Mother's Rosary Read online

  Copyright

  SWORD ART ONLINE, Volume 7: Mother’s Rosary

  REKI KAWAHARA

  Translation by Stephen Paul

  Cover art by abec

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  SWORD ART ONLINE

  ©REKI KAWAHARA 2011

  All rights reserved.

  Edited by ASCII MEDIA WORKS

  First published in Japan in 2011 by KADOKAWA CORPORATION, Tokyo.

  English translation rights arranged with KADOKAWA CORPORATION, Tokyo, through Tuttle-Mori Agency, Inc., Tokyo.

  English translation © 2016 by Yen Press, LLC

  Yen Press, LLC supports the right to free expression and the value of copyright. The purpose of copyright is to encourage writers and artists to produce the creative works that enrich our culture.

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book without permission is a theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like permission to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), please contact the publisher. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.

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  First Yen On eBook Edition: June 2017

  Originally published in paperback in April 2016 by Yen On.

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  ISBN: 978-0-316-56093-1

  E3-20170525-JV-PC

  “Have you heard about the Absolute Sword, Asuna?”

  Asuna stopped typing on the holo-keyboard and looked up at Lisbeth.

  “Athletic Horde? Are they going to hold a race or something?”

  “No, no, no.” Lisbeth laughed, shaking her head. She picked up the steaming mug on the table and took a sip. “Clean your ears out. I said Absolute Sword.”

  “Absolute…Sword. Is it a new legendary item they added or something?”

  “Non, non. It’s a person’s name. Or…nickname, I guess. A title. I don’t know the actual avatar name. Whoever it is, they’re so strong that someone started calling them the ‘Absolute Sword,’ and the name stuck. ‘The sword of absolute invincibility,’ ‘the sword of absolute power’…I think that’s what they mean by it.”

  The moment she heard the word strong, Asuna sensed that her curiosity had been tickled.

  She knew more than a bit about using a sword. In ALfheim Online, she played an undine, who typically stayed back to cast spells in battle, but every now and then she felt the itch to fight again and would pull out her rapier and charge into the enemy’s midst. Thanks to that, she was now the unhappy owner of the “Berserk Healer” nickname, a far cry from the elegance she normally tried to project.

  She actively participated in the monthly dueling tournaments to help her master the three-dimensional combat of ALO, and she could go toe-to-toe with mighty warriors like the salamandic general Eugene and the sylphic lady Sakuya. News of a brand-new rival could not be overlooked.

  Asuna saved her in-progress biology report and banished the holo-keyboard, picking up her own mug and refilling it with the click of a finger. She repositioned herself in her tree-branch seat, satisfied that she was in a comfortable pose for chatting.

  “And…? What is this ‘Absolute Sword’ like?”

  “Well…”

  1

  On the twenty-second floor of New Aincrad, white snow fell upon a deep forest.

  In the real world, too, it was the midwinter chill of early January, but with the advancing pace of global warming, Tokyo hardly ever dropped below freezing.

  The game management wanted to make the most of the season, however, so Alfheim, realm of fairies, was locked in a devastating winter. North of the World Tree located at the center of the map, it was common for temperatures to fall into the single digits and peak below zero. Nobody wanted to fly in conditions like that without proper equipment or anti-cold buffing spells. At the moment, Aincrad was floating above gnome territory, the northernmost of all the races, and the air was cold enough to cause ice crystals throughout all of its floors.

  But even a chill that could freeze a running brook solid could not penetrate the warming effects of thick log walls and a burning-red furnace.

  It was eight months since May 2025, when the largest update ALfheim Online had ever seen added the massive New Aincrad map to the game.

  Because ALO functioned on a replica of the system that the formerly deadly Sword Art Online ran on, the server already contained all of the data for SAO’s setting, the floating castle Aincrad. The new venture that had bought all the rights to ALO hardware and software from RCT Progress—its previous administrators—decided on the bold move of preserving all the old SAO character data that came along with ALO’s back end and, even further, merging it into the game.

  Naturally, part of this was a cold, practical decision to shore up their user-base numbers from dropping off after the discovery of RCT Progress’s criminal human experiments by offering a massive and exciting new update. But that wasn’t the only factor. The investors who put together the new company were all veteran MMO players since the 2-D days, and they couldn’t stand to have that meticulously designed world erased forever. At least, that was what Asuna heard from Agil, who served as a pipeline to the administrators.

  Since the revival of Aincrad, Asuna had continued through the game as an undine healer/fencer, but with a secret desire in mind.

  Naturally, her goal was to raise the necessary col (or wait, it was yrd now) and reach the twenty-second floor before anyone else so she could purchase the little log cabin hidden deep within the pine forest there. It was the very place where, long ago, she had once spent two wonderful, blissful, heartbreaking weeks.

  In last May’s update, they’d only added the first ten floors. In September they opened eleven through twenty. Then, on Christmas Eve, the night of December 24th, the labyrinth door that led to the twenty-first floor opened. At the moment the little fanfare played to celebrate the unlocking of the new content, Asuna was already racing up the long stairs with a party she’d put together of Kirito, Klein, Agil, Lisbeth, Silica, and Leafa.

  The twenty-second floor was a quiet one, almost entirely covered in forest, and there was a number of player homes that could be bought in the main village, so it was unlikely that any rivals were gunning for the same house that she was. But Asuna raced through the twenty-first floor like a tornado anyway, challenged the floor boss in the labyrinth with a joint raid party, and stood at the front of the nearly fifty-man army with her sword, despite being a half-healer build. Afterward, Klein told her that she was “even more impressive than when she was vice commander of the Knights of the Blood.”

  When she had at last kicked aside the body of the twenty-first-floor boss she’d finished off herself, Asuna raced to the edge of the twenty-second floor where the little cabin waited, hit the OKAY button on the purchasing window, and collapsed in front of it, shedding tears. That night, after all their friends had left the party, she shared a toast with Kirito and their “daughter” Yui, who was back in her human little-girl form, and Asuna bawled again. This time, it was a secret from her friends.

  Even Asuna couldn’t exactly put into words her fixation on this par
ticular log house. It was the place where she was finally united with the first boy she’d ever truly loved, after a great number of trials and tribulations—virtual or not—and they’d spent a brief but wonderful time together. That was an easy enough explanation, but Asuna felt there was more to it than that.

  She had always sought her place in the real world, and perhaps this was her “home” in the truest sense of the word. A comfortable, warm place where a pair of birds could rest their wings and huddle together to sleep. The home of her heart.

  Of course, after all the trouble she went through to get it this time around, the log cabin ended up as a hangout spot for their friends, and not a day went by where there wasn’t a visitor. Apparently, after her meticulous interior renovation, the house was such a comfortable destination that people would fly up from the surface to visit it. Both her old companions from SAO and her new friends in ALO would stop by incessantly to smack their lips at her home cooking. There was even one time when, through an act of considerable coincidence, they had a very tense meal with both Lady Sakuya and General Eugene at the table.

  On this day—January 6th, 2026—the living-wood stump table in the cabin’s main room was surrounded by familiar faces.

  To Asuna’s right was the beast tamer Silica, sporting the cait sith’s signature triangular ears. She was glaring at math equations from her winter vacation homework on a holo-display and groaning. To Asuna’s left was Leafa the warrior-mage sylph, her greenish-yellow hair tied into a long ponytail. Like Silica, she was grunting over homework—in this case, an English essay.

  Seated across from her was the leprechaun blacksmith Lisbeth, but she was reclined back in the chair with her legs crossed, a bottle of raspberry liquor in one hand and an in-game novel in the other.

  In the real world it was around four o’clock, but the time of day in ALfheim wasn’t coordinated with the outside world, so it was already after sunset, and the only thing to be seen out of the window was the falling snow catching the light of the lanterns. They didn’t need to hear the rustling outside to know that it was freezing cold, but the logs in the stove crackled merrily, and the mushroom stew in the deep pot bubbled and filled the room with warmth and aroma.

  Like her friends, Asuna had a holo-keyboard under her hands, poring over a browser window connected to the Internet and working on a school report.

  Asuna’s mother did not entirely approve of doing tasks in the VR world that could easily be accomplished in reality, but lengthy typing sessions were actually much more efficient here. There was no eye or wrist strain, and she could call up more pages than her actual 1600x1200 monitor could support and place them wherever she wanted.

  In an attempt to convince her mother, Asuna once had her log in to a full-dive application meant to facilitate text entry, but within a few minutes, her mother had logged out, complaining that it made her dizzy. She never bothered with it again.

  Full-dive sickness was a real thing, but after living in that environment for two years, Asuna couldn’t even remember what it felt like. Her fingers flashed and flew with perfect accuracy as she approached the conclusion of her report within the editing software.

  Just then, something settled on her shoulder.

  She turned to the right to see Silica’s head resting on her, the large triangular ears twitching as she slept with a satisfied smile.

  Asuna couldn’t help but grin. She tickled a feline ear with her index finger. “Come on, Silica. If you take a nap now, you’ll have trouble falling asleep tonight.”

  “Hrm…mya…”

  “There’s only three days of vacation left. Better get working on that assignment.”

  She pulled the ear, causing Silica to twitch and straighten up at last. She stared blearily and blinked several times before shaking her head and looking at Asuna.

  “Uh…aah…I’m sleepy,” she murmured, and yawned widely, little white fangs visible. The other cait sith players who visited the cabin exhibited similar sleepiness, which made Asuna wonder if there was some kind of racial status effect it had on them.

  Asuna looked at Silica’s holo-window and said, “You’re almost done with that page. Why don’t you just breeze through that one?”

  “Mmm…hokay…”

  “Is it too warm in here? Should I lower the heat?” Asuna asked.

  To her left, Leafa giggled. “No, I’m pretty sure the culprit is over there.”

  “Over there…?”

  Asuna, ponytail waving, followed the line of Leafa’s finger toward the stove affixed to the eastern wall.

  “…Oh…I see,” she murmured, nodding. Plopped in front of the red, burning stove was a finely polished wooden rocking chair.

  Slumped in the rocking chair and fast asleep was a spriggan boy with tanned skin and short black hair. His formerly spiky hair had been altered to lie flat, but the pointed and mischievous facial features were still intact. It was, of course, Kirito.

  A little dragon with pale blue feathers was curled into a ball on his stomach, its head resting comfortably on its soft, curled tail. This was Pina, Silica’s miniature dragon partner since the days of SAO.

  And snoozing on top of Pina’s soft down was an even smaller fairy with straight, lustrous black hair and a light-pink one-piece dress. It was Yui, an AI born from the old SAO server, now serving as Kirito’s navigation pixie. But most important, she was the daughter of Asuna and Kirito.

  The three-layer stack of Kirito, Pina, and Yui, each sleeping blissfully on the rocking chair, was having a nearly sorcerous effect on anyone around it. Just watching them for a few seconds was making Asuna’s eyelids grow heavy with sleep.

  Kirito was quite an avid sleeper himself. As if he was trying to make up for all the sleep he lost trying to defeat SAO the first time, Kirito collapsed into his favorite rocking chair and dozed away any time Asuna took her eyes off of him for more than a few moments.

  And Asuna did not know anything that made her sleepy faster than the sight of Kirito snoozing in his rocking chair.

  When they lived in the old Aincrad and Kirito fell asleep on the couches in the upstairs of Agil’s shop or on the porch of their forest cabin, Asuna would almost always slip in next to him and share in the warmth of sleep. She knew from personal experience what a soporific effect it had, so she could understand why Silica and Leafa felt the fatigue bearing down on them.

  But what was odd was the way the little dragon Pina—which should have been a simple collection of algorithms—would take off from Silica’s shoulders and curl up on top of Kirito whenever he was sleeping nearby.

  It almost made her wonder if Kirito was emitting some kind of “sleep parameter” as he was snoozing. As evidence of that, she’d just been wide awake and absorbed in her report, but now her body felt weightless…

  “Hey, now you’re sleeping, Asuna! And Liz, too!”

  She bolted upright, feeling Silica shaking her shoulder. Across the table, Lisbeth snapped up, too, blinking furiously. The girl smiled shyly and shook her pink hair, which gleamed with the metallic shine characteristic of leprechauns.

  “You can’t help but get sleepy, watching him…I wonder if it’s one of those illusion magic things that spriggans do.”

  “Hee hee! I doubt it. I’ll wake us up by putting on some tea. The instant kind, though.”

  Asuna stood up and pulled four cups out of the cupboard behind her. They were magical mugs that produced a random flavor of tea out of ninety-nine varieties with a single tap—a recent quest reward.

  With the mugs and some fruit tarts on the table, the four girls, including the now-awake Silica, each took a sip of a different kind of hot liquid.

  “By the way,” Lisbeth started, as though remembering something, “have you heard about the Absolute Sword, Asuna?”

  “The rumors started going around regularly just before the end of the year…so about a week ago,” Lisbeth said, then nodded to herself in understanding. “Oh, right, no wonder you didn’t know, then. You were in Kyoto a
t the end of December.”

  “Please don’t remind me of that unpleasant stuff when I’m playing a game,” Asuna said, frowning. Lisbeth laughed loudly.

  “I guess it’s hard being a rich girl from a rich family.”

  “It was hard! I had to spend all day in a full kimono and proper sitting position, greeting people. I couldn’t even enjoy a quick dive at night, because the building I was staying in didn’t even have wireless! I brought my AmuSphere with me, and it was all for nothing.”

  She sighed and drained the last of her tea.

  At the end of January, Asuna was essentially forced into a trip to the Yuuki household headquarters—her paternal grandparents’ home in Kyoto—with her parents and older brother. The rest of the family at large was very worried about her two-year “hospitalization.” She couldn’t very well refuse a trip to see them all and thank them for their concern and help during that time.

  When she was younger, spending the start of the year back home was an ordinary event, and she enjoyed seeing all the cousins around her age. But somewhere around the time she got into middle school, Asuna found this tradition to be more and more suffocating.

  The main Yuuki family was a line that had been in the currency exchange business in Kyoto for, without exaggeration, more than two centuries. They had lasted through the Meiji Restoration and the chaos of war, and they now ran a regional bank that had offices all throughout western Japan. Her father, Shouzou Yuuki, had grown RCT into a major electronics manufacturer in a single generation thanks to the ample funds provided by the main family business. The extended family was positively littered with company presidents and government officials.

  Naturally, like Asuna and her brother, all of the cousins were “good students” at “good schools,” sitting politely at the family table as their parents boasted about the award their child had won in a recent competition and the national rank their child scored recently on a standardized test. These conversations were pleasant on the surface, but that only hid the fierce current of rivalry running underneath. When Asuna began to recognize this atmosphere and feel alienated by it, the whole exercise struck her as nothing more than the family ranking its own children by value.