Sword Art Online - Volume 26 - Chapter 3

3

We helped Airy gather up the blanket and teaware, said good-bye to the frozen women for now, and headed higher up in the cathedral.

Of course, we retrieved our four swords from the locking mechanism, too, but when I pulled them out, the large doors began to close again, and I had to hurry back into the garden before they shut. A little push did not budge them in the slightest; we’d just have to trust that Airy could open them for us from the inside.

The doors on the south side were unlocked and gave way to a familiar staircase covered in red carpet. Eugeo must have taken these stairs on his own back then. Airy guided us upward until Alice stopped, just before we reached the ninetieth floor.

“Miss Airy…what happened to the bath that was on this floor?” she asked.

Memory flooded back into me: Yes, on the ninetieth floor of Central Cathedral, there was an enormous bath that took up the entire floor. But the doors on the other side of the landing were closed, so there was no way to know what was behind them.

“It still exists, Lady Alice,” Airy said matter-of-factly. “The pontifex’s art upon the Great Bath is still active, so even now, centuries later, its hot water is clean and pure. But the Star King renovated the interior so that it is separated into a women’s area and a men’s area. There was also an entrance directly to the bath from the levitating platform shaft on the north end, but it is currently sealed off.”

“Huh? A bath?!” “There’s a bath all the way up here?!” exclaimed Stica and Laurannei.

With no small amount of pride, Asuna explained, “It’s incredible. The bath is so big you can swim back and forth in it, and all the walls are windows, so not only can you see all of Centoria, you can also even see all the way to the End Mountains when the weather is clear.”

“You remember the baths, Asuna?” I asked without thinking.

Annoyed, the former Star Queen snapped, “Of course I do. After the Otherworld War, when we came back to the cathedral with Ronie and Tiese, I took two baths a day. You always said, ‘Later, later,’ so maybe you don’t remember that.”

“Ohhh…”

Upon reflection, that sounded familiar. But at the time, I was so busy with Fanatio and Deusolbert attempting to forge peace with the Dark Territory that I didn’t have the time to sit in a bath and soak.

I had always assumed that all of the Integrity Knights I’d fought the Otherworld War alongside—if you ignored the fact that I was in a coma right up until the final battle—were dead by now. But if Airy was correct and many knights had chosen the deep freeze, then I might be able to see some of them again, as long as we got the sacred art to unfreeze them.

The problem, however, would be the life span of the soul, as the sage Cardinal once explained to me. If that was one of the reasons the knights chose sleep, I couldn’t just go waking them up on a whim. It was a mystery how Airy could still be alive (or so it seemed) long after she’d crossed that time limit, but I didn’t think I wanted to ask her about that to her face.

I was staring dully at the door to the bath, lost in thought, when Alice approached on my right and said, “Kirito, I understand that you want to use the bath, but we don’t have time for that right now.”

And from the left, Asuna said, “That’s right, Kirito. We need to go to Admina and get that sealed chest. We can worry about the bath after that.”

“R-right. Let’s keep moving,” I replied.

Of course, on the inside, I was muttering, You two are the ones who actually want to go in there…

Another five floors up the staircase later, we walked headlong into a flood of bright light.

Natsu squealed and leaped out of Laurannei’s arms, hopping nimbly up the steps that were nearly half its height. We trotted after it.

Unlike the landings that appeared at each of the previous floors, this was an open space with railings on three sides. When I reached the floor after Natsu and the two pilots, I initially squinted at the light, but when I realized what I was looking at, I gaped.

The ninety-fifth floor of Central Cathedral was the Morning Star Lookout.

Two hundred years ago, Alice and I worked together to climb the tower’s outer wall, only barely making it up to this place with our lives. The outer rim of the floor had previously been open to the air, but now there were trees of all kinds planted along it, serving as a kind of blind to the outside.

What the trees were hiding was an all-white airplane resting in the center of the floor.

A dragoncraft.

“W-wowwww!” Stica exclaimed. The others were speechless when they caught up.

The pilots saw dragoncraft just about every day, so their shock could only come from the size of this one. Its length spanned half the floor, over eighty feet. The girls’ dragoncraft were about fifty feet, as I recalled, so it was significantly larger.

And unlike the Integrity Pilots’ dragoncraft, whose bodies were simple exposed steel, this was made of a pure-white material with a touch of translucence. A long vertical canopy was in the same color, and the wings were quite short in comparison to the length of the body. There were three heat-element exhaust ports, on the tail and under the base of each wing.

Despite its massive size, it didn’t seem ponderous thanks to its flowing design. This struck me as an aircraft that had been designed with no combat capability in mind, focusing solely on long-distance flight.

I stepped backward until I was next to Eolyne, and murmured, “Is this…the Star King’s dragoncraft? The one you talked about?”

“…I can guarantee it, even though I’ve never seen it for myself. Just look at that,” said the pilot commander, pointing out the right side of the hull, just under the canopy. I squinted and saw it was inlaid with silver alphabet letters—or sacred script, as they called it here. It read X’RPHAN XIII. It was a strange sequence of letters, but I knew right away that it was pronounced Zurfan. It was spelled exactly like the name of the white dragon that was a field boss on the fifty-fifth floor of Aincrad.

“So that’s the thirteenth X’rphan, huh…?” I murmured.

Airy turned back and nodded to me. “Yes, the final dragoncraft that the Star King created. He rolled it out a hundred years ago, but it’s still in perfect condition.”

“Were you maintaining it, too, Airy…?”

“That’s right. But it’s nothing more than the occasional washing of the surface with water elements and giving the eternal-heat and wind elements in the sealed canisters a little rev to freshen them up.”

“But…goodness, you’ve done so much for us…How can I even begin to thank you?” I said, at a loss to describe my gratitude. She’d been so considerate, so faithful.

“Look over there,” she said, pointing at a strange object in the corner, far away from the dragoncraft.

It was a metal disc about five feet across. The thickness was less than four inches on its own, except for the pair of tubes attached to the underside like tanks. A number of small nozzles were lined up along the outer edge. Several handrails were attached all around the top of the disc so that people could ride on it, but it was totally unclear what kind of tool it was meant to be…

Suddenly, deep in my head, I thought I heard the voice of my long-lost friend.

If the Church disappears, and you’re released from this calling, what would you do…?

And in response, the voice of Airy—the platform operator.

If I had a wish…I wish that I could fly this platform out there…wherever I could go…

“Is that…a levitating platform…capable of free flight through the sky…?” I asked.

Airy’s head bobbed deeply. “It is. I call it a flying platform. Because it has no wings, it required countless rounds of experiments and improvements until it was able to fly in a stable fashion, but Lord Kirito never gave up. He said it was a promise he and Lord Eugeo made with me…”

“……I see.”

Even I knew it was a weak, curt reply, but I couldn’t think of anything to add. If I’d tried, I wouldn’t have been able to hold back the tears.

Inside my head, I was about to pay a major compliment to the persistence of the Star King, whom I still couldn’t believe was myself—but then I realized at last that Airy had just mentioned the name of my friend, which I had been unable to say in the presence of Eolyne Herlentz.

I held my breath and glanced to the right.

A moment later, Eolyne looked at me. Behind the glass lenses embedded in the mask, I could see his eyes blinking rapidly.

“…What’s the matter, Kirito?” he asked. His voice seemed just a bit more enigmatic than usual—but it also sounded no different than before. His expression seemed as calm as ever, but he also looked a bit disoriented to me.

If I’d been observing his expression the entire time, I might have been able to detect a change in his manner at the moment he heard Eugeo’s name, but it was too late to find out now. Even still, I didn’t have the courage to intentionally drop that name in conversation again.

“No…it’s nothing,” I said, shaking my head. I turned to Airy. “When you mentioned making your dream come true down on the eightieth floor, you were talking about this flying platform?”

“That is correct, but it is not the only thing,” she replied, bringing her right hand to the chest of her apron. “I used to think that operating the levitating platform was my entire reason for being alive, but you and Lady Asuna…and the Integrity Knights, and the Unification Council, and Master Sadore…You all taught me about joy, pleasure, sadness, and loneliness. The majority of my memories and feelings have been compressed, so it takes time to remember…but they are always a warmth in my chest. It meant that I never found my wait here to be painful.”

She smiled again, and I nodded slowly. “I see…Well, that makes sense…”

Before I realized what I was doing, I lifted my hand to press right over my heart.

The memories are here. Here for all eternity.

I repeated these words, etching them into my being, and looked around the ninety-fifth floor once again.

The trees that hid this floor from view completely filled every side of the space. There was absolutely no way for anyone to see the space from the outside—not that there was a single building in Centoria even close to being this high up. But it also made it feel as though there was no exit for the dragoncraft.

“Ummm, Airy…in order to send the dragoncraft off, do we need to cut down these trees?” I asked. The former platform operator almost rolled her eyes.

“That will not be necessary. The trees are in planters that can be moved.”

“Oh. Okay. That makes sense.” That left just two doubts in my mind: “And the dragoncraft can fly to the planet Admina?”

“Of course.”

“How many can ride in it?”

“It seats two.”

“……Uh-huh.”

I took another look at the lineup around me. Pilot Commander Eolyne Herlentz asked me to travel to Admina and investigate what was happening there. That meant one of the two in the dragoncraft had to be Eolyne, with me being the other, I assumed. Asuna and Alice would just have to wait here, however many hours the investigation took.

Before I could open my mouth to speak, Laurannei announced, “Commander Eolyne, we will accompany you in our craft!”

Stica added, “We cannot allow you to undergo the danger of an unofficial investigation in Admina without any kind of personal detail!”

“Wh-what…?” stammered the commander, taken aback. He lifted his hands. “Remember, we went to the trouble of coming all this way because we can’t use the Pilothood’s dragoncraft…”

“We can always come up with a reason! Battle training, testing new equipment, and so on!” Laurannei persisted. While her features were identical to her distant ancestor’s, her personality was a little—no, more than a little fiery in comparison to Ronie’s.

According to Airy’s earlier explanation, Ronie and Tiese gave birth at a young age, raised their children well, and went into petrification when they were close to eighty years old. But in the Cloudtop Garden, they looked no older than their mid-twenties to me. That would mean they’d undergone some kind of life-freezing art around that age, but like the Deep Freeze sacred art, that was a secret only Administrator was supposed to have known.

Meanwhile, the girls were still hounding Eolyne about his decision.

“Lady Stica, Lady Laurannei,” interrupted Airy, who seemed almost as though she were enjoying herself the tiniest bit, “I’m afraid that outside of the atmosphere, the standard issue Keynis Mk. 7 dragoncraft the Integrity Pilothood uses can travel only half as fast as the X’rphan Mk. 13. If you are to escort them, Lords Kirito and Eolyne will have to spend much longer traveling.”

“Half?!” the two girls said at the exact same moment.

I was just as shocked. I’d thought that special experimental units and one-offs that had better specs than a standard model were something that happened only in anime and video games, but the Star King had rather immaturely overturned that assumption. The stark difference in specs cowed the pilots into acceptance, and they did not argue any further.

Relieved, I approached Asuna and Alice and murmured, “So based on what you just heard, me and Eolyne will go to Admina and…”

I stopped and took a half step away when I saw the way they were glaring at me.

“Remember, Kirito, ‘Strange Fish Shout, Run, and Report.’”

“Um…wh-what was that again?” I asked, furrowing my brow.

Fortunately, Alice could recite the whole saying. “Don’t follow any Strangers, don’t get into any Fishy cars, and be sure to Shout. Run away at the first sign of danger, and Report back with what happens.”

What am I, a little kid?! I wanted to shout, but I had too much self-control for that. Instead, I replied, “G-got it. I’ll be careful. I think you’re probably safe here, but just in case…”

“Nothing to worry about,” said Alice flatly. She stepped forward and grabbed my hand. “I’m serious, though, Kirito. We must have the sealed chest that contains the formula to the Deep Freeze art.”

“I know. I swear I’ll get it back,” I promised, clapping her hand with my own and giving Asuna a nod.

Eolyne and the pilots had just finished their own private conversation. I gazed up at the massive dragoncraft occupying the center of the floor and thought, Help us, X’rphan. If I’m going to help Alice and Selka reunite, and bring Ronie and Tiese back, I need your power.

The craft was in perfect condition, so it took only ten minutes to be ready to leave.

Eolyne, now dressed in his pilot’s uniform, took the front seat while I sat in the back. Once the canopy was down and I’d attached my seat belt, I gave the OK sign, so Airy pressed a hidden button near the stairs.

The trees in their massive marble planters directly ahead of us began to slide left and right out of the way. In no more than ten seconds, there was an open space more than wide enough for the craft to slip through, with nothing but blue sky ahead.

“All right, Kirito, here we go.”

“Whenever you’re ready,” I replied. A high-pitched vibration emitted from the rear of the craft. I had been questioning how we were going to take off without a runway of any kind, but this cleared it up: The X’rphan Mk. 13 had the ability to do a vertical ascent. The massive body lifted about a foot and a half off the ground, then slid forward through the air.

“Activating deception device,” Eolyne announced, flipping a toggle switch on the instrument board. This time the craft made a crackling sound. The parts of the white body I could see through the canopy material were turning transparent somehow. Now the people of Centoria wouldn’t see the X’rphan craft even if they happened to be looking up into the sky.

I swiveled around one last time to see Airy, Natsu, Stica, Laurannei, Alice, and Asuna standing before the stairs. The two pilots saluted, Alice gave a familiar old knight’s greeting, and Airy and Asuna waved.

My response was a big thumbs-up. I whispered to my pilot, “Hey, Eolyne, may I say the words?”

“Huh? What words?”

“These ones,” I said, clearing my throat. “X’rphan Mk. 13, takeoff!!”

A bit later, the vibration got just the tiniest bit louder. Instead of the booom skreeee roar I expected, the massive dragoncraft slid forward smoothly and politely, as powerful and genteel as a luxury car.

About fifty feet away from the tower, the craft began to rise while maintaining a level position. Centoria got smaller and smaller below, until I could see the farms and pastures surrounding the city.

Once our ascent speed reached a stable rate, Eolyne said apologetically, “I hate to disappoint after your very lively command, but this is about all we can manage until we reach an elevation of three thousand mels. When the main propulsion goes at full speed, it makes a hell of a sound.”

“Oh, I see. How long does it take to reach three thousand mels?”

“About ten minutes.”

“Hmmm…and how long to Admina?” I asked.

The commander’s blue helmet tilted to the right. “Well…if Miss Airy is correct that the X’rphan Mk. 13 is twice as fast as a Keynis Mk. 7, the entire flight should take about an hour and a half, I guess…”

“An hour and a half,” I repeated, frowning heavily.

At the mansion near the base, Eolyne had said it was a six-hour trip from Cardina to Admina on one of the big passenger craft. That would mean the standard fighting Keynis could do it in three hours, and the one-off unique X’rphan craft at half that again. It seemed to make sense.

But even six hours seemed like it was too fast. In the real world, the Mars probes that different countries were shooting over on giant rockets took about eight months to reach the planet. Of course, the Underworld probably wasn’t created on the same scale as the real solar system, but if the trip could be done in six hours, it seemed like it should be closer than Earth and the moon in real life. If there was another planet of the same size that close, it should be big enough to completely blot out the night sky with its presence.

“Um…Eolyne?”

“What?”

“I know it’s a bit late to ask this, but how many kilome—er, how many kilors apart are Cardina and Admina?”

“About five hundred thousand kilors, I think.”

“Five hundred thousand…”

That was farther away than the moon from Earth, but over a hundred times closer than Mars at its closest.

“Um, i-in that case, shouldn’t Admina be clearly visible from Cardina?”

“Huh? Of course it’s visible,” Eolyne said, more exasperated than I’d ever heard him before. He leaned his head back. “In fact, at this time of day…”

He was gazing through the clear canopy of the cockpit, then pointed straight forward.

“There. Right there.”

I craned my neck to follow Eolyne’s finger and saw a whitish star floating near the horizon. I blinked, then straightened in my seat. “Um, but that’s the moon…Lunaria, right?”

“That’s the old name.”

“Huh…?”

Stunned, I tried to grab the back of the seat in front of me and lean forward, but my seat belt held me in place. So instead I jutted my head forward as far as I could and shouted, “Wait a second! Admina is Lunaria?! So when you traveled there, it turned out not to be a tiny satellite, but a huge planet?!”

“Well, it’s still on the smaller side. The diameter of Admina is only about half of Cardina’s. So Cardina is the primary planet, and Admina is the secondary.”

“N-no kidding…”

“By the way, His Majesty the Star King was the first person to reach Lunaria in a dragoncraft.”

“No kidding,” I repeated, and gazed again at the moon—no, planet—hovering in the sky. True, the size seemed about twice as big as the moon did when seen from Earth, but to think that it wasn’t just a satellite…But then another thought occurred to me.

“But wait a second. The sigil of the Stellar Unification Council that we saw on the first floor…Isn’t the big circle in the middle supposed to be Solus, with the dot in the upper right being Cardina and the dot in the lower left as Admina? If the two planets are supposed to be rotating around Solus on opposite sides of the sun, then Admina shouldn’t be visible from here, right…?” I asked, gesturing to demonstrate my point.

“That’s just an artistic touch,” he said simply. “In fact, Admina and Cardina are lined up very closely on their respective orbits. Cardina’s closer and Admina is farther away, so that’s why you see it to the east at midday. It’s highest in the sky at dusk, and it sinks to the west in the middle of the night.”

“Ummm…”

I used my fists as stand-ins for Cardina and Admina, simulating their positions in relation to the sun.

“Ohhh…I see now. So that’s why the moon waxes and wanes over the course of a single night here…”

“Is it different in the real world?”

“Yep. Over there, the moon rotates around Earth—what you’d think of as Cardina—so it waxes and wanes over the course of an entire month.”

“Oh, really? I’d like to see that someday,” Eolyne said very casually. I didn’t know how to respond to it at first.

Everything in the Underworld was contained in the Main Visualizer, and the souls of everyone who lived here were stored in the Lightcube Cluster, both of which were on the Ocean Turtle, which was off-limits out at sea near Hachijojima. The ship’s nuclear reactor was providing power to the simulation, but if the government decreed the Underworld should be shut down, time would completely stop here, and if it were reinitialized or scrapped altogether, everything and everyone in it would be obliterated without a trace.

No matter what, that was the outcome we absolutely had to avoid. But as a measly teenager in high school, I was tragically powerless over that ultimate decision. All I could do was pray that Seijirou Kikuoka and Rinko Koujiro’s efforts to ensure the Underworld kept running would pay off…

Actually, no. I was here in the Underworld at Kikuoka’s request to investigate the identity of a possible intruder from the Seed Nexus a week ago. If this person was plotting some kind of interference or sabotage, I had to stop them.

Full of fresh determination, I told him, “I’ll show it to you. That’s a promise.”

“Looking forward to it,” Eolyne replied, seemingly unbothered by the slight delay in my response. “Altitude of three thousand mels. Rear seat, check fasteners.”

I quickly examined my belt once again and said, “All good.”

“Main propulsion is active in five, four, three…”

I glanced outside the cockpit again. We’d risen until the craft was at the height of the tallest, wispiest clouds, and I could see not just the End Mountains, but the Dark Territory beyond them, hazy and distant.

“…two, one, launch.”

The rumbling that had been modest thus far suddenly turned into a high-pitched scream, like a sports bike at full throttle. I felt my back being pressed into the seat, and the body of the craft vibrated with force. The rumbling didn’t feel like wind resistance, but the roaring of the eternal-heat elements inside the engine traveling directly into my body. I’d thought the dragoncraft the girls piloted were extremely fast before, but the power contained within the X’rphan was on a different level entirely.

“Um, i-is it supposed to do this?!” I shouted in a moderate panic.

Eolyne sounded undeniably agitated, too. “I-I’m not sure if this is entirely safe!”

“Maybe we should slow down a bit…”

“But we’re still far from top speed!” he informed me. The engine kicked into the next gear. Clouds ahead of us whipped past in an instant.

I had experience flying in ALfheim Online, so I thought being protected by a sturdy, armored dragoncraft would make this experience anything but frightening, but this sense of acceleration was beyond the pale. It took all my self-control not to impulsively hit the brakes with Incarnate power. Instead, I stared dead ahead and emptied my mind.

Suddenly, the sky around us was significantly darker than before. We had somehow risen from level flight into a climb. The Dark Territory surrounding the human realm was encircled by the Wall at the End of the World, which dwarfed the End Mountains separating the two territories. It was said that no living creature, including dragons, could cross that wall, but the dragoncraft were exempt from that definition, and this one raced farther and farther into the heights.

Before long, stars began to twinkle in the sky before us. As the sky went from rich blue to navy, the number of stars increased. The X’rphan continued to soar with absurd speed, but the vibration in the hull was calming down.

“Atmospheric exit complete,” Eolyne announced, just as the rumbling calmed down. I lifted my right arm and noticed that I felt almost none of the weight of gravity. Meaning we were in…

“…Outer space?” I muttered. The helmet ahead of me bobbed up and down.

“That’s right. Well, I can see why this craft is the stuff of legend…That acceleration earlier was only just over half the output of the main propulsion engine.”

“Let’s not try the maximum output,” I suggested. Up above, in the distant void of space, sat the shining star at the center of the system, Solus.

I’d had to remind myself several times that outer space in the Underworld was not an actual vacuum. For that matter, there wasn’t a single oxygen or nitrogen molecule in this entire virtual world. The breeze that brushed my skin and the air going in and out of my lungs was just a sensation the system was simulating for me. So if we were to open the canopy right now, it would be horrendously cold, but we wouldn’t suffocate.

Despite that knowledge, however, I couldn’t avoid primeval fear. Or perhaps that was a holdover from my experience in Unital Ring, suffering the suffocation magic of the witch Mutasina.

I swallowed to dispel that familiar blocked feeling in my throat, and asked Eolyne, “Are we already on the way to Admina now?”

“Yep. Although it’s not the most direct route.”

“Why not?”

“If we take the default route, we might be spotted by regular ferries and space force craft. Remember, our trip to Admina is a top-secret mission; neither the government nor the Stellar Unification Council knows about it.”

“Oh, that’s right…”

Eolyne’s mission was to find the cause for the sabotage of the Integrity Pilots. My mission was to find out the identity of who had infiltrated the Underworld from the real world and to collect the sealed chest containing the formula for the Deep Freeze art. None of these would be easy objectives to fulfill. When we got there, I had to stay focused on the mission without getting distracted, I told myself.

The pilot seemed to sense my nerves. “You must be tired after all that’s happened. It’ll take over an hour to reach Admina, so you can recline your seat and relax for a bit.”

His consideration and gentle voice were so similar to my late friend that I didn’t notice at first that my hands were clenched into fists. I took a deep breath to loosen my nerves, then felt for the reclining bar that would lower the seat back.

“Thanks…In that case, I’ll take you up on the offer.”

“I’ll wake you up if anything happens. Good night, Kirito.”

Good night, I replied silently, and closed my eyes.