Fairy Dance 2

by Reki Kawahara

  I realized upon reflection that I’d been helped by a great many people. But first and foremost, by the girl in front of me now. Leafa had helped Kirito, and Suguha, Kazuto; and during the entire time, she’d been grappling with her own deep, troubling feelings.

  It was a good moment to take a new look at Suguha’s face, a combination of bright, masculine vitality and the fragility of a freshly budded flower shoot. I reached out and caressed her cheek, and she smiled shyly.

  “Thanks for everything, Sugu—I mean it. I couldn’t have done any of it without you.”

  She looked down, face beet-red, and fidgeted. Eventually she made up her mind and leaned her cheek against my chest.

  “It’s okay…I was happy to do it. Happy to be helpful to you in your world,” she said, eyes closed. I slipped my arm around her back and gave her a gentle squeeze.

  Once I’d let go, she looked up and said, “So…you got her back? Asuna, I mean…”

  “Yeah. She’s back—finally back. Sugu…I…”

  “I know. Go see her. I’m sure she’s waiting for you.”

  “I’m sorry. I’ll explain everything when I get back.”

  I patted the top of Suguha’s head and got to my feet.

  In record time, I was pulling on my down jacket in the yard, ready for the trip. It was night outside. The old standing clock in the living room said it was just before nine—well after visiting hours, but if I explained the circumstances at the nurse’s desk, they would surely let me in.

  Suguha trotted over and offered me a nice, thick sandwich. I gratefully stuffed it into my mouth and descended into the yard.

  “Brr, it’s cold…”

  I hunched my shoulders. The chill seemed to pass right through my jacket. Suguha looked up at the night sky and said, “Oh…snow.”

  “Huh…?”

  There were indeed two or three large snowflakes glittering through the air. For a moment, I considered using a taxi, but decided that racing on my bike was a quicker trip than walking out to the main road and trying to find a cab.

  “Be careful…Say hi to Asuna for me.”

  “I will. I’ll give you a proper introduction next time.”

  I waved good-bye to Suguha, hopped onto my mountain bike, and started pedaling.

  The trip across the southern part of Saitama Prefecture went by incredibly fast with my single-minded bicycle sprint. The pace of the snow picked up, but not enough to pile up on the side of the road, and, thankfully, that kept the amount of traffic on the streets low.

  I wanted nothing more than to be in Asuna’s hospital room as soon as possible—but there was a part of me that feared it as well. I’d spent every other day for two months visiting that place and knowing only deep, deep disappointment. I would take my sleeping princess’s hand, so still I was afraid she’d turned into a sculpture of ice, and call out to her, knowing full well she would not hear.

  As I raced down streets so familiar that I knew where all the potholes were, I couldn’t shake a part of me that wondered if my discovery of her in the land of the fairies, the vanquishing of the false king, and the severing of her chains…were all nothing more than hallucinations.

  What if, several minutes from now, I visited her room to find that she was not awake?

  What if her soul had already left Alfheim and gone not to the real world, but to some other, unknown place?

  A terrifying chill ran down my back that had nothing to do with the snow pelting my face in the darkness. It couldn’t happen. The system that ran the game of real life would not be designed so cruelly.

  My thoughts writhed and tangled, but I kept pedaling. After a right on the main route, I headed into the hills. The deep, block-pattern treads of my tires chewed the asphalt and its light layer of sherbet snow. I kicked the pedals into a higher gear.

  Eventually the shape of a large, dark building came into view. Most of the windows were black, and the blue guiding lights around the helicopter landing pad on the roof blinked like ghostly wisps floating around a castle of darkness.

  At the top of the final hill was a tall fence. I rode along the perimeter for another minute until the front entrance came into view, flanked by tall gateposts.

  Because this was a special cutting-edge hospital that did not take emergency patients, the gate was shut tight and the guard box was unattended. I passed the main entrance en route to the parking area, where a small employee gate to the grounds had been left open.

  I left my bike in the corner of the parking lot, too impatient to bother locking it up. The parking lot was completely empty, lit only by the orange sodium-vapor streetlights. The only thing moving was the silent snow, painting the world white around me as it fell. I ran, my heavy breathing creating dense clouds of vapor.

  When I was halfway across the vast parking lot, I was about to pass between a tall, dark van and a white sedan when a silhouette emerged from behind the van and nearly collided into me.

  “Ah…”

  I was about to apologize as I avoided the figure—until the menacing gleam of something sharp and metallic swiped out at me.

  “?!”

  A sharp burning sensation burst across my right forearm just below the elbow, and a great number of white things spilled into the air. Not snow—fine, tiny feathers. The lining of my down jacket.

  I stumbled backward, only managing to stay upright by leaning against the rear of the white sedan.

  I stared, stunned, at the black silhouette standing six feet away. It was a man. A man wearing a dark suit. There was something long and white in his right hand. It glowed in the dull orange light.

  A knife. A large survival knife. But why?

  I could sense the man, standing in the shadows cast by the tall van, examining my freezing face. He spoke, his voice ragged and quiet as a whisper.

  “You took so long, Kirito. What if I’d caught a cold?”

  That voice. That high-pitched, wheedling voice.

  “S…Sugou…” I murmured in a daze. He took a step forward, and the orange light of the streetlamps hit his face.

  The hair that had been so neatly styled at our meeting several days ago was wild and bedraggled. There was a shadow of a beard on his pointed chin, and his necktie hung loose around his neck.

  But most of all, I noticed the bizarre look in his eyes through the metal-framed glasses he wore. Almost immediately, I realized what was so strange about it. His narrow eyes were bulging wide, the pupil of his left eye dilated and trembling in the low light—but his right pupil was constricted tight. The exact same spot that I’d pierced in our fight atop the World Tree.

  “That was so very cruel of you, Kirito,” he growled. “The pain won’t go away. Not that I’m worried—I’ve got plenty of drugs for that.”

  Sugou reached into his pocket and removed a few pills that he promptly tossed into his mouth. He crunched them heartily and took another step forward. By now I’d finally recovered from the shock, and managed to speak through dry lips.

  “You’re finished, Sugou. You can’t hide something that huge. Give up and face justice.”

  “Finished? How so? Nothing is finished. True, RCT may be useless now. But I’m going to America. There are plenty of companies who want me over there. I’ve got plenty of data from my experiments. If I can use them to complete what I started, I can be a true king—a god—the god of the real world.”

  He’s gone mad. No…this man had probably broken long before.

  “I just have a few things to clean up first. For starters, I’m going to kill you, Kirito,” Sugou muttered, expression locked in place. Then he lunged toward me, stiffly jabbing his knife at my stomach.

  “…!!”

  I barely evaded. An attempt to leap off the asphalt with my right foot was aborted when snow stuck in the sole of my shoe caused me to slip and crash to the pavement. I landed hard on my left side, the breath shooting from my lungs.

  Sugou gazed down at me with his mismatched eyes.

  “Get on your
feet.”

  The tip of his expensive leather shoe stomped into my femur once, twice, and again. Hot pain shot through my spinal cord deep into my brain. The impact rattled my wounded arm, which throbbed painfully. It was only then that I realized he’d actually cut my arm, not just the sleeve of my jacket.

  I couldn’t move. I couldn’t speak. The terrible murderous pressure of Sugou’s survival knife—a good eight inches long—froze the blood in my veins.

  Kill…me…that knife—?

  Only fragments of thoughts could find purchase in my scrambled wits. All my circuits were busy imagining, over and over, that fateful moment when the thick knife silently invaded my body, delivering the fatal blow. It was the only thing I could do.

  The throbbing in my right arm turned to a burning numbness. Black liquid was dripping from between my jacket sleeve and winter gloves. I imagined all the blood in my body flowing out of me. Death—not based on numerical hit points, but true, actual death.

  “C’mon, stand. Get up.” Sugou kicked my legs repeatedly, mechanically. “What was it you were saying to me back there? About not running? Not being a coward? Settling our score? How brave and bold you were.”

  His whispering was laced with the same madness I’d heard in the midst of that suffocating darkness.

  “Don’t you understand? Little boys like you who only know how to play video games have no real power. You’re scum, the garbage of society. And yet you had the audacity, the temerity to ruin my plan…There can be no punishment but death. Death is the only solution,” he droned.

  Sugou rested his foot on my stomach and shifted his weight forward. That physical force, combined with the mental pressure of his madness, took my breath away.

  I could do nothing but watch his approaching face and gasp in short, irregular bursts. Sugou craned over and raised his weapon high.

  Without a blink, he swung it down.

  “!”

  The only sounds were a muted grunt from the back of my throat and the dull crunch of the knifepoint grazing my cheek and digging into the asphalt beneath me.

  “Oopsie…Hard to aim when only one eye works,” he muttered, and pulled his hand back for another try.

  The knife’s edge, catching the glow of the parking lot lights, was an orange line against the darkness. The very tip was chipped from its direct impact against the hard pavement. That flaw, the ugly imperfection of it, gave the knife a greater sense of physical realism. It was not a weapon made of perfect polygons, but a compact mass of metal molecules: sharp, cold, heavy, deadly.

  Everything moved slowly. The snowflakes falling through the dark sky. The foggy breath from Sugou’s curved mouth. The edge of the knife as it descended toward me. The gleaming orange reflection of the blade, flickering with the serrated pattern on its back.

  I remember a weapon that was jagged like that, my brain subconsciously muttered to itself, piecing together fragments of meaningless memory.

  What was it again? A dagger-type item sold in the one of the cities around the middle of Aincrad. It was called a swordbreaker. The back was serrated like a saw to parry the enemy’s blow, with a small bonus chance to break their weapon. I was intrigued enough to put my Dagger skill in an empty slot and try it out, but I was never satisfied with its meager attack power.

  The weapon in Sugou’s hand now was smaller than that, not even large enough to be called a dagger. In fact, this would hardly be labeled a weapon—it was an everyday tool. It was not a weapon that a swordsman would use in a fight.

  Sugou’s words of a few seconds ago echoed in my ears.

  You have no real power.

  He was right, of course. There was no need to point it out. But what does that make you in your attempt to kill me, Sugou? A master knife wielder? Do you know how to fight?

  I stared at the bloodshot eyes behind Sugou’s glasses. Agitation. Madness. But there was something else as well: It was the look of a man trying to escape. They were the eyes of wild instinct, of he who lashes out with abandon with his back to the wall, trapped by monsters deep inside a dungeon with little hope for escape.

  He was just like me, struggling miserably in search of power that he never found.

  “Die, boy!!”

  Sugou’s scream snapped me from the decelerated world of thought back to the present. My left hand shot up and caught Sugou’s wrist in descent, while I reached out and jammed the base of his throat with my other thumb, just above his necktie.

  “Hurgk!” he yelped, lurching backward. I lunged and grabbed his wrist with both hands, scraping the backside against the frozen asphalt. He screeched and relaxed his grip. The knife clattered to the ground.

  Sugou lunged for the blade, screaming wheezily like some kind of whistle. I pulled back my right leg and planted a stomp with the sole of my shoe against his chin. From there, I scooped up the knife and got to my feet.

  “Sugou,” I growled, my voice foreign and guttural. The knife’s presence was hard and cold through my glove. It was a weak weapon. Too light, too short.

  “But it’ll be enough to kill you,” I muttered, and leaped onto Sugou, who was sitting on the asphalt stunned, mouth agape.

  I grabbed a fistful of hair with my left hand and slammed his head against the van door. The aluminum body dented inward and his glasses went flying. Sugou’s mouth was wide in a gasp of shock. I pulled the knife back, preparing to jab it at his exposed throat.

  “Grrh…aaah!”

  But I had to stop, to grit my teeth against the urge.

  “Hyeeek!! Eeyaaa!!”

  Sugou was emitting the exact same high-pitched squeals that I’d heard in Alfheim not even an hour ago. He deserved to die. He deserved to be judged. If I brought the knife down now, everything would be over at last. Finished. The decisive separation of winner and loser.

  But…

  I was not a swordsman anymore. The world where skill with the sword decided everything was a relic of the distant past now.

  “Eeeeh…”

  Sugou’s eyes suddenly rolled back into his head. His scream ended abruptly, and he slumped to the ground like a robot unplugged.

  The tension drained out of my arm. The knife slipped through my fingers and landed on Sugou’s midsection. I let go of him and got to my feet.

  If I spent another second looking at this hateful man, the urge to kill would return, and I would not be successful at stifling it twice.

  I pulled off Sugou’s necktie, laid him out on the ground, and tied his hands together behind his back. The knife went onto the roof of the van. Then I turned away and forced my stumbling body to make its way, step by clumsy step, across the parking lot.

  It took five minutes to climb the wide steps to the front entrance. I stopped there, breathing heavily, and took a look down at my body.

  I was a mess, filthy with snow and grit. My right arm and left cheek were throbbing painfully, but the bleeding had stopped, at least.

  The front door was automatic, but it showed no sign of opening. I peered through the glass to see that the lights of the lobby were dim, but it was brighter back at the reception counter. Fortunately, there was an unlocked glass push door on the left side that offered me a way in.

  The interior of the building was silent. I walked past rows of benches lining the spacious lobby. The counter was unattended, but I could hear laughing coming from the nurse station behind it. I prayed that I could make my voice heard.

  “Um…excuse me!”

  After a few seconds, the door opened and two women in pale green uniforms appeared. They looked pensive at first, but that turned to shock when they got a better look at me.

  “What happened?!” said one of them, a tall, young nurse with her hair tied up. My cheek must have bled more than I realized.

  I pointed back to the entrance and said, “A man with a knife attacked me in the parking lot. He’s knocked out next to a big van.”

  They looked nervous. The older nurse went over to a device behind the counter and leaned int
o a microphone.

  “Security, please come to the first-floor nurse station at once.”

  The patrolman must have been close, because within seconds a man in a navy-blue uniform came trotting over. When the nurses repeated my description, his face went hard. He said something into a small comm unit and headed for the entrance. The younger nurse went with him.

  The other nurse took an appraising look at the cut on my cheek.

  “You’re the family of Ms. Yuuki up on the twelfth floor, aren’t you? Is that your only injury?”

  She seemed to be under a slight misconception, but I nodded anyway. I didn’t have the willpower to correct her.

  “I see. I’ll call the doctor at once. Just wait here.” She hurried off.

  I took a deep breath and looked around the lobby. Once I was sure there was no one around, I slipped behind the counter and grabbed a guest pass. With my access in hand, I set my trembling legs working in the direction that none of the adults had gone—toward the hallway I’d traveled dozens of times before.

  The elevator was parked on the first floor, so the door opened as soon as I hit the button. I leaned against the interior wall as the car headed for the top floor. As it was a hospital elevator, its progress was gentle, but even that slight increase in pressure felt ready to break my knees. I barely stayed upright.

  After endless seconds, the elevator stopped and the doors opened. I practically crawled into the hallway.

  The few yards to Asuna’s room felt like miles. I had to prop myself against the handrail along the wall just to keep moving. Left at the L-shaped turn in the hallway, and there was the white door, straight ahead.

  Step after step after step.

  Back then, too—

  After the virtual world’s sunset-wrapped demise, I was released to reality. I woke up in a nondescript hospital room, and that day I made a journey on stumbling feet. In search of Asuna, I walked and walked. That path had led me to this moment.