“It seems really fun, though.” Asuna smiled to herself, seated at a separate roundtable with Kirito, Yui, and Sasha. She brought her teacup to her lips.
“It’s like this every day. Telling them to quiet down has no effect,” Sasha griped, but her eyes crinkled with love as she watched the children eat.
“You really like children, don’t you?” Asuna asked. Sasha smiled shyly.
“I was taking elementary education classes in college back in the real world. Remember how big of an issue dysfunctional classrooms used to be? I was so pumped up to be a role model to children. But when I came here and ended up living with these kids, I found out that reality is so much different from what I’d heard…I think I get more support from them than the other way around. But that’s fine…or natural, at least.”
“I think I understand what you mean.”
Asuna nodded and patted Yui, who was concentrating fiercely on the task of moving her spoon to her mouth. Asuna was amazed at how much warmth the girl had brought to her life. It was a different sensation from the painful throb in her chest whenever she touched Kirito. It was a gentle ease, a quiet feeling of being enveloped by invisible feathers.
After Yui’s spasms the previous day, it was blessedly few minutes before she’d woken up again. But Asuna didn’t want to go trekking long distances and using teleport gates after such a disconcerting incident, so at Sasha’s insistence, they spent the night in one of the church’s empty rooms.
Yui was feeling well in the morning, much to Asuna’s and Kirito’s relief, but their situation had not changed at all. The fragment of Yui’s memory that had returned made it clear that she’d never been to the Town of Beginnings, and apparently she hadn’t even lived with a guardian of any kind. That meant the cause of Yui’s memory loss and mental regression was still a mystery, and now they had no clues to follow up.
Despite all that, Asuna was certain of one thing.
They would live together until the day Yui’s memory returned. Even once their leave period ended and they returned to the front line, there would be a way to make it work…
Asuna stroked Yui’s hair absentmindedly. Kirito put down his cup to speak.
“Sasha…”
“Yes?”
“I wanted to ask you about those soldiers. The Army I remember was pushy and arrogant, but fully dedicated to keeping the peace. Those guys yesterday might as well have been criminal thugs…When did things get like this?”
The corners of her mouth tightened.
“It was about half a year ago that their focus seemed to shift. Some of them started extorting money from people and calling it ‘taxes,’ and others were trying to crack down on that behavior. I even witnessed Army soldiers fighting over it on occasion. The rumors said there was some factional squabbling in the upper ranks.”
“Hmm…well, it is a giant organization with more than a thousand members. You can’t expect it to be a singular monolithic entity. But if stuff like what happened yesterday is commonplace, we can’t just let that slide. Asuna…”
“What?”
“Does he know about this?”
Asuna had to stifle a laugh at the tangible distaste in Kirito’s voice at that pronoun.
“I’d suspect that he does…Heathcliff does seem to keep tabs on the Army’s activity. The thing is, he doesn’t seem to care about anything other than the completion status of the highest-level players. He’s asked me all kinds of things over the months about you, Kirito, for instance—but when we raided Laughing Coffin, that criminal guild, he just said it was up to us and left it at that. So I very much doubt that he’ll put together a group to force the Army into line.”
“Well, I suppose that sounds like him…But that does mean that there’s a limit to what we can do about this.”
Kirito leaned over to sip his tea, brows furrowed, when he suddenly raised his head and looked to the church’s entrance.
“Someone’s coming. Just one person.”
“Oh? Another guest, I suppose…”
Just as Sasha spoke, there was a rapping at the door that echoed through the chamber.
Sasha strapped her dagger to her waist and Kirito followed, just in case. A few moments later, they returned with a tall woman.
Her long silver hair was tied into a ponytail, and the sky-blue eyes in the middle of her sharp, slender features blazed with a memorable light. She seemed to exude intelligence.
Hairstyle and eye color were customizable in SAO, but given that the facial features of virtually every player were of Japanese ethnicity, few could pull off a look with such striking color choices. Asuna herself had tried out cherry-pink hair for a brief period before she had to ashamedly return to brown. She never brought up that sorry experiment to anyone else.
Asuna’s initial reaction was to marvel at the visitor’s grace and beauty, but she turned tense when she noticed the woman’s armor.
Partially concealed by her steel-gray cape was a deep green tunic and pants with a relaxed upper half, accented by dully gleaming stainless steel armor—the uniform of the Army. There was a short sword on her right hip and a coiled black leather whip on her left.
The children all fell silent as they noticed her clothes, their gazes wary. Sasha gave them a reassuring smile. “She’s all right, children. Continue your breakfast.”
At a glance, Sasha didn’t seem like the most dependable person, but the children had absolute trust in her. They relaxed and returned to their noisy eating. Sasha showed the woman over to the small table and pointed out a chair. She bowed and sat down.
Asuna was unsure of what was happening, and she shot a questioning look at Kirito. He answered as he returned to his seat.
“Um, this is Yuriel. She wants to speak to us.”
The silver-haired woman called Yuriel turned her gaze on Asuna and bowed.
“It’s nice to meet you. I’m Yuriel, and I belong to the ALF.”
“ALF?”
Asuna had never heard this designation. The woman nodded.
“Oh, I’m sorry. It’s short for ‘Aincrad Liberation Force.’ It’s a wordy title to say in full, so…”
Yuriel’s voice was a luscious, relaxed alto. Asuna had always felt her own voice was too squeaky and childish, so this only added to her envy.
“It’s nice to meet you, too. My name is Asuna, and I’m from the Knights of the Blood—well, I’m actually on temporary leave at the moment. This is Yui.”
Yui had taken her time emptying out the soup bowl and was now working on her fruit juice. She looked up and concentrated on the newcomer. She tilted her head a bit, then smiled and returned to her task.
Yuriel’s sky-blue eyes had gone wide when she heard the name of the guild.
“The KoB…No wonder you were able to dispatch them so easily.”
Asuna realized that she was referring to the thugs from yesterday, and her hackles raised anew.
“Does that mean…you’re here to take issue with what we did?”
“No, not at all. The opposite, in fact—I want to thank you.”
“…”
Asuna and Kirito sat in silent confusion. Yuriel turned to them and straightened herself formally.
“I came to make a request of you two.”
“A…request?”
She nodded, her silver hair waving. “That’s right. Allow me to explain. The Army did not always have this title. The current Army moniker, the ALF, wasn’t official until a former sub-leader of the guild, a man named Kibaou, seized the reins. Our original name was the MTD guild…Have you heard of that?”
Asuna hadn’t, but Kirito answered immediately. “That’s short for MMO Today. It was the biggest website in Japan covering online games. And the manager of the site organized that guild. But I thought his name was—”
“Thinker.” Yuriel’s face blanched slightly as she spoke the name. “And he did not want to create the heavy-fisted organization that the Army is today. He only wanted to share resources such as food and
information equally, among all players.”
Asuna had heard stories about the Army’s ideals and subsequent collapse. The idea was good: fighting monsters in safe groups for stable income, then sharing that money equally. But at heart, MMORPGs are a battle over system resources, and just because SAO put players in an extreme situation did not change that fundamental truth. In fact, it only accentuated it.
To make good on that ideal required the organization to have a realistic size and considerable leadership, and the guild was simply too large for that to happen. Looted items were kept off the ledgers, players were purged, others fought back, and the guild’s leader slowly lost control.
“And that’s when a man named Kibaou emerged,” Yuriel said, her voice pained. “He took advantage of Thinker’s hands-off approach to gather likeminded officers in his push to strengthen the organization. That’s when the guild’s name was changed to the Aincrad Liberation Force. Their first step was to make it policy to hunt criminals and control the most efficient fields in the wilderness. Until that point, we’d played nice with other guilds and observed proper farming manners, but with the power of numbers, we could control areas for long periods of time, increasing our income dramatically. As a result, Kibaou’s faction only gained more influence. These days, Thinker is more of a figurehead than anything else…Now Kibaou’s people are getting carried away and undertaking extortion inside the town under the guise of a ‘tax.’ Those were their foot soldiers you stopped yesterday.”
Yuriel paused to take a sip of Sasha’s tea. “But Kibaou’s faction had a weakness of their own. They focused so much on accumulating resources that they completely ignored the progress of the game. They’d put the cart before the horse. The average player within our guild began to point out the fallacy of this strategy…so Kibaou took a wild gamble to quell the unrest. He organized a group of a dozen or so of the highest-level players in the guild and sent them to raid the latest boss.”
Asuna couldn’t help but glance at Kirito. The memory of fateful Corvatz and his Army team’s ill-prepared attempt at Gleameyes, the boss of the seventy-fourth floor, was still fresh in their minds.
“High-level or not, it’s undeniable that our best fighters do not match up to you advanced clearers. Ultimately, our party was defeated, the captain was killed, and Kibaou was excoriated for his reckless gamble. We might have succeeded in kicking him out of the guild, but…”
The narrow bridge of Yuriel’s nose wrinkled, and she bit her lip. “Three days ago, his back to the wall, Kibaou set a trap for Thinker. He set up a corridor crystal to exit deep in a powerful dungeon and succeeded in getting Thinker to walk through it. Thinker went in unarmed, believing he and Kibaou were simply going to have a man-to-man discussion, and as a result, he was stranded in the deepest part of the dungeon with no means to fight his way free, nor any teleport crystals…”
“Th-three days ago…? Then he’s…?” Asuna asked reflexively. Yuriel gave a slight nod.
“His name has not appeared on the Monument of Life yet, so we think he managed to reach a safe haven. But it’s a very high-level dungeon, and he apparently can’t work his way free. As you know, there’s no way to send him a message within the dungeon, and he cannot access the guild’s item storage from there, either. There’s no way to get a teleport crystal to him.”
Arranging a corridor crystal to exit into certain death was a tried-and-true method of murder known as “Portal PKing,” and Thinker must have been aware of the practice. They might have been at odds, but he’d never expect another officer in his own guild would go to such lengths. Or perhaps he just didn’t want to think his comrade capable of such a thing.
As though reading Asuna’s mind, Yuriel muttered, “He was always too nice for his own good.”
She continued, “The Contract Scroll is an item that signifies the guild leader. Only Thinker and Kibaou can control it, so if Thinker never comes back, the guild personnel list and finances will be entirely under Kibaou’s control. As Thinker’s aide, it is my fault that I could not prevent him from falling into that trap and my responsibility to rescue him. But the dungeon he is trapped inside is too difficult for me to conquer at my current level, and I cannot rely on the help of other Army members.”
She bit her lip hard, looking straight into Kirito and Asuna’s eyes.
“When I heard that an incredibly powerful pair of fighters had just come to the city, I couldn’t resist the temptation to call upon you. Mr. Kirito…Miss Asuna.”
Yuriel bowed deeply, formally, to both of them.
“I fully understand how presumptuous this must sound of me, but could I ask that you assist me in rescuing Thinker?”
She stopped, her lengthy story concluded. Asuna gave Yuriel a scrutinizing look.
It was sad to say that within SAO, trusting the word of others was impossible. Even now, they couldn’t deny that this might be a plot to draw Kirito and Asuna out of the safety of town to do them harm. Normally, if one maintains an adequate knowledge of the game they’re playing, a con artist’s story will eventually tip its hand, but Asuna and Kirito were far too ignorant of the Army’s inner workings to know if this tale was true or not.
After a quick glance at Kirito, Asuna reluctantly spoke up.
“I’d like to help you, if there’s anything we can do. But for us to commit to that, we’ll need to do a minimum of research to back up your story.”
“That is…natural, of course.” Yuriel nodded. “I’m aware that I’m asking the impossible of you. But the thought of Thinker’s name being crossed out on the Monument of Life in Blackiron Palace at any moment is driving me to my wits’ end.”
When Asuna saw the silver-haired woman’s proud eyes mist up, her suspicion was shaken. I want to believe her, she realized. But at the same time, two years of experience in this virtual world were blaring a warning alarm not to let emotion cloud her judgment.
She glanced at Kirito, who seemed to be conflicted as well. His pensive black eyes reflected a heart that was torn between the desire to help Yuriel and a concern for Asuna’s well-being.
At that moment, Yui, who had been keeping silent, raised her face from her cup and said, “It’s okay, Mama. She’s not lying.”
Asuna was taken aback. Not just at the content of Yui’s statement but at the proper form and structure of it, in comparison to the halting pidgin of the previous days.
“Y-you can tell, Yui?” Asuna inquired closely. Yui nodded.
“Yeah. I can’t…explain, but I can tell.”
Kirito shot out a hand to scrunch Yui’s hair affectionately. He looked to Asuna and grinned.
“I’d rather trust and regret than doubt and regret. Let’s do it. I’m sure it’ll work out.”
“You never have a care in the world, do you?” Asuna shook her head in exasperation but added her hand to Yui’s head.
“I’m sorry, Yui. We’re going to have to put off finding your friends for a day. Hope you don’t mind,” she murmured. Asuna wasn’t sure if Yui really understood it, but the little girl beamed and nodded happily. She stroked that smooth black hair once more and turned to smile at Yuriel.
“We’d love to lend you our aid, meager as it is. I certainly understand the feeling of wanting to save someone who means a lot to you…”
Yuriel bowed deeply, her blue eyes brimming with tears.
“Thank you…Thank you so much…”
“Let’s save the thanks for after we’ve rescued Thinker.” Asuna grinned again. Sasha had been watching the entire conversation in silence, but now she clapped her hands together.
“Well! Now that that’s settled, it’s time to eat up! There’s plenty left; don’t be shy. You too, Yuriel!”
The weak light of early winter filtered through the deeply colored branches of the town’s trees, to cast pale shadows on the cobblestones. Very few people passed through the back alleys of the Town of Beginnings, which, in contrast to its massive size, only made it seem colder.
The group wa
s fully armed now. Asuna and Kirito, who was on Yui-carrying duty, followed Yuriel’s brisk lead through the town.
Asuna had naturally wanted to leave Yui with Sasha while they handled this business, but Yui stubbornly insisted on going along, so they had no choice. Their pockets were stuffed with teleport crystals, of course. If it came down to it—cruel as it might be to Yuriel—they were prepared to cut their losses and flee at any moment.
“Oh, now that you mention it, I forgot to ask about the most important thing,” Kirito called out to Yuriel. “What floor is the dungeon on?”
“This one,” she responded flatly.
“…?” Asuna was perplexed. “This…one?”
“There’s a large dungeon here…beneath the center of the Town of Beginnings. I suspect that Thinker is trapped down at the bottom of it.”
“You’re kidding,” Kirito groaned. “There was nothing like that during the beta test. I can’t believe I missed it…”
“The entrance to the dungeon is in the basement of Blackiron Palace—the headquarters of the Army. I believe it’s the kind of dungeon that only becomes available once a certain stage has been reached in the upper floors. We only discovered it after Kibaou had seized control, and he plotted to have his faction monopolize its resources. He kept it a secret from Thinker and me for quite a while…”
“I see. Fresh dungeons always have rare items that only pop once, then never again. They must have made quite a tidy profit from that.”
“Actually, it seems that wasn’t the case,” Yuriel said, slightly pained. “For a dungeon on the starting floor, it’s extremely difficult and dangerous. The average monster in there is on par with foes from at least the sixtieth floor and up. Kibaou’s advance party was badly overmatched, and they needed an emergency teleportation just to make it out alive. They used so many crystals that the cost of the expedition far outweighed the reward.”
“Ha-ha, serves them right.”
Yuriel returned Kirito’s chuckle with a smile, but her expression darkened again right away.
“But that just means that saving Thinker will be that much harder. Kibaou set the marker for that corridor crystal’s destination deep in the dungeon when he was running for his life. That’s where Thinker ended up when he traveled through the corridor. In terms of level, I can barely manage to beat the monsters in a one-on-one fight, so a series of them is out of the question. If you don’t mind my asking, are you two capable of…?”