Alicization Beginning

  If the STL was ever going to be put to a functional use, it would definitely need some kind of notable marker that identified its VR world as such, I noted to myself as I got up to my feet.

  So I didn’t have any certain proof yet, but it was reasonable to assume for now that I was in the Underworld. Meaning that in the real world, my body was lying in the STL test unit in Rath’s Roppongi lab, making two thousand yen an hour.

  “But wait…is that right?” I wondered, after my momentary period of relief.

  I could have sworn that Higa had told me my memories as Kazuto Kirigaya were blocked during testing to prevent data contamination. But the only part of my memory that was blank was the single day between seeing Asuna off and then getting into Rath’s STL. That was too narrow to qualify as a memory block.

  Plus—yes, that was right! I’d decided not to visit Rath for a while so I could study for my finals. Sure, the pay was tempting, but I didn’t want to think that it would take only a single day for me to break a promise to Asuna.

  So if this was an STL test dive, I had to assume that some issue had arisen. I looked up at the sky through the branches and shouted, “Mr. Higa! If you’re monitoring this test, call off the dive for a bit! I think there’s a problem!”

  More than ten seconds passed.

  Countless leaves shook in the breeze beneath the pleasant sun. Butterflies flapped their wings sleepily. Nothing changed.

  “Man…I don’t know about this…”

  A possibility suddenly occurred to me. Was this situation actually a test I’d elected to undertake?

  Perhaps they’d blocked only the brief bit of memory before the dive and tossed me into the STL’s ultrarealistic world to collect data on what a person would do if he wasn’t able to discern if his setting was the real world or a virtual one.

  If that was true, I wanted to smack my head for agreeing to such an unpleasant experiment. If I had assumed that I would easily escape my predicament through quick thinking and action, then it was a breathtakingly thoughtless decision.

  I used my fingers to list a number of possibilities that explained my situation, along with totally arbitrary percentages.

  “Let’s see…Chances that this is somewhere in the real world: three percent. Chances that this is an existing type of VR world: seven percent. Chances that this is a voluntary STL test dive: twenty percent. Chances that there was a spontaneous accident during the dive: 69.9999 percent. Which means…”

  There’s a 0.0001 chance I got summoned to a real alternate world, I added mentally. Racking my brain for an answer wasn’t going to get me much further. If I wanted to be more certain, I had to brave danger to interact with another person, be it game player or test diver.

  It was time for action.

  The first step was to quench my thirst, which was reaching persistent levels. I did a full 360-degree turn in the middle of the grass. The sound of flowing water was coming from what I estimated to be east, based on the position of the sun.

  Before I started off, I reached behind my back just in case, but there was no sword or even a stick there, of course. I strode forward before I could start to feel lonely about that, and in less than ten steps, I was out of the grass. Two huge trees stood at my sides like natural gateposts, and I headed through them into the dim forest.

  It was mysterious and eerie within the woods, with their velvety carpet of moss underfoot. The canopy of leaves far above blocked out nearly all the sunlight, so only the rare tendril of golden light reached the ground. The butterflies of the grass clearing were replaced with strange insects somewhere between dragonflies and moths that hovered and slid through the air in silence. Occasionally I heard the cry of some unfamiliar creature. It wasn’t like any place I knew on Earth.

  I walked for fifteen minutes, praying all the while that I didn’t run into any large, hostile animals or monsters. Relief set in when an array of ample sunlight appeared in the distance ahead. Based on the increased volume of sound, I could tell there was a river nearby. My thirst spurred my legs into a quicker pace.

  At the edge of the thick forest, there was a ten-foot buffer of grass, followed by the reflective silver of a water surface.

  “W-waddah,” I moaned piteously, crossing the final distance to the riverside and its soft undergrass. “Whoa,” I grunted as I stared into the water at point-blank range on hands and knees.

  It was beautiful. The river was not very wide, but the water in its gentle curve was stunningly clear. It was absolutely colorless but for a drop of blue, the white sand of the riverbed clearly visible through the pure mountain water.

  Given that, just a few seconds ago, I had been leaving room for the faint possibility that this was the real world, it might be dangerous to drink unfiltered natural water. But I could not resist the allure of a stream that looked like melted crystal in its pristine beauty. I gasped at the cutting chill of the water against my hand, but it did not stop me from scooping it up to my mouth.

  It was practically nectar. The taste of such sweet, fresh, pure water made me never want to spend money on a bottle of mineral water at the store again. I scooped up the water over and over with both hands, until eventually I just lowered my mouth to drink directly from the stream.

  With the intoxication of that life-water running through my veins, I finally eliminated from my mind the possibility that this was a standard full-dive VR world.

  No existing unit, such as the AmuSphere, could model liquid perfectly. Polygons were just a set of coordinates connected by a plane and not well suited to depict the complex, random shifting of water. Yet the water that rippled and spilled over my hands was utterly natural in appearance.

  It was tempting to dispel the notion that this was taking place in the real world, too. I sat up at last and surveyed the area. The beautiful stream; the fantastical forest that continued past the far bank; the odd, colorful fauna of the woods—none of it seemed to match up with a real-world location. After all, wasn’t it true that the more untouched by human hands a place was, the more severe it was likely to be? How could I be walking around in this light clothing and not have been bitten by any bugs yet?

  Thinking about that last question seemed likely to prompt the STL into summoning a cloud of poisonous insects, so I pushed it from my mind and got to my feet. I rounded down the likelihood of a real-world location to just 1 percent and looked around.

  The river flowed from north to south, curving gently. Both ends visible from here vanished among the massive trees. But based on the state and temperature of the water, I felt certain that I had to be close to the source. I’d be more likely to find civilization following the river south.

  I had just set off downriver, thinking it would be a much easier trip with a boat to ride, when the breeze shifted slightly, bringing a strange sound to my ears.

  It was the sound of something large and tough being struck by something even harder. Not just once. It was happening at a steady pace of about once every four seconds.

  It couldn’t be an animal or a natural occurrence. It was a virtual certainty that a human was producing this noise. I imagined someone chopping down a tree, perhaps. Briefly, I wondered if it would be dangerous to approach them, then smirked at myself. This wasn’t a kill-and-steal PvP MMORPG. My best option was clearly to make contact and gain information.

  I turned around and headed back upstream in the direction of the sound.

  Suddenly, I experienced a brief, strange vision.

  A glittering river on the right. A deep forest on the left. Straight ahead, a green path advancing with no end in sight.

  Three children walked down it abreast. A boy with black hair, another boy with flaxen blond hair, and between them, a girl wearing a straw hat with flowing golden locks. They threw off dazzling light from the setting summer sun.

  Is this…a memory?

  Long-distant days that would never return. Days he’d believed would continue forever, that he swore to protect and cherish, but that vanishe
d as easily as ice left in the open sun…

  Those nostalgic, heady days.

  2

  By the time I blinked again, the vision was gone, evaporating as quickly as it had come.

  What was that? The image was gone, but the sensation of nostalgia it brought stayed with me, clutching my heart agonizingly tightly.

  A memory of youth…In the vision of the three children walking along the riverside, I was absolutely certain that the boy with black hair on the right was…me.

  But that was impossible. There were no forests this thick or rivers this pristine in Kawagoe, Saitama Prefecture, where I grew up. And I’d certainly never been friends with a blond boy and girl. Plus, all three of us in the image were wearing the same rustic fantasy clothes.

  If this was the STL, did that mean the vision was a memory of my extended dive test last weekend? That seemed likely, but even with the fluctlight acceleration of the STL, I would have experienced only ten days at most. And the aching nostalgia that throbbed in my heart could not be caused by such a brief amount of time.

  Things were truly turning in a bizarre direction. I glanced down into the nearby river, wondering if I was really myself, but the stream was too warped to recognize the finer features in its reflection.

  I decided to forget about the prickling aftereffect and focused on that steady, repeating sound. This, too, had a familiar feel to it, but I still didn’t know whether it was the sound of a woodcutter’s ax. I shook my head to clear my mind and headed back upstream toward the noise.

  By the time the steady pace of walking allowed me to enjoy the beauty of the scenery again, I noticed my path was taking me farther to the left. It seemed the source of the noise was not at the riverside but deeper in the forest.

  As I walked, I counted on my fingers and realized that, oddly, the sound was not constant. After exactly fifty times, it would stop for three minutes or so, then resume for another fifty on the dot. It had to be coming from a human source.

  I would walk with a vague sense of direction during each three-minute interval, then recalibrate when the sound returned. Soon I had left the water behind and ventured back among the trees. Silently I passed by the now-familiar dragonflies, blue lizards, and enormous mushrooms.

  “…Forty-nine…fifty,” I counted, just as it became noticeably brighter among the trees ahead. It could be the forest’s exit or even a village. I quickened my pace toward the light.

  Climbing a set of rising roots like stairs so I could peer around an ancient trunk without exposing myself, I was met with a sight that was nothing short of breathtaking.

  It wasn’t the end of the forest or a human settlement. But the scope of the sight was so jaw-dropping that I didn’t have time to feel disappointed.

  It was a circular clearing in the middle of the forest, far larger than the little patch of grass where I’d awoken—about a hundred feet across, I guessed. The ground was covered in that pale-green moss, but unlike what I’d been walking over all this time, there were no ferns, vines, or low bushes at all.

  Just one thing, standing in the middle of the clearing, commanded my gaze:

  What an enormous tree!

  The trunk of the tree couldn’t have been less than thirteen feet across. Unlike the gnarled, broad-leaved trees of the forest, this was a conifer that stood absolutely straight. The bark was so dark it was nearly black, and numerous layers of branches spread out far, far above. It reminded me of the ancient Jōmon Sugi tree on Yakushima or the giant redwoods of western America, but the sheer presence of this tree gave it an unnatural air. It towered imperiously over everything.

  I slowly lowered my gaze from the impenetrable branches above to the roots of the tree. A lattice of massive roots thick as anacondas stretched in all directions, right up to the boundary of the rest of the forest. It seemed to me that the sheer life this tree sucked up was the reason for the clearing—nothing but moss could grow where the roots devoured all nutrients.

  It was a bit nerve-racking to step into the garden of an emperor like this, but I couldn’t resist the urge to touch such a tremendous thing. I made my way forward, tripping here and there over the mossy roots, because I couldn’t stop gazing up.

  Nearly every breath out of my mouth was a gasp. I had lost all caution for my surroundings, so enchanted was I at the sight. So, naturally, I didn’t notice until it was far too late.

  “?!”

  When I dropped my gaze to ground level, I met the eyes of someone peering around the trunk. My breath caught in my throat, and I twitched, stumbled, and crouched. My hand started to reach over my back, but there was no sword there.

  Fortunately, the first human I had seen in this world was not hostile or even cautious. He just stared at me, mystified.

  He looked to be my age—about seventeen or eighteen. His ash-brown hair had just a hint of waviness. Like me, he wore a simple tunic and trousers. He was sitting on a root like a bench, holding something round in his right hand.

  The odd part was his appearance. His skin was cream-colored, but he appeared neither fully Western nor Eastern. His features were fine and gentle, and his eyes looked dark green.

  The moment I saw his face, something deep in my head itched again…deep in my soul. But the instant I tried to seize the feeling, it vanished. I pushed aside that odd hesitation and decided to speak, to make it clear I had no hostile intentions. But before I could do so, I needed to know what language to say it in. I stood there for so long with my mouth agape that the other boy spoke first.

  “Who are you? Where did you come from?”

  There was something just barely alien about his accent, but it was otherwise perfect Japanese.

  I was just as stunned as when I’d first seen the pitch-black tree. For whatever reason, I hadn’t expected to hear my mother tongue in this clearly foreign world. There was something unreal about hearing familiar words come from the mouth of an exotic, Middle-Ages-European boy, as if I were watching a dubbed version of a foreign film.

  But I couldn’t stand there dumbfounded. It was time to think. My brain had been getting rusty recently, and I needed to get it percolating.

  If this was the STL’s Underworld, that meant this boy was most likely either (1) another test player in a dive, with memories from the real world like me, (2) a test player, but with memory limitations that made him just another resident of this world, or (3) an NPC being run by the program itself.

  The first possibility would make things easy. I’d just explain the abnormality happening to me, and he could tell me how to log out.

  But the second or third possibilities would not be so simple. If I started listing off a bunch of incomprehensible jargon about Soul Translator anomalies and log-out methods to a human or NPC who was functioning as a resident of the Underworld, it would only put them on edge and make collecting information more difficult.

  So I decided I needed to open a conversation using only safe terminology, until I could ascertain just who or what this boy was. I wiped my sweaty palms on my pants and tried to put on a reassuring smile.

  “Umm…my name is…”

  I paused. I wondered whether the names of people in this world were Japanese or European. I prayed that my own name could fit either case.

  “…Kirito. I was coming here from that direction and wound up lost,” I said, pointing to what I guessed was south. The boy’s eyes bulged. He set down the round object in his hand and got to his feet, pointing in the same direction.

  “You mean…from south of the forest? Did you come from Zakkaria?”

  “Er, n-no,” I said, fighting the instinct to let panic grip my features. “I, um…actually, I don’t know where I came from, really…I just kind of woke up from being passed out in the forest…”

  I was hoping for a response like, Oh, an STL error? Hang on, I’ll contact the operator, but the boy merely gave me the same shocked response. He stared closely at me and said, “Wait…you don’t know where you came from? Not even…what town you live
in…?”

  “Er, right…I don’t know. All I remember is my name…”

  “…I can’t believe it…I’ve heard the stories about ‘Vecta’s lost children’ but never thought I’d actually see one in person.”

  “V-Vecta’s lost children…?”

  “Don’t they call them that, wherever you’re from? When someone disappears one day or appears in the forest or fields all of a sudden, that’s what the villagers call them. The God of Darkness, Vecta, kidnaps people as a prank, stealing their memories and placing them in a far-off land. In my village, an old lady vanished years and years ago, they say.”

  “Ohhh…Then maybe that’s what I am…”

  On the inside, I found this ominous. It no longer seemed likely that this boy was just a tester engaging in a bit of role-playing. Sensing that some walls might be closing in around me, I decided to test out a more direct tactic.

  “Anyway…I’m in a bit of a bind, so I’d like to leave. But I don’t know how…”

  Silently, I was begging for him to pick up my hint, but the boy only looked at me with sympathy and said, “Yes, the forest is very deep. If you don’t know the way, you’re bound to get lost. But don’t worry—there’s a path out of here to the north.”

  “Er, no, I mean…”

  I threw caution to the wind.

  “…I want to log out.”

  My Hail Mary attempt was met by a curious tilt of the head. “L-log? What about a log? What did you say?”

  That settled it.

  Whether tester or NPC, he was a pure resident of the realm with no concept of a “virtual reality.” I tried not to let the disappointment show as I hastened to clarify. “S-sorry, I think I slipped into my local slang for a moment. Um, what I meant to say was…I want to find a place I can stay in a nearby town or village.”

  I thought it was a very weak excuse, but if anything, the boy was impressed.

  “Ohh…I’ve never heard those words before. And that black hair is uncommon in these parts…Perhaps you were born in the south.”

  “M-maybe you’re right,” I said with a stiff smile. He smiled back, all innocence, then crinkled his eyebrows with worry.