Sword Art Online - Volume 20 - Chapter 5

5 
The twentieth to thirtieth floors of Central Cathedral were the living quarters of the workers, sacred artificers, and knights. 
Kirito and Asuna’s room was on the southeast corner of the thirtieth floor. Curiously, it had the same layout as the South Centoria inn room they had rented for six hundred shia, but the size was very different. 
Upon opening the heavy door from the hallway, there was a small entrance room with another door that led into a tremendous living room that was nearly ten times its size. 
On the south wall were tall lattice windows that ran from floor to ceiling, and on the west wall was a full-size kitchen and bathroom. The east wall was shared with their equally spacious bedroom, which was about half the size of the living area. 
Unlike in Japan, the Underworld had no concept of the tatami mat as a measurement of interior space. For one thing, there were no tatami mats at all in North Centoria or the cathedral. The space of the wooden or tile floors was represented only in square mels or square kilors, which were sometimes abbreviated to squamels and squakilors, respectively. By this measurement, the living room was fifty squamels. 
The first time she was shown to the room, Asuna’s initial thought was that it must be incredibly hard to clean…but in the Underworld, dust and dirt were essentially treated like visual effects, not physical matter, so a bit of swinging away with a broom or duster was all it took to dispel the grime. It was Kirito who noted wryly that the process was more like retouching a digital photo than actual cleaning. 
There was another reason cleaning was much easier here, too. 
Shockingly, the cathedral—in fact, the entire Underworld—had not a single toilet. The people of this world ate food but did not expel waste. 
That characteristic was true of the real-worlders Asuna and Kirito while they were here, too, of course. Though she’d recently gotten used to the concept, she couldn’t help but wonder, when feeling stuffed after a big meal, where that food was supposed to be going. 
Kirito had much more experience in the Underworld than Asuna, and he took it in stride. “Someone at Rath probably figured that simulating bowel movements wasn’t necessary for raising an AI,” he said. But at the school for the survivors back in the real world, Asuna took a class in human development, and she did not agree with that assessment. In Freud’s model of development, young children go through an “anal stage” of growth, where toilet training teaches confidence and autonomy. 
She didn’t think that not going to the bathroom caused personality problems in the Underworlders, but it did leave her with concerns. Sometimes, Underworlders swore with words like shit. What exactly did they think that word represented? She always wanted to ask one of them but never could, and it had been over a year now. 
One year, three months, and sixteen days, in fact. 
She glanced over at the sheepskin calendar on the wall—this had been in use for many years and wasn’t a creation of Kirito’s or Asuna’s—and keenly felt the speed of time’s passage. Just then, she heard the front door of their room opening and closing. 
Kirito’s black hair was still a bit damp when he entered the living room. Apparently, he’d rushed back from the Great Bath on the ninetieth floor. Before, whoever finished bathing first would wait at the split in the hallway for the other, but when they learned that it caused the other residents who used the bath to stay away to avoid disturbing them, the pair decided to change their pattern and simply return straight to their living quarters. 
“Sorry about the wait,” Kirito said as he approached. Asuna took the towel off her shoulders to greet him. 
“You could at least dry your hair off first,” she said, wrapping his head in the towel and ruffling it with her hands. There were no hair dryers in this world, but a certain amount of time rubbing a surface with a dry cloth would get the moisture out, which made post-bath hair prep easier than in reality. 
Kirito let her do it, but he complained, “You’re always so much quicker to get out these days, Asuna…I thought I could catch up to you in the hallway…” 
“I’m not taking faster baths, Kirito, you’re staying in for too long. You were in there for an entire hour today.” 
“What, really?” he said, a moment before the ten o’clock evening bells sonorously tolled. “Whoa, you’re right…I completely missed the nine thirty bells…” 
“You weren’t swimming in the tub, were you?” she asked, pulling the towel off. 
He rapidly shook his head. “N-no, I wouldn’t do that…when other people are around…” 
“Well, I’m not convinced. Here, sit down,” she said, pushing his shoulder toward the large sofa in the middle of the living room. She picked up the brush she’d been using minutes before off the end table and carefully ran it through his dry hair. The brush had an ebony handle with silver inlay, and it was as close to a magic item as this world had—its bristles supposedly came from a kind of dragon that once lived in the eastern empire; not the familiar winged Western-style dragons but an Asian-type dragon with a long, narrow body. A few pulls through one’s hair left it smooth and shiny. The two of them admonished the decadence of the nobility, but this brush had been a present from Commander Fanatio to Asuna for a full year of service as the swordswoman subdelegate on the council, and she’d been using it ever since. 
As he sat there and allowed her to brush his hair, Kirito mumbled, “Really need to finish up that clock soon…” 
“I agree with you there. It seems like you’ve been testing it out for so long, though…Is it that hard to do?” 
“Yeah. You need a ton of very precise gears to run a proper clock, but the gears in this world are found in the winding mechanism of the castle gates and waterwheel accelerators—things that transmit a lot of force. And they don’t work as a clock when you put them together. Given that the time-tolling bells are perfectly precise, it doesn’t make sense to build clocks that don’t work as well…” 
“Ah, I see,” Asuna agreed. She added, “But wait…Fanatio told me there was a clock here on the cathedral ages ago, didn’t she? That the pontifex turned it into Bercouli’s sword. So who built that?” 
“My guess is that it was here in the Underworld from the start. Three hundred years ago, the place where Central Cathedral lies was just a little village, where the Rath engineers worked on raising the first generation of artificial fluctlights. I think they probably placed it there as a kind of monument.” 
“The First Four,” she murmured, recalling what Rath’s chief officer Seijirou Kikuoka had said back on the Ocean Turtle. 
Although she’d just finished brushing his hair, Kirito then ran his hand through it. “If only the console on the hundredth floor worked…Then I could summon the object data for the clock and replicate it all I want,” he grumbled. It seemed like a very optimistic wish. 
“If you could do that,” she pointed out, “you wouldn’t need to make physical clocks at all. You could just add a time readout to the menu, your Stacia Window. And more importantly…” 
…you might be able to end the maximum acceleration phase, she thought. 
The Underworld was currently operating at a stunning speed of five million times that of the real world. Though it was hard to believe, the entire year and three months that Asuna had spent in the Underworld only lasted a miniscule eight seconds of actual time. It was too frightening for her to think about the amount of data her real fluctlight must be exchanging with the STL. It was all too easy for her to imagine her physical brain simply frying itself out. 
But even if the system console came back now and allowed them the option of logging out, Asuna couldn’t honestly say she knew if she would leap at the chance to do so. 
Kirito and Asuna had placed themselves firmly within the governing system of the entire Underworld and brought vast and speedy change with them. She didn’t regret that, but the aftershocks of that revolution still continued, and the murder five days ago was likely a part of that. They had a responsibility to see their changes through. If they were to abandon that and peered back into the Underworld after logging out only to find that civilization had collapsed without them, she would be heartbroken. 
Kirito seemed to sense her internal conflict and reached behind his head with both hands to grab Asuna around the middle, then flipped her over until she was sitting on his lap. 
“Ah!” she gasped, then recovered and protested at being treated like a stuffed animal. “That was dangerous!” 
Though she couldn’t see him, she could sense that he was grinning. “You’re fine. I had you supported with Incarnation.” 
“That’s not the point! Gosh, it really is true that having mental powers really corrupts people…” 
“Corrupts? That seems mean,” Kirito said. He put his arms around her from behind and squeezed gently. 

Instantly, she felt all the tension go out of her. Every single day of their newlywed life in Aincrad, which felt like the distant past now—events of a previous life, even—she’d sat on his lap like this, nestled in his arms. Sometimes she even fell asleep that way. 
A long, long time had passed since then, but when he held her like this, she still felt that same sense of blissful security, that nothing could ever harm her. She leaned against Kirito’s chest, still clutching the dragon-hair brush, and closed her eyes. 
She wanted to fall right to sleep, to have Kirito carry her to the bed himself…but she couldn’t do that. If she fell asleep here, the ever-restless swordsman delegate would sneak out of the cathedral on his own to search for the missing trio of mountain goblins. 
At the impromptu meeting this afternoon, the Unification Council and Integrity Knighthood sent orders to investigate the South Centoria city government, but the five o’clock bells had already rung, so it wouldn’t go into effect until the following morning. And the official who appeared at the inn was probably an impostor, so an investigation of the city office would probably come back with a simple answer: “We didn’t order any transfer of goblins, and that official does not exist.” Asuna thought giving the nimble assassins an entire day of a head start was a bad move. But even Kirito wasn’t going to find the goblins by searching all over the vast city, and it was possible that, like at Obsidia, this was a trap designed to lure the delegate into a vulnerable position. 
Most importantly, Ronie the apprentice knight had asked Asuna to keep an eye on Kirito, and she had said she would. That was an agreement she had to uphold. 
The vision of Ronie’s expression, serious with concern for Kirito’s safety, prickled at Asuna’s heart. She knew how the younger girl felt about Kirito for a while now—before the Unification Council started, in the midst of the Otherworld War, on the night that they traded stories with Alice and General Sortiliena. But in all the time since then, Asuna had been unable to talk about it with Ronie. 
She knew the seventeen-year-old was grappling with feelings that had nowhere else to go, and it hurt Asuna as well. But she didn’t know what to do about it, either. 
There were times in the real world when she’d felt miserable like this, too. Friends she’d met in fictitious worlds, but with bonds that were nothing short of real…Lisbeth, Silica, Sinon, and Leafa. They also had powerful feelings for Kirito, but they kept them suppressed around her or laughed them off as jokes. In fact, whenever possible, they rooted for Asuna and cheered her on in her relationship. 
She always found that heartening but also painful. In fact, she even found Kirito’s ability to stand in the midst of such a treacherous web of attention without giving clear answers to be worthy of envy. 
But Kirito had been like that since the very first time she met him, in the labyrinth of the first floor of Aincrad. He extended his arms as wide as they could go to accept everything and never gave up on anything himself. It was because of that personality that he’d saved Asuna when he’d found her on the top level of the labyrinth, leveling up in a self-destructive haze that left her unconscious. On the boss battle of that floor, he had sacrificed his own reputation to focus all the hatred players felt toward the beta testers onto himself, choosing to take on the mantle of beater: someone who was both crucial to forward progress in the game but also despised by many. 
And that was the Kirito that Asuna had fallen in love with. 
So being locked inside this world with Kirito gave her a small measure of relief. 
At the end of the Otherworld War, after she helped Alice the Integrity Knight escape into the real world, Asuna stayed behind, solely because she couldn’t possibly leave Kirito behind by himself. Actually, that thought only occurred to her retroactively; at the time, she never even considered just logging out with Alice. It wasn’t out of any wish to monopolize Kirito, and after a year of time in here, her sense of remorse toward the friends and family she was increasingly unlikely to ever see again just grew stronger. 
But even then, there was a part of her that consistently thought that, at least in this world, she wouldn’t have to be trapped between her feelings of guilt toward Lisbeth and the other girls and her own romance. 
Asuna set down the brush on her knees and enveloped Kirito’s hands where they circled her body. The pressure squeezing her grew just a bit stronger. 
When they were reunited at the World’s End Altar at the very southern tip of the Dark Territory, Kirito fell to the white-stone ground and cried without end. She didn’t need to ask to know that he was weeping for the people he would never see again. 
Much time had passed since then, and it was very rare that they spoke of memories of the real world—or their friends and family that they were eternally isolated from. There were too many things to do and think about in this world, for one, but Asuna also hadn’t fully processed all the feelings she had, either. Perhaps the same was true for Kirito. 
Given the situation, she wanted to be perfectly truthful and fair to Ronie. She didn’t want to repeat what she had done in the real world. She wanted to think about what she could do for the girl and what was best—and yet… 
“…Shall we go to bed now?” Asuna whispered. Right behind her ear, Kirito said, “Sounds good.” 
She was about to slide off his lap when he slipped his right hand under her knees and lifted her up bridal-style. 
“Wha—? Hey…” 
She squirmed in surprise, and it caused the dragon-hair brush on her lap to slip. But it stopped in midair, fifty cens off the ground, then slid sideways to rest atop the low table. He’d used his Incarnate Arms to catch the precious brush. 
Asuna had spent a lot of time practicing that psychic power that only Kirito and the elite knights could wield, but the best she could do for now was budge a ten-shia copper coin a little. She was frightened at the thought of how lazy she might get if she could freely move common objects around. As it was, she only got to do a little cooking and cleaning of her room for household chores. 
“You startled me,” she murmured, looking at Kirito. He gave her a mischievous grin back. 
“I overworked you with that past-scrying today, so I can afford to pamper you a little.” 
“That was nothing, I told you,” she protested as Kirito glided across the living room, opening the bedroom door with another bit of magic. 
In the center of the room, which was nearly twice as big as Asuna’s bedroom in real life, was a bed that was another size larger than a king bed. The first time Fanatio showed her this room, she had said Now this is really too much, but the woman just smiled and cheerily informed her that the bed had been brought in when they were building the thirtieth floor of the cathedral, and it couldn’t be removed from the room without destroying it. And on top of that, the heavy single-piece black walnut headboard was so fine that Asuna’s latent streak of natural wood furniture appreciation wouldn’t allow her to refuse it. 
According to Takeru Higa of Rath, the Underworld took object and terrain data generated with the Seed program and converted it to the ultra-realistic mnemonic visual format. And the Seed was just a compact version of the Cardinal System that ran SAO, so in a sense, the walnut trees growing in the Underworld had the same digital DNA as the ones in Aincrad. 
Kirito laid Asuna down gently on the right side of the bed, then circled around the footboard to sit on the left side. He cast glances at the two light-element lamps on the walls, extinguishing the elements within them. When the man-made light was gone, only the pale moonlight coming through the large window on Asuna’s left illuminated the room. 
Then he picked up the blanket folded at their feet and pulled it up to Asuna’s chin. Once she was tucked in like a little child, he patted her lightly and went to lie down beside her. 
“…You’d better not sneak away after I fall asleep,” she murmured, feeling the sleepiness roll over her. She could feel him grimacing in the dark. 
“I won’t. I know there’s no way to find a couple goblins in a city the size of Centoria without a lead…” 

“It’s all right; I’m sure we’ll find them safe and sound. I’m sure the culprits need to plan…before their next…move……” 
Asuna resisted the sinking feeling of sleep claiming her body and shifted her right hand closer to Kirito. His warm, large hand searched out hers and enveloped it gently. 
Lately, when they were alone, she sought comfort from him like a little child. It wasn’t intentional—it just happened for some reason. 
Perhaps the reason had to do with the fact that their ages had inverted. 
Asuna’s birthday was September 30th, 2007. Kirito’s birthday was October 7th, 2008. Asuna was always one year older than him, but Kirito had already spent two years and eight months in the time-accelerated world of the simulation before Asuna dived in. He’d spent half a year of that time in an unconscious stupor, but even if you subtracted six months, Kirito’s mental age was now a year and two months older than hers. 
Though she almost never thought about this during the normal course of events, there were times when they were alone when little things about his mannerisms and speech felt older and more mature to her in a way she had never felt in Aincrad, and it caused her heart to skip a beat. Perhaps that feeling was accumulating within her and turning her more childlike in turn. 
Looking back, when she’d met Kirito in Aincrad, he’d been a kid in middle school who’d just turned fourteen. Asuna had been in her third year of middle school, with high school entrance exams just ahead of her. Circumstances had brought them together into a partnership, and they’d had many immature arguments along the way. 
Such fond memories, which seemed either like recent events or the long-distant past, gently guided Asuna into a deep and gentle sleep.