Early and Late

  “And I shall grant you that blade. Be careful not to hurl it into Urd’s Spring.”

  “N-no, I won’t,” I replied, all childlike obedience.

  The legendary blade Excalibur, which I’d been clutching in my hands all this time, vanished. It was now in my inventory, of course. I wasn’t childish enough to scream and holler in joy, so I kept my exultation to a single pump of a fist.

  The three women floated to a distance and intoned in unison.

  “Thank you, fairies. May we meet again.”

  In the center of my vision, a system message in an exotic font appeared. When the notice that we had completed the quest faded, the three spun around and made to leave.

  Before they could go, Klein raced up front and screamed, “S-S-Skuld! How can I get in touch with you?!”

  What happened to you and Freyja?! An NPC isn’t going to give you her e-mail address!!

  Unable to decide whether to hit him with the former or the latter, I froze in place. Only…

  My goodness.

  The two elder sisters vanished abruptly, but the youngest, Skuld, turned around with what almost looked like an expression of amusement and waved. Something shining flew through the air and landed in Klein’s hand.

  Then the warrior goddess did indeed disappear, leaving only silence and a faint breeze behind.

  Eventually Liz shook her head and muttered, “Klein, at this very moment, you have my utmost respect.”

  I agreed. I just had to agree.

  In any case…

  Our grand quest, starting spontaneously on the morning of December 28th, 2025, ended just like that, shortly after noon.

  “…Hey, you feel like having a party-slash-year-end celebration?” I suggested.

  Looking tired, Asuna smiled back at me and said, “I’m in.”

  “Me, too!” said Yui on her shoulder, thrusting her tiny hand into the air.

  6

  I wasn’t sure whether to hold our spontaneous celebration in the forest cabin on the twenty-second floor of New Aincrad or in a real-life location.

  In ALO, we had the absolute participation of Yui, who played a huge role in our success. But for a week starting from the 29th of December, Asuna would be at her family’s Kyoto home, so if we missed today, I wouldn’t see her again until next year.

  Recognizing this, our “daughter,” Yui, suggested it be held IRL, and so our year-end party was slated for Dicey Café at three o’clock in the Okachimachi neighborhood. After we waved farewell to Tonky at the landing of the hanging staircase, we raced up the long stairway to the city of Alne, which was still as lively as when we started the quest—they’d apparently felt some shaking when Thrymheim began ascending. A quick trip to the inn, and we all logged out.

  As soon as I woke up on my bed, I called Agil with the story. He grumbled about not having enough food on short notice, but he said he would have his famous spare ribs and baked beans ready by then in ample supply. The man was a model business owner.

  The forecast called for snow in the evening, so Suguha and I took the train into the city rather than my motorcycle. We had big luggage to bring this time, so my rickety old 125cc and its cramped trunk wouldn’t do.

  Tokyo residents like Klein often treated Kawagoe in Saitama Prefecture like the ends of the earth, but if you got on an express train, it took less than an hour to reach Okachimachi. By the time we opened the doors of Dicey Café just after two, only Sinon was there, and she lived practically down the street.

  After greeting the owner, who was busy cooking the meal, I got out the hard case I’d brought along. It contained four cameras with moving lenses and a notepad PC control station.

  “What is that?” Sinon asked curiously. She and Suguha helped me set up the cameras in four different locations around the room. They were ordinary webcams with onboard mics that we’d upgraded with high-capacity batteries and Wi-Fi connections, so four of them were enough to cover just about all of the small room.

  Once all the cameras were talking to the notepad and working properly, I connected to my high-spec desktop back home over the Internet and put on a small headset.

  “How is it, Yui?”

  “…I can see. I can see and hear everything, Papa!” came Yui’s clear voice through both the earbud in my ear and the notepad’s speaker.

  “Okay, try some slow movement.”

  “Sure!” she piped up, and the nearest camera’s small lens began to move.

  Yui would have a makeshift 3D model of Dicey Café in real time now, which she could fly inside like a pixie. The picture quality was poor and the system slow to react, but compared to the passive view she’d gotten from my cell phone camera before, this was a much more liberating glimpse into the real world for her.

  “…I see. So those cameras and mics are kind of like Yui’s own inputs…her sensory organs,” Sinon said.

  It was Suguha, not me, who responded. “Yes. At school, Big Brother’s in the mecha…mechaton…”

  “Mechatronics,” I corrected.

  “That-nics elective course. He says he built them for class credit, but it’s really just for Yui.”

  “I keep ordering more features from him!”

  The three of us laughed. I took a sip of caustic ginger ale and argued, “Th-that’s not all! If I can shrink the camera down and mount it on a shoulder or head, then we can take the machine anywhere…”

  “Yeah, and that’s for Yui, too, I’m saying!”

  I had no rebuttal to that.

  But the “AV Interactive Communications Probe,” as we temporarily called it, was far from complete. For Yui to be able to sense the real world just like the virtual world, we needed total autonomous movement of cameras and mics, and we were way short on sensors. Ideally, this automatic terminal would be humanoid in shape. But that was impossible with a mere high school’s resources, so I was hoping that some highly aggressive tech company built a beautiful girl robot soon…

  While I was lost in my purely altruistic daydreams, Asuna, Klein, Liz, and Silica joined the group, and two tables were pushed together to hold all the food and drink. Last came an enormous plate of glistening spare ribs, to thunderous applause for the cook. Agil took off his apron to sit down, and we poured glasses of champagne both real and nonalcoholic.

  “To earning Excalibur and Mjolnir! So long, 2025! Cheers!” I toasted briefly, and everyone joined in.

  “…You know, I’ve been wondering,” Sinon prompted, sitting in the seat to my right. It was an hour and a half later, and the feast had been totally picked clean. “Why is it Excalibur?”

  “Huh? What do you mean?” I asked, not understanding her question. Sinon spun her fork in her fingers and explained.

  “Normally in fantasy novels and manga and stuff, we Japanese usually pronounce it more like ‘caliber.’ Excaliber. But in the game, it’s pronounced Excalibur.”

  “Oh, that’s what you’re talking about.”

  “Oooh. You read those books, Sinon?” Suguha asked, perking up.

  Sinon smiled shyly. “I practically owned the library in middle school. I read a couple books about the legend of King Arthur, but I’m pretty sure they all phoneticized it ‘caliber.’”

  “Hmm. Maybe the designer who put the item into ALO just called it that out of personal taste or a whim…” I offered without any real proof. At my left, Asuna smirked.

  “I’m pretty sure that there were several more names in the original legend. Remember how in the quest, there was a fake version called Caliburn? Well, that was one of the real names in that list, I’m pretty sure.”

  The speaker on the table suddenly piped up with Yui’s officious voice.

  “The main variations seen most often are Caledfwlch, Caliburnus, Calesvol, Collbrande, Caliburn, and Escalibor, depending on the language.”

  “Sheesh, there are that many?” I marveled. In that case, the phonetic difference between “caliber” and “calibur” seemed like simple margin of error.

  Sinon continue
d. “Well, it doesn’t mean much…It just struck me as interesting, since ‘caliber’ has a very specific meaning to me.”

  “Huh? What’s that?”

  “Caliber is the English word for a bullet’s size. My Hecate II is a ‘fifty caliber’ because its rounds are .50 inches wide. I think the English spelling is different from Excalibur, though.”

  She paused momentarily, then looked at me.

  “…It can also refer to a person’s quality of character. That’s the source of the saying, ‘a man of high caliber.’”

  “Ooh, I need to remember that,” Suguha noted. Sinon chuckled and said it probably wouldn’t come up on any tests.

  Meanwhile, on the other side of the table, Lisbeth spoke up at last with a smirk and said, “Then I guess they needed to make sure whoever owned Excalibur had the proper caliber. From what I’ve heard on the grapevine, a certain someone made quite a killing with a short-term job recently…”

  “Urk…”

  It was just yesterday that Kikuoka wired me the payment for assisting in the investigation of the Death Gun incident. But I’d already set aside most of it for better parts for Yui’s desktop machine and a nanocarbon-fiber shinai for Suguha’s kendo, so the remaining amount was already quite depressing.

  But if I backed down now, that would only bring my caliber into question. I puffed out my chest and announced, “I-I intended to pay for today’s party all along, of course.”

  Cheers erupted from all around, and Klein emitted an earsplitting whistle. As I raised my hand in response to the crowd, I considered something.

  If there was one thing I’d learned about human potential throughout my experiences in the three worlds of SAO, ALO, and GGO, it was that “a single man cannot support anything on his own.”

  In each world, I’d been brought to my knees on many occasions and had only been able to continue walking thanks to the help of others. Today’s spontaneous adventure was the perfect example of that.

  So I was certain that my caliber—our caliber—was only as wide as when the entire group held hands in a circle and stretched as far as we could.

  I would not use that golden sword for just my own gain.

  With that oath in mind, I reached down for my glass on the table to lead another toast.

  Game of death.

  It was not a term with a clearly defined meaning. If it meant “a sport with physical risk,” that could apply to ultimate fighting, rock climbing, or motorsports. There was probably just one criterion that separated those dangerous sports from a game of death.

  In a game of death, fatality was listed in the rules as the penalty for failure.

  Not as the result of unintended consequences. Forced death, as a punishment for player error, defeat, or breaking of the rules. Murder.

  If that was your definition, then the world’s first VRMMORPG, Sword Art Online, had just turned into a game of death. Not more than twenty minutes ago, the game’s creator and ruler, Akihiko Kayaba, had stated as much in undeniable clarity.

  If your hit points fell to zero—if you “lost”—he would kill you. If you tried to remove the NerveGear—if you “broke the rules”—he would kill you.

  It didn’t feel real. It couldn’t. Countless questions swam through my mind.

  Is that really possible? Is it possible for the NerveGear, a consumer game console for home use, to simply destroy a human being’s brain?

  And more importantly, why do such a thing at all? I can understand taking a player hostage for ransom. But Kayaba doesn’t gain anything materially from forcing us to beat the game with our lives on the line. On the contrary, he’s lost his standing as a game designer and quantum physicist and descended into being the worst criminal in history.

  It made no sense. There was no logical sense.

  But on an instinctual level, I did understand.

  Everything Kayaba said was truth. The floating castle Aincrad, setting of SAO, had gone from a fantasy world full of excitement and wonder to a deadly cage with ten thousand souls trapped inside. What Kayaba said at the end of his tutorial—“this very situation is my ultimate goal”—was the truth. The deranged genius had built SAO, built the NerveGear itself…to make this game real.

  It was my belief in that fact that had me, Level-1 swordsman Kirito, running at top speed.

  All alone, through a vast grassland. Leaving my first and only friend here behind.

  To ensure my own survival.

  Aincrad was built of a hundred thin floors, stacked on top of one another in one mass.

  The floors were larger on the bottom and smaller as you went up toward the top, so the entire structure was broadly conical in shape. The first floor was the biggest in the game, at over six miles across. The biggest city on the floor, known as the “main city,” was called the Town of Beginnings, and it spread across the southern end in a half circle that was over half a mile wide.

  Tall castle walls surrounded the town, preventing monsters from ever attacking. The interior of the town was protected by an “Anti-Criminal Code” that ensured no player could lose a single pixel of their HP, the measure of their true life remaining. Put another way, that meant you were safe if you stayed in the Town of Beginnings, and you could not die.

  But the very instant that Akihiko Kayaba finished his welcoming tutorial, I made up my mind to leave the city.

  There were several reasons why. I didn’t know if the code would continue functioning forever. I wanted to avoid the infighting and distrust that were sure to develop among players. And the MMO gamer instincts that went down to my very core caused me to fixate on leveling up.

  In a strange twist of fate, I loved games of death in fiction, and I’d lived vicariously through many in books, comics, and movies from all over the world. The actual subject of the games varied, but they all seemed to share a common theory:

  In deadly games, there had to be a tradeoff between safety and liberation. There was no danger to your life if you stayed in the safe area at the very start. But unless you risked danger to proceed forward, you would never be free from there.

  Of course, I wasn’t possessed by some heroic desire to defeat a hundred floors of bosses and beat the game myself. But I was certain that out of the ten thousand players trapped in the game, at least a thousand were of that ilk. Whether alone or in groups, they would leave town, kill the weaker monsters around them, and begin earning experience points, leveling up, gaining better equipment, and becoming stronger.

  That was where the second bit of theory came in.

  In a game of death, the players’ enemies weren’t just the rules, traps, and monsters. Other players could be your enemy. I had never come across one that didn’t turn out that way.

  In SAO, the areas outside of town were PK-enabled. Surely no one would actually kill another player—but sadly, there was no guarantee that no one would succumb to the temptation of threatening that in order to take another’s gear and money. Just the thought of a potential enemy with stats and gear completely overshadowing my own made my mouth turn bitter with actual fear and anxiety.

  For that reason, I couldn’t take the option to rely on the safety offered by town life and abandon the possibility of strengthening myself.

  And if I were going to level up, there was no time to waste. I knew that the safest grasslands around the town would soon be jammed full of those players who chose action over safety. SAO’s monster pop rate was limited such that only a certain number would spawn over a certain period of time. When the first wave of prey was harvested, players would go bloodshot looking for the next one and be forced to compete with one another over the ones they found.

  If I were going to avoid that state and level more efficiently, I would need to move past the “relatively safe” areas into “slightly dangerous” territory.

  Of course, if this were a game I was playing for the first time, totally ignorant of what lay around me, that would be suicide. But for special reasons, I knew very well the terrain and mons
ters of the lower floors of Aincrad, despite this being the game’s first official day.

  If I left the northwest gate of the Town of Beginnings and cut straight across the open field, through a deep, mazelike forest, there would be a village called Horunka. Though small, it was indeed a safe haven just like the big city, with an inn, weapon store, and item shop; it was an excellent base of operations. There were no monsters in the surrounding forest with dangerous effects like paralysis or equipment destruction, so even playing solo, I was unlikely to meet an accidental death.

  I would go from level 1 to level 5 in Horunka. The time was six fifteen in the evening. The fields around me were golden with the evening sun pouring through the outer aperture of Aincrad, and the forest in the distance was gloomy with dusk. Fortunately, even after night, there were no powerful monsters around Horunka. If I continued hunting until after midnight, I would have good enough stats and gear that I could move on to the next settlement by the time other players filled the village.

  “…Talk about self-interest…I’m the very model of a solo player, I guess,” I mumbled to myself as I sprinted out of the city.

  I had to be light and joking about it, because if I didn’t, there would be a different kind of bitterness than that of fear: the sour tang of self-loathing.

  If only I had that friendly bandana-wearing guy with the cutlass along. At least helping him level up and aiding in his survival might overwrite my guilt somewhat.

  But I left Klein, my only friend in Aincrad, back in the Town of Beginnings. Technically, I invited him to come with me to Horunka, but Klein said he couldn’t leave behind his guildmates from a previous game.

  I could have offered to bring them along. But I didn’t. Unlike the boars and caterpillars that even Level-1 players could handle with ease outside the city, the forest ahead was full of more dangerous hornets and carnivorous plants. If you didn’t know how to react to their special attacks, you could easily run out of HP…and actually die.