Early and Late

  Though technically, there were three—no, four players who knew about it. Suguha, Asuna, Yui, and me. We’d found it at the very start of this year: January 2025. Today was December 28th, so Excalibur’s secret had stayed hidden for an entire year.

  “Aww, man…If I’d known this was going to happen, I’d have given it another shot,” I grumbled and stuck a spoon in the jar of homemade jam, scooping out a huge dollop of the gelatinous material and dropping it onto my toast. Next, I added a blast of whipped butter, spreading it until the two toppings were marbled. Suguha, who’d been watching her calories recently, looked back and forth between the toast in her hand and what I was doing with mine. Eventually, she lost the saving roll against temptation and silently pulled the butter container over to herself.

  Her meager resistance came in the form of taking a more reasonable amount of butter. Once she’d taken a bite of her toast, she pointed out, “Read it closer; they only just found it. They haven’t figured out how to get it yet.”

  “What?”

  I stopped myself in the middle of another huge bite and squinted at the tablet again. The article said that Excalibur’s location had been identified but there was no information about any player acquiring it. Now that I thought about it, if someone had found the prize, the screenshot would have been of the lucky winner holding the golden blade aloft.

  “Man, don’t scare me like that…” I sighed in relief, finishing the bite I’d started. Suguha smiled at me, picked up the carton of milk, and filled my glass.

  It was nine thirty in the morning on Sunday, December 28th, 2025. Winter vacation started today for the both of us, so it was a late breakfast. Our mom still had a few proofs to clear up before the end of the year, so she’d bolted out the door with another piece of toast earlier. Just because digital publishing didn’t need to worry about the status of the printer didn’t mean there weren’t challenges of its own.

  As usual, my dad was busy on assignment in New York, and the last message we’d got from him said he’d be home on the thirtieth. So Suguha and I ate alone, which meant that our conversation naturally turned to the subject of ALO.

  After my first slice of toast, I decided on the tuna spread for the second, at which point a thought occurred to me.

  “But how’d they find it, then? You can’t fly in Jotunheim, but Excalibur’s location is up high enough that you can’t see it without flight.”

  One year ago, Suguha (as Leafa) and I (as Kirito) were traveling from sylph lands to the center city Alne, and just as the World Tree came into sight, we got gobbled up by a giant earthworm and traveled through its digestive tract to the underground realm of Jotunheim.

  We were making our way around the subterranean map, avoiding the unbeatable, enormous Deviant God monsters as we sought a stairway back to the surface, when we came across a very odd sight. A humanoid Deviant God with four arms was fighting with another Deviant God with countless tentacles and a long nose, like a cross between an elephant and a jellyfish.

  When Leafa begged me to help save the one being picked on, I somehow managed to pull the four-armed monster to a nearby lake, where the jellyphant took advantage of the watery conditions to win. When the winner—which Leafa nicknamed “Tonky”—proved to be helpful rather than hostile, we got to ride on its back to the center of Jotunheim. Tonky cocooned and subsequently hatched with wings, flying us up to a passage in the ceiling that took us back to the surface. But on the way, we saw an upside-down pyramid dungeon tangled in the giant roots of the World Tree and, trapped in crystal at its very tip, the gleaming golden sword.

  As Suguha revisited the memories of that adventure, she looked up and grinned.

  “You were really torn at the time, weren’t you? You didn’t know whether to stay on Tonky and travel to the surface or jump over to the dungeon and go after Excalibur.”

  “W-well, yeah, I was torn…But if you ask me, anyone who doesn’t at least entertain the thought isn’t a true online gamer!”

  “That didn’t sound as cool as you thought it did.” Suguha grinned, snarky. But then she looked down in serious thought—and not about what to spread on her second piece of toast; her hand was already reaching for the tube of tuna paste.

  “…Tonky’s not going to come unless you or I call for him…and I haven’t heard anything about people discovering a way of flying in Jotunheim. So maybe someone else saved another jellyphant Deviant God the way we did and succeeded in enabling the quest…”

  “I suppose so…It’s hard for me to imagine another weirdo—er, charitable soul like you wanting to save such a gross—er, unique monster that way.”

  “They’re not gross! They’re cute!” argued my little sister, who turned sixteen this year. She continued. “But in that case, it’s only a matter of time before someone clears that dungeon and succeeds in getting the sword. It wasn’t discovered until today because the conditions for unlocking the quest were well hidden, but it’s been a year now, and there was that update that added sword skills, so the difficulty of the dungeon isn’t what it once was.”

  “Yeah…I guess…” I mumbled, and took a drink of milk.

  It had been this January that we spotted Excalibur. Since then, ALO’s management had passed from RCT Progress to its current group of venture capitalists, and they’d added the floating castle Aincrad to the game—in all, it had undergone a massive renovation. Once that upheaval settled down in June, I had joined Leafa, Yui, and Asuna for another ride on Tonky’s back to attempt winning the legendary Excalibur.

  We failed spectacularly. The hanging-pyramid dungeon was packed with the four-armed Deviant Gods that had bullied Tonky, only big-daddy versions of them, so powerful that it immediately made me want to give up. We challenged the dungeon as a party of three (plus one companion) as a reconnaissance run before a true attempt, but it was so clearly out of our league that we called it off early and decided to try again when we were much stronger.

  But when Aincrad was installed and the first ten floors made available to play, followed by the second ten in September, we switched over to that part of the game. We’d go back to Jotunheim to farm materials and hang out with Tonky every now and then, but there was no rush to deal with Excalibur—no one else could even spot the thing, much less succeed at reaching it.

  The thing about MMORPGs is that no item stays hidden forever. Now that the location of the sword was published online, even in a vague form, a swarm of players was bound to descend on Jotunheim. Some of them might even be in the dungeon as we spoke.

  “…What should we do, Big Brother?” Suguha asked, lifting her glass of milk with two hands now that she was done with her second piece of toast.

  I cleared my throat and answered. “Sugu, chasing after legendary items isn’t the only pleasure to be had in a VRMMO.”

  “…Yeah, I know. Getting a weapon with better stats doesn’t mean—”

  “But I think that we owe it to Tonky for showing us where the sword is. I’m pretty sure that deep down, he wants us to beat that dungeon. I mean, we’re pretty much best friends with him, aren’t we?”

  “…You just said he was gross,” my sister said with a piercing glance. I summoned my most dazzling smile for her.

  “So, you doing anything today, Sugu?”

  “…Well, the club’s on break, too.”

  I smacked a fist into my palm in triumph. With that decided, my mind was now in full-on tactical planning mode.

  “I’m pretty sure seven is the most you can fit on Tonky’s back. That means me, you, Asuna, Klein, Liz, Silica…and one more. Agil’s got his business…Chrysheight’s too unreliable, and Recon’s going to be in sylph territory…”

  “…Why not invite Sinon?”

  “Ooh, that’s it!”

  I snapped my fingers, pulled out my cell phone, and started scrolling through my contacts list.

  Earlier this month, I converted my character Kirito into Gun Gale Online as part of an ongoing investigation and met a girl named Sinon
there. After the case was solved, Sinon became friends with Asuna, Liz, and the rest, and created a new character in ALO to play with us.

  It was a brand-new character, just two weeks old, but given the skill-based nature of ALO, numerical stats carried less weight than most games. With Sinon’s talent, even a high-difficulty dungeon wouldn’t be out of her reach.

  While I typed up a message at maximum speed, Suguha nimbly stacked the plates and glasses and carried them to the kitchen. I couldn’t help but notice a bit of a bounce to her step as she did so. She had to be thinking the same thing as I was from the moment she showed me the news.

  We were going to fly into an alternate world with good friends and tackle a challenging but thrilling mission together. Few things could possibly be as exciting and fun.

  Once I was done sending the invitation to Sinon and the other four, I practically skipped over to the kitchen to assist Suguha with the cleaning.

  Even on a Sunday, getting seven players together so quickly at midmorning at the end of the year was quite a feat, only made possible through the personal respect I commanded—or more likely, the online gamer instincts roused by the allure of the Holy Sword Excalibur. Compared to when we challenged it as a group of four half a year ago, we had more people with better stats now.

  We met up at the workshop of the famous Lisbeth Armory on the main street of Yggdrasil City, where the leprechaun blacksmith took turns sharpening our weapons. It was common practice to refill your gear’s durability to maximum before tackling a major quest.

  Sitting on a bench against the wall and slugging from a bottle of liquor “for atmosphere”—though naturally, there wasn’t a single drop of alcohol entering his actual body—was Klein the salamander. Next to him, the cait sith beast-tamer Silica, complete with fluffy sky-blue dragon on her head, asked, “Are you already on New Year’s vacation, Klein?”

  “Yep, since yesterday. Even if I wanted to work, there’s just no business this time of year. And the stupid boss tries to spin it by saying that we’re a worker-friendly company, since we get a whole week off over the holiday!”

  In real life, Klein was an employee at a small import company. He often complained about his boss, but in reality it must have been a good company, because they looked after his needs during his two-year imprisonment in SAO and instantly returned his position to him when he got out. Klein clearly felt some debt to them in return, as evidenced by the fact that he was working hard on a new remote presentation system for their clients using the Seed package and mobile cameras. Given all the help I provided in modifying the cameras, a single all-you-can-eat Korean BBQ meal seemed insufficient, but I was willing to overlook it if he helped out with this quest.

  At that moment, Klein looked over as I leaned against the wall, considering my plan.

  “Hey, Kirito, if we manage to actually strike gold and win Excalibur today, you gotta help me go get the Spirit Katana Kagutsuchi.”

  “Aww, man…That dungeon’s so freakin’ hot…”

  “Yeah, and Jotunheim’s so freakin’ cold!”

  Our childish bickering was interrupted by a soft comment from the left.

  “In that case, I’d like the Bow of Light, Shekinah.”

  I looked over, feeling my breath catch in my throat. Leaning back against the wall like me, her arms crossed, was a cait sith with short, pale blue hair and pointed, triangular ears. If Silica was a cute, friendly munchkin cat, this cait sith was a cool, aloof Siamese—or perhaps even a vicious wildcat.

  “Y-you made your character two weeks ago, and you’re already after a legendary weapon?” I asked. The wildcat’s long, thin tail swished.

  “The bow Liz made me is wonderful, but I could use a bit more range…”

  At the worktable in the back, restringing the very bow in question, Lisbeth looked up with a pained expression and called out, “Just so you know, bows in this world are basically somewhere between spears and magic spells in terms of range! You can’t normally use them to hit a target a hundred yards away!”

  The wildcat shrugged coolly and smirked. “If I could, I’d go for twice that range.”

  Knowing that most of her experience was as an expert ultra-long sniper who could shoot a target two kilometers away in GGO, the best I could do was smile uncomfortably. If she actually found a bow with that kind of range, she’d be able to win any duel without an area restriction; she could dart out of sword range and fill her opponent with arrows like a pincushion.

  The blue-haired wildcat—my new friend, Sinon, who had just come to ALO two weeks ago—had picked up the bow, one of the trickier weapons in the game to use, and mastered it in the span of just a day. In ALO, the speedy sylphs could use shortbows and the powerful, burly gnomes could shoot down foes with their heavy ballistas, but she had overturned the usual tropes and gone for a long-distance longbow build as a cait sith, which had the best eyesight of all nine fairy races. At first I was skeptical, but I decided to let her have her fun. When Sinon started dispatching monsters before they began approaching, well beyond the range of even fire magic, I had to rethink my opinion.

  Bows in this world got the same accuracy correction that spells did, but beyond the bounds of that system assistance, the effects of wind and gravity kept arrows from flying where you wanted. But given that Sinon had played so much in GGO, which shared the same engine, she was already trained to take those factors into account. It was the same thing that happened when I went to GGO and was able to use my knowledge of “reading eyesight” successfully. Perhaps traveling among the many worlds of the Seed Nexus carried a meaning that I hadn’t considered before—

  The door to the workshop crashing open to my right interrupted my thoughts.

  “We’re here!”

  “Thanks for waiting!”

  It was Leafa and Asuna, who had gone out to buy potions and other supplies. They had just flown here straight from the market without bothering to store their purchases in their inventory, so the supplies from the baskets they were carrying quickly stacked up on the table in the middle of the room—colorful bottles of liquid, various seeds, and so on.

  A tiny navigation pixie named Yui flitted off of Asuna’s shoulder and flew over to plop onto the top of my head. My spriggan version of Kirito had featured spiky hair for a long time, but at Yui’s request, my hairstyle was closer to the old look now. She claimed it was easier to sit on this way.

  From atop my head, Yui’s little bell-chime voice tinkled, “We were gathering some intelligence on our shopping trip, and it seems like no players or parties have yet reached the hanging dungeon, Papa.”

  “Ahh…Then how did they find out about the location of Excalibur?”

  “Apparently they found another quest, separate from the hidden Tonky quest we discovered. As a reward for that quest, an NPC pointed out the location of Excalibur.”

  Asuna turned away from sorting the potions, her special undine-blue hair swaying, and grimaced. “And it sounds like this other quest was pretty vicious. It wasn’t an errand or protection quest, but the slaughtering kind. So now Jotunheim’s pretty decimated, with people fighting over pop spots.”

  “…Yeah, that sounds messy,” I opined.

  Slaughter quests were, as the name suggested, your typical RPG quest to “kill X number of X monsters” or “collect X items dropped by X monsters.” Because you had to go and whack every one of those monsters you could find, that meant that parties on the same quest in the same small area often found themselves at odds as they competed for the “pop” point—the place where the monsters repopulated.

  “Don’tcha think it’s weird?” Klein said, wiping his lips after he’d finally drained the last of his bottle of fire whiskey. “Excalibur’s sealed at the very bottom of a floating dungeon packed with all kinds of terrible monsters, right? Why would the location be a quest reward?”

  “That’s a good point,” Silica piped up, stroking Pina against her chest. “I would understand if the reward was the means of getting to t
he dungeon, but not that…”

  “Well, I’m sure we’ll find out when we get there,” said Sinon coolly from my left. No sooner had the words left her mouth than Lisbeth shouted from the back of the workshop.

  “All right! Everyone’s weapons are at full capacity!”

  “Thank you very much!!” we all chorused. We grabbed our beloved swords, katanas, and bows, sparkling as though they were brand-new, and equipped them. At the table, Asuna had called upon her experience as a battle planner to expertly divvy up seven different potion portions. We packed them away in our pouches, storing any that couldn’t be held as physical objects in our inventories.

  The clock readout in the lower right of my vision said it was still eleven o’clock. We’d probably have to stop at some point for a lunch-and-bathroom break, but we could probably reach the first safe spot in the dungeon before then.

  Once the seven players, one fairy, and one dragon were fully equipped, I surveyed the group and cleared my throat.

  “Thank you for answering my abrupt summons today, everyone! You have my word that I will pay you back for your assistance—emotionally! And now…let’s kick some ass!”

  It was probably just my imagination that there was a note of exasperation in the cheer that followed. I spun around, opening the workshop door directly beneath Ygg City and on the way to Alne, to reveal a secret tunnel entrance that would take us down to the underground realm of Jotunheim.

  2

  The door was at the end of a long route through Alne that was not found on any map; it wound through tiny alleys, up and down stairs, and even through backyards.

  It was just a normal, totally unremarkable round wooden door. It looked more like a decorative detail than a functioning door, in fact. But when Leafa pulled a small copper key from her belt pouch and twisted it inside the lock, there was a dry click. The key had simply appeared in her inventory after Tonky flew us up to the bottom of the tunnel that led to this door. In other words, the door would not open unless you had come through it from the other side first.