Sword Art Online - Volume 26 - Chapter 12

12

At no point, in either the real world or any virtual world, had I ever run as hard as I was now, I decided as I sprinted pell-mell after the flying black snake.

Fortunately, the landscape itself was completely consistent in its series of low, rolling hills, and my well of stamina was deeper than I’d realized. My breath got ragged and my muscles burned, but I was maintaining a pace that would have left me collapsed long ago in the real world, and Eolyne was keeping up.

I recalled that during the Otherworld War two centuries ago, the human army’s secondary force and the Dark Territory’s pugilists guild traveled hundreds of miles on foot. My authority level was far higher than theirs, so I couldn’t possibly give up and cry uncle after a few dozen miles, I scolded myself.

After thirty minutes of sprinting, the black snake finally began to drift downward. Inwardly praying, I said, “Are we finally reaching the goal?”

“I can only hope so,” said Eolyne. I looked over my shoulder at him.

His Highness the pilot commander had loosened his uniform down to the chest, and sweat ran down his forehead. The leather mask looked extremely uncomfortable, and if I wasn’t so self-conscious about bringing it up, I would have told him to just take it off.

Then again, he had said he wore the mask because the skin around his eyes was sensitive to sunlight. Solus still hadn’t risen over the slopes to the east, so he should probably be able to remove it now, at least for a little bit.

“Oh! Kirito, there!” Eolyne cried, pulling my attention away from him.

There was something beyond the hill we were climbing now.

At the foot of a basin collecting the predawn darkness, there was an obviously man-made structure. It was about the height of a three-story building, and not that wide, either, but it was accompanied by a nearby road about five hundred yards long—no, a runway. Making this…

“…A base?”

“So it seems,” Eolyne agreed. He put a hand on my shoulder to hold me back, then proceeded to the top of the hill, staying low, and finally getting down to a crawl.

In the sky, the black snake was flying right at the rectangular building, until it was no longer visible among the shadow. That told me it was almost certain that whatever had birthed that black snake was inside the building.

“Kirito, can you see that? Beyond the runway,” Eolyne whispered suddenly. I looked to the left.

At the end of the runway huddled something dark. At first I took it for some kind of massive ray, until I understood that this, too, was man-made. It was an enormous dragoncraft, even larger than the X’rphan Mk. 13.

“…Those wings are enormous…,” I murmured back.

“Yes,” Eolyne agreed, “it’s been maximized for capacity, not speed. There are a bunch of supports under those huge main wings, I believe.”

“Meaning…that’s what shot all those guided missiles at us?”

“I think so,” he replied quietly. “But if so, it means we were detected approaching Admina ahead of time. Either our information leaked somehow or they’re utilizing some kind of advanced detection system that even I don’t know about…”

I was a total amateur when it came to military and intelligence matters, of course, but I understood that either of these cases was a big deal to Eolyne. I couldn’t just shrug it off as “not my problem,” but I didn’t have anything to add.

“…Kirito. I have to investigate that base. Of course, it’ll involve some level of danger, so I can’t ask you to come with me…”

“Of course I will. It shouldn’t be a question,” I hastened to reply. Before Eolyne could protest, I added, “If I let you go alone and anything happens, I don’t know what I’ll say to Stica and Laurannei. Plus, maybe what I’m looking for is in there. In fact…if it’s okay to use Incarnation, we don’t need to sneak. I can just pull that building up out of the ground and take the walls and roof off piece by piece…”

“……”

Whether out of annoyance or admiration—surely the former—Eolyne said nothing for several seconds. He recovered and shook his head. “No. The people in there might know we crash-landed, but they shouldn’t know we’ve found their base yet. The perpetrator might be somewhere else right now, and there’s no harm in maintaining our secrecy for the time being.”

“That’s a good point…All right, I’ll follow your orders from here on,” I announced. While Eolyne shot me a suspicious look, he accepted the offer.

“Very well. I only have one order, though: Hold my hand and don’t let go.”

“H-hold your hand…? I don’t think we’re at the age where we need to worry about getting lost.”

“That’s not what I mean. We have to use Hollow Incarnation.”

“H-holo…?”

I couldn’t process what word he had said and had to wait for Eolyne to trace the spelling in the air for me.

“Hollow…? What do you mean?”

“It’s the advanced form of the Incarnation-Hiding Incarnation I mentioned earlier: Incarnation that removes your existence.”

“Removes your…existence…”

It was my turn to be totally shaken. I stared at the white leather mask, aghast, and asked him quietly, “Do you mean imagining yourself being obliterated?”

“No, not like that,” Eolyne said, shaking his head forcefully. In a warning tone, he explained, “It’s held to be impossible to remove yourself from existence with the power of Incarnation. After all, the source of the Incarnation is yourself. It would be like trying to use the suction tube of a cleaning machine to suck up the machine itself.”

Huh! So they have something like a vacuum cleaner here, too? I thought, getting distracted. “That’s a good point,” I said out loud.

Eolyne’s mouth was still pursed. “But with the level of Incarnation you can wield, I suppose you might twist that law of nature, too, Kirito. So don’t attempt to erase yourself with Incarnation, even as a joke.”

“I-I’ll take that lesson to heart,” I swore, raising my hand. “But then what is this Hollow Incarnation?”

“To put it simply, it’s using Incarnation to erase yourself from another person’s perception…Well, maybe erase isn’t the right word…Diluting? Fusing, maybe…”

“Diluting? Fusing…?” I repeated.

On his stomach on the ground, Eolyne shrugged. “It’d take me an hour to attempt to explain with any detail. Just trust that if you stick with me, the guards won’t spot you.”

“A-all right…I believe you.”

“Good. Then take my hand,” he said, offering his left. I grabbed it and held tight.

Eolyne’s eyes shut, and he let out a long, slow breath.

I was suddenly overtaken by a very strange sensation. A kind of rippling effect took place before my eyes, starting in front of me and spreading behind. The boundary between me and the world became vague, and a weightless feeling took hold in me, as though my flesh were expanding into air.

The feeling dulled very quickly but did not disappear altogether. Diluting was indeed a good word for it. My very existence was thinner than before.

Next to me, the contours of Eolyne’s figure were subtly but undeniably wavering. It felt like we had both become ghosts. I squeezed without thinking, and he squeezed back as a sign of reassurance. The thinning effect was only visual. Our bodies still occupied the space.

If this truly odd sensation was an effect of manipulating reality through imagination, then Eolyne’s Incarnation might not match mine in terms of simple strength, but his technique far outclassed mine.

I shouldn’t be getting full of myself just because I can do things like create defensive walls and lift dragoncraft into the air, I scolded myself. We started walking down the hill, matching our steps carefully.

The mysterious base was far more elaborate than I took it for at first.

The building itself was a sturdy mix of metal framework and stone; the walls seemed to be nearly three feet thick. Despite my confident comments earlier, it would hardly be a walk in the park to lift something like this with Incarnation alone.

It looked to be about fifty yards to a side and ten yards tall. The west side, which faced the runway, featured a massive warehouse-style shutter gate, while the personnel entrance was on the south side. We were heading for the back gate on the north side, however.

Guards dressed in dark uniforms stood on either side of the gate. They were holding not swords or spears but what clearly looked like guns. They weren’t quite like real-world rifles, but they would do more than hurt if we got shot.

But Eolyne headed directly for the gate, not bothering to even slow down. The guards should be able to see us by now, but neither one was so much as budging.

At the bottom of the hill, the ground turned from flower field to a gravel surface. Our boots made an unpleasant scraping sound, much to my consternation, but the guards did not react to this, either. If Eolyne’s Hollow Incarnation were merely an invisibility cloak, it shouldn’t cover up our footsteps on top of that, so it seemed that his explanation was accurate: It really did remove our existence from the guards’ ability to perceive us at all.

That made me worry about his longevity in maintaining this state, but at this point, all I could do was trust in him. I matched Eolyne’s pace as we took the shortest and straightest route to the back door of the base.

Fortunately, the gate was open. If we were preventing the guards from perceiving us, then maybe we could have just flung the gate open without drawing any notice, but I hadn’t wanted to test that hypothesis.

The gravel transitioned into paved stone tiles. The blank looks on the guards’ faces and their dark, shining rifles were crisp and clear now.

Thinking back on my time in Centoria as a student at Swordcraft Academy, there had never been standing guards like this, and that had been because Underworlders never broke any rules. If a place was labeled off-limits, you didn’t need a guard there because no one would ever go inside. The fundamental laws behind that were still intact two centuries later, so why were this base and Central Cathedral guarded so tightly?

I wanted to ask Eolyne this question—he was right next to me. But I’d forgotten to ask if I could speak to him while the Hollow Incarnation was active. It would be a disaster if I caused his Incarnation to waver and the guards spotted us. So I shelved my question for now—which meant there was a good chance I’d forget it later—and focused on walking instead.

The gate was at the end of a fence that jutted out from the side of the building in a rectangular shape. Because it was the rear gate, it was only ten feet or so across. Meaning that, as we were walking side by side, we would be going directly past the guards. I’d experienced this a number of times in SAO and ALO, but unlike those situations, this was not a quest running on a script. It could turn out the guards were just pretending not to notice us so they could blast us with their guns when we were right next to them.

Keeping myself wary and prepared to deploy an Incarnate shield at the shortest possible warning, I made my way down the last few yards. The eyes of the guards in the fierce helmets turned our way, passed through us, and then traveled back. I felt sweat blossom on my palms, but Eolyne’s stayed dry, and the cool texture helped keep me calm and centered.

Eugeo’s hands were like this, too.

We passed by the guards and got inside the fence. There were no further guards posted at the back door of the building itself. We quietly opened the glass door and went inside, where a dimly lit hallway continued straight ahead. There was no guard station or reception counter, making it obvious this was not an official facility in any capacity.

Down the corridor, a stairwell appeared on the right. You could go up or down—or continue down the hall. I didn’t have time to make a decision before Eolyne pulled me into the stairwell. When we were against the wall, he let go of my hand with a heavy sigh.

Immediately, the wavering of my vision cleared, and the strangely distant sensations vanished. The Hollow Incarnation had been released.

Eolyne’s chest was heaving for breath. I asked quietly, “You all right, Eo?”

“…Yes, I’m fine. I’ll be better soon.”

But despite his reassurance, he was clearly pale even in the dim hallway light. I felt around my uniform belt and pulled a metal bottle off a trio of loops. Laurannei had called it a high-concentration recovery solution. I pulled off the cap and offered it to Eolyne.

The exhaustion that accompanied the use of Incarnation was not a numerical decrease to life but the consumption of the fluctlight—the soul itself—so I didn’t know if a healing solution would help. Eolyne took it anyway and thanked me for it.

He put the little bottle to his lips and swallowed it all in one go. When his face was level again, there was an odd expression there, so I asked, “Is it, uh…not very good?”

“It tastes like…dark-roasted cofil tea that was used to pickle siral peel…”

“Uh-huh.”

So a rich lemon coffee, then, I thought.

There were no guidance signs in the stairwell, so it wasn’t clear what sort of facilities were located on which floors.

“…So where should we start?”

“Where do you think?” he asked in return.

Taken aback, I said, “Well, the basement, I guess.”

“Why?”

“Because whenever you’re running sketchy tests, you always do it in the basement,” I replied.

I recalled then that the only thing below Central Cathedral was cells. But that was a factor of the self-centered, utterly willful ways of Her Holiness Administrator. If the people who shot down the X’rphan were bad guys with more common sense, they would hide whatever things they didn’t want seen in the basement level.

Eolyne accepted my simplistic answer and pulled away from the wall.

“Well, let’s start from the basement, then. There won’t be any Hollow Incarnation from this point on, so make sure you watch our back.”

“Got it,” I replied, and we began to sneak down the stairs.