Early and Late

by Reki Kawahara

  “Like your Alfheim, Jotunheim was once under the blessing of Yggdrasil the World Tree, and it flowed with clean water and lush greenery. We hill giants lived here peacefully with our kindred beasts.”

  As she spoke, the environment of snow and ice silently wavered and faded. Superimposed over them were the very trees, flowers, and flowing water that Urd was describing. The image was even lusher than the gnome and salamander territories up on the surface.

  Even more surprising, Urd revealed that the bottomless Great Void behind us was not a simple hole in this other vision. It was a wide lake full of crystal-clear water. And the roots of the World Tree that dangled from the ceiling now were once thicker and stronger, reaching all the way down to the lake in all directions.

  Atop the thick root bursting through the surface of the water were little log cabins—no, entire towns. The whole image was very similar to Alne, the city on the surface.

  Urd lowered her arm, and the vision disappeared. The familiar sight of icy Jotunheim returned, and she surveyed it with a glance that was both impassive and somehow mournful.

  “Below even Jotunheim is Niflheim, the realm of ice. One day, Thrym, king of the frost giants there, turned himself into a wolf and snuck into this land, where he cast the sword that cuts all steel and wood, Excalibur, forged by Wayland the blacksmith god, into the Spring of Urd in the center of the world. The sword severed the World Tree’s most vital root, and in that moment, Jotunheim lost the blessing of Yggdrasil.”

  This time, Urd raised her left arm. The image screen appeared again, and I was silenced with wonder by the overwhelming sight contained within it.

  The roots of the World Tree that stretched all around the Spring of Urd suddenly rose and began to shrink upward toward the earth ceiling above. The towns resting upon them were shattered and destroyed in their entirety.

  Meanwhile, all the trees’ leaves fell, the grasses dried up, and the light faded. The rivers froze, frost descended, and blizzards raged. The unfathomable amount of water that filled the Spring of Urd froze instantly, and the withdrawing roots of the tree pulled the titanic ice block upward. The enormous creatures that resided within the lake fell out of the massive iceberg, spilling down into the abyss. I spotted what looked like the same jellyphant types as Tonky.

  The roots eventually rose up into the ceiling of Jotunheim—the ground level of Alfheim—and wedged the block of ice halfway into the soil. There was no doubt now that the iceberg was none other than the upside down ice pyramid that loomed over Jotunheim today. The very bottom of the iceberg, sharpened like an icicle, contained a tiny glint of gold. It was Excalibur, the very sword that King Thrym of the frost giants had used to sever the physical connection between the World Tree and Jotunheim.

  With all of the water gone, the once-beautiful lake had turned into a bottomless hole.

  Urd lowered her hand and the screen disappeared again. But this time there was no big change in the background behind it. At most, the block of ice overhead had been reshaped into its current dungeon shape. Leafa and I had seen for ourselves that Excalibur was still locked at the bottom of the pyramid.

  “A great horde of King Thrym’s frost giants spilled forth from Niflheim into Jotunheim, building fortresses and castles and enslaving us hill giants. He built his own castle, Thrymheim, within the ice block that was once the Spring of Urd, and he ruled over this land. My sisters and I survived at the bottom of a spring that froze over, but our former power is lost.”

  Urd lowered her eyelids, her story approaching its end. We were all listening with rapt attention, largely forgetting that she was an NPC relating a game quest.

  “The frost giants were not satisfied with just this, and they continue to attempt to wipe out our kindred beasts, who still survive in Jotunheim. If they succeed, my power will be entirely lost, and Thrymheim, the land of the pyramid, will be able to ascend into Alfheim above.”

  “Wh-whaaat?! But that’ll totally destroy Alne!” Klein bellowed indignantly, lost in his own full dive within the fairy tale we’d just heard. Urd, who was more of an AI than just an NPC with a few speech routines, nodded.

  “King Thrym’s goal is to lock Alfheim under ice as well, and invade the branches of the World Tree Yggdrasil. That is where he will find the Golden Apple that he seeks.”

  For a moment, I tried to recall such an item, and then it hit me. There was an area near the top of the tree guarded by an impossibly powerful eagle type named mob. Perhaps that was where this golden apple could be found.

  “Angered by the continued survival of our kindred beasts, Thrym and his frost giant generals have decided to use the strength of the fairies to achieve their goals. They promise Excalibur as a reward, to convince you to help slaughter our kindred. But Thrym would never give that sword to another. If Excalibur leaves Thrymheim, the blessing of Yggdrasil will return to this land, and his castle will melt into water once more.”

  “So…so Excalibur being a reward is all just a lie?! What kind of quest is that?!” Lisbeth squawked.

  The queen replied regally. “I believe that when Wayland, the blacksmith god, was forging Excalibur, he made one impure strike and cast aside his failure. This false blade, Caliburn, which is otherwise indistinguishable from Excalibur, is what I believe he intends to give away. It is very strong on its own but does not contain the true power of the holy sword.”

  “N-no way…He’s a king, and he’s just going to lie about that?” Leafa muttered. Urd nodded and took a deep breath.

  “That craftiness is Thrym’s greatest weapon. But in his haste to wipe out my kindred beasts, he made one mistake. In order to help the fairies he tricked with his honeyed words, he summoned most of his followers from Thrymheim down to the surface below. The defenses of his castle are now but a shadow of their normal strength.”

  At last, I glimpsed the outcome of this quest—of the queen’s plea.

  Urd, lady of the lake, gestured to Thrymheim above with a massive arm.

  “Fairies, will you infiltrate Thrymheim and draw Excalibur from the keystone pedestal?”

  3

  “…This is all getting pretty crazy…”

  Asuna was the first to speak after Queen Urd disappeared back into golden droplets and Tonky began to fly back upward—at a much more reasonable pace this time.

  Next, Sinon’s light blue tail whipped back and forth as she wondered, “This is…a normal quest, right? It just seems way too big for that…What did she say—that if all the animal Deviant Gods get wiped out, the frost giants will take over the surface?”

  “…She did,” I muttered, my arms crossed. “But do you think the developers would really do something like that without an update or an event notification? Other MMOs have events all the time where a boss comes to invade a town, but they at least warn you about it a week ahead of time…”

  Everyone in the group nodded in agreement. Then Yui leaped off my shoulder to hover in the air, shouting at a volume loud enough for everyone to hear, “Well, I have a conjecture, although I’m not one hundred percent certain about it…”

  She blinked slowly, processing how best to say it, then continued. “There is one aspect of ALfheim Online that makes it very different from other VRMMOs based on The Seed. The Cardinal System that runs the game is not the scaled-down version the others use but is a full-scale replica of the processor used in the old Sword Art Online.”

  She was right about that. Though I hated to remember it, ALO started as a wholesale copy of the SAO server so that one power-mad lunatic could perform illegal experiments on a small subset of the old SAO victims. So the Cardinal System that controlled the game world had the same power as that of the original SAO.

  Yui looked at her rapt audience and went on. “The original Cardinal System had several features that were taken out of the shrunken version. One of them is an automated quest-generation function. It absorbs legends and myths from cultures worldwide using the network, then repackages and remixes the proper names and story
patterns to generate an infinite number of quests.”

  “Wh-what th’ hell?” Klein gasped, his scraggly chin dropping open. “You’re sayin’ that all those quests we busted our asses to beat in Aincrad were just generated outta thin air by the system?”

  “…No wonder there were so many of them. By the seventy-fifth floor, the quest database of the intel agents had easily over ten thousand individual quests listed,” said the former vice commander of the KoB, who had diligently taken on as many quests as she could to help line the coffers of the guild’s operating budget.

  Meanwhile, Silica looked into the vacant distance and mumbled, “Plus, the stories were weird sometimes. Around the thirtieth floor, I think, there was a quest to beat some weird ogre with a mask and a saw, and no matter how many times you killed it, the quest would always reappear on the bulletin board the next week. Wonder what legend that was based on…”

  There were plenty of other examples I could think of, but I didn’t want this to devolve into an Aincrad-griping marathon all the way until we arrived at the pyramid of ice, so I steered us back to the original topic.

  “So Yui, you’re saying that the Cardinal System automatically generated this quest?”

  “Based on the actions of that NPC, I believe it is highly likely. Perhaps the developers have caused the inactive quest-generation function to start running again,” she said, her face dark. “But if that is the case, then it’s quite possible that the effects of the quest will play out as the story goes. That ice dungeon could float up to Alfheim, Alne will fall, and those Deviant Gods will begin to pop into the surrounding areas. In fact…”

  The little AI’s lips shut for a moment, and her features took on a note of fear. “According to my archived data, the Scandinavian mythology that forms the basis for this quest, and ALO as a whole, includes an apocalyptic war. It won’t just be an invasion of the frost giants from Jotunheim and Niflheim, but also flame giants from the realm of fire Muspelheim, even farther down, and they will burn down the World Tree…”

  “…Ragnarok,” muttered Leafa, who loved myths and legends and had a number of books about them in her room back home. Her emerald green eyes shot open and she cried, “But…I can’t possibly believe that the game system would totally overwrite and destroy the maps that it’s charged with managing!”

  That was true. But Yui just shook her head.

  “The original Cardinal System has the right to completely destroy the entire world map. After all, the final duty of the old Cardinal was to obliterate Aincrad.”

  “…”

  This time, I had no response.

  The next to speak was Sinon, who had been listening in silence until now.

  “So…let’s say this Ragnarok really does happen. If it’s not what the developers intended to have happen, can’t they just rewind the server status?”

  “Oh…yeah, yeah, that’s right,” Klein muttered, nodding.

  Rolling back a server by overwriting the current state with a backup version was something that happened from time to time, when programmer error or bugs caused players to gain undue advantages. Alfheim being reduced to a wasteland might not have any effect on individual players’ levels or gear, but nobody actually wanted the entirety of the fairy realm to look like the burned land in the east of salamander territory.

  However, Yui did not immediately confirm this suggestion.

  “It will be possible if the developers manually backed up all data and saved them to physically isolated media…But if they’re using Cardinal’s automatic backup function, depending on the settings, the best they can recover will be player data but not the original environment maps.”

  “…”

  Everyone was silent for two seconds. Then Klein abruptly shouted, “I’ve got it!” and opened his window. Then he hung his head and shouted, “Never mind!”

  “…What was that about?” Lisbeth asked, and the would-be samurai turned to her with a pitiful look on his face.

  “I thought I’d just call a GM and ask to check if they realize what’s going on. But it’s outside of normal user support hours…”

  “Morning on a Sunday at the end of the year,” I sighed, and looked up into the darkness.

  The giant ice pyramid was just in front of us now. If that structure, a thousand feet to a side, burst through the surface above, Alne would certainly panic—and worse. Half of its population had moved to Yggdrasil City atop the World Tree, but the city was still quite busy on weekend nights, both as a base of operations for the high-level dungeons in the Alne plains and as a central trading hub for the various fairy races. It was a very memorable city for me.

  “…I think we have no choice but to do this, Big Brother,” Leafa said, holding up a large medallion dangling from her right hand. Queen Urd’s gift to them was embedded with a large, exquisitely cut gemstone. But over 60 percent of the facets were pitch-black and did not reflect the light.

  When the gem was entirely black and every last animal Deviant God was hunted to extinction, Urd’s power would be lost entirely. That moment would mark the beginning of King Thrym’s invasion of Alfheim.

  “…I agree. After all, I gathered you here today so we could tackle that dungeon and get Excalibur. If their guard is down, even better.”

  I opened my window and fiddled with my equipment mannequin. Hanging on my back were both my long sword special-ordered from Lisbeth and a sword I earned from the fifteenth-floor boss of the New Aincrad.

  Seeing that I was back to my two-sword ways again, Klein smirked and crowed, “Awright, it’s the last big quest of the year! Let’s whup some ass and get on the front page of MMO Tomorrow!”

  Sure, the reasons were a bit crass, but Lisbeth had no complaints this time. The whole group cheered in unison, and even Tonky beat his wings and crooned.

  As the flying Deviant God picked up his ascent speed, he circled around the ice pyramid and sidled up to the entrance placed at the top. When Leafa was last to hop off onto the terrace, she rubbed his massive ear and said, “Wait for us here, Tonky. We’re gonna make sure you get your country back!”

  The sylph girl turned and drew a gently curved longsword from her waist. With all of our weapons in hand, we faced the tall double doors of ice that greeted us.

  Normally you would have to fight the first guardian at this point, but as Urd said, the door opened right away today. We took on a formation of Klein, Leafa, and me in the front; Liz and Silica in the middle; and Asuna and Sinon bringing up the rear. The group headed across the icy floor into the giant palace of Thrymheim.

  The maximum limit of a single party in ALO was the slightly irregular number of seven.

  In most games it was six or eight, and no official reason had been given for the choice of seven. That meant the max for a raid party was forty-nine, from seven parties of seven. It was a good thing there was an automatic redistribution option for money, because dividing it among seven members would be very annoying.

  When trying to construct a full party of just close friends, there were five of us always present: Asuna, Liz, Silica, Leafa, and me. We were all in high school—four of us in the same school—and two of us lived together, so it was easy to coordinate activities.

  For the sixth and seventh slot, it usually rotated between Klein the adult worker, Agil the café/bar owner, Chrysheight the busy government agent, and Leafa’s real-life friend Recon, according to whoever was free at the moment. Recon was in school, too, but in the Battle for Yggdrasil months ago, Sakuya the sylph leader had taken a shine to his bravery, and he was now permanently stationed in Swilvane as a staff member in her mansion. We could only hang out with him when Aincrad was hovering over sylph territory.

  In this case, we were happily able to welcome the archer—more like sniper—Sinon from my time in GGO, but that still left one problem with our party arrangement.

  We didn’t have enough magic. Our only member who regularly used magic skills was Asuna the undine, and because half of her ability was
put into the Rapier skill, she had only mastered support and healing spells. Leafa was a magic warrior, too, but all she could use was in-battle obstruction spells and light heals. Silica had some magic skill, too, but she was primarily support, and Liz’s specialty was, of course, blacksmithing. A third of Agil’s skills were mercantile, and Klein and I were muscle heads who put everything into close combat. Not one of us was any good at attacking spells.

  When our seventh slot was filled with either Recon, who played a very odd sylph build of daggers and high-level dark magic, or Chrysheight, whose ice magic attacks commanded even the respect of his racial leader, our attack strategies were much richer and varied. So if there was one weakness in this particular lineup, it was the lack of magical firepower.

  But that couldn’t be helped—we were transfers from SAO, a game of swords without any kind of real magic. My longsword, Asuna’s rapier, Liz’s battle hammer, Silica’s dagger, Klein’s katana, Agil’s ax, and no doubt Leafa’s sword and Sinon’s bow were not just simple weapons, but something like our proof of existence. We couldn’t just give up on the skills we’d honed and pick up magic. Whether it was inefficient or not, we stuck to our physical-damage-heavy combat style because that was where our pride lay…Until now.

  But even then, there were times when we faced a truly sticky situation.

  “This is a sticky situation, Big Brother! The golden one has too much physical resistance!” Leafa hissed on my left.

  I only had time to nod before the “golden one” lifted up its impossibly huge battle-ax.

  “Two seconds to shock wave! One, zero!” called out Yui from atop my head, as loud as her tiny body could muster. At the countdown, the five members in the front and middle rows leaped to either side. The hurtling ax blade and the resulting shock wave passed right where we had formerly stood, blasting against the far wall.

  Twenty minutes had passed since we entered Thrymheim, the palace of ice. As Queen Urd said, the density of enemies in the dungeon was much thinner than usual. There were essentially no encounters with ordinary mobs in the hallways. The mid-bosses on each floor were half gone. But the staircase guardians on the way to the next floor were still present, and the unfair, overwhelming power that once drove us off on a previous attempt was still on display.