Sword Art Online - Volume 26 - Chapter 4

4

In the sky beyond the window, the distant silver shine grew ever smaller.

Once the light, so small you would never have noticed unless you knew it was there, had passed through the cotton-puff clouds and vanished, Asuna let out the breath she was holding.

Alice was watching the sky right next to her. “So they’ve gone,” she said.

“They’ve gone,” Asuna replied. Alice briefly closed her eyes, saying a silent prayer, then sank deeper into the clear, hot water.

Ten minutes earlier, the silvery dragoncraft left the Morning Star Lookout. After seeing it off, the girls took Airy’s suggestion and rushed down to the Great Bath five floors lower. She said it was because they wouldn’t be able to see the craft fly away through the trees up there, but they couldn’t help but feel that she recognized their secret obsession with baths.

As a matter of fact, the windows in the Great Bath continued all the way to the ceiling and offered a clear view of the blue sky all around them. The vertically rising dragoncraft seemed to be almost translucent somehow, so it was difficult to find, but even the Star King’s private vehicle couldn’t hide the light of its exhaust. They were thus able to confirm that the dragoncraft made it out to space safely, but as Asuna sank up to her shoulders, she considered that perhaps some random person down in Centoria might have noticed it, too…or perhaps two people, or three.

“Ahhhhh……” The sound escaped her lips. Her body was enveloped in a comfort that relaxed her to the core, even to the inside of her mind. It seemed to her that this had happened before long, long ago.

Actually…it wasn’t just her imagination. It was on the seventh floor of Aincrad, wasn’t it? So nearly four years ago at this point. She and Kirito were at a hotel attached to a massive casino, the hub of a long questline, and they’d taken separate actions at one point—which ended up with her in a gorgeous hotel bath, if not quite as nice as this one. She’d been with Argo the info dealer; an NPC girl who ran the casino; and another NPC, a dark elf knight. She’d looked up to that knight like an older sister and let the woman pour water on her back to wash it off. Then she’d exhibited a mischievous streak unlike most NPCs and skirted her finger down Asuna’s spine…

An abrupt pain ran from Asuna’s back through her chest, and her breath caught in her lungs. She pushed the memories back down and focused on the sensation of the bath caressing her skin instead.

Thankfully, the pain melted away with time. Those days would never return, and she would never be reunited with that dark elf knight or the other NPCs. But the world of Aincrad, which they’d fought so hard to survive, became the cradle from which the great tree of the Seed Nexus sprang, and the flower that bloomed on the very highest of its branches was the Underworld.

Everything was connected and flowed together. The leaves and branches of that tree had been bundled together into Unital Ring to become one. It was almost like the Sefirot, the tree of life in Kabbalah mysticism.

On a whim, she thought about the spelling of Aincrad. Kirito had said that before Akihiko Kayaba’s incident was put into motion, it was announced that “Aincrad” was a shortening of “An INCarnating RADius.”

But the Sefirot tree started with Ain, inspired by Ayin, the Hebrew word for nothingness, right? If you cut that off, it left crad. She didn’t know if that was a syllable or word in Hebrew, but if it were English, the first word that came to mind was cradle.

Cradle of nothingness.

But in Kabbalah, didn’t the infinite come from nothingness? And from infinity comes……

Asuna let that trailing memory end there and sighed. It was pointless trying to decipher the thoughts of Akihiko Kayaba. For the sake of his dream of a truly alternate world, he trapped ten thousand real people, allowed four thousand of them to die, and in the meantime calmly played the role of Heathcliff, leader of the Knights of the Blood. There was no way to understand the thoughts of someone like him.

But when it came to the full-dive system he’d developed and its evolution—Soul Translation—she couldn’t help but admit utter wonder.

To this point, she’d experienced countless baths not just in the real world, but in all kinds of VRMMO games, and it felt to her like the baths in the Underworld surpassed the real thing. Not only was nothing unnatural about the fluid movement and skin sensation, but the overwhelmingly vivid sense of pleasant relief made it feel as though her soul itself was taking the bath.

But that only made sense; Rath developed the Soul Translator to allow the human soul to access its simulation. However, compared to the previous time she’d been in this particular bath—two months ago in the real world, two hundred years in the Stellar Era calendar—the fidelity of the sensations felt like it had been brought to a whole new level.

If I get too used to this bath, I’m not going to be satisfied by my bath at home anymore, she thought, troubled. It was all just too relaxing.

“Hey! Sti, what are you doing?!” someone shouted, followed by a massive splash.

On the far side of the gargantuan bath, a red-haired girl was swimming this way with a furious dog paddle. The bath was an entire 130 feet long and over 60 feet wide, so it made sense that you might want to swim in it…and then there was another splash.

Just after scolding Stica, Laurannei had chosen to jump into the bath from the hallway in the middle. With perfect form, she soon caught up to her partner and began to break ahead. In response, Stica sped up, and the pilots continued their race past Asuna and Alice in the other direction.

“…I once practiced my swimming in this bath, too. Of course, it was only when the room was empty,” Alice muttered under her breath.

Asuna giggled. “When I was a little girl, I swam in the bath at the Kurhaus…which is the name for a huge public bath in the real world. My mother was furious with me.”

It was then that Asuna recalled that Alice’s parents had died years ago after her childhood in Rulid. She didn’t have time to apologize for the comment, however.

“Don’t feel bad for me,” Alice noted quickly. “I don’t have any memories of my early childhood…I can’t ask for much more than a chance to be reunited with Selka.”

Asuna reached out under the water, trying to touch Alice’s hand. When she found it, she squeezed it tight. “Kirito’s going to find the sacred art that will undo the petrification. He will.”

“Yes, I believe that, too. It’s just…,” Alice trailed off. As though asking herself as much as anyone else, she continued, “Why did Kirito—the Star King—hide the formula on Admina? If he wanted a safe place, there can’t be a safer place than the higher floors of Central Cathedral.”

“That’s…a good point…,” Asuna murmured, gazing across the surface of the water.

A little brown furball swam slowly from right to left, making tiny splashing noises. It was Natsu, Airy’s pet. Alice noted dryly, “So…the rat can swim…”

“Long-eared wetrats inhabit the wetlands to the north of the capital,” replied Airy, who approached behind Natsu. She folded her arms before her, looking slightly bashful, and explained, “They have webbed toes, so if they swim their hardest, they’re even faster than fish.”

“Oh, I…didn’t know that…”

Natsu reacted to being the center of conversation by dunking under the water. It turned into a dark, barely visible shape that zipped away with astonishing speed. Ahead of it, Stica and Laurannei had turned around at the left end of the bath and were still racing in parallel. Natsu did a turn behind them, sped past them easily, then continued on toward the right end. Just before it reached the goal, it burst out of the water and landed on the marble path, turning to exclaim proudly, “Kurrrrrr, kyurrr!”

Asuna, who could not speak rodent language, nevertheless immediately discerned its meaning: “I win!”

That demonstration was enough to defuse the race between Stica and Laurannei, who stared at the victorious Natsu in a daze. After a moment or two, they broke out into applause. Natsu turned around, even prouder than before, puffing out its chest until it fell right onto its back.

“Ha…ha-ha-ha…,” Alice chuckled, unable to hold back. Asuna joined her. Even Airy began to laugh, soft and reserved.

As the water around her shook with her laughter, Asuna thought, I must protect this world. There’s no other option. I can’t let anyone destroy it before the moment Dr. Koujiro predicted at that press conference a month ago comes true: a world in which real-worlders and Underworlders can interact as equal human beings.

That’s the duty I’ve been given in exchange for my power as Stacia, Goddess of Creation…