Sword Art Online - Volume 22 - Chapter 2.3

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The outside was now wreathed in night. 

The day-night cycle of Alfheim was sixteen hours total, so it was not synchronized with real-world time. Outside the game, it was after five PM; being just past the summer solstice, there was still plenty of light at this hour—but in the fairy realm, the sun was long gone. 

The eighth floor of New Aincrad was a forest-themed floor. The third floor had the same motif but included grassland and rocky areas, whereas the eighth floor was utterly dedicated to thick mangrove forests. For one thing, there was no actual ground. The surface of the floor was covered in deep water that you couldn’t walk across. Instead, there were massive trees (far smaller than the World Tree, Yggdrasil, of course) all around, with a complex layout of hanging bridges connecting the elevated platforms that players had to travel across. 

In the SAO days, if you fell off, you had to wade through the water until you found a tree with a ladder to climb, but that was no longer a concern here. Asuna left the giant, blackened tree that contained the labyrinth tower, ignored the spiral staircase nearby, and buzzed the wings on her back instead. 

The reason the labyrinth tower and its surrounding trees were charred like this was explained as the work of the new boss, Wadjet the Flaming Serpent. The boss in Aincrad was completely different, and the trees around here had been perfectly green. Ymir’s designers had put a lot of work into redecorating this area for their new take on the original. 

She levitated directly upward for about fifty yards, only transitioning to horizontal flight once there was a decent amount of visibility below. The huge trees of this floor ran all the way up to the bottom of the ninth floor, so there was no way for her to get above the canopy. In the SAO days, this was one of the few floors where an intrepid climber could touch the bottom of the next floor up. Of course, no one could actually dig a shortcut hole through the rock. 

Yui made her way from Asuna’s shoulder to the front of her shirt as the fairy girl soared and wove around huge trunks dozens of feet across. 

“Where is Kirito now?” she asked the pixie. 

“He’ll be reaching the outer aperture any moment now. If he gets any farther away, I won’t be able to detect him anymore!” 

“Got it! Geez, he’s so fast…” 

She tucked her arms to her sides and focused on speed. She’d gotten accustomed to the unique flying system of ALO quickly and no longer needed the flight controller after just a few days of practice, but in terms of really pushing the limits of flight, she was still inferior to Kirito and Leafa. She did her best to avoid the obstacles, flying by the light of the lanterns hanging from the bridges connecting tree to tree. 

In time, blue light appeared ahead of her. It was moonlight; she was nearly at the edge of New Aincrad. Kirito had already left the floating structure, she was sure. 

Yui chose that moment to report, “Papa’s rising along the outside of New Aincrad!” 

“Huh…?” 

Asuna’s eyes went wide. Kirito had said he had something to do, so she’d assumed he was heading for Yggdrasil City atop the World Tree. But thinking about it now, if he just needed to log out, he could do so in any inn on the eighth floor, and if he was going to Ygg City, he could get there immediately from the teleport square in the Town of Beginnings on the first floor. 

This meant Kirito’s destination was somewhere else in ALO—well, higher up in New Aincrad. 

But as of now, June 22nd, the eighth floor was as high as you could get in New Aincrad. The outer apertures of the ninth floor and up were entirely closed off. You couldn’t just fly through them onto the terrain of the floors. Asuna had once gone with Kirito and their friends to fly up to where the Ruby Palace should have been on the hundredth floor, but they’d hit the altitude limit on flight at around the fiftieth floor. The only thing they could see from there was an endless slope of steel. 

Kirito knew he couldn’t get inside on a higher floor. So where did he think he was going…? This question filled Asuna’s mind as she burst out from the southernmost tip of the eighth floor into the open expanse. 

She turned back and saw an enormous full moon in the sky behind her. It was gleaming off the enclosed surface of the flying castle. Against it, just off the steel face, rose a tiny silhouette. 

He already seemed to be at about the fifteenth floor. There was something desperate about the directness of his path, and it made Asuna wonder if it was right for her to follow him. 

“Kirito…,” she murmured, while Yui peered out from the collar of her short robe. 

“Papa…” 

When Asuna heard that tiny voice, she made up her mind. She bent her knees and pushed off the air as hard as she could, stretching in a straight line toward the sky, an arrow of blue. 

She and Kirito were separated by the width of seven floors—about seven hundred yards. In the SAO days, this would have been worlds apart, but that was all in the past. Now Asuna had four radiant blue wings. 

On she flew, chasing after her beloved, but she had a premonition. Wherever Kirito was heading, it had to contain the answer to the mysterious sensation afflicting her. He must have come to some hypothesis based on talking with Yui and was now trying to see if he was correct. 

Kirito tore through the virtual atmosphere of the sky far above. He was past the twentieth floor and showed no sign of slowing. He didn’t even stop at the twenty-second floor, where their precious log cabin would be found. In a blink, he was past the twenty-fifth floor, where the Aincrad Liberation Squad had collapsed in battle against the boss. Where was he going? 

Then the black shadow suddenly flew in a sharp loop. He plunged right for the steel exterior next to him. 

“Oh…!” Asuna gasped, expecting a collision, but Kirito spread his wings to slow down just before the wall. He didn’t hit the surface hard enough to cause HP damage, but Asuna could detect the impact of his hands slapping the metal all the way from her location. 

It was…the twenty-seventh floor. 

The name of the main town on that floor was Rombal. It was a place covered with craggy rocks and boulders, where the towns and dungeons were carved right out of the mountains. It had been very popular with crafters in the SAO days, because many ores were available there, but Asuna did not remember it well. They’d struggled a bit with the metal-elemental boss, but from what she could remember, they’d been on the floor for only a few days in total. 

That information would be the same for Kirito, who was part of the same group of players. So why was he focused on this floor in particular? 

As she watched with bated breath, the black silhouette stayed still, hands pressed against the steel surface. Almost as if, by sheer force of prayer, he could will a hole to open in the wall. 

But of course, the impervious, indestructible wall did not change in any way. Asuna slowed her ascent as she reached the twenty-sixth floor, until she was coasting on momentum and upward draft and arrived at the space just behind Kirito. 

She didn’t say anything. Yui was silent as well, sitting inside her shirt. Almost no flying monsters would appear at this altitude, so the only thing in their vicinity was moonlight, the breeze, and the fortress of steel. 

At last, Kirito let go of the wall of the twenty-seventh floor. He lowered his hands, beat his wings a little, and turned around. 

“…Asuna. Yui.” 

There was the faintest hint of a smile on his lips. It was an expression she had hardly ever seen on him in the two years and eight months she’d known him. 

“Kirito…,” she whispered, closing the gap a little. But she was hesitant to get any closer. There were so many things she wanted to ask, but she didn’t know what to say. 

He looked away from her and took in the view, then pointed down and to the right. “Let’s talk there.” 

There was a bridge-like protrusion extending from the surface of the structure below. It was only about ten feet long, but it would serve as a bench. Asuna nodded and flew down with him, then sat on the sideways spike of steel. 

Kirito sat to her left, then lifted his right hand and rubbed Yui’s head where it popped out of Asuna’s collar. The smile on his face seemed to contain a hint of pain. 

“I’m sorry, Yui,” he said. “Sorry, Asuna…I must have worried you.” 

In response, Yui flitted out of Asuna’s clothes and sat on Kirito’s right shoulder. Her big black eyes looked right at Asuna’s, saying, Go on, Mama. 

Asuna nodded back and summoned her courage. 

“Kirito…what’s here on the twenty-seventh floor?” she asked. After a moment, she corrected herself. “What…was here…before?” 

But just saying those words was the key to opening the door to her memories. Asuna’s eyes went wide. 

Something did happen. On this floor. In fact, she had heard this story right from Kirito. The number of the floor itself hadn’t come up, but at this point, there was no denying it. This had to be the floor…where Kirito experienced the tragedy that led him to resist grouping up in guilds and parties and stick to being the only solo player in the frontier group… 

“Yeah…that’s right,” Kirito said with a little nod, sensing from her expression that she had figured it out. “The twenty-seventh-floor labyrinth tower…is where my first-ever guild, the Moonlit Black Cats, fell into ruin…” 

Kirito had told Asuna the tragic story of the Moonlit Black Cats just two days before their marriage in front of their forest home. That was October 22nd, 2024. 

They initially met Yui in the forest on the twenty-second floor a week after that, but Yui knew the general details of the story by now. This time, Kirito didn’t speak about the past again, but the present. 

“When Yui said that a player’s powerful emotions could be saved on the SAO server as an attachment to a place or item, I had an idea,” he said, his voice soft. “Maybe the emotions of everyone from the Black Cats are saved, too…Recorded in that hidden room in the twenty-seventh-floor labyrinth tower, their terror and despair when the ore elementals and dark dwarves trapped and surrounded them…” 

!! 

That brought back the image she saw in the midst of the Wadjet battle with distinct clarity. 

The pattern of random sandstone blocks on the wall—that was definitely from the labyrinth tower of the twenty-seventh floor in Aincrad. The room had been packed with ore elementals and dwarves. It was exactly like Kirito just said. 

“……Kirito,” she squeaked, the only thing she could say. When Kirito looked up at her, she tried to explain what she’d experienced. The vision she saw in the midst of the boss battle, the room that had to be the place where the Black Cats fell—and the sight of the city at night that she saw in her room after logging out yesterday. Of a flowing waterway and lights in the fog… 

“……” 

Even Kirito was at a loss for words after hearing about this. Eventually, he nodded and said, “Then…that settles it. The night vision was probably…the memory of one of them…Which means the phenomenon you’re feeling is from her…” 

He paused, then continued even more quietly, “From Sachi…calling you…But why would it be you…and not me…?” 

It was more a question to himself than to Asuna. But the reply came from the one person who had been silent thus far: Yui. 

“I think…it’s because you’re using a different account than the one you had in SAO, Papa…A different avatar.” 

“…!” 

Kirito bolted up straight. He looked down at his hands, clad in black leather gloves. Asuna was aware that his palms and fingers were subtly different than they had been in SAO. 

In starting up a new, normal online game life in ALfheim Online, Asuna, Lisbeth, Silica, Klein, Agil, and the many other survivors of SAO transferred their SAO account data to ALO as is. Kirito was the only exception, using the spunky young spriggan he created from scratch when he was trying to rescue Asuna from the birdcage. 

If Kirito had brought back his old avatar, then the emotions of this Sachi girl located somewhere on the twenty-seventh floor of New Aincrad would be affecting him, not Asuna. If anything, he would have been the one affected by the dissociative sensation. 

But why had Sachi chosen Asuna as a replacement for Kirito? And how had she? 

She had passed away over a year before Asuna and Kirito got married. At the time, Asuna was an executive officer of the new Knights of the Blood. She’d been focused on building up the guild and conquering new floors. She saw Kirito at strategy meetings and during boss battles, but nothing more. She hadn’t known that he had joined a guild called the Moonlit Black Cats or that they had been wiped out, leaving him as the only survivor. By that token, Sachi would never have even known Asuna’s name. 

Again, it was Yui who had an answer. 

“Mama, the avatar you’re using now, technically speaking, is still married to Papa’s old avatar. There’s no marriage system in ALO at the moment, so it’s not shown on your character status…but it’s still connected to Papa somewhere in your data.” 

“R-really?!” she exclaimed, despite everything. 

Kirito’s eyes bulged, too. After a moment, he murmured, “I see…When Sachi died…I was there. Her emotions at the moment of her death are probably saved on the server, not just in the labyrinth tower of the twenty-seventh floor, but also linked to my avatar. But since I changed to a new avatar, the signal Sachi’s memories are sending could only go to the next closest thing…and that’s Asuna, because of her link to the old me…?” 

That all made some kind of sense, at least. But it didn’t explain everything. 

“…Why is it happening now, though?” she wondered, looking at the exterior of the floating castle to her left. “The dissociative phenomenon first happened three weeks after my initial dive into ALO. And they’ve been happening more often lately. Plus, there’s more detail to them, like memories mixed in. That didn’t happen at first…” 

“……That’s because…” 

Kirito paused, then checked his window. After staring at the time readout, he took a deep breath, and in a tense voice, he said, “Sachi died…on June 22nd, 2023…That’s two years ago today. And it happened at…five forty-five PM. Three minutes from now…” 

“…!!” 

Asuna gasped. On Kirito’s shoulder, Yui sat frozen, her big black eyes widened in shock. 

Kirito closed his window and looked up into the night sky, which was now full of twinkling stars. He began to speak. 

“…In SAO…I saw…many players die. Some of them met their end by my own sword. So…I didn’t want to see the deaths of the Black Cats, and of Sachi, as being special anymore. When we were in Aincrad, I used the tree growing outside the inn the Black Cats called home as a grave marker of sorts. I would go visit it from time to time…but right now, I can’t visit the eleventh floor, where the inn was, or the twenty-seventh floor, where they died. So my plan was, while we were playing today, to just observe a moment of silence when the time came and have that be the end of it…But after what Yui said, I realized it was probably Sachi’s emotions saved on the server that were causing your dissociative sensation, and I had to be sure…” 

He placed his arms on his knees and clenched his fists. His head hung low, and he continued his story through obvious pain. 

“……If what Sachi felt at that moment…the terror, the despair, the sadness…are still saved on the server, trying to reach someone…then it should be my responsibility, as the sole survivor. But I changed my avatar and cut loose my past…and because of that, Sachi’s emotions had nowhere else to go…but to you……” 

“………Kirito,” Asuna murmured, shaking her head over and over. There were so many things she wanted to say that she couldn’t speak a single one. She felt so powerless, it was hard even to breathe. 

“You’re wrong, Papa!” cried Yui. She leaped off his shoulder and flitted right in front of his face, clutching her tiny fists in umbrage. “The only thing the Cardinal System saved was special emotional outputs that it couldn’t classify with the patterns it knew. This might be inappropriate to say, but the kinds of fear and despair that dying players felt in SAO were not unique. Just two weeks after the system began recording, it stopped saving despair-based raw data. So if Sachi left an emotional record on the server…it would not have been despair or terror!!” 

Kirito’s head lifted just an inch. His voice was raspy. 

“…Then…what Sachi left…was…?” 

Asuna did not hear the end of that sentence. 

At five forty-five and thirteen seconds on June 22nd, she experienced the largest dissociative episode yet. 

The hardness of the steel spike they were sitting on, the chill of the high-altitude winds, the texture of her mage’s equipment—all these sensations faded. She felt like she was floating. Her virtual weight vanished. 

Then Asuna’s mind separated from her avatar entirely. The floating black structure beside her, the starry sky, everything was overwritten by bright light. 

Her soul was sucked down a corridor of light to somewhere else… 

The next thing she knew, she was standing in an unfamiliar room. 

It was not large. The only fixtures were a simple bed and a wooden desk. The single window provided a view of a rustic, European-looking town. Instead of a sky overhead, there was just a lid of stone and metal. This was not the real world…It was some place in Aincrad. She recognized the style of the roofs and walls of the buildings. It was probably the main town of the eleventh or twelfth floor. Neither of them was available at the present time. 

It was night, and the room was dim because there was only a single lamp on the wall. This was probably a room in an inn, not a player home. Asuna circled the bed and approached the door. She tried to turn the knob, but her hand slipped through; she couldn’t grip it. She looked down at herself, and to her surprise, she was not an undine mage anymore. She was wearing a knight’s uniform of white and red. She had long gloves and boots in the same colors. There was no rapier at her side, but it was undoubtedly the equipment from her time in the Knights of the Blood. Her entire body was translucent, though, like a vision. 

What was happening? She looked up again—and saw the space above the bed flicker, revealing a vague outline. 

It was a female player, skinny and frail. She was sitting on the white bedsheets with her back to Asuna. She wore a light-blue tunic and miniskirt. No armor. The hair cut just above her shoulders was black with just a tinge of blue. It was clear even without seeing her face that she was around the same age as Asuna. 

The girl was shaking her torso left and right. She seemed to be singing—and in fact, at that very moment, a gentle song graced Asuna’s ears. It was a famous Christmas song. She was singing the chorus slowly and tenderly. 

As she listened, Asuna found her vision beginning to blur and sparkle with motes of light. Her eyes brimmed with tears. Powerful emotion gripped her chest. The girl’s feelings were flowing into her through the melody. There wasn’t a single ounce of fear or desperation. It was pure warmth, like the sunlight of spring filling her heart… 

One large teardrop spilled down Asuna’s right cheek as the song came to an end. 

The girl stood and turned around without a sound, facing Asuna across the bed. 

Because of the quavering light that filled her eyes, Asuna could not make out her face. The only detail she could see was a smiling mouth that opened to speak. 

There was a voice. 

You tell him for me. 

Tell him I was happy. 

The brilliant light surrounded Asuna again. She was being pulled away from the girl, the room, the town. 

As she felt the floating sensation drag her away, Asuna understood innately that this was the final out-of-body experience she would be having. 

Slowly and carefully, she opened her eyes. 

Countless stars glittered in a black sky tinged with indigo. The steel castle loomed over her, with a large full moon at its tip. 

Not far away, she found Kirito’s and Yui’s faces watching her with concern. His hand was propping her up in a sitting position. 

“…Thank you. I’m fine now,” she whispered, regaining her balance and glancing at what she was wearing. It was the regular blue robe again, of course. 

“Asuna,” he said, concerned and plaintive. She looked at him again. She was uncertain of how to proceed but then realized that what she needed to say was already in her mind. 

“Sachi was smiling,” Asuna said. Kirito’s eyes went as wide as they could go. 

She could see the stars reflected in his black eyes grow more numerous. Asuna used all her heart to impart the words that had been entrusted to her. 

Just as heartfelt as Sachi’s Christmas song had been.