Sword Art Online - Volume 28 - Chapter 9

9

A gentle, bright melody near my eyes pulled my consciousness from the dark, dense depths up toward the surface.

With my wits half-awake and half-asleep, I wondered which of the three worlds it was… ALO had an automatic disconnection function, but Unital Ring wasn’t as overprotective and would keep the avatar in place if you fell asleep while in the game. If anything attacked you, you would easily die. So there was no real reason to fall asleep in the game, and the only bedding we had at that moment was lumpy and scratchy and woven out of dried grasses.

The Underworld wouldn’t automatically disconnect you, either, but the beds in Central Cathedral were unbelievably smooth and soft, even for apprentice janitors. Whatever was supporting my body was neither lumpy nor smooth, but a mattress of a polyester pad and high-resistance urethane. It was my bed in the real world.

That much was obvious, but after at least sixty seconds of remaining inert, I finally went through the laborious task of blinking my eyes open. The light coming through the curtains was pale, weakly gray. I listened hard and heard a rushing, trickling sound; there was rain outside.

Without getting up, I felt around for my phone and brought it up to my face. There was a kitten icon on a message notification on the lock screen. I wondered who it was…then saw the name said Asuna. That was when I realized the picture was not of a real kitten, but of the expertly made cat robot, Rath’s “Yon-chan.” She’d just taken the robot in for a test the previous day and had already made it her messenger icon.

I smirked and touched the screen, allowing it to see my face and unlock the phone. There was a message from Asuna in the window that popped up, but it had no text in it, just a picture.

It was two smiling girls, standing side by side before a beautiful backdrop of red autumn trees. The one on the right in the off-white balmacaan coat was Asuna, but the girl on the left in the ash-purple riding jacket was unfamiliar to me. She was an inch or two taller than Asuna and had her long hair in a ponytail. Was it a friend from the returnee school I didn’t recognize? If so, she would have written something in the text.

…But once I got a better look, the ponytailed girl with the cool features was very vaguely familiar to me. Where had I seen her before? If it wasn’t school, it’d have to be Rath—but she was too young to be an employee, and it didn’t explain why she would be taking a picture with Asuna.

The only other answer was the virtual world, but in Unital Ring and ALO, avatars could be completely unrelated to real-life appearance, so seeing a photo in real life that stimulated my memory didn’t make sense. Liz and Silica were some exceptions, but that was because their characters were still based on their old SAO avatars, which were generated from your real body…

“…Oh!” I yelped, finally realizing the answer.

That was it. She wasn’t a student at the returnee school, but she was an SAO Survivor. Once my mind was on that track, distant memories locked into place and came to my mind, and I exclaimed, “Ohhh…”

It was Ashley, the greatest tailor in Aincrad. I brought her materials from a named dragon, and she fashioned the Blackwyrm Coat for me. If not for her armor and Lisbeth’s swords, I wouldn’t have been able to keep fighting on the front line. Like Argo, her whereabouts were unknown after SAO was beaten, but she definitely made it back to the real world safely.

I tapped the text entry box and typed, That’s great that you got to see her. Tell Ashley I’m delighted to see her well. Then I sent the message and put my phone on the wireless charging pad.

It was 11:50 AM, and I’d slept for nearly a full six hours, but if Asuna hadn’t set off my phone, I could have slept for another two hours.

That thought caused my stomach to gurgle and shrivel up. In truth, it wasn’t the time to be so indulgent with my sleep. I needed to find a way to rescue Eolyne Herlentz after his abduction at the space force base.

He was probably—no, almost certainly—being held in the Principia mega-dragoncraft. As the commander of the Integrity Pilots and the son of Stellar Unification Council Chairman Orvas Herlentz, he was an ultra-valuable individual, so I didn’t think they’d torture or instantly execute him, but Emperor Agumar was just as cold and cruel as Emperor Vecta, with the way he ordered his own dragoncraft crew to commit a suicide attack. If he learned Eolyne would not follow him, there was no telling what he might do.

Counterintuitive as it was, at that point my best hope was Tohkouga Istar, the one who had abducted Eolyne. Istar had pressed a knife to Eolyne’s throat and damaged the skin, but for some reason, I was certain the knife would draw no more blood. They had called each other “Kouga” and “Eol,” so I had a feeling there was a long relationship between the two of them. He might be unable to disobey the emperor’s orders due to the seal on his right eye, but Istar would still do what he could to avoid harming Eolyne, I reassured myself, rolling out of bed.

There was a strange object resting on the floor right in front of me. It was a rectangular object, about a foot wide and a foot and a half tall, with an aluminum surface. It wasn’t as heavy as it looked. Using the bolted-on carrying handle on top, I was just barely able to lift it.

On the lower part of the object were connections for power and communication, both of which had cables plugged in. On the other side was a control panel and power button. I turned it on, and a line a bit below the center split the whole thing in two. The upper half automatically pushed itself outward, revealing the interface on the inside.

Laser-etched just below the touchpad interface was a Rath logo and STLP1.0. It was the Soul Translator Portable, Version 1.

The previous evening, when Asuna and I left the Roppongi office, Seijirou Kikuoka took us each home in his car. Naturally, he wasn’t simply doing it out of the goodness of his heart. There was an outrageous souvenir loaded in the car for each of us.

Asuna got Yon-chan, the kitten-shaped robot. And I got the STLP.

As the name suggested, this was a downsized version of the gigantic STL in the Roppongi office, just small and light enough that a person could carry it. Its ability to read the resolution (if that’s what you wanted to call it) of the soul was inferior to that of the real STL, apparently, but it allowed you to dive into the Underworld with the mnemonic visuals system and even enabled the use of Incarnation. If not for it, I would’ve needed to ride my motorcycle for over an hour to reach Roppongi after getting Alice’s emergency request the previous night. Naturally, I couldn’t have stopped the Avus-class dragoncraft from crashing into the space force base, and I didn’t even want to imagine what would’ve happened to the people at the base like Eolyne, Ronie, and Tiese.

Had Kikuoka lent me the STLP knowing the situation unfolding in the Underworld, or was it just a lucky coincidence? Yeah, probably a coincidence.

I checked the clock again. I was definitely forgetting something. But what was it?

At that exact moment, there was a high-speed knocking on my door, which shot open a split second later. Suguha burst into the room in her tracksuit.

“How long are you going to sleep in?!” she shouted. There was a tray in her left hand, which she shoved in my face. “Now eat this!”

“W-wait, wait. First of all, I’m already awake.”

“You were sleeping five minutes ago!” she pointed out, which I had to admit was true.

I took the tray from her. It held some cold green tea and cucumber sandwiches.

“Oooh, thanks,” I said, sitting on the bed. I placed the tray on my side table, quenched my thirst with some green tea, and grabbed one of the sliced sandwiches.

It was a special recipe by my father, Minetaka Kirigaya, who was on work assignment in America. The sandwich itself was very simple, featuring only cucumbers, but they had to be evenly sliced, soaked in a mixture of salt, pepper, and wine vinegar, and then dried out and placed between thinly buttered bread. It was more work than it seemed.

Suguha had probably intended for us to eat these sandwiches together. But when I didn’t wake up, she just let me sleep until she couldn’t wait any longer. At the very least, I needed to savor the taste of her hard work.

“You can down that thing in one bite! C’mon, hurry!” she rushed me, sitting next to me on the bed. I stuck the whole piece in my mouth. I savored the pleasant crunch of the cucumbers and their gentle, smooth flavor, and swallowed.

“That was good. You’re getting better at this.”

“Really?” she said, chuckling to herself. Then she got herself under control. “I mean, there’s only five minutes left!”

“Why? What’s happening at noon…?”

“So you did forget. We’re going to meet with the AD people!”

“……Oh.”

Suguha picked up another sandwich and jammed it in my open mouth.

After eating, I cleaned up and brushed my teeth at triple speed, then rushed back upstairs to my room. I expected to get another round of hurry, hurry when I opened the door, but Suguha was just sitting there on the bed, staring with wonder at the mysterious object on the floor. My first instinct was to freak out, but then I reconsidered the situation and realized I wasn’t in trouble at all.

“Hey, Big Brother, what is this?”

“It says right on it.”

“Yeah, but what’s the STLP…? Huh?!”

Saying the letters out loud helped her realize what they meant. She tumbled down from the bed to get closer and stared at the front panel up close.

“Are you telling me this is some kind of mini version of the STL?! Can you use this to dive into the Underworld?!”

“Yep. Mr. Kikuoka delivered it to me yesterday,” I said, recalling the events of the previous night.

The STLP had been in the trunk of the electric sedan, and even with its special carrying case, it was a bit too much for one person to move. Mom was still at work and Suguha was in Unital Ring, so Kikuoka agreed to help me carry it up to my room.

It was a very strange, almost surreal scene to have Seijirou Kikuoka in my bedroom, dressed in his suit. I just stood there and watched him perform the initial setup and testing of the STLP. Aside from my parents, Suguha, Yui, Asuna, and Alice during the delivery incident, I hadn’t had anyone else in my room since elementary school.

When his job was done, Kikuoka looked around my room with a strange, subtle smile that was impossible to interpret, said it was a lovely room, and left. I could only wonder which part he was referring to. Supposedly, he was something of a minimalist himself, so maybe it was a serious compliment. One day, I’d have to raid his place in the Shinonome area and find out if he was being serious or just paying me lip service…

“Wait, what time last night?” Suguha asked, pulling me out of my thoughts.

I glanced at the clock on the wall and answered, “Around the time you were getting through the staircase dungeon, I think.”

“Oh, I see… Did you at least serve him tea?”

“No, he left right away.”

“He’s such a busy guy…”

I nodded. Suguha brushed the outer panel of the STLP.

“Let me use this sometime.”

“Sure, but…I thought you used the Terraria account to…”

“Anyway, time for Unital Ring!” Suguha interrupted, getting to her feet. She shoved the AmuSphere onto her head and lay down on the bed next to the wall. I would’ve told her to dive from her own room, but it was already past noon.

I put on my own AmuSphere and got down next to Suguha. We shouted, “Link Start!” in unison. Then I traveled through a rainbow tunnel, and as soon as my feet touched virtual ground, I shot upright.

Instantly, I heard a voice say, “You’re late!” and I hunched my neck guiltily.

Looking up, Sinon was sitting atop a thick beam with a musket resting on her shoulder. Next to her was Yui, holding a short bow. The roof over their heads was 70 percent caved in, giving a very clear look at the thin clouds in the sky overhead.

“Good morning, Papa!” Yui beamed, waving.

I lifted a hand to wave back. “Sorry I’m late! Thanks for standing watch!”

I had logged out of Unital Ring the previous night—er, that morning—at four o’clock. For the eight hours since, Yui had performed security for this little base all by herself, mostly. I’d said I didn’t want to take advantage of her convenient AI features, so it galled me to force her to work like that, but on the other hand, ever since her birth in Aincrad, she’d been an observer, and now that she was actually a player with her own agency, who was I to tell her not to make the most of her abilities?

While Yui looked off into the distance again, soft footsteps approached from behind me. I turned to see a massive black panther coming up to butt its head against my chest. I scratched it under the chin, eliciting a happy, deep purr.

“Thanks to you too, Kuro.”

“Grau!”

I didn’t know how much the lapispine dark panther actually understood human speech, but it sat down on the spot anyway and waved its tail back and forth eagerly. Smirking, I opened my inventory and pulled out some dried meat to offer.

But where was Suguha? We should have logged in at the same time.

I looked around; I was in a fairly large building. It had been almost ready to collapse when we found it, but the group had repaired the stone walls and wooden floors with materials on hand, so it was now a solid temporary base with a decent amount of sturdiness and comfort. Unfortunately, the roof was still full of holes, but we had to leave them, because once the building was completely repaired, it would be registered as a primary structure and might summon a local boss beast to come and attack.

This building apparently had been a guard station rather than a civilian home, so there were almost no interior walls—just one large room and two smaller storage rooms. There was a line of Crude Wood and Dried Grass Beds lined up against the wall of the big room, and the logged-out members of the group—Asuna, Argo, Silica, Holgar, Zarion, and Ceecee—were resting on them. I had been on standby on the floor instead because we just didn’t have enough beds, but even Unital Ring wasn’t going to give me a dead leg from crouching on the ground for hours at a time.

Any members who weren’t resting on the beds were already logged in, but the only ones awake in the building were me, Yui, Sinon, Kuro, Pina sleeping soundly in Silica’s bed, and Aga, who was curled up at Asuna’s feet.

For the time being, I went outside with Kuro. The sky was cloudy, but the temperature was mild, and the breeze from the river to the south ruffled my collar pleasantly.

Aside from the guard station we were using as a base, the ruined village had a stone watchtower and a wooden stable. The watchtower faced south, so it was probably meant to monitor the path leading down to the first tier. Not that many people were likely to get past the staircase dungeon, what with the swarm of giant hornets at the entrance and the golem guarding the exit.

Or, seen another way, the people who built this monitoring station were that concerned about an invasion from the lower level. You would think they could just fill in and seal off the dungeon leading up entirely, but maybe they had some need to get down from up there, too.

Between the very artificial three-tiered concentric circles and the perfectly circular basins around the first tier, what the hell was this place meant to be anyway? The scout party from Apocalyptic Date had encountered dark elves in the western forests of the second tier. Why had those elves called themselves Lyusula…?

I was standing outside the station pondering this question when I heard Lisbeth say, “Hey, Kirito, over here!”

Over on the west side of the ruins, some of our friends had gathered. There was Leafa, too, who should’ve appeared when I did. I trotted over and found they were facing someone else. I popped my head around Klein on the left end and immediately blurted out, “What the—?”

Standing a short distance away was a bipedal foxperson with slender limbs and brilliant dark-red fur. It was one of the four therians from AD who had kidnapped Yui the previous day, Azuki.

“Why are you here, Azuki?” I asked. “Weren’t we supposed to meet at the western bridge?”

Azuki thrust forth her pointed snout and demanded, “What in the world are you talking about?! I had to come here to find you because you didn’t show up on time!”

“Oh yeah. Sorry about that,” I said, scratching my head. The previous day, I’d told them I would be at the bridge to the west of the ruins by noon today, but the digital time readout in the lower right corner of my vision said it was already 12:10. “Wait…did you come here from that bridge in just ten minutes, Azuki?”

She puffed out her chest proudly. “Maybe next time you’ll respect my speed. Out of the two hundred therians who are on the second tier, I’m either the fifth or the sixth fastest,” she boasted.

Then why did you leave it up to Masaru the monkey-man to capture Yui? I wondered, but I guessed asking her that would only make her angrier. Azuki probably didn’t have the strength to pull it off.

“So is the fastest one a cheetah therian?” Leafa asked curiously.

“Yeah,” Azuki admitted. “But cheetahs don’t have staying power. Neither do I, though. For overall speed, I think it’d be one of the antelopes, like a springbok… Hey, stop trying to trick me into giving you information. That’ll cost you!”

She gave us all a nasty look, ending with an especially cold stare at me.

“All right, Kirito, let’s hear your answer! Are you going to fight alongside us or not?!”

“We will.”

“And let me warn you, after stringing us along this far, you can’t just stonewall us and give us nothing in… Wait, what? Did you just say you will?”

“We will.”

“……”

Azuki’s hostility was immediately deflated. Her long lashes beat several times as she processed my answer.

“…O-oh. Well, thanks. Umm…in that case, you should meet with our leader. And you also need to friend me for contact purposes.”

“Got it.”

I opened my window and quickly added Azuki as a friend. In moments, Leafa and Lisbeth were crowding in, too.

“Hey, me too!” “Yeah, don’t forget about me!”

“……Fine, if you want,” Azuki acquiesced.

Just then, the previously silent Klein shot his right hand straight up into the air and shouted, “I—I also request your friendship!”

In the moment, I couldn’t tell if everyone else’s silence was out of admiration, shock, or just simple secondhand embarrassment.

The leader of the forty-person AD scout party was a feline named Cathpalug who usually went by the nickname Casper.

Azuki befriended Leafa, Lisbeth, and Klein, then sent a message to Casper, got a message back at once, and told them, “The meeting place will be the midpoint between here and our camp. It’ll be at nine o’clock tonight. Got that?”

“W-wait…how far apart are we talking here?”

“Umm, about a hundred and eighty miles.”

“A hundred and…”

I was speechless. I knew it would be far, but when you said it out loud, the distance was almost unimaginable. In the real world, that was a trip you’d take the Shinkansen for.

“…So you’re saying you traveled over three hundred and fifty miles to kidnap Yui? How many hours…how many tens of hours did that take…?”

“Ummmmmmmmm…”

Azuki hemmed and hawed for a bit, then decided she might as well go ahead with it.

“There’s an item that triples your speed and stamina…a secret elixir. With that, even Rascal the Raccoon could run sixty miles an hour. So overall, it was a little under seven hours…”

“Sixty miles an hour?! Then why didn’t Masaru use that when he was running away with Yui?”

“We didn’t expect you would ride pets to chase us,” Azuki admitted, glancing at Kuro. The panther was sitting next to me. “The elixir only works on therians and beasts. So you’d have to give it to your pets, then ride on them. Do you have any other rideable pets aside from that one and your lizard?”

“Umm…”

I still wasn’t sure if it was going to be possible to get Misha there. Instead, Friscoll the negotiator stepped in to say, “We’ve got a huge bear, but it’s not as fast as the panther here, and it can’t get through the staircase dungeon.”

“Oh…yeah, it seems like the dungeon serves as a pet-sized gate,” said Azuki, her fine whiskers twitching. “And if you try to tame a monster around here right now, you’re not going to have the level or affinity to make the trip in time…which means only you and one other person are going to be able to reach the meeting place.”

“Wouldn’t that automatically make the other person Yui? She’s the only one with the capability to talk to dark elves…”

“At her size, she could ride on Otto’s back. Assuming she’s fine with that.”

“…We’d have to ask her,” I suggested.

From the guard station over twenty yards away, Yui shouted as loud as she could, “I’ll be fine! I’m excited to get a ride on a tiger!”

Azuki responded by waving to Yui, then said to me, “Sheesh, did she hear the conversation we’re having from that distance? She’s got better ears than me.”

“I suppose so,” I said with a grimace. Yui was capable of picking up and deciphering very faint sound signals a biological brain wouldn’t even identify as words, which some people might consider a kind of cheating. But like her skill with the bow, this was simply a tool she possessed that enabled her to protect herself and her friends in this world she was cast into without a choice. Besides, even if I told Azuki and her friends Yui was an AI, they wouldn’t believe me.

Meanwhile, Azuki glanced at Yui and Sinon again, then curled up her fluffy tail. “She’s such a sweet girl. I feel bad that we scared her so badly…”

“You should be. You could’ve just come up and asked for a negotiation,” remarked Klein. Azuki threw him a nasty glare.

“You can only say that because you didn’t end up fighting for your life on both sides. Us AD folks got attacked by SoulSoil on the left and BluePara on the right. We lost a third of our players in the first three days.”

“Oh…man, that sounds rough…,” said Klein, immediately sympathetic.

SoulSoil was short for Soulless Soil, a VRMMO with a very hard-core audience and outlook, set in a dark and heavy setting, where one simple mistake could lead to instant death.

Meanwhile, BluePara was short for Blue Parallelism, a VRMMO with rare cel-shaded anime rendering and a stylish and clean aesthetic that was popular with younger gamers. Both were among the highest-ranking on the Seed Nexus’s concurrent user charts. Stuck between the two of them, I thought it was no surprise they’d lose a third of their players.

“Yeah, but, Azu-Azu, I thought AD barely had any kind of infighting since the start of this game. Why wasn’t there a battle for leadership?” Friscoll asked.

“Who are you calling Azu-Azu?” she snapped. “Anyway, we didn’t need to fight over it because we already have the greatest leader we could ever want!”

“Is that the Cathpalug you were talking about?”

“No. Casper’s a really great leader, too, but there’s someone else above that. They’re the first one in AD to reincarnate as a high mytherian, a legendary character type that’s super hard to achieve and has a stupidly long questline…and it’s an elder dragonewt, the hardest of all…”

Azuki stopped herself there and jabbed a finger at Friscoll’s face, exposing her adorable little finger beans.

“I told you not to try extracting information from me! Ugh, we’re done here! I’m going back!”

“N-no, wait!” I shouted, quickly stopping her before she could hurry away. “When will we get that elixir? Also, aren’t you going to show us the way to the meeting place?”

“Oh, right. Umm…,” Azuki called up her ring menu again, looked at the communications tab, then said, “We need to arrange some things, so let’s meet at four o’clock at the same collapsed bridge again.”

“Got it. Just two more things… Are there any downsides to this elixir? Like, it lowers your maximum HP or has a small chance of killing you, or…?”

“Why would we drink something like that?” Azuki said, annoyed. She cleared her throat. “There is a downside, though, of course. It accelerates the loss of TP and SP. That’s it. So as long as you bring plenty of food and water, you’ll be fine.”

“Okay. And the other thing is…does the elixir work on birds, too?”

“It does. In Apocalyptic Date, avithians are considered therians. You’re not thinking of, like…taming any old bird and holding its leg while it flies, are you? Just so you know, the elixir only boosts speed and stamina, not physical strength!”

“I know, I know,” I reassured her, but Azuki’s triangular ears continued to twitch suspiciously.

Eventually she murmured, “Well, good,” and leaped backward, lifting her hand in salute. “See you at four. And don’t be late this time!”

With that warning, she turned and ran off. When she said fifth or sixth fastest, she meant it. The slender silhouette rapidly distanced herself until she rounded a gentle hill and was out of sight.

A few seconds later, Leafa and Lisbeth said in unison, “So…cuuuuuuute!!”

“Did you see that, Lis?! Her ears! Her whiskers! They were moving just like a real fox’s!”

“I did! And that gorgeous, fluffy, silky pelt… Oh, I should have asked if I could fluff it with my fingers!”

“We’ll make sure to ask next time we meet her!”

“I’ll fluff it, even if she says no!”

Despite their excitement, all I could remember was the time I splattered a Rotten Shot against that fox girl’s face—not that I was going to bring it up. Instead, I stepped aside and spoke to Klein and Friscoll.

“Listen…I think it’s going to end up as me and Asuna and Yui going to meet with their leader, but a hundred and eighty miles one way means we probably won’t be back the same day, and depending on the negotiations, we might end up traveling to the AD camp instead. In that case, we might not return for about three days.”

“That makes sense. I wanna go, too… I bet Casper the cat is a real cutie…,” said Klein, getting a far-off look in his eyes.

I ignored him and continued, “The thing is, I checked on Ruis na Ríg before coming here, and it was looking pretty chaotic…Agil says he suspects the ALO players who have moved in are going to start demanding the NPC living spaces for themselves…”

“Ah, yeah… I looked into that myself, and it turns out the news about Ruis na Ríg offering level-3 protection has spread pretty widely at the Stiss Ruins…”

Protection was the name for special effects granted to the log cabin that was the primary structure of Ruis na Ríg. At level 3, it offered a maximum of 100,000 extra durability to all secondary structures within 150 feet of the primary structure. The wood or stone huts people could build on their own at this point had a durability of maybe 3,000 or 4,000, and a lean-to made of branches and twigs might have 1,000 if you were lucky. Therefore, a bonus of 100,000 was a truly massive difference.

Klein returned from his world of dreams to scratch his stubbled beard and mutter, “And the protection area’s completely filled at this point. They’re selling a single hut for about eight hundred to a thousand els.”

“Eight hund…?! I don’t even have one hundred.”

“Oh yeah, you weren’t there for the gilnaris hornet fight, Kiri, my man. That nest was absolutely packed with riches.” Klein grinned. I gnashed my teeth. If a hut outside the walls was going for 1,000 mels, then how much would Ruis na Ríg itself fetch as a whole? It was a pointless exercise to wonder; I snorted and got back to the topic at hand.

“…So I want to fix the situation before we get to people actually making those demands. I’ve got two radical solutions. We could either build another structure at least five hundred yards from the log cabin and raise that one up to level 3 next, or level-up our log cabin even further. I’d like to knock out one of the two before Asuna and I have to leave in three hours…”

“Hmmm. Three hours,” Friscoll murmured thoughtfully. “It’s an hour-long round trip between here and Ruis na Ríg, so you’d have two hours down there. Either one would be real tough, but I think the level-up might be the better bet. You heard about the group of migrants who built a house by the river that got smashed by a boar boss monster, right? It was insanely powerful, they said.”

“I’d kind of like to try fighting it, but not to beat it. I want to be thoroughly prepared and find a way to tame it. So I guess leveling-up the log cabin it is… The problem is, how much building and adding do we need to do to level it up…?”

“That’s information we don’t have yet. I mean, there’s no way any player home in UR is at level 4 yet. There’s not enough material near the starting point, and the boss monsters are crazy strong if you leave that area…The Asuka and Apocalyptic Date folks are at the second tier only because they gave up on building a mid-base on the first tier and just put together supply porter squads of, like, a hundred players at a time to stay supplied.”

“Whoaaa…,” I murmured, using two-thirds of my mind to mull over what Friscoll was telling me, while the remaining third delved into memories.

It was January of the previous year that I’d met this thin-faced salamander in a huge cavern in Alfheim called the Lugru Corridor. Leafa and I were heading for the World Tree when we were waylaid by a huge regiment of salamanders, one of whom was Friscoll. He was the only survivor, and he easily accepted the deal I offered him. As we parted ways, I thought I’d never see him again, but one year and nine months later, we ran into each other at random in a different world altogether and were now companions. You never know where life will take you…

But now wasn’t the time to be lost in remembrance. It was twelve thirty, and if I was going back to Ruis na Ríg, I needed to be out of there by one o’clock, but I also needed to have all my info straight.

“When you say porters…you’re talking about a group with a bare minimum of gear that’s designed solely for carrying supplies, right? And they’re having them run laps from the starting point to the second tier and back…? I would assume they’ve got a safe route figured out, but it sounds dangerous to me.”

“I mean, obviously it’s dangerous,” said Klein, glancing to the southern sky. “I wanted to build a safe round between Ruis na Ríg and the Maruba River, so I put up fences and surrounded it with walls, but the more you try to reinforce it, the stronger the mobs that come around, it feels like. I don’t know what the AD and Asuka folks are doing to ensure safety, but it’s not the kind of game that allows for big groups of weakly armed people to go traipsing back and forth endlessly without disaster.”

“Agreed.”

“Same.”

The three of us crossed our arms and thought. Asuka was a rival, plain and simple, and AD would ultimately be one, too, but we were at a stage where there might be some teamwork in the cards, and I didn’t want to suffer any major losses at that point. When we had our meeting, I needed to remember to ask how they were ensuring the safety of their supply line. Not that they were likely to tell me…

“About that, Kirito.”

I turned around to face the speaker. Newly logged in, with Pina on her head, Silica stood there accompanied by Leafa and Lisbeth.

“Hey, Silica… About what?”

“The supply line. We need a way to carry food and materials from Ruis na Ríg to this base, right?”

“That’s right…and there’s this wood-louse-looking boss on the cliff face, right? We can’t fight it on a vertical battlefield, so I assume we’ll just have to trudge our way up and down the staircase dungeon…”

Just that morning, Silica and Lisbeth had come back from their scouting at the cliff to give us their hard-fought intelligence report, as I recalled. They looked at each other and grinned.

“We might not need to go climbing up and down,” Silica announced. Even Klein and Friscoll were confused by this.

Lisbeth held up a foot-and-a-half length of rope in her hands and tugged it straight.

“This is a prototype rope woven with half hemp fibers and half Needy thread. We’re going to test it out.”

“Test out…what?” I asked.

Silica and Lisbeth spoke as one.

“A zip line!”