4
Over 99 percent of the countless terrain objects that populated Aincrad’s many floors were classified as indestructible. All natural features, aside from standing trees, and all man-made objects, like buildings and walls, were impervious to any kind of attempted destruction.
In some dungeons, depending on the design, there were breakable walls, and every now and then, you found breakable rocks and soft earth in the environment, but I had never heard of a house that could be broken down. What if you bought a house that could be destroyed? Just imagine being asleep in bed when a huge hole smashed into the wall, and a guild of orange criminal players came storming inside…You’d be living in the world of the Three Little Pigs.
So right off the bat, I knew that my missing dream home could not have been destroyed by players.
“…Well, I agree with you there.” Asuna nodded when I finished my explanation. “That is, assuming there isn’t some extra skill like Land Speculation or something.”
“B-but what would be the point of driving up land prices here? They’d do it along the lake in Selmburg or something.”
“Ah yes. Property along the lake there is expensive. It would cost three times as much as my place…But I guess if we can’t find the house here, we might spring for a place there.”
“Er, I dunno…M-might be a little tough on my income,” I stammered, going pale. Asuna gave me a big smile and reassured me that she was joking.
She quickly moved back into strategic-officer mode and stared at the empty space of the little glen. “Well, let’s eliminate the possibility that someone destroyed the house…And just to be certain, the customization of player homes doesn’t extend to outer walls and roofs, right?”
“Uh, what do you mean?”
“I mean, when you buy a house, there’s a customization menu for the owner to play around with, right? Where you can decide which fixtures you want to remove?”
At last, I understood the point Asuna was making. “Ahhh,” I said, nodding, “so you mean someone might have bought the house, used the customization menu to remove the walls, roof, and floor, and turned it into a blank lot. Hmm…I’ve only ever lived in little places like apartments, so I’ve never seen the customization options on a house…”
“Same goes for me. Hey…let’s ask Liz!” Asuna suggested, opening her menu to type a quick message to her good friend Lisbeth the blacksmith.
I was on good terms with Liz, too. She was the one who’d forged my sword, Dark Repulser, so she was one of the few people on the list we would inform about our marriage. After purchasing the house today and completing the marriage process, we’d intended to send off a message to a dozen or so people promptly, including Liz. But now the order of events had changed, and we were going to be asking her about real estate.
The reply came back within moments. Asuna read over the message on a screen that only she could see, and she bobbed her head.
“She says you can’t remove or rearrange the exterior walls and roof. If you pay up, you can change the color or add bay windows and flower beds and options like that, but that’s it…”
“…And I’m guessing one of those color options isn’t ‘invisible.’”
More important, Asuna and I had walked all over the empty lot and found no traces of the building. If it were there but invisible, I would have smacked my face on the front door.
“Then…is there another option? Like outfitting it to be able to sink underground?” Asuna wondered, tapping at the ground with the toe of her boot.
I couldn’t help but smirk. “Ha-ha, it’s not going to be like some supervillain’s secret base. Besides, if you dug a hole in Aincrad deep enough to fit an entire house inside, you’d pop through the bottom and fall down to the next floor.”
“Awww, that sounds so lovely, though. Like a gnome’s house.”
“I thought those were dug into the side of a hill…Wouldn’t it be a dwarf’s house if it’s underground? You remember that huge dwarven citadel with at least a dozen floors, right?”
“Ew, I hated that place. It was so dank and had all those bug monsters…Besides, even that ‘underground’ castle was just on the inside of a mountain on the floor map.”
“It’s a structural flaw of Aincrad, isn’t it? Since there’s a limit to how thick the ground can be, you don’t get those classic RPG sprawling underground dungeons.”
“I’m fine with that!” Asuna snapped. “But do you really want to just stand around chatting? I mean, I’m having fun, but…”
I glanced at the sky to the sides. The trailing wisps of clouds in the sky were colored orange. The sun would be down in just two more hours.
“G-good point. Well, if it’s not invisible or a secret underground base, then…is it a moving fortress? No, that would make it too easy to march straight from the main city to the labyrinth tower. And that would rule out a flying fortress, too…”
I was getting further from likely possibilities and deeper into wild fantasies, much to Asuna’s chagrin. She glanced upward, while I hung my head, folded my arms, and thought.
“So it doesn’t seem likely that it was obliterated with the customization menu. Plus, that would mean another player has already bought it…I have a feeling that whatever caused this wasn’t player related…”
“……Hey.”
“But does that mean…a field boss with the ability to destroy terrain objects…? No, even the Geocrawler on the fifty-sixth floor couldn’t break the gate to the village. If there was a boss that crazy on the twenty-second floor, we would have had to put together a whole raid party…”
“Hey, Kirito.”
I felt a tugging on my coat sleeve and interrupted myself to look at Asuna.
“…What?”
“……Look.”
She lifted one of her white-gloved hands and pointed. I followed the angle of her finger up into the sky.
It was there, in the sky, directly above the largest cedar tree, beyond the north side of the empty clearing.
Floating high in the air, nearly touching the bottom of the floor above us, was a house. Because of the angle from the ground, you could only see the bottom, but the combination of massive logs made it clear that this was the cabin I’d been searching for.
I was so stunned that I couldn’t feel happy about spotting it—just shocked that it was floating over 250 feet overhead.
In a daze, I murmured, “Wh-why…is the house…flying…?”
“……You mentioned a flying-fortress option…It’s not that, is it…?” Asuna asked. I squinted to get a better look at the tiny feature far overhead, but I couldn’t see anything like wings or balloons or propellers.
But thanks to my skill-enhanced vision, I spotted two things I hadn’t noticed before:
First, there was a swirl of air below the house, flickering like heat haze. It was probably flying on top of something like a whirlwind fixed in place.
Second, sticking out of the south-facing window of the house and waving wildly at us all the way down on the ground was a person.
“S-someone’s in there,” I pointed out to Asuna’s surprise.
She craned her head farther and said, “Y-you’re right. From this distance, I can’t tell if it’s an NPC or a player, though…”
The visual clue that distinguished a player from an NPC was the color of the cursor. But this distance was much too far for the cursor to display.
I had no idea why the house was flying, but if the figure inside was a player rather than an NPC, we couldn’t just leave them up there. If the house fell from that distance, it would easily kill them.
“Wh-which is it…?”
Asuna and I watched with bated breath—when the figure suddenly pulled in its waving arm, then stuck it out again. It let go of some object that fell, glittering in the sunlight. The angle was so straight that it seemed to move slowly, heading directly toward the clearing where we stood.
“Oh…oh…oh…”
I took four steps to the right, then three steps forward, and caught the little object with both hands. Asuna rushed over so we could examine it.
“An empty…potion bottle…?” she said. I nodded, then looked back up at the floating cabin in the sky.
“It’s a player!” I shouted. An empty bottle after the potion’s contents had been drunk would soon disintegrate and disappear. To prevent that and keep the bottle, you had to put it away in a bag or in your virtual inventory menu. NPCs wouldn’t do something like that, so having an empty bottle was a sign that it was a player trapped in that floating house up there.
“W-we’ve got to save them,” I said, holding the bottle.
But Asuna, as ever, posed the proper question: “H-how?!”
“……”
That was indeed the question. As a general rule, there was no way for a player to fly in SAO. After all, then you could simply fly up to the next floor and bypass the labyrinth tower and boss—or go all the way up to the hundredth floor, the goal.
A few months ago, Asuna, I, and the blacksmith Lisbeth had flown briefly when we held on to the tail of a white dragon. But there was no choosing our destination then, there were no dragons on this floor, and I certainly didn’t want to repeat that experience.
“……W-well, let’s head to the spot right under the house,” I suggested without any better options. Asuna gave me a funny look but agreed.
When we walked out of the clearing and into the forest, the carpet of branches overhead blocked the sight of the flying house. But I used my special real-life skill Direct Line Intuition to maintain my bearings. It was surprisingly difficult in a forest, where you couldn’t see into the distance. I had tried explaining it to Asuna once, that you had to treat your legs like they were autorunning, but she just looked at me like my head was on fire.
But my intuition was correct, and after two or three minutes, the especially large cedar tree appeared. It was definitely positioned directly under the house. I looked up as I approached the trunk, and through the many branches, I could see the tiny floating shadow high above.
“So…what now? Climbing to the very top of that tree isn’t going to get us close to reaching the house,” Asuna observed, walking forward with her face pointed skyward.
I took the same pose and replied, “I was thinking that if we were directly below, we might be within shouting range…but that doesn’t seem likely, either…”
“Ahhh. If we could talk to one another, we could learn how that happened. Should we climb the tree, then? Maybe being up in the branches will make it possible to hear.”
“The problem is, these pine trees are harder to climb…Might be too hard without the use of the Acrobat skill…”
We were just within fifteen feet of the massive cedar tree when there was a roar from close by, like that of a monster, causing us both to jump with fright.
“Arf! Harrrf-harf-harf!!”
On pure instinct, I reached behind my back for the hilt of Elucidator but paused there. The howling was coming from a quadrupedal creature no more than sixteen inches long…Something I would normally call…
A dog.
It had longish fur in a light-brown color, with big bright eyes and a fluffy tail with a blue ribbon attached to it. The color cursor was yellow, indicating that it was either an NPC, a beast-tamer’s pet, or a nonactive monster that wasn’t in an aggro state.
“Ooh, it’s so cute!” squealed Asuna. She crouched down and reached out a hand, but I quickly held her back.
“N-no! Wait!”
“How come? It’s so cute.”
“It c-could be some kind of trap! For one thing, it’s weird that there’s just a dog hanging out on the map. What if it transforms into a direwolf the moment you touch it?”
“It’ll be fine. Look at how its tail is wagging.”
In the meantime, the little dog was hopping and spinning around in front of Asuna, practically begging her to pick it up. I maintained a tight hold on Asuna’s sword belt so she couldn’t squat down, and I stared at the mutt to check its cursor. The name that appeared was Toto.
“…Toto? That’s not a species name…So is that its given name…?”
“Awww! Even its name is cute! C’mere, Toto! Here, boy!”
“I told you to stay back…”
Asuna had already been hit by the Charmed negative status effect, clearly. I dragged her back with all my strength and gazed into the big, deep eyes of the mutt named Toto, seeking signs of wicked cunning within them.
Belatedly, I spotted a new detail. Floating about eight inches above the dog’s round head was a little ? icon.
“What…? A quest symbol?!” I shouted. “But why is it already in progress…?”
Asuna noticed it as well, and the pulling against my grip lessened. “You’re right…It’s got a quest…”
Each floor of Aincrad contained so many quests, you could barely hope to complete them all. Most of them came from NPCs with ! symbols over their heads, and when the quests were already active, the symbols turned to ?.
Meaning this doggy was a key person—er, animal—to a quest in progress. But the problem was that neither I nor presumably Asuna had accepted any quests relating to a dog…
“Oh! That’s it!” Asuna shouted. Startled, I let go of her belt. The fencer spun around and fixed me with a deadly serious look. “We’re usually occupied with taking out the labyrinth tower and floor boss, so we don’t usually take on the side quests, right? It’s been our blind spot. Whenever there’s some phenomenon that doesn’t seem to make sense, it’s got something to do with a quest. Such as…a flying house!”
“……Hmm,” I hummed, agreeing. Asuna spun back to face the little pup, who was still in a state of great agitation.
“And that means, in order to find the cause of why the house is flying…we need to make contact with little Toto here! You understand, don’t you, Kirito? We don’t have a choice!” she said, making it sound like a great personal sacrifice. Before I could stop her yet again, she crouched and reached for the furball.
“Arf-arf-arf!” the little brown dog barked happily and leaped into her arms. Its tail wagged furiously as it licked her face.
“Ha-ha-ha! Oh, that tickles! Awww, you’re so cuuute! I’ve always wanted to have a dog just like this!”
Fortunately, Toto did not turn into a giant man-eating wolf.
But what did happen next surpassed anything I expected by at least three light-years.
A tremendous whirlwind whipped up around our feet. The sheer power of the wind dragged us off-balance without any chance to resist. I toppled, and my feet left the ground—and to my horror, they did not touch it again.
“K-Kirito!”
Asuna reached out with the free hand that wasn’t holding Toto, and I grabbed it. The three of us were thrown upward by the impromptu tornado. The light blurred and rotated, and the wind caused my coat hem and Asuna’s skirt to flap hard (a phenomenon that never happened with ordinary breezes in the wilderness), not that I had the attention to dedicate to it.
“Ah! Aaah! Aaaaaaah!” I screamed.
“Aieeeeee!” Asuna shrieked.
“Harf-arf-arf!!” barked the dog with great excitement.
We rose directly up into the air toward the floating log cabin far overhead.
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