Sword Art Online - Volume 26 - Chapter 5

5

At ten AM on Saturday, October 3rd, the first baby was born in the Bashin living quarters on the west side of Ruis na Ríg.

At that time, Silica was in the stables on the north end, feeding the pets. Six days had passed since the start of the UR incident, and already the group’s pets had grown to quite a selection: Misha, the thornspike cave bear; Kuro, the lapispine dark panther; Aga, the long-billed giant agamid; Namari, the leaden long-tailed eagle; and Silica’s partner, Pina.

Fortunately, the four aside from Pina were either omnivorous or carnivorous and would happily eat the harve meat from the Life Harvester, of which they still had mounds and mounds in storage. For the time being, there was no concern over feeding them. She pulled the meat out of her inventory and gave it to Misha, Aga, and Kuro in that order, then the new guy, Namari. She was giving the eagle a luxurious scratch on the soft feathers under its chin when Lisbeth came racing into the stable.

“S-Silica, it’s here! It’s been born!”

“Wh-what has?!”

“A baby! A baby!”

“Y-yours, Liz?!”

“What?! No, it’s not mine! Oh, just come with me!”

Lisbeth dragged Silica behind her to the large Bashin tent, where Silica came face-to-face with a newborn baby in the arms of Yzelma, the Bashin’s chieftain.

In Japanese, it was common to describe babies as being “just like a little ball,” and no baby Silica had seen before fit that description better than this one, smooth and puffy, rolled up in a blanket. The instant she saw them, she exclaimed, “Awwww!”

The baby slept with utterly sound relief in Yzelma’s strong arms, which were as burly as Agil’s. Silica looked up at her and asked, “Is this your baby, Yzelma?”

The chieftain smirked and replied, “Did I look like I was malou to you? This is the child of Kayatre, wife of Suvor. Kayatre is resting over there after her delivery.”

“M-malou? What is that?”

“It means to have a baby in your belly.”

“Oh, I see. Malou…malou…”

She kept repeating the brand-new word until at last Yzelma smiled and nodded, and a pop-up appeared, saying, Bashin skill proficiency has risen to 16.

In the world of Unital Ring, natives like the Bashin, Patter, and Orniths each had their own language. If your proficiency in that language was still zero, the sounds they made were so strange and alien that they couldn’t even be expressed in letters, only symbols.

But if you listened patiently, you could sometimes make out sounds that might be repeatable. If you said that sound back to an NPC enough times, and they felt you had pronounced it well enough, your skill proficiency in that language had a chance to rise. Around the time your proficiency was 10, bits of their words would start to sound like Japanese. It was a clever but overly complicated system.

According to Yui the super AI, however, the strange sounds they made at zero proficiency were actually Japanese, just placed under many layers of filters that made them impossible to understand. Yui could analyze and decode the filters on her own, so she was able to understand the Bashin practically from the moment they first met. It was a bit of an unfair advantage, but if not for her, Silica and Lisbeth and Yui quite possibly would not have survived the first night in this world and never reunited with Kirito’s group.

In that sense, having the Bashin here in the town and giving birth to new babies was a truly wonderful development, Silica decided. She was savoring this sentiment when Yzelma asked her gently, “Would you like to hold them, Silica?”

“Oh…m-may I?”

“Of course. We Bashin have a saying that a babe held by many heroes will grow up strong and firm. And you are nothing if not a mighty hero.”

“Gosh, that’s a bit of an exaggeration,” she said timidly.

Lisbeth leaned over and smacked her hard on the back. “Don’t get all modest on us now! I got a chance to hold the baby earlier, and it was just so…so…”

She seemed to run out of words to describe the sensation, and continued to smack Silica’s back instead, so Silica reached out with some reluctance. Yzelma placed the baby in their swaddling cloth right into her hands.

The baby was heavy.

In terms of sheer weight, of course, the materials they used to build the town, like lumber and stone, were much heavier. But the overall weight of the baby, between their sweet scent, softness, and warmth, all felt breathtakingly real in Silica’s arms.

Perhaps they didn’t like the way she was holding them, because the sleeping baby scrunched up their face a tiny bit and began to murmur. Just when it seemed like they were about to cry, Pina leaned over from Silica’s shoulder and rubbed its head against the baby’s cheek. The baby seemed to like that texture and stopped fussing, returning to their restful sleep.

“…Does the baby have a name yet?” Silica asked quietly.

Yzelma said, “Yes. Yael.”

“Yael…Aww, sweet little Yael…,” she cooed, rocking the baby. I wonder if I’ll ever hold my own baby this way, she thought.

She hoped she would. But it didn’t feel like there was anything connecting that future self to her present self. Surely, somewhere and sometime, she would need to choose to leave this comfortable place of hers if she wanted to fall in love, get married, and start a family…

Something’s wrong with you, Keiko. You were stuck in bed for two whole years because of that whole crazy thing, and now you’re back to playing VR games again. Something’s wrong with you.

That was what her old elementary school friend had told her two weeks ago when they ran into each other. She could still hear their words in her head.

The virtual world and the connections she’d fostered in it were more important to Silica than anything. She was certain her friends felt the same way. But maybe it was something akin to a pack of animals that had undergone a long and arduous journey, huddling together in a place of safety and enjoying a much-needed rest together. A mental shelter for those players who’d lived through the harsh reality of Sword Art Online and needed a place to heal their wounds.

If so, her companions would probably all leave this place at some point, choosing to take their own paths in life. Asuna and Lisbeth were in their final year at the returnee school and would have college entrance exams in four months. She hadn’t asked them what their future plans were, but their time spent logged in was already noticeably lower, and it wasn’t certain they would actually come back to hang out together once they had moved on to college.

So in a sense, this UR incident might be the last time the whole group of friends would come together as one and fight as a team. Perhaps arriving at the land revealed by the heavenly light, solving all the mysteries, and returning to ALO would mark a kind of end point for their collective journey, whether they liked it or not.

It was inevitable. Time was always flowing, and they were becoming closer to adults with each passing day. Everything, no matter how fun, would someday come to an end.

But despite that—no, because of that…

Silica silently squeezed the sleeping baby in her arms. If the resolution of the UR incident was synonymous with the disappearance of this world, it would mean that everyone who lived here—the Bashin, the Patter, even newborn Yael—would vanish. That was a difficult possibility to accept now that they had forged this trust between them.

Six days ago, under the dazzling aurora in the night sky, Silica heard the voice say, To the first to reach the land revealed by the heavenly light, all shall be given.

It was still unclear what “all shall be given” referred to but considering the scale of the abnormality at hand, it couldn’t be simple items or stat boosts. But if it did turn out to be something like admin status, you might be able to save the NPCs somehow, if not the world itself.

She breathed in one last lungful of the baby’s milky scent, then lifted her face. “Yzelma, thank you for letting me hold Yael.”

“No, the thanks are all mine,” the chieftain replied, plucking the baby out of Silica’s arms with a single hand.

As soon as they were out of the tent, Silica and Lisbeth exhaled heavily.

“That baby was soooo cute…”

“Yeah, they sure were…”

“They were making little baby sounds…”

“They sure were…,” repeated Lisbeth. Silica glanced over and saw that her face was a melted, whimpering mess. Silica felt the same way, but she couldn’t just give in to the temptation to celebrate. Now that both the Bashin and Patter were having new babies, they needed to strengthen Ruis na Ríg’s defenses more than ever.

Of course, having defeated their biggest organized foe—Mutasina’s army—last night, there shouldn’t be any more adversaries seeking to destroy or take over their town anymore, at least among the former ALO players. In fact, there were more players coming to Ruis na Ríg since yesterday evening as a waypoint on their adventures; there were currently forty or fifty visitors to the south side of the town, where the shops were set up.

The surprising thing was that the Bashin and Patter had begun conducting trade with the visiting players. The Patter sold only simple meals and rations made from vegetables and legumes harvested from the fields within the living quarters, but the Bashin had armor made from animal pelts and accessories fashioned out of fangs, tusks, and rocks on display, which made for rather exotic-looking storefronts that proved quite popular with the players.

While the overall operator of Ruis na Ríg, Kirito—the settlement had initially been called Kirito Town, after all—indicated that he would not charge the NPCs any fees, the former Insectsite and Mutasina army players running lodging houses and shops in the south area were automatically deducted 5 percent of their earnings. If the Bashin business expanded too much, some might complain about an unfair advantage in that regard.

The rules around these dealings should probably be made clear before the town really started expanding in earnest, but the actual leaders of the town—Kirito, Asuna, and Alice—would be absent until later tonight. Hopefully, no trouble would arise while the three of them were gone, Silica thought. She turned to Lisbeth, whose face was still slack with bliss.

“Liz, when do you plan to open your smithy?”

“Huh? Smithee? Oh…right. The smithy.”

At last, Lisbeth’s mind seemed to return to normal function. She examined the commercial area of the town around her.

“We did a lot yesterday, so I suppose I have enough stock to open up. I’m just a bit worried about the supply of resources, that’s all…”

“Resources…meaning ore?”

“Yep. The only nearby iron ore spot is the bear cave to the north, right? Since you tamed Misha, the thornspike cave bears have stopped spawning, so at least it’s safe, but the amount of ore you can mine in one go is completely insufficient to supply all of Ruis na Ríg.”

“And that iron also needs to go to the buildings and furniture and whatnot…”

“On the other hand, it’s typical for iron to be in short supply at the start of an MMO. We struggled with that in Aincrad, too,” Lisbeth noted. She stretched and looked up to the sky. Silica followed her gaze.

Time in Unital Ring was synced with the real world, so the sky above Ruis na Ríg was a pleasant blue. Beyond the wispy clouds, of course, there was no massive floating castle of steel and rock. New Aincrad had transferred along with Alfheim after the incident started, but with its magical flight suspended, it plummeted to the Battranka Highlands twelve miles to the south and exploded on impact, instantly killing basically every person still inside it.

The majority of the exterior and structure of New Aincrad should have been iron, so it felt like there should be tons of it at the impact site—and not just ore, but refined iron—but according to the players from Mutasina’s force, there were incredibly dangerous monsters near that area, making it impossible to reach. Which left one conclusion.

“We’ve got to find and develop a new gathering point,” Silica murmured.

Lisbeth nodded. “That’s what it comes down to. Kirito said there was tons of iron ore in the cave behind the waterfall way down the Maruba River, but that’s too far to travel, and it’ll be trouble for us if that witch finds out about it. I’d prefer a source to the north of our town.”

The “witch” Lisbeth spoke of was Mutasina, of course. In the battle two nights ago, the long staff she’d presumably used to cast her horrifying Noose of the Accursed suffocation magic had been destroyed, along with her control over the hundred-strong army she’d amassed. But in the battle, Mutasina, along with her fellow mage Magis, the twin swordswomen Viola and Dia, and the unidentified body double, had all escaped through a smoke screen.

Silica didn’t have the chance to either fight or speak with them directly, but she could still remember the horribly realistic sensation of the Noose’s choking effect. If Mutasina could use dark magic that powerful, she wasn’t likely to give up after a single defeat. She probably couldn’t use the Noose again, but they had to assume she was out there somewhere, devising a new plan and sharpening her knives.

“And there should still be thousands of ex-ALO players in the Stiss Ruins. If she offers iron equipment as a reward, she could easily put together another force of a hundred or so…”

“If they invade with a group that large right now, I don’t think we could totally fight them off,” said Lisbeth. They shared a look, then turned to the tent behind them.

Yael was still soundly sleeping inside. In the Patter quarters to the east, the children born in the last few days were all scampering about. It was the humans who had brought these tribes to live here, so it was the humans who were obligated to protect them from outside enemies.

“…Liz, do you want to go exploring a bit to the north?”

“I was just going to suggest the same thing.”

They shared another look, then grinned.

In Unital Ring, where a single death was the end of the game, it was forbidden to do anything risky and reckless, but that didn’t mean they could stay hide in town forever. Silica and Lisbeth were both level-16, which was on the higher end among the group, although Kirito was already over level-20, after all the boss monsters he’d been fighting. They needed to close that gap by a level or two while he was away.

Others would be logging in soon, too. If they could get together a party of four, plus Pina and Misha, that should be plenty enough power for exploring the forest.

Silica and Lisbeth started picking up the pace, and before long they were outright sprinting for the log cabin.

The thing was, VRMMOs were just plain fun. The thrill of heading into unknown territory with your friends was a feeling that nothing else could replace.

If it was meant to end someday, then all the more reason to enjoy it to the fullest now.

Atop Silica’s head, seemingly absorbing her newfound determination, Pina spread its wings and cried, “Kweei!”