5

“I got no personal beef with you…”

Klein’s voice echoed off the ancient ruins. He turned his katana toward the army outfitted in red.

“…But you’ve gotta pay for what you did to my friend. You’ll get it back three times as bad…no, a thousand!!”

He charged at the enemy group. It was such a ridiculous and reckless move that Asuna actually forgot about her devastating pain due to exasperation. The next moment, however, another line of code rained down and formed a human figure next to Klein.

It was a large, burly man with chocolate-brown skin and a huge battle-ax.

“…Agil!!” she rasped.

The fighting merchant, who had assisted the SAO frontline group with both battle prowess and supplies, cracked a huge smile when he saw Asuna and gave her a thumbs-up. Then he turned and raced after Klein.

Already, the third and fourth people to arrive were on the scene.

One was a girl with short hair wearing a dark-red costume with a breastplate and a silver mace at her side. The other was a much smaller girl in a deep-blue tunic and skirt with her hair tied up at the sides.

“Liz!! Silica!!”

At last, Asuna’s eyes filled with tears. All the tension went out of her body, leaving her just strong enough to stay standing. She stretched out her arms to her companions, with whom she shared such a powerful bond.

“You…you came…”

“Of course we came!”

“What else would we do?!”

The two newcomers’ faces crinkled into smiles, Lisbeth taking Asuna’s right hand and Silica squeezing her left. Their beaming expressions were soon tearful as well.

“Look at what you’ve done to yourself…all covered in injuries like this…You’re pushing yourself too hard, Asuna.”

“Let us handle the rest. Everyone showed up for you.”

Just the presence of Lisbeth and Silica hugging her sides brought a warmth to the pain Asuna felt all over, and she felt her aches melting away.

“Thank…thank you…”

Through her overflowing tears, the rain of code fell on the entrance to the ruins. It led to hundreds of new warriors dressed in bright and varied colors.

“The red ones are the enemy!”

“Front line, charge! Push them back!”

“Rear line, pull back and check your spells!”

As soon as they landed, the new warriors traded calls in the language of the Underworld—Japanese—and prepared swords, axes, and spears to meet the oncoming enemy. It was clear from their impressive individual skill and orderly group coordination that these were all experienced VRMMO players.

That’s what it is.

At last, Asuna had enough functioning brainpower to put it all together.

When the American players had joined the battle, it meant that the Underworld’s time-acceleration rate was set to zero by the ship’s attackers. That meant that people from Japan could dive in with their AmuSpheres, too.

But the quality of the reinforcements’ swords and armor made it clear that they weren’t using default soldier loadouts.

They had converted their characters.

It was the only explanation. They’d moved the characters they’d spent so much time and effort into fashioning over to the Underworld.

Even though it wasn’t clear at all if they could get them back to the normal VRMMO world they came from. In fact, considering the way the Underworld was designed, it was quite possible that every character would be permanently deleted the moment they died!

“I’m…I’m sorry…I’m so sorry,” she said tearfully to her friends—and to all the fighters who came to help push back the enemy’s front row.

“What do you mean, Asuna?” Lisbeth asked. Her voice was brimming with absolute determination. “Everything that I’ve worked hard at in SAO and ALO was meant to come into play right here—to protect what’s important to me.”

“Yeah…You’re right………Thank you………”

Asuna let her head drop toward the ground.

There was still something left she didn’t understand. Who had told Liz and the rest about the Underworld’s peril and recruited all these converted reinforcements? It was hard to imagine that Kikuoka and Higa, trapped in the sub-control room of the Ocean Turtle, would devise and carry out such a strategy.

“…Liz, Silica. Who actually brought everyone here…?” Asuna asked.

The girls shared a quick glance, then broke into grins. “Shouldn’t that be obvious, Asuna?”

“It was Yui! Yui did her best to explain what was going on with the Underworld and the people living in it!”

The instant she heard these words, Asuna felt something wrench the muscles deep inside her. Tears flooded from her eyes.

Yui. The little top-down AI created in the old SAO—and Asuna and Kirito’s daughter. Of course…it could only have been her. She’d sensed the plan of the attackers that Asuna and Kikuoka could never have foreseen, and she’d worked to counteract it.

“……Thank you, Yui,” she whispered with all of her being. When she stood up again, her severed left arm was completely regenerated, and nearly all the wounds and scars across her body were gone.

From over her shoulder came a timid, hesitant voice.

“Um…Lady Asuna? Who are those people…and those knights…?”

It was Integrity Knight Renly, who looked stunned by this development. Behind him, the men-at-arms who’d just been saved were equally wide-eyed.

Asuna looked back and forth between Renly and the girls and gave him a smile. “They’re my very good friends and companions. They’ve come from the real world to save us.”

Renly blinked several times, then stared hard at Lisbeth and Silica. Eventually, his youthful face broke into an expression of relief.

“Oh, I see…I’m so glad…I was under the impression that aside from Lady Asuna, all the people from the outside world were fearsome warriors like the ones in red…”

“Hey! Of course that’s not true!!” Lisbeth scolded, scandalized, but she gave him a warm smile and bopped him on the shoulder. “I’m Lisbeth. Nice to meet you, Sir Knight.”

“Uh…th-thank you. And likewise. My name is Renly.”

Asuna had been watching this unfold with a warm glow inside of her, but now there was something of a certainty within her: She would never forget this scene for the rest of her life.

Two people born in different worlds had met, exchanged words, and begun a personal relationship. It was a story that ought to last for a very, very long time, and she couldn’t let it end in sadness.

She took a deep breath and asked Lisbeth firmly, “How many people converted in total, Liz?”

“Oh…right. I think it’s just over two thousand. We tried our best…but obviously not everyone was going to join us in this…” Lisbeth bit her lip.

Asuna gave her friend a pat on the back. “It’s more than enough. But…we don’t want a battle of attrition, just in case there’s a chance of reconverting. Focus on healing and don’t spread the line too wide. Liz and Silica, you should take about two hundred to the rear to create a support battalion.”

Focusing her mind on the battle ahead, Asuna gave quick orders to Renly and the guards behind him: “While I’m sure it’s not your first choice, I’d like you to join the priests and use your healing arts. The real-world warriors are not used to sacred arts, so it would be good of you to help teach them the ways.”

“Y-yes, Lady Asuna! You heard her, guards! We’re going to support these reinforcement knights!” Renly cried out. Despite their deep fatigue after multiple battles, the men-at-arms answered fiercely.

“…And what are you going to do, Asuna?” Silica asked. Asuna gave her a wink.

“I’m going to fight at the front, of course.”

This time, Asuna knew she wasn’t going to give in.

She raced to the front line and shared firm looks of understanding with those familiar faces from ALO who had come to help—Sylphic Lady Sakuya, Lady Alicia of the cait siths, General Eugene of the salamanders.

In fact, they weren’t all ALO converts. The ones assisting the swordsmen with extremely accurate crossbows were probably players from Gun Gale Online, like Sinon.

And there, in a tight-knit group and mowing down enemies like a storm, was the most powerful and experienced VRMMO guild of all, the Sleeping Knights. When Siune the mage spotted her, she smiled, and Asuna waved back, feeling the tears coming again.

They had all come to help, knowing that it could mean the loss of the avatars that were another part of themselves. As the only one protected by a super-account, she had to take the most risk and ensure that they suffered the fewest losses possible.

Asuna raced along the battlefield, giving orders to the new arrivals, instructing them to shrink the expanding line of combat, and rebuilding the semicircle of defense around the entrance to the temple ruins.

The two thousand converted warriors might have great stats and equipment, but there were over ten thousand American players still. In a war of attrition, the number of dead—those whose data was lost forever—would only rise.

There was one other worry she could not ignore.

The sensation of real pain, an unavoidable part of doing battle in the Underworld.

Unlike most of the Americans, who were already dead and logged out by the time they would actually feel much pain, the Japanese players were going to undergo a cycle of injury, retreat, and healing. Asuna had already experienced for herself how that kind of constant agony could break one’s will over time.

Please, everyone, hang in there. Just hold out until we can finish off these ten thousand.

Then the attackers of the Ocean Turtle would truly be out of manpower to send into the Underworld. All that would remain would be catching up to Emperor Vecta, whom Commander Bercouli and Sinon were holding down, and taking back Alice.

Her rapier flashing at the front line of battle, Asuna cried out, “It’s all right…We can win! We can win this working together!!”

It was a bit late for the Japanese VRMMO player by the name of Takashi Hirono to be wondering what he was doing in this position.

He’d been awakened at five in the morning by a call from a friend. The reason that he’d logged in to ALO and converted his character out of nowhere wasn’t because he had seen a cute girl desperately pleading her case or that he had found it to be a moving one.

If anything, the biggest reason was “just because.”

He was also a little bit curious to see what a VRMMO built on a government budget would look like. There was a sense of abandon, too, because his first major test in high school was terrible, so they were going to take away his AmuSphere soon; he just knew it. And lastly, he had just a tiny premonition that there might actually be something to this place that he hadn’t found in any other VRMMO he’d played.

Takashi converted the character he’d been working on for two years and logged in to a server he’d never heard of before. The first thing he saw was a huge man in red armor screaming in native English and swinging a halberd toward him.

He jumped back, his scream catching in his throat, but the point of the halberd hit his left leg armor, broke the plate, and dug a bit into his shin. He hadn’t felt this kind of pain since the time he fell off his bike in elementary school and broke a bone.

You didn’t say anything about this!! he wailed silently, doing his desperate best to dodge further halberd attacks, and used his ultra-rare longsword to defeat the large man somehow. He was about to throw up at the sight of real blood streaming from the wound on his leg when someone dragged him back to the rear, where the support battalion was located.

I hate this! I’m logging out! he screamed as his wound was attended to by a girl around his age wearing a light-blue frock, likely identifying her as a priestess class. Something about her struck him as very mysterious.

“I will heal you right away. Bear the pain just a bit longer, Sir Knight,” she said weakly. She put her hands on the massive wound—by Takashi’s standards, at least—and chanted a healing spell. At first, he thought she was an NPC.

But the diligence in her grayish-brown eyes, her winsome features neither Eastern nor Western in appearance, and the warmth of the light that she summoned to heal his wounds—all of them told Takashi that this was not an NPC, or a Japanese person role-playing, but a real human who lived in this virtual world.

Was that really possible? She spoke Japanese but wasn’t ethnically Japanese, and she wasn’t an NPC. So what did that make her?

Somehow, it wasn’t the searing pain of the halberd hitting his leg, but feeling this girl heal that wound, that convinced Takashi he wasn’t just taking part in some promotional event but was in the middle of something momentous and historic.

“There. You should be fine now, Sir Knight,” said the girl in the robes, with just a bit of pride in her voice. When she removed her hands, the two-inch-long cut was completely sealed, with only the faintest light-brown scar in its place. He no longer felt any pain.

“Th…thank you…,” he managed to stammer. He felt frustrated that he couldn’t say something that fit the image of something a “Sir Knight” would say. His face grew hot, and his tongue was heavy in his mouth. The next thing he knew, to his great surprise, his arms were reaching out to grab the girl’s slender body and pull her toward himself.

If this were a normal VRMMO world, Takashi’s actions would be recognized as improper conduct toward an NPC, and he would be given a warning by the system.

But the priestess girl just seized up awkwardly in Takashi’s arms and sucked in a startled breath. A few seconds later, Takashi felt her arms hesitantly circle his back and give him some small measure of pressure in return.

“It will be all right, Sir Knight from afar,” she whispered into his ear. “Even as an apprentice sister, I am completing my duty, as meager as it is. You are fighting with many times more bravery than I can. Please remember…that you are swinging your sword to protect this world and its many people.”

Then she brushed Takashi’s back gently with her right hand.

It was the first time in Takashi’s life that he’d ever hugged a girl, in either the real world or the virtual world. But he had the feeling that even if he got a girlfriend in the real world, he would never have a feeling that eclipsed what he felt right here and now.

The dreamlike moment passed, and they pulled apart. Takashi summoned his courage to ask, “Um…C-can you tell me your name?”

The apprentice priestess’s white cheeks flushed just the slightest bit. “Yes…my name is Frenica. Frenica Cesky.”

“Frenica…”

It had a strange sound to it, but it was perfectly suited to the girl across from him. Takashi introduced himself with uncharacteristic vigor—not his avatar’s name of Verios, but the birth name he didn’t particularly like.

“…My name is Takashi…Takashi Hirono. Ummm…when this war is over, do you think that I could see you again?”

Frenica’s brows rose just a bit, but then her eyes narrowed warmly, and she nodded. “But of course, Sir Takashi. When the war is over and peace returns to the world, I would like that. I will pray to the three goddesses for your good fortune in battle.”

She took Takashi’s hand in both of hers and rose to her feet. As he watched Frenica spin around, blue robes swirling, and rush off to treat her next patient, Takashi felt a powerful compulsion—to fight bravely until the end, so that he might stand tall and proud when he saw her again. This world was not just some game. It was another plane of reality, as weighty and worthy as the real world Takashi had been born into.

Even if his hit points—his very life—should be depleted, kicking him out of this world, he would be forward-facing until the end and continue swinging his sword. No matter how much they wounded and hurt him. If he couldn’t do that, he would never see Frenica again.

Takashi got to his feet, shouted to pump himself up, and began running for the front line of battle—not to complete a quest, but to fulfill his duty.