Sword Art Online - Volume 24 - Chapter 2

2

I finished my shopping in Ikebukuro, then got on the Tobu-Tojo Line express for thirty-two minutes. The street at the west entrance rotary at Kawagoe Station was still dry. According to the weather app, I had about ten minutes before it started raining. In a hurry, I ran to the public bicycle lot and pulled out my ride.

The quickest route from the station to my house was through the Little Edo old town area. There was always traffic there, but after the road expansion five or six years ago, they’d added a bicycle lane that made passage easier for cyclists like me. I pedaled as hard as I could, feeling the rain clouds looming from the south, and turned right once I was through Little Edo. As soon as I reached my home near the large shrine, large drops started to fall. I parked my mountain bike under the roof and used my waterproof bag to block the rain as I hopped through the front door.

I didn’t even have time to announce my presence before Suguha, waiting on top of the step in her tracksuit, shouted, “Welcome back, Big Brother! You’re late, by the way!”

“I can’t help that. I have twice the commute time you do…,” I started to say before suddenly feeling déjà vu. “Wait…didn’t we have this conversation yesterday?”

“We did,” Suguha agreed, confirming my suspicions.

I’m not stuck in a daily loop, am I? I wondered as she handed me the same towel she had the day before. I took it gratefully, wiping off the sweat and raindrops on my skin.

“So, uh, I’m guessing you need me to dive in as soon as I can again today…?”

“Obviously! We can’t decide what to do with Kirito Town unless you’re there.”

“Hold on…since when was that its name?!”

“Everyone calls it that now. C’mon, get to your room…Hey, what did you buy? Fancy treats?” she asked, noticing the bag with the department store logo on it in my hand. It did look like it would contain expensive sweets, but this was unfortunately filled with something else.

“No, um, it’s, uh…,” I mumbled, which was all Suguha needed to figure it out.

“Ohhh, okay, I get it. Wait…you bought that today?! That’s cutting it way too close, mister!!”

“That’s just evidence of how long I spent thinking about it…Anyway, you’re going in, too, right? Dive from your own room this time.”

“Fine, fine. There are some onigiri in the kitchen,” she said with a grin, then trotted up the stairs. I headed for the kitchen, making a mental note to get Suguha’s birthday present early next year.

Up in my room, I changed into more comfortable clothes, ate the salmon and cod roe onigiri Suguha made for me, then took care of my bathroom needs before I went to lie down on the bed and put on my AmuSphere.

Three days had already passed since the UR incident began, but the mysteries only grew deeper, rather than resolving themselves. Opinions were flying fast and furious on social media and message boards, but none of them were outside the realm of speculation, Argo told me while on the way to Ginza. All we knew for sure was that no player had yet reached the “land revealed by the heavenly light.”

We wanted to get there, too, of course, but our chances of being first were extremely low. Most of our group was made of students and adults who couldn’t stay logged in from morning until night every day. We still had the advantage of our entire home falling to a spot fifteen miles past the Stiss Ruins, the official starting point for all ALO converts. That meant we had to be further along than anyone from ALO, but within a week, we’d be overtaken by all the hard-core gamers who could dive all day long. We’d already been attacked by PKers the last two nights. If they’d had gear and levels equal to ours, we would have been wiped out.

But that didn’t mean we had the option of ditching school. I just had to fulfill my school duties to a respectable degree and play my best in the meantime. I dimmed the room lights, closed my eyes, and said, “Link Start.”

The rainbow array of light that ensued erased the gravity holding me to my bed and sent my mind soaring into the virtual world.

When gravity returned, I opened my eyes. I saw a familiar log cabin ceiling…and sighed with relief. I’d been worried about a possible third attack while I was at school, but my home was safe for now. Of course, I had means of receiving communication from Alice or Yui during the day, so if there had been an attack, they would have let me know, and I’d have bolted right out of the classroom for the nurse’s office so I could full-dive with an Augma. Obviously, though, I wanted to avoid doing that if possible.

I sat up, causing my now-familiar metal armor to clank as I looked around the cabin’s living room. When I logged out this morning, the cabin was packed with all the friends who’d met up with us, but it was empty now, even though Leafa had dived in barely minutes before me.

“…Hey, Sugu…I mean, Leafa, are you here?” I called out, walking to the front door and opening the thick slab of wood.

Outside was our circular yard, surrounded by tall stone walls and measuring sixty yards in diameter, with an area of roughly 1,950 square feet. A number of large production stations were placed along the wall. The interior here was empty, too. Not only were Yui and Alice not here, but even the trio of guardians were nowhere in sight: Aga, the long-billed giant agamid; Kuro, the lapispine dark panther; and Misha, the thornspike cave bear.

I was starting to get worried. Again, I called out, “Hello…? Anybody…?”

But my voice just vanished into the crimson sunset. Everyone had made sure to register one another as friends before logging out this morning, so if I opened my ring menu, I could send a message to any of them, but the eeriness of this experience gave me a primordial fear that I might find my friends list empty, too, and I didn’t want to lift my hand to open it.

I stepped off the porch and onto the ground, walking diagonally across the lawn to the south gate. During the invasion last night, Asuna, Alice, and Silica had fought with their lives to defend this wooden gate. I carefully pushed it open.

Yesterday, there had been deep forest all around the cabin, but it had changed dramatically. After the invaders burned the trees, our group had taken advantage of the carnage and used the wood to build a bunch of houses. The diameter of what Suguha called Kirito Town—surely impossible to rename now—was now two hundred feet. It was split into north, south, east, and west quadrants by intersecting X streets. The south area directly ahead of me was intended to be a business district, but not a single shop had opened yet, so it felt like a ghost town. The road that surrounded the log cabin’s circular wall, which we called Inner Perimeter Road, branched off into Four O’Clock Road and Eight O’Clock Road to the southeast and southwest, respectively. But there was no one in any of those directions, either.

I sucked a deep breath into virtual lungs, intending to call for someone as loud as I could this time—but I held it instead after hearing what sounded like the faint sound of a child laughing.

A nasty sensation trickled down my spine. There couldn’t be any children here. So was it…a ghost? Did our town being so empty summon ghost-type monsters into it?

I let out my breath quietly, listening. This time, I definitely heard high-pitched laughter. It wasn’t my mind playing tricks on me. The voice was coming from the east.

I brought up my ring menu and equipped my fine iron longsword, then walked east alongside the stone wall surrounding the log cabin. A large wooden building soon appeared on the right-hand side.

The east area was the residential space for the Patter, the ratpeople NPCs Sinon had brought with her last night. The fan-shaped area had a large meeting hall at the tip, which is what I was looking at now. The middle of the area was empty space for planting crops, while the outer edge was lined with compact homes.

There was another frolicking cry. It was not from the meeting hall…but the empty space on the other side. Envisioning some horror of invading ghosts wiping out the twenty Patter, I snuck down Four O’Clock Road. It wasn’t paved yet, so my iron-plated boots didn’t make much noise. I advanced along the wall of the meeting hall, then peered around the side.

And the sound that came out of my mouth was, “Weh?”

The empty space in the middle, which was split up like layers of a cake, had been naked earth just this morning. But already the northern half was tilled into rows, where the Patter tended to something that looked like corn plants. The southern half, which was still empty, featured Leafa, Silica, Alice, Asuna, and Yui, all in a row, watching over a massive four-legged guardian: Misha, the thornspike cave bear. But actually, it wasn’t the bear they were all watching and smiling at but five young Patter who were lined up astride Misha’s back.

Compared to their adults, the Patter children had shorter snouts and smaller ears. They squealed with delight for every plodding step from the bear. They were no bigger than infants in human terms, so if the ten-foot-long Misha wanted to eat them in one bite, it could…but there was one other thing more concerning now.

“…Hey, did those kids…?” I whispered into Leafa’s ear, but my sister just turned and shouted, “Oh, you’re finally here!”

That caused Asuna and the others to notice me and say hello. I gave them an automatic “Hey” and tried to ask my question again. “Did those little rats…er, little Patter come from somewhere? The party was all adults when we left that dungeon in the Giyoru Savanna, right?”

Leafa, Silica, and Asuna looked away awkwardly, so Alice said in a tone of bafflement, “It would seem they were born last night.”

“B-born?!” I repeated, looking at Misha’s back again. The five cavorting children were as tiny as beans on the gigantic bear, but they did not look like newborn babies.

“Was someone among the Patter pregnant…? And even then, they look pretty big for half a day.”

This time, it was Yui who explained. “Papa, I have been with the Patter all day long. The children appeared all at once at about nine o’clock this morning. The Patter seemed to understand they would be appearing and had beds laid out for them ahead of time. When they appeared, all five were about this big…”

She held out her hands to indicate a space the size of a melon.

“They were only small children, and they have grown to what you see now in the last nine hours. They can even speak, although it’s just individual words.”

“Wowww…”

It was all I could say. Five babies were born overnight and grew this much in half a day. The town was going to be overrun with Patter within a week at this rate.

Yui sensed my concerns and explained, “Based on extrapolation from my limited data set, NPCs in the world of Unital Ring seem to expand and contract in number based on their living space and environment. The capacity of the homes you built for the Patter was greater than twenty, so perhaps the babies appeared to match the number that would expect to live in this much space.”

“Ahhh…so that’s what it means,” Asuna murmured. “I was shocked by all the kids when I logged in—and even more shocked when you told me they were born this morning. But no matter how advanced a virtual world Unital Ring is, they’re not going to model, you know…the reproductive cycle in such realistic detail.”

Without missing a beat, Alice added, “The Underworld worked essentially the same way as the real world.”

Neither Asuna, Silica, nor Leafa could say anything to that, leaving me to touch that hot iron poker.

“W-well, the Underworld was a very special exception to the rule…”

But then I recalled that there was another notable exception: Sword Art Online. If you dug extremely deep into the settings menu and disabled the moral code setting, it was possible to perform The Deed. You couldn’t have a baby—as far as I knew. But why would Akihiko Kayaba have put a system like that in his game in the first place?

The Seed Package didn’t contain that function, so I assumed the same would be true of Unital Ring. Unless…

“They might not re-create all the steps, but given that this game has such a detailed sense of world-building, if an NPC can have children, maybe players can, too,” I murmured mostly to myself and mostly without thinking.

“Of course you can’t have babies!!” yelled Leafa, slapping my back with great force. It didn’t hurt, but I cried “Ow!” anyway.

“Wh-what was that for?”

“For being weird, Kirito! If players have a baby, who’s going to be the baby?!”

“W-well…I figured it’d be like an NPC, so an AI—”

But I couldn’t finish that sentence. A sudden pain like silver sparks shot through the center of my head, knocking me clean off my feet.

“Ah……”

I lurched and wobbled; Alice quickly grabbed my right arm to hold me up. Leafa leaned close and examined my face.

“Wh-what’s the matter, Big Brother?”

“I dunno…I’m fine. Just a bit of a headache.”

Silica sounded worried, however. “Kirito, you haven’t been getting enough sleep. Shouldn’t you log off early tonight?”

Atop her head, the tiny dragon Pina trilled, “Kyurrrr…”

“N-no, I’m fine. I feel normal now,” I claimed.

As a matter of fact, the pain lasted for only an instant. I shook my head as hard as I could—not that virtual movements had any effect on my actual brain—and didn’t feel a thing. I looked around, wondering what had come over me, and met Asuna’s eyes. Her expression seemed empty. Her hazel-brown eyes were looking in my direction but tunneling straight through me into the distance beyond.

“…Asuna?” I said quietly.

She blinked rapidly, and her eyes regained focus. “Oh…I’m sorry. I was spacing out there.”

“Everyone’s short on sleep, huh? Maybe tonight, we should let folks log out early if they need to.”

“Good idea. That goes for you, too, Kirito.”

“Got it,” I replied, although I had absolutely no intention of going to sleep early. My instincts were telling me that tonight, the third day in the game, would mean the difference between our town surviving or not—and the life and death of our group.

In the center of the square, Misha continued to walk in a slow circle, the baby ratmen screaming and laughing on their backs. If it took half a day for them to go from infants to children, would they become adults within a few more days or would they stay in this growth state for now? Either way, we had to protect this town to keep those kids alive, too.

“So…where are Kuro and Aga?” I asked, thinking of our two other pets.

Silica glanced to the southwest and answered, “Liz and Sinon took them to collect stones from the riverside. We would have sent Misha, too, but we couldn’t bring ourselves to end the fun for the children…”

“Ah, I see.”

In the world of Unital Ring, pets would obey orders from registered friends of their owner, to an extent.

“Maybe I should go and help, too,” I murmured. Asuna, Leafa, Alice, and Yui all chimed in to agree. We left Silica, Misha’s owner, in charge of the situation here, then headed for the southwest gate of the town.

But no sooner had we walked a few yards west along the inner perimeter than more footsteps approached. Lisbeth and Sinon appeared from Eight O’Clock Road, followed by Kuro and Aga. Both animals had cargo bags on their backs, likely fashioned by Asuna.

“Hey, guys,” I hailed. Lisbeth replied with a hearty “Heya!” but Sinon was looking downward, deep in thought. I scratched Kuro’s neck when it approached and asked the gunner, “Something wrong, Sinon?”

“Huh…? Oh yeah, it’s just…”

Sinon came to a stop and looked around at the group.

“I was thinking about how it’s nice that we have ample resources around Kirito Town,” she said, “but it seems likely that anyone attacking us will find them useful as well.”

“Uh…what do you mean?”

“Here’s an example. If the Carpentry skill lists things in the menu like a catapult and a battering ram, then you could use the stones at the river and wood from the forest to build as many as you want, right? And you don’t even need to go that far. They can already build pillboxes to serve as their offensive base…”

“Pillboxes,” I repeated, glancing at the others.

In my ignorant understanding, a pillbox was a structure that came with some heavy armaments capable of automatic fire. The musket Sinon was carrying now wasn’t going to be punching holes in our town walls, and you could easily approach while she was reloading it. Why the concern?

“Oh!” I exclaimed, finally understanding. “Other GGO players are going to have brought in huge machine guns and stuff like that, huh?”

“Yes. Like my Hecate, I’m sure they’re all too heavy for the players to use them, but eventually, they’ll be able. We should be prepared with a plan before it comes to that.”

“Hmmmm…”

At this moment, it was very hard to realistically imagine that scenario. Catapults and battering rams were hard enough, but it was simply impossible to envision a series of stone-made pillboxes with heavy machine guns blasting out of them.

But that was a kind of battle Sinon had participated in many, many times in GGO, I was sure. Now that the Patter had moved into this town and had children, we couldn’t just abandon them to their fate. We had a duty to anticipate all possible scenarios and prepare for them.

“…All right. I’m sure that if we put our heads together and think, we’ll come up with a way to prevent enemies from using the resources outside against us. But the first thing we should discuss today is”—I paused, looking around at every other person present—“what to do about the name of the town.”

“Huh? It’s Kirito Town, isn’t it?” Sinon replied.

Asuna and the others started to nod, so I thrust out my arms and protested, “No, no, no! If you call it that, it’s only going to make us more likely to get attacked!”

“Oh, you’re self-aware enough to know they’re after you?” Lisbeth noted wryly. I had no response, and soon Leafa and Asuna began giggling. With a totally straight face, Alice said, “What were you doing in ALO and these other worlds?”

We went back to the log cabin and formed a circle in the living room, along with Silica, who’d been released from baby ratpeople duty. We were missing Asuna’s favorite big table, so I wanted to make her a replacement soon, but for that, we’d need to find a tree with a trunk at least five feet across. Sadly, the spiral pines and other trees around here were two and a half feet at the largest, not nearly big enough to make a table that seated twelve.

Fortunately, the built-in oven in the kitchen was still here, and Lisbeth made us a pot with her Blacksmithing skill, so we could boil water. Asuna brought out the steaming pot and shook some black powder into it.

“…What’s that, Asuna?” Lisbeth asked.

Asuna replied proudly, “While I was waiting around for you last night, I picked a bunch of leaves in the forest, then tried dry roasting them in the pot. They turned into powder, and I got the Pharmaceutical skill. Anyway, I boiled half of them and turned them into liquid, and the rest turned into dyes.”

“Dyes…,” I repeated, then noticed something. When I had left for the Giyoru Savanna, Asuna’s hair had been light blue, as it was in Alfheim, but now it was back to a light-brown color, like she’d had during the Aincrad days.

“…You dyed your own hair?”

“You finally noticed,” she said, exasperated.

“How many other dyes did you make?” I asked to follow up.

“Ummm, there’s a darker brown, a deep red, and a dark gray, if I remember.”

“Hrmm…”

For an instant, I considered dyeing my hair, but none of them sounded right for me. Silica teased her own hair, which was a light-brown color like Asuna’s. “I’m guessing that bright colors and also pure black are probably rare dye colors. It would be a waste for you to change your hair color.”

“Hrrrrrmmm…,” I grumbled.

Meanwhile, Asuna set out enough homemade pottery cups for everyone, then scooped out the contents of the pot with a wooden ladle.

“I also managed to make a couple kinds of tea. These leaves were the ones that got the best response.”

“Only in comparison to the others,” noted Alice, who had probably been Asuna’s tester. Silica nodded vigorously.

The color of the liquid in the cups Asuna passed around was a dark blackish purple. I gave it a sniff; if you called it tea and gave it to me, I’d accept that it was tea. But if you called it medicine, I’d probably agree as well. That was the kind of complex scent that stimulated my nose. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t nervous, but I couldn’t be rude and ignore Asuna’s hard work.

I took a hesitant sip and discovered a flavor that was similar to barley tea with red shiso extract. A leaf icon appeared to the right of my HP bar, indicating a Buff.

“…It’s medicine!” I cried, and Alice and Silica nodded with intense agreement.

I was curious about the Buff effects, but it wasn’t bad, so I sat back and enjoyed it, giving Asuna plenty of feedback and appreciation. In no time, it was seven o’clock, and Klein logged in, too. Agil was supposed to show up by ten; he ran a café and bar, so that was to be expected.

Once the meeting started, I first raised the topic of the town name. Sadly, none of us had the sense of creativity to overwrite a hit as big as Kirito Town, so that became homework for the group.

Our next topic was the plan to accept other NPCs after the Patter. The first candidates were the Bashin people, who were already friends with Silica, Lisbeth, and Yui and lived close by. The second candidates were the Orniths, the birdpeople Sinon had met. They would be helpful in our settlement because they had muskets, which were currently the most powerful of long-distance weapons, but their settlement was on the other side of the vast Giyoru Savanna. According to Sinon, on the other side of the giant wall (and the magic-wielding Goliath Rana inside it) were huge, powerful dinosaurs. So crossing the savanna to ask the Orniths was a life-threatening endeavor, and there was no guarantee they would be interested in moving.

That left the Bashin as the natural choice to reach out to first. Lisbeth nominated herself to do the negotiation. Yui and Asuna asked to accompany her, and I wanted to go, too, but there was another crucial mission for me already.

Our third topic for discussion was Sinon’s worry about the bountiful resources nearby being used against us. Despite the variety of opinions shared, our conclusion was simply to stay more alert for attacks than before. We could expand our defensive stone walls and pave the interior in an attempt to leave no stone or wood left to gather, but an increase in defensive line size meant an astronomical leap in the strength needed to defend it, and harvesting those materials would be a huge undertaking. Plus, the reason for the town in the first place was to make players think twice about attacking us, so our priority should be to grow it into a real town, rather than simply boosting our physical defenses. For that reason, we needed companions good at collecting information.

After the meeting, Silica, Misha, Sinon, Klein, and Alice were left behind to defend Kirito Town, while I prepared to leave with Kuro for the Stiss Ruins, where I was scheduled to meet up with Argo.

But before I could leave the southwest gate, Alice came rushing up with a hooded cloak over her metal armor, saying, “I will go with you, Kirito.” The cat ears she’d inherited from her ALO avatar fit right into little ear pockets sewn into the hood, which was very cute.

“Huh…? You’re coming, too? Why?”

“Surely I do not need a specific reason to want to leave and travel,” Alice said with a trace of a pout. She murmured, “Plus, I would like to speak with you.”

Based on the serious look on her face, I could imagine what it was about. And I certainly couldn’t refuse her for that.

“…All right,” I said. “But I’d better let someone know you’re coming with us…”

“I told Klein and Silica. He was smiling at me for some reason.”

“……”

I made a mental note to send him a message not to get the wrong idea about that.

“All right, then, let’s go,” I said. “But we need to hurry.”

“That’s not a problem,” Alice stated, and Kuro growled in agreement.

Two players and one panther opened the heavy wooden gate a crack and left the town, running south down the trail toward the river.