling speed seemed slow because the chunk of
the floor carrying the log cabin was over a hundred yards across and
was suffering from major air resistance. If we were in a total free fall,
our feet would be pulling away from the ground, but I could still
walk, if with a reduced sense of gravity.
A part of me was optimistic enough to hope that the house might not
be destroyed when we landed, but I stifled that feeling at once. New
Aincrad was floating thirty thousand feet above Alfheim. Even with
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the virtual air acting as a brake, the little island we were located
upon was going to be smashed to atoms after a fall of that height,
leaving nothing but a crater behind. Maybe the land itself would be
fine, since VR terrain was considered indestructible—but our HP and
the cabin's durability would be blasted to nothingness instantly.
No, wait…
Asuna, Alice, and I could survive. We had fairy wings, after all, so we
could escape that grisly end by simply spreading them and flying. But
I didn't think Asuna would choose that method. She knew that we
were falling, but she still clung white-knuckled to the railing of the
porch and wasn't going to let go now.
I watched the floating castle drift farther away from us, my hand
similarly pressed to the wall of the cabin.
It seemed the entire castle itself was falling, not just these isolated
islands of earth. I didn't know what happened to New Aincrad, but
there was no doubting this was an unprecedented catastrophe in
motion. Beneath the reddened sky, the massive conical silhouette
tilted in a southern direction and continued to fall. Islands of rock
about the size of what we were resting upon broke off from the
floors below us.
Lisbeth, Silica, and Yui were leveling up on the forty-fifth floor of
New Aincrad, if I recalled. I was worried about them, but the most
important thing right now was to find a way to save this log cabin. If
a person falling from a height of thirty thousand feet spread out their
limbs to maximize air resistance, it would take about three minutes
for them to reach the ground, according to something I felt like I'd
read before. That meant we probably had about the same time until
this little island made contact with Alfheim on the ground. But
because this was the virtual world, it could be faster or slower.
To cut through the roaring of the air around us, I screamed at the top
of my lungs, "Dammit! If this were the Underworld, I could use my
Incarnate power to lift this stupid rock right up!"
Immediately, the cat-eared knight clinging to the porch snapped
back, "Stop trying to use Incarnation to solve every problem you
have!"
"I-if there's any situation that calls for it, this would be it!"
"It is during the greatest emergencies that a knight's mindset is
tested the most!"
Asuna had recovered some of her wits, and she cut into our
squabbling firmly: "You might not be able to use Incarnation, but
there might still be something we can do!"
The way she said that made me think for an instant that Asuna might
actually be able to call upon Stacia's geography-shaping powers here
in this world, too. But of course, her answer was something
completely different.
"Let's use our wings to push this rock!"
"What…?! You know there's no way for us to lift a chunk of earth this
big—," I protested, but Asuna shook her head.
"No, we're not going to lift it, just change the trajectory. If we can
push it to land in the right spot, then maybe…"
"Oh…I—I get it!" I exclaimed, reading the intention of my longtime
partner. "If we drop it onto water, or maybe sand or swamp, the
shock should be alleviated somewhat!"
"I see," murmured Alice, nodding. She spread her fairy wings. Asuna
and I pulled away from the cabin and jumped. Since we were freefalling, it took only a little upward lift for our avatars to rise quickly
off the ground.
At a hundred yards above the roof of the cabin, we stopped buzzing
our wings and maintained distance as we resumed falling. In a
(relative) hover over the little island, it was clear that the chunk of
land was like a piece of shortcake, a hundred yards at most on one
side, but two hundred on the other. The cabin was on the narrower
end, so if we could drop the wider end into the water first, perhaps
there was a chance our home could be saved—or so I wanted to
believe.
I looked beyond the island. The land far in the distance below was a
brilliant-green forest. Only in the sylph and undine territories was
there such a large, lush forest, but the shining reflection of water
here and there meant that, of the two, it had to be undine land.
That was lucky for us. The force the three of us could create together
was minuscule, but with that many lakes below, there was less
distance we might need to push to get it to land in one of them—or
so I hoped.
With great concentration, I focused on the diagonal descending
trajectory of the falling island. I could see several lakes below, but
none of them seemed like the right match in terms of size and shape.
The ideal body of water would be long and narrow, like an airport
runway, but that was too convenient to hope for—
"Oh…there!"
"That way!" Asuna and I shouted together. The glittering surface in
the far distance was probably a river, not a lake, but it was plenty
wide enough to give the island a soft, watery landing. It was located
along the trajectory of the island's fall, too. Just a shift of two
hundred yards to the right should do the trick.
"Let's hurry!"
Alice spread her wings again. The three of us shot into a descent
toward the left side of the island. As soon as I passed over the edge
of the plummeting rock, a huge increase in air resistance pushed me
back upward, but I did my best to dive and cut through it until I was
down at the side of the rock layer.
Our elevation at this point was about four thousand yards. So for
every twenty yards we fell, one yard of lateral movement should put
us safely into the river. The three of us could never move an entire
chunk of land like this while resting on the surface. It was only
possible while airborne.
I pressed my hands against the dark rock side and shook my wings as
hard as I could.
"Rrrraaaaah!"
On my right, Asuna joined in, with Alice on the left.
"Urrrrhhh!!"
"Upsy-daisy!!"
That struck me as an odd thing for a regal Integrity Knight and young
woman to say, but now wasn't the time for critique.
If we had tried this during the period when RCT Progress managed
ALO, our flight gauge would have dried up in moments, leaving us
helpless to fall. But the new management team, Ymir, was much
more generous and eliminated all limitations on flight. We could use
all the energy we wanted without running out. The hunk of rock, four
hundred yards at its longest, resisted our efforts initially like the
goliath it was, but as we persisted, its path slowly budged.
"If we push it too far, we won't be able to course correct!" Alice
warned. We could only follow our instincts at this point.
"But even now, us getting it there is a long shot…I think! Don't be
timid—just push!"
"I'm trusting in your good luck, Kirito!" Asuna shouted. Well, I had no
trust in that luck. I just had to tell myself that if I'd been saving it up,
this was the moment to use it.
For over ten seconds, we strained and pushed the island through the
howling wind.
The ground was much closer now. We were only a thousand yards
up…nine hundred…eight hundred. I couldn't see the river yet,
looking down past the side of the rock. Without realizing it, I started
to kick my legs in a subconscious attempt to add force. My every
ounce of strength was dedicated to pushing.
Then there was light shining below. A water surface…
"That's the river! Push for five more seconds, then disengage!" I
shouted. Asuna promptly began a countdown.
"Four! Three! Two! One! Now!"
The three of us spread our wings to go into a sudden stop. I felt it
jolting my body backward, and I nearly went into a tailspin, but we
locked our arms to stay stable and upright.
The huge shortcake-shaped piece of rock hurtled downward toward
the water, rear end first. The log cabin still clung to the pointed end,
ceiling slats and fence posts flying loose, but the building stubbornly
refused to collapse.
As long as the water absorbed enough of the impact…
I prayed to a god that probably wasn't present in this virtual world as
the moment of fate approached.
Three seconds later, the base of the chunk of rock made contact with
the surface of the water.
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A curtain of blue burst high into the air on the far end. Moving water
was an area in virtual reality that had a tendency to be abbreviated
to save processing power, but the realism of the jet of water here
amazed me; I couldn't believe ALO was able to depict such details.
The island bounced, then bounced again, and again. With each
impact, the cabin creaked and cracked.
Please hang in there! I pleaded, but as if to mock me, the island of
rock split down the middle. The water pushed back harder this time,
and the little island, nearly vertical at this point, was unable to
withstand the kinetic energy involved and broke over the middle.
"Aaah…!" Asuna wailed. I clutched her trembling hand.
The tip of the little island containing our log cabin broke off of the
rear wedge and flew through the air. Up ahead, the river curved
sharply, so there wasn't much water left in that direction to cushion
the impact. Beyond the river was thick forest. The piece of rock
plunged into it, sending huge conifer trees into the air. A choking
cloud of dirt and dust billowed upward, blocking our sight.
Lastly, there was a deep rumbling…and then it was bizarrely silent.