Alicization Running Page 10

  He has no idea at all, the observer noted. Next time he slept with his skin exposed, there would be no help.

  Eugeo trotted up and answered, “Sleeping on the hay in the barn might not cut it anymore. Why don’t we pay the fare starting tonight and sleep in the house?”

  “We won’t need to,” Kirito said with a grin. The observer couldn’t see it from its position at the base of his hair, but it could easily imagine the smirking expression. Kirito boasted, “After all, tonight we’ll be sleeping in the Zakkaria garrison building.”

  “…I’d love to know where you get that boundless confidence…” Eugeo murmured, shaking his head. He brought out another barrel stuffed with hay. While they made it look easy, a thick wooden barrel one mel across filled to the brim with hay was far, far heavier than the airy material would suggest. The average man their age might be able to lift it, but certainly couldn’t take two dozen steps with it.

  How was it possible that the skinny young boys could do this without breaking a sweat? It was because their object control authority was unbelievably high. High enough, in fact, that they could swing around the class-45 Divine Object resting against the wall of the barn: a longsword.

  That raised the question: How did two ordinary boys born in an obscure little village have such a high authority level? Even after half a year of observation, the reason was a mystery. At the least, it was an amount impossible to reach through ordinary training and safe sparring. Perhaps if they had engaged in serious battle against high-class wild animals, but they’d have to hunt so many of them that the animals would go temporarily extinct around the village. And that would be a twofold breaking of the Taboo Index: one for hunting without possessing the hunter’s calling and another for hunting past the prescribed amounts. Even proactive Kirito would not go to such lengths, to say nothing of the better-behaved Eugeo…

  The only remaining possibility was a foe whose authority-boosting value would be far greater than a beast…in other words, a triumphant battle over an invader from the Dark Territory. But that was impossible, too, only in a different way. It was unthinkable that these two boys, not even men-at-arms, would face off against the dread forces of darkness. And even the occasional dark knights and goblin scouting parties should be vanquished by the Integrity Knights from Centoria long before they ever reached the End Mountains.

  Even if there had been an unexpected infiltration near the boys’ village, that would represent a far greater problem in and of itself than their abnormal rise of control authority. It could be an omen of much bigger things. Perhaps even the Prophesied Time that was guaranteed to arrive someday but which everyone believed was in the far-flung future…

  While the observer pondered this from the safety of Kirito’s hair, the two youngsters carried the mountains of hay from the barn to the nearby stable, where they spread them into the feeding troughs of the ten horses there. As the horses proceeded to crunch on their breakfast, the boys took brushes to them in turn. This was the first duty every morning at Walde Farm, Kirito and Eugeo’s temporary home outside of Zakkaria.

  After five months there, they were so good at this task that they might have been confused for having the groom’s calling. They finished brushing just as the last one finished its meal. Moments later, the bells at the church in Zakkaria three kilors away chimed the seven o’clock melody. The Axiom Church created divine “Bells of Time-Tolling” for every town and village. Their sound traveled ten kilors in every direction without fading a bit, but any farther than that, and they were completely inaudible. This was one of the psychological barriers meant to prohibit autonomous long-distance movement in human units, but it seemed to have no effect on Kirito and Eugeo.

  They washed their hands at the water basin, hung the large horse brushes on the nails on the wall, then left the stable, each carrying an empty barrel in his hand. Just then, a pair of excited, expectant greetings erupted.

  “Good morning, Kirito, Eugeo!”

  The voices belonged to the farmer’s daughters. Teline and Telure were twins, turning nine later in the year. They had the same reddish-brown hair, the same dark-brown eyes, the same color tunic, and the same color skirt. The only way to tell them apart was the color of the ribbons they used to tie up their ponytails. When they had first been introduced five months ago, Teline was red and Telure was blue, but the mischievous girls loved to switch them from time to time to confuse Kirito and Eugeo.

  “Good morning, Teli—” Eugeo started to say in his normal tone of voice, before Kirito covered his mouth from behind.

  “Hang on! I sense something suspicious is afoot…”

  The girls looked at each other and giggled in unison.

  “Are you sure about that?”

  “It might just be your imagination.”

  Their voices, their mischievous smiles, and even the number and placement of freckles on their cheeks were identical. Kirito and Eugeo groaned and compared the two.

  Apparently, even Master didn’t know why human units were capable of coming in twins…or even triplets, on rare occasion. Twins were more likely to appear after consecutive unit deaths in an adjacent area, so it was probably a factor of the population adjustment function—but that didn’t explain the need to make them identical. At the very least, there didn’t seem to be any benefits that outweighed the trouble of being unable to tell them apart.

  On the other hand, the observer could see all units’ status windows—what they would call a Stacia Window—so it could sense at a glance that the twins had switched their ribbons today. In other words, Kirito’s intuition was correct.

  Of course, the boy couldn’t hear the inaudible, exasperated voice coming from the base of his hair, telling him to trust his gut. But he held up a hand and pointed at the red ribbon on the left. “Morning, Telure!”

  Then he pointed to the blue ribbon on the right. “Morning, Teline!”

  The girls glanced at each other again and shouted, “Bingo!” They held out their arms to reveal that each girl was carrying a woven picnic basket.

  “You win today’s breakfast: mulberry pie!”

  “Mulberries give you lots of strength! We spent an entire day picking them to help you two win at your big tournament!”

  “Aww, that’s so sweet. Thank you, Telure, Teline,” Kirito said, setting down the wooden barrel and rubbing the girls’ heads. They scrunched their little faces into huge grins, then simultaneously looked at Eugeo.

  “…Aren’t you happy, Eugeo?”

  “Do you not like mulberries?”

  The flaxen-haired boy vigorously shook his hands and head. “N-no, I love them! It’s just…I’m remembering some stuff from the past. Thanks, you two.”

  The girls smiled with relief and trotted off to a table set up between the stable and pasture. While they began to prepare the breakfast, Kirito sidled closer to Eugeo and patted him on the back.

  “We’re going to win today’s event, make our way to the top of the garrison, and be in Centoria by next year…very close to Alice. Right, Eugeo?” he said in a hushed but insistent voice.

  Eugeo nodded. “That’s right. It’s why I spent the last five months learning the Aincrad style from you.”

  Just this little snippet of conversation contained a number of fascinating bits of information. In over two centuries of service as a familiar, the observer had never heard the name of that school of swordfighting. And then there was the unit named Alice, who served as their final destination.

  If this was the same Alice unit who existed in the observer’s memory…their hopes were almost impossibly distant and unlikely. For she was currently located very, very high in the Central Cathedral that loomed over Centoria…

  “Kirito! Eugeo! Hurry up!”

  “If you don’t come now, me and Teline will eat all of it!”

  Kirito quickly withdrew his hand from Eugeo’s back and rushed for the table. The vibration was enough to interrupt the observer’s thoughts and bring it back to reality. How many ti
mes over the last five months had it needed a reminder that thinking was not its job? And now it was not only thinking about their fate…it was worried about it.

  The observer clung to the base of the black hairs and sighed yet again.

  After a hectic breakfast, the twins said, “We’ll come and cheer for you!” and left for the house.

  Once the boys had let the horses out to graze and finished cleaning the stables, they would normally engage in their sword practice using safe wooden blades, but today was different. They washed their hair and skin at the well—the observer evacuated to a nearby branch while this happened—then changed from their supplied work clothes to their own tunics and headed for the house.

  The farmer’s wife, Triza Walde, was an extremely generous and pleasant unit for her role in a farm of this size. It was surely why she had happily hired and taken in two suspicious, wandering boys. She greeted Kirito and Eugeo bracingly and gave them packed lunches as they headed off for their tournament. As they left, she called out, “If you lose, don’t become guards in the town, come back and marry Teline and Telure!” The two boys gave her very uncomfortable smiles.

  As they walked the three-kilor path from the farm to the town, they shared fewer words than usual. It must have been their nerves. The Northern Norlangarth Swordfighting Tournament held in Zakkaria every August 28th drew over fifty contestants each year from neighboring towns and villages. As a rule, these were all men-at-arms by calling in their respective hometowns; Kirito and Eugeo would almost certainly be the only exceptions.

  The only contestants admitted into the Zakkaria sentinel garrison would be the winners of the east and west blocks of the tournament, so neither of them could afford to lose once if they both wanted to achieve their dream. That would be hard enough as it was, and it also required them to not be in the same block. The observer didn’t know if the boys had even considered this…

  From up ahead came the dry sound of smokegrass bursting.

  The observer peered out of Kirito’s bangs and saw the reddish sandstone of the town beyond a small hill. It was Zakkaria, the biggest city in the NNM area. Its current designated population was 1,958 units, less than a tenth of Centoria’s, but on the day of the biggest event of the year, it was positively buzzing with activity.

  As they walked for the western gate of town, Eugeo mumbled, “You know…until I saw it for myself, I had started to wonder if Zakkaria even existed.”

  “Why would you think that?” Kirito asked.

  The flaxen-haired boy shrugged. “Because…even the grown-ups in Rulid have never actually seen Zakkaria, either. The old head man-at-arms, Doik, had the right to participate in the Zakkaria Tournament, but he never once made use of that right before he retired. And as the carver of the Gigas Cedar, I shouldn’t have ever had a chance to go to Zakkaria. So if no one’d ever been there, and I’d never get to see it, either…”

  “…then it might as well not exist?” Kirito finished. He grinned and added, “Well, I’m glad it does. Zakkaria’s existence means that Centoria’s not out of the question, either.”

  “That’s true. It…it feels so strange. It’s already been five months since we left from Rulid, and yet the fact that there’s more to the world than that village is still…well, incredible to me.”

  Eugeo’s words were a bit hard to fathom, but they caused the observer to recall a strange sensation. Throughout its long life in Master’s service, it had seen not just Centoria but the entire fifteen-hundred-kilor expanse of the human realms. That volume of memory far surpassed that of any human unit, aside from the Integrity Knights. But there were still areas unfamiliar to the observer. The place beyond the End Mountains that surrounded the human realm—the Dark Territory. It knew from secondhand sources that there were a number of towns and villages out there, even an enormous black city…But would it ever have the opportunity to register its existence with visual data in person?

  That was essentially impossible. It was a thought without any basis in fact, and yet, if it continued to observe these two, perhaps someday…

  The observer was so lost in thought that it was unprepared for a sudden vibration and nearly tumbled off Kirito’s head. It clung to the black hairs in surprise and looked up.

  Directly ahead was a horse rearing up in the air, front legs kicking. It shrieked and tried to toss the Zakkarian sentinel off its back. The sudden shaking had been from Kirito crouching down to avoid the horse’s hooves.

  Just a few dozen mels ahead was the west gate of the city. A horseback sentinel in his red uniform was situated just in front of the stone bridge over the moat, and for some reason, the horse had reared up and out of control the moment Kirito passed it.

  “Wh-whoa! Whoa!” the rider commanded, pulling on the reins desperately, but the horse would not calm. The “horse” dynamic object required a fairly high control authority to master, but any unit with the sentinel calling should have fulfilled that amount.

  That severely limited the causes of the horse’s continued abandon. Either it was losing life from lack of food or water or it sensed a very dangerous, large beast approaching—but neither of those seemed likely here.

  Meanwhile, the bucking horse reared up again. But rather than trying to get out of the way, Kirito continued crouching below it. Passersby began to scream and yell. Even a full-grown male unit would lose half his life if trampled by a horse—perhaps all of it, if he was unlucky.

  “L-look out—!” someone shouted, and Kirito moved at last: not backward but forward. He evaded the kicking legs and pressed up against the horse, grabbing it firmly around the neck with both arms. Then he commanded, “Eugeo, the rear!”

  But his partner was already on the move. He circled around to the back of the horse while Kirito held it still. The horse’s tail was whipping around wildly, but Eugeo reached out fearlessly and, like lightning, deftly snagged an object sticking to the brown hide and peeled it away. Instantly, the horse was as calm as if nothing had ever happened.

  Kirito rubbed its nose soothingly as the horse’s snorting breath steadily calmed. “There, there. You’re okay. Sir, you can ease up on the reins now.”

  The pale young sentinel riding the horse nodded nervously and relaxed his grip. Kirito let go of the horse and took a step back. It swung itself around and clopped over to its original position at the side of the bridge. Sighs and voices of relief could be heard throughout the crowd.

  The observer was among the relieved; it quickly folded up the arms it had unconsciously extended from its perch in Kirito’s hair. It had nearly cast a sacred art to protect Kirito from impact. In fact, if he hadn’t moved as quickly as he did, it would have. The action was unthinkable for an observer.

  Meanwhile, totally unaware that a little stowaway was reprimanding itself in his bangs, Kirito approached his partner and whispered, “Greater swampfly?”

  “Bingo,” Eugeo muttered back, glancing around the area. The foot traffic was moving again, and the sentinel was paying attention to his poor horse, so he felt emboldened to open his hand and show Kirito.

  Resting in his hand was a winged insect about four cens long, striped deep red and black. It looked like a bee, but there was no stinger at the end. Instead, sharp mandibles extended from its mouth.

  Among the “pest” dynamic objects that existed around only human units’ active areas, this was nothing particularly dangerous. After all, it posed no direct danger to humans. It primarily stole tiny amounts of life by sucking the blood of horses, cattle, and sheep. The sentinel’s horse had reared up because the greater swampfly had bitten it on the rump. But…

  “It’s strange,” Kirito muttered. He plucked the fly out of Eugeo’s hand, where it had died from the shock of its capture. “There aren’t any swamps around here, are there?”

  “Nope. I learned that the first day we started working at Walde Farm. They said the nearest swamp is in the western forest, so don’t take the horses that way.”

  “And it’s seven kilometers f
rom there to Zakkaria. The greater swampfly only lives around swamps, so it wouldn’t fly all this way,” Kirito noted.

  Eugeo pondered that notion but seemed a bit hesitant. “That’s true…but couldn’t it have wandered into a merchant’s carriage or something?”

  “…You could be right about that.”

  Even as they talked, the insect between Kirito’s fingers began to rapidly lose its red coloring. The lives of insect objects were already small, and a dead insect’s life was even smaller. Their corpses would maintain shape for only a minute at most.

  Soon the swampfly’s husk was a pale gray, and it crumbled like sand, emitting a slight spatial resource before disappearing.

  Kirito blew on his fingers, glanced around nonchalantly, and snorted. “Well, at least neither of us got hurt before our big tournament. I guess living with horses for all those months on the farm paid off.”

  “Ha-ha, good point. If we get into the garrison, should we enlist for horseback service?”

  “No ifs, Eugeo. We’ve come all this way, and nothing is going to stop us from getting in together,” Kirito said with a wicked grin. Eugeo was taken aback.

  “Why do you make it sound like stuff’s going to stop us? Aside from all the opponents we’ll have to defeat to win…”

  “Well, all I’m saying is…don’t get careless before the event. You never know what might surprise you at any moment, as we just saw.”

  “I didn’t realize you were such a worrywart, Kirito.”

  “You’ll never meet a guy who avoids recklessness and abandon like I do,” Kirito quipped, and patted Eugeo on the back. “C’mon, let’s go. We’ve gotta get a bite to eat before the tournament.”

  3

  Zakkaria was a town surrounded by long, rectangular fortress walls running east and west.

  It was nine hundred mels from north to south and thirteen hundred mels from east to west. That was well over five times the size of Rulid. It was built in the middle of a field with no nearby rivers or lakes, so all their water came from wells. It seemed a bit dry as a result, but it still had far more plant objects than the desert towns in the far south empire.