Here's the second chapter of Alfheim. This is looking to be a shorter arc, but I hope you enjoy it. Please leave a review; I'd love to know what you like!
Caring For A Rat: Book 2, Part 2
The Nervgear laid on my bed. I had closed the door with the intent of putting the headset on five minutes ago.
I was no further from the door than I had been at that time.
Intellectually, I knew that I had nothing to fear, that Sword Art Online had been deleted after Asuna and I had killed Kayaba, the man found dead in a hidden cabin. It had taken a while to come to grips with that.
Emotionally, I still feared that I would be drawn back into Aincrad when I put the helmet on, once again forced to fight for my life, but this time alone. It was a stupid fear, and I should just put the Nervgear on, get it over with.
I had been able to handle it perfectly well earlier, I even put the cartridge for Alfheim Online in without a single problem. But now that it was time to actually play the game, I was frozen, unable to move.
My phone rang in my pocket.
The screen shone in the dim light of the evening, casting weird shadows as I read who was calling me off the phone.
Tomo.
I shakily answered the call, grateful for the opportunity to avoid putting the Nervgear on for a few more minutes.
"Hey," Tomo said, her voice unnaturally flat.
"Hey," I responded, not sure what to say.
The silence between us stretched...
...and stretched...
...and stretched…
Until Tomo broke it.
"You nervous too?"
"Yeah," I said. It felt relieving somehow, to say it out loud. "I know nothing bad's going to happen, but…"
Tomo barked out a sarcastic laugh. "Look at us, two mighty warriors, scared o' a helmet."
"It's not just a helmet, though," I said, sinking down onto the bed. "It trapped us for two years."
Tomo grunted in agreement, then fell silent. "Look, do you want to start it up together?" I asked, moving over to pick up the Nervgear. "Say, count of three, and then we put it on? Get it over with?"
"That eager ta see me again, Kii-bou?" Tomo said, her voice far lighter than it had been in her last statement.
"Always," I responded, setting the phone on speaker. "Alright, count off?"
"One." I took a deep breath, and raised the Nervgear over my head. "Two." Tomo's voice shook, and I felt my heartbeat speed up. "Three!" Before I could stop myself, I pulled the Nervgear down over my head, and froze.
Nothing happened.
The evening light still played out across the floor of my room. I wasn't drawn back into the unforgiving world of Aincrad. I picked my phone back up, holding it close to my face.
"Well," I said, trying to sound less tired than I was. "It's on."
"Same here." Tomo sounded about as tired as I felt.
"Right, now we just have to start up ALO…" I trailed off, reaching for the switch.
"You better not change that handsome face o' yours in the character creation, Kii-bou," Tomo said, her voice hard.
"We're about to go into a game where the GM is potentially actively hostile, and you're worried about how I look?"
"Yes," My partner said. "I can take almost anythin', but if I have ta look at whatever cringey face you think is 'handsome', I might just snap." Her tone was light, teasing me about my perfectly fine sense of aesthetics.
"Just for that, I'm going to make the most unbearable to look at character I can."
"Kii-bou?" Tomo asked, her voice in a tone that was far too panicky for it to be real. "C'mon Kii-bou, it was a joke, you know I wouldn't-"
"See you in-game Tomo," I said, thumbing the end call button.
"Kii-bou you-" The blonde tried to get one last sentence in before the call was cut off, and failed. Chuckling to myself, I pressed the power button, and laid down in bed.
Wait for me, Asuna, I thought as the Nervgear hummed to life. I'm coming.
The sensation of the Nervgear starting up was surprisingly unfamiliar. But then again, it had been almost two years since I had experienced this. I closed my eyes, and felt a last-minute spike of fear as the startup animation played. For a second, I was logging in to Sword Art Online again, about to be trapped by Kayaba in his cruel world, unable to see my sister, my partner, or my wife.
And then after the colored lights sped past me, a pair of torches lit up a dark room, and a pleasant female voice started the standard pregame identification.
{Welcome to Alfheim Online.} A keyboard popped up in front of me, not dissimilar to the one I had grown used to typing on in SAO. {Please enter your name and the gender you wish to be identified as.}
Smiling, I typed out what felt just as real as my birth name. [Kirito] The system accepted it without complaint. I tapped the Male button almost as an afterthought, frowning at the lack of options on the gender front. There wasn't even a [Nonbinary] button.
While I frowned over the archaic and downright backwards game design, the narrator continued speaking. {There are nine races in Alfheim. Please choose one.} Without hesitation I scrolled through the options to select the [Spriggan] race, just like Tomo and I had agreed.
{You have selected the Spriggan race, is this the correct race?} I pressed down firmly on the confirm button, nodding absently to myself.
"Yes, I'm sure."
{Importing Character Data} What? My mind spun, There was character data to import? Where would it have come from? I'd never played Alfheim Online before. And this wasn't like the old Mass Effect games; you couldn't just port a character over from one game to the next.
In fact, the only game I had even played before on this console was… no. It couldn't be, could it?
As my thoughts spiraled, my avatar morphed, and the floor opened up beneath my feet. I fell away from the character creation room like a rock, and the glow of teleportation enveloped me.
When it cleared, I was standing on the ground in the middle of a forest, the moon shining brightly above me.
"Well," I said to myself, "This isn't the Spriggan City."
Five minutes later, I was no closer to figuring out where I was. I hadn't studied the various regions of Alfheim, beyond what to expect in the Spriggan zone, and the Jungles there were far denser than these woods. What I had figured out, though, was that I was rather overleveled for a new character, with most of my skill meters, how the game tracked levels, sitting at the max.
I also had a full inventory, although most of it was corrupted and barely readable. I doubted that my swords would even do damage. I was scrolling through my inventory, trying to figure out if there were any items that had survived whatever had just happened when I received a friend request from Argo.
I accepted it, and was immediately faced with an angry spriggan. "Kii-bou I swear if you-!" She paused before she could truly build up steam, noticing my surroundings. "Where are you?"
"About that…" I smiled sheepishly, scratching the back of my head. "I don't… actually… know?" I shrugged helplessly.
Argo let out a loud sigh, then tossed her head back, laughing helplessly. It was strange to see her with black hair. That must have been the default for spriggans, but still, she looked strange with it.
"Only you, Kii-bou," The info broker muttered. "Only you could manage to get lost in the character creator."
"Hey," I said indignantly, "I didn't mean for this to happen."
"I know you didn't," Argo said, "Doesn't mean it didn' happen."
"I think that the game imported my old data," I said as I continued browsing my inventory. Man, Asuna sure did carry around a lot of cooking implements, didn't she? I was lucky that the inventory in ALO seemed to be much larger than the one in SAO.
"I think it did for me, too..." Argo said, tapping on a few things out of frame. "Well, they do both use the Cardinal system, so I guess it wouldn't be-"
"Unless they used the same framework for SAO, this shouldn't be possible." I cut Argo off, "In any case, it looks like all of my items have been… corr...upted." I fell silent, a single clear string of text blinking back at me from the middle of the page.
"Kii-bou?" Argo said, although I paid little attention to her. I placed my finger gingerly on the item, and a window popped up. [Do you wish to activate this item?]
"Please don't hate me if this fails," I said, pressing down on the button.
"Kii-bou what?!" A swirl of lights surrounded me, spiralling up into the air above. I don't know how much of it Argo caught, but it was enough to make her stop talking.
I stared upwards, my heart in my throat as the light took on a familiar form, and with a trill, Yui took physical form. She opened her eyes, and then they widened further in panic as gravity took hold of her.
I dived forward, catching her before she hit the ground, wrapping my arms around my alive, oh so gloriously alive daughter. "Yui," I choked out, clutching her tightly to my chest, burying my face in her hair.
"Papa?"
"Yui?!"Argo shouted across the call, "Kirito, where are you, I-I need to get there-"
"Ago-mama?" Yui sounded confused, squirming in my arms, trying to look around. "Where are you?"
"I'm in Pilover," the info broker said, starting to walk somewhere. "The Spriggan Capital. Kirito, you need to figure out where you are now!"
I nodded, still holding on to Yui.
"I'm- I'm going to go try and get geared up. What with my items bein' corrupted as well." Argo looked away from the camera. "Call me back when you figure out where you are, and don't get too distracted playin' with Yui, 'kay?"
"Okay," I said, running my hands through Yui's long black hair as she peered around.
"Ago-mama? Wait-" Yui was cut off as Argo closed the call. "Ago-mama?"
"It's okay Yui," I said, "She just... she needs time to think, okay?" Argo had confided in me about what had happened in the hidden dungeon beneath the black iron palace, and the competing nightmares she had of being trapped behind a barrier while the Fatal Scythe struck me, Asuna, and Yui down, and of her carrying a struggling Yui up the steps of the dungeon as mine and Asuna's names faded from her friends list.
Her feelings regarding Yui were complicated.
My daughter nodded at my words, although she seemed unconvinced.
"Alright," I stood up, carrying Yui with me in my arms. "Now, I don't know if you noticed, but we aren't in SAO."
"That's obvious, Papa," Yui rolled her eyes. "Where are we then?" She asked, looking around.
"I don't know," I said, and then I swung her up onto my shoulders for a better view. "Let's see if we can find out, shall we?" Yui grunted in agreement, gripping onto my surprisingly stiff hair as I turned around, surveying my surroundings. Ten seconds later, I relayed my findings up the chain.
"Well, we appear to be in a forest," I said, making my daughter giggle, "And these trees have broad leaves on them, so we are in a temperate forest." Yui kept giggling.
"No, Papa, what game are we in?"
"Oh, what game are we in?" I pretended to be surprised, although from the way Yui was stifling her laughter she wasn't fooled in the slightest. "We're in Alfheim Online, and I don't know all the specifics of the game itself, but it is using some variation of the Cardinal system, otherwise I wouldn't have been able to bring you out."
Yui hummed from atop my shoulders, thumping her feet against my chest. "As for our physical location, do you have any sort of navigation skills?"
"I don't think so…" Yui trailed off, her feet growing still. "But it looks like there's some kind of entity similar to me that I can slot into as an avatar that does have navigation systems!" She relayed with considerable enthusiasm.
"Alright, if you think it might help out, then-" Before I could finish, Yui had popped open her menu, tapped a few buttons, and was enveloped by another shower of light. Her weight dissolved from atop my neck, and I made a reflexive grab for one of her legs, only managing to hit myself in the chest.
"Oh wow!" Yui's voice rang out from approximately the same location; above my head. I took a few steps backwards, as Yui descended in her new form.
She was tiny. Approximately the same size as my hand from wrist to fingertip, with a set of gossamer pixie wings not much longer than her arms. They still held her aloft, and my daughter whizzed around my head, delighting in her newfound ability to fly.
"This is so cool!" She cried as she passed my face for the fifth time. She shot up into the air, and spun back down to hover in front of me. I reached out with one hand and she landed on my palm.
"Cute," I muttered to myself, poking her with my other hand.
"Papa!" Yui huffed indignantly, puffing her cheeks out.
"Sorry, sorry," I quickly straightened up, scratching my jawbone with the hand not holding my now pixie-sized daughter. "You're just- actually," I said, letting my hand drop. "What are you now?"
"The name in the files is Navigation Pixie," Yui said, taking off from my hand to alight on my shoulder. "And I can mark various familiar player I.D.'s." The navigation pixie shaded her eyes. " Una-mama and Ago-mama are that way." she pointed off somewhere, I wasn't really paying attention as part of her sentence grappled me and reeled in every scrap of my focus.
"Asuna's here? In-game?"
Yui looked surprised for about a second, before nodding. "Her signal's very faint, but I can see it. I'll need to get closer to have any sort of lock on it." After so long, I finally had a solid lead on what had happened to Asuna. The photographs weren't faked. She was here. She was here, and I was going to find her and break her out of her prison.
Why was I still standing around? I had to get moving. Argo was already getting geared up. I started walking through the forest, Yui cheerfully telling me little bits of data that she was mining out of the game as we went.
About five minutes later, under Yui's instruction, I tried to fly for the first time.
It went about as well as could be expected.
The first time I lifted off from the ground was simple enough, the controls that Yui had found for me were easy to use, at least at first glance.
"Alright Papa, let's try to go a little higher," My pseudo-daughter said, scrolling through a menu while I gripped the control sticks nervously. Hesitantly, I pulled back on them, a motion that lifted me up with the sound of []. After ten seconds of ascension, I was now hovering well above the treetops.
"That wasn't too bad," I said to myself, my hands relaxing a bit around the joysticks. "Now I just push forward, right?"
"Un." Yui nodded in affirmation. I pushed forward on the joysticks, eager to get my first taste of flight. Yui's eyes flew open as I moved, and I had half a second to comprehend my mistake before I was hurled across the sky by the system, completely out of control.
Leafa darted through the night, heading for Swilvane. Lady Sakuya needed to be warned that there was a Salamander Raiding party deep in Sylph territory, and with the rest of her party dead, and the respawn timers being what they were, it would be up to her to deliver the message. No matter how good a swordswoman she was, she didn't have the stats to take on three high-spec Salamander Dragoneers.
And that was discounting the range advantage they had on her with their spears and magic. They had come out of nowhere, hitting her smaller party from the side and dropping the tank before they could do anything. From there it had been a desperate running battle as they were slowly picked off, sometimes managing to take their attacker with them. Sigurd had made a sacrifice play, drawing three soldiers off from the rest of them.
But the salamanders had still outnumbered her party, and with Recon dead in a mutual takedown, she was the only one left.
Inwardly, she cursed not having leveled her stealth magic up more. It hadn't been a high enough level to escape the enemy's searchers, and now she was stuck running for her life, hoping desperately for her wings to recharge in time.
Leafa dodged around a tree, keeping her sword in front of her, angled above the waist, took three steps, then skidded to a stop. "Fuck." She'd stumbled into a clearing.
"Don't curse, it's unbefitting of a lady." One of the three remaining Salamanders descended in front of her, and she contemplated going back for the woods, but another salamander landed behind her, laughing.
"I'll swear as much as I want to, asshole," Leafa said, raising her sword into a stance that had been drilled into her all her life. It was somewhat inappropriate here, but Kendo was still a formal school of swordsmanship, something she doubted any of her opponents had.
"Such a mouth on you," The Salamander in front of her mocked, pretending to be taken aback. "Are all Sylphs this foul?"
"Seems like we're doin' a good thing by killing them then," The salamander behind her growled, and she shifted her weight, preparing to burst forward to try and take out the warrior in front of her before his companion on the ground, or the one still hovering above the three of them in the air could interfere.
A distant, high-pitched scream rolled out across the forest, and Leafa almost stumbled. Her opponent was not so lucky, having shifted his weight inexpertly and falling to one knee in his surprise. But before Leafa could take advantage of his moment of weakness, an unfamiliar black-clad fairy tumbled through the sky and slammed into the Salamander hovering above her.
The two collapsed to the ground, the salamander managing to separate himself from the newcomer mid-air, and make a somewhat gentle landing. She'd have to watch out for him.
"Oh, oww, that hurt," The newcomer said, sitting up, and Leafa couldn't help letting the tip of her sword drop a little in surprise. A Spriggan? The Spriggans lived on the other side of Alfheim, directly across the world tree from Sylph lands, and there weren't that many of them besides. So what was one doing here? "Alright, looks like I'll have to work on that."
"Hey, You're interfering!" The salamander behind Leafa shouted, seemingly not caring for his safety as he let the Sylph capitalize on his distraction to sidestep, putting herself out from between the two aggressors.
"Oh, I'm sorry, I'm just-" The Spriggan cut off his apology as he took in the situation. The Salamander he had hit in his impact had returned to the skies, looking distinctly rumpled, while the other two remained on the ground, brandishing their spears. "What exactly am I interfering in?"
"Nothing a Spriggan needs to concern himself with," The flying salamander said, managing to sound so patronizing it almost physically hurt Leafa's ears. "You'll be dead too fast to really understand." His threat made, the mage started chanting, forming a fireball in his hand.
"Look, dude, I'm sorry, I'm still getting the hang of flying, can we just let this be-" The spriggan's second attempt to apologize was cut off as the Salamander mage flung his fireball at the grounded Spriggan. In a display of speed that nearly took her breath away, the newcomer, wearing what she vaguely recognized as beginner's equipment, sidestepped a six-word fireball, managing to avoid the explosion that should have killed him in one shot. "Alright," he said, falling into a strangely familiar stance, holding his sword out behind him, parallel to the ground, and one hand in front of him. "I guess we're doing this."
Everything happened very quickly after that.
One of the Salamanders charged her, his spear already coming in for a thrust. She deflected the polearm, and took a cross step, coming in with a slice parallel to his spear. The warrior tried to deflect her blow with the haft of his weapon, but she adjusted her cut, her hands steady as she cut through virtual armor, skin, and bone. Her opponent gasped out in pain, dropping his spear and clutching the remains of his arm. She had managed to sever it just above the elbow with her strike.
Another blow took his head off.
A shattering sound across the clearing caught her attention, and she looked up to see the other salamander's spear shatter from where the Spriggan had apparently driven his sword through the shaft.
The black-clad swordsman pivoted around his blade, dug into the earth, and lashed out in a devastating side kick that sent his opponent stumbling backwards. Before the salamander could recover, the spriggan had ripped his sword out of the earth, and swung it in an uppercut blow that nearly split the poor spearman in half.
"Tch," The mage grumbled, still hovering in the sky, before turning and fleeing.
"Hey!" The black-clad warrior shouted, raising his sword. "Get back here! You started this!"
"Let him go," Leafa said, lowering her sword. The Spriggan didn't seem to be a threat unless provoked, and she was very tired from having to fly and run for well over half an hour, in addition to the very draining fights against superior numbers of opponents. "Unless your flight gauge is full you're not going to catch him, and you'll be a sitting duck for a mage in the air anyway."
The oddly familiar stranger frowned, but sheathed his sword and straightened. "Well, that was interesting. Anyway, it's nice to meet you, I'm Kirito."
