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Chapter 3: Tango for Two

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Disclaimer: I don't own anything.

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Aincrad didn't quite have a government in place yet. After nearly four weeks of Klein's diplomatic efforts, they had the People's Council which could be used to request things, but it was unwieldy and massively inefficient. So nobody was all that surprised when said almost-government couldn't quite agree on a representative for the invitation they'd received to the victory-celebration at Maihama.

The Floors didn't exactly trust other Floors, having had little to no interaction with each other for as far back as anyone could remember, which meant that they couldn't trust a representative from a different Floor than their own. And there were nearly a hundred different Floors who had the same opinion of each other's lack of trustworthiness, so a consensus was pretty much completely out of reach.

Still, that lack of trust wasn't really all that bad, considering how most deals between Floors could be settled on a Floor-to-Floor basis, and that none of them truly cared to argue all that much about the world outside of Aincrad. Apparently, having lived in almost perfect isolation for centuries of history, the Floors were quite determinedly content to rule themselves.

The only exception to this separation were the Adventurers, but everyone considered those to be something like legendary heroes, and very few Adventurers really got involved with businesses anyway. Sure, there were tailors and smiths and shopkeepers, as well as various other odds and ends, but despite their job-titles they either worked almost exclusively with high-level customers or they were pretty laid back about running a store.

In other words, in the eyes of the People of Aincrad, there weren't a lot of competition to be wary of from the Adventurers' side of things, so most everyone were quite content with having said Adventurers represent them internationally, as long as they didn't try to make any explicit business-deals and instead brought back any offers to the council as a whole.

Considering how utterly unenthusiastic the Adventurers in question had been at the idea of talking merchant-stuff, Kirito honestly couldn't say that it'd been a stupid move. An exasperating one perhaps, since it meant that some poor sod would need to write up any offer made to them to bring it back to the full council, but not a bad decision.

'If you can't trust someone with your back, don't give them a chance to stab you in it.' That was just common sense.

But that also meant that their group of potential diplomats were entirely down to Adventurers, which was a bit awkward. Not to mention that Adventurers had their own politics to bicker about.

They needed to send someone strong, so at least one Clearer was a must. They needed to send someone well-connected, so probably a guild-leader. They needed to send someone who could be trusted, so someone well-respected.

Kirito had gleefully let everyone else worry about the details, seeing as his own reputation kept him away from both 'well-connected' and 'well-respected', making him very close to illegible. So it'd come as a complete surprise to him when Asuna had guiltily admitted that their whole little family was going on vacation.

Yui seemed enthusiastic enough about visiting a foreign land filled with potential hostiles, but Kirito had really been planning on slacking off now that their push onto the 93rd Floor was over.

Apparently, seeing as how Kirito was 'the strongest player', Asuna was the guild-leader of 'the strongest Clearer guild', and their daughter was 'one of the People of Aincrad', everyone had thrown the three of them under the buss. It might've also had something to do with the fact that Klein's attempts at diplomacy were now legendarily infamous, and that most everyone agreed that the DDA were dicks.

Not that anyone would ever say that out loud where they could hear it, of course. But that didn't change the facts.

Obviously, there were some complications with having the leader of the DDA's 'rival guild' somewhere away from Aincrad, but considering how pissy the People's Council would be if they did something wrong-... Well, if the DDA made a nuisance of themselves in Asuna's absence, then they'd end up in charge of trying to wrangle the council into some kind of diplomatic agreement, and that'd keep them occupied for months at least. Not to mention how extremely uncomfortable it'd be for everyone involved.

The DDA would be lucky to even survive that, when its members realized that they could just quit the guild and join one that wasn't slowly being choked to death under the mounds of petty paperwork that the council refused to stop generating.

Ah, the wonders of bureaucracy. And the beauty of being able to use it to threaten annoying people into not causing problems for everyone around them. Kirito couldn't quite suppress the evil grin at the thought.

But even if it'd been decided that they'd be the diplomats, they still needed an escort. An escort that wasn't Klein, because yes, he was that infamous by now. The realization that they'd be perfectly willing to send Kirito the Beater on a diplomatic mission, whilst keeping Klein away from it, kind of went to show how ridiculously infamous the man had become. And that was despite how Klein had actually done exactly what he'd been sent out to achieve, which had been to create the People's Council.

It was probably the fact that he kept getting tossed down elevator shafts into Safe Zones by overprotective fathers. It was kind of really hard not to notice, seeing as how he tended to scream like a little girl, all the way down. Not that Kirito could entirely blame him for that, because falling from a ridiculously high place to your non-death was still going to give you nightmares, even if it didn't actually hurt you. But that was neither here nor there.

It wasn't like they could really send anyone who wanted to go, and they were somewhat limited to people who were either politically important or capable of running for the hills without getting caught – just in case things went unimaginably bad. Which meant that there were a total of four citizens of Aincrad hitching a ride on the Ocypete as it returned to Maihama. A Family of three, and a certain information-broker who was notoriously good at her job.

There would've been five of them, but Agil had decided that he was going to be catching up on his regularly scheduled nap-time, instead of sitting around a table and glaring at stuffy people for possibly hours on end. And there wasn't really anything Kirito could use to argue against that.

Nap-time was the most important part of the day.

XXX

It was hard to make an accurate assessment of the four diplomats from Aincrad, but they seemed like good people.

It was a bit strange that there were only four of them, until Shiroe remembered that this wasn't really a celebration for Aincrad so much as it was a chance for Aincrad to join in with some polite applause for the victory of their neighbors. There was a 'quality over quantity'-feel to the group, that made Shiroe quite certain that it'd been chosen for its ability to leg it should the negotiations turn ugly, and Shiroe couldn't quite help but wonder what exactly they were expecting to face at Maihama.

Still, there were definitely some oddities in their chosen diplomats that made Shiroe itch to figure it out.

He'd met Asuna before, of course. What with her seemingly being the main spokesperson during the information-exchange that had been negotiating the Ocypete's journey past Aincrad. It did make him wonder whether or not she was the most respected guild-leader available, or if she'd taken on the role as their face outwards for a different reason.

Kirito was a bit more complex, seeing as he was the young woman's husband, and one of the Adventurers with the highest levels that Shiroe had managed to catch a glimpse of during his entire time in Aincrad. Definitely a strong player, but the question was if the teenager was respected for it or not. His reason for attending seemed somewhat flimsy.

Then there was Yui, whose reason for attending was blatantly flimsy – especially considering how the group seemed to be prepared for hostilities – and which had been officially summed up with the words 'we couldn't find a sitter'. Meaning that either they were making up excuses, or that they were for some reason overly cautious about letting the young girl out of their sight.

If Asuna was really the leader of one of the most important guilds in Aincrad, then she should've been able to trust someone in said guild to take care of the girl. The fact that she was claiming that she couldn't meant that she likely didn't actually trust her guild-members all that much. Which wasn't actually all that implausible, considering how the Knights of the Blood had somewhere around thirty members, and it was entirely possible that the recruiting hadn't been as selective as it could've been. There were bound to be some unsavory characters capable of slipping through the cracks, though that she couldn't find anyone trustworthy among those thirty people set off more than a few warning-bells in Shiroe's ears.

It was possible that she'd only recently been promoted to guild-leader, inheriting an unstable position from the previous one. But a guild was built on trust, and if the guild-leader didn't trust the members, then the guild wouldn't last for very long. So if Asuna truly didn't trust the Knights of the Blood with anything important, then it was very likely that the guild was going to start breaking apart within a few more months, depending on what exactly they were doing over there.

To be honest, the presence of the family of three really unnerved Shiroe for some reason. Perhaps it was merely the resurfacing worry of nepotism and delusions of grandeur having taken over Aincrad's leadership, or perhaps it was simply that Shiroe had never been all that good with children. Either way, it made him uncomfortable.

The fourth and final member of Aincrad's expedition was someone Shiroe hadn't even caught a glimpse of previously. Another young woman, this one with whisker-marks drawn on her face. Argo was apparently an information-broker famously nicknamed 'the Rat', and seemed to be infinitely amused by toying with people's heads. She also seemed to be a good friend of Kirito's, considering how they teased each other.

That an information-broker would want to attend this kind of gathering was perfectly reasonable, and if she was as famous as she proclaimed herself to be then she likely had enough respect to leverage out an invitation to come along. That wasn't a concern, Shiroe would've been more worried if Aincrad hadn't sent someone whose job clearly included the gathering of information – mostly because in that case he would've been worried about which member was their secretly appointed information-gatherer.

What did concern Shiroe however, was that – even aside from the family of three – the four members all had a clear informal connection to each other. After all, Yui seemed to be fond enough of the woman to have taken to calling her 'auntie'.

It was possible that the friendship had been established amongst people who were simply 'the best'. But it was equally possible that the friendship had somehow allowed Argo to muscle into the position of 'the best information-broker'.

And Shiroe still wanted to know how the hell Aincrad's government worked, as well as get an actual explanation for what 'Clearers' really were.

Oh, certainly, Clearers were people who'd risked their lives, trying to free everyone from the game. But that didn't account for the culture that would've likely sprung up around them during their two years of imprisonment. Where they considered as something like nobles, or police-officers, or military, or just heroes? How did the non-Clearers treat them, and how far did they trust in their judgment?

The fact that – barring the underage Yui – no member of the People were to be part of the upcoming diplomatic gathering was also telling. Though what exactly it was telling of was up for grabs. Did the People simply have nobody available who was willing to venture outside of Aincrad? Did the potential opinions of the People actually not factor in at all with the Adventurers of Aincrad? Did the People simply trust that the Adventurers would be enough to secure whatever interests they had in this meeting? Or was Shiroe missing something again?

It was frustrating to have to deal with so many unanswered questions dangling just outside of his reach.

Still, he couldn't quite reject his initial impression that the four who'd been sent to attend the big celebration at Maihama were good people.

XXX

Either Argo had hit her head somewhere, or there really was such a thing as 'love at first sight'. Kirito wasn't sure which option disturbed him the most.

One moment everyone had been politely following the lead of their hosts, dancing or juggling politics, the next Argo had decided to make a spectacle of herself. Which was absurd, because Argo didn't do that. She clung to her 'behind the scenes' persona at all times, and only really let her more playful side make an appearance among people she trusted.

That was probably part of why she was such an amazing information-broker. Everyone could appreciate professionalism when lives were on the line.

Asuna had been caught up smiling with chilly politeness at all of the stuffy old men who seemed convinced that it ought to have been Kirito doing the politicking, because apparently it wasn't a woman's place to lead a country. So Kirito had played with Yui and pretended to have absolutely nothing between his ears except for air and hopeless adoration for his cute daughter. It wasn't exactly difficult, but it also meant that he had to pretend not to be paying attention to Asuna's frosty temper or be caught cataloging the good escape-routes.

There was a reason there were only four of them present, and it could be roughly summed up as 'the less people there are, the easier they are to evacuate'. Functional immortality or not, nobody wanted to die, and since Yui had come with them, Kirito wouldn't hesitate to do everything in his power to get her clear and back to safety, no matter the cost.

Though he was grateful that – unlike most of the People who could've otherwise been chosen – Yui was small enough to carry under his arm if he had to leap out through a window or something.

He'd been distantly aware that Argo had seemingly hit it off with the cat-person 'Nyanta' from Akiba, but it'd seemed to be more along the lines of investigating what it was like to be a non-human type of character. There was also a younger girl involved in that talk, and Kirito had guessed that Argo would collect the information she wanted and then disappear off to collect even more information about something else. Except she hadn't.

For some bizarre reason, Argo had taken offense to their hosts inability to 'play anything other than waltz', which had somehow led to her grabbing Nyanta and asking one of the other Adventurer bards if they knew how to play tango.

Which was absurd, because Argo didn't do stuff like that, except she had, and now she'd cleared the dance-floor as the People of the Land stared a little awestruck at the two of them. Kirito also noted that the girl Nyanta had been talking to looked kind of utterly heartbroken, but hopefully that would sort itself out.

Obnoxious though she could be, being the center of attention hadn't ever seemed like a thing that Argo enjoyed, though Kirito could admit that it was possible that she'd calmed down about it now that their lives weren't really on the line. They were functionally immortal after all, and it was kind of comforting to know.

But still, tango? Argo doing the tango with someone she'd just met? Argo doing the tango amidst stuffy politicians who only wanted to do the waltz?

'Head-trauma' was the theory that made the most sense in Kirito's eyes, but everyone kept insisting that love was blind, so maybe that was related?

XXX

Smooth movement, morphing into sharp movement. Rapid flows, suddenly becoming agonizingly slow. Hands that never stopped moving, as if they couldn't quite decide which parts they wanted to touch the most. Faces so close together that Nyanta's whiskers would brush her cheeks every time they turned.

Tango was very much a sensual type of dance.

The orchestra seemed more or less stunned by both the music and the dancing, and they weren't alone in that. It made Shiroe wonder whether or not he'd actually heard any kind of music that weren't from Elder Tales, because if people were awestruck by the music whilst Nyanta and the woman from Aincrad danced tango like it was going out of style, then perhaps there was something to it that was worth paying attention to.

It was entirely possible that the People weren't so much not utterly scandalized by the dance, as that they were too awestruck by the idea of a different kind of music to really notice that they ought to be scandalized. Or perhaps they weren't as prudishly stuffy as Shiroe had been led to believe by the rest of their observed culture.

The People of the Land followed a lot of the norms of old Europe, and that place had considered waltz to be a daring and nearly scandalous kind of dance when it'd first appeared. After all, in waltz the dance-partners were supposed to actually touch each other, rather than sort of awkwardly hover next to each other.

Shiroe made a face as his eyes fell on an expression that was very different from the rest.

Poor Serara looked devastated, but that was kind of expected considering how some strange woman had swooped in out of nowhere and stolen her crush off to dance the most intimately sensual dance in the known world. Heartbreak was perfectly understandable, considering the situation.

But from what Shiroe could see from this distance, Nyanta was mostly concentrating on the movements of the dance rather than his dance-partner. More sensual because the dance was designed to be a contest of sensuality, than sensual because there was someone worth being sensual with. The professional pride of a dancer was a fearsome thing.

Akatsuki fidgeted next to him, and Shiroe decided that he should probably save them both the humiliation of trying to do the tango by asking the ninja for a dance the moment a waltz started up again. And that wasn't entirely because the idea of Akatsuki leaning heavily into his arms and the both of them letting their hands wander-...

Well, it wasn't entirely because the thought of... that made him kind of want to run away and hide under his bed for a week or two. It was also because he was fairly certain that he'd have a very hard time not dragging Akatsuki along with him, and then entirely skipping the idea of hiding under the bed.

And he really didn't need the reminder about what 'horizontal tango' meant, thank you very much.

XXX

"Oho? Did you like the show, Kii-bou?" Argo grinned at him.

Kirito made a thoughtful noise before nodding. "I've never really watched people dance before, so it was interesting. I never considered how the footwork involved in that might effect someone's ability to fight."

Argo's grinning face kind of stuttered and her shoulders slumped. "Ah, you're the same as always, Kii-bou." She glanced towards Asuna, and made a weird motion with her hand. "You have my deepest sympathies, Aa-chan."

Asuna smiled, looking fondly amused for some reason. "I don't know. I think it's adorable."

Kirito had the strangest feeling that he was being made fun of.

XXX

Shiroe sighed. It'd been three weeks since the ball at Maihama, and everyone were being very demanding of his time.

Maryelle wanted him to help plan for the upcoming Autumn Festival, because that woman loved her celebrations. Akiba as a whole still needed a few problems smoothed out in its running. And Isuzu wanted to build a school.

Log Horizon's newest member was very passionate about music, and had taken great offense when it'd been revealed that the People of the Land only had forty-two songs. Within the first week of the end of the Ball, she'd already organized a huge meeting between music-interested individuals so that they could all try and write down as many songs from their old world as they could find.

However, simply adding more songs to the number of 'forty-two' wasn't actually going to fix the main issue. Namely, how the People were unable to make their own music.

Which was why Isuzu wanted to build a school, open for musicians all across Yamato. A place where they could learn how to compose, as well as a place to meet others who were doing the same thing. Whether the school survived for very long, before its students spread across the world and created their own ways of teaching the musicians of Yamato, wasn't really a concern. Isuzu was convinced that the People needed a starting-place, and she was determined to give it to them.

All things considered, Isuzu was probably the one who was causing Shiroe the least amount of annoyances of the three main things that occupied his time. She had somehow managed to charm a good dozen other Adventurers into helping her out, and really didn't need much more than a bit of funds from the Round Table to pay a salary to her teachers.

It was kind of crazy that Isuzu – who couldn't be older than seventeen – had ended up as the headmistress of an entire school, when she herself ought to still have been stuck as a student in one back in their old world. But all the other teachers seemed quite enthusiastic about following her lead, so Shiroe wasn't going to question it.

More amusing though was Isuzu's decided name for said school. And Shiroe had been very clear that nobody was ever going to explain what a 'golden retriever' actually was to Rudy. Mostly because it was funny.

The mage knew that Isuzu had named the school after him to some extent – in honor of it having been him who inadvertently gave her the idea – but he didn't quite understand it. 'The Golden Retriever's Institute of Music and Dance', or 'the Golden Retriever' for short, translated into something like 'the golden fetcher' for the People of the Land. And considering how Rudy was blond and Isuzu had made him run errands here and there from time to time, it sounded more like a slightly-rude nickname to Rudy and everyone else relying on the auto-translate feature than what it actually was.

Shiroe dearly hoped that he'd be able to see Rudy's face the moment he realized that Isuzu usually looked at him in the light of dealing with a pet dog. It was bound to be hilarious.

XXX

Lord Marves had tried to grab Yui.

Lord Marves lost an arm.

Lord Marves' bodyguards tried to step in.

Lord Marves' bodyguards woke up in their cathedral back in Minami.

Lord Marves said a lot of things about being important, and desperately talked a lot about his many elaborate plans for Akiba.

Lord Marves was sent back to his ship – sans an arm – along with the very politely worded note that, should they ever desire to make trade through Aincrad again, then the Holy Empire Westelande were to offer an official apology for having one of its nobles openly assaulting the princess of Aincrad.

Kirito stared after the ship as it disappeared over the horizon. On the one hand, he was fairly sure that a great deal of offense would be had against them for their violent actions. On the other hand, the Adventurers of Minami hadn't been expecting Aincrad to be populated with SAO-survivors, and had looked partially terrified at the thought of somehow pissing them off even before the actual fighting had begun.

All in all, from the performance of the bodyguards, Kirito was fairly sure that Aincrad could weather most enemy forces that could be thrown at them without much issue. And he was pretty sure that the Holy Empire Westelande would be trying to make amends for Lord Marves' behavior, rather than using it as a reason to march to war.

Then again, honestly he didn't care all that much. Neither did any of the other Clearers. Even the DDA loved Yui, and they were dicks.

The idea of some bigoted old man would dare raise his hand towards Yui had been enough for the girl to be officially declared to be 'royalty until further notice'. Which meant that – as Yui's parents – Asuna and Kirito would probably end up with an official royalty-status soon enough.

Not that any of that particularly mattered. No, much more important was the very serious consideration of what to do with Lord Marves' severed arm.

Kirito was seriously considering mounting it on a pike down by the harbor, but Asuna kept insisting that that was unhygienic, and Thinker had suggested a 'burning of the arm'-festival.

It was a choice that weighed heavily on Kirito's mind, as he absently listened to Klein try to cheer Yui up by giving her as much ice-cream as she could eat.

But really, what kind of idiot tries to separate a parent from their child over something as idiotic as them 'being of the People'?

XXX

Shiroe took a deep breath, and then read through the letter again.

Aincrad, being as it was situated in the middle of what used to have been a channel rather than a few kilometers separating the 'Tokyo Lake' from the sea, was the port that every ship needed to pass through in order to reach Maihama. Which meant that Lord Marves' plans of causing problems for Akiba had fallen apart when he hadn't been able to continue past said port.

The plans had been clever, and Shiroe had still had to deal with some of it through the annoying pattern-less improvisations from Lord Marves' subjects. But in the end it'd been impossible for the man to follow through, seeing as he'd managed to provoke the Adventurers of Aincrad into sending him back to his country sans an arm.

Aincrad, who had in fact gone so far as to officially name 'Yui of the People of Aincrad' as their princess in retaliation to the man's actions. It was rather blatantly obvious to Shiroe that it'd been a spur-of-the-moment kind of thing, but it was probably the most efficient way of keeping Westelande from demanding that those who'd defended the girl be punished.

In all likelihood, the girl was simply very popular among the Adventurers and the People both, and they'd all been more than happy to take revenge against the man who'd tried to grab her. Though Shiroe was wondering if it was because the girl's parents were well-respected, or if it was something about what she represented to the Adventurers.

Two years they'd been trapped within SAO, separated from their families. So it wasn't all that farfetched to imagine that the idea of Asuna and Kirito being Yui's parents was something a bit like 'proof that family can be found' for the Adventurers. And in that case, them closing ranks to defend the 'ideal happy family' that they so longed for, could be fairly easily explained.

Not that the Adventurers of Aincrad were alone in closing ranks. In fact, the People's Council seemed to have finally found something they could agree on, and had been quite gleefully inventing long-standing traditions about how 'princess were chosen to live with Adventurers'. Never shying away from saying that Westelande must be quite the barbaric place indeed that its nobles would attempt to interfere in such a thing.

Lord Marves and his heavy-handed attempt to 'return the child stolen from the People' had caused a lot of problems for a lot of people, even as it united all of Aincrad towards a common enemy.

In fact, according to the letter, there were plans regarding holding an entire festival around the burning of the man's severed arm. And Shiroe honestly wasn't sure if he was supposed to laugh or wince at that, morbid as it was.

Two years trapped in a death-game, always knowing that they could be killed by their bodies failing, their avatars dying, or the government pulling the plug on them. To have kept on going in the face of that, the SAO-victims were a determined bunch.

And, the more he saw of them, the more he was realizing that, whether they be the People of Aincrad who'd survived in isolation on their separated Floors for centuries, or the Adventurers of Aincrad who'd risked their lives to connect those Floors; the citizens of Aincrad as a whole were a ruthlessly capable people.

Shiroe was finding it hard to decide whether he ought to be impressed or terrified by the people who'd always been referred to by the media as the innocent 'victims' of the SAO-Incident. The more he looked at it, the more he'd call them 'survivors' instead.

Regardless, with Aincrad's geographical position in mind, this particular series of events could lead to the international trade in Maihama being dealt an almost crippling blow. After all, most of Maihama's trade came by sea-route, and if Aincrad refused to let Westelande's ships pass through their ports, then the trade between the two countries could potentially be brought to a complete halt, depending on exactly how reliant they truly were on the sea-routes.

And if trade fell through, then war would likely become more and more attractive as tensions rose. But considering the way that a handful of Aincrad's Adventurers had wiped out nearly fifty high-level Adventurers within a few minutes-...

Nobody wanted to end up declaring war on an unpredictable party who could very well be capable of crushing their armies underneath their heel. And who knew how a party as unpredictable as Aincrad would take an open declaration of war between Eastal and Westelande? No, most likely all plans surrounding war were going to be carefully revised until the People of the Land managed to at least convince themselves that Aincrad wasn't as dangerous as they'd feared them to be.

Shiroe knew that the Adventurers of Elder Tales vastly outnumbered the Adventurers of Aincrad, and he knew that there was likely a lot of trauma involved in fighting other humans that the SAO-survivors had that the rest of the world didn't have. But in all likelihood that just meant that Aincrad wouldn't treat a declaration of war as a game.

And if war wasn't a game-... Well, the saying went that 'all is fair in love and war'.

It was hard to imagine how Aincrad might be able to turn a war against Adventurers into a 'true war' instead of a massive PVP-event, but Adventurers spawned in specific locations. And now that the game-mechanics allowed for it, locations could be destroyed, couldn't they?

Shiroe really didn't want to imagine what would happen, should someone actually manage to permanently destroy a cathedral, but he could guess that if someone really pushed them, Aincrad was probably the party most likely to attempt to do it.

XXX

Kirito breathed a sigh of relief when he first heard Westelande offer an unconditional apology for the actions of one of their nobles, almost a week after the incident in question.

Nobody wanted to end up in a war with their surroundings, but they couldn't exactly let them get away with doing something like this without surrendering too much of their independence. It was a politic-thing, and Kirito wasn't entirely happy about trying to figure it out.

Asuna was much better at dealing with people than he was, and even she seemed mostly resigned to the annoyance that was juggling empty platitudes with the countries around them. But then, his wife had always had a tendency towards stabbing things first and asking questions later.

It was part of why he loved her.

Still, dodging out of a potential war-declaration was cause for celebration, even if the arm-burning festival had perhaps been a little bit too much on the enemy-provocation scale than what had probably been sensible. In hindsight.

Yui seemed to have had a lot of fun with it though, so Kirito really wasn't regretting it at all.

Their daughter was officially a princess of the People of Aincrad, and they'd just reached the 97th Floor. Tensions were high, and excitement was building, because even if there was nothing up there, the Clearers had been trying to reach the 100th Floor for so long that they couldn't quite stop themselves from vibrating in curious excitement.

Of course, there were those who seemed more somber about it, in all likelihood thinking deeply about how they were supposed to distract themselves from being trapped when they no longer had the goal of Clearing the Floors. After all, what was a Clearer without any further Floors to fight their way through?

Hopefully, they'd find an answer once they actually reached that place, because right now they didn't really have a clue.

XXX

The Round Table was hemorrhaging money.

Not in the sense of 'they needed to stop buying frivolous things', but more along the lines of 'they had a national debt'. It wasn't due to anything the Adventurers had done, so much as it had to do with the game-mechanics of it all.

In-game, a certain amount of money was taken away on a timely basis depending on the size and cost of the purchased building. It was supposed to reflect the 'cost of upkeep', and was rarely especially extravagant, seeing as land tended to be fairly inexpensive for a player to buy. But that wasn't the case anymore.

The Round Table owned the Cathedral, the Guild Building, and the Trade Building, along with several other similarly important facilities. And the prices for those places were ludicrously high, meaning that the calculated upkeep from the game-mechanics were equally ridiculous. The money in question wasn't even actually used for upkeep purposes, seeing as they needed to hire people separately in order to actually perform maintenance on them.

It was just a whole lot of money, going down the drain.

It wasn't sustainable, and yet they couldn't give up on any of the buildings for fear that a single guild or person would be able to cough up enough money to take it for themselves and create an imbalance in power.

So of course he'd talked to the Kunie who were in charge of money, but apparently they were severely limited in their ability to help. Not even when Shiroe had bypassed the concept of 'loan' and instead suggested the idea of 'selling certain things to be permanently held by the Yamato-server'.

Apparently, it wasn't that they were unsympathetic, but rather that – due to an ancient treaty – they didn't have any authority over the gold that they held. They couldn't make or oversee a contract like that, because it would be to 'interfere with the flow of the gold', which they were forbidden from doing.

Considering the Kunie Clan's very specific lack of a denial though, Shiroe was pretty sure he understood how to bypass that particular constraint. The Kunie Clan couldn't interfere, but the way they used the ancient treaty to refuse meant that their inability to interfere was purely due to that.

So all he needed to do was find some way to commandeer the Kunie's technical ability to manipulate the flow of gold. And ReGan just so happened to have a big clue about where they might find a way to do that.

Which was why he'd grabbed Naotsugu and were now halfway to Susukino.

He probably should deal with Aincrad, or with the princess, or with Akatsuki's discomfort at being left behind, but-...

He was mostly leaving Akatsuki behind because he trusted her, and because the ninja was in desperate need of friends. And... because he might be getting a little bit worried with how used he'd started to become to having a second pair of hands following him around. It was useful to be sure, but he'd actually started to not pick certain things up when moving out the door, because he'd been entirely convinced that Akatsuki would be there to pick them up for him.

He hadn't actually been wrong, most of the time. But it was such a habit of casual reliance that he felt a bit like he was exploiting her for manual labor.

Regardless, the money-problem of the Round Table was a priority, and Akatsuki was uniquely suited to befriend the princess, among the people Shiroe actually trusted to be capable of guarding her. As for Aincrad-... Well, they seemed to have calmed down a lot, now that nobody dared to go out of their way to provoke them, and the sea-trade was once again flowing smoothly through the mountain-kingdom's ports.

XXX

"Welcome." A familiar voice echoed across the room.

They'd finally defeated the Floor Boss of the 99th Floor, nearly a month after the incident with Lord Marves, with everyone working harder than ever in order to reach their final goal. December was just around the corner, and they'd hurried past the stairs to begin the final climb, only to belatedly realize that the 100th Floor was a giant Boss Room.

Heathcliff smiled at them from the throne that dominated the empty room. Like a proud parent, now amused by their bewilderment. "It's been a while."

Kirito wasn't sure who realized it first, but it was Asuna who answered.

"Kayaba." It was more stunned horror and heartbroken betrayal, than anger. She'd always admired her former guild-leader, even if he sometimes annoyed her by skipping out on doing his paperwork.

Heathcliff's smile grew a bit warmer, as if he was honestly happy to see her. "Ah, I hear motherhood is treating you well, Asuna-kun."

Kirito saw red.

XXX

A/n: What? Did you really think I'd killed him off that easily?

And yeah, Argo does tango, because reasons. Vathara is again to blame for Nyanta being a professional dancer.