3

And so it was that my survival declaration did not come off as impressively as I had intended. Regardless, I still managed to gaze around the clearing with a renewed sense of spirit.

The grassy area the half-busted log cabin fit neatly into was a circle about fifty feet across. It was originally surrounding a mega-sized spiral pine, I decided, but now sported a fresh footpath to the southwest that ended at the river. The empty space of the clearing was stuffed full of 150 logs, and our first task was to do something about it.

My only experience with survival-type RPGs was on my old PC years ago, so I had no experience with them in a full-dive setting; but the general strategy should still be the same. First you acquired water and food, then found tools and materials, so you could create garments, shelter, and weapons.

But in this initial grace period, we wouldn’t get hungry or thirsty, plus there was a river nearby, so we could worry about that part later. The first task for us was gaining the most primitive of tools: a knife.

“Let’s go back to the river.”

“Why? To catch fish?” Asuna wondered, wide-eyed.

I gave her a toothy grin. “Eventually. But there’s something else to do first.”

We trotted down the path freshly cleared of felled trees toward the river. The bank, which was littered with stones of many colors, seemed difficult to walk on before, but now that I was looking at it through the lens of a survival game, I realized it was a mountain of treasure. I stopped and told the girls, “Look for as heavy and hard of a rock as you can. Preferably long and narrow, about twelve inches.”

“…Got it.” Alice and Asuna walked away, looking down at their feet, while I turned my back to search for something else. I wanted a large rock with a flat, stable top—a workstation. I found a good one right away, so I picked up a random round stone off the ground and smashed it against the rock surface. It split into two pieces on the first hit. If this were an ordinary VRMMORPG, the shattered rock would spray off light particles and vanish, but the two pieces resting on top of the work surface were not going away. I tapped them to check the properties. It said: Cracked Favillite, Weapon/Material, Attack Power: 2.18 striking, Durability: 5.44, Weight: 3.71.

“Ugh…It even goes down to decimal points,” I groaned, just in time to hear footsteps and voices behind me.

“How about this one?” “Will this work?”

Asuna placed a rough, gray-green rock on my workstation. Alice rolled a smooth, blackish-brown stone next to it. Both were the size and shape I’d asked for.

“Let’s see…”

I picked them up, one in each hand, and gauged their weight. Both felt very solid and heavy, but the green one was just a tad more so. On the other hand, I felt like the black one was harder.

For now, I decided on using the green one as material, placing it in the middle of the slab and holding it there with my left hand. I lifted the black stone in my right and took careful aim. Whether in the real or virtual world, losing your concentration during tasks like this was cause for error. I shouted “Three, two, one!” and swung it down with all my strength.

Clang! Orange sparks shot outward from the collision. Carefully, I let go with my left hand—the green stone sat there briefly, then split down the middle. There was a dull shine to the split face, and the edge was as sharp as a shard of glass.

“That’s pretty good,” I murmured to myself, holding one of the halves and raising the black stone again. I focused on a spot next to the split edge and swung again. But this time I didn’t get enough on it. There were only a few sparks, and nothing happened.

“Um, Kirito?” asked Asuna at my right while I was aiming for my third strike. “I get what you’re trying to do…but when you’re banging rocks together while dressed like that…Well…”

She had her hands pressed to her mouth for some reason. Then Alice pointed out, “You look like the Neanderthals on the TV show I saw the other day. What if you wear a pelt instead of your underwear?”

Asuna lost control and started giggling, and Alice followed her lead. And here I was in my underwear, doing my best to help them survive.

“Hohhh! Hoh-hoh-hoh! Hoh-hoh-hoh-hohhh!” I grunted, pretending. Instantly, the floodgates burst open, and the girls grabbed their sides and howled with laughter. While they shrieked, I lifted up my striking stone again.

“Hohhh!!” I bellowed, smashing the green rock, right next to the previous split, and creating another fine vertical crack. A thin layer of stone broke free and landed on the stone slab. It was about a foot long, two inches wide, and less than half an inch thick…exactly the shape I was looking for.

I brushed the other pieces off to the side and laid the shard flat on the work surface. One end was thinner than the other, so I decided that would be the tip, and the thicker side would be the handle. Very carefully, I struck it with the black stone.

This was a virtual world, so I had faith that the system would understand my intention and fashion the stone into the shape I was envisioning. Even still, I was very cautious about how I struck it. Eventually, just for an instant, the stone shard shone.

A system window popped up before my eyes.

Stoneworking skill gained. Proficiency has risen to 1.

Earning a new skill was always cause for celebration, but I was more curious about the quality of my finished product. I tapped the stone shard, which was now in roughly the right shape, calling up its window.

Crude Viridacutite Knife, Weapon/Tool, Attack Power: 7.82 slashing, 5.33 piercing, Durability: 10.05, Weight: 3.53.

“Yesss!” I shouted, striking a pose. I’d forgotten about the Neanderthal act. It said crude, but the attack power and durability were significantly higher than the cracked favillite I’d made earlier. This would make the job much easier.

I placed the knife at the edge of the workspace, then gathered the pieces of the rock that was apparently called viridacutite. Once again, I struck it with the black rock. The piece that chipped off was too small, so I tried again. After a couple of attempts, I got a good-sized slice, so I chipped down the right details and produced a second knife.

Either because my Stoneworking skill was already at 3 thanks to the extra practice or because my own ability as a player was getting better, the third one was done very quickly. The remaining piece of viridacutite, apparently under the size necessary for a modified item to exist, vanished into little dots of light.

I laid out the three knives on the stone work surface.

Whether VR or traditional, games treated weapons and tools with a simple general rule: If it has the same name, it has the same shape. It made sense, given that you’re creating multiple copies of the same in-game object, but because the chips and dents are also matching, it made for an odd visual effect when the identical pieces were laid side by side.

These three knives, however, while essentially the same size and shape, were all different in the fine way they had broken off, the contours of the edges, and the coloring. I checked their windows—they were all considered viridacutite knives, but the attack and durability ratings also had different decimal values.

“Hmm…”

I looked down at the countless rocks beneath my feet, then at the afternoon sky overhead.

A server having a number of unique rare weapons was one thing, but if they had more than three sets of visual data for the lowliest stone knife, that was a very thorough level of in-game assets—and it only made the situation eerier. No matter how excellent The Seed Package might be for VR game development, the costs of producing this level of detail had no upper limit. At the very least, whoever had sucked the ALO players into this survival game was clearly not very interested in the cost efficiency of this game as a product.

A creator like Seijirou Kikuoka, who had built the Underworld, or Akihiko Kayaba, who had built Aincrad.

“Do you not like how they look, Kirito?”

Asuna was leaning over to question me, and I raised my head with a start. I pushed that disquieting thought away and shook my head. “N-no, it’s not that. Um, I was just wondering if, uh, there’s a way to upgrade these further…”

It was a spontaneous excuse to hide my real thoughts, but once I said it, I realized it was worth trying out. Processing and customizing items was a major facet of survival games. I looked around the area for a bundle of weeds sticking out of some rocks and used one of the new stone knives to cut the bundle loose. I gave one end of the bundle to Asuna to hold, then twisted it. Once the twists reached from end to end, the weeds shone like the knife did, and another new message appeared.

Weaving skill gained. Proficiency has risen to 1.

Yeah, yeah, I’ll take a look later, I thought, closing the window so I could tap the freshly woven grass rope.

Crude Ubiquigrass Rope, Tool/Material, Durability: 4.10, Weight: 0.65.

Once again, it was crude, but I just needed it to be usable. I picked up a knife from the workspace and wrapped the grass rope tightly around the handle end. As I hoped, the item flashed again when I was done wrapping, and the rope fused to the knife, despite the fact that I didn’t tie a knot at the end.

Crude Rope-Wrapped Viridacutite Knife, Weapon/Tool, Attack Power: 7.82 slashing, 5.33 piercing, Durability: 15.82, Weight: 4.18.

“And that’s how it works,” I said, showing them the properties window. They nodded, half impressed by my handiwork.

“I see. So the upgrade increased the durability…”

“With a bit of a bump in weight, however.”

I was hoping for at least a polite round of applause, but I was disappointed. Asuna and Alice looked at each other and offered their thoughts simultaneously.

“How annoying!”

“It seems like a very tiresome process.”

I made the two annoyed girls create their own grass ropes so that they learned the Weaving skill, and we returned to the log cabin carrying our new stone knives.

At this point, the crimson of the sunset sky was directly overhead. It would be dark within an hour. It seemed impossible for us to gather all the necessary supplies for repair by then, but I at least wanted to get the logs done.

This will work, I told myself, placing my other hand on a nearby log and sinking the edge of the knife into the rough bark. By rubbing it back and forth vigorously, I created a pleasant ripping sound, tearing the bark loose to fall to the ground, where it…did not disappear. Once again, there was a window right in front of my face.

Woodworking skill gained. Proficiency has risen to 1.

I was expecting that to happen, so I erased it at once and ignored the bark on the ground for now, focusing on moving the knife. If you tried to shave a tree trunk this size with a knife barely better than a Stone Age tool, it would take you more than an entire day, but in the virtual world, as long as the way you did it was right, the rest of the process was simplified—in most cases. The thick bark fell away with enjoyable regularity, and in just a minute, the blackened spiral pine sawlog flashed and turned into a rounded ivory-white bare log.

Shallow grooves ran all over the shining inner wood in spirals and swirls, which I guessed was the root of its name. I tapped the surface, and the window that appeared revealed the new item as Sawed Aged Spiral Pine Log. The repair window for the cabin didn’t specify a tree species, so that should meet the requirements.

“Do you get how this works?” I asked the other two.

Asuna and Alice nodded.

“Then help me strip the bark off all these logs.”

We got right to it. With the three of us working together, the 150 logs represented about fifty minutes of work.

But that wasn’t all of it. Aside from the sawed logs, we needed seventy-five sawed planks, two hundred iron sheets, a bunch of iron nails, oil, and glass…It was obviously impossible for us to gather all these things before nightfall. The planks were one thing, but creating the iron sheets and nails from scratch would require a variety of raw materials and quality tools and fixtures, plus the skill proficiency to use them.

I really need a wiki! I thought desperately as my hands busied themselves hacking off tree bark. Under normal circumstances, running around to gather information on my own and brainstorming with friends to complete a goal was the entire point of an RPG—but with our log cabin scheduled to fall apart in half a day, I was desperate for any help I could get. If I had access to a wiki right now, that would be the cat’s meow. Actually, one of us was technically a cat. Would that be the “cait sith’s meow,” then? They’d probably been telling that joke since ALO launched, so I decided it was best not to try that one out on my captive audience.

Such wandering thoughts filled my mind while my hands were busy. The work itself was moving smoothly, but I was worried about the durability of the stone knife I was abusing. It was a crude knife, after all, so I wouldn’t be surprised if that durability rating of 15 went down to zero at any moment. If I stopped and checked its properties, I’d know the number right away, but it wasn’t like I had any way to make it last longer, so I chose to focus on the task at hand instead, praying it would hold out. Every now and then, a window appeared to let me know that my Woodworking proficiency had risen, which was the encouragement I needed to keep going.

I had estimated fifty minutes, but by getting accustomed to the action over time, we reached the final log at just forty-two. Asuna and Alice finished skinning their fiftieth logs a bit before me, which didn’t feel fair, but at least I could thank my knife for holding up throughout the task.

The tree trunk flashed and turned into a sawed log, and I gave my stone knife a tap. The window said that its remaining durability rating was only 0.46.

“Ooh, yours just barely made it,” said Alice. She checked her own knife. It said 0.13.

“Wrapping the rope around it was the right call,” said Asuna with a grin that faded quickly. She’d probably remembered that we had only finished acquiring one of the six different materials needed for the task. And the trees we’d used to get them weren’t even ones we’d cut down ourselves—they had been knocked flat by the falling island. We’d need at least an ax to cut down more trees for the remaining twelve logs and all the planks.

“…Another twelve hours…,” she murmured worriedly.

I had to add another cruel fact to the picture. “And…tomorrow’s Monday…”

“Ah!”

Asuna’s eyes bulged; she’d forgotten that part. If we were heading into Saturday or Sunday, we could have attempted to pull an all-nighter collecting materials, but staying in a dive right up until leaving for school was too much to ask. I might be able to do something like that, but a good daughter from a rich family wouldn’t get away with such behavior. She’d just made up with her strict mother; she didn’t need to get in trouble for playing games all night.

I placed a hand on her shoulder and willed as much reassurance as I could into my voice. “It’ll be all right. If my parents find out, I can get down on my hands and knees to beg their forgiveness—I’ll find a way to gather all the materials tonight and save our cabin. Trust in me; I’ll get it done.”

“And I will help, of course. I have nothing on my schedule until tomorrow evening,” added Alice with a smile, but it did not cheer Asuna up.

“…But…it won’t be easy to make iron and glass, will it? If the three of us work together to the last moment and it doesn’t work out, I can probably accept that defeat…but I can’t log out early and leave you two to do the hardest parts on your own…”

“…”

I was going to reassure her again but thought better of it. In the reverse situation, I would probably log out and then be up all night, unable to sleep. As a matter of fact, our probability of getting all the materials in twelve hours was very low. In that situation, I would rather have her stay than drive her out. But…

“Hmm…”

I could practically feel the smoke gushing from my ears, I was thinking so hard. Almost without realizing I was doing it, I asked, “Your mom…How is Kyouko keeping track of your diving?”

“Well, she has an admin screen for our home server. She’s not totally monitoring me like before, but she does stay up late working…so if she happens to glance at the screen, she’ll know right away.”

“Hmm, I see…All right, I’ll do something about that.”

“Wh-what?! How?!” Asuna asked, shocked.

I grinned. “I’ll let that be a surprise for later…In any case, you’ll need to log off for dinner, right?”

“Yeah…from around seven to seven thirty.”

“Okay, I’ll log off at the same time. I’ll send you a message after.”

“All right…,” Asuna said, but there was still apprehension in her eyes as she looked to the log cabin and went silent.

The left wall was completely collapsed, the ceiling was heavily dented, and the framework was bent. It hurt just to look at it like this. Every second that passed, our home’s durability ticked away.

I was going to tell her once again that it was all going to be okay, but first, Alice held her stomach and complained, “If only my machine body were able to eat food already.”

Asuna and I were taken by surprise. “Um…you mean, like, normal bread and rice and meat and stuff…?” I asked.

The cat-eared knight nodded matter-of-factly. “Yes, of course. According to Dr. Koujiro and Higa, development is proceeding. Apparently, fine-tuning the taste sensors and such will take more time.”

“Ooh!” Asuna exclaimed, smiling at last. She reached out to grab Alice’s hand and shouted, “Then when you’re able to eat food in the real world, we’ll have to throw you a welcoming party at Dicey Café! I’ll make lots of delicious food for the occasion!”

“That is a very enticing offer. I will have to rush Higa.”

The two women were so excited about this that all I could think at the moment was Good luck, Higa.

The sky was turning deep purple at this point, with stars peeking through. It was 6:50 PM, about time for us to log out of this mystery world—but there was something I wanted to try first.

Asuna, Alice, and I split up the ten piles of sawed aged spiral pine logs between our three personal inventories. Once we were full, we rushed into the log cabin and moved them to the home storage, a large decorative box attached to the wall of the living room. While the life span of the building itself might have been dropping, it still functioned as a home, so even on the off chance that some other players happened across our cabin while we were offline, they wouldn’t be able to get inside, much less steal our precious logs.

When the 150 logs were stored inside the cabin, we picked up all the loose bark that was still lying around, and despite not knowing what it might be used for, we stored that, too. Lastly, we packed away the weapons that were unusable for the moment and headed for the living room. It was 6:55 PM now.

The next time I log in, I need some new armor…or at least clothes, I thought, looking down at my nearly naked avatar.

Then I glanced at Asuna and Alice. “See you in thirty minutes.”

“…Yeah.”

I hadn’t explained the nature of my secret plan to Asuna, but the fencer responded bravely anyway. Alice nodded without a word, and the three of us called up the ring menu together. The SYSTEM icon was in the upper left, and from the submenu that followed, we pressed the LOG OUT button with a door icon on it.

A confirmation window appeared with a little jingle. It warned that if you didn’t log out in a safe location, you could possibly die while in the middle of the process, but there was no safer place to be than inside a player-owned home.

I hit the check-mark-shaped button at the bottom of the window, and the text at the top of the confirmation window changed.

Disconnecting from Unital Ring.

“Unital…Ring?” I repeated. That was the very first time I’d heard the name of this world.

So we weren’t in Alfheim anymore. It was an unfamiliar place ruled by a completely new game system.

A rainbow ring rose up from my feet, surrounding my avatar and covering the evening scene with a deluge of color. I was lifted by a sense of weightlessness, the direction of gravity shifting…

When I regained the sensation of my physical body, I couldn’t yet open my eyes.

The pressure of the mattress against my back, the softness of the pillow supporting my head, and the rougher fiber of the mattress-pad texture against my hands were all the familiar sensations of my own bed. The LOG OUT button was functioning properly.

Relieved, I was about to open my eyes when I noticed something.

There was a considerable weight against my stomach. In fact, I felt the sides of my body being compressed, too.

Am I tied down?! I thought in a panic, tearing the AmuSphere off my head and opening my eyes.

“Ah, you’re awake!” said a voice.

I wasn’t being restrained. Someone was straddling my stomach. The room was somewhat dark, so I couldn’t see a face, but there was only one person in the entire world whom I knew would do something like this.

“…Um…Suguha?” I said to my sister. “What are you doing there?”

“You shouldn’t have to ask. It’s almost dinnertime, so I came to wake you up!” Suguha pouted, puffing her cheeks. She reached out with an arm encased in a track jacket sleeve and tugged on my bangs. “I shook you and shook you, but you wouldn’t wake up, so I was almost about to rip your AmuSphere off. Even in combat, you should have noticed!”

“No, I wasn’t in combat…Hmm, that’s weird. I didn’t feel any shaking at all. Anyway, you don’t have to be physical about it; you could have just sent me a message.”

ALO allowed for communication with outside networks, which meant you could browse the Net while in-game, trade e-mails, and send short messages. But Suguha pouted even more and protested, “I did! Twice! But minutes went by without any contact, so I had to resort to more direct measures!”

“Wait, really? I didn’t get anything.”

“You were probably so wrapped up in your questing that you didn’t even notice. Ugh, if I’d gotten back an hour earlier, I could have joined everyone. Liz was supposed to show me a great new spot for raising skill levels that she was telling me about…”

“They invited me, too, but I definitely got Liz’s message. Must have been some system error or disconnection…,” I started to say, before I thought better of it.

It wasn’t an error that Suguha’s messages didn’t reach me. By that point, the game system had already transitioned over—from the familiar style of ALfheim Online to this mysterious new survival RPG, Unital Ring. Apparently, UR—if that was how they officially abbreviated it—was not nearly as welcoming of outside connections as ALO.

“…I think you made the right decision not diving in, Sugu,” I muttered.

My sister blinked. “What do you mean by that?”

“Um…it’s hard to explain briefly, but something bad is happening inside…”

“Bad? Like a salamander attack?”

“No, not that sort of thing. I’m still not quite sure what’s hap—”

I cut myself off there. Asuna and Alice should have logged out safely by now, like me. But what about Liz, Silica, and Yui, who were on the forty-fifth floor of New Aincrad when the anomaly happened?

I did a sit-up to get off my back, and it caused Suguha to topple off her mounted position and onto her back.

“Aaagh!” she shrieked, flopping her legs in the air, but I ignored my sister and grabbed the Augma off the desk and put it on. As soon as it was active, I shouted, “Yui, are you there?!”

But there was no response. She was probably still in ALO…er, in Unital Ring. If I wanted, I could use the PC where Yui’s core program was stored to shut off her connection to the game, but I didn’t want to force her to do anything unless it was absolutely necessary.

“But what does it mean…?” I muttered to myself.

Then something clicked in my mind.

The fact that I could log out meant that Unital Ring wasn’t shut off from the rest of the world like the old SAO. The abnormal event happened around five o’clock in the afternoon, and it was almost seven now. Over the past two hours, many of those ALO players must have logged out and talked to the publisher or traded information elsewhere online.

Using the virtual desktop my Augma displayed, I tried to access the biggest online game info site in the country, MMO Today. But just then, Suguha stood furiously at my side, having rolled backward off the bed to escape, and yanked on my shirt.

“I told you, it’s dinnertime! Mom made your favorite tonight!”

Well, now I couldn’t tell her I’d eat later. Reluctantly, I got to my feet, still wearing the Augma.

As I walked down the hall, I opened a browser. First, I checked for messages from Ymir, the company that ran ALO, but there was nothing. Then I went to MMO Today, and when I glanced at the familiar top page, I squawked, “Nwuh…?!”

Suguha, who was leading the way, turned back in confusion. “What’s wrong?”

But I couldn’t open my mouth to speak—or even look at my sister. My body was frozen like stone, staring at the headline at the top of the web page.

Massive Abnormalities Unfolding in Over One Hundred VRMMO Worlds!

It wasn’t just ALO.

The anomaly was happening across the entire Seed Nexus.