2

By the time I blinked again, the vision was gone, evaporating as quickly as it had come.

What was that? The image was gone, but the sensation of nostalgia it brought stayed with me, clutching my heart agonizingly tightly.

A memory of youth…In the vision of the three children walking along the riverside, I was absolutely certain that the boy with black hair on the right was…me.

But that was impossible. There were no forests this thick or rivers this pristine in Kawagoe, Saitama Prefecture, where I grew up. And I’d certainly never been friends with a blond boy and girl. Plus, all three of us in the image were wearing the same rustic fantasy clothes.

If this was the STL, did that mean the vision was a memory of my extended dive test last weekend? That seemed likely, but even with the fluctlight acceleration of the STL, I would have experienced only ten days at most. And the aching nostalgia that throbbed in my heart could not be caused by such a brief amount of time.

Things were truly turning in a bizarre direction. I glanced down into the nearby river, wondering if I was really myself, but the stream was too warped to recognize the finer features in its reflection.

I decided to forget about the prickling aftereffect and focused on that steady, repeating sound. This, too, had a familiar feel to it, but I still didn’t know whether it was the sound of a woodcutter’s ax. I shook my head to clear my mind and headed back upstream toward the noise.

By the time the steady pace of walking allowed me to enjoy the beauty of the scenery again, I noticed my path was taking me farther to the left. It seemed the source of the noise was not at the riverside but deeper in the forest.

As I walked, I counted on my fingers and realized that, oddly, the sound was not constant. After exactly fifty times, it would stop for three minutes or so, then resume for another fifty on the dot. It had to be coming from a human source.

I would walk with a vague sense of direction during each three-minute interval, then recalibrate when the sound returned. Soon I had left the water behind and ventured back among the trees. Silently I passed by the now-familiar dragonflies, blue lizards, and enormous mushrooms.

“…Forty-nine…fifty,” I counted, just as it became noticeably brighter among the trees ahead. It could be the forest’s exit or even a village. I quickened my pace toward the light.

Climbing a set of rising roots like stairs so I could peer around an ancient trunk without exposing myself, I was met with a sight that was nothing short of breathtaking.

It wasn’t the end of the forest or a human settlement. But the scope of the sight was so jaw-dropping that I didn’t have time to feel disappointed.

It was a circular clearing in the middle of the forest, far larger than the little patch of grass where I’d awoken—about a hundred feet across, I guessed. The ground was covered in that pale-green moss, but unlike what I’d been walking over all this time, there were no ferns, vines, or low bushes at all.

Just one thing, standing in the middle of the clearing, commanded my gaze:

What an enormous tree!

The trunk of the tree couldn’t have been less than thirteen feet across. Unlike the gnarled, broad-leaved trees of the forest, this was a conifer that stood absolutely straight. The bark was so dark it was nearly black, and numerous layers of branches spread out far, far above. It reminded me of the ancient Jōmon Sugi tree on Yakushima or the giant redwoods of western America, but the sheer presence of this tree gave it an unnatural air. It towered imperiously over everything.

I slowly lowered my gaze from the impenetrable branches above to the roots of the tree. A lattice of massive roots thick as anacondas stretched in all directions, right up to the boundary of the rest of the forest. It seemed to me that the sheer life this tree sucked up was the reason for the clearing—nothing but moss could grow where the roots devoured all nutrients.

It was a bit nerve-racking to step into the garden of an emperor like this, but I couldn’t resist the urge to touch such a tremendous thing. I made my way forward, tripping here and there over the mossy roots, because I couldn’t stop gazing up.

Nearly every breath out of my mouth was a gasp. I had lost all caution for my surroundings, so enchanted was I at the sight. So, naturally, I didn’t notice until it was far too late.

“?!”

When I dropped my gaze to ground level, I met the eyes of someone peering around the trunk. My breath caught in my throat, and I twitched, stumbled, and crouched. My hand started to reach over my back, but there was no sword there.

Fortunately, the first human I had seen in this world was not hostile or even cautious. He just stared at me, mystified.

He looked to be my age—about seventeen or eighteen. His ash-brown hair had just a hint of waviness. Like me, he wore a simple tunic and trousers. He was sitting on a root like a bench, holding something round in his right hand.

The odd part was his appearance. His skin was cream-colored, but he appeared neither fully Western nor Eastern. His features were fine and gentle, and his eyes looked dark green.

The moment I saw his face, something deep in my head itched again…deep in my soul. But the instant I tried to seize the feeling, it vanished. I pushed aside that odd hesitation and decided to speak, to make it clear I had no hostile intentions. But before I could do so, I needed to know what language to say it in. I stood there for so long with my mouth agape that the other boy spoke first.

“Who are you? Where did you come from?”

There was something just barely alien about his accent, but it was otherwise perfect Japanese.

I was just as stunned as when I’d first seen the pitch-black tree. For whatever reason, I hadn’t expected to hear my mother tongue in this clearly foreign world. There was something unreal about hearing familiar words come from the mouth of an exotic, Middle-Ages-European boy, as if I were watching a dubbed version of a foreign film.

But I couldn’t stand there dumbfounded. It was time to think. My brain had been getting rusty recently, and I needed to get it percolating.

If this was the STL’s Underworld, that meant this boy was most likely either (1) another test player in a dive, with memories from the real world like me, (2) a test player, but with memory limitations that made him just another resident of this world, or (3) an NPC being run by the program itself.

The first possibility would make things easy. I’d just explain the abnormality happening to me, and he could tell me how to log out.

But the second or third possibilities would not be so simple. If I started listing off a bunch of incomprehensible jargon about Soul Translator anomalies and log-out methods to a human or NPC who was functioning as a resident of the Underworld, it would only put them on edge and make collecting information more difficult.

So I decided I needed to open a conversation using only safe terminology, until I could ascertain just who or what this boy was. I wiped my sweaty palms on my pants and tried to put on a reassuring smile.

“Umm…my name is…”

I paused. I wondered whether the names of people in this world were Japanese or European. I prayed that my own name could fit either case.

“…Kirito. I was coming here from that direction and wound up lost,” I said, pointing to what I guessed was south. The boy’s eyes bulged. He set down the round object in his hand and got to his feet, pointing in the same direction.

“You mean…from south of the forest? Did you come from Zakkaria?”

“Er, n-no,” I said, fighting the instinct to let panic grip my features. “I, um…actually, I don’t know where I came from, really…I just kind of woke up from being passed out in the forest…”

I was hoping for a response like, Oh, an STL error? Hang on, I’ll contact the operator, but the boy merely gave me the same shocked response. He stared closely at me and said, “Wait…you don’t know where you came from? Not even…what town you live in…?”

“Er, right…I don’t know. All I remember is my name…”

“…I can’t believe it…I’ve heard the stories about ‘Vecta’s lost children’ but never thought I’d actually see one in person.”

“V-Vecta’s lost children…?”

“Don’t they call them that, wherever you’re from? When someone disappears one day or appears in the forest or fields all of a sudden, that’s what the villagers call them. The God of Darkness, Vecta, kidnaps people as a prank, stealing their memories and placing them in a far-off land. In my village, an old lady vanished years and years ago, they say.”

“Ohhh…Then maybe that’s what I am…”

On the inside, I found this ominous. It no longer seemed likely that this boy was just a tester engaging in a bit of role-playing. Sensing that some walls might be closing in around me, I decided to test out a more direct tactic.

“Anyway…I’m in a bit of a bind, so I’d like to leave. But I don’t know how…”

Silently, I was begging for him to pick up my hint, but the boy only looked at me with sympathy and said, “Yes, the forest is very deep. If you don’t know the way, you’re bound to get lost. But don’t worry—there’s a path out of here to the north.”

“Er, no, I mean…”

I threw caution to the wind.

“…I want to log out.”

My Hail Mary attempt was met by a curious tilt of the head. “L-log? What about a log? What did you say?”

That settled it.

Whether tester or NPC, he was a pure resident of the realm with no concept of a “virtual reality.” I tried not to let the disappointment show as I hastened to clarify. “S-sorry, I think I slipped into my local slang for a moment. Um, what I meant to say was…I want to find a place I can stay in a nearby town or village.”

I thought it was a very weak excuse, but if anything, the boy was impressed.

“Ohh…I’ve never heard those words before. And that black hair is uncommon in these parts…Perhaps you were born in the south.”

“M-maybe you’re right,” I said with a stiff smile. He smiled back, all innocence, then crinkled his eyebrows with worry.

“Hmm, a place to stay. My village is just to the north, but we never get any travelers, so there’s no inn. But…if I explain the situation, maybe Sister Azalia at the church can take you in.”

“Oh…I see. That’s good,” I said with all honesty. If there was a village, a Rath staffer might be in a dive there or monitoring it from the outside. “In that case, I’ll go to the village. Just north of here, you said?”

I glanced ahead and saw that in the opposite direction of the way I’d come, there was indeed a narrow trail. No sooner had I started walking than the boy held out a hand to catch my attention.

“Oh, w-wait. There are guards in the village, so it might be difficult to explain the situation if you show up alone. I’ll go with you and tell them what’s going on.”

“Thanks, that’ll be a big help,” I said. Inwardly, I was certain he wasn’t just an NPC. His conversational skills were too fluid for him to be a low-level program with preset answers to general questions, and an NPC wouldn’t elect to be so active in my affairs, either.

I didn’t know whether I was diving from the Rath lab in Roppongi or their company headquarters at its undisclosed location in the Tokyo Bay area, but I could tell that whoever owned the fluctlight controlling this boy had a very helpful personality. Once I had safely escaped this test, I owed him some thanks.

Meanwhile, the boy’s face clouded again. “Oh…but I can’t right now…There’s still work to be done…”

“Work?”

“Yes. I’m on my lunch break.”

I glanced down at the bundle of cloth at the boy’s feet, through which peeked two round rolls of bread. That was what I’d seen him holding at first. The only other object was a leather water pouch—a very meager excuse for a lunch.

“Oh, I didn’t realize I was interrupting your meal,” I said, but he only grinned back.

“If you can wait until I’m done working, I’ll go to the church with you to ask Sister Azalia if she’ll let you stay there. That’ll be four hours from now, though.”

I wanted to go to the boy’s village as soon as possible and find someone who could explain the situation, but more important, I didn’t want to be on thin ice with a bunch of conversations. Four hours was a long time, but with the STL’s fluctlight acceleration, it was only an hour and change in real time.

And for some reason I didn’t understand, I found that I wanted to talk more with the helpful young man. I told him, “It’s fine, I can wait. I appreciate the help.”

His smile grew a bit wider, and he replied, “I see. In that case, you can sit anywhere you like. Oh…I didn’t give you my name yet, did I?”

He held out his right hand. “I’m Eugeo. Nice to meet you, Mr. Kirito.”

His grip was much firmer than his skinny build would suggest. I rolled the name around in my head. I didn’t recall hearing it before, and it didn’t sound like it belonged to any language in particular, but the word was familiar on my tongue for some reason.

The boy named Eugeo let go and sat back down on the tree root, took the rolls out of the cloth, and handed one to me.

“Oh, I’m fine,” I said, waving my hand, but he didn’t withdraw the offer.

“Aren’t you hungry, too, Mr. Kirito? You haven’t eaten anything, I bet.”

As soon as he said that, a pang of hunger hit my brain, and I unconsciously clutched my stomach. The river water was delicious, but it didn’t fill the belly like food did.

“True, but…”

I hesitated again, and this time he pushed the roll into my hands. Eugeo grinned and shrugged.

“It’s fine. I know it’s ironic to say this after I just gave you one, but I’m not really a fan of them.”

“In that case…thank you. As a matter of fact, I’m about to pass out from hunger.”

Eugeo laughed and said that was what he figured. I sat down on the root across from him and added, “Plus, you can just call me Kirito.”

“Really? Well, I’m just Eugeo, too, then…Oh, hang on,” he noted, holding up a hand to stop me from taking a bite of the bread.

“…?”