“I have urgent business I need to see to right now, and I don’t have time to explain. I don’t think I’ll be able to make it back.”
“…”
He looked straight into her eyes for a moment and promptly nodded in understanding. “Okay. You can explain while we move.”
“Huh…?”
“Either way, you’ll need to use your feet to get out of this place, right?”
“…Fine. I’ll talk as we run.”
Leafa took off down the main street of Lugru, looking for a corner that would put her in the direction of Alne. They wound their way through the crowds and under a large gate carved out of a giant boulder. It spit them out on another stone bridge crossing another underground lake. Leafa filled in Kirito on the details as they ran, boots clacking on the stones. It was very fortunate that there was no fear of running out of breath in ALO.
“…I see.” When Leafa was done talking, Kirito looked ahead, deep in thought. “Mind if I ask a few things?”
“Go ahead.”
“What do the salamanders get by attacking the leaders of the sylphs and cait siths?”
“Well, first, they can prevent the alliance. The cait siths won’t be happy at all if their lord gets whacked because the sylphs leaked the information. In a worst-case scenario, it might even lead to war between the two…The salamanders are currently the most powerful faction in the game, but if the sylphs and cait siths join forces, they’ll probably flip the power balance. The salamanders want to prevent that from happening.”
They reached the other side of the bridge and entered another cave tunnel. Leafa set her map to display in front of her so she could check their path as they ran.
“Also, you get a massive bonus for defeating an enemy lord. You earn thirty percent of all the gold stockpiled in that lord’s mansion. Not only that, but the mansion’s city is considered occupied for ten days, and all players can be taxed freely. It’s an incredible amount of gold we’re talking about. And the reason the salamanders are the most powerful now is because they managed to kill the original sylph lord with a trap. Lords almost never, ever leave the safety of home territory because of it. That was the only time any lord has ever been killed in ALO.”
“I see…”
“That’s why, Kirito.” She glanced over at the profile of the boy running beside her. “This is a sylph problem…You don’t have any reason to get further involved. Alne is just on the other side once we exit this cave. I’m guessing we wouldn’t leave the meeting place alive, so we’d have to start over from Swilvane all over again, which is a waste of several more hours of gameplay. And in fact…”
Leafa had to shut something tight in her heart in order to say what came next.
“If you really need to get to the top of the World Tree, your best bet might be working with the salamanders. If their plot succeeds, they’ll have more than enough money to make a solid attempt on the World Tree. Maybe they’ll hire a spriggan as a mercenary—I’m not going to complain if you just kill me right here.”
I won’t resist it if that happens, she thought. It was unfathomable under normal circumstances, but she knew she couldn’t beat him, and she didn’t want to fight him, even if they’d only known each other for a single day.
If it comes to that…I might even quit ALO altogether…
She looked over at Kirito again, who was still running, his expression unchanged.
“Anything goes; it’s just a game. Kill what you want, take what you want,” he muttered, then paused. “I’ve seen enough people who think that way to last a lifetime. In a way, it’s true—I used to think that way myself. But it’s not. There are things you have to protect and uphold because it’s a virtual world, even if it makes you look stupid. I learned that from someone…very important to me…”
His voice suddenly turned warm and gentle.
“It might seem like a paradox, but I don’t think you can fully isolate the player from the role-playing in this VRMMO thing. If you let your inner greed run wild in this world, that will come back to haunt your real-life personality. The player and character are one and the same. I like you, Leafa. I want to be your friend. I would never cut down someone I liked for personal gain, no matter the reason.”
“Kirito…”
Leafa stopped running, her breath suddenly trapped in her chest. A moment later, Kirito stopped as well.
She clenched her hands together, trying to stay upright in the indescribable deluge of emotion engulfing her, and looked into his black eyes.
Oh…I see, she thought.
It was the reason she always kept a certain distance from every other player in this game. She couldn’t tell if she was dealing with a flesh-and-blood human being or a character in a game. Behind every word, she couldn’t help but wonder what people were really thinking. She didn’t know how to respond to others, and every outstretched hand became a weight on her shoulders, something she could only escape with the beat of her wings.
But there was no need for her to bother with that. Let her heart feel as it felt. That was all she needed, and that was the only truth.
“…Thank you.”
The words floated up from the deepest part of her heart. If she tried to say anything else, she knew she would burst into tears.
Kirito smiled shyly. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to preach at you there. It’s a bad habit.”
“No, I truly appreciate it. So…I guess this is good-bye, once we leave the cave.”
Kirito’s eyebrows popped up in surprise. “No, I’m going with you, of course.”
“H-huh?”
“Oh crap, I’m using up your time, aren’t I? Can you navigate while we run, Yui?”
“Roger that!” the diminutive fairy squeaked. He turned back to Leafa.
“Can I see your hand?”
“Umm…”
Kirito reached out with his left hand and squeezed Leafa’s right. Even in her confusion, Leafa’s heart leaped when she realized it was the first time they’d held hands. In the next instant, Kirito took off at ferocious speed. A shock wave rattled her eardrums, as though they were breaking through a wall of air.
She thought they’d been running fast before, but it was nothing like this. They were moving so fast, the texture of the rock walls melted into radial blurs. With Kirito dragging her by the hand, Leafa felt her body float nearly horizontal in the air, flopping left and right whenever he took a sharp turn through the tunnels. It was the least romantic experience in the world.
“Whaaa—?!”
She couldn’t help but wail and squint her eyes as they passed through a wider space in the cave. A large number of yellow cursors blinked into life around them—they’d disturbed a pack of orcs.
“Um, um, monsters—” she tried to yell, but Kirito plunged straight through the group without any sign of slowing down.
“Aaaaah!”
Leafa’s scream met the roar of the monsters’. But the crude knives they swung at her did not land a single blow. Kirito instantly identified the spaces among them and weaved his way through with frightening speed. The orcs screeched and hissed with anger, but by the time they turned to pursue, Kirito and Leafa were already down the next tunnel.
They disturbed a few more packs of orcs, but Kirito never stopped running. Naturally, this caused a large horde of monsters to gather in hot pursuit, the ground behind them rumbling like the sound of river rapids. This phenomenon was called “running a train” and was considered quite poor manners. Any fellow players they ran across would no doubt be swallowed by the mass of orcdom trailing behind the pair, but fortunately they had no such encounters before the light of day grew visible at the end of the cave.
“Hey, that might be the exit,” Kirito said, moments before Leafa’s vision went pure white. Suddenly, her feet were no longer touching earth.
“Hyieeeeh?!”
She squeezed her eyes shut and screeched, her legs flapping in open air, until she realized that the roaring that had envelope
d her body for the last few minutes had dissipated.
When she found the courage to open her eyes again, they were in the midst of endless sky. Kirito must have taken them straight out of the cave exit and halfway up the mountain at full speed, launching them into the air like a catapult. Below her feet was nothing but sheer gray cliffs. Their momentum was taking them up into a majestic parabola through the air.
She hastily spread her wings to enter a controlled glide, and she finally let out the breath she’d been holding.
“Bwah!”
Wheezing and panting, she turned back to look at the shrinking cave mouth and saw with a shiver that it was packed with monsters. She gave Kirito her nastiest glare.
“You shortened my lifespan!”
“Ha-ha, I think you mean I shortened our trip time!”
“Dungeon-crawling is supposed to be a careful process where you isolate monsters and keep them from ganging up on you…I don’t know what game you’re playing, but it’s not this one,” she muttered. Eventually, her pulse returned to normal, and she took a fresh look at their surroundings.
Directly below was a vast meadow with the occasional lake sparkling in the sun. A winding river connected those pools of blue, and beyond that was…
“Oh…”
Leafa held her breath.
A vast, vague shadow loomed beyond the sea of clouds above. The trunk reached into the heights like a pillar bearing the very sky itself, and the branches and leaves that sprouted at the top were large as constellations.
“So that’s…the World Tree,” Kirito murmured in amazement at her side.
Just out of the mountains, they were a good twelve miles of real distance from the tree, but it dominated that stretch of the sky already. It was impossible to imagine what it would be like to stand at its base.
They floated onward for several moments, staring at the World Tree in silence, before Kirito came to his senses.
“Hey, we can’t just be sitting here. Where’s this big meeting taking place, Leafa?”
“Oh, good point. Well, the mountain range we just crossed forms a giant circle around the center of the world map. There are three major passes through the mountains: Dragon’s Valley, facing salamander land; Rainbow Valley, facing the undines’; and Butterfly Valley, next to the cait siths’. They’re holding the meeting on the interior side of Butterfly Valley, so…”
She wheeled around until she pointed northwest. “We’ll need to fly in that direction for a bit.”
“Gotcha. How much time do we have?”
“…Twenty minutes.”
“So if the salamanders are attacking the meeting, they’ll go from here to there,” he surmised, waving his hand from southeast to northwest. “We don’t know if they’re ahead of us or behind, so I guess we just have to hurry and hope for the best. Let us know of any big groups you detect within search radius, Yui.”
“Okay!”
All on the same page, they beat their wings and picked up speed.
“Funny, why aren’t there any monsters?” Kirito wondered aloud as they cut through the clouds.
“Oh, there are no monsters on the Alne Plateau. I suppose that’s why they chose it for the meeting.”
“I see. Kind of ruins the scene, if your big diplomatic gathering is interrupted by a monster attack…Doesn’t help us much now, though.”
“What do you mean?”
Kirito flashed her a wicked grin. “I could have piled up another train of monsters and led them right into the salamander raid party.”
“Where do you get ideas like this? The salamanders are going to be in an even larger party than the one that attacked us in the cave, so either our warning will be in time and everyone will flee to safety in cait sith land, or they’ll kill us all together.”
“…”
Kirito rubbed his chin, thinking hard.
“Oh! Player signal!” Yui suddenly cried. “A large gathering ahead—sixty-eight in total. I believe this is the salamander raid. There are another fourteen farther ahead, most likely the participants in the sylph–cait sith meeting. The two groups will meet in roughly fifty seconds.”
Just as she finished her announcement, the cloud cover blocking their view ended. Leafa was at the maximum possible flying altitude, and there was green grassland below.
Far below them was a group of countless figures. They flew in distinct, five-man wedges, and their silent, careful progress made them look like menacing stealth bombers closing in on a hapless, oblivious target.
She looked farther beyond in the direction they flew and spied a small, circular terrace. That white strip in the middle must have been the long table. There were seven chairs on either side, making it an impromptu meeting room.
The people seated at the table must have been deep in conversation, as they showed no sign of noticing the coming threat.
“We didn’t make it,” Leafa mumbled to Kirito.
Even if they somehow sped past the salamanders to warn the two leaders, not all of them would make it to safety in time. She had to be prepared to sacrifice herself and act as a shield to allow the leaders to escape.
She reached out her hand and softly held Kirito’s.
“Thank you, Kirito. This is far enough. You go to the World Tree…It wasn’t that long, but it was certainly fun,” she said with a smile. But just as she tucked her wings and prepared for a steep dive, Kirito squeezed back. She looked up with a start and saw his usual confident smile.
“Running out isn’t my style.”
He let go and plopped Yui back into his shirt pocket, then beat his wings hard and sped ahead. Leafa had to close her eyes for an instant, as a brief shock wave hit her full in the face. When she opened them again, Kirito was already in a dive, headed straight for the little terrace.
“W-wait?! What are you doing?!” Leafa shouted, slightly hurt that her meaningful farewell had been ruined in an instant. But Kirito did not turn back. She hurried after him, exasperated.
Ahead, the sylphs and cait siths had finally noticed the brigade descending upon them. They kicked chairs aside and drew blades, the silver flashing in the sun, but compared to the heavily armed assault squad, they were woefully underpowered.
The lead team of low-flying salamanders surged suddenly upward and halted, readying their long lances like birds of prey about to descend on a rabbit. Further teams flanked right and left, until they half surrounded the terrace. The world was blanketed in the moment of silence before slaughter.
One of the salamanders raised a hand. Just as he was about to give the signal to attack—
An enormous cloud of dust erupted at the edge of the terrace directly between the opposing sides. A split second later, the air rocked with the sound of an explosion. Kirito, the black meteorite, had crashed to Earth without slowing a bit.
Every person in the clearing froze. The dust slowly settled and Kirito got to his feet, turning to stare imperiously at the salamanders, hands on his hips. He puffed out his chest, took a deep breath—
“Stay your blades, all of you!!”
“Whoa!”
Even in her dive, Leafa cringed. The shout was so deafening, the previous explosion might as well have been whisper-quiet. She was a few dozen yards up in the air still, and her body was tingling with the force of it. The salamander formation shook as though suffering some kind of physical pressure, the members falling back on their heels.
The volume of his voice was one thing, but his astonishing nerve was another. What in the world did he think he was going to accomplish here?
Despite the trickle of sweat down her back, Leafa landed behind Kirito, next to the green-clad sylphs. She soon found one in a very recognizable outfit.
“Sakuya,” she called out. The sylph turned at the sound, and her dazed eyes went wide.
“Leafa? What are you doing h—? I mean, what’s happening?”
She’d never seen the leader of the sylphs so unraveled. “It’s a long story. The short version is that o
ur fate is currently in his hands.”
“…I’m so confused…”
The sylph turned her back on Leafa and watched the proud, dark figure. Leafa took the opportunity to sneak a good look at Sakuya—Lady Sakuya, the leader of the sylphs.
She was extremely tall for a sylph woman, her straight hair—such a dark shade of green it was nearly black—falling long down her back and cut cleanly straight across. Her skin was so white you could almost see through it, her eyes were long and slender, her nose was graceful, and her lips were small and thin. Hers was the kind of beauty that cut like a knife.
She wore a traditional front-opening kimono. Tucked inside the sash was a lengthy katana, even longer than Leafa’s. Her pure white legs ended in tall wooden sandals that were red. The overall effect was stunning, and this memorable appearance had helped her win nearly 80 percent of the vote in the elections.
But those votes were not all cast for her beauty, of course. The business of leading an entire race of players kept her from hunting, so her statistics were not as high as others. But she was skilled enough with the blade to reach the final in nearly any dueling tournament. She was also honest and forthright, and she commanded respect.
It was then that Leafa noticed a petite woman standing next to Sakuya.
The large, triangular ears poking out from her wavy, corn-gold hair were the signature mark of a cait sith. She exposed plenty of wheat-brown skin through her swimsuit-like battle outfit. On either side of her waist were clawlike melee weapons with three massive talons each. A long striped tail extended from the rear of her suit, and it twitched and trembled as though expressing its owner’s anxiety.
She had large eyes with long lashes and a small, rounded nose—features that almost seemed a bit too adorable, but which certainly made her stand out from the standard look of ALO. Leafa had never met her before, but she could guess that this was Alicia Rue, lady of the cait siths. Like Sakuya, her extraordinary popularity had made her a longtime leader of her people.
Behind the two fairy leaders were sylphs and siths, six each on either side of the long white table, all looking stunned by this turn of events. She’d never seen any of the cait siths, of course, but all the sylphs were high-ranking players. She checked just in case, and, sure enough, there was no sign of Sigurd.