Alicization Beginning

  “In the two years since Selka came to the church, she has not once returned home. Even if that was the case, I cannot believe that she would go there without attending prayer or saying anything to me. Even if there are no laws against it…”

  “Then…maybe she’s out shopping. How do you get the ingredients for breakfast every day?”

  “We bought two days’ worth of food yesterday evening. All the stores in the village are closed today.”

  “Oh…of course.” That emptied my meager stock of imagination. “…I’m sure she had something important to do. She’ll be back very soon.”

  “…I certainly hope so…” Sister Azalia murmured, her brow furrowed with concern. She sighed and said, “In that case, I will wait until midday, and then pay a visit to the village hall if she is not back yet. Forgive me for interrupting you. I must prepare for the morning prayer now.”

  “It’s all right…I’ll check around the area afterward,” I told her as she inclined her head and left. A faint, nasty tinge of worry welled up within me as I dumped out the remaining water in the basin. I recalled something troublesome in my conversation with Selka last night but couldn’t remember what it was. Had I said something that would prompt her to slip out of the church?

  Morning prayer passed with this concern gripping my chest, and at the end of breakfast, where the children all wondered where Selka was, she still had not returned. I helped clean up the dishes and went out the front door of the church.

  We hadn’t explicitly made the same agreement as yesterday, but it was nonetheless a relief when I saw that flaxen hair coming from the northern path at the eight o’clock bell.

  “Good morning, Kirito.”

  “Morning, Eugeo.”

  He showed up with the same smile as ever. I followed up with, “You get the entire day off, right?”

  “That’s right. So I figured I would show you around the village today.”

  “That’d be great, but I need you to help with something else first. Selka hasn’t been seen all morning…so I thought we could go look for her…”

  “What?!” he exclaimed, his green eyes wide and worried. “She walked out of the church without telling Sister Azalia first?”

  “That’s what it sounds like. Sister Azalia said it was the first time this has ever happened. Can you think of anywhere she might have gone?”

  “Might have gone? I don’t know…”

  “Last night I talked with Selka about Alice for a little bit. So I was wondering if she might be someplace that reminds her of Alice…”

  Only once I had said the words aloud did I finally, belatedly, ashamedly realize the source of my unease.

  “Ah…”

  “What is it, Kirito?”

  “No way…Say, Eugeo. When Selka asked you why the Integrity Knight took Alice away years ago, I hear you didn’t tell her the reason. Why not?”

  He blinked rapidly and, after a few moments, bobbed his head. “That’s right…she did ask that. So…why didn’t I tell her? I didn’t have a very solid reason…Perhaps I was just uneasy about the possibility that Selka would try to go after Alice…”

  “That’s it,” I grunted. “I told Selka last night. I told her how Alice touched the ground of the land of darkness…She must have gone to the End Mountains.”

  “What?!” Eugeo paled. “That’s bad. We have to track her down and bring her back before the villagers realize…When did she leave?”

  “I don’t know. She was gone by the time I woke at five thirty…”

  “In this season, the sky starts to lighten up around five. She couldn’t walk through the forest before that point. Which means she left three hours ago,” Eugeo said, looking up at the sky. “When Alice and I went to the cave, it only took us about five hours to get there, and we were kids. Selka’s got to be over half the way there by now. I don’t know that we can overtake her in time…”

  “Let’s hurry. We’ll go right now,” I insisted. He agreed at once.

  “We don’t have time to prepare. Fortunately the path is along the river, so we won’t lack for water. Okay…it’s this way.”

  Eugeo and I started walking north, just slowly enough that no passing villagers would be suspicious of us. As the shops trickled away, so did the foot traffic, and we were soon racing down the paved road. Within five minutes, we reached a bridge over the river and snuck out of the village without drawing the posted men-at-arms’ notice.

  Unlike the wide barley fields of the southern end, the north end of the village ran right up to dense forest. The river that wound around the hills of Rulid in the form of a canal split the forest as it ran north to south, and there was a small path on its bank covered in short grass.

  Eugeo plunged down the riverside path without hesitation, then came to a halt about ten steps in. He held out his hand to stop me and crouched, touching a patch of grass with his other hand.

  “Right here…It’s been stepped on,” he murmured, and made the sigil to bring up the grass’s window. “Its life is a bit down. It would be more if an adult had stepped on it, so that certifies that a child walked here a little while ago. Let’s hurry.”

  “Uh…right,” I said, and picked up my pace to follow after him.

  For as long as we walked, the river stayed on the right, and the forest stayed on the left. The only change to the scenery was one large pond and a brief elevation change. It almost made me wonder if we’d fallen into the RPG trope of the “looping dungeon.” We were out of hearing range of the town’s bell, so the only way to tell time was the slow progress of the sun.

  Eugeo and I continued to trace the river’s path at a trot just below a run. I would absolutely have run out of steam going at this pace for thirty minutes in the real world. Fortunately, the average male my age in this world was much healthier, and I felt it more as a pleasurable activity than fatigue. I proposed speeding up to Eugeo, but he said that if we ran any faster, our life would drop too much and force us to take a long break to recover.

  We’d been following the path at this precise speed for two whole hours but hadn’t seen the girl yet. In fact, she would probably have arrived at the cave by now. Fear and haste mingled in my mouth with a metallic tang.

  “Hey…Eugeo,” I called out, taking care to keep my breathing steady. A step ahead and to my right, he looked over his shoulder.

  “What?”

  “Just to be sure…If Selka goes into the land of darkness, will the Integrity Knight immediately come to take her away?”

  His eyes unfocused as he consulted distant memories. “No…I think the Integrity Knight will fly to the village the next morning. That’s what happened six years ago.”

  “I see…Then even in a worst-case scenario, we’ll still have a chance to save Selka.”

  “…What are you thinking, Kirito?”

  “It’s simple. If we can take Selka out of the village before the end of the day, we might be able to run away from the knight.”

  “…”

  He faced forward again, mulled it over, then muttered, “We can’t…do that. I have my Calling…”

  “I didn’t say you had to come with us,” I noted forcefully. “I’ll take Selka and go on the run. This was my fault for running my mouth, anyway. It’s my responsibility.”

  “…Kirito…”

  I caught sight of the wounded expression on Eugeo’s face and felt a prickle in my heart. But this was necessary to challenge his subservient nature. I felt guilty using Selka’s peril for my own purposes, but I needed to ascertain whether the Taboo Index was simply a list of ethical and moral taboos or if it was an absolutely enforced set of rules for the residents of this world.

  After a few seconds, Eugeo slowly shook his head side to side.

  “You can’t…You just can’t, Kirito. Selka has her own Calling. Even if the knight comes to take her away, she won’t agree to go with you. And I don’t think it will come to that in the first place. Selka would never violate the serious taboo of setting fo
ot in the land of darkness.”

  “But Alice did,” I pointed out. He winced and bit his lip but argued more forcefully this time.

  “Alice…Alice was special. She wasn’t like anyone in the village. Not like me…and not like Selka.”

  He picked up speed, suggesting that he wasn’t going to talk about it any further. As I followed, a silent question echoed in my heart to that mysterious girl.

  Alice…who are you?

  To Eugeo, Selka, and the other people of this world, the Taboo Index was clearly something they could not break, even if they wanted to—the same way that you could not break the physical laws that kept a human being from flying in the real world. That seemed to line up with my suspicion that they had true fluctlights but were not human beings in the same sense as I was.

  But what did that make Alice, who broke—was able to break—that terrible taboo? Was she another tester diving in with the STL like I was? Or…

  My brain seized upon different fragmented thoughts one after the other as my legs moved automatically. Eventually, Eugeo broke the silence.

  “There it is, Kirito.”

  I came to my senses and looked up. The forest was clearing out up ahead, and I could see a wall of ashy gray rock beyond it.

  With a last spurt of energy, we sprinted across the remaining few hundred yards and came to a stop where the ground underfoot turned from grass to gravel. I stared at the sight before me in shock, panting at last.

  It was nothing short of a transition space between area maps, a sure sign of artificiality if I’d ever seen one. The thick green of the forest hit a brief neutral zone, then abruptly turned into a nearly vertical rock cliff. To my surprise, a light snow dusted the surface close enough nearly to touch. However high the altitude was, the peaks of the mountains were pure white.

  Those peaks continued to the left and right as far as the eye could see, perfectly splitting the world between this side and that. If someone had designed this world, I could practically scold them for the lazy way they’d drawn this border.

  “These are…the End Mountains? And just on the other side is the land of darkness…?” I muttered in disbelief. Eugeo nodded.

  “I was surprised the first time I came here, too. That the end of the world…”

  “…Was so close,” I finished, unconsciously craning my neck in confusion. It was close enough that we’d reached it in just two and a half hours, without any impediments on the way. It was as if…it was tempting the villagers to come and trespass into the forbidden land. Or on the flip side, allowing the residents of the land of darkness to attack…

  I stood there, mulling it over blank-faced, which prompted Eugeo to say, “Let’s hurry. We must’ve closed the gap with Selka to thirty minutes by now. If we drag her back as soon as we find her, we can still be back to the village during daylight.”

  “Y-yeah…good point.”

  He was pointing ahead, where the little brook we were following got sucked into a hole in the rock face—technically, it was flowing out from there, not going in.

  “So that’s it…”

  I trotted closer. The cave was quite tall and wide, with a rock shelf jutting from the wall to the side of the fierce creek. It was totally dark on the inside, and the occasional breeze brought a freezing chill with it.

  “Wait, Eugeo…What are we going to do about light?” I asked. I had totally forgotten about the most important item for a good dungeon spelunking, but Eugeo said he had it under control. He lifted a stalk of grass that he had picked up along the way. I wondered what he was going to do with the fuzzy cattail—until he started chanting in English.

  “System Call! Lit Small Rod!”

  System Call?! I thought, shocked.

  The tip of the stalk of grass in Eugeo’s hand started to glow. It had enough pale bluish light to illuminate a few yards ahead. He headed farther into the cave.

  I raced to catch up alongside him, the shock still racing through my veins. “Eu-Eugeo…what was that?”

  He squinted sternly at me, but there was a hint of pride tugging at his mouth as he said, “A sacred art—a very easy one. I had to practice it a whole lot two years ago when I decided to come and get the Blue Rose Sword.”

  “Sacred art…But…do you know the meaning of those words? Like system and rod…”

  “Meaning? There’s no meaning; they’re just spellwords. They’re words you say to beseech God and receive a miraculous blessing. The higher sacred arts have many times more spellwords, I hear.”

  That made sense to me. They didn’t know the meaning of the system terminology—it was all treated like mystical magic words. Still, that was a very practical spell. Whoever designed this world was clearly quite pragmatic.

  “Say…do you think I can do it, too?” I wondered, excited despite the circumstances.

  Eugeo wasn’t sure. “It took me about two months to use this art, practicing between my work shifts every single day. According to Alice, people with the talent for it can use it in a day, and others might never be capable of it their entire lives. I don’t know where your talent level lies, but I doubt you could do it right away…”

  Did that mean that using magic—sacred arts—required some amount of skill training through repetition? If so, he was probably right that it couldn’t be mastered in a day. I gave up on the idea for now and stared into the darkness ahead.

  The wet gray walls turned right and left and seemed to continue on forever. A chilling wind assaulted my skin at all times, and even with a partner at my side, the lack of any sword, or even a sturdy stick, was starting to make me feel helpless and uneasy.

  “Hey…are you sure Selka came down here?” I wondered aloud. Eugeo pointed the glowing cattail toward the ground at our feet.

  “Oh…”

  Within the ring of the impromptu lantern’s glow was a shallow, frozen puddle. It had been stepped on in the middle, and there were cracks extending in all directions from that spot.

  I tried stepping on it myself. The ice cracked loudly and split further—which meant that before me, someone lighter had been the perpetrator of the first cracks.

  “I see…That settles it, then. I don’t know if she’s reckless or fearless…”

  Eugeo found that statement to be curious. “There’s nothing to be afraid of. No white dragon in this cave anymore—not even a mouse or a bat to contend with.”

  “Oh, r-right,” I replied, reminding myself that there were animals in this world but no actively aggressive monsters to worry about. At the very least, I could consider this side of the End Mountains to be the equivalent of a VRMMO protected area.

  I exhaled, trying to let the tension drain out of my spine—when from the darkness ahead came an odd sound on the breeze. We looked at each other. It sounded like the screeching of a bird or wild animal of some kind.

  “Hey…what was that?”

  “…I don’t know…I’ve never heard that sound before…Ah!”

  “Wh-what is it now?”

  “Do you…smell something, Kirito?”

  I drew in a deep breath of the cave air through my nostrils.

  “Oh…it’s kind of a burning smell…and…”

  Mixed with the scent of burning tree sap was just a hint of something raw and bestial. I grimaced; it wasn’t a reassuring smell.

  “What is that…?” I wondered when a new sound came, and I held my breath.

  It was the long, trailing sound of a girl screaming.

  “Oh no!”

  “Selka!”

  We both leaped into action, our feet sliding a bit on the frozen rock.

  The blood in my veins froze, and my limbs felt numb. It was the first true, palpable sense of danger I’d felt since I showed up in this world—even more than I’d felt when I originally didn’t know where I was.

  So the Underworld wasn’t a paradise after all. It was a thin layer of peace stretched over a core of evil. That was the only explanation. This world was an enormous vise meant to trap all
kinds of people in its grasp. Someone had spent centuries slowly, methodically screwing it tighter. To see if the residents would band together and fight back or be crushed under its weight.

  Rulid Village was one of the places closest to the vise’s jaws. As the final moment of reckoning approached, the souls in the village would slowly disappear, one by one.

  But under no circumstances could I allow Selka to be the first. It was my fault she came to this cave in the first place. For toying with her fate, I had a responsibility to see her home safely…

  Eugeo and I raced through the cave by the weak light of the grass stem. With each desperate gasp of air, my chest hurt. I slipped numerous times, the elbows and wrists that whacked against walls of ice throbbing constantly. It was easy to imagine our “life” dropping throughout the process, but that wasn’t going to slow us down now.

  The farther we went, the stronger the odor of burning wood and animal stink. Mixed in with the screeching voices was the constant shuffling of metal. I didn’t know what awaited us ahead, but it was hard to imagine it being friendly.

  My gamer’s instincts told me that with a single knife on hand, we had to come up with a plan and tread lightly, but even louder in my head was the knowledge that we had no time to waste. Plus, Eugeo’s panicked face was even paler than mine, and I knew he wouldn’t be convinced to turn back anyway.

  Suddenly, I saw orange light flickering on the rock walls ahead. Based on the way it was reflecting, there seemed to be a very large dome in the distance. I could feel the antagonism ahead, prickling against my skin. There was more than one of them—many, in fact. Eugeo and I plunged into the dome together, praying for Selka’s safety.

  Take in everything and execute the most efficient choice of action, as quickly as possible.

  Following the guidelines burned into me from experience, my attention darted around, absorbing the images like a wide-angle camera.

  The circular dome had to be nearly a hundred and fifty feet across. The floor was covered with thick ice, but there was a stretch toward the middle that was cracked open, exposing water nearly dark enough to be black.

  The source of the orange light was a pair of fires lit around the impromptu pond. Firewood snapped and crackled within black iron braziers.