Sword Art Online - Volume 22 - Chapter 1.1

022-01 The Day Before 22nd Floor of Aincrad October 2014

1 

Nine PM, October 23rd, 2024, Aincrad Standard Time. 

I, Kirito, the level-96 swordsman, proposed to Asuna, the level-94 fencer, and she accepted. 

This was only within the VRMMORPG called Sword Art Online, of course. In the real world, Asuna and I had never seen each other in person, and I wasn’t old enough to be legally wed—although maybe Asuna was. 

I’m not sure what the first online game to incorporate a marriage system was, but for the last twenty years at least, weddings between characters had been a popular feature of MMOs. In most games, there was a bonus given to the married couple, so many players chose to do it for practical reasons, while others got married as a result of role-playing. There were even examples of people getting married in-game and then going on to get married in real life afterward. I imagine that if you surveyed all the MMO players in the entire world and asked if they’d ever had an in-game marriage, over half of them would say yes. 

But unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately) for me, of all the MMORPGs I’d played, I had never been married to another player. 

The reason why, aside from my total lack of communication skills, was because I felt completely unsure of what it meant to be “married in a game.” If I, Kazuto Kirigaya, playing the male avatar Kirito, was married to the female character Random-ko, played by someone somewhere in the real world (who quite possibly could have been male or female), should I consider myself to be in a permanent party with Random-ko forever? Should I also assume that I had paired up in some way with the real person playing Random-ko…? 

To be completely honest, it wasn’t as though I’d never received an invitation to get married from female players on my friends list or in my guild in games I played before SAO. But every single time I was asked, I froze up in front of my monitor, sweating profusely, and just made things awkward for them. 

I was an overthinking, overly timid coward, and I knew it. 

But the entire reason I was so enthralled with MMOs was because they were worlds where nothing was real. Behind every character was an unfamiliar player of uncertain gender and age. There was no point in wondering, Who is this person anyway? Everyone, including me, was not actually their in-game character. 

However, there was something about the marriage system that collided headfirst with this perception of mine. Even if it was just in a game, there was something about having a unique relationship with another person that I couldn’t get past. I couldn’t help but be conscious of that person in the real world, sitting at their computer with a mouse and keyboard. 

So I avoided ever becoming permanent partners with other online players, and that carried over into Sword Art Online after it turned into a death game. In fact, I might have kept my distance from others even more, since our avatars’ looks and bodies were essentially our own. 

But there was one person who slowly but surely melted away that alienation, that fear of mine—Asuna. 

In the nearly two years we spent trapped inside that deadly game, she occupied different positions, but she never left my field of view. She started off as an impromptu party member, then eventually joined the Knights of the Blood guild and also took part in our boss raids. Sometimes she helped investigate mysterious safe-zone murders, and sometimes she cooked S-ranked ingredients into meals for me. It was through my experiences with Asuna that I learned a valuable lesson. 

In this world—and in the real world, too—and maybe even in the old-school MMOs I played on a desktop, it was my choice to decide if the person I stood across from was really them or not. If I doubted them and kept them at a distance, they would be false. If I trusted them and drew closer, they would be real. 

And with me now, right here, was a warrior named Asuna. 

It was fun to be with her. Asuna fighting, Asuna laughing, Asuna sulking—they all stirred powerful emotions in me. I wanted her to always be within arm’s length, and I wanted a tangible connection to her. When I looked at Asuna, I no longer wondered who she really was, even for a moment. 

That was why I proposed to her. 

It was not as though all my doubts were gone. I couldn’t be completely certain that my desire for Asuna’s presence was truly what you’d call love. I kept at a distance from my family in the real world and maintained my stance as a solo player in this world. It made me wonder if I was truly capable of loving another person. 

But I felt sure that if I stuck around with Asuna long enough, I would learn the answer to that last question. 

That was the mental side of getting married in SAO, as I had come to feel about it. 

On the other hand, even in a game, that still left the physical side of getting married—or more concretely, the question of our domestic situation. 

After we were married, we would be living together, of course. The back-alley room where I slept in Algade on the fiftieth floor was much too small for the both of us, and even Asuna’s maisonette in Selmburg on the sixty-first floor wasn’t quite up to size. And aside from the space issue, there was another reason we couldn’t continue living in the same places. 

Asuna the Flash, subleader of the Knights of the Blood, was essentially the most popular player in all of Aincrad at the moment. 

The newspapers printed and sold by info dealers featured popularity polls, where she regularly placed first by a mile. She had multiple fan clubs. The owner of a chain of general stores offered her a deal to record not CDs, but RCs—recording crystals—but they’d backed off when she pulled her rapier on them. 

She was worlds different from the player I remembered at the start of all this, when she wore a hooded cape like Little Red Riding Hood. All the same, if word got out that the game’s sweetheart was married, it’d be front-page news. 

If all her many fans mourned the change, and their energy eventually morphed into curse-type attacks aimed at me, her marriage partner, then my real-life luck was sure to plummet. Well, fine, maybe that wasn’t really a concern, but we couldn’t enjoy our new life together if people tried to interview her about it all the time, so we wanted to keep it a secret for as long as we could. 

Naturally, we’d be telling her many—and my few—friends, so the secret wouldn’t last for that long, but we couldn’t enjoy the honeymoon forever, anyway. Only four days had passed since we toppled the Gleameyes, the boss of the seventy-fourth floor, so it would still be several days before players discovered the boss chamber on the seventy-fifth. But even if Asuna and I didn’t take part in mapping the labyrinth tower, we had to be there to fight the boss. 

So before then, we had to find a home in a nice, peaceful place where we would spend time together for at least ten days…or maybe two weeks…or even more. 

As far as finances went, if Asuna and I sold off all the items we’d collected that no longer served any real purpose, we would have enough col to purchase a single-story home in the safe zone, near a town. But within that same day, the info dealers would sniff us out. Ideally, we’d want a home on one of the forgotten floors long past, in a discreet, out-of-the-way location but with a comfortable amount of space. 

That was a difficult set of conditions to meet, but as a matter of fact, I’d had my eye on such a place before I proposed. 

The twenty-second floor of Aincrad hadn’t been the frontier of player progress in a year and a half. Being lower on the conical flying castle, it was therefore a larger floor, but nearly all of it was covered by deep forests and grasslands—a beautiful floor that was low on interesting features to most players. There hadn’t been any memorable quests or field bosses, either. The advancement group made a beeline to the labyrinth from the main town of Corral, rushed through the mildly difficult tower, and beat the boss in a number of days that was significantly fewer than average. At this point, the only players who would visit the twenty-second floor were fishermen heading for one of its many lakes and woodcrafters gathering lumber from its forests. 

I hadn’t visited it for a long time, either, but there was a sight that had stuck with me for a long time that I just couldn’t forget: 

On the day the twenty-second-floor boss was defeated, I rushed back to Corral alone to clean out all the quests I’d left unfinished. 

Near the banks of a crystal clear blue lake, I found a tiny footpath that was nearly invisible until you were right on it. It didn’t seem related to any quests, but I walked down it anyway, climbed a hill, and found myself at a single log cabin sitting quietly in the midst of a dense pine forest. 

Moss dotted the log walls, and there were two or three saplings growing from the roof, but it wasn’t dilapidated at all. If anything, it had a kind of natural beauty, like a house built by elves that blended in with the trees around it. 

I opened the wooden gate (the fact that I could do this was proof no other player owned the home) and used my Search skill to survey the interior (it was empty, meaning no NPC lived there, either) before approaching the front terrace. At last, hanging from the doorknob, I found the wooden FOR SALE sign. 

At the time, I was still under level-40, so I used my finger to count the digits of the number on the sign, then exhaled and turned to leave—though I couldn’t help but look back over my shoulder several times with longing. In my head were visions of being rich enough that the col I’d need to buy the house overflowed from my packed inventory. 

As a matter of fact, by the time I was level-70-something at the end of the fiftieth floor, I could have scraped together enough to buy it. But as a member of the frontline team, I couldn’t make my base of operations a house that was a twenty-minute walk from the nearest teleport gate. Ultimately, I chose a little roost in Algade on the fiftieth floor, and I’d been spending my nights there until just a few days ago. 

It had been a year and a half ago that I found that little log cabin in the woods—but when I made up my mind to propose to Asuna and wondered where we would live, that was the first image that popped into my mind. Frankly, to me, there was no other choice. 

To propose to her, I’d brought up the information on the log cabin, suggested we move there together, and lastly, said, “Let’s get married.” 

Asuna had said yes without a moment of hesitation. I’d like to think that the log cabin played some small part in that.