“So…what do we do now?” Kirito wondered.
It was Leafa’s idea to save the elephant creature, but she hadn’t spared a thought for what would come after that. It was still a terrifying Deviant God standing before them, its cursor a hostile yellow. One swipe of its clawed limbs would easily kill the both of them.
But the fact that it had approached so close and still hadn’t attacked them proved that this was already an irregular scenario. In a high-level hunting ground like Jotunheim, common sense said that every monster would fly into a rage and attack any player that crossed its field of vision. The fact that it was not doing so gave Leafa hope that it would leave them alone and eventually shuffle away…
A second later, her hopes were dashed. It whistled and extended its long nose straight at them.
“Ugh…”
Kirito prepared to leap out of the way, but Yui pulled on his ear with an adorably tiny hand. “It’s all right, Papa. The little one’s not angry.”
Little one? Leafa’s jaw nearly dropped at the irony. Suddenly, the finely separated tip of its nose snaked around the both of them and lifted them straight off the ground.
“Hyeeek!” Kirito wailed pathetically. Leafa couldn’t even manage a squeak. The elephant head easily lifted them a few dozen yards into the air and tossed them not into its mouth, but onto its back. Fortunately.
They landed butt first, bounced, and fell again. The jellyphant’s body had seemed slick from a distance, but it was actually covered in thick, short gray hairs. Once Kirito and Leafa were safely settled in the center of its back, it roared again—apparently in satisfaction—and began moving about as though nothing had happened.
“. . .”
After sharing a wordless glance with Kirito, Leafa gave up attempting to understand what was happening and stared out at their surroundings.
Being the “land of eternal darkness” did not mean that Jotunheim was actually pitch-black. The stalactites clinging to the ceiling gave off a faint glow, which glimmered dimly off the snow coating the ground. If the place weren’t so deadly, it would have been quite beautiful. The dark forests, the jutting cliffs, and the towers and castle looming over it all were easily visible from their present vantage point.
After a minute of riding on the back of the jellyphant and feeling the vibrations of its twenty legs, Kirito murmured, “Do you suppose…this is the start of some kind of quest?”
“Umm…” Leafa wondered for a moment. “If it was a quest, we would have gotten some kind of prompt or start log by now.”
She waved a hand to indicate the upper-left area of her view. “Since there was nothing like that, it’d probably be more of an in-game event than a simple commission quest with an obvious beginning and end. But that’s a troubling sign…”
“Why is that?”
“If it’s a quest, we’re guaranteed to get some kind of reward at the end. But since in-game events are more like a little prefab drama involving the players, we can’t be assured of a happy ending.”
“Meaning…we might be heading for something unspeakably awful?”
“Very possible. I made the wrong choice in a horror-themed event once and got boiled to death in a witch’s cauldron.”
“Wow. That’s messed up,” Kirito said, his smile looking more like a grimace. He brushed the heavy hair at his side. “Well, we can’t put this horse back in the stable. Er, this jellyphant? And we’d probably take tons of damage jumping off from this height, so I guess we just ride it and see what happens? Um…I know it’s a bit silly to bring this up now, but…”
“What is it?”
The spriggan looked at Leafa, his expression serious again, then dipped his head.
“I’m sorry about what I said earlier, Leafa. I made light of your feelings. Maybe I wasn’t taking this world seriously enough. ‘It’s just a game,’ I told myself. But I should have known already that whether the surroundings are real or virtual, the things you feel and think are real, and the truth…”
A look of anguish crossed his downturned face. For an instant, Leafa felt she saw something familiar in that expression, but she put the thought aside and waved her hands in supplication.
“N-no, it’s my fault. I’m sorry…After all you did to help me and the rest of the sylphs, I should know perfectly well that you don’t see ALO as just another game.”
Lately, Leafa had come to feel strongly that there was something about this new VRMMORPG genre that tested each of its players.
Generally speaking, it was a player’s pride that was being challenged. This was a game, so it was impossible to win all the time. You might fall into a trap set by players of an enemy race. You might get into a fight and simply be beaten into the mud.
When that happened, how hard could you struggle? If you lost, how would you regroup and hold your head high? That was the test. In traditional video games played on a flat monitor, there was no expression of emotion unless you entered a specific command. If you lost, the most that happened was a frowning emoticon in the chat window. But in the full-dive environment, every player’s emotions were written plainly across his or her face. You might even be seen shedding tears of frustration.
Many players glibly abandoned a disadvantageous fight or logged out the moment they lost, specifically in order to avoid showing anyone that kind of emotion. Leafa, too, wanted no one to see her cry, if she could help it.
But the mysterious spriggan before her seemed to spare no thought for the concept of maintaining face. When they were ambushed by the salamanders in the Lugru Corridor and when he was being pulverized by General Eugene’s legendary sword, Kirito made no attempt to hide his anger and frustration—he struggled and scrabbled until he ultimately emerged victorious. No one who wrote this off as “just a game” could do such a thing.
“Can I…ask you something?”
What game did you play before this? What are you like in real life? Leafa nearly asked, but she bit her lip. It wasn’t right to ask other VRMMO players about their real lives and identities unless you were very close.
She shook her head and told Kirito not to mind, grinning. “I guess this means we’ve made up. I can stay up as late as it takes. I’m at the time of year where I don’t have to go to school if I choose not to.”
Leafa extended her right hand. Kirito chuckled and squeezed it. She started shaking it vigorously to hide her embarrassment, but only got more self-conscious when she noticed Yui grinning happily at the two of them. She let go and turned away, certain that her face must have gone red to the tips of her pointy ears.
The elephantine Deviant God continued trundling on, totally unconcerned with the conversation taking place on its back. When she looked to the direction of their travel, Leafa’s brows knitted, her blush completely forgotten.
“What’s wrong?” Kirito asked. She reached out and pointed ahead.
“We were supposed to be heading for the staircase either to the west or the south, right? I think it’s taking us the exact opposite direction…Look.”
She was pointing through the darkness to a vast silhouette taking shape ahead. It was an upside-down conical structure dangling from the gently curved ceiling of Jotunheim. An endless series of tiny branches draping down came together to form a kind of net, woven around an impossibly massive pillar of ice.
The distance-blur effect of the game’s visual engine told her that it was at least five miles away, but it was so large that it seemed closer than that. A number of blinking lights were embedded in the icicle, and their steady flickering pattern lent the structure an awesome grace.
“What’s all that twisty stuff around the giant icicle?”
“I’ve only ever seen that in screenshots…They’re the roots of the World Tree.”
“Huh…?”
She cast a sidelong glance at Kirito’s squinting face before continuing. “See, the roots of the tree go so far into the earth of Alfheim that they hang down from the ceiling of Jotunheim. Our friend here isn’t t
aking us to the outer rim of the cave, he’s heading for the center.”
“Hmm…Well, since the World Tree is our final destination, is there any way we can climb those roots up to the surface?”
“I’ve never heard of anything like that. Besides, look at them. Even the lowest-hanging tendril only comes halfway down to the floor. That’s got to be hundreds of feet tall, and there’s no flight down here. We can’t get up there.”
“I see,” Kirito sighed, then switched gears with a grin. “Then we just have to trust our weevil, or isopod, or whatever he is. We don’t even know if he’s escorting us to a feast at the palace, or if we are the feast.”
“W-wait. Iso-what now? If anything, it’s an elephant or a jellyfish monster,” Leafa instructed him, but Kirito raised his eyebrows in surprise.
“What, you don’t know about giant isopods? They’re on the bottom of the ocean, like pill bugs that are this big…” He stretched out his hands to a terrifying size. Leafa shivered and quickly cut him off.
“Okay, I get the picture! Let’s just give him a name, then. A cute one!”
She looked at the furry, dumpling-shaped body—and the round head nearly hidden at the other end—and tried to think of something with zo in it, which was the word for “elephant.” Yuzo? No…Zoringen? Not that…
“How about Tonky?” Kirito piped up suddenly. Leafa blinked in surprise. It was certainly cute enough, but where did he get that name? Hang on…something about “Tonky the Elephant” sounded familiar.
After two seconds of trawling her memory bank, the answer came to her. It was the name of an elephant in a picture book she’d had as a child. As the story went, after a massive war, zoos were ordered to put down their wild animals. The heartbroken trainers gave the animals poisoned feed, but clever Tonky the Elephant didn’t eat it. Instead, he kept rearing up on his hind legs until he eventually starved to death. Leafa remembered bawling her eyes out when her mother had read the story to her.
“Kind of seems like an ominous name to give it,” she muttered, and Kirito grimaced.
“Good point. It was just the first thing that popped into my head.”
“So you know that story, too, huh? Well, fine. Let’s go with that!” Leafa thumped her fist into her palm and stroked the fur at her feet. “All right, Deviant God. From now on, your name is Tonky!”
The creature gave no response, of course. She chose to interpret that as a lack of disagreement. If it was turned into a pet through the use of the Taming skill, the name could be made official within the game, but she’d never heard of even the master tamers of the cait sith succeeding in bringing a Deviant God to heel.
From atop Kirito’s shoulder, Yui waved her tiny hands at the creature, which was many hundreds of times larger than she. “It’s nice to meet you, Mr. Tonky! Let’s be good friends, okay?”
This time, they saw the floppy ear/gill at the side of the creature’s head wave slightly, perhaps it was just coincidence.
The jellyphant named Tonky continued northward along the bank of a frozen river. On the way, they had more than a few encounters with other wandering Deviant Gods trudging through the wastes. But for some reason, the creatures only threw the group a glance from beyond the trees or hills that separated them, and walked on without further interest.
Perhaps they saw Leafa’s party as nothing more than an accessory of Tonky’s, but that didn’t explain why the three-faced giant had attacked the beast. The only potential reason that came to mind was that all the Deviant Gods they passed without incident were nonhumanoid in shape, like Tonky itself.
She turned to Kirito to ask his opinion and was aghast to see that once again, the spriggan was fast asleep, his head lolling. She clenched her fist, ready to pound him, when she was struck with a much better idea and began shoveling up the snow that had accumulated on Tonky’s back.
Before the snow could dissipate, she quickly tugged on the back of Kirito’s collar and dumped it down his back.
“Hweeg!!”
Kirito leaped up with a strangled yelp as the chilly sensation hit his back. She bid him good morning and asked the question that had been on her mind a moment earlier. The spriggan sulked for a bit, then pondered the idea.
“So you’re suggesting…within the Deviant Gods, there are fights between the humanoid kind and the animal kind?”
“Perhaps. Maybe the humanoid ones would only attack Tonky’s kind.”
The Jotunheim zone had only been added to the game a month ago during a major update, and it was so difficult that very little progress had been made on it. If this situation represented some kind of special event, it was quite possible that Leafa and Kirito were the first players in the entire game to realize it. If a Deviant God hunting party had witnessed the battle between Tonky and the giant, they would have merely waited for Tonky to die before finishing off the other one.
“Well, only Tonky and the designer of this event know the whole truth. Let’s see how this plays out,” Kirito said, rolling onto his back. He put his hands behind his head and crossed his legs at the knee. Yui flitted off of his shoulder and landed on his chest, then assumed the exact same position as him. Irritated by this lack of caution and making a mental note to hit him with a freezing spell the next time he fell asleep, Leafa looked at the time readout in the corner of her vision. The pale digital numbers said that it was already past three o’clock in the morning.
Leafa had never stayed logged in after two at the latest, so this was uncharted territory for her. She brushed the thick fur at her feet, feeling conflicted over her very first all-nighter in a video game.
The odd Deviant God continued at its steady pace, completely unconcerned with its tiny passengers. It finally stopped at the top of a gentle hill that was covered in snow and ice.
“Wow…”
Leafa walked up closer to Tonky’s head and marveled at the sight before her.
It was a hole. But the word hole wasn’t adequate to describe the scale of the thing. It was a vertical shaft so wide across, the far side was hazy with distance. The sharp, sheer cliffs were covered in a layer of thick ice, too. That ice was transparent white near the top, but gradiated as it descended into the depths, first to blue, then to deep indigo, then finally to pitch-black. No matter how hard she squinted, there was nothing but darkness down there.
“Wonder what’d happen if we fell,” Kirito muttered nervously. Yui gave him a perfectly serious answer.
“According to the map data I can access, there is no defined floor to the shaft.”
“Gnarly! So it really is a bottomless pit.”
Both Leafa and Kirito inched backward and headed for the high ground on Tonky’s back. But before they could get there, the Deviant God’s body shifted into motion.
It’s not going to toss us in there, is it? she thought frantically, but the creature, thankfully, did not seem to be so ungrateful. It folded its twenty legs inward, lowering its massive bulk to the ground in one even movement.
After several seconds, the bottom of Tonky’s trunk thudded heavily on the snow. It gave a brief wheeze, tucked the elephantine trunk underneath its body, and finally stopped moving altogether.
“. . .”
They looked at each other, then carefully descended off the creature’s back. A few steps away, they turned back to find that it was neither elephant nor jellyfish anymore. With its tentacles and head firmly tucked beneath its body, the monster now resembled nothing more than a giant dumpling.
“So…what was the point of all this?” Kirito asked. Leafa walked forward and patted the gray, furry hide.
“Hello, Tonky? What are we supposed to do now?”
There was no response. She smacked it a bit harder, then noticed a change in the texture of its skin. When they were riding on Tonky’s back, the flesh had the resiliency of urethane cushioning, but now it was harder.
Alarmed, she put her ear to the furry hide, thinking it might have died after completing its purpose. Much to her relief, t
here was a steady, faint pulse echoing through the massive body.
So Tonky was still alive. In fact, the HP gauge in its yellow cursor showed that the wounds it had suffered at the hands of the three-faced giant were fully healed.
“Does this mean…it’s just sleeping? While we’re struggling to stay up all night?” She was about to yank on its fur in retribution for its cheekiness when Kirito called out to her.
“Hey, Leafa. Look up, it’s really cool.”
“Huh…?”
When she raised her face, the sight that greeted her was indeed stunning.
The conical shape of the World Tree’s roots were now directly overhead. The black tendrils wove around a mammoth icicle that was roughly the same width as the vertical shaft below it. When she looked closer, there seemed to be some kind of structure within the icicle. She could make out tiny corridors and rooms carved into the ice, the flames within gleaming blue through the translucent surface.
“It really is incredible…If that’s all one dungeon, it’s got to be the largest in all of ALO,” she said, unconsciously reaching toward it. There was at least two hundred yards of space between her and the bottom tip of the icicle, of course. Even an imp, with their underground flight abilities, couldn’t reach that height.
“But how do we get up there?” she mumbled. Kirito seemed about to say something, but before he could get the words out of his mouth, the pixie on his shoulder cried out.
“Papa, I’m getting a player signal approaching from the east! There’s one…with twenty-three behind it!”
“…!!”
Leafa sucked in a large breath. Twenty-four players—clearly a raiding party hunting Deviant Gods.
This should have been the encounter they were waiting for. If they explained their plight, they might be allowed to join the party until they could safely reach an exit to the surface.
But the players heading toward them now had a very specific intention in mind.
Leafa bit her lip and looked to the east. After a few seconds, she heard the faint sounds of footsteps in snow. It was quiet enough that without her excellent sylph hearing, she wouldn’t have noticed. She also didn’t see anything—they must have been using concealment spells.
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