Fairy Dance 2

  Copyright

  SWORD ART ONLINE 4: Fairy Dance

  REKI KAWAHARA

  Translation by Stephen Paul

  Cover art by abec

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  SWORD ART ONLINE

  ©REKI KAWAHARA 2010

  All rights reserved.

  Edited by ASCII MEDIA WORKS

  First published in Japan in 2010 by KADOKAWA CORPORATION, Tokyo.

  English translation rights arranged with KADOKAWA CORPORATION, Tokyo, through Tuttle-Mori Agency, Inc., Tokyo.

  English translation © 2015 by Yen Press, LLC

  Yen Press, LLC supports the right to free expression and the value of copyright. The purpose of copyright is to encourage writers and artists to produce the creative works that enrich our culture.

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book without permission is a theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like permission to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), please contact the publisher. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.

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  First Yen On eBook Edition: May 2017

  Originally published in paperback in April 2015 by Yen On.

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  The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.

  ISBN: 978-0-316-56088-7

  E3-20170501-JV-PC

  Looking up, one could see a great many lights glimmering in the darkness.

  They weren’t stars. Hanging from the vast dome above were countless stalactites, glowing faintly from within. In other words, the present location was the floor of a cavern, and the issue was the scale of it all.

  The span from wall to distant wall was unfathomable. It had to be nearly twenty miles across in real distance. The height of the ceiling was at least five hundred yards, too. And across the floor spread a great many features: cliffs, valleys, lakes frozen white, and snowy peaks—even fortresses and keeps.

  Calling it a cave did it no justice. It was an underground room, a subterranean world.

  And in truth, it was just that. This world was what spread beneath the fairy land of Alfheim: a singular field of darkness and ice, prowled by terrifying Deviant Gods. Its name—

  Jotunheim.

  5

  “Bwa-chooey!”

  Leafa the sylph warrior quickly covered her mouth with both hands after the very unladylike sneeze ripped its way free.

  She glanced at the entrance to the shrine, imagining one of the enormous Deviant Gods peering inside of it at them, drawn by the sound. Fortunately, the only thing she saw was dancing snowflakes. As they approached the little fire flickering on the floor, the flakes melted away into nothing.

  Leafa scrabbled back to the rear wall of the shrine, where she readjusted the collar of her heavy cloak and gave a single heavy sigh. Every time she felt the brief warmth of the little fire, fatigue crept closer, and she had to blink herself awake.

  The stone shrine was small; less than fifteen feet in height or width. The walls and ceiling were covered in reliefs of frightening monsters, and the way they seemed to move with every flicker of the light made for a very uneasy atmosphere. But Leafa’s companion, sitting with his back against the wall, was nodding peacefully, unaware of and unconcerned with the eerie vibe.

  “Hey! Get up!” she hissed, pulling his pointy ear, but he only murmured sleepily. On top of his knee, a tiny pixie was curled into a ball, fast asleep.

  “Remember, if you fall asleep, you get logged out!”

  She gave his ear another tug. This time, he flopped over on top of her thighs, wriggling in search of a more comfortable position.

  With a squeak, she jerked her back straight, and she rapidly clenched and unclenched her hands in midair as she considered just how to strike the guy awake.

  Then again, she couldn’t blame him for being tired.

  The real-time clock in the lower-right corner of her vision told her it was after two in the morning. Leafa was normally fast asleep in her bed at this time of night.

  Of course, Jotunheim—and Alfheim above it—were not actual fantasy realms. They were virtual worlds contained entirely within a server somewhere in Tokyo, the capital of Japan, on the planet Earth. Leafa and her partner were engaging in a full-dive simulation through an interface helmet called an AmuSphere.

  Leaving this world was actually quite simple. A downward swipe with the first two fingers of her hand would call up a menu window with a log-out button. She could also lie down and fall asleep for real, during which time the machine would sense the change in her brain waves and log her out automatically. When she woke up in the morning, she’d be in her bed back in the real world.

  But for right now, there was a reason she had to fight the fatigue that assaulted her. And it was for this reason that she made a fist and brought it down directly onto the spiky black hair of her companion.

  The special yellow burst of light that indicated a manual attack was accompanied by a satisfying crunch, and her partner leaped up with a yelp. He looked around in a panic, head in his hands—only to see Leafa smiling at him.

  “Good morning, Kirito.”

  “G…good morning.”

  Her companion was Kirito, a spriggan swordsman with lightly tanned skin and black hair. His rambunctious look—like that of any protagonist from a shonen manga—was currently being ruined by the pout on his lips.

  “Was I…sleeping?”

  “On top of my legs. You should be grateful I only punched you once.”

  “…I’m sorry. If you want, you could take a nap on mine…”

  “No, thank you!” She turned her head to the side and glanced at Kirito out of the corner of her eye. “If you’re done being an idiot, maybe you could share the brilliant escape plan you formulated in your dreams.”

  “In my dream…Oh, yeah. I almost got to that giant pudding à la mode…”

  It was stupid of me to expect anything better, she thought, slumping her shoulders. She looked to the shrine entrance again, but the only thing she saw amid the darkness was the flurry of snow dancing on the wind.

  Leafa, Kirito, and the sleeping pixie Yui were trapped deep at the bottom of Jotunheim, and they couldn’t make their way back to the surface. This was the reason they couldn’t just log out.

  If they wanted to, they could leave the game at any time. But the shrine was neither an inn nor a safe haven, so if they returned to reality, their avatars would be left behind as soulless husks.

  Nothing seemed to draw the presence of monsters like an unattended avatar. Death came swiftly for helpless punching bags, and when they logged in next, they’d find themselves back at their save point: the sylph capital of Swilvane. And then what would their long journey from her character’s homeland have been for?

  Leafa and Kirito were traveling to Alne, the capital city at the center of Alfheim. They’d left Swilvane earlier today—technically, it was yesterday. They’d flown over vast forests, raced through a long series of mine tunnels, and helped prevent a disastrous attack at the hands of the enemy salamanders, which earned them the gratitude of Lady Sakuya, leader of the sylphs. They’d left her side just after one o’c
lock.

  Excluding bathroom breaks, they’d been in a continuous dive for over eight hours. Alne was still far off in the distance, and they didn’t seem likely to reach it any time soon, so the decision was made to call it a night at the nearest inn. They landed in a small village they’d just happened to cross in the midst of the forest.

  If she’d only taken the trouble to call up a map, to confirm the name of the village and the presence of any inns. Instead…

  “Who would have guessed that the entire village was just a giant monster in camouflage?” Kirito sighed, clearly retracing the same recent memory. She let out a long breath and agreed.

  “Tell me about it…Who said there were no monsters on the Alne Plateau?”

  “You did.”

  “I have no recollection.”

  They both sighed again.

  When Leafa and Kirito first landed in the strange village, they were mystified by the lack of any NPC villagers. They had been walking into the largest building they could find, to look for a shopkeeper of some kind, when it happened.

  The three buildings that made up the town crumbled simultaneously. They didn’t even have time to gasp in amazement at the inn suddenly turning into a slick, shining blob of flesh, as the ground beneath their feet split apart to reveal a dark red cave that squirmed and undulated. What they’d thought was a village was just the mouth of a horrifingly large wormlike monster, which had evolved to mimic an entire fairy settlement.

  It swallowed Leafa, Kirito, and Yui instantly. Leafa was certain that being dissolved in stomach acid would be by far the worst way to die she’d ever experienced in her year of ALO.

  Fortunately, they didn’t meet the earthworm’s taste; after a three-minute tour of its entire digestive tract, they were mercifully expelled. Skin crawling from the sticky substance covering her body, Leafa tried to stop her fall with her wings, only to get another shock.

  She couldn’t fly. No matter how she tried to work the muscles around her shoulder blades to flap her wings, they provided no lift. She and Kirito fell through a featureless darkness and plunged deep into a bank of snow.

  After flailing and struggling to work her head out from under the pile of snow, Leafa saw not the moon and twinkling stars of the night sky, but an endless ceiling of stone. A cave—so that was why she couldn’t fly. After close scrutiny of her surroundings, she saw a looming, inhuman form slowly prowling across the snows. It was clearly a Deviant God–level monster, something she’d only ever seen in pictures until now.

  She quickly leaped to cover Kirito’s mouth before he could start shouting. Leafa realized that she had unintentionally made her first-ever trip to Jotunheim, the vast underground realm that was notoriously the most difficult region of ALO. Which meant the worm monster wasn’t designed to eat adventurers, but force them down into the land of ice.

  They stayed still long enough to evade the attention of the five-story-tall creature as it shambled along on its many legs. Once free to move again, they trudged wearily on until they found the little shrine and decided to formulate a plan. Without the ability of flight, however, their options were limited. They’d been sitting along the wall of the shrine, staring at the little campfire for nearly an hour now, without any progress to show for it.

  “Well, the problem is I don’t know a thing about this Jotunheim place, much less how to escape it…”

  Kirito had shaken the sleep out of his eyes. He peered sharply into the darkness outside.

  “Didn’t the leader of the sylphs say something about this when I handed her all my money? ‘You can’t make this kind of money without camping out to hunt Deviant Gods in Jotunheim,’ or something.”

  “Yeah, she did,” Leafa agreed, traveling back through her memory.

  Shortly before they were swallowed by the giant worm, Leafa and Kirito had saved a secret conference between the leaders of the sylphs and cait siths from a deadly ambush at the hands of enemy salamanders. After they did so, Kirito donated a massive sum of yrd to their war chest, at which point Lady Sakuya, leader of the sylphs, had made the previous remark.

  “So where did you make such a preposterous amount of money, Kirito?”

  Leafa’s sudden derailment was met with a hum of “ah, um, well…” followed by a muttered answer.

  “I, erm, received that money. From a friend who’d played this game obsessively, then decided to retire from it…”

  “Hmm.”

  It was true that when players quit a game for good, they often passed on the cash and loot they’d stockpiled to a friend. That made enough sense to Leafa.

  “So, what’s on your mind? Something the matter with Sakuya’s comment?”

  “Well, based on the way she said it, there must be some players who do hunt down here, right?”

  “There are…apparently.”

  “Which means there must be other ways to get to and from this place that aren’t one-way routes like that worm monster.”

  She nodded, finally understanding where he was going. “There are…apparently. I’ve never used them myself, since this is my first time here, but I’ve heard there’s a large dungeon at each of the four cardinal directions in Alne—and at the bottom of each is a staircase leading here, to Jotunheim. They should be…”

  She waved a hand to bring up her menu and map. It displayed the large, flat circle that was Jotunheim, but because it was her first trip here, the entire map was grayed out aside from the small area that was their immediate surroundings. She touched the edges of the map—top, bottom, left, and right.

  “Here, here, here, and here. Our current location is right between the center and the southwest edge of the map, so the closest staircase would be either west or south. However,” she said warily, “the dungeons that house the stairs are guarded by Deviant Gods, as you might expect.”

  “What’re the stats on those things?” he asked airily. She gave him a withering look.

  “I know you’re tough, but not this tough. From what I hear, a huge party of salamanders attempted to tackle Jotunheim right after it was first opened, and they got easily wiped out by the first Deviant God they faced. Remember how much trouble you had against General Eugene in that duel? Well, he didn’t last ten seconds against one.”

  “…That’s saying something…”

  “The current strategy requires at least eight people each to be heavily armored tanks, high-firepower damage dealers, and healers for backup. Two light-but-agile fighters are going to be squished like ants against one of them.”

  “They’re formidable, then…”

  Leafa glared at Kirito, who, his head bowed like he was nodding in agreement with her, was actually surreptitiously hiding the fact that his nostrils were flared with excitement. She added, “But I’d say it’s ninety nine percent likely we’ll never make it to one of the exits. Who knows how many Deviant Gods we’ll pull along the way, walking from this distance?”

  “Really?…Well, I guess on this map we can’t just fly over them, huh…?”

  “Right. We need sunlight or moonlight to recharge our wings, and that’s clearly in short supply in a cave. Apparently, if you play as an Imp, you can fly for a bit underground, though…”

  She broke off and examined her wings. The pale green wings that marked Leafa as a sylph and Kirito’s gray spriggan ones were both dull and wilted. A fairy that couldn’t fly was just a human with pointy ears.

  “So that leaves our final option as joining a big raiding party to help get us past those Deviant Gods to the surface…”

  “That’s right,” Leafa agreed, looking outside the shrine.

  The only things she could see through the dim, bluish gloom were endless snow, some forests, and an eerie castle looming over it all in the distance. Of course, if they got anywhere near that castle, they’d be greeted most unpleasantly by its monstrous boss and countless underling Deviant Gods. There was no sign of any other players.

  “Jotunheim was recently added to the game to serve as the most di
fficult dungeon yet, for those who weren’t getting enough out of the dungeons on the surface. So there’re never more than ten parties down here at any time, from what I understand. The possibility that one of them might coincidentally pass right by this shrine is lower than us beating a Deviant God on our own…”

  “A test of our real-life luck stat,” Kirito smiled weakly. He extended a finger and poked the head of the sleeping pixie on his knee. “Wake up, Yui.”

  The tiny, pink-clad fairy batted her long eyelashes sleepily, then rose to a sitting position. She covered her mouth with one hand and stretched out the other with a wide yawn. Leafa was entranced by the adorable display.

  “Aawh…Good morning, Papa, Leafa.” Her voice was as delicate and beautiful as the strumming of musical strings.

  “Morning, Yui,” Kirito responded kindly. “I’m afraid it’s actually the middle of the night, and we’re underground. Do you think you could run a search to see if there are any players nearby?”

  “Yep, sure thing. Just a moment, okay?…” She bobbed her head once and then closed her eyes.

  Kirito’s little companion Yui was a Navigation Pixie, an in-game helper that anyone could buy for an extra fee. But as far as Leafa knew, Nav Pixies simply read out answers from the help system in a bland autogenerated voice. She’d never seen one with Yui’s rich emotional range. In fact, she’d never even heard of a pixie having an individual name and personality.

  While she wondered if those things would naturally develop after summoning the same fairy enough times, Leafa waited for Yui’s search results.

  The pixie’s eyes popped open nearly immediately, only to have her ears droop apologetically. She shook her silky black hair back and forth.

  “I’m sorry—there were no player signals within the range of my data search ability. In fact, if I had been paying close enough attention to spot that the village was not marked on my map…”

  Leafa felt compelled to reach out and stroke Yui’s hair, as the little fairy hung her head sadly.

  “It’s not your fault, Yui. I kept you busy by asking you to keep an eye out for other players. You can’t blame yourself for this.”