16

The entire time that Asuna had waited back in Grandzam, she had been following my location on her map.

According to her, she’d started running out of town when she saw Godfrey’s marker disappear, which meant that in barely five minutes, she had covered the three miles it took us an hour to walk. It was an impossible number, faster than the agility stat boost could explain. When I pointed this out, she smiled and said it was “an act of love.”

We returned to guild headquarters, reported what had happened to Heathcliff, and applied for temporary leave. Asuna cited her lack of trust in the guild, and after a momentary silence, Heathcliff accepted her request. But at the end, he gave that strange smile again and added cryptically, “You’ll be back on the battlefield soon enough.”

Outside of the tower, it was already growing dark. We walked to the teleport gate holding hands. Neither of us spoke a word.

With the orange light of the sun hitting our backs, we walked slowly through the black silhouettes of Grandzam’s many towers. I absently wondered where Kuradeel’s bottomless hate had come from.

It wasn’t that rare for players to commit wicked deeds in SAO. It was said that there were several hundred criminals in the game, from thieves and bandits to those like Kuradeel and Laughing Coffin, who brutally slaughtered their victims. At this point, they were considered a natural feature of the game, much like monsters.

But the more I thought about it, the stranger it seemed. It was obvious that anyone who intentionally caused harm to other players was working to the detriment of our shared quest to beat the game. Their actions suggested that they didn’t want to leave.

But when I thought about Kuradeel, he didn’t seem to fit that definition. His thoughts had nothing to do with escaping the game or preventing others from doing so. He represented an absence of thought—a man who had stopped pondering the past or future, allowed his own desires to rule him, and fostered the will of evil.

What did that make me? I couldn’t honestly state that my entire purpose within the game was to defeat it. If anything, I was exploring dungeons and gaining levels out of simple inertia, nothing else. If the only reason I fought was to know the pleasure of being better than others, did I truly wish for the game to be over?

I suddenly sensed that the metal plate under my feet was losing balance and sinking, so I stopped walking. I gripped Asuna’s hand harder, as though fighting to stay attached.

“…?”

I glanced at Asuna for an instant and saw her peering quizzically at me, her head tilted. I turned back to the ground and muttered more to myself than to her.

“…No matter what happens…I’m going to send you back…to the real world…”

“…”

This time, she squeezed my hand.

“We’ll go back together.”

She smiled.

We eventually reached the teleport gate square. Only a few players milled about, hunched over in the chill winds that suggested the coming of winter. I turned straight to Asuna. The warm light that shone from her powerful soul was meant to guide me.

“Asuna…I want to spend the night with you,” I said unconsciously.

I didn’t want to be apart from her. I’d just faced the threat of death like never before, and that pall was unlikely to leave my spine any time soon.

I would see them in my dreams tonight, if I slept at all: his madness, the stabbing sword, the feeling of my hand sinking into flesh. I was sure of that.

Asuna looked at me wide-eyed, seemingly grasping the meaning of my statement…and eventually gave a small nod, her cheeks flushing.

Asuna’s apartment in Selmburg was just as luxurious on my second visit, and it had a welcoming warmth to it. The decorative objects placed here and there spoke highly of the owner’s excellent taste, but when Asuna saw them, she stammered.

“O-oh my gosh, it’s such a mess. I haven’t been home in a while…”

She giggled nervously and started stashing things away.

“I’ll get started on dinner. You can read the newspaper or something.”

“Um, okay.”

She removed her equipment and disappeared into the kitchen with an apron while I sank into the comfortable sofa. I picked up a large bundle of paper on top of the table.

Calling it a newspaper was a bit disingenuous. It was really just a collection of stories cobbled together by players who made a living gathering information and selling it as “news.” But with no real form of entertainment in Aincrad, this was a precious bit of media, and more than a few players bought subscriptions. I picked up the four-page paper, gazed absently at the front, then threw it aside in disgust. The front story was my duel with Heathcliff.

DUAL BLADES WIELDER UNVEILED, MERCILESSLY CRUSHED BY HOLY SWORD, the headline screamed, with a helpful picture of me—taken with a special recording crystal—lying prostrate before the triumphant Heathcliff. All I’d done was help add another entry to his legend.

On the other hand, if this cemented the public’s opinion that I was no big deal, it would help deflect attention, I told myself. I flipped to the item marketplace listings, and eventually a fragrant smell wafted out of the kitchen.

Dinner was steak from one of Aincrad’s cattle-like monsters, topped with Asuna’s special soy sauce. The meat itself wasn’t a particularly high rank, as such things go, but the sauce did all the work. Asuna smiled as she watched me stuffing my face.

After dinner, we sat facing each other on her sofas, drinking tea. She was being unusually talkative, rattling off her favorite weapon brands and places she’d like to sightsee on various floors of the castle.

I mostly listened absentmindedly, letting her do all the talking, but when Asuna suddenly fell silent, I couldn’t help but be concerned. She stared down into her cup, as though looking for something in the tea. Her face was a steely mask, as if she were preparing for battle.

“H…hey, what’s wro—”

She set her teacup down on the table with a clatter before I could finish.

“…Okay!”

Asuna braced herself and stood up. She walked over to the window, touched the wall to bring up the room options and then immediately turned out the lanterns in the corners. The room was plunged into darkness. My Search skill automatically blazed into life, switching my eyesight to night-vision mode.

Now the room was colored a faint blue, with Asuna shining brightly at the window, reflecting the lights of the town. I was confused but held my breath at the beauty of the sight.

Her long hair looked dark blue in the gloom, and the slender white of her arms and legs extending from the tunic shone as if they were producing the light by themselves.

Asuna stood silently at the window. She was hunched over, so I couldn’t see her face. When she drew her left hand to her chest, she appeared to be grappling with some inner decision.

Just when I was about to say something, to ask what was going on, she moved. With a small ping, she traced her finger in the air and drew open her status window. Her hands moved over the glowing purple options in the blue darkness. It seemed from here like she was manipulating her equipment…

And in the next instant, the knee-high socks she was wearing disappeared without a sound, exposing the slender curves of her legs. Her fingers moved again. This time, her entire one-piece tunic was gone. My mouth dropped open and my eyes were wide.

She was wearing nothing but her underwear now. Tiny little slips of white cloth that barely covered her breasts and hips.

“J-just don’t…stare, okay?” she stammered, her voice trembling. As if it was that easy to tear my eyes away.

She crossed her arms in front of her body and fidgeted, but eventually looked up and gracefully lowered her arms.

I felt a shock as though my soul had just escaped my body.

Beauty wasn’t the right word for it. Her smooth, shining skin was clad in particles of blue light. Her hair was the finest silk. The swelling of her breasts was more ample than it had originally seemed. The flesh of her slender hips and long legs was as tight as a wild animal’s. Paradoxically, her curvature was so perfect that it couldn’t have been rendered in any graphics engine.

This was not a finely modeled 3-D object. If anything, it was a sculpture that God himself had filled with a soul.

Our bodies in SAO were semi-automatically generated with data the NerveGear gathered when we logged in and ran the calibration process for the very first time. Given that, it was nothing short of a miracle that such a beautiful body should exist in the game.

I stared and stared at her half-naked figure, my mind blank. If she never got tired, put her hands back up, or spoke to me, I would have stared in silence for an entire hour.

She looked down and blushed so hard that I could see it in the blue darkness.

“G-go on—you, too…Are you g-going to embarrass me?”

Finally, at long last, I understood what Asuna was doing.

When I’d told her that I wanted to spend the night together, she’d interpreted it beyond the literal meaning.

The instant I realized what was happening, my mind fell into a deep panic. I’d just made the biggest mistake of my life.

“Ah! No, that’s not what I—I didn’t mean it like—I only meant that I w-wanted to sleep in the same room…that’s…all…”

“Wha…?”

I spilled my train of thought in an embarrassingly straightforward manner, and now it was Asuna’s turn to be blank-faced. Soon enough, it turned into a mixture of absolute shame and rage.

“Why…you…”

I could see the lethal intent she fused into her clenched fist.

“Idiot!!”

Asuna’s punch burst forward at my face with the full assistance of her agility stat, but just before it could connect, the system’s anti-crime code kicked in, sending deafening echoes and purple sparks around the room.

“Aaah! I’m sorry, I’m sorry, forget that last part!”

I waved my arms desperately and tried to explain before Asuna could ready another blow.

“I’m sorry! It was my fault! I-I mean, besides…can you even do…that? In SAO…?”

She finally dropped out of her fighting stance, but the look of burning rage and exasperation on her face did not change.

“Y-you didn’t know?”

“I didn’t know…”

She proceeded in a small voice, her face suddenly shifting from anger to embarrassment.

“…If you…dig deep in the options…there’s a ‘Moral Code Removal’ setting.”

I had no idea. There certainly wasn’t anything like that in the beta, nor in the manual. This was a very unexpected way to pay the price for not caring about anything but fighting while I was in SAO.

But this revelation led to another suspicion. Before my better sense could intervene, I spoke it out loud.

“Does that mean…you’ve done this befo—”

Her fist exploded in my face again.

“O-of course I haven’t! I found out about it from someone in the guild!”

I hastily prostrated myself and apologized over and over. It took several minutes to defuse the situation.

A single tiny candle placed on the table was the only thing that lit Asuna as she lay in my arms. I traced the pale skin of her back with a finger. Just that warm, smooth sensation coming through my fingertips was pure intoxication.

Asuna’s eyes opened slightly, batted several times, and she smiled at me.

“Sorry, did I wake you?”

“Mm…I was dreaming. Of the old world…It’s weird.”

She rested her face against my chest, still smiling.

“In my dream, I got so worried. I was afraid that everything about Aincrad, and the fact that I met you here, was a dream of its own. I’m glad it didn’t turn out to be that way.”

“That’s weird. Don’t you want to leave?”

“I do, I do. But I don’t want to lose the time I’ve spent here. We’ve come a really long way…but these two years are very important to me. I realize that now.”

She looked serious for a moment, then took my hand off her shoulder and held it to her chest.

“I’m sorry, Kirito…It should have been me who finished that fight.”

I sucked in a quick breath, then let it out slowly.

“No…Kuradeel went after me, and I was the one who drove him to do what he did. That was my battle.”

I stared into Asuna’s eyes and gave a slow nod.

Her hazel eyes were faintly brimming with tears. She raised my hand to her lips. I could feel their gentle touch.

“I’ll be there to help bear what you bear. We’ll carry it together. I promise. No matter what happens, I’ll be there to protect you.”

Those were the words.

The words that I’d never been able to utter up to this point. And now, my lips trembling, the words came tumbling out of my throat—out of my soul.

“…And I…”

The faint sounds barely pushed the air.

“…will be there to protect you.”

It was so tiny, so doubtful, so unconvincing. I couldn’t help but grimace, and then I squeezed her hand back.

“You’re strong, Asuna. Much stronger than me…”

She blinked at this, then smiled.

“That’s not true. In the other world, I was always the type to hide behind someone else. I didn’t even buy this game for myself.”

She giggled, remembering something.

“My brother bought it and had to go on a work trip, so I got to try it out on the very first day. It was so hard for him to leave without it, and now I’ve been hogging it for two years. I bet he’s so angry.”

It seemed to me like she’d gotten the worse side of that deal, but I nodded in agreement.

“You need to get back and say you’re sorry.”

“Yeah…I’ve got my work cut out for me.”

But those brave words came mumbled, and she looked away nervously. Asuna squeezed her entire body against me.

“Hey…Kirito. I realize this contradicts what I just said, but…do you think maybe we should leave the front lines for a bit?”

“Huh…?”

“I’m just scared…We’ve finally connected in this powerful way, and I can’t help but feel like going back into battle will lead to some terrible thing happening…Maybe I’m just tired of this.”

I brushed her hair with my fingers and was surprised to find myself agreeing with her.

“Good point…I’m tired, too.”

You didn’t need dwindling stat numbers to notice that day after day of stressful combat took its toll. Especially when it involved extreme shock like today. Even the strongest bowstring will snap if you keep pulling on it. A little rest was necessary sometimes.

I could feel the impulse that drove me to battle, something that felt a bit like peril, drifting further away. All I wanted to do right now was be with this girl, to grow closer together.

I put both arms around her and buried my face in her silken hair.

“There’s a nice place down in the southwest region of floor twenty-two. Lots of forests and lakes, no monsters. There’s a tranquil little village there. Couple of log cabins available to buy. Let’s move down there. And then…”

When I paused to find the right words, Asuna turned her sparkling eyes to me.

“And then…?”

I forced my stubborn tongue to continue.

“L…let’s get married.”

I’ll never forget the smile she gave me then.

“…Okay.”

One large tear rolled down her cheek as she nodded.