Sword Art Online - Volume 27 - Chapter 3

3

As she approached the front door, the smart-home system detected the phone in her bag and undid the three-part lock.

Asuna Yuuki adjusted the paper box in her left arm so that she could open the door with her right. Inside, the house was gloomy and quiet. According to the schedule when she checked it that morning, her father was out golfing and her mother was at the university, so neither would be home before nine o’clock, and her brother was on a trip to the Kansai area until the following day.

Previously, she hadn’t thought anything of returning to an empty home, but she was starting to find it a lonely experience. That was strange, considering she might be leaving home in half a year—or maybe that was why she felt this way to begin with.

She stopped in the bathroom to wash her hands and face, then headed up the stairs. Once she was inside her room, the lights came on automatically, and the air-conditioning began to run. She put the box on the desk and exhaled.

Asuna would have liked to take the lid off immediately, but she used patience, putting together a change of clothes and heading downstairs to the bath. She had set up a timer before leaving Rath’s office, so the tub was full and heated. There were times when the smart home felt like it was intruding into her business, but this was a feature she could appreciate.

First, she rinsed off the sweat of the day with the showerhead before moving to the tub. The feeling of the slightly too-hot water covering her skin up to her shoulders caused her to exclaim, “Hahffff…” in sheer delight.

The bath in the Yuuki family home was the maximum for a modern bath system: the 1822 model, meaning that it was 1.8 meters on the short side and 2.2 meters on the long, or 6 by 7 feet. That was nothing compared to the Great Bath in Central Cathedral, of course—the Great Bath was 60 by 120 feet.

In subjective time, it had been just five hours ago that she had been taking in the bath experience with Alice, Airy, Stica, Laurannei, and Natsu, where she had thought, If I get too used to this bath, I’m not going to be satisfied by my bath at home anymore. But now she had to admit that there was a certain kind of relaxation you could get only in the bath in your own home.

Normally, she liked to drizzle aromatic oils into a lukewarm bath and have some cold drinking water and her Augma on hand, but there was no time for that today. She wrapped it up quickly, dried her hair, and performed some skin care, at which point it was six forty-five.

She ate a quick meal in the kitchen, brushed her teeth, and headed for her room.

Just in case, she checked that all the windows were shut and covered, then opened the box on her desk. She lifted the curled-up gray kitten from the packing material, placed it on a large cushion on the ground, and pushed the switch under its front right leg.

Awake once again, the kitten sat upright with its front paws neatly side by side, like an Egyptian statue. Its greenish eyes looked around the room. Ten seconds later, it hopped off the cushion to the floor, put a paw on Asuna’s lap where she knelt on the ground, and pleaded, “Mew, mew.”

Based on its expression and sound, it seemed clear that it was complaining of hunger.

“Are you hungry, Yon-chan? Hang on a minute…”

She stood up, intending to go down to the kitchen to find something a kitten might like to eat—until she remembered that Yon-chan was a robot. She froze, uncertain of what to do. Thankfully, the answer was in Seijirou Kikuoka’s notes.

Asuna went back to the desk and stuck her hands into the packing material, feeling around until she touched what felt like a board covered in plastic. She pulled out a blackboard about the size of a standard A4 piece of paper: the wireless charging pad.

She opened the plastic bag, hooked up the provided USB cable to the pad, then stuck the plug on the other end into the wall socket. After she placed it on the ground, the cat meowed and curled up on the board.

It would probably keep sleeping until its battery was full again. Asuna brushed its fluffy fur and whispered, “We’re going to be good friends, Yon-chan.”

Honestly, she still wasn’t in the mood to put her full trust in Seijirou Kikuoka. There was still a 1 percent chance that giving her this robot kitten was part of some plot of his. But at the very least, she was confident he was not the kind of slimeball who would use onboard mics and cameras to spy on her.

The plastic bag the charging pad came in also contained a folded piece of paper that seemed to be the manual. She skimmed through it until she could confirm that a full charge took about five hours to finish.

When Yon-chan wakes up, I want to introduce it to Yui, she thought, sitting on the bed.

There was a heaviness in her mind at the moment. She’d left the house at seven in the morning and been in a dive in the Underworld from nine to five, so some fatigue was natural, but there had been only one combat incident, and her actual body had been lying on a gel bed the entire time. Kazuto told her to go to bed early, but she could still be active for another three or four hours.

She picked up her AmuSphere from the rack on the side table and placed it over her head. Once the positioning and height of her pillow was agreeable to her, she lay down on the bed. The room automatically adjusted the ceiling lights to night mode.

Relaxing her entire body, she closed her eyes and stated, “Link Start.”

Back in the world of Unital Ring for the first time in seventeen hours, Asuna took a look around the living room of the log cabin. But there was no sight of Yui, who had been online just two hours ago, nor any of her friends.

Next, she examined her own status.

Her HP was full, while her MP, TP, and SP were all near 80 percent. Her personal protection was her linen dress and Lisbeth’s fine iron armor, while her weapon—a rapier—was made of a material two tiers higher: fine steel.

Compared to the Integrity Pilot uniform she borrowed in the Underworld, her clothes were very simple and rough to the touch, but that was nothing compared to the crude robes of grass fiber she’d made right after they were first sucked into this place.

The UR incident happened at five o’clock in the evening on September 27th, and it was currently seven o’clock on October 3rd, so six days and two hours had passed so far. The amazing thing was that it both felt like it was already six days and only six days.

At the time, she had assumed they’d be back in their proper place in The Seed Nexus in two or three days at the most, but now it seemed like that might never happen. The anomaly would continue to hold until someone reached the center of the world map as indicated in the initial announcement: the land revealed by the heavenly light.

Be that as it may, she was going to protect this log cabin as well as Kirito Town, better known as Ruis na Ríg.

With that oath in mind, she opened the door and stepped out onto the porch. The sun had long since gone down, leaving only the muted hint of indigo in the western sky, but the many torches lit around the area bathed the yard outside in orange firelight.

The yard, cramped with various crafting stations, was just as quiet as the house. But there were strange sounds of unrest coming from over the ten-foot-tall stone wall that surrounded the circular clearing. It was a buzzing as though huge crowds of people were milling around just on the other side of the wall, but that couldn’t be right.

Suspicious, Asuna headed for the wooden gate on the south side of the wall to get out—but abruptly stopped short.

There was no gate. A huge door had stood there the last time she logged out, but now there was just a gray wall.

Surely she didn’t get north and south mixed up. Asuna spun around, but it was still wall. The Seed program was almost spitefully stable, so there was no way that it suddenly bugged out and caused a gate but nothing else to vanish.

Now she was truly stumped. She cast around, looking for anything that would help her, and noticed something that hadn’t been there before. On the west side of the yard, next to the smelting furnace, was a towerlike stone structure. It was about as tall as the stone wall, with a single door at the base and a ladder on the left side that you could climb to the top.

She trotted over and considered whether to climb the ladder or open the door, opting eventually to climb. The ladder was made of wood and was firm and strong. It didn’t so much as creak under Asuna’s weight, even with all her gear equipped. Still, she climbed gingerly. The top of the tower was a little roof, four and a half feet to a side, with handrails all around, like a lookout.

Once she was up, Asuna held tight to the spiral pine handrail and went on tiptoe to see farther over the stone wall.

She gasped.

“Wha…?!”

The circular path surrounding the log cabin, which they called Inner Perimeter Road, was being traveled by dozens of people, some of who stood around in groups to chat. Unlike in other games, you couldn’t bring up cursors by focusing on people in this world, so there was no in-game indicator to tell NPCs and players apart. But if she trusted her instincts and years of experience, these were all players.

It wasn’t just the inner perimeter, either. Eight O’Clock Road to the southwest, the commercial district to the left of it, and even the Bashin dwelling area to the right were bustling with players. There were easily more than a hundred, just from what she could see. If the entirety of Ruis na Ríg was this busy, there could be three—no, more than five hundred people here. They’d had visitors come up from the Stiss Ruins to the south before, but even at the busiest, it was never more than fifty at a time.

Had Mutasina the witch come with another huge army while she, Kirito, and Alice were gone, and taken control of Ruis na Ríg after all? If so, where were her friends? Surely they couldn’t all have been eliminated…

Gripped by the horror of the worst-case scenario, Asuna was startled to hear a familiar voice hail, “Hey, Asuna!”

She popped away from the handrail and looked down the ladder. On the ground and waving up at her was a girl in an apron: Lisbeth the blacksmith.

“Liz!”

Relieved, Asuna waved back. She turned around, grabbed the sides of the ladder, and carefully adjusted her grip to slide all the way down in one go. As soon as her feet touched ground, she spun around and asked, “What’s with all the people in town?! Is everyone okay?! Where were you?!”

“Oh yeah, it’s a surprise at first, huh?” Lisbeth said with a smirk. She pointed to the door at the base of the tower. “I came through here. We dug a tunnel underground, and it comes out in the Bashin area.”

“A tunnel? But why…? And what happened to the gate that was here?”

“Hmm, I guess I gotta explain things in order…This might take a while, so let’s sit down over there,” Lisbeth said, pointing to the row of blacksmithing facilities where she conducted her business. She sat down on a round chair before an anvil, while Asuna took the garden bench across from it.

Recognizing that the camp wasn’t in peril after all, Asuna still couldn’t help but glance at Lisbeth’s neck. Sure enough, her healthy egg-white skin did not bear the hideous black ring of the Noose of the Accursed, Mutasina’s terrifying, multitarget suffocation spell.

Lisbeth didn’t show any sign of noticing Asuna’s attention. She opened her inventory and took out two faintly iridescent green cups. Next, she removed a leather waterskin and poured a dark-brown liquid into the cups.

“Here you go,” she said. Asuna took the cup with both hands. It looked and felt like metal, but it was shockingly light.

“When did you learn to make stuff like this?” Asuna asked.

Lisbeth gave her a conspiratorial wink. “I’m improving by the day. Made these out of gilnaris hornet carapace.”

“Hornet…You mean bees? This is made of bee carapace?!” Asuna exclaimed, pulling her face away from the cup.

Lisbeth cackled. “You’re fine. I melted them down and turned them into gilnaris steel ingots. See? Hornet isn’t even in the name anymore. No wonder those damn bees were so tough; their shell was literally made of metal.”

“…‘Damn bees’? Liz, were you fighting giant hornets?”

“Fighting wasn’t even the half of it,” Lisbeth said cryptically before lifting the metallic green cup to her lips. Asuna hesitantly did the same; there was no funny smell. If anything, the liquid had a scent that reminded her of black tea.

She took a sip and discovered a taste like several kinds of heavy tea flavored with fruit. If only it were ice cold, she thought. Even at room temperature, however, it was far and away better than the tea Asuna had made by brewing the random leaves sitting around. It even had a mild MP recovery effect.

“Did you make the tea, too?”

“Oh, of course…not. The Patter sell this stuff.”

“Oooh…So they sell tea now, on top of the preserved food?”

If it’s this good and there are that many customers around, it’s bound to fly off the shelves, she thought before coming back around to her original question.

“So why are there so many people here?” she asked, prompting Lisbeth to tell her everything that had happened that day.

Lisbeth explained about going with Silica and Klein into the northern Zelletelio Forest to search for a spot to harvest ore.

She described the swarm of gigantic gilnaris hornets and their discovery of Friscoll, who’d been scouting out the swarm.

She relayed his story of the world of Unital Ring being three concentric rings and the route to the next step up going through the hornets’ nest, and she told of how they’d worked with Dikkos and the other Alfheim Online players, Zarion and the Insectsite players, and the Bashin and the Patter to tackle the fight and emerge victorious…

Once Lisbeth reached the end of her story, Asuna took a deep breath before responding.

“…So you’re saying that the swarm of giant bees and their queen play a similar role to the bosses on the twenty-fifth and fiftieth floors in SAO?”

“Ummm…yeah, I guess?” Lisbeth said initially but then changed her mind. “Actually, considering that you helped beat the seventy-fifth-floor boss in Aincrad, I don’t know that I would put this boss fight on the same level.”

“Oh, don’t say that. Unital Ring is the same as SAO in that you can’t afford to die. Besides, your raid party only had twenty-four people, you said? From what I’m hearing, it was probably a fight meant for a group of fifty or more to finish…”

“Hmm. Well, the boss room…not that it was a room, more like a giant tree dome…I’d say that we could have easily fit a hundred players in a space that size. It was actually a really close fight, but the MVPs were definitely Sinon and Silica. Sinon’s leadership and accuracy were impressive, and Silica…She reminded me of Kirito.”

“Huh…? In how she fought?” Asuna asked, confused. In her mind, Silica’s in-and-out agility-focused fighting style and Kirito’s furious attack-first close-combat style, aided by preternatural recognition, didn’t share much in common.

But to her surprise, Lisbeth shook her head and said, “Not in terms of power, but imagination. When the queen came out to fight, all these surprises kept coming up, but Silica was so quick on her feet to react to them, you’d be impressed. Especially when she delivered the finishing blow! Five of us surrounded the queen when she fell to the ground, and we held our arms up like this and called forth our inherited weapons, which were too heavy to lift, and…”

She rose from her seat excitedly, holding her hands up in a demonstration.

“We dropped them right on the queen! Sounds like something Kirito would come up with, right?! Talk about a wild idea that takes advantage of how the system works! The way you muscle up when your back’s against the wall!”

“Ha-ha…Yes, I see,” Asuna said with a giggle.

Lisbeth blinked, coming back to her senses, then cleared her throat and sat down again. “Well…anyway, I’m just saying that it’s nice to see your underclassmen come into their own.”

Asuna laughed again. “This isn’t a school athletic team.”

On that topic, however, Asuna had heard that Lisbeth was planning to continue to higher education. Did that mean that once she graduated from the returnee school and went to college, she’d graduate from playing VRMMOs, too?

She opened her mouth to ask, then thought better of it. She wanted to treasure this time with everyone while it was here…at least until the UR incident was resolved and everyone went back to ALO.

Instead, she got back on track. “So you beat the hornet boss. How does that connect to the crowds in Ruis na Ríg?”

“Well, there’s a cliff wall north of the forest…Friscoll called it the first barrier. I mentioned how the hornet boss was like the guard of that barrier. Well, news spread to the Stiss Ruins right away that we beat it. Apparently, we were the third-fastest group in Unital Ring to beat the guardian boss.”

“The third…Which games were the first and second?”

“I don’t know the order, but apparently it’s Asuka Empire and a game called Apocalyptic Date.”

Asuna wasn’t that familiar with everything about The Seed Nexus, but she had heard of both of those games. Asuka was a Japanese-themed VRMMO that Yuuki and her Sleeping Knights played before they converted to ALO. AD was a post-apocalyptic game that was surprisingly popular given the niche choice of having all the player avatars be anthro.

“Interesting…So basically, all the ALO players who heard you guys beat the guard boss decided we had a chance to catch up to AE and AD, and they moved their base of operations to Ruis na Ríg?” Asuna guessed.

Lisbeth affirmed her guess somewhat bashfully. “Yeah, you might say that. Of course, it’s only a small portion of the ALO players, but we’ve still got a good five or six hundred…”

“You should be proud! Your hard work got this many people excited about their future possibilities,” Asuna said, leaning forward to pat Lisbeth’s arm. Her friend rubbed the side of her nose and chuckled with embarrassment. It was such a theatrical gesture that Asuna couldn’t help but burst into laughter herself. She gazed out at the stone wall surrounding the log cabin’s parcel of land.

“…Well, I understand why there are so many people here, but why is the gate gone?”

“Oh, that’s easy. You know how the gates and doors that you can make on your own in Unital Ring don’t have any system-level locks on them?”

She had a point there. The missing gate had only been fastened by a primitive bolt from the inside. It had been very hard to keep it safely closed when Schulz’s team attacked, presumably lured into doing it by Mutasina’s gang, Asuna recalled vaguely as she listened to Lisbeth’s explanation.

“We beat the boss around four, and I went back to Ruis na Ríg at five. Not long after that, by six, the first travelers from the Stiss Ruins started showing up here. The thing is, everyone explores a new town when they get there, right? Naturally, they want to know what the round walled structure in the middle of town contains. We had the bolt in place, but they were pounding on the gate and trying to climb the pillars, see…So after conferring with Agil and the gang, we did an emergency removal of the gate, filled in the gap in the stone wall, and made it so you can go in and out through a tunnel.”

“So that’s what happened…”

At first, she’d thought it might even be a bug, but this made much more sense. If Asuna were one of the people visiting, she would have been curious enough to try knocking on the gate, too, she supposed.

“But…if that’s the case, removing the gate doesn’t actually solve the issue. Anyone nimble enough can climb up the wall, and you could destroy the wall itself with a strong enough hammer…”

“Yeah, that’s the problem.” Lisbeth groaned, side-eyeing the wall as she finished her fruit tea. Asuna drained her cup as well and exhaled.

Twenty minutes had already passed since she dived in, and there was a curtain of stars twinkling in the blue night sky. If the roads to Kawagoe were clear, Kikuoka would have dropped off Kirito at home by now, but even he would need another ten minutes to dive in.

“…From what I hear, though, Dikkos and Holgar and the like have been telling folks that the home in the center of town belongs to Kirito and to avoid messing with it,” Lisbeth reassured Asuna as she poured more tea.

“Oh, that’s good,” Asuna murmured, but a sobering thought occurred to her. “Wait…wouldn’t that just increase the chances of people wanting to mess with the cabin…?”

“Ah-ha-ha-ha. Yeah, that’s the problem.” Lisbeth grimaced.

Kirito was the Black Swordsman who beat SAO, fought famed duels with Yuuki in the duel tournament of ALO, and made himself a legend with his lightsword in GGO’s Bullet of Bullets—at this point, just about any VRMMO player had at least heard of him. Unfortunately, however, not all of them thought well of him. And if they found out that Kirito’s home was here in Unital Ring, where just about anything was possible, there was a high likelihood that someone would try to mess with it.

“Maybe we should at least augment the wall,” Asuna murmured.

Lisbeth’s smile vanished. “Yeah, this wall is just stones from the Maruba River, packed together with clay. In fact, I don’t think I checked its current durability.”

She stood up, cup still in hand, so Asuna followed.

In front of the wall, Lisbeth tapped a stone with her free hand. The properties window that appeared said Crude Stone Wall, Structure, Durability: 527.3. The durability of a single stone was somewhere between five and ten, so this seemed appropriate for a single wall section, but there was an additional line of text at the bottom. Lisbeth noticed it as well and read it out loud.

“Hmm? What’s this…? Protection of the Ancient Oak: Added Durability: 100,000…W-wait, a hundred thousand?!”

The two girls shared stunned looks, then stared at the window again, but they had read it correctly the first time. The log cabin itself had a durability of 12,500, so this new number was literally an order of magnitude higher.

“Protection of the Ancient Oak…but there are no ancient trees in here,” Asuna murmured, looking around the clearing. They had planted a garden tree next to the cabin, but it certainly wasn’t ancient. And there hadn’t been a protection of this kind on the wall when they’d built it.

Protection. Where had she seen that term before…?

“…Oh!” Asuna cried and rushed toward the other end of the clearing.

“Hey! Where are you going, Asuna?!” Lisbeth shouted after her, but Asuna didn’t slow down. She raced across the lawn and only screeched to a halt when she was right at the cabin. She tapped the log wall forcefully to bring up the house’s control window.

There were four buttons reading INFORMATION, TRADE, REPAIR, and DISMANTLE. She selected the INFORMATION button, calling up a sub-window with a special properties section at the bottom.

Level 1 / Protection of the Forest: Within a radius of 100 feet of the center of the building, the owner and any friends or party members have a small chance of executing attack skills whose requirements are not yet met.

She remembered this effect. But at some point, additional special effects had been added.

Level 2 / Protection of the Bear: Within a radius of 150 feet of the center of the building, any animals tamed by the owner or owner’s friends will not lose affinity points and will gain an extra 20 defense.

And then one more.

Level 3 / Protection of the Ancient Oak: Within a radius of 150 feet of the center of the building, all secondary structures will gain an addition 1,000 to 100,000 durability, depending on the type. This additional durability will not degrade over time.

“That’s it!” they cried together.

The source of the hundred-thousand durability was revealed, but it also gave way to new questions. Since the first day, when they repaired the log cabin, Asuna had not performed any expansion or augmentation of the cabin, so how had its structure level gone up twice? Surely it hadn’t simply increased over time.

Uncertainly, Lisbeth suggested, “Maybe…it wasn’t that the house itself expanded, but that everything else being built around it increased the level…”

It seemed likely at first glance, but Asuna realized this didn’t quite make sense, either.

“Ruis na Ríg has a bunch of different housing structures, and they all have their own structure level, right? If that theory’s correct, wouldn’t all the houses continually proc the effect on one another and make their levels rise infinitely?”

“Good point…Oh, wait!” Lisbeth exclaimed, and tapped the SPECIAL EFFECTS label on the window.

With a little bell chime, a Tips window appeared. Asuna had forgotten about these. She read the text with Lisbeth.

When a residential structure is built without any other residential structures within a radius of 1,500 feet, it becomes a primary structure and gains special effects in accordance with its structure level. Anything built in close proximity to the primary structure is categorized as a secondary structure and receives the primary structure’s special effects.

“Ummm…?”

Lisbeth seemed uncertain of what she was reading, so Asuna explained the parts she understood.

“It means that only a building that’s just plopped down on its own in the middle of nowhere can be a primary structure—basically, the main building—and all the other houses and walls and things that come after it are treated as expansions to the main building. And that Protection of the Ancient Oak only applies to the secondary structures…”

“Hrrm,” Lisbeth grunted, and tapped the STRUCTURE LEVEL label this time. The sub-window popped up a sub-sub-window with a little ring.

All primary structures have a structure level. Structure level rises as the primary structure is strengthened and expanded or as secondary structures are built. When structure level rises, protective effects are added. Secondary structures always have a structure level of zero, however, and do not earn protective effects of their own.

“Ahhh, I see now,” Lisbeth said, catching on quick this time. She snapped her fingers. “So the reason the log cabin’s level rose is because we built a ton of houses around it. But because all the other ones are secondary structures, they don’t give one another experience.”

“When building all those houses for Ruis na Ríg, someone probably would have noticed the effects of the protection if they’d checked closely on the log cabin. In any case, that Protection of the Ancient Oak will be a massive help. As long as the cabin doesn’t get destroyed, this means that all the homes and walls in Ruis na Ríg are practically indestructible.”

“Yes, I suppose so. Oh, but…”

Lisbeth closed the two smaller windows and reexamined the explanation of the Protection of the Ancient Oak on the original pop-up.

“It says the radius of effect is a hundred and fifty feet, so I guess that would be the limit of how far we can build Ruis na Ríg…”

“But fifty yards should be enough, right? I’m pretty sure we’re only at thirty right now.”

“Wellll,” Lisbeth said meaningfully, and glanced down to her right. Asuna followed her lead and checked the clock. It was seven thirty—about time for Kirito to show up.

Exactly as the thought entered her mind, the door on the porch to their left opened.

She and Lisbeth looked up. Sure enough, it was Kirito leaping out of the cabin. The girls were standing next to the wall, so he didn’t notice them at all, hurling himself off the porch and sprinting to the southwest. When he reached the spot where the gate had been the previous day, he came to a sliding stop in a cloud of dust.

“Wh-what the—?! There’s no gate!”

Asuna looked Lisbeth right in the eyes, and they both burst into laughter.

Two minutes later, Asuna, Lisbeth, and Kirito were walking through the tunnel from the newly built tower to the west.

Based on what she had said earlier, Lisbeth’s group beat the guardian boss at around four in the afternoon, and people started arriving at Ruis na Ríg from the Stiss Ruins at around six. Considering that it was a nearly twenty-mile route between the two, that was a remarkable pace, but it also meant that the gang scrapped the gate, built the tower, and dug out the tunnel in just one hour after that point.

Of course, it was a game world, so removal, like construction, was an instantaneous process in the menu, but the tunnel couldn’t have been easy. In fact, Asuna had not been aware that you could dig a hole big enough for a person to fit through in Unital Ring. In SAO and ALO, the ground was impervious to any kind of destruction. She’d just assumed that held true here, too.

They traveled through the dirt tunnel for about sixty feet, at which point there was a staircase ahead. Lisbeth went first, holding the torch, and at the top, they emerged into a small tent. This was newly built as well; the ground was bare, and there was no furniture nor people inside.

Kirito was the last up the stairs. He lifted the tent fabric hanging over the exit just a bit to look outside.

“Ahhh, so it comes out into the Bashin housing area. Yes, I don’t suppose any shoppers are going to come wandering in here.”

“You’d think.” Lisbeth scowled. “But some of the new players around here just walked into the Bashin and Patter homes as though they owned the place, so we had to surround their living areas with tall fences. That settled things down for the moment, but Agil said that it might develop into a big problem in the future.”

“Huh…? What do you mean?”

“Well, look outside the town,” Lisbeth said, lifting the flap so she could step out of the tent.

The Bashin living quarters were shaped like a quarter slice taken from a ring cake. Tents of different sizes stood on the east end of the area, while three long and narrow wooden buildings were on the west end.

Yesterday, there was nothing separating the dwellings from the paths, but now there was a six-foot-tall fence surrounding the living quarters. It wasn’t entirely shut off, however; there were gates to the north and south, and there was no fence along the interior path. Instead, a row of smaller mercantile tents was set up facing the road, and they were packed with customers.

The Bashin were good at fashioning pelts, bones, and fangs into tools and objects—their leather armor and bone weapons were lightweight, sturdy, and good-looking. They also weren’t cheap, but there were bound to be more than a few players who preferred the Bashin’s wares over Lisbeth’s orthodox iron gear.

Lisbeth was thinking the same thing at that moment. “I can’t fall behind,” she murmured, and headed for the north gate.

They walked on the northwest path—Ten O’Clock Road—greeting familiar Bashin warriors as they went. On the other side of the path was the stables area, so there were only a handful of customers there.

The three stables housed Silica’s pet thornspike cave bear, Misha; Kirito’s lapispine dark panther, Kuro, and leaden long-tailed eagle, Namari; and Asuna’s long-billed giant agamid, Aga. It had been nearly twenty hours since Asuna had last fed Aga from her own hand, but the NPCs who managed the stable were taking good care of the animals, and with the Protection of the Bear, the pets’ affinity would not drop over time, so Asuna swallowed her desire to see Aga and hurried after Lisbeth instead.

They walked down Ten O’Clock Road to Outer Perimeter Road, where Ruis na Ríg’s northwest gate came into view. It was wide open, with no guards blocking the way, and beyond it was the vast expanse of the Great Zelletelio Forest. Or at least, it should have been.

“Huh?!”

“Wh-what’s this?!”

Asuna and Kirito were shocked.

The forest had been cleared an extra twenty yards or so from the outer wall, where a plethora of homes now huddled up against one another. Most were crude wooden huts, but some were more like stone shacks. They’d been built in a disordered array, as tightly as the system would allow; they faced in all different directions, and the paths between them were twisted and winding. In the tiny gaps where no one could fit the tiniest little shack, players huddled over small campfires, two or three people at a time.

After collecting her thoughts on the stunning sight, Asuna admitted, “It’s q-quite remarkable…But why did this happen…?”

“Probably due to the Protection of the Ancient Oak,” Lisbeth replied, tapping the wall of a nearby hut. Since she wasn’t the owner, the window that popped up listed only the building’s type and durability, but sure enough, it said, Protection of the Ancient Oak: Added Durability: 100,000.

“Someone must have built a shack right outside the wall first and noticed the protection effect. Normally, the durability would be four or five thousand, which could easily get destroyed and ransacked while you’re offline, but with an added hundred thousand, they’re basically indestructible. Since your carrying capacity is so limited in this game, having a safe place to store materials at a minimum of effort is a huge advantage. And if you have your own home, you don’t need to stay at an inn every time you want to log out,” Lisbeth explained.

It all made perfect sense. Asuna and Kirito had gone to extreme lengths to protect their log cabin from the thornspike cave bear the first night they dropped into Unital Ring, after all.

“…Ahhh, yes. No wonder they built these,” Kirito murmured, nodding deeply. “But how does this relate to the issue of the Bashin living space becoming a problem in the future?”

“Ummm, well, I can only tell you what Agil said to me,” Lisbeth admitted, rapping the wall around Ruis na Ríg with the back of her finger this time. “Once you’ve got a home, you start to want a better one, in a safer location, with more space, right? But the land inside Ruis na Ríg is half occupied by NPC housing. There are going to be people who insist on us kicking them out to let more players in…according to Agil.”

“No, we can’t do that!” Asuna cried, immediately indignant. “We brought the Bashin and Patter to Ruis na Ríg. When the Skull—I mean, when the Life Harvester attacked, they risked their lives to fight it with us! We can’t kick them out—”

“I know, Asuna. We’re never going to do that,” Kirito declared, brushing her elbow reassuringly.

That helped calm her down a bit. She gave Kirito a look before resuming. “The Protection of the Ancient Oak works over a radius of fifty yards, so we can push the defensive walls out another twenty. We could have everyone temporarily scrap their homes, move the walls out as far as the effect will allow, and then split up the land into parcels so they can rebuild… In fact, if we put together some two- or three-story houses here, we could fit many times the population inside.”

“…That is true. But it might be difficult in practical terms,” Kirito murmured pensively.

“Why?” she asked.

He glanced at the men happily chatting as they roasted meat on a spit over a fire in the cramped alley. “MMO players tend to dislike allotment systems. The majority don’t want a nice little place someone arranged for them; they want to pick out their spot and build their own place however they like. In fact, I bet there are folks who want to build themselves a new town, different from Ruis na Ríg…”

Kirito stopped there, paused, then turned to Asuna and Lisbeth and spread his arms.

“That’s the thing. Why don’t they do that? Based on what you said, any home built five hundred yards from Ruis na Ríg will be a—a…”

“Primary structure,” Asuna said helpfully.

He pointed at her. “That. So if they do that, they can enjoy the protective effects and use all the land they want.”

“…Yes, that’s true…,” Asuna said, mimicking Kirito’s look of frustrated confusion.

To their surprise, however, Lisbeth said, “As a matter of fact, people have already tried that.”

“Huh?! You mean there’s another town nearby?”

“Actually…I’m only passing on this info thirdhand, so I can’t vouch for any of it, but what I heard was that one of the groups that came here from the Stiss Ruins went and cleared some land along the river to the northwest and built a home. And in no less than five minutes, a freakin’ giant boar came charging along and smashed the house to pieces.”

“A boar…”

Asuna and Kirito shared another look.

“…I haven’t seen any monster like that around here.”

“Neither have I. It couldn’t have been drawn to the house…I assume…”

It was a spur-of-the-moment comment, but there was something that caught in Asuna’s mind, and she went back into her memory to figure out what it was.

On Sunday, six days ago, the log cabin fell to earth here just minutes after five o’clock in the evening. The gigantic thornspike cave bear attacked roughly three hours later.

What if that attack hadn’t been a coincidence…?

“…Maybe it’s true, then,” Asuna murmured.

Surprised, Lisbeth said, “Meaning the boar actually was drawn to the house? That just doesn’t seem fair, does it?”

“No…she might be right. Before you met up with us, Liz, our cabin was attacked by a great huge bear on that very first night.”

“Oh yeah. I think you did mention that.”

“I assumed that it was drawn by the sound of me using sword skills to fashion the logs into boards, but maybe there’s a system that summons, like, legendary local beasts to attack any new dwelling. The boss near here was a thornspike cave bear, but since Silica tamed one, maybe the game summoned a giant boar to be the new boss…”

Lisbeth grimaced. “Eugh, that’s kinda messed up, huh?”

Asuna agreed, but it also made a kind of sense to her. “Yes, it’s mean, but the effect of the protection is really powerful. I’m sure it’s really hard to build a house, or a town, in the wilderness, but once you get it established, it’s much harder for it to be destroyed. I think that’s the intended game balance.”

“Interesting,” murmured Lisbeth. She turned around to look back at Ruis na Ríg.

A diameter of sixty yards was nothing for a town or village in the real world. There were plenty of apartment buildings that were larger than that. But it was their town, something they’d fought hard to protect and build up. The thornspike cave bear on the first day, Schulz’s party on the second, the Life Harvester on the fourth day, and Mutasina’s army on the fifth…One wrong move in any of those battles would’ve meant defeat, and there could be even larger attacks in the future.

In that light, they couldn’t rest on their laurels. While the Protection of the Ancient Oak was mighty, if someone could destroy the log cabin itself somehow, that protection would be lost. This was a world that supported not just primitive guns with gunpowder, but also flying pets and massive magic spells that could suffocate a hundred people at once. If someone managed to bomb the cabin from above, even the sturdiest walls wouldn’t help it.

“Hey, Liz.”

“Hmm?”

“In the Tips section on the log cabin, it said that structure level rises as the primary structure is strengthened and expanded or as secondary structures are built…right?”

“I can’t believe you memorized that line just from reading it once.” Lisbeth smirked. “Well, I don’t know if it was exactly the same or not, but I recall it saying something like that.”

“In that case, we should be able to raise the level more by building up the log cabin itself.”

“Uh…are you sure, Asuna?” Kirito asked from over her shoulder.

She turned around. “Yes. We need to do everything in our power.”

“…Okay, then.” He grinned.

She’d be lying if she said she was totally gung ho about it. That log cabin was the one she spent two very precious weeks in with Kirito, back on the twenty-second floor of Aincrad. That was why they were so desperate to protect it when it literally fell into the world of Unital Ring, and she wanted to bring it back to ALO in its original form. But it would all be for naught if the cabin was destroyed, and besides, the true heart of the house wasn’t in its exact shape.

The faint smile on Kirito’s face changed ever so slightly.

“…What is it?”

“Just thinking…when you weren’t around, Yui and I talked about expanding the log cabin. I thought you wouldn’t like it…but then Yui said that you didn’t get hung up on the exterior looks. That as long as the true nature of the house remained, you wouldn’t care if the shape of the house changed.”

“Yui said that…?”

“So I asked her what the true nature was…,” Kirito said, but Asuna held up a hand to stop him.

“It’s okay. I know.”

“…You do.”

They exchanged smiles.

“Ah-hem!” somebody said behind them very obviously.

Asuna spun around in a hurry. “S-sorry, Liz.”

“Who, me? No need to apologize to little old me! I was just thinking, it would be reeeeal nice to get back to work…”

“Um, w-work?”

“You know? This thing?” Lisbeth said, making a hammer-swinging gesture.

“Oh…right, you were coming back to the log cabin to do some smithing.”

“Yep.”

“Where did everyone else go, then?”

“Isn’t it obvious?”

Lisbeth lifted her arm and pointed to the sky to the north.

“They’re conquering the stairway dungeon to get up to the second tier!”