Early and Late

  “It’s true that Griselda and I had a shared inventory. So your assertion that when she was killed, all of the items within her storage remained with me is true. However…”

  The tall blacksmith’s sharp gaze traveled through the moonlight-reflecting glasses to pierce me. In a flat voice, he continued. “What if the ring wasn’t being kept in her inventory? What if it was materialized as a physical object, equipped on her finger…?”

  “Ah…” Asuna gasped.

  I was just as taken aback. I had completely failed to take that possibility into account.

  Materialized items always dropped at the spot of a player’s death, if killed by a monster or another player. So if Griselda were equipping the ring in question, it would fall into the murderer’s hands rather than staying in Grimlock’s possession.

  Realizing that he now held the advantage, Grimlock’s mouth curled into a grin. But that smile vanished as he put his fingertips to his forehead and shook his head in a display of mourning.

  “…Griselda was a speed-type swordsman. Surely it’s not that surprising that she’d want to just get a little taste of the massive agility boost from wearing the ring before it got auctioned off, right? Yes, when she was killed, all of the items that were in our shared inventory stayed with me. But the ring was not among them. It’s the truth, Detective.”

  I suddenly realized I was clenching my teeth. I tried searching for some means of tearing apart his argument, but the only person who could testify as to whether she was wearing the ring in question at the moment of her death was the killer—most likely, a member of Laughing Coffin.

  As I held my silence, Grimlock lifted up the brim of his hat. He swung a look over the other four and gave a sanctimonious bow.

  “And now, I will be on my way. It’s a shame that the ringleader in Griselda’s murder wasn’t caught, but I believe that Schmitt’s repentance will surely soothe her soul.”

  With another tip of his hat, the blacksmith turned around. Amid the silence, Yolko’s voice over his shoulder was full of something fiery.

  “Please wait…No—stop.”

  He came to an abrupt halt and turned back just a bit. Those kindly looking eyes behind the glasses glimmered with something dangerous.

  “Is there more? Please don’t bother me with your emotional, unfounded accusations. This is a holy place to me,” he said smoothly and haughtily. Yolko took a step farther. For some reason, she raised her hands in front of her and glanced down at them for an instant. When her dark eyes faced forward again, there was a fierce power in them that I hadn’t seen in her before.

  “Grimlock, you’re claiming that the leader was wearing the ring at the time. So the killer stole it without you having it. But…that’s impossible.”

  “…Oh? Based on what evidence?” Grimlock asked, turning smoothly.

  Yolko tore into him. “You remember when the guild had that meeting to decide what to do with the ring? Me, Caynz, and Schmitt said that we should use it to strengthen the guild, rather than sell it. Caynz actually wanted to use it himself, but he decided to stick with the leader. He said she was the strongest fighter in Golden Apple, so she ought to equip it.”

  Next to Yolko, Caynz looked somewhat guilty. But she merely gestured and continued. “I still remember every last word of her response. She smiled and said, ‘You can only wear one ring on each hand in SAO. On my right hand is the guild leader’s sigil…and on the left is my wedding ring. So I can’t use this.’ Understand? There’s no way she would secretly take off either of those rings to try out that new one’s bonus!”

  When her harsh shriek died out, everyone present held their breath.

  It was true that there was only one ring slot for each hand on the equipment mannequin in the menu. If both were already full, a new ring could not be equipped. But…it was still weak.

  No sooner had the thought entered my mind than Grimlock quietly pounced. “What do you mean? She would never do that? If you’re going to use that logic, I would never kill Griselda—she was my wife! You are leveling unfounded accusations against me, nothing more.”

  “No,” Yolko whispered. I held my breath as the petite woman slowly, firmly shook her head. “No, you’re wrong. There is proof…Whoever actually killed her left behind every item they judged to be worthless, right out in the open where they did the act. Fortunately, the player who discovered them knew the leader’s name and delivered her leftover articles to the guild home. That’s how, when we chose to make this grave marker her resting place, we were able to leave her sword here, until it eventually disintegrated. But…that wasn’t all. I didn’t tell anyone…but there was another memento of hers that I buried here on my own.”

  Suddenly, she spun around, knelt behind the little grave nearby, and began to dig in the dirt with her bare hands as everyone else watched and waited. When Yolko stood up again, she held out her hand to show what she was holding. Despite being freshly dug up from the soil, the little box shone silver in the moonlight.

  “Oh…a Permanent Storage Trinket!” Asuna gasped. As she noted, it was the box of permanence that only master-class craftsmen could fashion. At maximum, they could be about four inches to a side, so they couldn’t hold large items, but a few small accessories could fit inside. Even if left out in the open, no item inside here would ever suffer the natural degradation of its durability.

  Yolko reached out with her left hand and pulled up the lid of the silver box.

  Sitting on the white silk liner were two gleaming rings. She picked up one, a larger silver ring. On its flat tip was a carving of an apple.

  “This is the Golden Apple sigil, which she always wore on her right hand. I still have my own, so it will be very easy to compare and confirm.”

  She put that ring back and picked up the other one—a narrow golden band.

  “And this is the ring that she never took off the ring finger of her left hand—your wedding ring, Grimlock! It has your name carved on the inside! The fact that these rings are here is unshakeable proof that at the moment she was taken through a portal outside of town and murdered, she was wearing them! Am I wrong?! If I am, then explain it to me!!” she finished in a tearful scream. She thrust the glittering golden ring right at Grimlock, large teardrops rolling down her cheeks.

  No one spoke for several moments. Caynz, Schmitt, Asuna, and I held our breath, eyes wide, watching the confrontation.

  The tall blacksmith, his lips pursed, stood frozen in place for over ten seconds. Eventually, one corner of his mouth twitched, then tensed.

  “That ring…You asked me about this on the day of her funeral, Yolko—if I wanted to keep Griselda’s wedding ring. And I told you to let it fade away, like her sword. If you’d just said you wanted it…”

  Grimlock’s head was downcast, his face hidden behind his wide-brim hat. He fell to his knees, as though the string holding him upright had snapped.

  Yolko put the golden ring back into the box, closed the lid, and clenched it to her chest. She looked skyward, her damp face scrunched up, and whispered, in a voice now dull and soft, “Why…why, Grimlock? Why would you kill the leader…your own wife, just to turn the ring into money?”

  “…Money? Money, you say?” Grimlock rasped from his knees, chuckling. He brought up his left hand to open the menu. With a few short operations, he produced a large leather bag. He lifted it up, then hurled it onto the ground. The heavy thud contained the clear sound of many metal items scraping. Just the sound alone made it clear to me how much col was contained within.

  “This is half of the money I got from liquidating the ring. I haven’t spent a single coin.”

  “Huh…?” Yolko said, her eyebrows crossed in confusion.

  Grimlock looked up at her, then the rest of us, and said in a dry voice, “It wasn’t for money. I…I just had to kill her. While she was still my wife.”

  The round glasses turned to the mossy grave for a moment, then came back. The blacksmith continued his confession.

 
“Griselda. Grimlock. It’s no coincidence that our names sound similar. We always had the same names, going back to the games we played before SAO. And if the game featured it, we were always married. After all…after all, she was my wife in the real world, too.”

  My mouth fell open in shock. Asuna sucked in a sharp breath, and the others’ faces were portraits of stunned surprise.

  “She was the ideal wife for me; I had no complaints. She was the very picture of the sidekick wife: cute, sweet, obedient. We never once had a fight. But…once we got stuck in this world…she changed…”

  He shook his head, hidden beneath the hat, and let out a low breath.

  “I was the only one who quaked and shivered in fear at being trapped in here. Where did she hide all of that talent? In fighting ability, decision-making, and everything else, Griselda—no, Yuuko—was greater than me. And more than that, she overrode my complaints to create the guild, recruit members, and start training. She was far more alive here than even in real life…and more fulfilled…Watching her up close, I had to admit that the Yuuko I loved was gone. Even if we someday beat the game and got back to reality, the well-behaved, subservient wife I knew would not return.”

  The shoulders of his long-sleeve jacket trembled. Whether it was in self-mocking laughter or sobs of distress, I couldn’t tell.

  His whispering continued. “Can you understand my fears? If we got back to the real world…and Yuuko asked for a divorce…I couldn’t bear that disgrace. So…so it was best to act while I was still her husband. While I was still here, with a legal method of murder at my disposal. Can anyone blame me…for wishing to keep my memories of Yuuko pure and pristine?”

  After his long and ghastly confession had finished, no one spoke.

  I heard the hoarse voice emerge from my throat, though I wasn’t even aware I was doing it at first.

  “Disgrace…disgrace? Your wife wouldn’t listen to you…and that’s why you killed her? She was strengthening herself and your friends to help escape from here…and might have one day stood among the ranks of those advancing us through the game…And just for that…?”

  I had to use my left hand to hold down my right to keep it from instinctually drawing the blade on my back.

  Grimlock looked up lazily, the lower frame of his glasses glinting, and whispered, “Just for that? It was plenty enough for what I did. Someday you will understand, Detective, once you have found love and are about to lose it.”

  “No, Grimlock. You’re wrong about that.”

  It was not me who bit back at him, but Asuna. Her beautiful features were cast in an expression I couldn’t read as she quietly stated, “What you felt for Griselda wasn’t love. It was possession. If you still love her, then take off your left glove. But I’m sure that you’ve already cast aside the wedding ring that Griselda never removed even to the moment of her murder.”

  Grimlock’s shoulders trembled, and in a mirror image of what I had done moments before, grabbed his left hand with his right.

  But he stopped there. The blacksmith silently held his grip, not removing the glove. The silence that followed was broken by Schmitt, who spoke up at last.

  “…Kirito. Can you allow us to determine his fate? We will not execute him ourselves, of course. But he must pay for his crimes.”

  His calm voice contained none of the terror that had gripped him until just minutes earlier. I looked up at the tall man in his clanking armor and nodded.

  “Okay. He’s all yours.”

  He nodded back and grabbed Grimlock’s right arm, pulling him to his feet. With the slumping blacksmith firmly under control, he said to me, “I appreciate this,” and descended the hill.

  Next to leave were Yolko and Caynz, after she had buried the silver box back where it belonged. They passed by us, bowing deeply, then shared a look.

  Yolko offered, “Asuna, Kirito. I don’t know how to apologize to you…or to thank you. If you hadn’t come to our aid, we would have died tonight…and never succeeded in exposing Grimlock’s crimes.”

  “No…it’s thanks to you for remembering about the two rings at the end. It was a brilliant closing argument. You should be a lawyer or a prosecutor if we ever get back to reality.”

  She chuckled and shrugged. “No…You might not believe me, but at that very moment, I swear I heard her voice, telling me to remember the rings.”

  “…I see…”

  They bowed again and descended the hill after Schmitt as Asuna and I watched. Eventually all four cursors had vanished in the direction of the town, leaving only the blue moonlight and gentle breeze on the lonely hilltop.

  “…Hey, Kirito,” Asuna said abruptly. “If you were married to someone…and later on, you found out she had a side you never knew about, what would you think?”

  “Uh…”

  I hadn’t expected this question and didn’t have a quick answer. I had only been alive for fifteen and a half years. I had no way to understand a life like that. But after giving it some good, desperate thought, I came up with an answer, shallow though it was.

  “I guess I’d think I was lucky.”

  “Huh?”

  “I…I mean, being married means you already love the sides of her you’ve already seen, right? So if you find a new side of her and fall in love with that…it’s t-twice as much to love.”

  It was hardly worthy of being called intelligent, but Asuna thought it over, tilted her head, and grinned a bit.

  “Hmm. That’s weird.”

  “Uh…weird…?”

  “Whatever. More importantly…all this activity has got me starving. Let’s get something to eat.”

  “G-good idea. Then…let’s go get that Algade specialty, the one that looks like a fried pancake, only without the savory sauce it’s supposed to have…”

  “Rejected,” she stated flatly. I started to trudge along, when she suddenly grabbed my shoulder from behind.

  I turned around with a start and witnessed an inexplicable sight for the nth time since the safe-haven incident occurred.

  In Aincrad, all sensory information was nothing more than coded digital data. That meant that ghostly phenomena could not exist.

  So what I was seeing was either a bug in the server or an illusion that my biological brain was producing.

  On the north face of the hill, a slight distance away, next to the grave marker that stood solitary next to the foot of the gnarled tree, stood a female player, translucent and glowing a pale gold.

  Her skinny body was wrapped in the minimum of metal armor. There was a narrow longsword at her waist and a shield on her back. Her hair was short, and her face was stately and beautiful, but her eyes were brimming with a strong light that I recognized from several other players I knew.

  They were the eyes of a conqueror, of one with a strong will to bring this game of death to an end with her own sword. The woman watched Asuna and me silently with a smile on her lips, then, as though offering something, stretched out her open right hand.

  I, like Asuna, held out my right hand in return and, when I felt something warm in the palm of my hand, clenched it tight. The warmth passed through my body and lit a fire in my chest, only to leave through my lips in the form of words.

  “We will carry on…your will. One day, we’ll beat this game and free everyone.”

  “Yes, we promise. So please…watch over us, Griselda,” Asuna continued, the whisper reaching the lady warrior on the night breeze. Her translucent face split in a wide grin.

  And in the next moment, there was no one there.

  We let our hands drop and stood in place. Eventually Asuna squeezed my hand and grinned.

  “C’mon, let’s go. We’ve got a lot of work tomorrow.”

  “…That’s right. Gotta clear this floor before the week is over.”

  We turned and walked down the little hill in the direction of town.

  1

  “Look at this, Big Brother.”

  With dull, sleepy eyes, I stared at the tablet Sug
uha was holding out to me.

  I’d gotten plenty of sleep last night, but I felt like my dreams were exceptionally long. So when I got to the kitchen table, it was the sort of situation where I had to force my recalcitrant mental gears to turn via a strong cup of coffee. But even with that mental fog, the warning light in a corner of my brain was flashing as I took the tablet from her.

  After all, the last time she had handed me something under similar circumstances, it was two weeks ago, when she had proof of my secret shame—that I had converted my character from ALfheim Online (ALO), the fantasy flight-based VRMMO, to Gun Gale Online (GGO), a sci-fi gunfighter of the same medium. At first I wondered if she’d uncovered some other misdeed of mine and hastily tried to think of what I’d done recently. But Suguha only chuckled and reassured me. “I’m not trying to string you up this time, Big Brother. Just look at it!”

  I hesitantly took the tablet she offered me and examined it. Just like the printed copy she’d shown me last time, it was a news article from MMO Tomorrow, the country’s biggest VRMMORPG website. But this time, it was not categorized as GGO news, but ALO. The first thing that caught my eye was the screenshot in the article, which was not a player avatar but a landscape shot. So the spriggan in black truly hadn’t gotten himself into trouble this time.

  Relieved, I read the lead paragraph of the article. Almost instantly, I was hit by a different kind of shock and couldn’t stop myself from shouting. “Wh-what?!”

  The article read, The Holy Sword Excalibur, most powerful of the legendary weapons, found at last!

  My fatigue completely forgotten now, I tore through the rest of the article and let out a long groan.

  “Hrrrrmmm…So they finally found it…”

  “Personally, it was a lot longer than I expected.” Suguha pouted, spreading blueberry jam on her toast from her seat across the table.

  The Holy Sword Excalibur.

  It was the one weapon in ALO said to be able to overpower the Demon Blade Gram, weapon of the salamander general Eugene. Its existence was long known, thanks to its tiny description and picture on the official website’s index of weapons, but the means of finding it in the game had remained a mystery.