Sword Art Online - Volume 26 - Chapter 1

1

“……Selka!!”

Overcome with emotion, the Integrity Knight Alice Synthesis Thirty cried out and charged like a gust of wind.

The navy-blue hat atop her head couldn’t withstand the force. It flew off, revealing long braids as she moved. I caught the hat in midair then sped after Alice.

My companions—Asuna, Integrity Pilot Commander Eolyne Herlentz, and his subordinates Laurannei Arabel and Stica Schtrinen—followed closely behind. In a matter of seconds, Alice had climbed the green slope in the middle of Central Cathedral’s Cloudtop Garden and stopped just short of its peak.

On the flat top of the man-made hill was a single, aged broadleaf tree. It was not flowering at the moment, but my instinct told me it was an osmanthus tree.

Long, long in the past—only two years ago in my own time, but two centuries in the Underworld—Eugeo and I had come here to the eightieth floor and seen an osmanthus tree right in this spot. It hadn’t been a real tree, however, but instead Alice’s weapon, the Osmanthus Blade, transformed so it could absorb sacred power.

The sword was currently stuck in the unlocking mechanism for the great doors leading to the Cloudtop Garden. So the osmanthus tree ahead of us was presumably a real tree planted after the Otherworld War. But that wasn’t the most important thing now…

“Selka,” Alice said again, her voice barely audible this time. She stumbled uncertainly toward the shade under the tree.

Before her was a girl in a formal seated position, protected by the tree standing over her.

She wore a white veil and a vestment of the same color. Her closed eyelids and the hands resting on her lap were as white as alabaster. It was a cold texture that gave off no sense of vitality. But the details were too fine for her to be a statue, either. This was a real person who had been petrified—placed under the Deep Freeze art.

I knew her face and name. She had grown somewhat since the form I remembered, but there was no doubt that it was Alice’s younger sister, Selka Zuberg.

Selka had been a nun in training in the tiny village of Rulid at the northern end of the realm. It was unclear how she had come to be petrified within Central Cathedral, but upon awakening from my two-month coma at the Rath office in Roppongi, I had apparently given a message to Alice, who was there waiting for me: Alice, your sister, Selka, chose to go into deep freeze to wait for your return. She’s still slumbering now, atop that hill on the eightieth floor of Central Cathedral.

I had no memory of Selka being frozen here or of telling Alice about it, but those words had been the impetus for Alice, Asuna, and I to return to the Underworld. With the help of Eolyne and others, we had finally reached her.

Alice, dressed in the blue uniform of the Pilothood, knelt in front of the slumbering girl and placed her hands over her sister’s. It did not have any magical dispelling effect.

“Selka…,” Alice repeated, her voice tight. Asuna joined her and placed a hand on her trembling back. I wanted Selka to awaken as soon as humanly possible, but the art of Deep Freeze would surely require its own special art to undo it. I didn’t know it, of course; the only ones who would have were the prime senator of the Axiom Church, Chudelkin, and Administrator…

I glanced around for clues and saw, about three feet away on either side, two other women standing watch over Selka.

Based on the texture, they seemed to have been frozen in the same way. Both wore robes that reached their feet, and their hands rested on the pommels of longswords, tips touching the ground. They were not wearing armor, but a familiar cross-and-circle insignia was stitched on the front flap of their robes, so they were surely knights. They seemed to be in their mid-twenties, if I had to guess…and then I noticed something else.

“Uh?” I gasped softly.

First, I stared closely at the woman on the right, then I examined the woman on the left before returning to the right again.

Their ages were nothing like I remembered them, but their faces, their general bearing…perhaps…

I spun around like I’d been struck, found the commander and the two pilots who were watching from an uneasy distance, and beckoned them to come closer.

“E-excuse me, Stica and Laurannei? Can you come over here?”

They seemed surprised by the summons, but promptly chirped, “Of course!”

Stica got up the slope first; I positioned her next to the woman on the left. Then I had Laurannei stand next to the knight on the right so I could compare the finer details.

They were very similar. If the girls aged another decade, they would probably look exactly like these two knights. Stica and Laurannei looked just like their ancestors from seven generations ago, too.

Which would mean these knights were…

“Are they…Ronie and Tiese…?” I murmured, stunned. The pilots were the first to react.

“What?!” “No way!!” they shrieked, spinning on their heels to examine the taller knights they were standing beside.

Alice and Asuna promptly turned away from Selka to see as well. They initially looked up at me, then got to their feet, Alice staring at the knight on the left while Asuna peered at the one on the right.

After a few moments, Asuna pressed her hands to her mouth and whispered, “I-it really is Ronie. And this one is Tiese…But why are they…?”

I couldn’t believe it, either. I had just assumed that after the Otherworld War, Ronie and Tiese had gotten married, had children, raised new knights, and after decades of happy life, had returned to the Lightcube Cluster from whence they’d come. At the very least, because of the existence of Laurannei and Stica, we knew they had children.

But nothing else was known. They could have given birth at a young age, then allowed themselves to be petrified while they were still young. But that would mean being permanently separated from their children while they were just babies; I couldn’t imagine that such well-meaning girls would do something so cruel to their own families.

Was it not Ronie and Tiese’s will to be frozen here? If so, what could have happened here two centuries ago…?

I was rooted to the spot, full of equal parts delight that their fluctlights were intact and confusion at the many questions they’d left behind. Alice approached me and grabbed my shoulder.

“Kirito, can you undo the petrification on Selka, Ronie, and Tiese with your Incarnation?”

“Wh-what…?!” I stammered, taken aback. But considering the possibility for a moment, I decided that it might actually work. However…

“I can’t completely rule it out…but I’d prefer to undo the effect with the proper art. When I turned Amayori and Takiguri back into eggs, I just imagined time rewinding. But I can’t fathom how you’re intended to imagine turning people back to normal from the Deep Freeze effect. If I use Incarnation the wrong way or only partially undo the effect…”

Alice took her hand off my shoulder and clapped it over my mouth to stop me from talking.

“All right, you don’t need to say any more…but I don’t know the art to undo Deep Freeze, either…,” she admitted dispiritedly, letting go of my mouth. She looked at the young pilot commander waiting behind us. “Eolyne, do you know?”

His answer did not surprise me.

“I’m sorry, but no. I’ve read about the Deep Freeze art, but nothing more than that…Today is the first time I have ever seen someone under its effect.”

“…Ah. That’s too bad…,” she replied, looking away.

Asuna placed a comforting hand on her back again. “It’s all right, Alice. Kirito told you that Selka was waiting for you here, didn’t he? He wouldn’t have said that if there wasn’t a way to undo the petrification.”

I wanted to back her up on that, but I had no recollection of that particular memory. If it was this Star King who had said that to Alice, shouldn’t he have left behind a scroll or medicine or something that would undo the spell?

Stupid Star King, I grumbled to myself yet again. I approached Alice, too, and added, “Let’s keep going for now. Maybe there’s a tool or the art to undo the petrification farther up.”

“……Yes. Maybe there is,” Alice agreed weakly. She bent down to caress Selka’s head once more, then looked past the osmanthus tree.

On the other side of the hill was another set of double doors identical to the ones behind us. The stairs to the eighty-first floor ought to be behind them, but my memories of that were faint, for some reason. It took a little thinking to understand why.

When Eugeo and I had navigated through the tower toward the top floor, where Administrator had lived, we’d fought against Alice here in the Cloudtop Garden. In no time at all, her powerful, flowing sword had me pinned to the wall. I’d activated my Perfect Weapon Control in a desperate attempt to turn the tables, but the force of it had gone haywire and blown a hole in the cathedral’s wall, sucking me and Alice outside.

I’d kept a firm grip on her, despite her protests, and eventually convinced her to climb back up the wall with me and inside the tower again. Thinking back, our separation on the eightieth floor was the effective end of me and Eugeo’s long journey together.

If I hadn’t fallen out of the tower there…or if all three of us had fallen, maybe things would’ve turned out differently…

But I had to brush that intrusive thought away.

“Wait for me here,” I stated. “I’ll go get the swords from the unlocking device.”

“Please, sir, allow us to handle an errand like that,” insisted Stica, until I cut her off.

“Forcing a girl to carry such a damnably heavy object like that is a real-world taboo as serious as anything in the Taboo Index,” I said, an awkward attempt at a joke. Stica and Laurannei looked surprised.

Asuna added, “It’s also taboo to use the d-word to girls like that, Kirito.”

“Oh. Pardon me,” I said, hunching my shoulders guiltily.

I had just taken a step toward the downward slope of the hill when a heavy clank! rang across the enclosed garden.

It was the unlocking sound we’d heard when entering this place. But the huge doors ahead of me were still open. Which could only mean one thing.

I spun around as fast as humanly possible, just as Alice cried, “Kirito, the far doors!”

In moments I had sprinted back to the osmanthus tree, where I could see the south side of the garden past the trunk. At the bottom of the gentle slope, past the bridge over the little brook, the set of doors was slowly opening.

Technically it was only the left of the two doors, from our perspective. It didn’t seem like there was a great host waiting behind it, but neither Asuna, Alice, nor I had our swords. In a pinch, I could probably use Incarnation to pull them out of the device and summon them back to our hands, but then it might get detected by the North Centoria Imperial Guard’s Incarnameters.

If this looks like a dangerous foe, we’ll flee at once, I told myself, watching the growing gap between the doors carefully.

At last, the door fell silent. It wasn’t open all the way—barely a foot and a half, in fact. Stepping through into the garden, about as tall as Stica and Laurannei and around the same age, was a girl.

She had hair evenly cut above the shoulder, held back with clips shaped like bird feathers. Her dress was a gentle blue, covered with a brilliant white apron. There was a wicker basket in her hands. She carried no weapons.

The girl took a few plodding steps forward, at which point a brown shape came waddling after her. The long ears made me think it was a rabbit at first, but the body shape was more ratlike, and it measured about a foot long.

The girl and creature walked along the path and over the bridge. Where the path split in two directions, she ignored it and continued straight up the hill. A few seconds later, the bunnymouse spotted us at the top, and it chirped, “Skwirr!”

She raised her head at the sound, looking quizzical at first, but her eyes gradually got wider as she realized what she was seeing.

Suddenly, she began racing up the hill. She lost her footing on the grass several times, slipping awkwardly. It made me want to shout, You don’t have to run! but it didn’t seem like the right situation for that. Fortunately, she made it to the top without falling. After taking a moment to catch her breath, she turned to the three of us under the tree.

At last, I realized that I recognized her.

She was the girl who had operated the levitating platform back in the days of Administrator. Was that really possible, though? When Eugeo and I had met her, she said she’d been doing the same job for 107 years already, and now it was another 200 years later. That would make her over 300 years old…twice the supposed time limit of the soul, which was estimated at 150 years. An incredible length of time.

“Ummm…are you…?”

…really that platform operator? I wanted to ask.

But as if to answer that unspoken question, the girl’s deep-blue eyes opened wide, and she spoke in a flat voice that was exactly as I remembered it.

“Lord Kirito…Lady Asuna…Lady Alice.”

Trembling droplets gathered at the corners of her eyes and then fell onto her apron.

But that was the extent of her outward show of emotion. She set down the basket, folded her hands against her lap, and bowed deeply.

“Welcome back.”

Her quiet, tremulous voice was accompanied by the squeak of the bunnymouse. “Skwirrk!”