A shining metal-gray light appeared, which took further shape as my command continued. It grew out to a good foot and a half with a pointed end—a brand-new climbing hook.
I gripped it tight, looked up at the seam in the stone where my sword was stuck, and pulled my arm back.
“Hmph!”
With all the strength I could muster, I drove the hook into the wall. To my relief, it didn’t break. The blade stuck right in the narrow crack. I gave it a few firm yanks up and down as a test, and it appeared wedged tightly enough to support my weight.
Objects generated by sacred arts had very little life and would disappear in a matter of hours if just left around. So it wasn’t suitable to be a lifeline between Alice and me, but it would at least be sturdy enough to act as a decent foothold when climbing the wall.
I could feel the doubt in Alice’s gaze as I held the hook tight with my right hand and pried loose my poor abused sword with my left. Once it was safely back in its sheath, I hung from the fifteen-inch support with both hands and kicked up like mounting a bar.
My physical abilities in the Underworld weren’t exactly like in the later days of SAO, where I had agility that would make a B-movie ninja jealous, but I was still much nimbler and stronger than in the real world. I put my right foot on the bar and rose up to a standing position, with my left hand pressed firmly against the wall.
“A-are you all right?” came a hoarse voice. I saw Alice looking up at me with a pale face and her free hand clutching the golden chain. She looked surprisingly young and innocent. For a moment, I was tempted to pretend to fall, just to see what she’d do, but then thought better of it.
“I think…I am.”
I gave her a little wave with my right hand, then chanted another sacred art to summon a fresh climbing hook. I drove it into the next seam overhead and climbed up as before. It was only six feet of progress, but I felt a small measure of accomplishment at the success.
I called down to Alice, “I think this will work! Just follow me and climb up on the first bar below.”
The Integrity Knight stared at me without budging. Eventually her lips moved, and I just barely heard the sound, “…an’t.”
“Huh? What’d you say?”
“I said…I can’t!”
“Uh…sure you can. With your strength, it should be easy to pull yourself up to—”
“That’s not what I mean!” she insisted, cutting off my awkward attempt at a pep talk. “I have never experienced a situation like this before…and at the risk of exposing myself to shame, it is all I can do just to hang here. I simply can’t climb up on such a slender step…”
Her voice trailed off into nothing again.
I was shocked. As a general rule, Underworldians were uncomfortable with situations outside their personal experience or expectations. So they had a poor ability to react to impossible circumstances, to the extent that when I cut off his arms, Raios’s fluctlight actually collapsed before his life ran out—or so I assumed.
Even an Integrity Knight had to be struggling with the experience of breaking a hole through a supposedly indestructible wall, getting sucked into the void outside, and dangling from a height that even dragons couldn’t reach. Perhaps though, deep down, the superlative sword-wielding Alice Synthesis Thirty was just another girl.
In any case, given her abundance of pride, I had to assume that the Integrity Knight’s admission of weakness meant she was at her wits’ end.
“Okay!” I shouted. “Then I’ll pull you up to the bar with the chain!”
Alice bit her lip, apparently weighing fear against pride, and ultimately decided that she’d cast her lot already and wasn’t going to change her mind. She tugged on the chain.
“Th-thank you for the assistance,” she squeaked. I gripped the chain, resisting the urge to tease her.
“All right, I’ll lift you slowly. Here goes.”
I carefully pulled it up. The hook under my feet creaked, but it seemed to be able to withstand two people for a bit of time. I lifted the golden knight a few feet, careful not to rock the foothold too much, then held the chain in midair.
“There. You can pull out your sword now.”
Alice nodded, slowly removing the point of the Osmanthus Blade from the white stone. A large amount of fresh weight yanked on the chain, and I gritted my teeth as I held it still. Once her sword was back in its sheath, I resumed lifting.
When Alice’s boots were resting on the first hook below, I instructed her, “Now place both your hands against the wall to steady yourself…good. I’m releasing the chain now.”
I couldn’t see her face due to the angle, but she did subtly tip her head as she clung to the wall. Imagining her desperate expression below that windswept blond hair, I lowered my right arm. She momentarily wobbled, then regained her balance.
“Phew…”
I let out a long breath I didn’t realize I’d been holding.
How many more feet until this so-called Morning Star Lookout on the ninety-fifth floor? As long as I could successfully repeat this process, we would make it eventually. The problem boiled down to the time it took to make it up one block. Night would fall eventually, and if we needed to sleep while hanging off the wall.
“Okay, I’m going to go one step higher again,” I warned her.
She turned her panicked face toward me and replied, barely audible through the breeze, “Please be careful.”
“Sure thing.”
I gave her a bracing thumbs-up—a gesture I was certain no one in the Underworld understood—then chanted the system command for a third climbing hook.
Despite Centoria getting ready for its summer solstice festival in the lands below us, when the sun began sinking, its progress was mercilessly swift. Against the white stone, the orange light of the setting sun quickly progressed from a burning red to violet to deep navy blue, until only fragments of the End Mountains were visible in the last red light of the day, far, far to the west.
Overhead, the stars were twinkling, but they did not bless our progress. An hour earlier, we had come across an unexpected limitation of the system that was proving rather difficult.
The process of our climb was simple: I created a hook with sacred arts, stuck it in the gap between the marble blocks, and climbed on top of it. Then I would lift Alice with the chain so that she stood on the hook below me. Once we did this about ten times, we’d gotten a single repetition down to under three minutes.
The problem was with generating the hooks themselves. There was no statistic in this world that corresponded to what we’d call mana points in ALO. The magic they called sacred arts could be repeated as often as you wanted, as long as the spell was within your system access level.
That did not mean they were usable anywhere and everywhere, however. This world’s rules dictated that all production required magical resources, a fact that applied to sacred arts as much as anything else. In order to execute an art, you needed to expend spatial resources, either in the vicinity of the user or through consuming the life of valuable catalysts or living things—even humans.
Spatial resources were tricky because they couldn’t be measured in numbers. For the most part, this value came from sunlight or the earth. Wherever the ground was fertile and open to the sun, resources would be rich, enough to support continued casting of high-level arts. On the other end, a windowless room in a stone building would run out of resources very quickly and take a long time to recharge.
By those rules, our current situation—stuck at a height of fifteen hundred feet off the ground with the sun sinking over the horizon—was about as bad as it could possibly get. Before long, my hook-generating sacred arts had dried up all of the twilight’s resources, leaving us unable to continue upward.
“System Call! Generate Metallic Element!”
Over my palm, outstretched to catch some last bit of light in vain, a few little motes of silver light floated, then snuffed out with tiny wisps of smoke.
I s
ighed, and below me, I heard Alice murmur, “Generating containers like that uses much spiritual power. Now that Solus is gone, you’ll be lucky to manage one per hour. How far have we climbed?”
“Err…I think we’re past the eighty-fifth floor now.”
“So there’s a long way to go until ninety-five.”
I gazed longingly at the traces of purple in the sky. “Yeah…and in any case, once it’s dark, it’ll be too dangerous to keep climbing. And if we try to camp out here, getting any rest will be difficult…”
At worst, someone would need to dangle from the chain, but not only could we not create more hooks, they would also disappear after a few dozen minutes, so we’d have no choice but to use our swords as supports again. And I wasn’t sure they could withstand the pressure all night.
I looked up the wall face, stubbornly hoping that there’d be some kind of outcropping we could connect the chain to, using its fastener. And then…
“Oh…”
There was a series of evenly spaced shadows with complex shapes against the wall not much more than twenty feet above us. When the sun went down, the mist around the tower dissipated, revealing these hidden decorations.
“Hey…does that look like something to you?” I asked, pointing. Alice looked up and narrowed her blue eyes.
“You’re right…Statues, perhaps? But why would they be here, so high up, where no one will see them?”
“I don’t care why, as long as we can sit and rest on them. But they’re a good…eight mels above us. We’ll need another three bars in order to climb up there.”
“Three bars…,” she repeated, deep in thought. “All right. I was planning to save this for an emergency…and it looks like the time has come.”
She pushed her back against the wall and removed the gauntlet on her left hand. She stared at the faintly glowing piece of armor and began to chant the command for a sacred art. When she finished her execution (many times smoother than mine), there was a flash, and the gauntlet had turned into three more climbing hooks. Alice’s matter-transforming arts must’ve had better energy efficiency than generating from thin air, given my inability to summon any myself.
“Here, use these,” she said, stretching upward with the hooks in her hand. I crouched down and carefully took the tools.
“Thank you—this is a huge help.”
“If it’s truly necessary, I have more armor…”
I glanced at the fine breastplate that covered her upper half and shook my head. “No…we’ll leave that one to the very end. You never know what we might need…”
I carefully got to my feet, stuck two of the hooks into my belt, and lifted the third.
“Uraa!”
Sure enough, the golden hook was much sturdier than the metallic elements I’d created; it sank deep into the rock’s seam. I did the now-familiar climbing routine and used the chain to pull Alice up. After another repetition, the mysterious objects were half as far away, and much clearer in the darkness.
They were stone statues, as it turned out; large and ornate, a significant number surrounded the cathedral walls on narrow terraces. But these were not the holy statues of goddesses and angels that I’d seen inside the tower. They were human-shaped, true, but bent at the knees into a crouch, with their arms folded menacingly over their legs. Gnarled muscles bulged, and wings as sharp as knives extended from their backs.
Worst of all, the heads of the statues were utterly alien, curved and elongated at the front and ending in a conical mouth. They looked like the heads of some kind of grotesque giant weevils.
“Ugh…that’s such a creepy design,” I groaned.
“Huh…? W-wait…that’s from the Dark Territory…!” Alice exclaimed.
Just then, the head of the statue right above me craned back and forth, its lamprey mouth opening and closing. That was not some decorative statue carved out of stone. It was…alive.
If this were a quest in some ordinary VRMMO back in the real world, a statue attack would be inevitable after a demonstration like that. But in this case, the person writing the scenario was either a total sadist or a green beginner. We were stuck on these foot-long hooks jammed into a sheer wall, with nowhere else to go.
The term certain-defeat event crossed my mind, but I dismissed it just as quick. This wouldn’t be one of those thrill-ride incidents where someone would swoop in and save us if we fell. We had to use our brains to evade danger on our own, or we would die.
While I prepared myself for danger, the winged statue shook itself and began to change color. Its white skin, the same hue as the tower stone, began turning a slick charcoal black, starting from the extremities.
I drew my sword in anticipation of the black wings snapping out into full extension. Without taking my eyes off the former statue, I shouted down to Alice, “Looks like we’ll have to fight here. Not falling off should be the top priority!”
But I didn’t hear the Integrity Knight respond right away. I glanced down and saw her face, pale in the night, a perfect picture of shock. On the updraft of wind I heard the whisper: “No, how is this possible?”
An Integrity Knight should know everything about the Axiom Church. Why would she be so surprised? From what I knew through my secondhand reports about Administrator, she was abnormally cautious. Surely, it wasn’t so unthinkable that she would not only prevent flight to the tower’s upper sections, but also place stone guardians along the walls in case any challengers were persistent and mad enough to climb all the way.
The guardian—which, aside from the head, looked similar to a typical video game gargoyle—gripped the terrace ledge with clawed hands and emitted a whoosh of air from its mouth.
A shiver went down my back as I realized the gargoyles on either side of the animated one were also changing color. If they were placed equally around all four walls of the cathedral, there could be at least a hundred.
“Oh, damn,” I hissed, turning to press my back to the wall and hefting up my sword. Just that was enough to unbalance me, given the tiny bar I was standing on. Even in SAO, I had never tried to fight like this.
But before I could even start planning, I heard the wings flapping overhead. The gargoyle was hovering against the dark-blue sky, the round eyes on either side of its elongated head fixed on me. The monster was bigger than I’d expected, probably more than six feet. Even its dangling tail looked about as long as I was tall.
“Bshaaa!!”
It let out a hiss like steam escaping a valve, then plunged headfirst toward me.
It didn’t seem to have any ranged attacks, fortunately, so I anticipated claws on one of its limbs to appear next. Right or left, top or bottom—
“…Whoa!!”
With a whiplike crack, its tail shot out. I jerked my head away and yelped in surprise; the tip grazed my cheek, as sharp and pointed as a knife.
I’d managed to dodge, but my balance was now a problem. I wobbled atop the hook, attempting to stay upright. Mercilessly, the gargoyle’s tail shot at me again.
With my left hand against the wall to steady myself, I blocked the tail attack with the sword in my right. It was all I could do to hold it up like a shield. There was no way I could actually swing it around to sever the spike.
“Urgh…”
Sensing that this wasn’t the time to be thrifty, I took my left hand off the wall and pulled out one of the two golden hooks in my belt. Envisioning the movements of the Throwing Weapons skill I’d practiced so much in SAO, I hurled the spear at the center of the gargoyle’s body.
I didn’t put that much effort into the throw, but the short spear lived up to its nature as Alice’s gauntlet, shining bright through the gloom to sink deep into the gargoyle’s lower stomach.
“Bshhi!” it hissed, its circular mouth spurting black blood. The monster flapped its wings irregularly, trying to regain altitude. I’d inflicted some good damage, but not enough to vanquish it. The black, insectoid eyes glared at me with rage.
Even knowing there
were more important things at hand, I couldn’t help but wonder, Was it just a program controlling that freakish monster? Or, like the people from the Dark Territory, was it an artificial fluctlight…?
“Bshhhuuu!!”
A second cry jolted me out of that thought. Two more gargoyles had descended from the terrace and were circling around, waiting for their opportunity to strike.
“Alice, draw your sword! The monsters are coming for you!”
I glanced below and saw that the Integrity Knight was not yet over her unexplained shock. If they attacked now, she’d be either skewered by a tail or knocked off the hook.
Should I try to climb the remaining dozen or so feet to the terrace while the gargoyles are still hanging back? I had only one hook left in my belt—and I suspected the furious beast with the hook stuck in its stomach would not be kind enough to give it back.
If the current high-pitched screech was any indication, the three hissing monsters were getting ready to attack again. I could potentially be forced to let go of the lifeline chain and jump down onto a gargoyle if it swooped on Alice. I felt my belt for the chain’s clasp. Then my eyes went wide.
The length of the chain was over fifteen feet. And there were only about twelve feet between me and the ledge.
“Alice…Alice!!” I bellowed as I slid my sword back into its sheath. The Integrity Knight twitched and turned her blue eyes to me at last.
“Hold tight to the chain!”
She frowned, looking confused. I used both hands to grip the chain connected to her sword sheath and pulled, lifting her off the hook. She belatedly grabbed the chain and gasped, “Wait…are you…?”
“If we both survive, I’ll give you all the apologies you want later!!”
I sucked in a deep breath, then yanked—no, hurled—the knight hanging on the chain upward. Her long golden hair and white skirt billowed through the air as Alice swung in a semicircle.
“Eyaaaa!!” she shrieked, a surprisingly amateur reaction, as she passed between the gargoyles on her way to landing on the ledge above. Landing not in the active sense, but the passive. I decided to ignore the very unladylike Murgk! that ended her scream.
Alicization Dividing Page 3
