Sword Art Online - Volume 4 - Fairy Dance Read online

  Sword Art Online

  Volume 4

  ~Fairy Dance~

  Written by:

  Reki Kawahara

  Illustrations by:

  Abec

  Translated by:

  Baka-Tsuki

  Disclaimers:

  All materials’ copyrights reserved by their respective authors and the associated publishers.

  Please respect their rights. Works will be deleted upon request by copyright holders.

  Translators:

  KuroiHikari

  Black Cats of the Full Moon

  Editors:

  Aorii

  Black Cats of the Full Moon

  Saorian

  Thinklife

  DrFaust

  Chancs

  Zero2001

  ePUB by:

  Simon

  Prologue

  Looking up, there were many lights shining beyond the dim sky.

  Those were not stars. They were countless icicles that hung from the vast ceiling and emitted a faint phosphorescence contained inside them. In other words, this was the bottom of a cave, and its size was the problem.

  The distance to the faraway towering cliffs was, in real world distance, probably 30 kilometers. The lowest height till the ceiling was 500 meters. A countless number of carved cliffs and ravines, frozen-white lakes and snowy mountains, and fortress and castle-like structures could be seen at its bottom.

  With that, the scale of the cave was unbelievable. This underground space, no, it should be called the «Underworld».

  Actually, it was just that. This was another field that filled the undergrounds of the fairy world, ALfheim, a dark world of ice and snow, ruled by dreadful evil-god-class monsters. Its name is -

  «Jötunheimr».

  Chapter 5

  “Achoo!”

  Lyfa, a swordswoman of the Sylph race, quickly covered her mouth with both hands after letting out an explosive, unladylike sneeze.

  She stared out toward the entrance of the shrine, afraid that the evil-god had heard her and would poke its huge face in.

  Fortunately, the only thing that floated in was the falling snow. As the snow neared the fire burning on the floor of the shrine, it turned into a puff of steam and disappeared.

  Lyfa crouched down by the back wall while scratching the thick fur collar of her mantle.

  “Haa…”

  Sighing, Lyfa began to warm herself at the nearby fire. She felt more comfortable and soon found herself nodding off to sleep.

  The small stone shrine they were in was about four meters in length, width and height. The walls and ceiling were decorated with reliefs of eerie monsters that seemed to move in the firelight; it wasn’t the most comfortable interior. As her gaze turned to the side, Lyfa caught sight of her companion reclining against the wall, beginning to doze off, his peaceful—or foolish—face nodding up and down like a ship bobbing in the harbor.

  “Hey, wake –”

  While whispering, Lyfa pulled his sharply pointed ear. The only reply was a mumble that sounded like “munyamunya”. On his lap was another companion, a pixie, sleeping soundly while curled in a ball.

  “Hey, if you fall asleep, you’ll log out!”

  She pulled his ear again. Doing this made his head end up on her thighs, his head rolling around as if looking for a comfortable position.

  Lyfa’s body stiffened in mortification, her hands clenching futilely as she wondered what method to attempt next to wake him.

  It isn’t surprising that he is falling asleep though, she realized as she looked to the lower-right of her field of vision. After all, it is past 2:00 AM in the real world. Normally, Lyfa would already have logged out and been soundly asleep in her bed.

  That’s right, Jötunheimr and ALfheim were worlds that were products of a gaming company. Somewhere in the real world in Japan’s metropolitan city of Tokyo was a server machine and this place is a virtual world inside it. Lyfa and her companion existed here as people using the FullDive interface machine called «AmuSphere».

  It was actually quite easy to leave the virtual world. One simply had to extend the index and middle fingers of his or her left hand, wave them in order to open the game menu, and press the «Log Out» button. Alternatively, you could simply lie down and fall asleep; the AmuSphere would sense the user’s lowered brainwave activity and automatically disconnect. Come the next morning, users would wake comfortably in their own beds.

  However, there was a specific reason that Lyfa and her companion could not sleep here.

  Finally deciding on an impish course of action, Lyfa made a fist with her left hand and sharply rapped it on her partner’s spiky, black-haired head.

  Whoosh! Along with a burst of a refreshing sound, the yellow light which characterized a homing bullet attack activated. Lyfa’s companion made a strange, startled sound and bolted upright. Immediately taking his pained head in both of his hands, he looked around and saw the smiling Lyfa.

  “Good morning, Kirito-kun.”

  “…Oh, good morning.”

  Her companion was a Spriggan swordsman. He had slightly dark skin, black hair, and if not for the depressed expression, could be mistaken for the hero in a shounen manga.

  “…I, I fell asleep?”

  “And you even got a free lap pillow; you should be grateful you got off with only one small punch.”

  “…Then I was impolite, as an apology, you can use my lap as a pillow if you would like, Lyfa…”

  “There is no need!”

  Lyfa turned away quickly, casting a sidelong glance at Kirito.

  “Don’t say stupid things—did you dream of any nice escape ideas?”

  “Speaking of dreams, I was just about to eat this delicious looking pudding with a huge helping of ice cream.”

  Thinking herself a fool for asking, Lyfa’s shoulders slumped and she turned back toward the entrance of the shrine. Snow danced on the wind blowing through the darkness, but nothing else moved.

  There it was—the reason they couldn’t log out. Kirito, Lyfa, and Yui, sleeping on Kirito’s lap, were trapped in Jötunheimr, unable to escape to the surface.

  Of course, if all they wanted to do was leave the game, it was easily possible. However, this shrine was neither a safe zone nor an inn. Thus, if they were to go back to reality now, their virtual bodies here would be left essentially soulless for a period of time. Virtual bodies left unattended had the tendency to attract monsters, and their helpless bodies would be reduced to nothing, causing their 《Death》, in no time. They would then be returned to 《Sylvian》. If that happened then what would be the meaning of traveling all the way here from Sylphid territory?

  The purpose of this journey that Lyfa and Kirito have undertaken is to reach the central city of ALfheim: «Aarun».

  They had left Sylvian earlier today—yesterday evening to be exact. After passing over a vast forest area and then through a series of mine tunnels, they were ambushed by a group of Salamanders. After repelling the attack, they had met with the Sylph Lord Sakuya, were thanked, and then left, events finally calming down some time around 1:00 AM.

  At that point in time, Lyfa and Kirito had already been in FullDive for eight continuous hours, minus the time needed to take bathroom breaks. With Aarun nowhere in sight and truthfully a long way off, they decided to stop at the first village they came across and log off. Just at that moment, the pair saw a village in the middle of the forest and, cheering at their good fortune, landed in it.

  At that time, even if it would have been troublesome, they should have checked the map if only to confirm the name of the village and the presence of an inn. Who would have thought
…

  “…Who would thought, that village was a mimic monster…”

  Kirito, who seemed to be remembering the same thing, sighed. Lyfa also sighed and nodded.

  “That’s true… Whoever said no monsters appear on the Aarun Plateau?”

  “I believe that was you.”

  “I don’t recall saying anything like that.”

  With this effortless banter, they sighed again in unison.

  Upon landing in the mysterious village, they hadn’t see any villagers—NPCs—while looking around. Still thinking that there should at least be an innkeeper, they went to enter the largest building in the village when…

  All three buildings in the village collapsed. What used to be the inn immediately revealed a fleshy lump. However, they had no time to be surprised at that as the ground beneath their feet split open to reveal a gaping hole made of the same fleshy substance. It was a gigantic earthworm type monster that waited underground with its folds projected above ground to lure in prey.

  Kirito, with Yui in his pocket, and Lyfa were pulled into the earthworm’s mouth by a strong suction. While sliding down the worm’s throat, Lyfa was convinced that death by being dissolved in a earthworm’s digestive juices was probably the worst way of dying she had experienced in a year of playing ALO.

  Their luck seemed to be good however, as the earthworm didn’t appear to have a stomach. Their tour of its digestive tract lasted for a good three minutes before they were unceremoniously ejected from the other end of the earthworm, the mucus coating Lyfa’s body giving her goosebumps and a sense of revulsion. As she tried to slow her fall using her wings, she began to panic.

  She couldn’t fly. No matter how much strength she put into her shoulder blades, she couldn’t beat her wings. Straight down into the darkness she fell, with Kirito close behind, and with a bang, they landed in a deep snow drift.

  Lyfa was the first to recover and struggle out of the snowbank, and, upon looking up, she saw not the moon and stars but a canopy of stone extending as far as she could see. ‘No wonder I couldn’t fly, this is a cave,’ Lyfa thought as she inspected her surroundings.

  As she continued to look around, an abnormal shape appeared near the snow bank where she had first fallen. It was undoubtedly an «evil-god class monster», which she had previously only seen in pictures.

  Next to her, Kirito poked his head out of the snow. Before he could say anything, she quickly covered his mouth, understanding their dire situation. They were in the endless underground world, «Jötunheimr», the most difficult field in ALO. In other words, that giant earthworm wasn’t a trap to capture prey for food, but to transport players here to this land of ice.

  The nearly five story building tall, multi-legged evil-god finally moved away. Lyfa’s group then found this shrine to hide in, and pondered what to do. Unfortunately, there was no quick and easy way to leave this place when flight was prohibited. They had been looking at the fire while sitting with their back to the wall for about an hour, which brought things to the present.

  “Well… before I can make an escape plan, I need to know about Jötunheimr considering I have zero knowledge about this field…”

  Kirito finally drove away his drowsiness, looked out into the darkness with sharp black eyes, and spoke.

  “Indeed, before coming here, the Sylph lord said something when I handed over the coins. ‘I think to earn this much money, you’d need to hunt evil-gods in Jötunheimr,’ or something like that.”

  “Ah, yes, she said that.”

  Lyfa nodded her head, recalling the memory.

  Before getting swallowed by the worm, Kirito and Lyfa had met with the Sylph and Cait Sith Lords at their conference and fought off a large hostile force of Salamanders who had attacked them in surprise. Afterward, Kirito had given the same lords a large sum of money when he heard that they lacked funds. While accepting these funds, the Sylph lord Sakuya had certainly made some remark resembling that.

  “…Having said that, Kirito-kun, where did you get all that money?”

  The unexpected question derailed Kirito’s train of thought and caused him to stumble over his words.

  “That, ahh, some people I knew gave it to me. They used to play this game a lot in the past, but now have quit playing…”

  “Well, if you say so…”

  It was a common enough story. A player, retiring from the game, gave his money and equipment to friends or acquaintances. Lyfa decided to believe it and returned to their original conversation.

  “Then what is the problem? What is it about Sakuya’s speech?”

  “Well, if the lord said something like that, then there must be players hunting in this field right?”

  “There should be some.”

  “Thus, in addition to the giant earthworm which acts as a one way trip, there should be another way to enter and exit this field.”

  Finally understanding what Kirito was getting at, she nodded in affirmation.

  “There seems to be… but like you this is my first time here so I haven’t been there. In Aarun city there are large dungeons to the East, West, South and North, with their deepest floors supposedly having stairs leading to Jötunheimr. The location should be…”

  Lyfa called up the menu with her left hand and opened the map. She could see that Jötunheimr appeared to be nearly circular, with everything around them except their current location grayed out since she hasn’t been there before. She touched the map with her right index finger, indicating points at the top, bottom, left, and right.

  “They should be here, here, here and here. We are now in a shrine between the center and the southwest wall, so the nearest stairs should be to the South or West. But…”

  Lyfa slumped her shoulders before making her next remark.

  “All of the dungeons stairs will have evil-god class guardians there.”

  “Those evil-gods, how strong are they?”

  Lyfa looked incredulously at Kirito before answering his question.

  “No matter how strong you are, this time it won’t be enough. Rumor has it that when this area first opened, the Salamanders sent down a large party. They were completely wiped out by the first Evil-god class monster they met. General Eugene, who even you struggled against, didn’t last more than ten seconds against it.”

  “…That certainly is something…”

  “To hunt here, you have to have heavily armored players as human shields, high-powered attackers, and at least eight players focusing on support and recovery. We are two lightly armed swordsmen; before we could do anything we would be trampled flat and killed.”

  “I would like to avoid that.”

  Kirito nodded, but hearing about that kind of challenge seemed to have gotten him so excited that even his nostrils were twitching. Lyfa, seeing this, made sure to add another warning.

  “But before that, there’s a 99% chance we won’t reach the stairs. Running this long distance will draw evil-gods, and we will be dead before we can target them.”

  “I see…and we can’t fly in this map.”

  “Yes. To restore the power of flight, we would need either sunlight or moonlight. But as you can see, neither one of those is available here…The only exception is Imp players, who can fly a little bit underground…”

  Here, her words cut off and they looked at each others’ wings. Sylph Lyfa’s dark green wings and Spriggan Kirito’s grey wings had both lost their luminescence and withered. The only thing that marked them as fairies were their pointed ears, as they could not fly.

  “So, our last hope is to meet one of those large-scale evil-god hunting teams Lyfa mentioned earlier, join with them, and make our way back above ground.”

  “That sounds about right.”

  Lyfa turned her gaze outside the small shrine as she nodded.

  Through the thin blue darkness, past an expansive forest of snow and ice, stood a fortress-like building. Of course, it was controlled by the most powerful Boss-class evil-god and its minions; goin
g close to that place would mean a very unpleasant death. Naturally, no other players could be found in the area.

  “This Jötunheimr replaced the above ground dungeons as the highest level in difficulty. It was just recently added. So, the number of times that a hunting party has come down here is apparently less than ten. The chance of them accidentally coming near this shrine might be lower than us defeating a evil-god class monster alone.”

  “I guess this will be a real test of our luck.”

  Kirito gave a weak smile, then used his right index finger to poke the head of the nearly ten centimeter tall girl sleeping in his lap.

  “Hey Yui…wake up.”

  After blinking her eyes with their long eyelashes two or three times, her small body wrapped in a pink dress abruptly shot up. She put her right hand on her cheek, stretched her left arm high above her, and gave a big yawn. This gesture was so lovely that Lyfa could only stare in fascination.

  “Fuwaaa…Good morning Papa, Lyfa-san.”

  The little fairy greeted them in her bell-like voice. Kirito spoke to her very gently.

  “Good morning, Yui. Unfortunately, it is still night, and we are still underground. Sorry to bother you, but could you search for other players near us?”

  “Yes, understood. Please wait…”

  Yui nodded her head and closed her eyes.

  The official name for the little fairy, Yui, that Kirito carried around was a «Navigation Pixie». As long as players paid an additional fee, they could summon one from the menu window. Though from what Lyfa has heard, navigation pixies should only give basic information that the system deemed relevant. They should also speak in a synthesized voice and have no emotions. She had never heard of one with a personality or even a name.

  ‘If you constantly summon the same navigation pixie for a long time, does it get this friendly?’ thought Lyfa while awaiting Yui’s reply.

  When she opened her eyes, her ears drooped in disappointment, and she shook her glossy long raven-colored hair.

  “I’m sorry, I can see no response indicating other players in the range of my data collection. Before that, if I had just noticed that that village wasn’t registered on the map…”