Early and Late Read online

  To my surprise, she suddenly asked for ginger tea.

  I had to call Mom to ask how to make that. All I needed to do was put ginger juice and honey into hot water—it was even easier than cooking in Aincrad. But for a kid with no cooking experience, it was a challenge. Despite nearly slicing up my fingers on the grater, I managed to put together a cup of ginger tea and bring it to her. Instead of her usual insults, she looked at me with a blissful expression, and—

  “…Ung…kh…”

  I couldn’t keep the sound from escaping my throat.

  I wanted to see them.

  I wanted to see Suguha, Mom, and Dad.

  The overwhelming impulse rocked my avatar, and I faltered, putting my hands on Agatha’s bed. I lowered my knees to the floor, squeezed my white shirt, and sobbed again.

  I wanted to see them. But that wasn’t allowed. The electric field from the NerveGear cut off my conscious mind from the real world and trapped me in this place.

  Using every ounce of willpower to hold in the sobs threatening to rip free of my throat, I felt like I finally understood the “truth” of this world.

  It wasn’t about dying or living. There was no way for me to “earn” a real understanding of death here to begin with. Because in the real world, a place where death was just as permanent as here, I’d never been close enough to death to know.

  No, it was the fact that this was an alternate world. That I couldn’t see the people I wanted to see. That was the one truth. The reality of this world.

  I buried my face in the sheets, gritted my teeth, and trembled violently. There were no tears. Perhaps there were tears falling on my real cheeks, as I lay on my bed back home in the real world. Perhaps they were in view of Suguha, watching over me in person.

  “…Wut’s wong, Big Bwudda?”

  A soft hand touched my head.

  Eventually, it started to clumsily caress my hair. Over and over.

  Until the moment my crying ended, the little hand never stopped moving.

  (The End)

  AFTERWORD

  Hello, this is Reki Kawahara. Thank you for reading Sword Art Online 8: Early and Late.

  This is my first short story collection since Volume 2. As the title suggests, it covers from the latest story of SAO (technically, the story in Mother’s Rosario happens a week later) all the way back to the earliest (again, technically the first chapter of Volume 1 begins an hour earlier, ha-ha).

  As those of you reading ever since the first volume (or before that, from my web version), the story of SAO jumps ahead after the very start and covers only the three weeks before Sword Art Online was beaten, a full two years after it began. After that, I wrote the four short stories in Volume 2 to fill in some of the gaps of the past. But as a matter of fact, when Dengeki Bunko offered to publish them in book form, I was faced with a real dilemma. I wondered if it would be better not to simply publish my web version in book form but to take all the material of the first two volumes and rearrange it into a full story, filling in more blanks as I went, to thoroughly explore the game of death from start to finish.

  Obviously, I only considered that idea and never went with it (mostly because I was terrified of how much fresh writing I’d need to do to fill it all out), but in truth, the image of Kirito immediately after leaving Klein behind in the Town of Beginnings always stuck in the back of my mind. When the beater chose the quickest route to personal strength, what was he thinking and feeling? My desire to explore that moment never really went away.

  When I learned that Volume 8 would contain two stories I already published on the web (“The Safe Haven Incident” and “Calibur”), I decided, “Why not write a new story about what happened after Kirito ran out into the wilderness on the first day?” And what I produced was the “Day of Beginnings.” Given that nearly ten years have passed since I wrote the very start of SAO, there might be a bit of inconsistency in Kirito’s depiction, but I’d be very lucky if you considered that part of the fun.

  If I get the chance in the future, I’d like to write another story about Kirito taking on the first floor with his new trusty blade. Just be patient with me!

  And now, for the standard apology section…With the “Safe Haven Incident,” as is the danger with all retroactive sequels, it does introduce a few inconsistencies with what I wrote in the first volume. (For example, in Volume 1, Kirito claims that he has never entered an NPC restaurant with Asuna, but he does exactly that in this story…) I briefly thought about cheating around the issue by changing the owner of the restaurant to a player, but that didn’t really solve the fundamental issue, so I didn’t bother. I’m sure there are other spots here and there that caused you to raise an eyebrow, but I hope that you can understand the very strange circumstances of this long story’s development and overlook the small things!

  While I’m on a roll with apologies, let me address the reveal of the trick and the resolution to the mystery story contained in “Safe Haven Incident.” I’m sure that the big mystery-novel fans among you are outraged at its un-believability. I do enjoy reading mysteries, so I thought I would tackle the genre as a writer, and I apologize for not knowing what I was doing! I’d like to keep working at it and try again someday.

  This is not an apology, but a bit of advertisement. The “Calibur” story you read in this book is what happened if the quest was successful. I also wrote a “what if they failed” version that appears in the June 2011 issue of Dengeki Bunko Magazine. If you get the chance to read that after this one, you might just enjoy the story 1.2 times more!

  To my editor, Mr. Miki, whom I put through hell for forgetting to submit this afterword when he was super busy with the editorial office moving, and to my illustrator, abec, for doing yeoman’s duty with a cramped June–August two-month turnover, thank you so much! And to everyone else, I hope you return for the fourth story arc, beginning in Volume 9!

  Reki Kawahara—May 2011