Kirito couldn't help but smile as he looked at the various groups of people that came from all over the universe, granted that some of them looked more alien than Human but who was he to judge.

If the Imperial Guard said that they were Human, then they were Human, after all, they were the ones that had been fighting next to the strange ones.

He normally would have used the teleportation gate to go to the floor where he and Asuna lived, but part of his duties was to keep an eye on the different groups of people that now called Aincrad home.

The reason was that with the growing number of Humans and Strange Humans, the chances for problems grew.

For example, the Imperial church demanded that it should control several floors or at the very least two separate floors, one that had the breathtaking beauty of nature and another that had one of the Hive cities.

The leaders of the church were constantly trying to set up a new cathedral or something else on a floor, normally the players would have ignored them, after all, everyone had a right to worship who they wanted.

The problem was, that the members of the church tried to kill or punish anyone that they claimed had broken the law, even if the person had never been anywhere near the area.

That was just one of the things that he had to keep an eye on.

Unfortunately for everyone, because the people in Aincrad came from different planets, they all had cultures that caused problems with each other.

Some people came from planets where there wasn't a single area where a person could live beyond the hive cities that they called home, they lived in worlds where the only way people could live was by moving from one place to another.

The problem with this was that some of the cultures didn't believe in consent, the reason was that they didn't have the luxury for it.

The survival of the tribe was all that mattered and if that meant that they had to kill all of the men from another tribe and take their women by force then so be it.

He stopped walking and looked at one of the Sed-Humans.

The species had another name but he called them Sed-Humans because calling them Succubuses only risked having someone that had an itchy trigger finger point their guns at them.

The species looked just like any other person, except they had horns on their heads, and depending on the kind that one encountered their horns varied.

He had seen both men and women with horns that were similar to a ram, and more than once he had spoken to someone who looked completely Human, except they had two tiny bumps that came out of their skulls.

He started walking when the woman that had caught his eye noticed that he had been staring at her and he ignored the seductive smile that she gave him.

Because the first floor was so big, it didn't have a lack of fields, forests, and oceans, meaning that it had all sorts of regular and Strange Humans living on it.

Unfortunately, the new arrivals also brought with them their versions of rats, or what would have been called rats if they weren't such twisted abominations.

Luckily for him, he didn't have to worry about them as the monsters that called Aincrad home, didn't like seeing anyone enter their territory, so they quickly dealt with the threat before it became unmanageable.

Kirito finally stopped walking, it seemed as if this was going to be just another routine job, and while the alien ship's size was unusual, as long as nothing happened it would join the scavenger fleet and help Aincrad when the time came.

[]][][]

Radius felt the millions of minds that called the Craft world home, she was disgusted by what she saw.

Every time that she connected to one of the spaceships she gained all of the information that was in them, it didn't matter if the information came from artificial computers, or the brains of the servitors who once were humans and now were a mixture of man and machine.

the same went for all of the alien ships that she had encountered until now.

Every time that the Players found something that she deemed too dangerous to exist, she made sure to label it as dangerous and kept it from entering the castle.

She was more than tempted to order both the servitors and the golems to enter the craft world and have them throw every soul stone into space so that the only thing that the massive ship obeyed was her.

How she wished that she could have done that before the craft world's pieces had been brought back together.

Something had been awakened, the moment that the craft world's pieces were reattached to one another.

She could see it trying to get through her barriers, it sent whispers into the castle and the surrounding ships, but her barrier kept it from reaching anyone, but that was only a temporary solution.

Tomorrow the exploration teams would enter the alien ship and they would have to deal with the threat.

Radius felt something in the distance, something that she had never seen before, it was something that rivaled her both in power and skill but at the same time it was something similar to her.

She quickly turned her attention towards something that was now inside of the alien ship something that wasn't there before.

She found what looked like a gateway made out of blue light near the pile of skeletons, and she frowned, this was something that she couldn't allow to happen so she simply covered up the hole and closed the gateway by force.

She would have to order her children to destroy the gate tomorrow.

Again she felt something in the distance, something filled with hate, anger, and what felt like an unquenchable thirst for blood calling, not to her but to the Craft World.

Whatever was out there was searching for it, but it wasn't able to find it.

She briefly considered letting go of the alien's ship, but she needed to know what was going on, and that meant that she would need to take the information that she needed from the soul stones before she threw them into space.