Sword Art Online 9: Alicization Beginning by Reki Kawahara and abec

Author:Reki Kawahara and abec [Kawahara, Reki / abec]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Yen On
Published: 2017-07-25T00:00:00+00:00

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.

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