Sword Art Online - Volume 27 - Chapter 6

6

The seven-thirty bells rang their melody right as Alice finished eating her dessert.

When Eolyne had returned from the bath just ten minutes ago, he had eaten about 70 percent of his meal and apologized to Airy for leaving some behind. He hadn’t eaten much at the restaurant they had stopped at before arriving at Central Cathedral, either. Maybe he just didn’t have a big appetite in general.

At the restaurant, Alice had been so delighted to eat some good Centorian food again that she overdid it a little, and because she hadn’t had a single coin to her name, it forced Eolyne to pay for the whole meal. She was mortified.

If she was going to continue visiting this world, she’d need a source of money of some kind, but she had no idea how she was going to get it. She couldn’t go around chopping down trees for money with her Osmanthus Blade, the way she did back when she lived by Rulid.

Unconsciously, she touched the leather pouch fastened to her belt with her right hand. She’d been carrying this pouch on her at every moment since returning to the Underworld; it contained two fist-sized eggs. They belonged to her dragon mount, Amayori, who passed away during the Otherworld War, and its brother, Takiguri. Kirito had used Incarnation to rewind their state to before their deaths.

There were two reasons Alice had come back here. One was to be reunited with her sister, Selka, and that had been fulfilled.

The other was to help these two eggs hatch so that she could raise them to their former selves. This, too, was going to be an extremely difficult task. The eggs would eventually hatch if kept in a suitably warm environment, but dragons were a surprisingly sensitive animal and their young needed constant care. Alice couldn’t stay here for months at a time, so she’d have to leave them to someone with appropriate knowledge, expertise, and care.

At that point, she recognized the reality she’d been afraid to face and bit her lip with consternation.

Even though she had been reunited with Selka at last, they couldn’t live together. The only reason they were even eating together like this was the mercy of Dr. Koujiro extending her visit past the five o’clock deadline. She could be pulled out at any time and couldn’t complain about it.

“What’s the matter, Alice?” Selka asked.

The mention of her name drew Alice’s distracted attention. “Oh, nothing…Would you like some more, Selka?”

She pulled the huge plate of shortcake pieces closer, but her sister just grimaced and shook her head.

“No, I’m full! What about you girls?” Selka asked.

Ronie merely smiled. “I don’t need any, either. You, Tiese?”

“……”

When she didn’t hear an answer, Alice looked over.

Tiese’s maple-red eyes were wavering with an uncertain light, looking off to her left. There was a large plate of baked sweets in that direction, but that wasn’t what she was staring at. It was the masked man drinking his cofil tea behind it: Commander Eolyne Herlentz.

Selka and Ronie outwardly accepted the explanation that Eolyne was a stranger who just so happened to look like Eugeo, but Tiese was having more difficulty believing it.

That made sense. Alice could count the number of times she had traded words with Eugeo on two hands, and even she had nearly shouted with shock when she first saw Eolyne at the mansion outside of North Centoria.

So it was impossible to blame Tiese, who had been Eugeo’s page at Swordcraft Academy, for feeling unnerved about the experience. For that matter, Selka and Ronie had to be feeling much the same way; they were just acting normal for Tiese’s benefit. There had to be all kinds of questions swirling around inside their heads.

As for Eolyne himself, he seemed to be lost in thought. That made sense, too. The existence of a rebel force had only been theoretical for so long. Getting extremely concrete proof of them had to be a major shock to his system.

It was Airy’s calm voice that broke the awkward silence. “Has everyone finished their meal?”

“Ah…yes. Thank you, Lady Airy. I mean, Airy. It was delicious,” Alice said. Selka and Ronie followed, and finally Tiese and Eolyne came back to their senses to thank her for the meal as well.

After the table was cleared, Eolyne, Stica, and Laurannei returned to the base. The girls complained that they wanted to stay overnight at the cathedral, but the all-day pass they’d been given by their superior officer was only valid until nine o’clock, when the space force base closed its gates, and if they were even a single minute late, they could be subject to a disciplinary hearing.

Even still, Laurannei persisted in arguing that the military’s commander in chief and commander of the Integrity Pilots should be able to extend the valid time, but Eolyne would not assent. While he was not subject to any of these rules, he, too, would be scolded by his vice commander for staying out without any contact.

While she could sit out the argument, Alice was reminded of the old commander and vice commander of the Integrity Knights, Bercouli and Fanatio. Freewheeling Bercouli had often been scolded by Fanatio, too. It was a surprise to her that they’d had a child together, and now their distant descendant was the chairman of the Stellar Unification Council, with Eolyne as his foster son. The connections that bound people were very strange, indeed.

Ultimately, Stica and Laurannei had to give up on the idea of staying at the cathedral, so everyone went down to the eightieth floor. The great doors leading to the levitation shaft closed again the instant they removed the four swords that unlocked them. But there was a hidden lever on the wall to the right of the doors, and Airy was able to open the doors again with it.

Once the two pilots and their commander had descended the disc out of sight, the others shut the doors again and returned to the ninety-fifth floor.

After the Otherworld War, the levitating platform had been automated, and the shaft had been expanded to go from the first to ninetieth floors, as opposed to the fiftieth to eightieth, as it had been before. But because the highest floors were sealed, it was once again limited to the eightieth floor—and to even get to that floor, you needed to press a hidden button using Incarnation.

So reaching the Cloudtop Garden, Great Bath, and Morning Star Lookout required taking story after story of stairs. Even going back to the Axiom Church days, however, Alice had not minded this so much. Taking step after step on the red-carpeted stairs caused all the stray thoughts in her mind to melt away and allowed her a chance to truly appreciate the grand scale of Central Cathedral.

Of course, the holiness and infallibility of Administrator, who the massive white tower was meant to embody, had turned out to be an utter lie. Even still, Alice was unable to hate the tower itself. Kirito the Star King should have been able to tear it down if he wanted, but he chose it to be the headquarters for the Human Unification Council, and in his later years, he and Asuna used it as their retirement retreat. What was his reasoning…?

Before she knew it, she was on the ninety-fifth floor. The starry sky was visible past the trees that lined the space.

“Airy, it’s December now, isn’t it? If there are no walls here, why isn’t the air cold?” Alice asked.

Airy glanced down at her feet. “The trees block the wind, and the pipes embedded in the floor carry warm water from the heater on the ninety-fourth floor.”

“Heater…”

The word sounded familiar. In a moment, Alice recalled a conversation with Phercy, Laurannei’s little brother, at the Arabel mansion in Centoria, where he had explained the workings of heaters and coolers.

I’ll need to pay a visit to him soon, so we can uncover the reason why he’s unable to perform an ultimate technique, she thought, crouching to touch the marble floor. There was indeed a faint heat emanating from it. She stood up and asked, “There wasn’t a mechanism like this here in the past, was there?”

“Correct. It was the Star Queen who installed it. She called it floor heating.”

“Ah, so it was Asuna’s doing.” Alice chuckled.

She looked around once more. Nearby, Selka, Tiese, and Ronie, holding Natsu yet again, were lined up and staring at the sky. A quietly blinking orange light in the direction they were looking must have been the exhaust from a large dragoncraft flying from Centoria to somewhere else.

Ronie and Tiese had told Kirito that they would return to their knight’s duties, but the only times Kirito would be able to visit this world would be Saturdays and Sundays in the real world. Now that they had been unfrozen, they would have to continue living their lives like everyone else, but what would their official status be? They couldn’t just walk up to the front door of the Arabel and Schtrinen families and claim to be their ancestors. The same was true for Selka.

She started to wonder if Kirito—the Star King—had actually considered these details when helping freeze the three of them.

At that moment, Airy began to inhale and exhale deeply, for some reason.

She announced, “I believe that I will now complete my final duty as the guardian of the sealed floors.”

The others swung around to stare at her.

“Your final duty…? What do you mean, Airy?” asked Selka.

Quietly, the woman replied, “I must ask you to make a choice.”

Airy escorted them to the northeast corner of the Morning Star Lookout.

It looked totally empty at first, but after Airy pressed a button hidden on a nearby pillar, a circular staircase descended from the high ceiling and touched down on the floor.

Alice recalled that, two hundred years ago, there had been stairs on the north side of the floor, but that location was now occupied by the jutting wings of the X’rphan Mk. 13. If they were going to move the stairs, why treat it like a hidden trick staircase? And she still didn’t know what this “choice” was that Airy was going to offer them.

Despite her many questions, Alice followed Airy up the spiral stairs.

Above them was the ninety-sixth floor. Even the senior Integrity Knights had not been allowed to enter it without permission. What even was there? She found the answer right as her boots made contact with the floor at the top of the stairs.

The ninety-sixth floor had been host to the senate. Human beings whose lives had been frozen, and whose emotions and thoughts had been ripped away, were placed in countless boxes affixed to the walls and treated like living monitoring devices that searched all over the entire human realm for violators of the Taboo Index.

Alice thought she heard a hoarse voice rasp, System Call…, and flinched horribly. She nearly shut her eyes in fear but forced them open. The entire floor was shrouded in darkness, revealing nothing.

Right in front of her, there was a faint clicking sound. Then a dim light appeared, far overhead, bringing light to the area.

The structure was entirely different from the senate of two centuries ago. There was a very wide hallway, about ten mels across, with a number of storeroom-like spaces on either side. The ceiling was very high up, too, reminding her of the dragon landing platform that used to be on the thirtieth floor. A bit farther on from the top of the stairs was a stone pillar that seemed to be a control panel, at which Airy was standing.

“Keep moving, Alice.” A poke came at her back, which startled her into moving a few steps forward. Selka came up behind her, then rotated in place, staring.

“…Ahhh, I see. They outfitted this to be their bedchambers,” she said, which Alice did not quite understand. Selka moved on, and Ronie and Tiese rose to the top of the steps, looked momentarily surprised, then continued after her.

Alice moved onward, too, and peered into the first side area on the right.

“…Oh!” she gasped.

It looked like the dragon landing—in fact, it was. Curled up and sleeping inside the shack-sized partition was a huge dragon. But its scales, which should have had a metallic luster all over, were now as gray and faded as stone.

For an instant, she thought it might have been remains, rather than just a sleeping dragon—but then she realized that it was simply petrified, the same way that Selka and the others had been.

She did an about-face and saw another dragon sleeping in the partition on the other side of the hall. Each partition was about six mels wide, and the hallway itself was a little under fifty mels, which she calculated as holding eight chambers to a side, sixteen in total. Was each one playing home to a dragon…?

“Tsukigake!” “Shimosaki!” two voices called out in unison, drawing Alice’s attention to the hallway. Tiese and Ronie rushed over to compartments near the middle of the room.

Alice hurried over, too, eager to see. Tiese was at the left side of two adjacent partitions, with Ronie on the right. Each of them had thrown her arms around a petrified dragon’s neck.

“…Are those their dragons?” she asked Selka quietly.

Her sister nodded demonstrably. “Yes. That’s Tiese’s Shimosaki on the left, and Ronie’s Tsukigake to the right.”

“Ahhh…”

This morning, she had noticed the disappearance of the dragon stables from Central Cathedral’s front grounds. She’d asked Eolyne what happened to the dragons, and he said, “At the same time the knighthood was sealed away, half of the dragons being kept at Central Cathedral were sent back to their habitat in Wesdarath, while the other half were sealed along with the knights.”

She hadn’t understood what he meant by “sealed,” which referred to the state of being frozen in stone. Like with Selka’s trio, the right sacred art formula would bring them back to life.

At that particular point in time, Alice sucked in a sharp breath.

Eolyne had said that Integrity Knights were sealed away, just like the dragons.

But…that would mean…

“Lady Tiese, Lady Ronie,” Airy said gently. “We are going to a higher floor. What will you do?”

Ronie, who had Natsu riding on her shoulder, looked back just a little and said in a hoarse voice, “We’ll stay here for a bit. Don’t worry—we’ll catch up soon.”

“Very well,” Airy replied, bowing. She looked at Alice. “Shall we go now, Lady Alice and Lady Selka?”

She headed down the hallway. Alice shared a look with Selka before hurrying after her.

At the end of the hallway, there was an upward-opening door shutter, like at the dragon landing area. Next to it was a human-sized door. They followed Airy inside and found another staircase.

This one was another three floors’ worth of height. As they settled into the long climb, Alice consulted her memory of having been here.

The old senate chamber had occupied from the ninety-sixth floor to the ninety-eighth, as well. But it wasn’t as large as this, and Prime Senator Chudelkin’s chamber had been hidden away where this staircase room was. There had been a very narrow staircase there that went all the way up to the ninety-ninth floor…

The place where Alice had once awakened without any memories following the Synthesis Ritual.

And the place where Eugeo fought Kirito after he, too, had been synthesized into an Integrity Knight.

Airy opened the door at the end of the staircase and disappeared through it. For just an instant, Alice hesitated before walking through it. This floor, too, was locked in total darkness, so she couldn’t see a single mel before her eyes.

Suddenly, a white light sprang into existence. Airy had silently generated a number of light elements. The hovering lights lit up the surrounding area.

As Alice had remembered, it was an absolutely white room.

It was perfectly circular, with a diameter of about thirty mels. The floor and ceiling were polished white marble, without a single fixture of any kind. That much was the same as the previous time she saw it, but now there were things that hadn’t been there before.

Along the curved wall, spaced at intervals of about six mels, were sixteen stone statues.

Alice managed to stumble forward before she simply toppled over, then she made her way to one of the statues.

It had long, gently flowing hair. Full-body armor in a style very similar to the kind Alice had left back at the mansion. Her face, eyes closed and serene, was stunningly beautiful, even in stone.

Alice took another unsteady step and called out the statue’s name in a voice barely louder than a whisper.

“……Lady Fanatio……”