Early and Late

by Reki Kawahara

  “Heh heh…I knew this would happen…Knew that guy would come and save us at the last second…”

  Liar! I thought furiously, and I suspected everyone else joined me on that one. In fact, we’d all forgotten about him. The dutiful, heroic Deviant God glided closer and closer, with plenty of time to scoop all of us up before we crashed.

  Because of all the falling ice around the disc, Tonky couldn’t sidle up directly next to us; instead, he pulled into a hover about five yards away. But even a heavily weighted player could make that jump.

  Leafa was the first to effortlessly leap over onto Tonky’s back, practically humming as she did so. She held out both hands toward us and shouted, “Silica!”

  Silica nodded, clutched Pina’s legs with both hands, and made an awkward running start before she jumped. Pina was left essentially dangling Silica below her, and she flapped her wings to boost the airborne time. That was a privilege only a tamer with a flying pet could boast. She flew over and landed safely in Leafa’s arms.

  Next to leap was Lisbeth, with a bold “Traaah!” and Asuna following with a graceful long jump. Sinon even showed off with a double spin before landing near Tonky’s tail.

  Klein looked at me nervously and I waved him onward.

  “Awwright, get ready to see my beautiful—” he started, preparing his timing. I whacked him on the back. The jump at the end of his flailing head start was coming up a bit short, but Tonky reached out his trunk and caught Klein in midair.

  “Wh-whoaaaa?! Ohmygod!!” he screamed.

  I ignored him and looked down below. Beyond the translucent disc of ice, the Great Void threatened to swallow my entire view. I looked forward, started a quick run—then came to a horrifying realization.

  I couldn’t jump.

  Or to be precise, I couldn’t jump five yards with the tremendous weight of the Holy Sword Excalibur clenched in my arms. It felt like my boots were biting into the ice just standing here.

  Over on Tonky’s back, everyone else seemed to pick up on my concern.

  “Kirito!” came their impassioned cries. My head downcast, I grappled with a powerful, momentary doubt.

  I had two choices—fall to my death holding Excalibur or discard it and live. Was this five-yard gap a test of my greed and fixation as a player, really just a coincidence? Or was it a trap laid by the Cardinal System…?

  “Papa…” Yui murmured worriedly above my head. I nodded back.

  “…Damn you, Cardinal!” I swore, grimacing.

  The next moment, I cast aside the sword in my hand.

  Suddenly, my body felt light as a feather. The golden shine glittered as it spun out of my field of view.

  I took a short lead, tensed, and leaped, turning around in midair. For all of its weight, Excalibur fell slowly, like a feather fallen from a phoenix’s wing, glittering into the endless hole.

  The moment I landed backward on Tonky, his eight wings spread wide. I felt myself pressing into his back with deceleration. The creature had been falling with the disc so we would remain level, and now it switched to a hover, stopping our fall.

  Asuna came over and patted me on the shoulder. “We can go back and get it sometime.”

  “I will get a lock on its coordinates!” Yui reassured me.

  “Yeah…good idea. I’m sure it’ll be waiting for me somewhere in Niflheim,” I muttered, ready to say a silent farewell to the world’s strongest sword, which I had once held in my hands.

  But that was cut short by the blue-haired cait sith who stepped in front of me, pulling her enormous longbow off of her shoulder and nocking a narrow silver arrow.

  “Two hundred meters,” she muttered, chanting a quick spell. White light wreathed the arrow.

  As we watched in disbelief, the archer/sniper Sinon drew her arrow back.

  At a forty-five-degree angle, far below the plummeting Excalibur, she let it fly. The arrow shot off, leaving a strange silver line in the air behind it—Retrieving Arrow, a spell common to archers of any race. It essentially stuck an extremely elastic, sticky thread to the arrow. It was a useful spell, allowing you to retrieve arrows that would normally be lost and pulling distant objects within reach, but the thread threw off the arrow’s arc, and there was no homing ability, so it was only accurate at close range.

  Finally realizing what Sinon was intending, I couldn’t help but think, Even you couldn’t…

  Even she couldn’t do this. That distance was twice the effective range of the bow Liz crafted for her. And even within range, there were plenty of negative factors: unsteady footing, falling ice, a moving target.

  But—but, but, but.

  The falling point of golden light and the descending silver thread, as if pulling toward the other, grew closer, closer…

  And collided with a little thack.

  “Hah!”

  Sinon yanked on the magic thread connected to her right hand. The golden light abruptly slowed, then came to a stop and began to ascend. The little point of light steadily grew larger and longer, until it resembled a sword again.

  Two seconds later, the legendary weapon that I had just given an eternal farewell stuck right into Sinon’s palm.

  “Wow, it’s heavy,” the cait sith grunted, using both hands to secure it before turning to the group.

  “S…S…S…”

  Seven voices chimed in perfect unison.

  “Sinon’s so freakin’ cool!”

  She responded to the group’s adulation with a twitch of her triangular ears, as her hands were full with the sword, then looked at me last and gave a slight shrug.

  “Don’t look so pathetic. You can have it.”

  Apparently I’d had a giant message reading Give it to me! in magic marker on my forehead. I looked off in an attempt at innocence, but Sinon grunted, holding out the sword.

  I felt a slight bit of déjà vu. Two weeks earlier, Sinon had given me something with the exact same gesture at the end of the battle-royale final round of the Bullet of Bullets tournament in GGO.

  I had taken it automatically, a plasma grenade that would wipe out all of my HP in one blast, and the two of us had held it between us so we could die together—a bit of an ominous end, I had to admit. I was too scared to look up how the rest of the Net had reacted to that scene.

  But this time, the sword wasn’t going to explode. I hoped.

  “Th…thanks,” I said, holding out my hands to accept the sword—which was pulled back at the last second.

  “But promise me one thing first.”

  And with a dazzling smile, the biggest she’d worn since coming to ALO, the blue-haired cait sith dropped a bomb ten times more destructive than that plasma grenade.

  “Every time you draw this sword, think of me.”

  Crackle.

  The air went icy cold, and the golden blade Excalibur passed from Sinon’s hands to mine. But the virtual sweat running down my back was so vivid, I didn’t even feel its unearthly weight.

  “Ooh, it’s tough being a real playe—”

  Klein started to say unhelpfully, but I cut him off with a stomp on his foot and tried to keep my voice as calm as possible.

  “…Yes, I will think of you, and be grateful. Thank you. Your aim was simply superb.”

  “You’re welcome,” Sinon replied with a saucy wink, then turned and moved in the direction of Tonky’s tail. She pulled out a peppermint stem from her quiver, stuck it in her mouth, and sucked on it. Sinon was trying to pull off the super-cool, hotshot sniper aloofness, but I didn’t miss the trembling in the tip of her tail. That was the sign she was holding in belly laughter. She got one over on me! I groaned, but there was nothing to be done about the suspicious glances from the women now.

  To my surprise, the first one to come to my aid this time was Tonky.

  “Kwoooo…” he trumpeted, drawing out the sound and powerfully flapping his eight wings to ascend. I looked up and saw what was probably the last and biggest spectacle of the entire quest commencing before my eyes.
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br />   Thrymheim palace, jammed deep into the ceiling of the cavernous realm of Jotunheim, was beginning to fall.

  The bottom part had crumbled without a trace, but the rest of the structure was still intact. We’d always assumed it was an upside-down pyramid, but there had been an identical mass of the same size hidden above it. In total, Thrymheim was a pyramidal octahedron, just like the chamber that contained Excalibur.

  The length of each side was exactly three hundred meters. Which meant the distance from top point to bottom point was the same as the diagonal of a square: 300 times √2 made 424.26 meters. The special viewing deck of the Tokyo Skytree was 450 meters high, so it was nearly that size. I was glad that we didn’t need to travel up through the dungeon before going back down.

  As my brain was busy with those pointless calculations, the palace of ice began to fall with a cracking like thunder. As the wind pressure hit it, the ice began to crumble faster. Glacier-size crevasses began to form up and down the structure, breaking it into several large chunks.

  “…So we got to go on one little adventure in that dungeon, and now it’s gone forever…” Liz murmured. Silica clutched Pina in her arms and chimed in.

  “It’s a bit of a shame, isn’t it? There were plenty of rooms we didn’t even go in…”

  “Our mapping percentage was only 37.2 percent,” Yui added sadly from atop my head.

  “Yeah, it’s a real waste…But I had a lotta fun,” Klein said gravely, hands on his hips. Then he thought of something and swiveled around, and in an odd voice, he asked, “Hey, Leafa. So, erm…that Freyja’s still a real goddess somewhere, right? One that ain’t that Thor guy in disguise?”

  “Yeah, that’s right,” Leafa said.

  He smirked. “Ah, great. So if I go around lookin’, I might just meet her someday.”

  “…Maybe you will.”

  It was an act of kindness on Leafa’s part that she didn’t point out that Asgard, realm of the gods, did not exist in ALO. I thought back to King Thrym’s final words before Thor finished him off for good. He seemed to be saying something about the Aesir being the true…something. What was it?

  But that fragment of memory was wiped out by the dying wail of Thrymheim, the deafening crash of its utter annihilation at last.

  The tremendous icebergs falling through the sky passed so near to Tonky that I practically could have reached out to touch them. They tumbled down into the Great Void below and vanished into endless darkness.

  …Actually, that wasn’t quite right.

  I could see some kind of light at the bottom of the hole. A flash of wavering blue, glimmering just like…water. It was the surface of water.

  From the depths of the seemingly endless pit came a different kind of rumbling as a mass of water swelled up higher and higher. The tremendous deluge of ice was swallowed by the liquid, melting and adding to the water level.

  “Oh…up above!” Sinon motioned, mint stem still poking out of the corner of her mouth.

  Following her lead, I looked upward, to be met by yet another astonishing sight.

  With the collapse of Thrymheim, the roots of the World Tree shriveled into the ceiling of Jotunheim were freed at last, thickening and writhing like massive animals. They tangled together and stretched downward, in search of something. It was like a giant had just dropped a mass of wooden stakes. As we watched in silence, the roots reached down into the pure water surface that filled the former Great Void, sending huge concentric waves rippling outward. They spread across the vast lake like a net, until they splashed against its shores.

  It was the same sight as Queen Urd had shown us. The roots of the World Tree, now thick enough that they looked like an extension of its massive trunk, finally stopped moving and seemed to be emitting powerful waves of some kind. They felt like pure adulation, the rejoicing of a desert wanderer who arrives at the oasis at last.

  “Look…there are buds coming from the roots,” Asuna whispered. Indeed, all over the sprawling roots, tiny buds were popping up and sprouting green leaves—though from this distance, it was clear that each were in fact huge trees of their own.

  A breeze picked up.

  Not the bone-chilling rattle that had always swept through Jotunheim. A warm, gentle wafting of spring. At the same time, the light filling the realm grew several times brighter. I looked up again to see that the dim crystals embedded into the ceiling of the cave were each shining as powerfully as a tiny sun.

  Kissed by the breeze and the light, the snow choking the ground and thick ice covering the brooks and rivers began to melt before our eyes, replaced by fresh green buds on the damp black earth. The Deviant God fortresses and castles here and there were quickly covered in greenery and turned into ruins.

  “Kwoooooh…”

  Tonky suddenly spread his eight wings and wide ears, lifting his lengthy nose for a long, loud trumpeting.

  Seconds later, similar responses echoed back from every direction. Emerging from the springs, rivers, and the massive lake in the center of the world were more jellyphants, like giant dumplings with tentacles. And that wasn’t all. Many-legged crocodiles, two-headed leopards—a variety of animal-type Deviant Gods were emerging from the ground and water to roam the land again.

  In fact, amid the beautiful greenery, they were no longer “Deviant Gods” at all. They were simply pleasant, gentle inhabitants of the land, soaking in the breeze, the flora, and the sunlight. Even if they were a bit…bigger than most. No matter how hard I looked, there was no sign of any humanoid Deviant Gods to torment them.

  Tonky had lowered himself enough that here and there were tiny raid parties visible below, standing still in shock. They had to be absolutely stunned. After hours of frantic work for Archduke Thjazi on his slaughter quest, just before they were about to succeed, their ally giants vanished and the environment around them underwent a dramatic change. No wonder they were shocked.

  As Klein had said before we started, we might need to explain what exactly happened to an MMO Tomorrow reporter for anyone to understand the full story, but he could fulfill that role and soak in the glory, I decided.

  Leafa sat down promptly and began to brush the silky white fur on Tonky’s broad back, whispering, “…I’m glad. I’m so glad for you, Tonky. Look at all of those friends. There…and there…and there…All around us.”

  Even antisocial me had trouble keeping down a rise of emotion at seeing the large tears dripping down her cheeks. Silica joined in and embraced Leafa, heaving with sobs, as Asuna and Liz wiped their eyes. Klein, arms folded, turned away so that no one could see his face, and even Sinon seemed to be blinking rapidly.

  Lastly, Yui leaped off of my head and landed on Asuna’s shoulder to bury her face into the long blue hair. For some reason, she didn’t like my seeing her cry recently. I wondered whom she got that habit from…

  And then I heard a voice.

  “You have succeeded gloriously.”

  I faced forward with a start.

  Beyond Tonky’s large head was a floating figure amid a backdrop of golden light.

  It hadn’t even been two hours since I last saw it, but the sight was practically nostalgic for me. It was none other than the ten-foot-tall blond bombshell, Urd, queen of the lake, the source of our quest.

  But unlike last time, where she was faint and translucent, now she was clearly full-bodied and real. She must have escaped from the spring that she’d been hiding in to keep away from Thrym’s grasp. The pearly scales on her limbs, the golden hair that ended in tentacle tips, and the light green robe that covered her body were all glittering in the fresh new light.

  Her mysterious turquoise eyes narrowed serenely, Urd spoke again.

  “With the removal of Excalibur, blade that cuts all steel and wood, the spirit root severed from Yggdrasil has returned to its mother tree. The tree’s blessing fills the land again, and Jotunheim has regained its proper form. This is all thanks to you.”

  “Aww…shucks. If it weren’t for Thor, I doubt we�
�d have ever beaten Thrym,” I mumbled, and Urd nodded.

  “I felt the lightning god’s power as well. But…be cautious, fairies. The Aesir may be the enemies of the frost giants, but that does not make them your friends…”

  “Um…Thrym was trying to say something like that himself. What does that…?” Leafa asked, wiping her tears away as she got to her feet. But the Cardinal System didn’t seem to understand the vague question, and Urd silently ignored it, rising slightly.

  “My sisters wish to thank you as well.”

  Urd’s right side rippled like water, and a figure emerged.

  It was slightly smaller than her older sister—but still tall enough to tower over us. Her hair was blond as well, but a bit shorter than Urd’s. Her robe was a deep blue. If Urd’s features were “regal,” hers were “refined.”

  “My name is Verdandi. Thank you, fairy warriors. It is like a dream to witness Jotunheim green and verdant once again…” she whispered blissfully. Verdandi waved a willowy hand, and a wave of items and sacks of yrd fell before our eyes, flowing into our temporary item storage. As a party of seven, we had plenty of room, but I was starting to worry about hitting even that limit.

  Then, on Urd’s left side, a little whirlwind burst into life, bringing with it a third silhouette.

  This one was in full armor. Long wings stretched from either side of her helmet and boots. Her blond hair was tied tight, hanging on either side of her beautiful, bold face.

  And this third sister had a very striking feature of her own. She was human—er, fairy—sized. Compared to Urd, the eldest, she was not even half as large. Klein’s throat made a strange glumph sound.

  “My name is Skuld! You have my thanks, warriors!”

  Her clear, clipped voice rang out, and she swung her arm in turn. There was another treasure-fall of loot. A warning about imminent space shortage began to blink in my message area on the right side of my view.

  The two younger sisters backed away, and Urd strode forward again. If she gave us a similar windfall, we would absolutely run out of space. If that happened, the leftover items would be materialized as objects, to pile up on Tonky’s back. But, for better or for worse, Urd merely smiled at us.