Sword Art Online: The Flame-Eyed Warriors
Chapter 3 — Ragna and the Dragon Tamer
There is a particular quality to mornings in Aincrad that the game's designers had clearly spent considerable time on.
The light arrived gradually, filtering through the inn windows in the unhurried way of light that has somewhere to be but is not in a rush to get there. It touched the cobblestones outside in long, amber-edged strips. It found the edges of armor hanging on hooks and the surface of weapons leaning against walls. It made the world look, for approximately the first twenty minutes after dawn, like somewhere worth being.
The Flame-Eyed Sword Troupe had developed their morning routine with the quiet efficiency of people who had been waking up beside each other their entire lives and had long ago ironed out the inefficiencies. Kanna was always first. Odyn was always second. The others assembled in an order that varied slightly day to day but always resolved itself into the same configuration by the time they gathered outside the inn, weapons secured, breakfast consumed, ready.
It was Sarai who noticed.
"Where are you going?"
Ragna had his back to them, already moving toward the teleport plaza with the particular forward lean of someone who had somewhere specific to be. He paused. Turned slightly.
"Info gathering," he said. "Private kind."
"Can I come?" Lyra asked, with the directness of someone who already suspected the answer and was asking anyway on principle.
Ragna crossed back to her and crouched down, bringing himself to her eye level. He smoothed the wayward strands of lavender-blue hair from her forehead with the automatic tenderness of someone who had been performing this gesture for so many years it had become reflex.
"Afraid not this time," he said. "The kind of gathering I'm doing needs to stay quiet."
Lyra's expression did the thing it always did — a brief, honest fall, followed by a recovery that was faster than it had any right to be. "You won't be gone long?"
"Few days. I'll bring something back."
Her face rearranged itself immediately into something brighter, and Ragna shook his head slightly, smiling despite himself. She had always been like this — grief and joy existing in her at almost no distance from each other, one giving way to the other with a speed that could be either infuriating or deeply endearing depending on the circumstances.
"It's Titan's Hand," Baron said. It was not a question.
Ragna straightened, rolled his shoulders once. "That would be the one."
Kanna had been watching the exchange with the quiet attention she applied to most things. "Be careful," she said, which was her version of saying considerably more than that.
"You know me," Ragna replied.
"That's why I said it."
He grinned at her, turned, and was gone into the morning crowd before anyone could add anything further.
Kanna watched the space where he had been for a moment, then turned back to the others. "Alright. We have our own work to do."
The forest on the thirty-fifth floor was the kind of beautiful that did not particularly care whether it was appreciated.
It existed in the way that all the natural spaces in Aincrad existed — rendered with a specificity that suggested either genuine love for the subject matter on the part of its designers or a very precise set of reference photographs. The trees were large and unevenly spaced, the light through the canopy was green-gold and moving, and the undergrowth held the quiet, purposeful quality of somewhere that many things lived and none of them were interested in being observed.
The argument had begun the way most arguments in Aincrad began: with two people who wanted different things and insufficient patience on both sides to navigate around the difference.
The girl at the center of it was small — not child-small, but slight in the way of people who have always occupied slightly less space than the room expected of them. Her armor was practical gray over a yellow tunic, the skirt-like lower portion moving when she did in the way of something designed more for agility than formality. Her name in the game was Siluca, and she wore it with the particular ownership of someone who had chosen it for reasons she didn't necessarily intend to explain.
On her shoulder, a tiny dragon — real in the way that only deeply well-designed things manage to be, its scales catching the dappled light with iridescent exactness — pressed its small nose against her cheek with the focused affection of something that had decided she was its entire world and was not interested in revising this position.
The girl she was arguing with was taller and had the kind of surface pleasantness that was actually a weapon in a very specific social armoury — designed to charm exactly as long as it was useful, and to vanish completely the moment it wasn't. Rosalia had red hair and a pike with a cross-blade that was slightly more theatrical than it needed to be for its stated purpose, which was possibly the point.
"You don't even fight on the front lines," Siluca was saying, her voice three degrees sharper than it had been five minutes ago, which was still several degrees calmer than the situation arguably warranted. "Why would I give you my healing crystals?"
"Because," Rosalia said, playing with a strand of her own hair in a gesture so deliberately casual it had clearly been practiced, "that's how these arrangements work. You're popular, dear. It's only fair to distribute a little."
"That's not — that's not how anything works—"
"Fine," Siluca said, and the word had the quality of a door closing. "Keep everything. I'm done."
"Siluca, wait—" one of the other party members called.
She was already walking.
She did not look back. Behind her, visible to no one she would have wanted to share the observation with, Rosalia's expression underwent a small but significant transformation — the smile not disappearing, exactly, but sharpening at its edges into something with rather different implications.
The forest at night was convincingly dark.
Siluca had gone further in than was wise, which she knew even as she was doing it, which is often how unwise things happen — not through ignorance of the danger but through a particular kind of emotional velocity that makes the calculus of safety feel temporarily irrelevant. She had needed distance. She had found it, along with a pack of Large Apes whose red eyes materialized out of the dark in a rough semicircle around her.
She fought well.
This was worth noting, because it was true and because it was easy to overlook in the moment: she was genuinely skilled, her dagger moving through a series of sword skills with an economy of motion that spoke of hours of practice. The apes were simply a different category of problem — higher level, more HP, hits that landed with the weight of something that had been designed specifically to be difficult.
Pina circled above the fray, small wings a blur, and when a strike landed badly and Siluca's HP dropped faster than expected, the familiar descended immediately with the healing breath that was its most reliable talent. The warmth of it spread through her avatar like a hand placed on a shoulder.
She reached for her inventory.
The space where the healing crystals should have been was empty.
The realization arrived not as a thought but as a physical sensation — the particular cold that is the body's way of registering danger before the mind has finished processing it. She looked up. The largest ape had drawn back, coiling its weight into the preparation for a strike that she did not have the HP to survive.
Pina saw it first.
The tiny dragon did not calculate the cost. It simply moved — inserting itself into the space between its tamer and the descending blow with the singular, complete decisiveness of something that had already made its choice long before this moment and was only now arriving at the occasion to act on it.
The blow landed.
Pina's HP gauge, displayed in Siluca's peripheral vision, dropped from green to yellow to red to nothing in a span of time too brief to be processed in real time. Only afterward. Only when the pixels began their slow dissolution, drifting upward in the flickering dark of the forest like sparks rising from a fire that has just gone out.
What remained in Siluca's trembling hands was a single feather, iridescent and still warm with the residual light of whatever Pina had been.
"Pina," she said.
And then the remaining apes turned toward her, and she closed her eyes, and the forest was very dark, and she did not hear the sword skills activate until they had already done their work.
The young man who stood in the aftermath was dark-skinned, pointed-eared, amber-eyed in the particular way that the members of one specific group of players were amber-eyed — not as a cosmetic choice, but as a fact. His armor was black and purple, practically fitted, no unnecessary ornamentation. His sword was already being resheathed with the ease of someone for whom the motion required no conscious direction.
He looked at Siluca. He looked at her hands. He understood what had happened in the same moment she finished understanding it herself.
"Was that your friend?" he asked.
Not familiar. Not companion. The word he had chosen was friend, and Siluca felt the accuracy of it land somewhere below the register of language.
"Pina," she said. "She was my best friend."
"You're a beast tamer," he said, not quite asking.
"I was." She looked down at the feather. "I don't know what I am now."
He was quiet for a moment. "Check the feather. It might have an item name attached."
She did. It didn't. The item description was bare — a memorial object, nothing more, no special properties, no revival potential embedded in its data. When she understood this, something in her chest that had been holding itself together on the basis of hope simply let go, and she stopped trying to hold the grief in.
"I should have been stronger," she managed. "I knew those monsters were above my level. I knew, and I went anyway, because I was — I was angry and I wasn't thinking—"
"Hey."
He placed a hand on her shoulder. It was not an intrusive gesture; it was the gesture of someone who had been in proximity to grief before and knew that what it sometimes needed was simply a point of contact, a reminder that the world outside it was still there.
"If I had arrived a few minutes earlier—" he started.
"It wasn't your fault."
"No. But I'm sorry all the same."
She looked at him properly for the first time. Flame-colored eyes, which she had not quite registered in the chaos of rescue and loss, and a face that was younger than his bearing initially suggested. He looked like someone who had been given a great deal of responsibility at an age that was perhaps slightly too early for it, and who had decided, rather than resenting this, to simply become equal to it.
"There's a chance," he said carefully, "that Pina can be revived."
The words reached her in fragments, each one arriving a beat after the previous, assembling themselves into a meaning that her mind was not immediately willing to accept as possible.
"...What?"
"Floor 47. There's a dungeon called the Hill of Memories. At the summit—" He paused, measuring his words. "There's said to be an item. A revival flower. For familiars."
She was already on her feet, already reaching for her menu, already—
"Siluca."
Something in his voice stopped her.
"The time limit for revival is three days."
She counted. She had been in the forest for — she checked the game clock — fourteen hours since Pina had died. Which meant she had approximately fifty-eight hours remaining. Which meant the route to floor 47, the dungeon clearance, the descent, everything — all of it had to be accomplished inside that window.
The color drained from her face.
"Three days," she said.
"Yes."
"Then we need to—"
"We need to move quickly," he agreed, and the we was so matter-of-fact that she almost didn't register it, the way you almost don't register the ground beneath your feet until you realize you had expected it to give way.
"You don't have to—"
"I know," he said. "I'm going."
He opened his inventory and began transferring items — equipment of a caliber that she recognized, even at a glance, as several tiers above anything her current stats could normally justify. He moved them to her inventory with the same efficiency he seemed to apply to everything.
She stared at him. "Why would you do this for someone you don't know?"
He rubbed the back of his neck, looking somewhere to the left of her face.
"Promise you won't laugh," he said.
"I promise."
"You remind me," he said slowly, "of my younger sister."
Siluca held the laughter in for approximately three seconds before it escaped her, quiet and helpless and completely genuine. "I'm sorry — I'm sorry, I did promise—"
"I knew you'd laugh," he said, but there was no real irritation in it.
"I really am sorry. It's just—" She covered her mouth, collecting herself. "It's a good thing. It's a sweet thing."
He extended his hand. "Ragna."
She took it. "Siluca. And — thank you. For all of this."
"Don't thank me yet," he said. "We should find an inn and map the route. There's a town nearby."
"I know it," she said. "They do cheesecake there."
He looked at her. "Is that relevant to our current situation?"
"It's very relevant. It's excellent cheesecake."
A pause. "Alright then," he said, and led the way.
The town had the particular busyness of a mid-floor settlement that had found its equilibrium — not a frontier town, not yet the polished safety of the lower floors, but a place that had decided it was staying, had built accordingly, and had the foot traffic to prove it. Players moved through the streets in the organized patterns of people who had things to do and a reasonable expectation of surviving long enough to do them.
They had not been on the main street for three minutes before the voices found them.
"Siluca!"
Two players, both in the middle range of the armor quality that suggested dedicated players who hadn't yet cracked the upper tier. Their relief at seeing her lasted approximately as long as it took them to register Ragna standing beside her, at which point it curdled slightly into something that wore the mask of concern but had different eyes.
"You were gone so long," one of them said. "We were worried."
"We can take you wherever you need to go," the other offered, his attention on Siluca but his body angled toward Ragna in the way of someone establishing a territorial boundary they hoped would be read without needing to be stated.
Siluca did the calculation in approximately one second. She moved slightly — not dramatically, not by much — and her hand closed around Ragna's arm with the grip of someone choosing a direction.
"That's really kind of you both, but I'm already in a party, so — sorry, bye!"
She pulled. Ragna went, because there was nothing to be gained by remaining.
Once they were out of earshot, she released his arm with the slightly over-casual manner of someone completing an action they had not entirely planned and were now retroactively deciding was unremarkable.
"Sorry," she said. "That was — I used you as cover and I shouldn't have done that without—"
"It's fine," Ragna said.
"They don't take me seriously," she said, after a moment. "They just want someone to be their — their decoration. Their mascot." A pause. "That's all anyone here has ever wanted me for."
She said the last part quietly and without self-pity, which somehow made it worse.
"The Dragon Tamer," Ragna said, reading the implication of it.
"I let it go to my head. The title, the — the idea that I had something other players didn't." She looked at her hands. "And then the moment things got hard, I went somewhere I wasn't ready to be, and Pina—"
"Siluca."
She looked up.
He touched the top of her head once, brief and gentle and entirely brotherly. "You're stronger than you think. Both of you were."
She held his gaze for a moment, then looked away.
"Let's go find the cheesecake," she said, which was not a non sequitur so much as a decision to move forward rather than backward.
"Yes," he agreed. "Let's."
They found a table at an inn with a kitchen that took itself seriously. The cheesecake arrived in portions that suggested someone behind the counter understood that the purpose of dessert in a game where everything else was potentially lethal was to be, as completely as possible, fine.
Ragna wrapped both hands around a cup of something warm and leaned back in his chair with the ease of someone who had been in enough dangerous situations to appreciate a genuinely unthreatening one.
"Was this your first MMO?" he asked.
"Yes," Siluca said, fork paused over her plate.
"A lot of people change when there aren't real consequences," he said. "They play at being something they wouldn't choose to be in a context where it would cost them something. The cruelty, the—" He stopped. "In a normal game, that has a ceiling. You can log out. Here—"
His hands, she noticed, had tightened slightly around the cup. A small thing, involuntary, the kind of tell that a person makes when a thought arrives that carries more weight than the conversation had been braced for.
"Ragna-san," she said.
He looked at her, and something in his expression shifted — the awareness that he had let something visible that he had intended to keep managed.
"Sorry," he said.
"Don't be."
She leaned forward and placed her hands over his, which was a small and somewhat impulsive gesture that she did before she had fully decided to do it. His stillness in response was not surprise, exactly. It was something more like recognition.
"You saved me," she said, very simply. "Whatever is hard about all this for you — that's still true."
He looked at her for a moment, and then some of the tension in his shoulders moved.
"You've cheered me up," he said, with what sounded very much like genuine surprise at the fact. "Thank you."
Siluca's face, in the warm light of the inn's interior, achieved a shade of red that the game engine rendered with admirable technical precision. She withdrew her hands and addressed herself urgently to the question of whether the cheesecake had arrived yet and where, specifically, the server had gotten to.
That night, after the table had been cleared and the practical details of their route to floor 47 had been discussed and a room secured, Siluca lay in the particular wakefulness of someone whose mind had too many things in it to permit sleep. The loss of Pina remained where losses always remain — present, aching, not yet processed into the quieter form of grief that time eventually produces.
But there was something else there too. Something that was not grief at all.
A soft knock at her door.
She sat up immediately.
"Are you still awake?" Ragna's voice, careful and low.
"Ragna-san—" she said, and then stopped, because her voice had done something undignified. She collected it. "Just a moment."
She pulled casual clothes on over her nightclothes with the focused speed of someone who has approximately twelve seconds and is making them count, and opened the door to find him standing in the hallway with a spherical device in his hand and the expression of someone who had knocked because they genuinely had something to say, not because of anything else, and wanted this to be clear.
"I forgot to go over the floor 47 route," he said. "I can come back in the morning if—"
"Now is fine," she said. "Come in."
They arranged themselves at the small table with the device between them, and Ragna pressed the activation point on its top. The sphere opened and projected a three-dimensional map into the air above it — soft blue light rendering the floors of Aincrad in precise miniature, the route from their current position to the Hill of Memories traced in a warmer gold.
"If we follow this path—" he began.
He stopped.
His expression changed. He held up a hand.
"Shh."
And then he was through the door in a single motion, the fluid speed of someone who had been trained to move rather than react, arriving at the point of action before the decision to arrive had fully formed. The corridor was empty except for the retreating edge of a dark cloak disappearing around the far corner.
He returned to the room, and the easy manner of the evening had been replaced by something more alert.
"Someone was listening," he said.
"But the walls here don't—"
"If your listening skill is high enough, they do." He closed the door behind him and stood for a moment, running the implications out in his mind. "It takes practice. There aren't many players who have it."
"Who would want to—" Siluca started, and then stopped, because the answer was arriving in pieces and she didn't like the shape it was assembling into.
"I'm not sure yet," Ragna said, which was technically true while also being a way of saying: I have a theory and I'm not going to frighten you with it prematurely.
"We'll need to be careful going forward," he said. "Get some sleep. We leave early."
She looked at him. "Ragna-san."
"Yeah."
"Whatever this is — I'm glad you're the one here for it."
He was quiet for a moment. "Get some sleep," he said again, and left, and she heard his footsteps move down the corridor toward his own room, steady and unhurried.
She lay back in the dark and thought about the route to floor 47, and about Pina, and about the particular quality of someone who could move that fast when it mattered and that gently when it didn't.
She fell asleep faster than she had expected to.
Floor 47 of Aincrad — the Flower Garden
The teleport gate delivered them into a world that had apparently decided to be beautiful without qualification or restraint.
Flowers. Everywhere — in colors that the game's palette had clearly been pushed to its limits to produce, in densities that made the floor look less like a dungeon level and more like the interior of someone's very sincere idea of paradise. The sky was the particular blue that only existed here, that slightly-too-perfect blue of a world whose atmosphere had been calibrated by someone who loved blue.
Siluca ran ahead before she had consciously decided to, drawn forward by the irresistible combination of color and light and the sheer tactile impossibility of it. She knelt beside a cluster of something violet and watched the small rendered insects move between the petals with a precision that bordered on the devotional.
"It's like dreaming," she said.
"Floor 47 is usually called the Flower Garden," Ragna said, coming to stand beside her. "Even people who never come here for the dungeon make the trip just for this."
Siluca stood, smoothing her skirt, and noticed the couples. Several of them, taking unhurried paths through the flower fields in the particular way of people for whom the destination was incidental to the being-together. The observation arrived in her mind in a neutral register and then promptly ceased to be neutral, and she felt the blood reach her face at a velocity she had no mechanism to prevent.
"Siluca?"
"Nothing — nothing, sorry—" She fixed her hair with great unnecessary focus. "Let's go."
"Are you sure you're—"
"Completely fine," she said, at a pitch approximately one key higher than normal. "Which way?"
He looked at her for a moment with an expression that suggested he had noticed something but had made the gentlemanly decision not to specify what. He turned and walked toward the mountain path.
She fell into step beside him and looked very deliberately at the flowers.
He gave her the teleport crystal at the bridge, with the matter-of-fact gravity of someone who had thought carefully about contingencies and wanted her to have the instrument of the one that mattered most.
"If anything happens," he said. "Anything at all. I say the word, you use it."
"But—"
"Siluca."
The way he said her name had a particular quality to it — not stern, not a command, but simply final. The way a door sounds when it has properly closed.
"Alright," she said.
"Thank you."
They walked. The mountain path ascended through plant monsters that Ragna dispatched with the compact efficiency of someone for whom this tier of enemy had long since ceased to represent a genuine challenge. They fought occasionally together — Siluca's dagger moving in the patterns she had been refining for months, finding the angles that the upgraded equipment Ragna had given her allowed her to reach with new ease — and in the intervals between, they talked.
She asked about his sister. It was a small question, tentative at the edges, with the awareness embedded in it that there are things people keep and things they share and that the invitation to share is an act of trust that can be declined.
He did not decline it.
"She's stubborn," he said, after a moment. "But only because she needs to be near people. The stubbornness is just — it's her way of staying in the orbit of the people she cares about."
"That's not really stubbornness at all," Siluca said.
"No," he agreed. "It isn't."
"Do you miss her?"
He was quiet for a beat. The answer was in the silence, if you knew how to read it.
"In real life," he said, "my family — all of us, everyone related to me — we aren't treated well. Not because of anything we've done. Because of what we look like. Because we're different in ways that make certain people uncomfortable, and those people have decided that discomfort is something that should be expressed outwardly and at volume."
Siluca did not respond immediately, because there is a kind of thing that is said that requires the person hearing it to actually hear it before they respond, and this was one of those things.
"Your eyes," she said.
"Among other things."
"That's—" She stopped. "I don't have a word for how awful that is."
"You don't need one."
"Ragna-san."
"Yeah."
"I think," she said carefully, "that your sister is proud of you. I think that anyone who knows you is."
He looked at her, and the expression on his face was one she could not entirely read, but which had in it something that looked like it had needed to land somewhere and was relieved to have found the place.
"There it is again," he said.
"What?"
"Making me feel better."
She felt warm and looked away at the summit ahead of them, where the dungeon waited.
"Nearly there," she said.
"Nearly," he agreed.
The ground opened under her foot without warning.
One moment she was stepping forward with renewed determination onto a path that appeared solid; the next, the jaws of a large plant monster had closed around her, lifting her off her feet with the patient aggression of something designed specifically to catch the unwary at the threshold of their destination.
"Ragna!"
His sword skill ignited before she had finished the word. The strike took the creature apart in a single, decisive arc, and she dropped free and landed in an undignified heap that she recovered from with more speed than grace, tugging her skirt back into place with the focused dignity of someone who was absolutely not embarrassed.
Ragna stood over the dissolving monster with his blade resting on his shoulder, completely unruffled, and offered her a thumbs up.
She laughed in spite of everything, which was exactly what the moment required.
The altar at the summit was old in the way that the best virtual spaces managed to be old — not through the application of rust and crumbling textures, but through a quality of stillness, as though this particular location had existed long enough to develop its own gravity.
The flower bloomed as they approached, as if it had been waiting. Petals of pure bioluminescent light, opening with the slow certainty of something fulfilling its purpose. The color of it was the color of something alive.
"Go ahead," Ragna said.
Siluca knelt and took the flower in both hands. It transformed as she lifted it — petals resolving into a crystalline vial, the light condensing into liquid, warm and luminous.
She held it up. The glow cast soft shadows across her face.
"This will bring her back," she said.
"Yes," Ragna said. "As far as I know."
She closed her eyes and smiled, and the smile was the kind that reaches every part of a face simultaneously, the kind that is not constructed but simply happens, and for a moment the dungeon and the danger and the three-day window and all of the complexity of the world they were trapped in receded, and there was only this: a girl holding a vial of light, and the genuine possibility that something lost could be recovered.
"We should revive her back at the inn," Ragna said. "There are high-level monsters in this area — Pina should be revived somewhere she doesn't have to immediately defend herself."
Siluca opened her eyes. "That's very thoughtful," she said.
"I've been thinking about it for a while."
"How long have you—"
His hand shot out.
"Behind the tree on the left," he said, in a voice that had changed. Not louder. Lower, actually. The particular register of someone who has located a specific threat and is addressing it directly.
"Whoever is there," he said, projecting to the distance without appearing to raise his voice, "may as well come out. Unless you'd like me to arrange it."
The tree gave up its occupant.
Red hair. Predatory smile. The smile of someone who had been watching and thought the watching had been private.
Siluca's breath caught. "Rosalia."
The clearing worked through its revelations in the particular order that confrontations tend to work through them — the surface justification first, then the actual motive underneath, then the architecture of the thing that had been built to accomplish the motive, and finally the moment when the person who had built the architecture realized that the person across from them had already mapped it completely.
Rosalia wanted the revival flower. The party membership, the argument with Siluca, the careful separation — all of it had been scaffolding for this single moment.
"Nice," she said, when Ragna laid the structure of it out. The word was the verbal equivalent of a very thin wall.
"The green cursor," Siluca said slowly. "She's not actually—"
"The green players find the targets," Ragna said. "The orange players do the taking. The green cursor is the door the orange players hide behind."
"Ah." Rosalia performed the expression of a woman who has just been correctly diagnosed and is deciding whether to be impressed or dismissive. "And you worked this out how, precisely?"
"The eavesdropper last night. The route information you mentioned. The fact that you knew Pina had died." He looked at her steadily. "Nobody told you that. You already knew because someone was in that forest with Siluca. Watching."
Rosalia's eyes moved to Siluca with an expression that had given up the pretense of anything other than what it was.
"And the Silver Flags," Ragna said.
A small silence.
"Oh," Rosalia said. "Them."
The dismissiveness of those two words — the compression of everything that represented into something small enough to be waved aside — was the thing that had been building in Ragna since the night before, and it was the thing that, now, produced the particular quality of stillness that appeared in him.
Not anger. Stillness. The kind that was more dangerous than anger.
"Their leader," he said quietly, "went from the front lines to every warp point in this game. With tears on his face. He didn't want you killed. He wanted you to answer for what you'd done." A pause. "Do you understand the difference between those two things?"
"Can't say I do," Rosalia replied, and snapped her fingers.
The orange players emerged from the treeline in the order they had been arranged — seven of them, weapon skills activating in the coordinated rush of people who had done this before and expected it to be finished quickly. They converged on Ragna from multiple angles with the logic of an attack designed around a single assumption: that the target would move.
He didn't.
He stood completely still and received every strike, and the health bar above his head responded accordingly — decreasing, as health bars do under sustained assault, and then restoring, at a rate that the combined output of seven orange players at their level could not outpace.
The attacks continued for approximately forty seconds. The health bar remained, within a narrow band, where it had been when they started.
The clearing grew quiet except for the sound of weapons moving through air and striking armor and the frustrated breathing of people whose model of the situation had just been disproven by experiment.
"400 HP per ten seconds," Ragna said, into the silence between strikes. "Approximately. That's what the seven of you are putting out." His voice was conversational. "I have 15,270 HP. My auto-battle regeneration restores around 600 per ten seconds. We could remain here until the floor's maintenance cycle and you wouldn't get anywhere."
"That's—" Rosalia was doing the mathematics and not enjoying the results. "That's impossible."
"MMORPGs with leveling systems are unfair that way," Ragna said simply. "The numbers, at sufficient distance, become insurmountable. That's the design."
He produced a crystal from his inventory. It caught the light of the flower fields below, prismatic and cold.
"The former leader of the Silver Flags spent everything he had on this crystal," he said. "It's keyed to the prison coordinates. He wanted justice, not revenge."
Rosalia extended her pike toward him, and there was, finally, something in her face that was not performance. "I'm green. If you attack a green cursor—"
The sound of motion was not loud. It was simply the sound of something that had been in one location and was now in another, and the interval between was too brief to have registered as movement.
He was behind her. His blade was at her throat, not pressed, but there — present, a fact, a boundary.
"Do you think," he said quietly, very close to her ear, "that matters to me?"
She was still.
"If spending a few days on orange means that the people I care about are safer, then that is what I will spend."
He stepped back.
"Drop the weapon."
She did.
The crystal activated in his hand, and the orange players were pulled from the clearing one by one in the familiar white-flash dissolution of a forced warp, deposited at coordinates they had not chosen and could not immediately escape. The last thing visible of Rosalia, before the light closed around her, was her face — and on it, for the first time, something that was not a weapon.
The clearing was empty. The flowers continued, unbothered.
Siluca was very still behind him.
"Ragna-san," she said.
"I should have told you earlier," he said, turning. "That I was using this situation to find them. That wasn't fair to you."
"You saved my life," she said. "Twice, now, if I'm counting correctly."
"That's not—"
"Ragna-san." She met his eyes, and her expression was entirely clear. "You are a good person. I am not scared of you. And I would like to go back to the inn now and revive my friend."
A beat.
"Yes," he said. "Alright."
The room at the inn held the warm last light of the evening when they returned to it.
They sat on the edge of her bed with the small table moved to one side, and the revival flower and Pina's feather arranged between them with the particular care given to things that matter enormously and are handled accordingly.
"Five days," Ragna said. "I've been away from the front lines five days. I should get back."
"I know," Siluca said. She was looking at the feather. "I think it's wonderful, what you do. The Assault Team. All of it."
"You could do it," he said, and said it with the simple directness of someone making an observation rather than offering encouragement, which made it land differently than encouragement usually did.
She laughed softly. "I couldn't."
"You're closer than you think. The gap between where you are and where we are — it's smaller than it looks from the outside. Most of it is just—" He paused, looking for the right word. "Time. And choosing, repeatedly, not to stop."
"You make it sound simple."
"Most things that are difficult are simpler than they appear. The difficulty is in the doing, not the concept."
She studied him. "Where did you learn to talk like that?"
"Like what?"
"Like someone who has thought very carefully about things."
"Probably from a sister who asked very good questions."
She smiled at that. "I'd like to meet her. All of them — your whole family."
"In the real world," he said. "When this is finished."
"In the real world," she agreed.
"Are you ready?"
She looked at the feather. Picked it up with both hands. Looked at the vial.
"Ragna-san," she said. "Close your eyes for a moment."
He looked at her with the slight wariness of someone who recognized this phrasing as potentially containing a social complication.
"It's a thank-you," she said. "I just don't want to have to look at your face while I do it."
He closed his eyes.
She stood, slightly — rose on her toes the small necessary distance — and put her arms around him in the brief, careful embrace of someone who is being thorough about the expression of gratitude. Then she pressed a kiss to his cheek, quick and warm and decisive, and stepped back before he had finished registering what had happened.
"Okay," she said. "You can open them."
He opened his eyes. His hand rose to his cheek with the automatic motion of someone whose nerve endings had just received an unexpected message and were checking to confirm. His face had arrived at a shade of red that was not the amber of his eyes and not the dark of his skin but something in between, something new.
"Siluca, I—"
"And the other thing," she said quickly, "is that I want to add you to my friends list."
"I—yes," he said. "Yes, of course."
They opened their menus, and the friend request went through, and the small digital acknowledgment of it — her name appearing in his list, his in hers — was somehow as significant as the thing that had preceded it, in its own smaller way.
"Now," she said, "let's bring her back."
She poured the vial onto the feather, and the light came first as a warmth, then as a brightness, then as something that was both of those things and also a sound, a tiny precise sound, the sound of something that had been absent returning to its place.
Pina materialized in the air between them, small wings testing themselves against the existence of air again, iridescent scales catching the lamplight with the same exact quality they always had, the same quality they had always had, not diminished by death or absence or the three days it had taken to reverse them.
The little dragon looked at Siluca.
Then at Ragna.
Then back at Siluca.
And flew to her.
Siluca made a sound that was not a word but that contained the whole weight of the past three days resolved in a single exhalation. She caught Pina against her chest and held on, and the dragon pressed its small head against her collarbone and made the particular satisfied sound of something that has returned to exactly where it was supposed to be and knows it.
Ragna watched this and said nothing, because there was nothing to say that the scene did not already contain.
After a moment, Pina lifted its head, looked at him with the direct intelligence of a familiar who has assessed the situation and reached a conclusion, and flew across the short distance to nuzzle briefly against his cheek.
"Oh," he said, softly, somewhat surprised.
The dragon returned to Siluca's shoulder, tucked itself in, and appeared to have decided the matter settled.
"Thank you," Siluca said, her voice thick. "For everything. All of it."
Ragna gathered his equipment. He checked the arrangement of it with the habitual efficiency of someone who was returning to something that required him.
At the door, he paused.
"When we meet in the real world—" she started.
"We will," he said. "That's a fact, not an aspiration."
"Will you introduce me to your sister?"
He was quiet for a moment, and in that moment something passed across his face — not sadness, exactly, but the particular tenderness of someone thinking about something they love very much that is currently far away.
"I think," he said, "she'd like you quite a lot."
He stepped into the hallway. His footsteps moved away in the direction of the teleport plaza with the steady, unhurried rhythm of someone walking toward something they knew how to do.
Siluca sat with Pina on her shoulder and the warmth of the lamplight around her, and thought about the real world — about the day it would become accessible again, when the hundred floors were cleared and the game's particular gravity released its hold and all of them returned to the lives they had been suspended from.
She thought about Ragna, and about his sisters, and about the family with flame-colored eyes that had grown up being hated for the wrong reasons and had somehow, in the middle of a death game, found a way to be extraordinary.
She thought: I want to be the kind of person who deserves to know them.
Pina made a small, contented sound against her neck.
"We'll be okay," Siluca told her. "Both of us."
The lamplight held. Outside, Aincrad's night settled over the flower floor in shades of deep blue and starlight, and somewhere on the upper levels, a young man with amber eyes was moving back toward the front.
To be continued — Chapter 4: Murder Mystery, Part One