5

Mom’s dinner was a brown stew chock-full of mushrooms and chicken. Since it was the first thing I’d asked for after coming home from SAO, I considered it my favorite ever since.

I did love it, of course, and sometimes I tried my hand at making it. But I couldn’t bring myself to be honest and admit to my mom that the reason I loved it was deeply tied to memories within Aincrad, and that it was originally a rabbit stew, rather than chicken.

In fact, all my favorite dishes—teri-mayo burgers, salt-flavored ramen, and honey pies—came from virtual-world memories. If those memories from the past faded, I might no longer want to eat those foods, but for the moment, that didn’t seem likely.

I sent one e-mail before eating, then took off my Augma so I could enjoy my meal—despite working with tech as the editor in chief of an IT magazine, Mom was very picky about device manners at the table. When I had put all the dishes away, the living room clock said it was 7:22. Only three minutes until I was supposed to meet back up with Asuna. Mom was enjoying her post-dinner coffee on the sofa; I thanked her for the meal and headed back upstairs. Suguha followed behind me and said “I’m going to take a bath, okay?” before heading toward her room. I yanked on the back of her collar.

“Gweh…Wh-what was that for?!”

“We need to talk. It’s important. Bring your AmuSphere over to my room right now.”

“H…huh?”

I can’t say I didn’t deserve the suspicious look she gave me. Regardless, I grabbed my sister’s shoulders, spun her around, and pushed her forward. “On the double!” Suguha went into her room grumbling, but she came back out with her AmuSphere in one hand and her phone in the other. I beckoned her in.

Once she was inside my room, I shut the door and asked her as quickly as I could, “Sugu, where’s your resurrect point right now?!”

“Huh…? It’s in your house…on the twenty-second floor of New Aincrad.”

“Good. And that’s the last place where you logged out?”

“That’s right. What is this all about?”

“I’ll explain inside. Get ready to dive.”

“Dive…from here?!” she said, her eyes wide as she looked around my room. “But you don’t even have any cushions in here. Am I supposed to just lie on the floor?”

“We can each take half the bed. C’mon, hurry!”

I pushed her shoulders again and sat her on the bed. She looked up at me, her mouth working silently. I plucked the AmuSphere from her hands and plopped it onto her head.

“Ah, h-hey, wait…”

Just then, the phone in Suguha’s hand beeped with a notification. She looked at the screen reflexively, and her thick eyebrows lowered. “Oh, it’s from Nagata…Yikes! Look at all the e-mails and calls!”

“Ignore them. I know what he wants,” I said mercilessly, causing Suguha’s mouth to drop open again.

“H…huh…?”

“There’s something more important to deal with now. C’mon, take the other side.”

“Sheesh…” Suguha pouted but placed her phone on the headboard, then went to lie down on the back side of the bed. I positioned myself next to her and put on my AmuSphere, lowered the visor, and glanced at the clock in the lower left of the interior monitor as I waited for it to boot up. It was 7:24:47.

There wasn’t really a need to hit the timing on the exact second, but I took a deep breath anyway and said, “We’ll dive on a countdown of five, four, three, two, one…”

“Link Start!”

When gravity kicked in and sank the soles of my shoes against hard floor again, I opened my eyes to see that the undine in the white knight uniform and the cait sith wearing golden armor were already waiting in the log cabin’s living room. It was dark inside, lit only by the weak handmade torch stuck into the crack in the wall.

Asuna and Alice were about to say something when they saw me, but then their eyes moved to my right. Two seconds later, a fourth figure appeared beside me, and they cried out.

“It’s Leafa!”

“Leafa!”

They rushed over and clutched the arms of the sylph magic warrior.

“You’re all right! I’m so glad…”

“We were really worried!”

Suguha, now in character as Leafa, looked absolutely perplexed. She stared at the two of them.

“Um, Asuna, Alice…what do you mean, all right…? Why is it so dark in here?”

Then she looked at me, and her jaw dropped once again.

“B-Big Brother…why are you dressed like that?!”

“I’m going to need you to overlook my state of dress for now,” I said, glancing down at my underwear-clad avatar briefly before looking up at my sister. The lightweight green armor and long katana she kept at her left hip belonged to her usual battle outfit. She didn’t seem encumbered by it. That meant the grace period for carrying equipment weight was still active. Leafa’s ears had become more human-shaped, but it was such a subtle change that even she hadn’t noticed yet.

Relieved, I asked her, “Sugu…I mean, Leafa, was anything different about the ALO login sequence?”

“Huh? Oh…yeah, I was a bit confused during the falling sequence…I passed straight through some patterned wheel thing. That was different than usual. What was it?”

“…I knew it…,” I murmured. I’d seen that image once before. It was when I had converted my spriggan avatar into the shooting-centric world of Gun Gale Online.

“That’s the converting ring. When you logged in, your avatar was forcibly converted into this world’s style.”

“H-huh?! Converted…? But this is your usual home, Big Br…I mean, it’s Kirito and Asuna’s home…,” Leafa said, looking around the darkened living room.

Then she pressed her hands to her mouth and uttered hoarsely, “Wh…what the…? Asuna, what happened?!”

I couldn’t blame her for being shocked. All the interior objects, the furniture and decorations that Asuna had put so much work into selecting and arranging, were gone from the spacious living room.

And that wasn’t all. The back wall where there had once been a large fireplace was utterly shattered, exposing the outdoors. The center of the floor was severely dented. There were holes in the ceiling here and there. I’d seen the damage many times by now, but it still made my heart hurt.

Asuna moved her hand from Leafa’s arm to her back and said, “Leafa, we’re not in Alfheim anymore. We were teleported into this world with our cabin…well, no, I suppose with all of New Aincrad.”

We sat in a circle in the spot where the big, puffy couch had once been and imparted our current knowledge to Leafa.

She listened, hugging her knees, and nodded when we were done, her long golden ponytail swaying. She glanced sidelong at me.

“I see…Now I get why you’re dressed like that.”

“Your understanding means the world to me. Asuna and Alice still have their armor, but they can’t equip their swords anymore…so yours is all we can count on right now, Leafa.”

“…So you brought me here to be your bodyguard?”

“Well, uh, not only that,” I said hastily.

My sister glared at me, then looked out at the forest through the collapsed wall. “What kind of monsters show up around here?”

“We still haven’t seen any creatures yet,” answered Alice. She reached for her empty sword belt on instinct. It was a lonely gesture. “But when we went into the forest to look for kindling earlier, there were multiple howls in the distance. It seems certain that something is living in this forest.”

“Ugh…and if I’m level-1, then I can’t use magic…”

“Yes, the sacred arts…er, the spells used in Alfheim did not have any effect here. If Yui were here, she might be able to explain things to us. Were you able to communicate with her on the other side, Kirito?”

Even in the dark, Alice’s blue eyes shone as bright as sapphires. I stared back into them and said, “No, she didn’t respond. I think she’s probably still here somewhere with Liz and Silica.”

“Hmm…I hope we can regroup with them. If they were inside New Aincrad, then they can’t be too far away…”

“Oh, about that!” Leafa said, leaning forward. “I get that New Aincrad fell down to earth, but what happened after that? Did you see everything, Kirito?”

“We were so desperate to give this cabin a softer landing that I didn’t have time to watch it…”

“Besides, Leafa,” said Asuna, putting her hands in the air to explain, “the piece of rock that split off kind of rode across the air with us on it, at a thirty-degree angle or so…If New Aincrad fell from a height of six miles, then our landing point would be about ten and a half miles away. There were some rocky mountains below us at points, so the truth is, we didn’t even hear the sound of New Aincrad crashing to the ground.”

“Ten miles…That would be an easy trip if we had wings,” Leafa lamented, wriggling her back, but of course, no fairy wings appeared. She was so enamored with flying that she had the nickname Speedaholic. Losing them had to be an even bigger shock than having her character stats reset.

But true to her nature, my sister put on a brave smile and took it in stride.

“All right, I have a grasp of the situation. So your goal for now is to repair this house, right? Then I’ll help, of course! This is my home, too!”

“…Thank you, Leafa,” Asuna said, momentarily surprised. She squeezed my sister’s hands kindly and turned her gaze to the damaged living room. “Calculating from the rate of durability decrease, we’ve got a bit over ten hours until the building is destroyed…and we still have a bunch of materials to gather by then. What we need are…”

Asuna tapped the floor to bring up the properties window of the house and showed Leafa the screen of items needed to conduct the repair process. While they talked this over, I opened my ring menu and chose the SKILLS icon.

The window that appeared contained a list of skills I’d gained. At the top was the One-Handed Sword skill that was a holdover from ALO, but it was useless at the moment, since I couldn’t use my actual sword.

Below that was a list of crafting and support skills I’d learned since we landed here. Stoneworking, Woodworking, Weaving, and Physique. All of them were barely more than zero, but they were my lifeline for the moment.

I tapped the Stoneworking skill, and a new window appeared displaying my current proficiency and the items I could craft with it. Among the primitive weapons like stone knife, stone ax, and stone spear was a stone sword. If it came to it, that was going to have to be my weapon, but it was all too easy to imagine Suguha rolling around and crying with laughter when she saw me holding a stone sword in my undies, so I was hoping to make my first weapon a metal one.

Next to the names of the stone weapons was a hammer symbol. Curious, I tapped it, and a smaller pop-up that said Tips materialized with a little jingle.

Items displayed with this icon must be created manually, by hand or with a tool.

That would suggest that some items didn’t need to be created that way, so I scrolled farther through the list. After the weapons were tools like stone plates, stone hammers, and whetstones, followed by building materials like stone blocks and stone foundations. All the items so far had the manual symbol next to them.

At the very bottom were names like stone hut and stone hearth and stone furnace, and they had a symbol that looked like two overlapping rectangles next to them. I tapped that icon, and the pop-up jingled again.

Items displayed with this icon can be produced from the skill window. All the necessary materials must be in your inventory already.

“I see…”

I tapped the stone hut to bring up the list of needed materials. There was a PRODUCE button at the bottom of the window. Out of sheer momentum, I pressed it, but of course, it said You do not have the necessary materials.

“Ooh, there’s a furnace for smelting iron!” exclaimed Alice, who came over to look at my window. “Couldn’t we use that to create the iron sheets and nails and such to repair the log cabin? As well as make new weapons?”

“Well, I suppose that’s right,” I said, unable to commit to a positive or negative answer. “But we’ll need iron ore to make iron, of course, and it’s not that easy to find in games like this. I doubt we’ll find it just growing out of the ground in the middle of the plains.”

“Where do you acquire it, then?”

“The orthodox way is on a mountain or in a cave. But there aren’t any mountains around here…”

“Which leaves a cave,” said the cat-eared knight. She did not sound enthused.

Something I learned since we started adventuring together in ALO was that the bold and seemingly flawless knight I met in the Underworld actually did have a natural weakness to some things. One was natural caves; while she was perfectly comfortable in human-constructed dungeons and catacombs, she did not like to go into caves and grottoes formed by natural forces. I suspected it had to do with some distant childhood memories that were supposedly deleted, but I’d never considered it important enough to ask her about.

“Well, I doubt we’ll just happen across caves wherever we wander…so let’s focus on wrapping up all the materials we can make with wood first. Especially now that we have our helpful lumberjack with us.”

Leafa spun around, incensed. “Excuse me, Kirito! Are you referring to me?! All I have is this sword!”

“And it’ll do. When I was in the Underworld, I cut down a tree that couldn’t be cut down for a thousand years, and that was with a single longswo—”

“Okay, okay, I’ll do it,” she interrupted so that she wouldn’t have to listen to me brag. “But based on what you said, my ability to use this sword will only last during the…what did you call it? Grace period? How many more hours is that?”

“Um, to find that out, we’d have to ask the person behind this whole state of affai—,” I said, until Alice jabbed me in the side. “Gah! Wh…what was that for?”

“Here, Kirito, look at this,” she said, ignoring my protest and opening her ring menu. I stared at them, but the eight purple icons seemed no different from my own.

“…What am I looking at?”

“The color of the icons. Does it seem like the coloring shifts as they rotate right?”

“Oh…that’s true!” shouted Asuna. She’d opened her own menu and was nodding as she examined it. “Yes, the icon at the very top is more reddish, but as you go clockwise, they get bluer and bluer, until the eighth one is like a bluish-purple. But…what is it about that, Alice?”

“When I looked at this right after landing, I recall that nearly all the icons were tinted blue. It imprinted in my mind because I thought they looked like the shade of zephilia flowers. But right now, their colors are changing, up to about the fifth icon…Could this be depicting the amount of time left in the grace period?”

“Ohhh…I see what you mean…”

I closed all the crafting windows and stared at the base menu. If they represented a kind of timer, like Alice said…then about five icons had changed color in two and a half hours. Thirty minutes for each one.

“…If there are only three icons left, that gives an hour and a half until they all have changed color…”

“What…? That’s it?!” exclaimed Leafa, looking around the room as if searching for a wall clock.

Alice closed her ring menu and said tersely, “Let’s hurry. We should at least cut down all the trees we need while we can still use Leafa’s sword.”

Leafa didn’t complain this time. She gripped the sheath of her long katana and said seriously, “All right. I’ll chop down the trees. You strip off the bark.”

“We know what to do. So let’s get busy, Leafa,” said Asuna. With that, we rushed out of the open doorway.

But we stopped before we even got off the brutalized porch. The overwhelming darkness of the forest at night seemed to consume us. Even outside, we couldn’t see more than a dozen feet or so ahead of us.

“…I think we’re going to need light…,” I murmured, and the surroundings grew a tiny bit brighter. Not because the game itself was being helpful, but because Alice brought out the impromptu torch we were using to light the cabin.

“How did you make the sparks to light that, by the way?” I asked belatedly.

Alice pulled two egg-sized rocks from the pouch she had on her belt to show me. “I returned a bit before you two did, so I looked for flint rocks at the river. I thought we’d need them when it got dark.”

“N-nice one…”

I should have figured that someone actually from another world would have her head on straight!

“So how do you use them?”

“It’s actually easier here than it is in the Underworld. You just bunch up the dead grass into tinder, then strike the sparks about ten times until it catches. Then you transfer the fire to the branch.”

“Hmm…”

I prefer the magic way! I moaned inwardly but managed to hold my silence. In SAO, where there was no magic, we usually had lanterns, but given that you lit those by simply tapping them, that was essentially magic, too. The world of Unital Ring was not going to make things easy for us.

“Well, I’ll go look for more…”

But before I could even finish my sentence, Alice hopped down to the ground, took a few steps, then crouched. There was a large selection of dead branches there that I hadn’t seen before. She extended the torch into its midst, and they soon began to snap and pop with great force.

“Oh wow! The fire effects are so realistic!” Leafa exclaimed. I couldn’t blame her. The dancing red flames and soaring sparks were so fine in their detail that I couldn’t tell the difference from a real campfire. As I thought when I first saw the trees in the forest, the graphical quality of this world was far beyond that of ALO…and even SAO. In terms of the visual impact, it was like upgrading a flat-panel display from HD quality to 4K.

But it was also something that didn’t add up with the information I’d collected when I logged out.

It wasn’t just us ALO players who’d gotten converted here against our will. It was the majority of the major VRMMOs that made up The Seed Nexus. Probably hundreds of thousands of players from over a hundred virtual worlds in all. Did the system capacity exist in 2026 to have a world large enough to hold so many players and yet contain so much incredible detail…?

“Kirito, wake up and help out!”

A hand slapped my bare back, and I jumped. “Yeow!”

“You’re the one who said we didn’t have time. Let’s get moving!”

“R-right…”

Like Leafa said, this was the time for action, not reflection. Alice’s campfire was burning vigorously now, casting reddish light on the forest surrounding the clearing. We could do plenty of work like this without needing to carry torches.

“Okay, let’s do this…,” I started to say.

But Leafa already had her blade out, swinging it fiercely at the nearest spiral pine. Shwack! It made a nice, pleasing sound. Meanwhile, I was standing there with my fist raised at an awkward height, earning me mixed glances from Asuna and Alice.

After we save our house, I’m going to get myself some new gear, I swore to myself. Even if it means going to school after an all-nighter.

True to its nature as an Ancient weapon in ALO, Leafa’s sword sliced up the spiral pines like they were nothing, despite not being a proper woodcutting ax. It took no more than thirty seconds for her to cut down a tree, so even with three people working on skinning and hauling it off, any delay would cause our side of the process to get backed up.

After fifteen minutes of high-focus teamwork with Asuna and Alice, we had another tremendous stack of spiral-patterned logs in the clearing. There were three piles of ten logs each. That should be more than enough to make the seventy-five sawed planks we needed for the repair.

But as I stood there satisfied, hands on my hips, a question occurred to me.

“Um…how do we make the planks…?”

There were plenty of planks available for purchase at the local home improvement store in the real world, but I didn’t know exactly how they made them. I guessed they probably just sliced the logs into thinner pieces…but you’d probably need some heavy-duty equipment to process logs of this width.

Asuna had the knowledge to back up my guess. “Of course, we don’t have a large band saw here, so we’ll at least need a frame saw…”

“F-frame saw?”

“Yes, it’s a huge saw they used back in the Meiji era.”

“Ohhh…I think maybe I’ve seen that in a Japanese history textbook once…”

I’d never heard of a band saw, either, but I could guess that it was the name of another kind of wood-processing tool. “So we need a saw…We might be able to craft one with iron and the Blacksmithing skill, but both of those will probably take a lot of time. But then again…they didn’t have saws all the way back in the earliest periods of Japanese history, right? So how did those people make planks of wood?”

“Well, let’s see…”

Even brilliant Asuna had to pause and make a face like she was searching her memory, but as always, she found the answer there. That’s how I could tell her brain was simply different from mine.

“A saw that can cut a log vertically, like the frame saw I mentioned…came to Japan from the Asian mainland in the fourteenth or fifteenth century. Before that, they would hammer wedges into the logs to split them, then use hand axes and planes to finish the surfaces. Splitting wood with a wedge is basically just hoping the grain will split in your favor, so it was inefficient and susceptible to failure. Longer planks were a real extravagance back in those days.”

“Huh…With wedges, eh?” I murmured, gazing at the stacks of logs.

I’d been examining them as we stripped the bark off. The name spiral pine definitely referred to the way the tree rotated like a drill as it grew. The fibers were twisted into a spiral pattern inside the trunk. If this game could even factor in grain direction to individual trees, then striking them with wedges was almost certainly going to shatter them without a straight split. And we couldn’t get a wedge either until our little civilization in the forest clearing reached the Iron Age.

“Rrrmmm…wood planks really are a product of humanity’s wisdom,” I said, impressed.

Asuna said, “That’s true, but that’s not all. You can only get a proper plank from the center of a log, so it’s really the life and history of a tree that’s lived for decades. I feel like if you consider it from that angle, it only makes sense that it’s difficult to create planks from trees.”

“That’s true. And yet, somehow, we have to make this into a plank, or we can’t repair our cabin…,” I said, slapping the end of the log.

Just then, Leafa came back from her task with Alice and smacked me hard on the back.

“Yeow!”

“Now, now, Kirito. You’d better not be discounting my skill and the power of Lysavindr here.”

“Ouch…why does everyone keep slapping me on the back…?”

“Ha-ha-ha! When you look like that, it’s impossible to resist. Wanna give him a whack, Asuna?”

“You could pick a better way of saying that!” I protested, leaping away from them. I thought Asuna looked momentarily disappointed, but I hoped it was a trick of the light. Either way, I had to be more careful to keep my back pointed away from these women.

“A-anyway,” I said to Leafa, “what was that about your skill?”

“Just move out of the way.”

She gestured for the rest of us to back away, then stood in front of the pile of logs. Her silver blade was perfectly still in her hands, resting in an orthodox forward stance.

“Um, Sugu, you aren’t going to chop those logs with your sword, are you—?” I asked, accidentally using her real name.

Without turning away, the sylph warrior said, “I’ve cut down thirty of them, so I think I’ve got the hang of it now. Just watch.”

At that point, I had no choice. The flat of Lysavindr gleamed red with the reflected light of the campfire.

Categorically speaking, Leafa’s long katana was considered a bastard sword, meaning that when wielded in one hand, she could use One-Handed Sword skills, and when held with both, she could use Two-Handed Sword skills. There was a downside that came with that convenience, though; it was heavy and difficult to use with one hand but lighter and less powerful than a proper two-handed sword. But as a kendo athlete, she claimed that it was just the right length and weight.

As the rest of us watched, Leafa lifted her blade as smoothly as though drawn by invisible strings. Then she paused and held it for just a moment so that a green glow infused it—the visual effect that indicated an imminent sword skill. I was already certain because weapon skills still existed, but this was further confirmation that the numerous special attacks from the original SAO were still carried over into this game.

“…Haah!” Leafa barked, swinging her sword. Two slices split the night air: the two-part Two-Handed Sword skill Cataract.

Normally, it was consecutive high swings that went wham, wham! But Leafa’s version was so fast that they both seemed to happen in a single breath. The slashes entered the edge of the log on top of the pile, the green light passing all the way through to the other end before vanishing.

After a second’s pause, the log silently split into two, then tumbled to the ground. In the center, between the spot where the two slashes had gone, was a single, thin plank of wood. It, too, toppled over to the right and would have fallen to the ground if I hadn’t leaped forward to snatch it first.

It was about three-quarters of an inch thick. The surface was as smooth as if it had been lovingly planed, and the grain was vivid and diagonal. I tapped it with my left hand to bring up the properties window. It was called a sawed aged spiral pine plank.

“What do you think, Kirito? Will that work for repairing the cabin?” asked my sister as she lowered her sword. I gave her a thumbs-up.

“It’s perfect. But…”

I put the freshly cut plank into my inventory, then glanced at the two parts of the vertically split log on the ground.

“…This method can only make one plank per log…We need to create some means of supporting the logs first…”

“Huh? Just use your hands,” she said breezily. Then she pointed at one of the log’s split halves and said, “Put that back up on the pile, then hold it up vertically.”

“……”

I had a bad feeling about this, but I did as she said, picking it up and placing it back where it was before—but standing on the point of its severed edge. Once it was balanced just right, I used both hands to hold it up.

“Now hold it right there. Here goes…”

Leafa raised her sword again and easily activated a sword skill. This was the simple one-hit Two-Handed Sword skill Cascade. The blade hit three-quarters of an inch from the previous cut, the green light flashing through the bottom of my hand.

“Yikes!” I yelped. There was a light shock from the effect, but no damage. I would have let go, except that Leafa instructed, “Hold it right there!”

This time, she used Cataract again, which had just finished its cooldown. Then Cascade once more, followed by Cataract.

After six slashes in total, the object itself must have run out of durability, because the end of the log shattered like glass. I was left with six long slabs of wood, perfectly parallel, if slightly varied in size—this was unavoidable, because a log is a round cylinder. Added to the initial plank, this meant we’d gotten seven planks of wood from the half-split log.

“Brilliant work, Leafa!” marveled Alice, who gave her a little round of applause. “When I was living in seclusion near Rulid, I made a living by felling trees, but I was never able to carve them into planks so skillfully.”

“Teh-heh-heh-heh, aw, it’s nothing.” Leafa chuckled rather creepily.

“No, it really is amazing,” added Asuna. “Two-Handed Sword skills are tough to control, but you landed them with perfect accuracy. I don’t even think Kirito can do that.”

What?! I balked. But I had no way of demonstrating my incredible skill at this moment. Instead, I silently put the six planks in my inventory, circled around the other side of the stack, and lifted the other half of the log into place.

“Let’s keep this up and get through the rest of the logs, dear sister,” I instructed.

Leafa happily cried “You got it!” and raised her sword again.

When she was done slicing through the ten logs, it was after eight o’clock. There was a little less than an hour until the grace period on our equipment weight ended.

Because Leafa’s log-splitting exhibition almost never missed, we’d gained 130 planks, but overall, we’d still only filled out two of the six types of materials needed to repair our log cabin. And the other four would be difficult to acquire. We didn’t even know how to get them.

“Now we have to do something about iron,” muttered Asuna, staring into the weakening light of the campfire.

I folded my arms and said, “Yes…I should be able to make a furnace with stones from the riverbed, but that doesn’t solve the matter of the ore to put inside it. I’m sure we’ll find some in a cave, like we talked about earlier, but there are bound to be monsters…and tougher ones than what we’ll find outside…”

“I know…If we could just use our swords…,” Asuna lamented, looking at her hand. I felt the same way—in fact, I was doubly frustrated because I couldn’t wear armor, either. Giving us four hours of time to ignore that rule was fine and dandy, but converting everyone’s characters by force and telling them too bad if you weren’t equipping your gear, or took it off for a moment, was just plain cruel. It was common for people to unequip weapons in town or indoors, and there had to be a high percentage of the hundreds of thousands of players dragged into this like Asuna and me, who weren’t built to play the tank role and could no longer hold their weapons.

By this point, MMO Today’s message boards and various social networks would be bustling with discussion of this incident. I wanted to log out and gather as much information as I could, but the materials to repair the log cabin took precedence. Leafa was our lifeline of hope, and she could only use Lysavindr for a bit longer.

“I have to wonder,” Asuna suddenly murmured, “how did you know that my brother had that online connection, Kirito?”

“Er, w-well…”

The very person I sent an e-mail to with my Augma after logging out earlier was Asuna’s brother, Kouichirou Yuuki. I knew that he’d installed a secret dedicated line that didn’t run through the home server, and I asked him to let Asuna use it. But I didn’t have time to explain how I knew about that, so I had to keep it as brief as possible.

“I made Kouichirou a promise to show him around New Aincrad, and that’s when I heard about the independent line.”

Asuna made a weird kind of gasping noise.

“Wh-what was that?”

“Sorry…it’s just that I can’t get used to you calling my big brother by his first name. You know how informal that is…”

“Hey, he insisted. At any rate, it means you can dive as late as you want without worrying about being yelled at.”

“I feel a bit guilty, but Mama likes this cabin, too, so I feel like I should explain it to him someday,” Asuna said, sighing a little bit. Then the moment passed, and she said, “Well, we should head off to find that iron o—”

She didn’t finish. There was another wild animal call from the forest. This time, it wasn’t distant howling, but clear, hostile growling. It was accompanied by the crackling of twigs and bushes.

“Kirito!” “Big Brother!”

Alice and Leafa rushed over into formation. All four of us readied our weapons, but only Leafa had a proper sword. The three indigenous members of the party had only sad, crude stone knives. Still, it was better than nothing, I told myself, squeezing the grip wrapped in grass rope.

Something growled again, closer this time. It was deep and guttural, brrrrr, like the idling sound of a large motorcycle. Obviously, there wouldn’t be anything like that in this world. I squinted into the dark woods, but the brightness of our campfire left me unable to see anything beyond the first few rows of trees.

Perhaps we should put out the fire…But if these were animal-type monsters, they might be afraid of flames. I had to assume that if we put it out, there would be no way to relight the kindling with the inefficient method of striking up sparks once we were in the midst of battle.

As if to punctuate my hesitation, a third short growl sounded. The cracking sound of twigs being stepped on approached slowly from the north of the clearing toward the west. The owner of that voice was just beyond the tree line.

“We’ll be fine,” I said in a voice hoarse enough to indicate that we were not fine. “It might be a monster, but I’m sure it’s just a wimpy starter monster. Stone knives should be more than enough to kill it.”

“…You mean like the blue boars in SAO?” Asuna asked.

I nodded. “Yes, something even lower than a boar, like a wolf or a fox or a nutria…”

“Kirito, what is a nutria?” asked Alice. I was about to tell her that it was like a capybara, but then I realized she wouldn’t know what a capybara was, either. What were those big rats with the long ears from the Underworld called again…? Before I could recall the answer, an especially ferocious howl came from the woods on the other side of the campfire.

“Grroarrroooo!”

With a tremendous cracking, an entire clump of bushes was flattened, and a huge shadow leaped into the clearing. It charged toward us, shaking the earth, and stood up just before the fire.

It was enormous. Its head was well over six feet off the ground. Its limbs were thick, its head was round, and its claws and fangs were abnormally long and sharp. Its blackish-brown fur was long and shaggy. It was clearly not a wolf or a fox—and definitely not a nutria…

“A b-b-beaaaar!” screamed Leafa, pointing at the creature. Then she swiveled to point at me. “You said it was going to be a wimpy one!”

“Huh? That’s weird…,” I muttered. Then it hit me.

We split off from New Aincrad with the log cabin. Thanks to the air resistance, and possibly the rotational power of the floating castle, we landed over ten miles away. In real-life terms, that was only the distance from my hometown of Kawagoe to the nearby city of Wakoshi, but in RPG terms, it was an endless trek. On top of that, there was no guarantee that New Aincrad’s landing point was the “starting zone” for this game. The whole area around us could be full of mid-level monsters instead.

“Grrrlg…,” growled the bear, standing on its back legs. The light of the fire clearly illuminated the jagged lightning bolts of white fur under its neck. I supposed that rather than being a moon bear, this was a lightning bear. I wanted to know its official name, but even though it was clearly hostile, the game was not displaying a cursor over the bear’s head yet.

Fight or run?

My brain ran on overdrive as I stared at the bear’s baleful red eyes. We were all level-1. If the bear was level-10 or so, we stood no chance. But if we ran, our only options were inside the cabin or toward the river to the southwest. There was a huge hole in the cabin wall, and there could be other monsters at the river. Plus, if we ran in the dark without a light, I was sure I’d trip on something and fall in no time.

Just then, there was a loud crunch, and the logs in the fire collapsed, sending up a huge curtain of sparks. On that signal, the bear lowered its front legs to the ground, scratched the dirt with its fierce claws several times, and started to charge.

“We have to fight, Kirito!” yelled Leafa, brandishing her sword. There was no time to think anymore. I shouted “Take the front!” and leaped to the right of the bear, readying my knife. Asuna jumped to the left, while Alice rushed to help Leafa.

“Gwoaaah!” bellowed the bear as it ran. It leaped over the fire, totally unafraid, and landed in front of Leafa. Then it stood on its rear legs again, raising its paws high. Leafa was not a small target by any means, but because the dark pelt of the bear melted into the darkness, it seemed three times bigger than her.

The sylph warrior was not afraid, however.

“Haah!” she cried, charging, her long blade flashing right for the bear’s exposed left flank. Bright-red damage effects spilled forth, and at last, a red cursor and HP bar appeared over the bear’s head.

This was my first glance at a cursor in this game. It took the form of a rotating ring intersected by sharp spindles. The ring featured an HP bar and the monster’s name on the top and bottom. It displayed the bear’s name in Japanese, rather than the English alphabet, reading Thornspike Cave Bear.

I barely had time to process this visual information when four huge claws slashed through my vision. The bear’s massive right paw did not connect, however. The loss of Leafa’s wings had done nothing to diminish her agility; she nimbly dodged out of the way of the creature’s claws and jabbed with her sword again. It was another clean hit…but the bear’s HP bar was only down about 10 percent so far.

Lysavindr was one of the greatest of the Ancient weapons in ALO, and if its specs carried over to this game, then, even in the hands of a level-1 player, it ought to destroy a starter monster in a single hit. If it was this difficult to do any real damage to it, then the bear had to be an extremely high-ranked monster.

“Groaaaah!” it howled with fury, stretching out its arms and trying to block Leafa from escaping. Once it caught her, it likely intended to bite her. She had to be very careful with how she approached it.

But this was the moment that Asuna, who had circled around the bear’s rear, bravely made a charge.

“Yaaaa!” she shrieked, and immediately after came a heavy thud. The stone knife in her hand sank deep into the bear’s fur, and it spilled red light when she promptly pulled it back out.

The damage was minuscule, but it succeeded at drawing the bear’s attention. It turned to chase after Asuna, but the rotation was slow, and its feet weren’t made for nimble pivoting.

As soon as I sensed the bear’s attention was broken, I made eye contact with Alice, and we leaped into motion together. Without a word, we drove our knives into the beast’s flank and back.

“Goaaah!” it roared, throwing its head back in pain.

As soon as we leaped out of the way, Leafa activated the One-Handed Sword skill Vertical Arc. It carved a blue V into the bear’s massive back. This time, it had a visible effect on the HP bar. Now it was down to 70 percent.

We can do this!

With the three knives darting in and out to confuse the bear while Leafa struck it with major attacks, we could finish this in another four—no, three rounds, I felt sure. I breathed in to instruct the group to keep repeating this pattern. Except…

“Grraaagh!!” the bear howled, returning its front legs to the ground and jumping toward the forest. Was it going to run away—?

Sadly, that was not the case. It used all four legs to quickly distance itself from us, then whipped around with a cloud of dust and stood up again. It stretched out its arms, pointed its head to the heavens, and arched its huge back as far as it could go.

The very clear lightning-shaped outlines of white fur on its chest suddenly trembled, like they were completely different and distinct animals from the bear.

Something’s coming.

I felt a cold shiver down my back and tried to shout “Get out of the…”

But it was too late. The white bristled hair in the lightning patterns stood up like porcupine quills and shot whistling from its chest. There were dozens…hundreds of them.

“Kirito!” Alice shouted. She leaped in front of me and crossed her arms.

We were enveloped in a storm of quills. Ta-ta-ta-tang! Metal armor deflected the barbs, while they sank through leather and cloth—and flesh.

In my right shoulder and left leg, I felt not pain, but something very close to it—a mixture of intense heat and cold mixed together.

The HP bar in the upper left corner of my vision lost over 70 percent of its value at once, turning deep orange. The HP of the other three went down, too. I looked at my shoulder and saw a milky-white quill with a metallic sheen stuck in deep, about six inches long and a fraction of an inch wide.

Just two of these took out nearly three-quarters of my health?! I fumed. But I was a level-1 player with no armor, and this monster had to be at least level-10, so I supposed it was a miracle I’d survived at all. And without Alice’s protection, I absolutely would have died.

Having just demonstrated why it was called a thornspike cave bear, the beast lowered its front paws to the ground and growled in satisfaction, certain of its victory. The fur quills had shot out in quite a spray; there were at least a dozen in Leafa’s and Asuna’s armor, too. We’d get wiped out if it attacked like that again.

“Let’s back away!” I suggested.

But with her stone knife pointed at the bear, Asuna shouted back, “Where will we go?!”

“It has to be inside the cabin!”

“There’s no wall!”

Yes, the left wall of the log cabin was damaged to the point that there was a huge, gaping hole there. If the bear got inside…

“We’ll just have to deal with it!” I replied. Asuna, Alice, and Leafa all gave me a look that said I should have known, but they went along with the plan anyway.

The bear resumed its approach. Its glowing-red eyes were full of menace, warning that if its prey were to turn around and run, it was ready to leap on our backs.

I waved at the other three to back away, while moving steadily away to the right. My destination was the other side of the pile of logs we didn’t use for planks. Retreating carefully, so as not to expose an opening to attack, I waited until the logs blocked the bear’s line of sight, then shouted, “Run!”

We sprinted for the entrance to the log cabin, right as the bear roared behind us.

“Gwaoooh!!”

I could feel the vibration of its tremendous weight galloping for us, followed by a cacophonous clattering.

I spun around to see that the bear had charged headfirst through the mound of logs and gotten stuck beneath them when they collapsed. In vain, I hoped it would simply die from the pressure, but of course, we weren’t that lucky. The bear easily kicked the tree trunks off and resumed its charge. Its HP bar had gone down a tiny bit, but it still wasn’t even halfway done.

“Hurry, Kirito!” Asuna urged. I turned back to see that the women had reached the entryway at the porch. I raced for all I was worth, leaping up the collapsed stairs and into the cabin, grabbing the doorknob and smashing it closed behind me out of sheer momentum.

Thwaaam! A tremendous shock slammed into the door two seconds later, rattling the entire cabin. Bits of dust and wood sprinkled down from the cracked beams and punctured roof.

“H-help prop up the door!” I shouted, but the others were already there, pressing against it. There was another shock. The door twisted more, to the point where I was afraid it would soon pop out of the frame.

After two body blows against the door, I sensed the bear walking away. Please, let it return to the forest, I prayed as the footsteps continued to the right.

I moved about on tiptoe, peering outside through the windowsill of broken glass. Instantly, as though waiting for me, the bear bellowed “Grrfh!” and charged at us. I panicked and pulled my head back. The bear head-butted the wall anyway. The log wall, which was much stronger than the door, creaked and cracked, and more wood chips fell throughout the living room.

Asuna tapped the nearby wall to take a glance at the properties window and let out a little shriek. “Kirito, the house’s durability is going down!”

“Damn…”

I gnashed my teeth, but it was no surprise, after taking three hits from such a huge and powerful body. If we stayed in here, and the bear continued, it would completely knock down the cabin at some point.

There had to be something—some other way to drive the beast off.

I glanced around the room in a desperate haze. If I had that bottle of dried chili peppers in the pantry, I could attack the bear’s nose with it, but everything from furniture to food ingredients had been spirited away when we teleported into this world. The only thing left behind was our home storage box, but that was also…

Not empty.

Inspiration struck. I glanced at the box, then at the huge hole in the ceiling, then at the box again. It was very close…but if the range for a trade request here was the same as in SAO and ALO, it should be just enough.

“Alice, kneel down right there!” I said. The cat-eared knight looked very confused. Then a fourth impact shook the cabin. We didn’t have a moment to waste.

Looking grave, Alice did as she was told and knelt down at the spot indicated.

“Sorry about this!” I shouted, placing my bare foot on the right shoulder plate of her armor. Alice squawked in surprise, but I launched myself off of her, stretching as far as my arms could reach.

Even with my reset character stats, I was just barely able to catch the beam with my fingertips. Struggling and rocking my body, I managed to pull myself up, then gave a new order.

“Asuna, pull all the logs out of the home’s storage menu and trade them to Leafa!”

After years of working with me, Asuna was used to my baffling and unexplained ideas. Without asking why, she immediately tapped the storage box. After hitting a few buttons on the window, she promptly put her hand down against the floor, as if resisting some terrible invisible weight. But with great determination, she called up the ring menu and sent a trade request to Leafa, who was waiting about six feet away.

Once the source of all that encumbrance moved, it was Leafa’s turn to fall to her knees. “It’s so heavyyy!” she groaned. Before I could even tell her what to do, she was busy getting it done; she sent a trade window to Alice, who accepted the items, then sent the final trade request up to me.

It was quite a distance, but I did see a small window pop up. This part was where keen knowledge and experience from years of playing VRMMOs came in handy.

The range of a trade window was a little over eight feet. But once you received the window, you could move another three before finalizing or refusing the offer. Faced with a small message that said Alice has sent a trade request. Do you accept? I stood up on the ceiling beam.

There was a hole easily large enough for a human to pass through in the roof just over my head. I grabbed the lip and did a pull-up. Just before I crossed that three-foot threshold, I let go of one hand and hit the ACCEPT button on the window before resuming my grip and pushing with all my power until I was fully out of the hole.

I knelt on the roof as a window appeared, saying You have accepted 150 sawed aged spiral pine logs. At that moment, a tremendous weight jolted me downward. I fell flat on my face on the sloped roof and tried desperately to keep from falling off.

The bear below noticed me up on the roof and growled deep and loud. The campfire was about to go out, but the light was just enough to see the large black form backing away to get a proper running start. It was lined up about three feet to the right of me.

Technique and knowledge were done. What I needed now was pure guts.

“Nwaaaaa!” I bellowed, just as loud as the bear, and extended my folded arms. I ignored the system message that said Physique skill proficiency has risen to 3 and used all the willpower I possessed to shift my body to the right. Six inches…one foot…two feet…three feet.

“Graoooorg!!” it howled monstrously. The bear began a fifth charge at the cabin. From my precarious spot on the gabled roof, I could easily imagine being shaken and tumbling off, but I fended off that fear to bring up my menu. From there, I tapped the log icon in my inventory menu, selected the button to materialize, and jabbed OK with my index finger.

A number of logs suddenly appeared before my eyes, each one over a foot thick, and tumbled down the slope of the roof. They appeared in a continual stream, completely blocking my view. But I definitely heard the initial log slamming into the ground very clearly—as well as the scream of a trapped bear.

The spiral pine logs continued to burst to life before me, hurtling down the roof and leaping into thin air as they fell. And it was no wonder—there were 150 logs in our home storage space. Even the strongest strongman would be unable to so much as stand if he had all of that weight in his personal inventory. Making use of the trade window’s range, however, allowed us to ferry them up to the rooftop like a bucket brigade.

The thudding continued unabated below, and eventually the bear stopped roaring. The modest-sized clearing was probably a mess of logs by now, but compared to the pain of losing our cabin, it wasn’t a big deal at all to recover 150 logs…or a thousand, or ten thousand.

At last, the final log popped out of my inventory, rolled off the roof, and clattered to the pile below.

Suddenly, there was an unfamiliar musical fanfare in the air, grand and stately but somehow lonely, and a blue ring of light surrounded my body. It rotated rapidly and rose up above my head, then vanished, leaving behind a new message window.

Kirito’s level has risen to 13.

From 1 straight to 13?! It boggled my mind. Why so much?! Just for rolling a bunch of logs down a roof?!

But a moment later, I realized the huge influx of experience points was not from the rolling of the logs, of course, but the death of the cave bear beneath them. I only wanted it to get hurt enough to run away, but the log fall was massive enough that it completely obliterated the bear’s remaining hit points instead.

In that case, why didn’t I get an item-acquisition message before the level-up fanfare? Even a wild animal monster should drop some kind of natural material, if not cold, hard coin.

Very carefully, I crawled down the slope of the roof so I could peer down at the clearing below. Then it became instantly clear why no items had dropped. I could see the bear’s body, limbs splayed, beneath a chaotic sea of logs. Apparently, in this world, monsters did not disintegrate like in SAO when they died, but they remained as carcasses. In other words, if you wanted their raw materials, you had to get them yourself.

Assuming it wouldn’t disappear for a while, I crawled back to the hole in the roof. Falling through it now would be the height of embarrassment, so I gingerly lowered my legs through, making my way safely back into the room with the help of the ceiling beams.

“You did it, Kirito!” cheered Asuna, hurtling toward me like a cannonball and throwing her arms around my neck. I patted her slender back and was going to tell her that it was thanks to her hard work, when I noticed the very meaningful glances that Alice and Leafa were throwing in our direction. With some on-the-spot recalculation, I said, “It was thanks to…e-everyone’s hard work.”

Alice nodded with a smug smile that said Of course it was.

The bear attack was the biggest disaster—well, second biggest, after crashing to earth with New Aincrad—since we’d teleported into this new world. But we’d managed to survive it, split up to recover all the logs in the mess outside, and returned them to the home storage. That left only the giant bear’s corpse behind.

“So…what are we supposed to do with this?” Leafa asked uncertainly. Asuna and Alice looked at me. I thought Alice would have had experience making use of the wild animals she’d hunted in the Underworld…but I didn’t want to rely on that. I readied my stone knife.

The graphics in Unital Ring were remarkable, but surely they wouldn’t re-create dead bodies to a realistic degree. Surely they would make it as simple as a quick action or two to complete the process. Surely, I prayed as I pressed the knife to the bear’s jaw. I swiped a clean cut from chest to stomach, and the huge bear flashed, then vanished, leaving behind many items.

As expected, a message appeared: Dismantling skill gained. Proficiency has risen to 1. I dismissed it and looked at the pile of materials on the ground. The soft, furry stuff had to be bear pelt, and the big pink globs were probably bear meat, but there were plenty of other little things scattered around.

“So they don’t automatically go into your inventory,” Asuna noted, scooping something up from the ground. It was a claw, large and curved, about four inches long.

Alice took notice and frowned. “But how do they determine who gets looting privileges?”

“Anyone can pick anything up…I’m assuming,” I said, mulling this over. “But while bear pelts and bear meat are one thing, it seems like rare weapons and items dropping in a full-size raid battle would be utter chaos. Even if you decided on your rules ahead of time, there’s nothing in the game itself that stops someone from ignoring them…”

It was a troubling idea to me, but not something we’d have to deal with for quite some time. Asuna tossed the bear claw to me and clapped her hands. “Well! We’re the only ones here for now. Let’s put Mr. Bear’s guts into storage and get back to collecting the repair materials.”

“Good idea,” I agreed, opening the ring menu. Only one of the icons was its original color now. We had thirty minutes until the grace period ended.

Leafa looked rather gravely at the colors. “But, Kirito, we need to get iron next, right? Do you have any leads on where to get it?”

“I may have an idea.”

“Oh really? Where were you thinking?”

The three women stared eagerly at me. I pinched the claw Asuna gave me between two fingers and spun it around.

“This guy’s place.”