Ten months had passed since the death game began.
February 2024 found Ryuto and the Moonlit Pavilion pushing steadily through Aincrad's floors, their frontier now planted firmly on the fifty-sixth level.
The climb had not been kind.
The boss chambers of the twenty-fifth and fiftieth floors had each exacted a brutal toll — casualties that left the raid team hollow-eyed and quieter than usual around the campfire. But they had survived. That, in this world, was the only metric that mattered.
With the guild's momentum holding steady, Ryuto decided he'd earned a break.
Asuna had already taken her leave — she'd reconnected with a close friend, a senior-level blacksmith, and the two had gone hunting for rare crafting materials together.
Ryuto handed the guild's operational reins to Yulier, their ever-reliable second-in-command, and slipped away from the fifty-sixth floor with a lightness in his step he hadn't felt in weeks.
He called it observing the lower floors' living conditions.
It was a vacation. He wasn't fooling anyone.
February 22nd greeted the thirty-seventh floor with warm sunlight and a sky so blue it almost looked painted.
His original destination had been the fortieth floor, but the moment he stepped out of the teleport gate, a sudden downpour ambushed him without warning — the kind of cold, miserable rain that soaks through a cloak in seconds.
His good mood evaporated on the spot.
He stood there in the deluge for a moment, cursing Kayaba Akihiko under his breath with impressive creativity. Strangely, it helped. The frustration drained away almost as quickly as it had arrived, and he tapped the teleport crystal again with a lighter heart.
(Kayaba Akihiko, somewhere, presumably felt nothing.)
The thirty-seventh floor was a different world entirely.
The teleport light faded, and Ryuto stood still for a moment, just breathing.
A gentle breeze moved through the trees. Sunlight filtered down through the canopy in warm, shifting columns. The air smelled like pine and damp soil — nothing like the stone-and-iron scent of the frontier floors.
"Perfect," he murmured.
He left the town behind and wandered into the forest at a leisurely pace, hands loose at his sides. The trees here were old and dense, their roots sprawling across the path like sleeping giants.
Even after more than a year inside Aincrad, the world still had a way of catching him off guard with its beauty — the way light moved through leaves, the texture of bark, the particular silence of deep woods.
Nova rode on his shoulder, small and warm, occasionally tilting her head to track something moving in the underbrush.
The peace lasted about twenty minutes.
From somewhere deeper in the trees came the sharp crack of sword skills discharging and the guttural roar of monsters.
Ryuto slowed his pace. It wasn't unusual — the lower floors were popular grinding spots, and plenty of players could be farming exp out here. He turned to give them a wide berth.
Interrupting someone's grind uninvited was poor manners at best. In a world where paranoia had become a survival instinct, an unknown player materializing mid-fight could get very awkward, very fast.
He angled away through the trees.
The sword skill sounds faded. The monster roars did not.
Ryuto stopped walking.
The roaring was getting louder — not the rhythmic, controlled noise of a fight being won, but the ugly, escalating chaos of a fight going wrong. He stood still, listening.
Nova shifted uneasily on his shoulder.
Then a voice cut through the forest, raw and broken with grief.
"Pina!!!"
The petals of his skill materialized around his hand before he'd consciously made the decision. The white-gold spear snapped into his grip.
He was already running.
She hadn't moved from where she'd fallen.
The small dragon — Pina — lay cradled in the girl's arms, its light fading in stuttering pulses. The green HP bar had been reduced to a thin, desperate sliver.
As Ryuto broke through the treeline, it ticked down to nothing.
The sound it made disappearing was almost gentle. A soft pop, like a soap bubble.
The weight in the girl's arms vanished. Pina dissolved into a cascade of blue data, leaving nothing behind but a single pale feather that drifted down into the girl's open palm — weightless, luminous, and heartbreaking.
The girl didn't move. She just sat there, staring at the feather, tears cutting silent tracks down her face.
The monster that had killed Pina turned toward her.
Ryuto didn't slow down.
He came in low and fast, the spear leading.
The first monster didn't register his presence before the hit landed — light burst from the impact point, cracks spreading across the creature's body like broken porcelain. He was already pivoting to the second before the first had finished dissolving.
The spear moved in clean, decisive arcs. No wasted motion. No flourish.
One by one, the cracks glowed, bloomed, and the monsters came apart in showers of scattered polygons.
The last fragment spun away on the breeze and faded.
Ryuto stood in the sudden quiet, silver hair settling back around his shoulders, red eyes sweeping the clearing for stragglers. Finding none, he let the spear dissipate and turned around.
The girl was staring at him.
She was small — petite, even by normal standards — with a tamer's equipment and wide, dark eyes that had gone from devastated to stunned somewhere in the middle of his fight.
The pale feather was still clutched in both hands.
He recognized her immediately. The build, the style, the feather, and the name she'd cried out —
Silica.
He'd been in this world for over a year, and his luck in certain departments remained impressively consistent. The dangerous situations, the bad weather, the cursed timing — all still present and accounted for.
But somehow, he kept running into the girls from the source material. Every single time.
Nova let out a small, questioning chirp from his shoulder.
Ryuto glanced at her — really looked at her, this small creature that had been with him since nearly the beginning. If Nova had been the one lying in the dirt with a fading HP bar, he wasn't sure he'd be holding himself together any better than the girl in front of him was.
Nova tilted her head at him, entirely unbothered.
That will never happen, he told himself, with complete conviction.
He walked over slowly and crouched down to her level, keeping his voice even.
"When a Familiar dies, it drops a resurrection item," he said. "There's a place called the Hill of Memories — southern area of the forty-seventh floor. The flowers that bloom there are what you need to bring Pina back."
He paused.
"But you'll need to move within three days."
The shift in her expression was immediate and almost painful to watch — grief cracking open to let something fragile and desperate through. She looked up at him with eyes that had gone bright and searching, like someone offered a lifeline and terrified to reach for it.
"...Really?"
"Really," Ryuto said. "Three days. That's the window."
The light in her eyes wavered. He could see her doing the math — the forty-seventh floor, the distance, the monsters between here and there, the level gap.
The hope flickered.
He hadn't planned to say the next part. It came out on its own.
"I can take you there."
The words surprised even him.
He sat with them for a moment, half-expecting to find something uncomfortable underneath. But when he examined it honestly, it wasn't complicated.
Familiar or not, cute or otherwise — if he'd come across anyone sitting alone in a clearing looking like their world had just ended, he'd have reached out. The fact that he kept a Familiar himself, that he understood exactly what that bond felt like, only made it clearer.
This wasn't charity. It was just the right thing to do.
He stood and extended a hand.
"Don't worry. Today I'll—"
She took it and stood — and immediately pitched forward as her legs, folded under her for too long, gave out completely.
She stumbled straight into his chest.
There was a beat of absolute stillness.
Then she scrambled back like she'd touched a hot stove, face blazing scarlet, bowing rapidly.
"I'm so sorry! I didn't mean — I wasn't — sorry!"
She straightened, flustered, and seemed to realize she'd forgotten something important. She took a breath.
"Um. Thank you. For saving my life. I'm Silica."
She looked up at him, genuinely curious — no recognition in her eyes, no careful deference. Just a girl who didn't know who he was.
"And you are...?"
Ryuto looked at her — pink-cheeked, clutching a pale blue feather, recovering her dignity with admirable speed — and felt something close to amusement warm his chest.
He found he didn't mind the anonymity at all.
"Ryuto," he said simply.
...
TN:
I'm back, guys! I had to put this story on pause due to some management issues, but I'm back now with new and improved translation quality. 😄 Did you notice any improvements?
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