Floor 27 – Chapter 1 – The White Chapel

Since the "Battle of Emstrey", almost a month had passed, and progress through the floating castle had been almost unbearably slow, having returned to the same pace and situation that the frontline had been on back on the First Floor.

In other words, it wasn't just slow; it was glacial.

The limited progress made sense – the numbers on the assault team had been decimated by the Dream Reaper, and those hadn't just been the ones who'd died, but that included those who had parted ways with them for reasons other than boss battles.

There were plans underway to recruit others to help, mainly mid-level players who'd wanted to help, but for one reason or another, had been kept in a kind of reserve unit. Much to her surprise, Jet had agreed to help train up the group of mid-level players, on the proviso that Heathcliff left them well alone.

Actually, it hadn't been quite so pleasant as that – there was a lot of swearing involved, most of it directed towards the now leader of the HOA, after Jet had discovered what the man had suggested about Seven.

Because of being split between training the younger players, and clearing, the progress had been slow, and in that month, the frontline had managed to progress only through the 26th Floor, and onto the 27th Floor, which it had turned out was once a large system of mining tunnels that had been repurposed into towns and settlements, though many of those tunnels still contained masses of useful materials for the crafting community that had developed throughout the past months.

Which was why Rain, Philia and Sanya had taken the job of escorting Lisbeth throughout her hunt for the crafting materials needed to complete the orders she'd taken on from the newer members of the Assault Team, whilst Jet, Asuna, Kizmel and herself would start to complete quests in the main towns of the floor…

"Thank you, adventurers! With those blasted moles gone, we can continue to mine for our crystals." The NPC thanked them.

"It's no problem, keep up the good work."

"So, that's almost everything in this town done, right?" Asuna asked, looking around the town.

"I think so, yeah." Jet answered. "And not a moment too soon, Rain's just messaged me. She says they've got everything Liz wanted, and to meet her at the Tavern."

/-/

The Tavern in the town of Ham's Stead, named "The White Chapel" was what Jet might, perhaps, have charitably called "a dump". Far from being a religious building built with white stone, it was in fact, the very epitome of what Strea had once called "the working men's public house"; in that it was not particularly clean, the bartender owned the pub and knew everyone in the town, and that if you happened to be an outsider, you got funny looks from everyone until you became trusted amongst the locals…

Fortunately, they'd helped the barkeep by tracking down a local thief who'd been stealing their precious beer, and so, they were very much welcomed into the pub. If he was honest, that had been a master stroke of planning by him in capturing the crook…

The thief had clearly been sampling his merchandise during his little raids and so, they'd set a trap for him – Kizmel still keeping her Midnight Mantle, even after her realisation that she was… unique amongst the people of Aincrad, and so she would play the key role in springing the trap…

After all, seeing her appear from thin air behind him was almost certainly not something he'd been expecting. He'd spent the hour after they'd caught him and thrown him in the local gaol rambling about "invisible women", before the alcohol had taken its toll on him… and he passed out, much to the joy of everyone nearby.

"So, Liz is happy then?" Asuna asked.

"Indeed, it was like watching a child on Christmas Day, watching her search through her rewards." Sanya said, barely looking up from her menu.

"So, anything on your end that might help?" Rain asked.

"Not a damn, I'm afraid."

"Two days we've been here, and we have yet to even understand how to trigger the main story quest!" Rain seemed understandably annoyed at the slow progress, and he wasn't about to blame her on that one – there was only one quest left in this town, and the other settlement, Hal's Stead, had only a single quest in it anyway, and they'd finished that yesterday!

"There has to be something though, surely?" Asuna thought aloud, as Koharu and Kizmel came back with the group's drinks.

"Argo's said she's looking and she'll give us first dibs on any information, but she's not found anything yet either…" Philia told them, looking up from her message window.

"I think this may be the first time I have ever seen you all look despondent… like this, anyway." Kizmel stated. "Perhaps we were looking in the wrong direction entirely?"

"Perhaps, maybe we should start looking through the tunnels tomorrow, to understand whether the answer is in there…" Sanya said, taking a sip of her drink.

"Murder! There's been a murder!" A woman rushed through the door, dishevelled and panicked, as if she'd ran from wherever the murder was to the inn. Her clothing was quite obviously that of an NPC, and so, despite the morbid situation, he found a small smile come to his face; they'd found it!

That smile was quickly wiped off his face when even Kizmel gave him a look of "not the time or place", but he racked his brains to think of anything that might be useful here…

Cries of murder in the White Chapel…

Now why did that sound familiar, he thought to himself?

/-/

Walking through the streets, the atmosphere amongst the Concord felt a little strange – Jet was almost silent, whilst everyone else was thinking aloud, bouncing ideas off of each other.

"Koharu, any idea why he's not speaking?" Asuna asked her, and the answer was extremely simple to her; he was lost in thought, trying to put every piece of the puzzle together in his head. Considering they hadn't even seen the puzzle yet, it was probably quite optimistic to think he could solve it, but she wasn't going to stop him from trying…

"He's just lost in thought."

"A blank expression on his face… I rather thought that was the default." Sanya commented smugly, before receiving an almost universal expression of disapproval for her troubles; a single finger raised at her, without him turning to look.

"Just thinking about what we might come face to face with." He replied, a grimace on his face already.

"Should we… be concerned by that reaction?" Asuna, for once, looked slightly worried – she'd never really seen Jet like that before, she'd realised. He'd always been relatively "devil may care" in the way he'd acted around Asuna and Kirito, so to see him genuinely concerned about something was new for Asuna…

"Just… I have a bad feeling about this one."

Before too long, they'd followed the young woman to a shop on the corner of the main street and walked in through the partially broken door.

"Sorry, the door was locked, so we had to break it down to get in." The young woman told them as they walked in. The place they found themselves was apparently a butcher's shop, if the parcels of meat and long string of sausage was anything to go by, though the hygiene standards were appalling!

Those packages were left strewn around the shop with little thought to anyone who might have to…

"I thought this was supposed to be a murder scene, not a butcher's shop…" Sanya picked up one of the packages of raw meat, and almost immediately put it down again in disgust. "A particularly unclean one at that! That smells vile!"

Jet stood in front of her, eyes wide and expression clearly contorted as he tried to keep something in. "I don't think this is a butcher's shop..."

"Then how do you explain the meat lying around?" Sanya asked, rolling her eyes in contempt of his statement. It hadn't escaped her notice that Asuna had almost sprinted outside when she'd had the same realisation as she'd had.

"Remember what that woman said, Sanya…"

"That she was…" Sanya came to the same realisation as he had. "Oh. I feel as if I should be sick, but…"

"Yup." Jet admitted with a grimace on his face. "Guess I was on the right path then."

"You didn't say anything!"

"I was thinking it." Jet defended. "Guess Aincrad has its own Jack the Ripper…"

"Well, it should be easy enough to find a young girl in amongst these mines then…" Sanya stated, whilst everyone else gathered looked at her as if she had grown an extra head in those moments.

"Erm, Sanya? Jack the Ripper wasn't fictional." Rain ignored the grumblings of "probably wasn't, anyway" from Jet and carried on. "They were a murderer in Victorian London."

"That… actually makes more sense, now I think of it."

Ignoring Sanya's surprising lack of media savvy, Philia asked about the elephant in the room. "What killed her then?"

"I would imagine being butchered like an animal would not be conducive to her health, Philia." Kizmel answered, with an almost Jet level of sarcasm to her words.

"Sure, but you wouldn't just lie there and let that happen, would you? Besides, killers only mutilate their victims after they die, far easier than trying to fight them to do it."

"Should we be concerned about her knowledge of murderers?" Kizmel asked, an eyebrow raised at the new information that Philia was an amateur sleuth... or a murderer who was bad at hiding their crimes.

"I watch a load of documentaries, sue me." Philia shrugged.

"Well, considering that Philia almost certainly knows more about this stuff than I do… you're in charge Ginge."

"Okay then, so we need to look for a murder weapon, and work out what killed her in the first place." Philia looked around, equipping a pair of gloves. "Oh, and talk to everyone nearby. See if anyone saw anything weird in the minutes and hours before."

/-/

As Rain and Sanya talked to the locals, Rain had told her she was thankful that Seven was currently spending time with the "training group", as she'd named it.

She might have been vastly more intelligent than herself or Rain, but the young woman was also inexperienced and naïve, and so, subjecting her to the sights and smells that she had just witnessed in the woman's flat was something she would not have wished on her worst enemy!

That was not just murder, it was cruel, sadistic and humiliating towards the victim. No matter who she was, she had not deserved that fate! No one did, and yet, the murderer was still here somewhere – a terrifying prospect for anyone, and one that even she was willing to admit frightened her a little.

"I'm really sorry to interrupt you sir, but did you see this woman earlier?" In terms of information gathering, they had come to a mutual agreement that Nijika would do the talking, her friend having a far more social streak to her than she would ever have, whilst she would stand there and take notes from what was being said.

The man they had stopped was an older one, probably in his early fifties, and he looked as if he had lived a hard life, especially down here in the mines. "Aye, she was a local wench. Saw some bloke with her, looked a right sort."

"Right sort?" Rain asked. The one problem with taking notes here was that she needed to know what she was hearing in order to take the notes down. She already struggled to comprehend what Argo the Rat was saying sometimes, and the accent used by these NPCs was almost incomprehensible to her – a strange mix of Japanese and an awkward dialect in English.

"Oh, what I would not give to have Jet here right now…" Sanya grumbled under her breath, before realising what she had just said. "He would be an ideal translator!" She hastily added, whilst Rain snickered to herself.

"Aye, ya know the type. Dashin' lookin' chap, but ya wouldn'y leave him wit' ya lass." The miner told them. "Looked a bit of a ponce really, slummin' it down here."

"Anything of a physical description?"

"Tall an' lanky. Funny complexion too fer a cave dweller."

"Thank you, we'll do our best to catch him."

"Glad there's still sum trustworthy uns amongst ya." The miner said as he walked away.

"So, we know it was a man of some kind, and that they were tall, well dressed and of a wiry build."

"You actually understood that?" Sanya asked, surprised by Nijika's newfound understanding of the English accents.

She wondered whether she had perhaps misjudged the idiot Knight earlier. She'd assumed, probably not unfairly, that he was simply using Nijika's abilities as a warrior to make up for his own failings in that regards – her sparring matches with him had proven that absolutely wasn't the case - and when she had asked (more like demanded) him to explain his friendship with Nijika, he had explained everything truthfully; that Nijika had developed a crush on him, one that he had attempted to let her down easily from when he realised he was in love with Koharu, and that they had come across her again on the Seventh Floor, scaring off a photographer that was sneaking around.

He had presented her two options: go back to the orphanage, or to join them in their adventures, and she had chosen to join them.

She was not sure why that hurt to discover quite so much, but she supposed it fit Nijika perfectly – never wanting to stay in one place too long and wanting to prove herself.

"Yup, Jet gave me a few lessons in understanding his accent."

"His accent is rather clear though? It is like mine in that regard."

"His real accent."

"Oh, this will be fascinating to discover…" She let a small smirk come across her, before Rain looked at her with a look that she recognised very well – a look of "whatever you are planning, do not do it." "Fine. He remains unmolested."

The fact that Nijika suddenly went wide eyed was cause for concern, not to mention her face now being almost identical in colour to her hair. "Please tell me that wasn't your plan. To, err…"

Now it was her turn to go wide-eyed and blush in realisation at the implication. "No! I mean, I would not…" She trailed off, looking around her skittishly, desperate to find something else to focus on. After a cursory glance, a tall and well-dressed man caught her eye, an almost perfect match for the man described by the miner… "Ni-Rain! Look!" She hissed, trying to keep a lower profile.

"Huh?" Rain looked around and spotted the same man, wandering into a different tavern to the one they'd been in earlier, the White Chapel. "I believe we may have found our mystery man! Find everyone, I'll follow him."

"Be careful Rain."

"I know."

/-/

"You let her go alone?!" Asuna almost shrieked at Sanya, whilst Jet worked to plug his ears. "Why on earth would you think that was a good idea?!"

"Asuna!" She tried to calm her down, though to no avail. Asuna was equally as stubborn as her partner was…

"You aren't seriously agreeing with her, are you?"

Clearly fed up with this debate, Jet interjected. "Look, right now, pointing the finger is going to get us nowhere. When Rain makes a decision, she makes a decision and that won't change. We know this, Sanya knows this, and it has happened. What we need to do now, is to work out where she went, who she was following, and more importantly, whether they're linked to… well, that."

"That's something else that bothered me." Philia stated, interrupting the argument. "Even when an NPC dies normally, it's never that graphic. Remember that puzzle quest on the 16th Floor?"

"Yeah, the guy got his head bashed in. Why?"

Koharu grimaced, remembering that scene too. It had been a bloody mess when they'd discovered Pithagoras' body too, but at least then she could avert her eyes from the scene – something they couldn't have done with that young woman…

"Maybe I'm wrong, but at least then the murder mystery made sense; we needed to find an object. Here though?"

"You think it's not a quest?"

"Maybe. Just a hunch though so far."

"Hey! Get off her!" A familiar young voice shouted from across the tavern, and the group's attention snapped to her. Silica, desperately trying to stop two men (probably about their ages, if she really had to guess); one of them from grabbing and swatting at Pina, whilst the other was leering at her in a way that had everyone around them feeling uncomfortable…

SLAP!

Before she got chance to do anything, a crack of noise shook the room into silence. Everyone in the room, regardless of what they were doing, paused and turned around to see what had happened, only to be met with the sight of the young dragon tamer stood in front of the older man, whose face was now marked with a bright red handprint…

"That was… unexpected." Kizmel broke the lingering silence post-slap first.

"Atta girl!" Jet beamed, worryingly proud of the fact Silica had just slapped a man an entire foot taller than herself hard enough that he looked close to crying… "That is how you deal with creeps in a bar!"

"You little-" The man that had been grabbing at Pina changed his target, grabbing Silica by the wrist with a look on his face that made her uncomfortable, let alone Silica…

"Hey!" She shouted, getting the creep's attention. "Let her go!"

"Oh, and what is in it for us?" The other one, his cheek still glowing red, turned towards her with a leering grin, befitting of a lecherous creep…

"Not having your internal organs rearranged and being forced to eat through a straw for the next month." She'd seen Jet angry before at creeps, but he'd usually kept a tone of mirth in his comments – an amusement at the pathetic displays, even, but this? That mirth was completely absent in his tone, replaced with the edge of a razor blade…

"Oh, the White Knight is so bold as to threaten us? I do rather think you'll find that an ill-conceived proposition…" The brown haired one stated with an underserved air of superiority.

"Alright then, you creeps want to go, then we'll go outside." He shrugged, that sense of detachment becoming apparent in his mannerisms as he stood up. "See how a duel between us goes, eh?"

"Jet!"

"Relax, Ko, I can handle these fuck-knuckles. Just make sure Silica's okay, will you?"

"This is a bad idea, Jet…" She answered him bluntly. "Picking fights like this, for no reason, this isn't like you…"

"It's not for no reason, Koharu. You saw what they were like to Silica, and the way that one looked at you. What if they start on someone else, and everyone around them just sits on their hands and does nothing? Someone has to speak up against these bastards, and if that means force-feeding them a helping of… you get the idea."

Despite her reservations, he wasn't wrong – everyone but them had simply watched as Silica was harassed by them, and she couldn't say she wasn't concerned about them trying something much worse when the eyes weren't on them, but she wasn't sure this was how to do it. "Just… be careful, please."

"Ah, you know me!" He smirked as he left the tavern, and the group.

"I do... that's why I'm worried…" She wasn't lying there – she really was worried for him. Not for the fight, she had more than enough faith in her partner and boyfriend to put the two creeps in their place, but for his behaviour.

He'd always been a bit of a loose cannon in her opinion, frequently playing fast and loose with rules where it helped him, but he'd always had some kind of self-preservation, as strange as it often appeared to be…

Since Strea had died though, she'd noticed him having picked up some of his sister's worst habits – her willingness to "throw down" as she'd once put it, her short temper and a more… prideful streak that had started to come to the surface. The worst part of it was that she wasn't even sure if he noticed it, and if he hadn't, how long would it be until he did?

That was what worried her.

/-/

Outside of the White Chapel, the stage was set for one the least fair battles – if it could even be called that, a curb stomp probably being a more accurate description – in Aincrad's history.

The two cretins, apparently named Raios and Humbert, stood at arms, their swords drawn, ready for the counter to reach zero. Given it was still at 54, he had a bit of time and gave some thought about his strategy for this one.

He'd meant every word he said to Koharu – these people wouldn't stop until they'd been utterly obliterated, which didn't mean beating them in a duel, no, it meant beating them effortlessly in a duel. So effortlessly that it looked less like a fight, and more like a ritualistic destruction of their egos…

With that in mind, he didn't retrieve his new sword, Caeldfwlch, but rather an umbrella, and stood in a stance more fitting of someone bored by the current situation than someone with only thirty seconds on the clock before a fight. The only sign that he wasn't bored was the grin on his face, a grin that made even onlookers wary… but not his opponents apparently.

"Ooh Raios, doesn't he look terrifying?"

"Now now, Humbert, it is unsporting to mock the mentally handicapped…"

Well, that was the second mistake of the day for them. If they thought he would rise above that insult, they were sorely mistaken… well, they would be once he was done with them, anyway. "Hm, so that's how you want to play, is it? Your parents must be so proud of their little, bullying nonces…"

"How dare you!"

"You will regret those words!"

"Nah." He smiled. "I won't. But you'll regret every life decision you made though. To quote a British poet… Man's too big for their boots." With ten seconds to go, he twirled the umbrella around his wrist to land it in his hand, and then gave his foes a brief curtsey…

1… Fight!

With that action, the countdown hit zero, and before either cretin stood a chance of reacting, the first strike went to him; the tip of his brolly being jabbed into the blonde's right eye before being retracted to a defensive stance, just in time for the other to charge him…

This was going to be too easy, he thought as he countered him; throwing the cretin to the floor with a simple bodycheck and using the resulting redirection of his momentum to throw the bastard to the floor.

His friend, now recovered from the surprise assault to his optical nerves with an umbrella, stood ready to hit him with a sword skill – a rudimentary Vertical Slash, but still a surprisingly astute tactical decision… given the circumstances.

Not one that would pay off though, as the cretin would feel an umbrella handle impact with his Adam's apple, breaking his attack stance, before the handle swung around to hook around his neck, and drag him into range.

"Guh!" The grey haired one coughed, before he found an armoured kneecap slamming into his crotch. It wasn't as if he'd be using it any time soon, Jet thought, especially as that was why he was fighting this duel in the first place…

In pain from the second surprise attack, the grey haired one collapsed to the floor besides his friend, who'd rather sensibly chosen to stay down when he'd been subject to his embarrassing loss…

Now with both roundly defeated, Jet towered over them, his umbrella held to the grey haired one's throat. "Now, what was that about regretting my words again? I couldn't hear you from where creeps like you belong – in the gutters."

As he mocked his fallen opponents, the victory banner appeared above them, confirming him as the victor.

He'd been right – this really had been too easy!

"Yuh-you… the boss won't stand for this! Watch your back, White Knight!" The grey haired one – Humpty Dumpty – hissed as the pair skulked off in humiliation.

"Cryptic." He rolled his eyes at the implications of their threat, as everyone else looked at him. "Well, the pair of muppets have been dealt with."

Much to his surprise, a number of people in the tavern started clapping, and he felt himself go a little bit flush at the sudden praise…

The bartender seemed to be the most vocal supporter of his actions. "Good riddance to them! Keep comin' in here, harassin' the women, honestly wondered when someone was gonna g'izz 'em one."

"So that wasn't an isolated incident then?" Asuna asked, somewhat surprised.

"Nah, lass. They'm always on 'bout that boss o' theirs an' what he'll do to the girls if they say anything. Ya ask me, lad, they're a bunch a poncy tosspots, the lot o' them." The bartender simply shrugged, before his expression became a bit grimmer. "Tho', what wi' all them missin' girls…"

"Hang on, sir, did you just say "missing girls"?"

"Aye love, yer lucky ya got a good 'un wit' ya."

"Umm, how long has this been going on for?"

"Couple o' days now." He said, wiping down a glass. "Wondered when anyone'd do anythin', but ya know what it's like wi' us lot. Too closed off fer our own good sometimes…"

That was concerning – this wasn't a single murder, but likely a number of them, but so far with only one body…

And he'd just chased off the two main suspects, and told them never to come back…

He groaned into his hands as he realised that bit.

"Oh, for f-" was as far as he got, before he felt a pair of hands clamped over his mouth, a vain attempt at censoring his frustration, before a second realisation came to the front…

Just who the hell was Rain chasing after then?

(Author's Comments)

I honestly thought this would take until the New Year to finish. Guess not, and I'm hoping to get back to a proper schedule in the New Year, now I'm not nearly buried in coursework...

If anyone's curious, the accent of the local NPCs is meant to be a heavily modified version of a British dialect - from around the Black Country (named because it was a massive industrial area.). Believe me, as someone who can speak fluent Yam-yam (yes, that is the real name for it. No idea why.), if it wasn't heavily modified... even the English speaking Jet would be baffled.

For example...

"No, bab, they'm alway on abart that boss of theirs and wot 'e'll do to 'em if they say owt. Oi ay, babz and monz, they'm a right pair o' mardy gits."

Also, a quick update:

I have a new story, set in GGO - An Englishman in the Glocken. It's set after Aincrad, with The Concord doing their usual... and getting caught up in a conspiracy in the game, as well as some mysteries for later on in Aincrad. Check it out if you want to see more of this!