The monsters toppled without even a death scream, filthy black blood spurting from the clean-cut stumps. Not a single drop so much as touched Alice, of course. She straightened up, quite matter-of-fact, and looked over at me as I stood there struggling with defense.
“Do you need any help?”
“…N-no, I’ll manage,” I protested. I’d seen all of the minions’ attacks now and sidestepped a claw-and-tail combination attack. Before the monster could pull away to a safe distance, I executed a familiar combo of my own.
For a long time, I found it mysterious that the Underworld had the same sword-skills concept as SAO. After two years of internal debate, I still hadn’t arrived at a completely satisfying answer. Perhaps the Rath engineers utilized SAO’s Seed platform to build the foundation of their virtual world, but as far as I knew, The Seed didn’t actually have the sword-skills function built in. If it did, I would’ve been able to use sword skills when I converted to Gun Gale Online.
Perhaps wise Cardinal in her hidden library knew the truth, but I didn’t ask her when I had the chance. Cardinal knew that she and all other Underworldians were living in an experiment designed by Rath, a reality she grappled with deeply. I couldn’t bring myself to make her confront the fact that everything she knew was a kind of artifice. And at this point, the reason that sword skills existed here wasn’t that important. As long as they worked properly and were tools I could use, that was all that mattered.
The sword in my hand glowed blue and engaged in the four-part attack Horizontal Square.
“Rrraaaahh!” I bellowed. My sword lopped off the minion’s arms and tail, then severed it clean across the chest with the final swipe, not that I was trying to compete with Alice. The momentum of the attack nearly took me off the ledge, but I managed to hold still in time, watching the pieces of the monster fall separately through the clouds below.
I figured that if the pieces didn’t evaporate into thin air during the fall, some monk wandering the cathedral grounds below would eventually get a real scare.
“Ooooh,” Alice murmured with the approval of a teacher observing her pupil’s exhibition. I swiped my blade left and right before returning it to the sheath at my side—I’d have preferred to stash it over my back, but there were no shoulder harnesses in the armory—and looked at her sidelong. “What?”
“Nothing. It was a rather odd skill—that is all. I daresay you could attract quite a crowd if you exhibited it on a stage during the summer solstice festival.”
“Gee, thanks.”
I had to chuckle to myself from being with such a sardonic knight. Then a thought manifested, and I asked, “Have you ever even seen Centoria’s solstice festival? If anything, it’s a holiday for the common people. At Swordcraft Academy, hardly any of the upper noble children went to it…”
There were exceptions to the rule, of course; Sortiliena was a noble, and she looked forward to the festival every year, I recalled fondly.
Alice snorted. “Do not take me for one of those nobles with their airs. Of course…I…have…,” she protested, before trailing off prematurely.
Her mouth was hanging open, her brow knitted in confusion, searching for some answer. She lifted her bare left hand and pressed her fingertips to her smooth forehead. Then she shook her head several times and mumbled, “No…One of the monks told me…there was such a festival. Integrity Knights are forbidden…from mingling with the common folk…outside of duty…”
“…”
That made sense. The Integrity Knights believed they were summoned from Heaven by their pontifex, but that wasn’t true. Administrator brought human beings who excelled in wisdom or strength to the cathedral and performed a Synthesis Ritual that locked their memories away and turned them into knights. Therefore, if any knights wandered around the cities below, they might run across their former family, leading to chaos.
Alice was number thirty, making her the second-newest knight after Eldrie Synthesis Thirty-One, who’d been converted this spring. Logic dictated that she’d probably been synthesized within the past year as well, and yet she’d been taken from Rulid eight years ago—leaving a blank period of seven years.
What kind of life had Alice lived here during that time? Was she learning sacred arts as an apprentice sister? Did Administrator have her frozen as a prisoner the whole time?
Perhaps she had actually visited Centoria’s summer solstice festival before being turned into a knight. Maybe that little scrap of conversation was peeling away at an old memory hidden behind her memory block…
If I kept asking her little questions about the solstice festival, perhaps I could cause her Piety Module to eject, the way it had with Eldrie. I opened my mouth to speak, only to quickly clamp it shut.
Cardinal had said it would take more than just removing the Piety Module from Alice the Knight to turn her back into Eugeo’s friend Alice Zuberg. I needed the fragment of her “most precious memory,” which Administrator had removed entirely. So if I removed Alice’s module now, it would cause her to go entirely unconscious. I didn’t want to do that, especially when there was no saying when the next enemy might attack.
And for one thing, Alice hadn’t even blinked when she ran into Eugeo, her childhood friend for years back in Rulid. That indicated the comprehensiveness of her memory block. It was unlikely that a minor topic like the festival would dislodge the module, and it would probably backfire by making her more suspicious of me.
She watched me mulling this over, a questioning look on her face, then switched gears and said, “Minion blood brings disease with it. We must clean it off.”
“Hmm? Oh…”
Alice pointed at me, and for the first time, I realized that a few drops of the monster’s blood had landed on my left cheek. I was going to wipe off the foul-smelling liquid with my sleeve when she snapped, “Don’t do that!”
Stunned, I had to wonder how many years it had been since someone scolded me that way.
“Ugh, why must all men be this way?” she lamented. “Don’t you at least have a hand towel of some kind?”
I stuffed my hands into my trouser pockets. The right one was empty, and the left was stuffed with things that weren’t a handkerchief. I had to sheepishly admit, “I don’t have one…”
“…Forget it. Use this,” she said, producing a white handkerchief from somewhere in her skirt and handing it to me with a look of disgust.
If she was going to treat me like a little boy, I might as well lift up her skirt and rub my cheeks on it, but I realized she could easily kill me for that. Instead, I gratefully accepted the lace-edged kerchief and carefully wiped my cheek. It took the minion’s blood clean off, as if the fabric had some sacred art of cleansing cast upon it.
“Thank you very much,” I said, resisting the urge to call her teacher. I tried to hand back the cloth, but she turned her head away and said, “You will clean that before you return it, or I will cut you in two.”
Dark days ahead. What could I possibly say to someone like this to avoid combat once we’re back inside the tower, so that I can reunite with Eugeo? I looked around, imagining my partner climbing the stairs inside. By then, the light was totally gone from the sky, replaced by twinkling stars. We’d defeated the minions, but there was no way to generate new climbing hooks until the moon rose and gave us its meager resources.
I stuck Alice’s handkerchief in my pocket and examined the terrace. As long as we didn’t get any closer to them, it seemed that the minion statues would remain in stone form along the wall. If I rushed up to it and swung my sword at a vital spot before it could fully transform into flesh, I could probably beat it, but there was nothing to be gained by exposing myself to that danger.
We’d just have to wait here for the next few hours while the moon rose. I was perfectly happy to sit down and rest for a while, but I wasn’t sure that I could avoid angering Alice for that entire time. I decided to hold my tongue until I could think of a way to improve the mood of the testy Integrity Knight.