Early and Late

  “Use Mjolnir, Hammer of Lightning, for your righteous battles. And now—farewell.”

  The god waved his right hand, and a bolt of pale lightning erupted throughout the chamber. We reflexively shut our eyes, and when they opened, no one was there. A small dialog box announced that a member had left, and the eighth set of HP/MP bars was gone.

  On the spot where Thrym fell, a veritable waterfall of items was dropping and vanishing as they were automatically stored in the party’s temporary inventory.

  When the rain of loot abated, the light shone brighter in the boss chamber, driving away the darkness. Sadly, the mountain range of golden treasure lining the walls also vanished. On the other hand, I had a feeling that we were all packed to the limit with items and wouldn’t have been able to take any of it with us anyway.

  “…Phew…”

  I walked over to Klein with a little sigh and placed a hand on his shoulder. “Congrats on the legendary weapon.”

  “…And here I am, without a single point in Hammer skills,” the katana swordsman replied, face halfway between laughing and crying, holding the hammer as it glowed with a dazzling aura effect. I gave him a big smile.

  “Well, I’m sure Liz would be delighted to have it. Oh, wait, she’ll probably melt it down for ingots…”

  “Hey! Even I wouldn’t be that wasteful!” Lisbeth retorted.

  With a straight face, Asuna pointed out, “But Liz, I hear you get an incredible number of orichalcum ingots if you melt down a legendary.”

  “What, really?”

  “H-hey, I haven’t said I’m giving it to her yet!” Klein wailed, clutching the hammer. A wave of laughs broke out from the group.

  But at that very instant, a roar broke out that shook me to the core, the ice floor rattling and swaying.

  “Aaaah!” Silica screamed, her triangle ears down.

  Next to her, tail twisted into an S-shape, Sinon shouted, “We’re…moving?! No, floating!”

  I came to a belated realization.

  The palace of Thrymheim was rising bit by bit, shuddering like a living being. But why—No—Unless—

  Leafa looked at the medallion around her neck and yelped, “B-Big Brother! The quest is still going!!”

  “Wh-what?!” wailed Klein. I shared his feeling. I assumed that beating Thrym, head of the frost giants, would be the end of the quest—but then I recalled the exact words of Urd, queen of the lake, when she gave us the mission.

  Infiltrate Thrymheim and draw Excalibur from the plinth. Not “beat Thrym.” In other words, that horrendous boss was only a single hurdle along the way…

  “The last light is blinking!” Leafa nearly screamed.

  Yui responded, “Papa, there’s a downward staircase being generated behind the throne!”

  “…!!”

  No time for a response. I took off running for the royal throne.

  It looked like a chair, but as Thrym’s personal seat, it was really more like a shack. If it weren’t such an emergency, we might have fun trying to see who could climb onto the seat portion, but on this occasion, I just ran around the left side.

  Around the back, as Yui said, there was a small staircase leading downward in the ice floor. It was much too small for a frost giant but just large enough for a single human—er, fairy—to pass through. I plunged into the dark opening as the footsteps of my companions drew closer.

  My mind worked furiously as I dove down the stairs, skipping three steps at a time. If we failed Urd’s quest—meaning that the players down on the ground below succeeded in their slaughter quest—the ice palace of Thrymheim would rise up to the city of Alne above. But Thrym, the very king who sought to invade Alfheim, was no longer around. Maybe he would just come back to life as if nothing had ever happened. But given the Cardinal System’s fixation on details, I couldn’t imagine it going ahead with such a forceful story progression.

  Meanwhile, as if she were reading my mind, Leafa’s voice came over my shoulder as we ran down the stairs.

  “…Listen, Big Brother. I only remember a few vague details…but I’m pretty sure that in the original Norse myth, Thrym wasn’t actually the master of Thrymheim.”

  “Wait…what?! But the name…”

  “Yeah, I know. But in the myth, it was Th…Th…”

  While Leafa tried to pronounce the name, Yui must have connected to the outer Net and run a search, because she filled in, “Thjazi. In the myth, it was not actually Thrym who desired the golden apple Urd mentioned, but Thjazi. And within ALO, it seems that the NPC actually offering the slaughter quest in question is one Archduke Thjazi, found in the largest castle in Jotunheim.”

  “…Meaning the replacement was already there from the start…”

  So if Thrymheim ascended to Alne, this Thjazi guy would probably come up and assume the throne above as the true last boss. I couldn’t help but feel that Cardinal was actually trying to have the city destroyed and the Alne Highlands conquered, but I had no intention of giving up now. Not because I wanted Excalibur that badly but because I owed it to our friend Tonky. And if I happened to get a legendary sword out of the deal, I wasn’t going to complain…

  Meanwhile, the vibrations running through the castle were getting fiercer. At times there was a palpable shift in speed, making it clear that the palace was carving its way through the soil of Jotunheim. I held my breath and practically fell down the spiral staircase, I was running so fast.

  “Papa, the exit is in five seconds!”

  “Okay!” I shouted, racing pell-mell for the bright light coming into view.

  It was an octahedral space carved into the ice—in other words, like two pyramids placed base to base. Essentially, it was a burial chamber.

  The walls were very thin, such that the lower parts of them offered a clear view of the map of Jotunheim below. Around us was a fall of rocks and crystals coming loose from the ceiling of the cave. The spiral staircase went through the center of the burial chamber and down to the deepest point.

  And at the end, a deep, pure gleam of golden light.

  It was the very same light I’d seen with Leafa when we first rode Tonky up to escape from Jotunheim, twinkling away at the base of the inverted pyramid of ice. After an entire year, I’d finally come to it.

  The staircase ended at last, and the seven of us filed down to form a semicircle around it.

  At the center of the circular floor was an ice pedestal about twenty inches to a side. Something small seemed to be trapped in the middle. When I looked closer, I realized it was a fine, soft-looking tree root. Countless delicate little fibers wound around each other, forming one thick root.

  But after a point, the two-inch-wide root was cleanly severed. The cause of the cut was a thin, sharp blade detailed with delicate runes—a sword. The shining golden sword stretched straight upward, such that half of it was exposed out of the ice pedestal. It had a finely shaped knuckle guard and a hilt of smooth black leather. A large rainbow gemstone shone on the pommel.

  I had once seen a sword exactly like this. In fact, I had held it myself.

  The man who treated ALO like a tool for his own ambitions had tried to generate it using GM privileges to cut me apart. But those privileges had already transferred to me, so I created the sword instead and tossed it to him so we could finish our fight.

  At the time, creating the world’s strongest sword with a single command filled me with revulsion. I felt like I could never undo that action unless I someday sought that blade through the proper means. Yes, it might largely have been through coincidence, but the time had finally come.

  …Sorry about the wait, I silently told the sword, and took a step forward to grab the hilt of the legendary blade, the Holy Sword Excalibur.

  “…!!”

  I tugged at it with all of my strength.

  But the sword was totally immobile, as if fused with the pedestal—with the very pyramid castle itself. I got a two-handed grip, braced my feet against the ground, and heaved with all of m
y body.

  “Hrng…gah…!!”

  The result was the same. A nasty chill trickled down my back.

  Unlike SAO and GGO, numerical stats like strength and agility weren’t displayed in ALO. The requirements for equipping any weapon or armor were vague, no more detailed than ambiguous stages like “easy to use,” to “a little tricky,” to “not really under control,” to “difficult even to lift.” So more than a few players wound up with great weapons that were clearly too heavy for them but, too stubborn to give up, they kept using their overweight gear and ultimately suffered as a result.

  But given that it was a game and there had to be numbers underpinning everything, that meant they were simply hidden stats. Basic values determined by race and body size could be affected and pushed in different directions by skill boosts, magical gear bonuses, support magic, and so on. Looking just at base stats, a salamander like Klein would be a bit higher than a spriggan like me.

  But as he used a katana and relied on sharpness and accuracy in his cuts, he leaned toward agility effects with his skills and gear. And since I liked using heavy swords, most of my adjustments affected my strength. As a result, out of the seven of us, I most certainly had the highest strength. Meaning that if I couldn’t get the sword to budge, no one else would be able to pull it free. It was so obvious that nobody even offered to try.

  Instead there came a voice from behind.

  “Keep trying, Kirito!”

  It was Asuna. Liz piped up with a “You’re almost there!” Instantly, Leafa, Silica, and Klein joined in with their own cheers.

  Sinon yelled, “Show me your spirit!” Yui cried, “Come on, Papa,” with as much volume as she could muster, and Pina howled, “Krurururu!”

  As I was the one who recruited this party in the first place, I wasn’t going to stop now. I had as much statistical buff as I could get, so the rest was down to enthusiasm and willpower. I had to believe that my stats weren’t numerically insufficient; I just had to unlock the right amount with force and timing. The only answer was to pull with all of my muscle—all of my mental force of will.

  My vision began to fade into white, lights flashed in front of my eyes, and I started to wonder if I’d soon cause the AmuSphere to auto-disconnect me due to abnormal brain patterns, when—

  Something cracked. I felt a faint vibration in my hands.

  “Ah!” someone shouted.

  A powerful light began surging through the pedestal at my feet, blotting out my vision with gold.

  Next, a crashing deeper and more tremendous than any sound effect I’d ever heard pierced my ears. My body stretched backward, and amid shards of ice that shot in all directions, the sword in my right hand traced a brilliant golden arc in the air.

  My six companions reached out to steady me as my body flew backward. I looked up, struggling with the tremendous weight of the sword, and met their downward glances. Their mouths twisted and broke into smiles, ready to unleash raucous cheers—if it weren’t for what happened an instant later.

  The little tree root was freed from the ice pedestal. It rose up into the air and began to stretch, to grow. The fine little hairs spread downward before my eyes. A fresh growth emerged from the severed end of the root, racing directly upward.

  A powerful roar was approaching from above. I looked up to see that something was rushing down through the hole we’d come from, disintegrating the spiral staircase as it went. It was more roots. The roots of the World Tree that were holding Thrymheim in place.

  The thick roots tore through the chamber to touch the much smaller one freed from the pedestal. They wound together and fused.

  Then, as if all the shaking we’d felt so far was just a precursor, a true shock wave rippled through Thrymheim.

  “Wh-whoa! It…it’s gonna split apart!” Klein roared, and we all grabbed hold of one another as a million tiny cracks spread through the ice walls around us.

  There was a series of earsplitting explosions. Pieces of the thick ice walls as large as a horse carriage broke free left and right, plummeting downward toward the Great Void below.

  “Thrymheim itself is collapsing! We must escape, Papa!” Yui bleated overhead. I looked to my right at Asuna, and she looked back.

  Together we chorused, “But there’s no staircase!”

  The spiral staircase we descended into the chamber had just been destroyed without a trace by the onslaught of the massive roots of the World Tree. And even if we raced at top speed back the way we came, the best we could do was return to that open terrace.

  “What about clinging to the roots?” Sinon asked, keeping cool despite the chaos. She looked up and shrugged. “Actually…never mind.”

  The roots affixed into the soil above stretched down halfway through the chamber, but even the little capillary roots closest to the circular disc we were standing on were a good thirty feet away. We couldn’t jump that far.

  “Hey, World Tree! This isn’t very thoughtful of you!” Lisbeth shouted, brandishing a fist upward, but she was talking to a tree. What was it going to do, say sorry?

  “Awwright…Time to check out the great Klein’s Olympic medal–winning high-jumping skills!”

  The samurai hopped to his feet and got a running start—but the circular platform wasn’t even twenty feet across.

  “No, you idiot, don’t—”

  But I couldn’t stop him. Klein launched himself into a beautiful Fosbury flop of about seven feet high. Given the meager running start he had, it was actually quite impressive, but still far short of the roots. He traced a hard parabola in the air and crashed into the center of the floor.

  The shock of that impact—or so we all believed—caused a fresh series of cracks to spider through the walls. The bottom of the chamber, the very bottom tip of Thrymheim, separated from the rest of the palace at last.

  “K-Klein, you idiot!” cursed Silica, who hated roller coasters, and seven players, one pixie, and one pet entered free fall atop a small circular cylinder of ice.

  If it were a slapstick manga, we could all sit down and enjoy a cup of tea during the scene.

  But falling from heights in a VRMMO was actually quite terrifying. Sure, we got to fly among the clouds in Alfheim, but that was thanks to our trusty wings. A player in a flightless situation, such as a dungeon, would get quite the scare from a jump of even fifteen feet. Even I didn’t like to do them.

  So the seven of us all clung to the circle of ice, screaming for all we were worth.

  In the air around us, other massive chunks of ice that came loose at the same time as us were colliding violently and bursting into smaller pieces. Up above, massive Thrymheim seemed to be breaking into pieces, each crack freeing more of the World Tree’s roots to swing loose.

  At last, I hesitantly peered over the edge of the circle to what lay below.

  Three thousand feet below—less than that by now—loomed the surface of Jotunheim, the Great Void yawning wide. The disc we were riding on was heading straight for the center of the hole.

  “I wonder what’s down there,” Sinon wondered.

  “M-m-maybe it’s like Urd said, and it g-g-goes down to N-Niflheim!” I managed to respond.

  “I hope it’s not too cold…”

  “I-I-I bet it’s absolutely f-freezing! It’s the h-home of the f-f-frost giants!”

  The conversation gave me a bit of willpower at last, so with Excalibur still clutched in my hands, I turned left to ask Leafa, “H-h-how goes the slaughter q-quest?”

  The sylph girl, her ponytail sticking straight upward with the acceleration of the fall, instantly stopped screaming—I suspected she might have been shrieking with delight—and glanced at the medallion around her neck.

  “Oh…w-we made it in time, Big Brother! There’s still one light left! Oh, good…”

  She beamed wholeheartedly, spreading her arms wide to hug me, and I rubbed her head.

  Since the World Tree was regaining its former state, that meant that Queen Urd and her kindred wou
ld be regaining their power, and the humanoid Deviant Gods would no longer hunt them. That would mean that even if we fell into the Great Void and died partway or plunged all the way down to Niflheim, our sacrifice wouldn’t be in vain.

  The only worry on my mind was Excalibur, held tight in my hands. The big question was if I could actually earn the right to own the sword if I hadn’t yet completed the quest. I probably needed to meet up with Urd alive and ensure that the quest completion switch was flipped.

  Behind Leafa’s back, I tried to open my window and stash Excalibur inside anyway. As I suspected, the sword resisted my attempt to stick it into the menu.

  Hey, I got the sword in my hands legitimately. That’s all that matters. If I don’t get to keep it, well, this gaudy, golden legendary look isn’t really my style to begin with, I told myself, a weak sour-grapes defense.

  Suddenly, Leafa pulled back from her grip around my neck.

  “…I heard something.”

  “Huh…?”

  I put all of my concentration into listening, but all I heard was the rushing of the wind. The ground level was much closer now. We had maybe sixty seconds at best before we smashed—er, plummeted—into the Void.

  “There it was again!” she cried, and managed to carefully stand up on the falling disc.

  “H-hey, be caref…” I started to shout, when I heard it.

  It sounded like a distant wailing: Kwooo…

  I looked around with a start. Beyond the falling chunks of ice around us, in the distant southern sky, a small white light was approaching. As it swung closer, I made out a fishlike body, four pairs of wings, and a long nose.

  “Tonkyyyyy!” Leafa called, her hands around her mouth. It wailed in response again. That sealed it. It was Tonky, the flying Deviant God who delivered us to the entrance of Thrymheim. Now it seemed all too obvious: He gave us a ride there, so it made sense he would pick us up. If only he would hurry…

  “Th-this way, this way!” Liz cried, and Asuna waved, too. Silica timidly looked up from Pina’s feathers, where her face had been buried, and Sinon swung her tail in annoyance.

  Still sprawled out in the same position that he had landed from his ultra-high-jump, Klein finally looked up, grinned, and gave a thumbs-up.