Thanks for reading thus far. here's a new chapter, in which Suguha discovers many things about her brother, and Asuna has tea with a madman.
Caring For A Rat: Book 2, Part 5
I wasn't sure if it was the way I responded, or my facial expression that gave me away, but whatever it was, Leafa was absolutely certain of my identity.
I was fairly certain of hers as well. There were only three people in my life that hadn't been in SAO that knew that I was a SAO survivor, and that I was close with Asuna.
And since my parents were at work, there was only one option. "Sugu, when did you-"
"That is not the question here Kazuto!" My sister yelled, grabbing me by the collar and lifting me into the air. "Why are you diving back into VR?!"
"Wanted… to… save…" I choked out as my clothing started to restrict my breathing. Leafa's eyes widened, and then her lips curled into a frown.
"Of course it's about Asuna again!" she spat, dropping me on the floor. "You're visiting her in that room day after day, not putting any work into getting better. It's always one of the first things you do in the morning! Sometimes you don't even eat until you've seen her." Suguha paused to take a breath, then continued to rant as I picked myself up off the ground.
"You know, I thought that since you were dating that Argo girl, you might actually stop hovering around her bedside like some kind of ghost, but no! You're still just as obsessed as ever! You're even diving back into the same thing that trapped-" Leafa's eyes widened and she stumbled back.
"She's trapped in here; she's trapped in Alfheim." My sister clapped a hand over her mouth.
"I'm going to rescue her Sugu," I said, brushing off my jacket. "I care for her too much to see her trapped and do nothing."
"I-" Leafa stopped speaking, then shook her head. "No, I can't let you do that. You need to focus on recovering, and diving into Alfheim is the exact opposite of what you need to do to recover!" She drove a finger into my chest. "Let your girlfriend handle the negotiations with us, and focus on recovering."
"I can't do that," I said, gently pushing her finger away. "I promised to have her back at all times, and if I didn't go to her when I knew she was in trouble, I'd be breaking that promise."
Leafa sighed, muttering something under her breath. I could see her coming to a decision as her shoulders grew more set, regaining the solid posture of an experienced kendo practitioner. "Can I go with you?"
She sounded so desperate that it nearly broke my heart. "Alright." I said, coaxing Yui into my pocket. "But we'll need to move fast. I promised I'd meet up with Argo for some preliminary scouting."
Leafa fell in beside me without complaint, and the two of us headed out from the clearing. The tower in the Outpost wasn't nearly as high as the one in Swilvane, the Sylph capital, but it sufficed to leap off from.
The rest of our journey was largely uneventful, thankfully, aside from having to outrun mobs every now and then. The entire time, My sister stared at me with an inscrutable gaze. I would have to talk to Argo about it. She would probably have a better idea of what was going on than I would.
In any case, we arrived at the Legue Corridor before too long.
Leafa stood before the entrance, gripping the hilt of her katana tightly with one hand. She seemed hesitant to enter.
"What do we need to worry about in there?" I asked, adjusting the sword at my side. I still hadn't been able to find a proper second weapon. I didn't strictly need one, my one-handed style was good on it's own, but I felt like I would need two swords if I was going to make it up the world tree to rescue Asuna.
Leafa shrugged. "Probably not much." She released her sword, and stepped forward into the gloom. "The mobs here are weak. But the salamanders send a patrol or raid through here occasionally, and if we run into one of them…" she frowned, "things could get hairy."
"Alright, keep an eye out for other players, got it."
"It's not a joke, Kazu-Kirito!" Leafa said, gripping her katana so hard I thought it might take durability damage. She let out an explosive breath. "Just, stay behind me, okay?"
I raised an eyebrow, but fell in behind her as we moved without complaint.
Asuna tossed another biscuit through the bars of her cage.
"Really, must you waste the food I have so generously given you?" the creep said, leaning back in his chair, looking for all the world like he expected her to listen to him. Asuna tuned him out, instead trying to figure out how far she could throw one of the biscuits like a frisbee.
It was a lot harder than it sounded. It had been years since she'd thrown a frisbee, and a biscuit was shaped almost nothing like it. With a snap of her wrist, Asuna tossed another biscuit at a gap between her cage bars.
It curved during its flight, and it slammed into one of the bars, shattering.
Shattering just like she had.
It still haunted her, that day in the depths beneath the Black Iron Palace. The horrible, awful terror as the Fatal scythe revealed itself in a move that cut Kirito's health in half from the air passage of it's strike.
The panic that had flooded her chest when her husband lay against the wall opposite from her, his leg twisted in a sickening direction.
The sheer absence of pain amidst the cold feeling of a scythe bigger than she was piercing her from back to front.
The feeling of her body coming apart, scattering into thousands of bits of ash.
Then, the feeling of being pieced together, a sensation she couldn't describe even if she tried. How did one describe the sensation of your mind shattering and then being pieced back together so meticulously that even it's owner noticed no difference?
And then losing Yui, the little girl that had become near and dear to her heart oh so painfully fast.
It all culminated into one single sentence for her, one that even almost being killed by Kuradeel hadn't caused to sink in.
Live for today, for tomorrow may never come.
It was what had made her push for a relationship with the girl she had long had a crush on.
The next biscuit that was thrown was higher, and a bird mob swooped down and plucked it out of the air.
Argo had grabbed her and swept her up in a similar fashion, refusing to let the depressed and suicidal girl that she had been waste time, helping her steady herself while she became the fearsome fencer she was known as today.
"With our wedding next week, my queen, I would like to know what your thoughts are on the decor," The creep said, pulling a long draw of wine from his glass. "Obviously we cannot hold a wedding in a hospital, so we…" Asuna stopped paying attention. He was trying to get a rise out of her, like he always was.
"A caricature artist might be a nice touch," Asuna said, "I'm sure they'd be able to capture a most accurate picture of your likeness." In all it's horrific glory. She completed the statement in her mind.
Although he seemed to forgive her throwing things and even juvenille insults rather easily, he was rather touchy about his looks. The first time she had called him ugly he had grabbed her by the throat and pinned her against one of the bars of her cage before going on a rant about how he was the most beautiful being alive and that she should be grateful to even lay eyes on him.
She never called him ugly again.
It was the only time he had ever touched her.
"Hah, perhaps!" The creep sneered. "It's not as if plebian artists can capture my magnificence. I should have one create a portrait of you as well, so that you might see all that makes you so attractive to me." He sighed dramatically, slapping his forehead with the back of his palm.
"But alas, what I am most attracted to is not something that can be captured by a camera or by a brush. No, it is your mind I am most drawn to." Sugou rose from his seat, starting to circle around her. "It works in such mysterious ways. I want to know how to break it down into all it's little pieces to see how they work and fit them back together."
Asuna leaned away from him as subtly as she could, struggling to keep the disgust from her face. The creep continued undeterred, his voice tinged with excitement, and even what seemed like arousal.
"Doesn't that sound nice? To have your mind worked over by a master like me? Oh, just think of the things we'll be able to do! I could program you to bend over every time you want food, or laugh at every joke I make, or many more wonderful things!"
Asuna very carefully didn't respond. She wasn't certain she could open her mouth without hurling an insult at him right now, and her hands quivered on her lap as she fought the urge to strangle the creep.
The Creep, of course, came to the wrong conclusion. "Oh, I know you're eager, my queen, but I am not ready yet. Soon I will be though, and then I can welcome you back into the real world as my perfect wife." The creep sat down, calling up a notepad. "But if you are to be my wife, we must have a wedding, and it must be a perfect wedding, attended only by the best guests."
"So," The Creep started to tap on the keyboard. "I know who I am going to invite, but who would you like to invite? Surely not that pitiful boy who begs for your attention at your bedside?"
"Kirito?"
"Oh, was that his name?" The Creep waved dismissively. "He seemed so sad and angry when I told him we were getting married. You'd think a friend as loyal as him would be happier that something so wonderful would be happening to a friend of his."
"He's going to miss the wedding?" Asuna forced tears to well up in her eyes. "No, I always wanted him to be there when I got married."
"Well, I'm sorry my queen," The Creep said, "But he might go tattling to those pathetic bureaucrats who think they run the country, and we can't have that. They wouldn't understand our love."
"He's going to miss the wedding." Asuna let tears flow freely from her eyes, and hunched down, holding her head in her hands as sobs wracked her body.
The creep stood, "Well, I'll let you come to terms with it. I'll be back tomorrow for more tea. Do please try to compose yourself by then. I expect a cohesive guest list from you when I return."
Asuna didn't respond, too busy sobbing. As The Creep approached the door, she carefully arranged her fingers so that one eye could narrow in on the keypad he was using to enter and exit the cage. 3… 0… 0… 9… The fucker used my birthday.
As the oblivious Sugou Nobuyuki vanished down the stairs, Asuna's body stilled, as if the sobs had never even happened, and she raised a surprisingly tear-free face from her hands. The imprisoned fencer turned away from the World tree, staring out at the pale blue sky.
"Looks like I'm on my own."
The Legue Corridor had started out relatively calm and quiet, but as we got closer and closer to the center, and the safe zone of Legue, the hotter it became, and the stronger the monsters were.
"Get behind me!" Leafa called out, cutting an earth elemental in half with a single strike, shattering it. I ducked beneath the swing of another elemental and sprang back behind my sister. She took advantage of the elemental's overextension with the ease born of many kendo tournaments, lopping off it's head with a single stroke.
"That's the last of them, daddy," Yui said, descending from where she had been hovering at the ceiling.
"Good." I sheathed my sword, scanning the new pop-up window. "Let's see, ooh, one of them dropped something nice!"
It was a pair of gloves. They were primarily specced for AGI, but they had a pretty significant secondary boost to both Disarm Resistance and STR. I equipped the gloves immediately, their dark green hues clashing horribly against the bright yellow tunic I was wearing, which was the best piece of chest armor I had been able to find.
I'd need to replace all this gear before I met up with Argo, or I'd be a laughingstock.
Still, it would serve me well for now.
I flexed my hands, feeling the way my new gloves bent and stretched as I moved. I was torn out of my appreciation for my new gear by a hand grabbing my shoulder and swinging me around.
"Kazuto, you need to stop being so reckless!" Leafa pressed a finger into my chest. "You keep diving headlong into every single pack of enemies we come across, and I have to pull your butt out of the fire every time! Your gear isn't good enough to carry you through this!"
"It's Kirito here, and I'm trying to keep you from getting flanked," I said. "Leafa, I'm used to fighting alone. I'm a bit out of practice, yes, but I can handle myself in a fight."
"You're a spriggan in gear that's just barely above starter level fighting enemies that give most mid-level players trouble!" Leafa groaned, "Ugh, why do you have to be so…" She turned on her heel and stalked away, grumbling.
"Uh, Leafa?"
"Forget it!" she snapped, her shoulders tensing. "Let's just get to Legue so that we can log out and I can talk to you properly."
I opened my mouth, intent on trying to talk to her about it, but Yui pinched my cheek before I could speak. When I turned to her, she shook her tiny head. The message was clear: Not right now. Shrugging, I fell into step behind my angry sister.
In a way, she wasn't wrong. I was a far less skilled fighter than her when it came to one-on-one duels, and likely in a group battle as well. She had more formal training than me, and her national quarter-final placement last year didn't come out of nowhere.
But I had fought far longer than she had in a virtual environment. I could estimate how fast, how far, and when a mob was going to move just by seeing it idle in a field. I knew how to predict the attacks of over a hundred different types of monsters that had none of the tells that you expected from humans.
I knew how to exploit the AI of mobs to my advantage, kiting them into each other, or even making them attack each other sometimes.
So it stung, to have my experience pushed to the backseat in favor of my admittedly low-level gear and weak racial abilities. What were they again? I remembered a 25% bonus to the quality of items found, but there was something else…
I swept open the spell list for spriggans as we continued marching. Most of them were distractions of the sort you'd expect a race of treasure-finders to have: set off a distant trap, sense nearby traps, create an illusion that distracts mobs, and so on, but one of the ones near the bottom caught my eye. Probably the only spell designed for use in battle in the entire list.
[Metamorphosis.]
It was a badly designed, clunky spell that probably wouldn't have made it past alpha if it was SAO. The caster said six words, and was transformed into a random vaguely humanoid creature that matched their attack power.
It was the sort of spell one had to use before combat, and it had a relatively short duration of thirty seconds, meaning that it would be almost impossible to pull off properly. You might get a couple good hits in before you reverted, but unless you could get out all six words mid-battle and luck into a useful mob, then you were probably going to die as a result of using the spell.
On a whim, I checked my attack power. It had stabilized at 2,046 after I had changed my gloves out.
"Hey, Leafa, what's your attack power?" I called out, interested in how I matched up to my sister.
"1,534, why?" she grumbled back.
"Just curious," I evaded poorly, and Leafa gave me a stink-eye, before accepting my words. It was probably due to the difference in our builds. Leafa tended to rely on critical strikes that most people wouldn't be able to guarantee the way she did, from what I had seen.
We rounded a corner and I saw the narrow tunnel we had been walking through abruptly widen into an enormous cavern, so big that the top was shrouded in the smoke rising from... was that a pool of lava underneath the bridge? Yes, yes it was.
No wonder the temperature had been steadily increasing.
Thankfully it seemed this game was less realistic than SAO, because we were only uncomfortably warm, rather than the near-painful heat we should have been experiencing.
I headed for the bridge.
"Wait!" Yui's voice stopped me just before I stepped through the doorway. "There are… twelve player signatures out there."
"And," Leafa grumbled, "Maybe they're friendly." From the way she was speaking, I wasn't certain if she was trying to disparage Yui, or actually believed her words.
Yui shook her head. "They're salamanders."
Leafa sighed. "Guess we're dead." She said it so-matter-of-factly that I felt the floor drop out from under me. "Unless we turn around now and hope they didn't see us." She peered out into the cavern. "Yep, that's a Salamander patrol squad out there."
"No." I surprised myself when I spoke. "We're getting through to Legue."
"I don't know about you, Kirito," Leafa said, "But my stealth spells aren't going to get us through there, they've got spells specifically to detect Sylph stealth spells, and a group this size would have one running at all times."
"I can't waste time here," I said, brushing past Leafa, "Asuna's waiting for me."
"Kirito, you have got to-" I cut her off, starting to chant.
It was a quick, six-word chant, and I felt more than saw Leafa's incredulity as I chanted. Everyone knew Spriggan spells were situational in combat, at best, and designed more for exploration than anything else.
I was taking a gamble on this spell, and As I swelled in size, I knew that my gamble had paid off.
A deep, foreboding howl echoed through the cavern.
Leafa stared up at the beast that had taken the place of her brother. It stood almost three times as tall as a normal human, so big that the top of it's head almost brushed the ceiling. It's feet were cloven hooves, but they caused the ground to shake as it stepped. It's hands were curled into claws so long that she could use one of them as a sword.
As she looked up, and up, more and more of the beast revealed itself to her. It's chest was a grotesque stretch of muscle barely hidden beneath a thin layer of blue fur. The arms were similarly corded, creating a display that made her almost sick to her stomach.
The creature's mouth grinned, and Leafa gripped her katana tighter. Above it's mouth, it's red eyes gleamed with malice, the enormous horns of the creature framing it's head, so that the eyes seemed to stare into her, judging her, and finding her wanting.
She felt weak in the knees upon seeing it. This was a boss monster her brother had turned into, something you would need a full 40-man raid party to destroy. If whatever spell he used to pull this off gave him a fraction of the destructive power-
The beast exploded out of the cavern, it's red eyes gleaming. Leafa hurried after it despite herself, lifting off the ground in her haste. She came out of the doorway in time to see the Creature, whatever it was, engage the squad of Salamanders she thought would be their doom.
The first blow of the creature sent half of the six-man front-line sailing from the bridge, shattering in mid-air. The remain lights fell into lava, with no way to recover them. The salamander squad tried to reform, the three remaining frontliners converging on the creature while the backliners nocked arrows or started chanting spells.
The creature didn't give them a chance, it's legs bulging as it leaped over the front line, it's arms coming forward, then out in a maneuver that swept the salamanders off the bridge.
It was the most one-sided slaughter she'd ever seen.
The five remaining salamanders were well and truly panicking by now, as the mage took flight, heading back towards Legue.
The creature reached out, his hand closing in on it's fleeing prey, and closed around the mage's legs. It swung the salamander like a club, hammering it's human weapon into the one frontliner that was making to attack it. The frontliner shattered as they flew from the bridge.
The creature grinned and raised the groaning captive mage again. The mage seemed to realize what was happening as the creature took aim at one of the fleeing salamanders.
"No! No! No!" The mage yelled, fear shooting through his voice as he scrabbled desperately at the claws that held him tight.
It was in vain.
The creature brought a heavily muscled arm down with such speed that for a second Leafa expected the crack of a whip. The mage shot through the air so fast that he had even less chance to turn on his wings and bank out of his fall than the salamanders that had been thrown from the bridge.
The mage collided with the one remaining fleeing frontliner, who had stopped to look over his shoulder at precisely the wrong time, letting his compatriot slam into him with enough force that both of them went tumbling over the side of the bridge.
Their screams as they sank into the lava echoed in Leafa's head.
The creature faded, it's blue skin and terrifying horns becoming dull, then translucent, then transparent, and finally disappearing.
Where it had been, her brother now stood. He was standing, staring out at nothing.
Cautiously she approached. Items lay scattered across the bridge, the swords and staves that the fallen salamanders had dropped before they died. Kirito didn't even look at them, the way he had been checking the loot screen after every other battle.
"Kirito?" Leafa hated how scared she sounded at that moment. This was her brother she was speaking to. The weak, nerdy kid who used to come running to her if he had problems with bullies, who never left his room except for school. And even more importantly, he was family. He wouldn't hurt her.
But as she looked around at the graveyard that surrounded them, all she could think of was how terrifying the creature he had become had been.
