Sh*t hits the fan, redux.
This chapter has been driving me crazy. It's definitely better than it was before, but I think I got to the point where my nitpicking wasn't really doing anything productive anymore :'D I'm pretty sure half the reason the last chapter took so long to upload was because I kept messing with this one XD Anyways, if I put off posting this chapter any longer, I probably wouldn't get to it until after like another month, so here we go XD
I'm an angel with a shotgun, fighting 'til the war's won; I don't care if heaven won't take me back - Angel with a Shotgun (The Cab)
o0o0o
When one of Sakuya's perimeter guards comes back with a Salamander in tow, Sakuya has a feeling she already knows who it is.
Alicia's ears press back against her head warily, tail bristling. "How did they know?" she murmurs, her choker bell tinkling as she moves.
As they draw closer, Sakuya asks Alicia, whose race has superior eyesight, to describe the Salamander. As the Cait Sith rattles off a list of descriptive characteristics, the Sylph leader's suspicions are confirmed. Her hand curls cautiously around the hilt of her katana, unsure of whether or not to draw.
Each member of both leaders' guards has their weapons half-drawn or prepared to attack as Catherine lands abruptly in a plume of dust. Sakuya's harried-looking guard follows behind with Catherine's sword in hand; the Salamander doesn't even look at him as he quickly points his sword at her back. He opens his mouth to speak, but she beats him to the punch.
"The Salamanders got a tip from someone in the Sylphs, and they know you're here," she says bluntly, ruby eyes glittering in the afternoon sun, and she nods at the leaders. "They're bringing an ambush party to take the two of you out. They'll be here quite soon."
As a frisson of cold fear ripples through the fairies, Sakuya's eyes widen, then narrow in barely restrained fury, her grip on her weapon turning white-knuckled.
"Who?" she demands, the weight of a single icy word like a glacier. A few Cait Sith next to her spook at her tone, and even a few of her own guards shy away nervously, but Catherine simply shrugs a shoulder.
"Eugene didn't say." She crosses her arms, a resigned, bitter look on her face. "I have to admit, it's insane. Forget clearing the World Tree. Seizing this sort of power would mean unbalance for the entire rest of the world, probably forever."
The two leaders exchange tense looks, and the air is filled with the sound of fairies summoning their wings.
"I'm glad we had a chance to talk in Sylvain," Sakuya says to the Salamander with a brief nod of respect. "We should be able to outpace them, especially if they haven't been able to rest their wings. Everyone, let's-"
"I wasn't done."
Rocking back and forth on her heels idly, Catherine fiddles with a pouch on her belt, head bowed slightly as she appears to think. The tension stretches taut like a bow string while they wait for her to speak, well aware that each second dripping away is another second that the Salamanders draw closer.
"We all want to get to the top of the tree," she says, finally raising her gaze, and gone is the capricious, devil may care confidence that Sakuya saw in Sylvain, now replaced by something colder. "Still, it's not a matter of life and death for you."
Like water, Karma lets her blank mask settle smoothly with hardly a ripple as she says, "But it is for someone I care about."
In a blur of red, she pivots, grabbing her sword and unsheathing it in one fluid movement. The frame of the Sylph guard behind her topples with a scream, head severed from his body, as he melts into a dying green flame. In stony silence, Heathcliff watches, hands clasped stiffly behind his back.
Every single fairy is frozen as she lifts her sword to point at the leaders, flickers of a green flame dancing upon the steel like drops of blood. Distantly, she thinks that if this was SAO, they would likely already be scrambling into formation. This'll be easier than she thought.
"One chance," she whispers. "I'll give you one chance to make this easier on everyone here. Surrender yourselves, and I won't kill anyone else. Or, I'll kill everyone here, and then both of you."
Several of the guards immediately burst into vocal disagreement, but Sakuya's voice cuts through them quickly.
"I've heard of your skills, but you can't defeat us and twelve of our guards by yourself," she says, eyes blazing. "I too will give you one chance to surrender and leave now."
"I didn't come here with the intention of raising any white flags. Will you give yourselves up or not?"
"We're not just going to give up without a fight," Alicia hisses, and a growl of agreement ripples through the guards.
Karma sighs, lowering her sword. In one smooth motion, she withdraws a red potion from the pouch on her belt, pops the cork off, and gulps it down before crushing it in her fist. "I didn't think you would."
There's always been a certain beauty to her brutal, mechanical efficiency, Heathcliff thinks to himself as she rips into the guards like tissue paper, tearing through two more before the rest can even rush into battle positions. They may be higher levelled and better equipped than the average player, but one weakness that nearly every fairy shares is their lack of experience with aggressive, high speed melee combat—and even in Aincrad, she was the best of the best. The potion she just drank affords her an even more offensive approach, buffering her HP loss with its potent regenerative properties, and she's got about a dozen more, having stopped a few minutes in a town on the way to stock up.
Unlike when she fought the Sylph party, she cuts down each player ruthlessly; here in Alfheim, dismemberment is not sufficient to take a player out of the fight, not with the magic system. Having even one more player with her to watch her back would be useful, but she doesn't have that luxury. Heathcliff said he wouldn't get in her way; he said nothing about helping her, nor is she even certain she would allow him to.
"Someone go get the perimeter guards!" one of the guards cries. "We need to protect-"
Their words are abruptly cut off by virtue of a sword up the jaw with Karma's full weight behind it. Wrenching her blade out, Karma whirls to parry another blade in the same motion, dancing back into the thicket of bristling weapons. As of now, only three guards are still standing in addition to the leaders, plus now four remain lights. The precautions they took with setting lookouts were suddenly worth less than nothing after they let her get this far already.
When outnumbered, divide and conquer—and they were kind enough to do the first half for her. One against six and six are much more comfortable odds than one against twelve.
In her periphery, she can see streaks of green and orange as the perimeter guards return, and just in time to replace their dead allies. Spells rain down from the mages, but it proves to be their undoing as she weaves and ducks among her foes, using them as shields from their own allies' haphazard offense while she dismembers their defense.
Confused shouts fill the air as Sylphs and Cait Sith try to direct each other in battle, only to waste precious time fumbling in hesitation. Separately, the Sylphs work well enough with their Sylph friends and the Cait Sith with the Cait Sith, but it's apparent that they've rarely fought alongside the other race before as a whole. Coordinated spells require planning and teamwork, which they have little of together—their numbers are hurting more than helping them, and Karma wastes no time in singling out the biggest threats, the mages who are high levelled enough to resurrect others. Once they're gone, the rest will be simple cleanup.
Half of the guards left are shouting at their leaders to run; the other half are pleading for orders on what to do. The leaders look torn between fleeing and staying to help, and that hesitation costs them dearly. If it were her in their positions, she wouldn't have hesitated to run, knowing that her life carried far more weight than the guards'. For that matter, if it were any clearer guild leader in their positions, they wouldn't even hesitate before doing something, but neither Sakuya nor Alicia has felt the pressure of risking their very lives in every battle they face.
Perhaps that's why they don't run—because the ability to recognize a fight they'll lose is not one that they've ever staked everything upon.
"Get away from her!" Sakuya shouts over the massacre while Alicia repeatedly casts heals and ranged spells from next to her as fast as cooldowns allow. "Hit her with staggered long range spells from afar!"
Against a melee enemy, it's a pretty predictable strategy—especially since it's all they've got—and she'd planned accordingly.
Chanting under her breath, Karma lets her spell fly just as the fairies try to fan out, a firework streaking into the sky. A dome of fire erupts above the plateau, saturating everything in scarlet and crimson—the sight is oddly reminiscent of Sword Art Online's first day announcement. Her swordsmanship isn't the only skill she's been training; in a world of magic, she would be stupid to ignore such a powerful weapon, one that she's been honing since the very first day. With her melee abilities, she could even afford to focus much more on her magic skills.
The dome quickly arcs down towards the ground, closing the fairies into the type of close range brawl that spells a death sentence against her. Screams and shouts fill the acrid air along with the smoke, from fairies as well as a few pets, which are quickly destroyed as they try to come to their owners' defense. There's even a several meters tall, armored dragon rampaging around, but dragons in this game don't have the best AI or agility. They're more suited for blasting ranged damage in mass combat than a PvP fight against one very small, very fast target. In this chaotic, cramped arena, it's getting in its allies' way more than Karma's.
In a way, Karma muses distantly to herself, this is oddly reminiscent of the Laughing Coffin confrontation on New Year's, as she started out facing odds that any sane person would balk at. Except this time, the tables have turned, in more ways than one.
I'm the bad guy here, aren't I?
The leaders are staying back, mostly trying to direct their troops and support from afar. In her periphery, she sees Sakuya trying to resurrect someone and hurls a chair at her, breaking her concentration. Meanwhile, Alicia is chanting a spell to break the dome, but before she can finish, a pinwheel of crimson-tinted steel strikes her back midair, causing her to tumble into the fire with a shriek.
"Rue!" Sakuya cries, leaping into the air after her friend to drag her to a rough landing.
By this point, Karma is mostly running on autopilot, because this is so much easier than it was in Aincrad. After all, trying not to kill them isn't even something she needs to think about anymore. And killing people is shockingly straightforward. All she has to do is use all that practice of aiming for nonlethal areas, and just do the exact opposite—beheading is a guaranteed one-hit KO, and she has both the precision and the stats to execute such strikes.
A tiny, hysterical laugh bubbles in the back of her throat as she muses, This is so easy, why haven't I been doing this all along? followed immediately by, Am I going insane?
For a split second, her gaze strays to the red-clad figure standing on the edge of the plateau.
Oh, she realizes. That's right. I don't have you to be better for anymore.
Perhaps it should bother her more, how easy it is to make the switch. As people say, doing the right thing always takes effort, and she tried in Aincrad. Every blow was carefully placed, every battle calculated, except during the Laughing Coffin raid when she let her emotions get the better of her. She barely remembers that fight either, having been on autopilot then as well.
So if this is her autopilot, does that meant that this is just her default?
Huh. Well, there's a thought she has absolutely no wish to unpack ever. It's a good thing she's so well practiced at ignoring all of her problems, right?
The guards are finally starting to fight back against Karma's aggressive assault, but it's already far too late. As another dies, one of them swings a mace at her and instead hits their partner when she sways backwards. A kick to the gut sends the mace-wielder stumbling backwards, impaling themselves on their partner's blade, and she dances back from their remain light to take another potion.
Three left, and she's starting to get to the point where she has to ration her HP instead of just tanking hits to land her own. She suspects that once these three guards are down, it'll be comparatively easy to finish the leaders.
Some distance away, the dragon can be seen snorting and stomping around, spitting cinders and smoke, and an idea strikes. She dismisses the cage of fire, leaving her with just enough magic to cast a heal, and takes off, flying low to the ground in short bursts of speed to outmaneuver the guards while chanting. Upon casting, the spell brings her health back up to about two thirds.
In the corner of her eye, she can see the two leaders trying to resurrect remain lights. So far, she's refrained from directly engaging them much, and Alicia yelps as Karma lunges for her suddenly. The ear-shattering roar from the dragon is all the confirmation Karma needs, and she bats aside Alicia's claws to land two solid punches to the Cait Sith before grabbing her and throwing her at Sakuya.
The three remaining guards are soon on top of her; weaponless, she falls back under their attack, goading them on as she strains all her senses to keep track of the battlefield. Accompanying each quaking step of the dragon, a fiery glow starts to paint her opponents from behind her as heat gathers at her back.
One of the guards' eyes grow wide as they turn to warn their allies, but they're too slow. With more brute force than grace, she grabs two chairs from the table and swings them with all her might. The guards fall like bowling pins, and she leaps to stand behind them, spreading her arms out in an almost mocking gesture.
Alicia's spell fizzles out at her fingertips as she shrieks at her familiar, "No, don't-"
BOOM!
Painless heat engulfs the spot where they stand, and Karma feels momentarily weightless as the blast throws her into the air. The heat and the light sear the breath in her lungs, but she knows her racial resistance to fire will blunt the damage. She gets her feet underneath herself, breathing out when her HP stops with just under a quarter remaining. The dragon is rooted in place for the moment, tongue lolling in exhaustion.
Her enemies aren't so lucky. Blinking away the afterimages, she can see that two of them have been reduced to remain lights, and from the looks of his avatar, the last one is just about to go too.
Quickly, she knocks back the last regeneration potion she has left, just in time for the dragon to come charging at her again, swiping with rugged claws. She leaps back from the beast's clumsy attack and slides under its belly to avoid a volley of wind spells, only to get thrown into the overturned table from a swing of the dragon's lashing tail.
Gritting her teeth against the disorientation of the impact, she yanks a chair in front of her with her feet to block Sakuya's katana before kicking the chair at her. Summoning her wings, she tackles Sakuya as hard as she can before snatching her katana and changing focus. The force of her strike drives her sword straight through the remaining guard's armor and the fairy himself clean off the plateau before she kicks him off of the end of her blade, his remain light streaking away like a fallen star.
Heathcliff has to admit, there's something both awe-inspiring and completely terrifying about Karma right now. Even he wouldn't dare get in her way with the look in her eyes.
This is the strength of someone who has something to fight for, who has found a flicker of hope and will stop at nothing to keep it burning. This is what she could've been in Aincrad, had she not so adamantly insisted on bringing as many criminals in alive as she could.
He thinks that once, she would've fought for him like this too, even if it went against everything she was; he had only to ask, and she would've given up every moral and value she stood by.
The upper bar in her HUD is crawling back up from the low red zone—a little dangerous, but luck appears to be on her side today—as the potion peels wounds away from her skin, pixel by pixel. From the air, she withdraws her spare sword from her inventory, discarding her stolen one as she circles back around to land. She's a little ahead of schedule, so she'll need to stall long enough for the Salamanders to come finish the job.
At a quiet word from Sakuya, Alicia reluctantly recalls her dragon, which somehow shrinks down to an inanimate ornament and fastens itself to her race leader mantle as a decorative trinket—a good choice, given how unwieldy it is. Karma's sword that she threw at the Cait Sith earlier is nowhere to be seen.
"You should've run when you still had the chance," she can't help but remark. It's a bit of a low blow, but it's nothing they don't already know.
Alicia's tail lashes. "A true leader would never order their subordinates to do something they wouldn't."
That's fair. But a good leader would care more about the whole than the individuals. She keeps her mouth shut; no need to rub so much salt in the wound.
A bitter smirk tugs briefly at the corner of her lips. Looking at things from Alicia's point of view, Heathcliff really was only a leader in name, never risking his life like the people he led into combat. Asuna was always the real leader of the KoB—her, Godfree, and Uzala.
The thought of them—one imprisoned, one dead, one grieving—chases her short-lived mirth away, and she grips her blade tighter.
"You said it yourself—what the Salamanders are doing will destroy the lives that many of us have built from the ground up in this game, perhaps permanently," the Sylph Leader says emphatically, perhaps making one last attempt to sway Karma, futile as it is, especially when all she's doing is wasting time—time that Karma can use to regenerate, and time that the Salamanders can use to close the distance. "What you're doing is hurting real people! This isn't just a game to us."
Karma wants to laugh at how ironic it is that Sakuya would pick that particular line of argument.
"Yeah, well, I bet you're right," she concedes. "I'm sure this place does mean a lot to you. I get that. I know what I'm doing."
"Then why-"
"Because I also know all about hurting real people, as you put it." This weight upon her conscience will never be as heavy as it was in Aincrad. After all of that, what's a little more to carry, if it's for Asuna's sake? "And no matter what you think, this is nothing more than a game for people like you," she whispers, hardening her heart like the steel of her armor and blade. "At the end of the day, you have the option to respawn. You have the freedom to simply roll another avatar. You have all the second chances you could ever want no matter how many times you die!"
Her voice, having risen to a shout with each word snapping like fire arrows, drops to a whisper as she leans forward.
"We never did."
And Asuna never will until she's free.
Her wings rocket her across the plateau in the blink of an eye, and the two fairies split up quickly, darting back and forth in an attempt to overwhelm Karma. They work together better than their guards did, and they're at near full health, as they were staying back and healing most of the time.
If she had more than a fifth of her health points left, they wouldn't stand a chance—a battlefield commander whose troops have been obliterated and a mage whose MP has been spent, two leaders whose duties stop them from training enough to have the stats to pose a real threat. But while Karma can't tire in the virtual world, her HP isn't infinite. Although she deals far more damage than she takes, the latter begins to add up until she has only a tiny triangle of red remaining—one scratch, however small, away from death, and she's out of potions.
Tail twitching with nervous energy, Alicia comments, "You're not regenerating anymore."
Karma shrugs a shoulder. "My potion just wore off."
With careful discipline, she keeps her gaze trained on the leaders. They look suspicious, probably wondering why Karma seems to have given up, especially when they're nearly as close to death as she is, but they have their backs turned to what Karma can see just past them—small red dots emerging from the treeline on the low ground, right on time.
Alicia shifts in place, her bell tinkling. "You were an SAO survivor," she says aloud. "Is that it? Is this some misguided attempt at revenge against other VR players? I'm sorry you had to go through that, really, but we had nothing to do with it!"
She stares, genuinely baffled. "That's...not it." With a wry grimace, she adds pointedly, "I know exactly where the blame lies, and it has nothing to do with you. I have no personal grudge here—in fact, under different circumstances, I probably would've been on your side. But right now, the Salamanders need you dead, and I need them. That's all there is to it."
Sakuya narrows her eyes. "You told me you wouldn't let people tell you what to do," she accuses. "And now, you're letting the Salamanders use you for their own purposes."
Rolling her eyes, Karma exhales sharply through her nose. "Didn't I just say it was the other way around? And I've told you, I never cared about faction divisions."
"Then what about just being a decent person and doing the right thing?" Alicia retorts.
For the second time today, she nearly laughs at the irony. Oh, if only they knew all the things she's already done wrong. "There's something precious to me at stake here. I can't afford to care about right or wrong."
To the credit of the two leaders, they only raise their weapons once more, determined to die on this hill fighting a fight they could never win.
"Then you're a hypocrite," Sakuya says, voice cold with rage, "and I misjudged you severely."
"Trying to judge me when you knew nothing about me was your mistake." One that Karma is tired of people making, but when did anyone ever listen when she tried to correct it?
Her eyes flash. "Yes. Clearly," she agrees resentfully.
Karma lifts her blade, feeling much like a villain, and even if she is one, what does it matter anyway? As long as Asuna can be freed, it doesn't.
"There is no such thing as black and white," she says in a flat voice, resigned.
Shades of gray, that's all Aincrad was. For a castle encased in steel, the truth was fragile and could bend at a mere whim, and if there was one thing she ever believed was absolute-
Well, it's gone now.
o0o0o
A sea of white roils underneath the mismatched duo as they fly over the cloud cover to conceal their distinctively colored flight trails from the small group of Salamanders beneath them. Their wings will run out of energy soon, but Yui tells them that it'll be enough to make it to the plateau—though not before the Salamanders.
Part of Leafa is still marvelling over the near-sentient tones of the AI that seem to capture human emotions, like excitement and trepidation and fear, when Yui pipes up again, her little voice tense with worry.
"I only sense three fairies on the plateau," she says nervously, and Leafa stiffens, exchanging a wide-eyed look with Kirito.
"Where are their guards?" she asks aloud, wishing they didn't have to fly over the clouds so that she could see what was going on below. "Don't tell me they were all killed…"
"It can't be the Salamanders, though," Kirito mutters. "At least not the group we've been following. Maybe they sent an advance group first?"
A small gasp comes from his coat pocket. "Now it's down to two."
"Maybe Sakuya and Alicia fought off whoever attacked them?" Leafa asks, with a sinking feeling in her gut.
As they fly, she checks her HUD for a message popup, eyes flickering up and to the left every few seconds. If the Salamanders kill Sakuya, Leafa and every other Sylph will receive a message that Sylph territory now belongs to the Salamanders. She can't be certain about Alicia and the Cait Sith, but for now, no news is indeed good news.
The clouds fall away then, and Leafa scans the plateau frantically.
There! Amidst the smoke and ashes and tumbled furniture, the only players left alive are a Sylph and Cait Sith, both adorned with the shoulder mantles of race leaders. Near them dances a flickering red remain light. The Salamander group may be ahead of them, but if they can buy enough time, the leaders might be able to outpace them.
As Leafa watches, Alicia reaches out to help Sakuya up before throwing her arms around her. Beaming, Leafa lifts a hand to wave-
And at that moment, meteors arc up from the treeline to firebomb the plateau.
o0o0o
shattered windows and the sound of drums; people couldn't believe what I'd become - Viva la Vida (Coldplay)
I heard it was the wrong things I get right, I blame it on the monsters in my mind - Believers (Alan Walker, ft. Conor Maynard)
Hehe she...might be slipping.
I know 1v14 might be stretching it, even for Karma (and fun fact, this was 99% of what was driving me crazy about this chapter), but she had a lot of things on her side (and some luck), and a lot of things that were not on the Sylphs'/Cait Sith's side (such as luck :'P). Add in the fact that this is the most direct way to Asuna, and it'll take an immovable object to counter the unstoppable force.
Regarding her apathy towards the other players, all the killing she had to do in SAO did screw with her and her moral compass. I figured with this situation, I could go one of two ways: either have Karma be so against/traumatized by the idea of killing that she refuses to do it under any circumstance, or have her be completely indifferent to killing in VR because if there's no death penalty, then who cares.
(Guess which one I went with.)
Plus, everything else that's happened has not been good for her mental state either, so any ability to empathize with the people she's destroying has long since been yeeted out the window. It's funny; in the Legrue Corridor episode, Kirito tells Leafa he won't betray her because actions matter even in a virtual world. He literally says "I'd never attack someone for my own benefit." And then we have Karma, who just straight up lacks the ability to care anymore.
On another note, I was kinda struggling to actually include Heathcliff in this chapter? Because this entire chapter is basically the fight XD I was able to bring him up when she started thinking about why it was so easy for her to do Bad Things, and then she thinks oh, it's because he was my role model and he betrayed me so I don't have to hold myself to those standards on his account anymore. Which...there's several things not quite right with that, but as she said, we don't have to unpack that right now :)
Not gonna lie, the fight scene was kind of fun to do XD I looked at an earlier version of it, and the fight was legit only half a page long (whereas this was over five pages) XD All the editing I did was basically to make Sakuya and Alicia less helpless (and a little smarter). They had half their guards set up as a scouting screen, that way they'd know if someone was approaching, like that guard who brought Karma in. (Unfortunately, like Karma pointed out, this was quite useful in theory, but actually ended up backfiring on them :/) Like, you guys are both faction leaders, out in the middle of a neutral wild zone where you could be attacked at any point (and for that matter...why?).
Anyways. I have so many more nitpicks with this part (among others) of the Fairy Dance arc, but whatever. This author's note is already long enough XD The main question is, what are Kirito and Leafa gonna do now that there's no one here to save? :D