Being honest with himself, Kirito knew that he was terrified of pain. Having lived his entire life in the relative luxury of twenty first century Japan, he had very little stomach for discomfort in general, and his experience in SAO had done little to change that. Kayaba Akihiko had not been so much of a sadist as to devise a way for the players to experience severe pain in his death game. In fact, Kirito had been almost pathetically grateful for the painkillers and steroids that had been used in his physical therapy to help him recover and return to a relatively normal life.

That was why, as soon as the treacherous Viscount's lightning bolt struck him, Kirito's mind went blank. It was like his brain was a computer with a million I/O channels and all of them were screaming Pain at once, an indescribable burning that seemed to be incinerating every nerve in his body on a slow path to his brain. Pain that went on, and on, and on, and then suddenly, blessedly, stopped.

Kirito opened his eyes, feeling as if he were in a dream. Everything felt so detached. He was falling, plummeting towards the ground below. What had just happened?

He blinked once, twice, arms moved feebly, strangely numb. He tried to stretch his wings, but all that he felt was a tingling sensation that ran from his wing stems to the tips and then back down.

Then, suddenly he hit something that wasn't the ground.

"Kirito. Kirito!"

Kirito blinked again in a daze as he starred up at the scruffy face of a man he'd last seen weeks ago while saying goodbye to his sister. A name came to his buzzing head.

"Klein." He coughed out, feeling his tongue flop around uselessly.

"Hold on Kirito!" Klein shouted right in his face.

"Kirito!"

Something else hit him, smaller than Klein. Asuna had grabbed hold of him, peering into his eyes, lips moving wordlessly.

"Kirito-kun, say something!"

"Oy, we need a medic over here!" Klein shouted at the top of his lungs.

"N-no." Kirito groaned, gently pushing himself free of Klein, nearly falling out of the air before he spread his wings shakily. He couldn't say he was just shrugging it off, but he was still airborne and the world was making more sense by the moment. "W-what was . . . what was that?" Kirito asked as he finally regained his senses. He shook his head again, no, Wardes had mentioned something about this before, back in La Rochelle.

"That's what I want to know!" A Sylph shouted as he came gliding back to hover beside them. It was Emshael, looking a bit less confident and a lot more worried. "Damn things like a rapid fire Odin's Blast!"

Kirito looked up to the battle above them as there was another flash. The inexperienced Sylphs, who had been holding their own as skirmishers, were now being badly pressed by the combined power of Wardes and his group of Dragon Knights. Even the Salamander reinforcements weren't doing much to slow down what was essentially a mop up battle as they used their numbers and power to force the Faeries apart and chase them down.

Whenever the Salamanders and Sylphs tried to mass up to use powerful magic, Wardes would force them to defend themselves with barriers instead. And when they tried to give chase individually, or use their less powerful spells, they were blocked or intercepted by the superbly coordinated Dragon Knights.

Worse, many of the Sylphs couldn't run. With the exception of Emshael's group and Kirito, most of the Faeries had used up their flight magic returning to the Zeol and hadn't been able to recharge much before the ship had been struck. They would have only a few moments before they exhausted their remaining flight power and were left exposed and vulnerable.

"Emshael, you're good with magic right? I need to borrow your sword." Kirito grimaced as he felt pain lancing through every muscle in his body. He really would have preferred the numbness from before.

"Hold on a second Kirito." Klein growled. "Are you sure you're alright, you . . ."

One look was all he had to give Klein to shut the Samurai up. They both knew what was at stake. Sometimes a boss battle hadn't gone their way, sometimes the boss had some trick up its sleeve like a health regeneration that was triggered at one percent HP, or a sudden change in attack patterns, or a new mob type revealing a special technique. When that happened, the whole tempo of a battle could be broken and everyone would be in danger.

Viscount Wardes was just such a Boss, and now they needed to take him out before he could leverage his advantage to decimate the entire Raid Force.

Above them, a Sylph mage was being pushed back within the shell of his barrier spell. The translucent marble began to shrink as it was bombarded by wind and fireballs, and then shattered as a strike of lightning cracked against it, sending the stunned Sylph falling. A Tristanian Dragon Knight swooped in at the last moment, catching the Sylph only to be pursued by two of Wardes' allies.

They needed to get the Viscount's attention, make him focus on people who could fight back effectively so that the others would have a chance to hold their own against the other Knights.

Klein stared at him for a moment longer and then nodded. "Alright, but if that's the way it's going to be, I have your back . . . and so does Liz."

Kirito blinked as he was presented with a wrapped parcel that Klein had been carrying over his shoulder. Pulling apart the canvas wrapping, Kirito looked closely at the contents and then back to Klein. They were . . .

"They're perfect." He said without a trace of doubt.

Just touching them, holding them as he slung the twin sheaths over his shoulders, he knew. A sense of deja vu overtook him as he calmly reached over to draw each blade, one obsidian black, the other silver-white. The weight was reassuring in his hands, heavy, and perfectly balanced. He felt like he was holding Elucidator and Dark Repulser once more.

"Kirito-kun, are you sure?" Asuna asked, worry glinting in her eyes.

He smiled back at her and nodded slowly. "I don't see any other choice . . . But . . . I think I have a plan."

Having joined the Griffin Knights at an exceedingly young age, and achieved the rank of Square in service to the crown of Tristain, Wardes was a self admitted perfectionist. Driven forward by dissatisfaction and even a small hint of self hatred, it had been what had motivated his ceaseless training, his perpetual study and research to expand upon and perfect his Lightening Spell and the Ubiquitous Wind that he had used so often to good effect.

That was why, as he twisted at the reigns to coax his dragon into a bank so that he could guard against the incoming black blur, he felt a mild sense of irritation to see that he had failed to finish his target as he had expected.

Quite unusual, he'd more than tripled the power of the spell. Given the effects that even a human killing burst had had on the other Fae, he would not have expected even an especially vital Faerie to regain consciousness so quickly, much less recover enough to fight.

He was still thinking this as a white blur slashed past him, forcing his Wind duplicate to expend more of its limited reserves of willpower to deflect the strike. It was followed almost immediately by a red clad faery who thrust upward with distinctively curved blade in an effort to skewer the real Wardes. His duplicate expending the last of its willpower to defend him, promptly expiring and dissolving back into the air.

Wardes met the red Faerie's reduced strike with his own sword-wand, knocking him away before switching his casting to his Wind Dragon, speeding his drake so that he could give chase to the 'Lightning Flash' and Kirito before they could escape him. The way they fought spoke of expertise that should be denied to the Faeries and Tristain.

A flight pair of Sir Wells' dragon Knights formed up on his wing, and at his direction, further enhanced their speed with wind magic in order to keep up with Wardes and the two fleeing Faeries. He had them now, they only need stop moving about for but a moment so that the could lay in his aim. They were fleeing, or rather, being driven away from the greater battle and towards a patch of open sky and isolated ground tucked off in the southern corner of the Newcastle Peninsula. The terrain here offered good cover but was too broken for a massed advance and so had largely been bypassed by both sides.

Perhaps they didn't have much flight magic left and intended to land under cover? A fireball lashed out behind him and Wardes didn't even bother to parry, simply swiping it aside with a wind blade before signaling for one of his wing mates to deal with the troublesome Red Faerie at their back.

To his front the two Faeries boosted a bit further ahead, and then the by now familiar shower of arcane runes began to encompass Kirito. Clicking his tongue, Wardes pulled back on the reigns just as the Faeries vanished into a cloud of fast expanding black smoke.

Wardes reacted immediately, pulling back. Smoke screens were not an unknown trick in the repertoire of mages and even commoners, a bit of fire and earth or wind and earth magic, or even some simple kitchen alchemy would suffice to produce a concealing cloud of smoke sufficient to cover an escape. But this was much much more than that. Wardes and his Wingmate banked up and away in an effort to climb above the screen, but they were quickly overtaken, surrounded by darkness that carried a faint stench of dry earth and brimstone.

The Dragon Knight on his wing used his wand to conjure a clear path through the cloud but was distressingly unable to find its edge. It seemed like they were trapped completely in a world of black smoke with only a weak glimmer of sunlight to convince them that they had not gone blind.

The Former Griffin Knight remained calm, an unknown spell meant trouble, but one could not plan for every eventuality and had to remain adaptable. Cautiously, he raised his sword-wand and began to take soundings, his blade trembling as the sound waves were sent out into the air and returned, coursing back into his own focused mind.

The earth below was broken and jagged, providing good cover, if they had gone to ground they would be invisible, his wingmate's dragon and the beat of its wings generated a subtle turbulence to his left. A scattering of small signatures, sparrows, hawks, and crows, as lost as Wardes in this inscrutable cloud, and . . . from above.

He pointed his wand straight up and thrust, a wind dervish parted from the tip of his blade, a whirling sphere of death for anything it touched made of flesh and bone. It cut a path into the smoke and then vanished with nary a trace nor sound to hint that it had struck home. Kirito burst through the smoke screen, followed by Asuna, both aiming to strike him down, showing a superb display of focus and coordination. If they had been Griffin Knight recruits, he would have been quite impressed by their showing and approved them immediately, however, his present circumstances demanded a more decisive response than adulation.

Swinging his sword wide, one Wardes became two once more as he utilized his second master spell, Ubiquitous Wind. Again, though he had not devised the concept of a wind construct controlled at a distance, he was one of the few to perfect its usage to the point that it could be used as more than a novelty. Wardes turned his attention to Kirito while his false self deflected the swift thrusts of the Faerie Girl's sword.

Suddenly, Warde's mount gave a violent shudder, a spray of vibrant red arced up into his vision followed by an equally red pair of wings. The Red Faerie from earlier could not suppress his grin as he parted ways with Warde's dragon. The Drake had not had so much as time to cry out as its throat had been slashed back to the bone.

Stupid. Sloppy. Wardes thought clinically. He'd allowed his success to breed overconfidence and assumed skillful novices. He'd been cautious, but unprepared for a well executed attack. Now, with his dragon dying beneath him, he had no means to maneuver in the air without diminishing his ability to fight back.

He would have to trade the advantage of the skies for the cover of the ground below. Slipping from his saddle before Kirito and the others could make another pass, Wardes slashed the straps of his harness, leaving his duplicate atop the dragon as a decoy while he fell free, using magic to sound through the smoke and determine distance to the ground and then to arrest his descent at the last possible moment.

With an acrobatic flip, he spun about in midair, landing heavily and absorbing the impact as he crouched upon the broken earth of the cliffs of Newcastle Peninsula.

For a moment there was silence save for the distant sounds of the ground and aerial battles, and then their came a shout of triumph, a roar of his wing mate's dragon cut short, a shout of surprise, and then a blood curdling scream that fell and then kept falling off behind Wardes, disappearing into the mists beneath the white isle.

He grimaced to himself, arrogance on his part had put him into a difficult situation. He was now grounded, though not far from his own lines. More importantly, he was exposed to three flying opponents and at least one of the Faeries had the ability to see through this mess of smoke, no doubt its original castor. If their intent was simply to remove him from the fight they would depart no doubt as soon as they had confirmed their kill.

Warde's smile returned. This granted an opportunity if he were only to learn from his own mistake.