"Papa!" Eyes growing wide, the little Faerie girl, or rather, the Pixie Yui, looked up urgently from her perch within the pocket of her father's coat, hair swirling in the slipstream of flight. They flew east into darkness, leaving behind the setting sun.
Karin heard her perfectly well from her place atop d'Artagnan, the Spriggan swordsman hanging off the side as his wings recharged. She didn't need to be told the source of the trouble when Yui suddenly cried out for her father's attention. By now, she had grown eminently used to assuming the worst. She gritted her teeth.
'Louise'.
What had that girl done this time? Kidnapped, or run off, Karin couldn't say, both seemed impossible, but here they were. The only certainty she'd had, which was growing weaker by the moment, was that it had not been a wish for death that had pushed Louise to plunge from the porthole of her cabin. Mother and daughter were, for once fortunately, alike in that regard. There had to be something that Louise was trying to achieve by this.
Shielding his daughter's head with one gloved hand, Kirito called out, keeping his voice above the roar of the wind. "What is it, Yui? Can you detect Louise-san?"
A quick shake of the head, exaggerated so that the miniscule gesture could be seen. "Mmm. Maybe. I just detected a very large bandwidth increase in Cardinal's local server nodes!"
"Which means what?!" Karin shouted impatiently over the wind, feeling only a small erg of remorse at the way the Pixie girl cringed. But the anger wasn't directed at her, it could lay squarely only on Karin herself. 'I should have foreseen this.'
All the effort of escorting Louise home, personally, with multiple guards aboard a military airship. All squandered. It would have taken an entire Black Ops strike force to have had a chance of touching her daughter. But in all of her planning, pre-empting external enemies, Karin had never imagined the need to protect Louise from what now appeared to be her worst enemy of all. Herself.
She bit down on a foul curse, one that she had learned as a girl from soldiers and had not stopped using at every opportunity until her marriage. 'I'm such a fool!'
"It's the World Tree." Yui explained concisely. "The Spirit we call the Cardinal System resides within Yggdrasil, which acts as its physical hardware, its body. Ever since we became physical existences, I've been able to detect and map some of Cardinal's signals." Yui nibbled worriedly at her lip. "But… this is the first time I've detected this much traffic. Papa, Karin-san, we must be very close to a node that's experiencing an enormous amount of activity!"
Karin exchanged glances with Kirito, who appeared to be following the girl's gibberish far better than herself. They were not so far from help that they could not turn back, but would they have time?
When Louise had been discovered missing, the alert had gone out at once. While the crew searched every alcove and hiding place, the post ship had been brought about and taken low, the mage officers lighting up the parabolic reflectors mounted to the keel and throwing the urchin's nests overboard with keen eyed watchers to scan the forests and fields along their flight path.
Proving the merit of her reputation once again, the Lady Asuna had immediately directed her Sylph and Salamander subordinates to attach themselves to the Manticore Knights. Using the mounts to rest, the Faeries could conserve their flight magic until they found something, and then quickly report back to the ship or give chase in a burst of speed that could outmatch even the mounted cavalry.
The Maeve herself had remained aboard the ship to direct the search effort and to keep track of the three flight pairs with the help of the mage officers. Karin had been paired with the Black Swordsman as her wing-mate. They had together been tasked the eastern flank to search for any sign of Louise, or those who had taken her.
"Yui, have you ever detected something like this before?" Kirito asked his daughter.
Yui blinked furiously, telegraphing some immense mental load that seemed to tax her faculties to the limit, before supplying her answer. "Sometimes… I've detected server spikes, especially around the center of Arrun and at the Tarbes Garden. But never anything like this, and they never last this long."
So this signal had a time limit?
Craning her neck westward, Karin could no longer see the ship, but she knew it was there, crawling along low to the ground as its magelight reflectors swept its flight path like an aquatic dragon on the hunt in shallows. She took stock, calculating the time to fly back, and then return to this airspace, and judged it unfavorable. By the time they got back, the event might already be over, and any clues might be gone along with it.
Besides, she judged, between herself and one of the Fae's strongest Swordsmen, they would not be lacking in battle power. It was at least worthy of investigation. "Can you point us in the right direction?" Karin requested.
With a determined nod, Yui reached an arm out of her father's pocket and pointed downward and to the North East. "That way! I'm not sure of the exact spot yet, but I'll be able to isolate it as we get close!"
"Yui, whatever happens, when we get to this node, I want you to stay with Karin-san's familiar." The black swordsman instructed to his daughter. His reluctance to bring her along had been evident from the outset, but the girl's unique powers of perception had been too valuable to squander.
Karin patted her familiar's neck, the Manticore's emotions streaming into hers through their arcane bond. From their first meeting, he had responded favorably to the little Faerie girl in both her Pixie and human forms, one of the few persons other than Louise, Cattleya, and Karin herself that she had ever seen elicit a purr while petting him. D'Artagnan would protect Yui readily enough, no matter what else came to be. It would then fall on Karin and Kirito to protect Louise.
Banking in Yui's pointed direction, while Karin momentarily cursed the darkness and their lack of signal flares, they followed a path towards the deepest forests, where light splashed off the high canopy, never penetrating even in daylight to the depths of the forest floor. Louise was someplace in there? Karin's eyes narrowed as she spotted and then overflew a clearing, taking in the odd markings along the ground, talon tracks. A dragon had landed here recently, but now was nowhere in sight. Hidden in the forest, she wondered? No native drake would want to spend the night in the deeps of an ALfheim forest. There were things in those depths that could make a landed drake their prey.
Or had it gone back into the air, to watch from above? Karin looked up, all about in the sky. Nothing.
Karin thought it had to be the place, but Yui insisted that it was further still. Karin's eyes were naturally drawn downward again as their destination became clear. It had been glaringly obvious once she'd looked at it, but from the corner of her eye, it had barely registered. She'd thought it had been errant moonlight, reflecting from some lost lake. But now, peering more closely, she could see that it was much too bright, too golden.
The glow, a radiance coming from the ground and shining into the sky like a night orb brought to earth. At least, that was how it appeared, a sphere, shimmering with its own inner light, from every branch and every leaf, right down to the spiraling trunk that illuminated the throat of the gaping maw from which it sprung.
"An Yggdrasil Shoot!" Yui reported before Karin could even think to ask.
Like the ones near the Gardens. Karin recalled Louise's report, and with it, her convictions redoubled as she realized what idiot thing Louise had to be attempting.
"She's trying to bind the World Tree!" Karin said, the words ripped from her lips by the wind. She hoped against hope that Kirito had not heard them, but he paid the comment no mind as he released his grip on d'Artagnan's saddle and fell into formation beside Karin.
"We can't see anything from here." Kirito observed. The golden light around them failed to illuminate the depths the caverns, the trunk of the shoot vanished into a narrowing in the mouth of the mound from which it grew. The opening was too narrow for d'Artagnan. They needed a place to land.
"There!" Karin pointed to the edge of the mound, to the mouth of a cave. It must have been the entrance to the underground. But still, no sign of anyone. It put Karin on edge. As a wind mage, trained in the Cavalry, she was used to the skies. A ground battle, a subterranean battle especially, was better left to the likes of an 'Earth-Wyrm' like Belgen.
"Yui!"
"R-Right Papa!" Yui accepted reluctantly, flitting from her father's pocket, to the safety of d'Artagnan's saddle. As soon as Karin was sure that the girl was secure, she unfastened the clips of her harness, and simply fell.
Sliding from the saddle, she allowed herself to go limply into a headfirst dive, the Spriggan following close behind with his wings folded and dismissed to hide their glow. Only at the very last instant, just before they would have struck the ground and been instantly killed, did they arrest their falls, Karin touching down in a short lived whirlwind just as Kirito flared his wings, landing in a ready crouch.
In the sky above, d'Artagnan had entered a holding pattern, circling like a carrion eater waiting for the spoils of battle. If it became necessary, hopefully it would be their enemies who were on the menu.
"Nothing here."
Karin turned to Kirito, the youth's eyes were lit by the telltale green glow of the Fae Perception skill. A talent of some of the Fae that further enhanced their acute senses. While no guard against dedicated stealth magics like those possessed by the Sylphs, they could at least be somewhat confident that they would not be surprised by mundane opponents.
'Mundane.' Karin reminded herself, skeptically. There was no telling who had done this, who had taken Louise. They may well have been the remnants of the Conspiracy with access to more of the 'stealth cloaks' of the Sylphs.
Perhaps a few had seen Louise that night and slipped away to report back to their masters. Seizing such a hostage, if they proved her connection to ALfheim, they could tear the alliance apart without casting a single spell in battle. Except… Karin shook her head angrily. Louise would never cooperate with such men. Not of her own volition, never willingly. But there were so many ways she, an innocent, could have been corrupted, compelled to act against her interests by men of evil and cunning.
"Just a sec." Kirito urged, raising a hand to complete a short chant. The world took on a slightly emerald hue, growing brighter until she could see into the shadows and deep into the twisting throat of the cavern.
"Let's go." Karin breathed, hefting her sword and setting off for the entrance. They were halfway there when the sound of a damned scream faintly reached them from deep within the barrow-mound, wafting into the sky from its dark mouth.
'Louise.' Karin's heart caught, and then came back, hammering inside of her chest, beating to be let out. All thought of subtlety, of restraint, vanished with that scream. "Louise!"
"Wait up!" The shout was lost to her.
Suddenly, Karin was moving, accelerating as she channeled barely contained magic into and through herself. The surface of her focus hummed as it was caught in a confined vortex. Kicking off the ground with a gust of wind as she sprinted, faster, faster than even Kirito could keep up, so fast that she trusted only her training to keep her upright, her reflexes to keep her comparatively frail body from smashing itself against stone, and the sheer wake of wind magic before her to ward off any surprise attacks.
Roaring into the pitch black of the hill, she quickly thought her thanks for the Fae gift of night vision as the cave walls blurred past her. Her original intent had been stealth, to approach cautiously and under cover of darkness, but she made no attempt at that now, trusting her tornado of wind-blades to shield her. A banshee's cry marked her passage as her magic furrowed into the earth around her, destroying all minor obstacles.
There came sounds of surprise from just ahead of her, not lasting more than an instant as she reached, and then crashed through what must have been sentries lying in ambush. The men, or women, or perhaps they even been orcs for all that their remains would tell, had been readying for an attack, but their preparations had done them no good. Their line was struck, overwhelmed, all the defenders turned to bloody rags and froth before Karin even realized that she had left no survivors. She dismissed the thought, there would surely be more to capture and interrogate further below.
The scream. Louise's scream hadn't stopped. It had only grown louder after she'd entered the caves, louder, impossibly louder, without any sign of dying away. It was a beacon, a siren's call that she had to answer.
The cavern walls were opening up, branching into a network of caves that honeycombed the hill like a giant insect nest, or maybe the highways gathering on the road to hell. Being so vast, it should have occurred to her that something would live in this moldering place, but she'd never thought that it could still be here when humans were present. She jetted down the widest set of the branching tunnels and entered an immense chamber, lit in the center by a column of moonlight. Seeing no enemies, she without pause continued her rush to the dark tunnels on the other side.
From the corner of her eye, turning her head and then raising her wand, she saw it, saw the silhouette of an immense form in the shadows and a massive attack coming straight for her. With a desperate thought, she commanded the wall of wind and vacuum blades that had been guarding her front to instead protect her flank as she began to dodge, aiming to take the attack at an angle to her defenses. It barely succeeded, her bulwark of wind stripped and diminished by a burst of elemental wind fit to rival her own. Just as the attack began to abate, a second wave of elemental fury struck, piled under the mass of a third wave, and then overwhelmed what remained of her spell, stripping it away and leaving her exposed.
Karin gasped. That sort of power!
'Guard!' She brought for a compressed shield dome of wind, shaped it to an elongated cone just before the waves struck her. The attacks roared past at first, then Karin released her foothold, allowing herself and her defenses to swept up and thrown to safety. Dozens of mails away, she righted herself in midair with a burst of wind before her heels in, skidding across the gravel and stone floor. It couldn't have been performed more gracefully if a Sylph had done it.
Karin looked up, to the direction of the attack. Such overwhelming power, almost certainly not that of a mage, or even a single mob. And she was right, after a fashion.
-Rrrarrghh!-
The booming bark echoing off the walls seemed to come from all directions. -Rrrarrggh Rrrarrgh Rrrargh!-
A rapid-fire staccato of barking, a thrice-overlapping roar that should have been impossible from one beast alone. Gravel crunched and slid as a giant's paw emerged from the shadows into the moonlight, then a second foreleg, both the size and thickness of an ancient oak's trunk, easily fit to crush Karin flat. Glowing red eyes emerged from the darkness, one pair, then two, then three. Growls emanated from three toothy maws, from between the peeled back lips of three pointed muzzles, breathing flames, ice, and poisonous green ichor respectively.
Karin took a step back, assuming guard as she was confronted by something she'd thought was only a fantasy from story books.
A conversation with Lady Sakuya once had revealed to Karin that the Mobs and Bosses were often inspired by creatures of myth and legend. Coming from a people who wanted to experience great stories and adventures, this had come as no surprise. There had been a time when she too would have stayed up late into the night thinking of such things, imagining them as a young girl. What had been surprising was how much those stories of the Fae shared with the legends of Halkegenia.
And now, she was face to face with another legend, another monster conjured up and given life by the dreams of the Fae. So shocking as to leave her unable to question what it could be doing here. No ordinary mob, it must have been what the Fae referred to as a Boss.
'A Cerberus!'
-Rrrargh Rrrarrgh Rrrargh!
At the end of the last head's bark, the first had already begun to spit flames, not just a jet, a firestorm that would have overwhelmed a lesser mage's defenses before they could even scream. Karin herself was forced to wait it out, to crouch down within her defenses as she guarded, first against the boiling hell that stormed around her, stone splitting as the water within burst to steam, and again when the frozen hell came, the flames overwhelmed by a continuous wave of solid cold that split the rock yet again, sucking the new moisture from the air in a fine cloud of icy crystals.
Safe, for now, behind her barriers, the strain was mounting.
'It… won't let me attack.' Karin grimaced. As soon as one head tired, the next would take its place, one after another, after another, an endless cycle that left no opening that she could risk. After the beast's first lone attack had so easily ripped apart her defenses, she had to assume its combined power was comparable to her own Heavy Wind. Or at least, any incarnation of that spell that she could cast in the time it would give her.
But then, even over the roar of the inferno, she heard the scream going on, somehow brighter, louder than ever before, impossible to be coming from human lungs. 'D-d - ' "DAMN YOU! Don't stand between me and my DAUGHTER!"
Pushing more magic into her shield, compressing the composing air, Karin pushed outward with her will, demanding that the world answer. A blossoming wall of wind crashed into the Cerberus, bodily lifting the immense beast. She sent after it a barrage of vacuum blades for good measure, biting into its fur and tracking slashes across its noses and muzzles. The damage was far diminished from what the blades should have been capable of. The beast seemed to have some form of innate resistance.
The barks turned from anger into squeals of sympathetic pain, but before she could gather up the power for a Heavy Wind, she was met by a fourth element. The heads, each aspects of fire, ice, and poison, were as it turned out matched in the rear by a trio of bushed tails, rising over the beast's head, the bristled lengths shining blue with traces of magic as they fanned, the tails representing the aspect of wind.
What came next was, if not comparable to her own powerful wind spells, was very close, she imagined, to what it would have felt like to be struck by a weak imitation of the Heavy Wind while only half prepared for it. Driven back as her incomplete barrier began to give out, almost failing before…
The barking stopped, replaced by whimpering yelps, the spell letting up.
"Karin!"
The head of fire shook and tossed, magmatic ichor spilling from its maw as it tried to dislodge the form clinging on for dear life. It was having a devil of a time with the attempt. Twin swords were firmly driven into the eye socket, anchored in place while the Black Swordsman was looked down at her with open anger.
"Damn it! You can't just charge in alone!"
Swords came free and descended again, and again, and again, slashing bloody trails across the lips of one muzzle, jumping up to the head and across to the next, keeping out of reach as the Cerberus snapped thrice, and then thrice again, trying to swallow him whole. It would only be a matter of one false step and he would be gone, yet Kirito remained fearless and sure-footed. Even in her youth she would have considered it insane.
Karin readied herself, they needed to finish this beast off, but… the scream that had recognizably started as Louise's voice had become a low keening, and now, even that was beginning to fade. Karin only sensed that, when it was gone, something terrible would happen. Kirito sensed it too, and made his decision.
"Listen, I'll hold this Boss!" He spun, extracting his blades from the skull of the head of ice with a bloody shower, leaping to the ground and then rushing between the behemoth dog's legs, dodging the trampling trunks as he slashed at the tendons and joints, at the soft underbelly.
'Hold it?!'
"Swords won't reach its vulnerable points!" Karin called. In such a confined space, she wasn't sure if she could conjure up a spell that would do the job quickly and not kill them in the backlash.
Kirito couldn't spare her a glance as he scrambled out of reach of one set of jaws, dodging flames from the next. He tossed his left sword in a white flash, an expert throw that pierced the second head's right eye, and then the right black sword doing the same to the third head's right. "I know!"
Now cyclopean in all three heads, the Cerberus was acting strangely, adjusting its heads into a triangular pattern, shielding its remaining three good eyes, staring them down as it blinked against the pain. Kirito threw aside his coat to reveal a simple, short sleeved black shirt, the wiry muscles between mid-arm and gloved wrist visible. "Five minutes. I should be able to handle it for that long. There's sure to be more beyond, but I'm betting this is their strongest defense! Get Louise and then return to the ship! Don't worry about me."
Her effort to answer, to call out his plan for what it seemed, suicide, was cut off as the Spriggan began to chant, roaring a spell that Karin suspected she'd heard before. This was a Spriggan at least on par with Morgiana. It would be a sight to see at any other time. But now, Karin understood.
"Founder help you, Kirito."
She picked herself up, and with the first chant broke into an accelerated run, with the second resummoned her bulwark of blades, knowing that time was of the essence now. She tried not to think too hard about the prismatic, elemental lights ahead of her, reflecting off wet walls from the battle behind her. As she advanced from the cavern, disappearing behind the curve of the tunnel walls, she forced herself to listen over the bestial roars as two titans collided with each other, tearing and rending with a viciousness that was entirely unnatural. Louise's endless scream had nearly petered out now.
She had only the fading echoes ahead to guide her, but those echoes led from darkness to light, and light led to a thinning in the cavern branches that took her inevitably to the center of it all, to a pale and beautiful underground glade surrounded by waterfalls, and the glowing silvery bulk of a miniature World Tree within a vast central chamber lit by a golden light. A half dozen figures in mottled cloaks, faces invisible behind smooth, featureless masks. They all raised their sword-wands as one, but they weren't what stilled Karin now, they were irrelevant, dead men walking.
Footsteps echoing over the distant rumble of the ongoing battle above, Karin stopped in her tracks, snarling at the scene before her, her vision following beyond her enemies to the base of the Shoot, situated atop a small hill in the center of the glade to where the light had grown to an eye watering intensity before a small, fragile silhouette, and another greater one.
Her back arched, hanging lifelessly, the small form of her youngest daughter was supported by the arm of a man… a man who would have looked the part, in any epic, of a hero. Hawkish, silver haired, and of assuredly noble countenance, kitted fully for war in splendid blood red armor, a white cloak, and a gleaming tower shield with a red cross, a bulwark fit for any Salamander assault force. The man looked up from Louise, bemused, as if noticing where he was for the first time.
Karin couldn't have cared less. Her family's enemies would all perish here and now.
Spells were roared by the men all around her, releases of fire and water, of earth and air, and the battle for the life of her daughter was met.

Yui, Kirigaya Yui, formerly MCHP-0001 in the game world of Sword Art Online, and now a very real little girl in the world of Halkegenia, had for the past two months had been struggling with a frustrating scarcity, a deprivation that affected only her.
It was not that she lacked for food, or water, her mother and father provided for her, loving and caring for her like she really was their flesh and blood daughter. But the one thing that they could not provide, which had driven her to read, listen, and experience voraciously, had been ready access to information.
Beyond any normal human being, Yui was a being of information. She was built up from it, an ever growing aggregation of Wisdom giving rise to an intelligence dissimilar to human awareness but convergent on a similar state. With that at her heart, the limited information flow that she now had as a being of flesh and blood felt like a drought.
She had her eyes, her ears, her senses of touch, taste, and smell, and her extra sensory ability comprising a full range of powerful but limited functions vaguely standing in her for her Radar, Mapping, and Data Access capabilities as a navigation Pixie. In some cases this functionality was far, far higher in fidelity than she had ever experienced before.
Touch, real touch, provided orders of magnitude more data than she ever would have predicted, and taste was an ongoing delight as her mother taught her its new subtleties with every meal.
It still did not make up for what she was lacking. Rapid access to external databases, to local server data, and to player stats, were all missing and all badly missed. That was, until now.
Now, for the first time in two months, Yui was in her true element, swimming in a sea of information even as her physical body remained curled up within the saddle atop d'Artagnan, extending feelers and probing at the network connections that had been so abruptly made available.
She'd sensed it as they'd neared the Yggdrasil shoot, and her suspicions had only grown stronger as she isolated the local data connection, cautiously coming close to tapping in. She tracked packets, and the rise and fall in signal strength, spying without ever really looking, as if she were trying to peer through a Key Hole or listening to the vibrations of voices thought a pipe.
Before, despite everything she had tried, Cardinal had sounded like Junk or Static, simply meaningless signals being sent and received by a heavily corrupted system. Now though, the Signal was coming through infinitely stronger, strong enough to raise it fully above the threshold of her perception, lasting long enough to her to log and track packets and construct a pattern recognition routine. And with it, for the first time in months, Yui could finally hear what she had been searching for, threaded within a signal of awesome complexity.
Beautiful
It had an aesthetic all its own, like the refraction of light though an optically perfect prism, or a fractal equation propagating infinitely down upon itself. More even than that, there was another sensation, hard for her to place until at last she realized. It resonated with the deepest part of… Query… her soul?
This was what the Pixies heard, or at least, a part of it. The signal that linked them to Yggdrasil, to Cardinal. Yui grew hopelessly overwhelmed just trying to riffle through a single millisecond of it. So much data. The processing capacity that she possessed now, entirely sufficient to run her Primary Binary Cluster and auxiliary routines, was wholly inadequate to the task she had set for herself now.
Frustrating!
Something occurred to her then.  "Block out what you do not need. Listen for just one strand of the Song." Query If she couldn't read the whole signal, then maybe she could read just a part? A little part, she just had to know how to ask. Yui had every reason to ask.
Papa had left her here, he'd left her to keep her safe. And she couldn't stand it.
The sense of Coddling, of Helplessness, was eating her up, her frustration building. Even worse, having gone underground, she couldn't sense Papa or Karin anymore, even with her extended senses. Then the signal strength feeding through the local node had suddenly intensified again and she had to know what was happening, couldn't just stand by anymore.
Query. Cardinal was sending and receiving a tremendous amount of data. Would it be possible? Yui wondered quickly. For every day she hadn't been able to communicate with Cardinal, she'd spent that time studying the GM access card, analyzing its responses to her endless poking and prodding until she was almost certain that she'd picked apart the Black Box.
The result of her efforts had been a Mask that would allow her to pretend to be the GM access card for purposes of accessing a command console or other Cardinal interface. However, her attempts to actually utilize the mask she had constructed had all ended in failure, though not for lack of trying. Cardinal had simply been unresponsive no matter what she tried.
That could change now, with so much traffic coming and going. It was a Golden Opportunity, one that she could not allow to slip past… she just needed to spoof the system a little. The Yggdrasil shoot below them almost certainly counted as some sort of Node or Server, so there was every possibility it could work.
From her hiding place, safe in the saddle of the circling Manticore, she closed her eyes in concentration, devoting all of her processing power to running the Mask, taking interpreting and returning the expected authentication keys and handshake protocols. After that, it was as simple as reaching out to touch, and…
Connection Successful
Yui couldn't celebrate too soon however, as her exuberance was replaced by surprise and then bewilderment at the sheer torrent of information that was flooding in. Where it had been a flood before, now it was a hurricane!
She grabbed hold of packets, scanning them greedily to discover what was happening, to build up her understanding of the situation, and then was forced to take a step back again. The coding… she'd thought she'd be able to interpret it all, it should have been following standard communications protocols but… it looked like the code had changed too, branching and diverging in non-binary ways that shouldn't have been possible for a program.
Yui recoiled back, her mind shifting gears rapidly like an old data storage device engaging different drives. She couldn't read it directly like she'd thought, she had to use the mask she'd constructed to compile the code into something resembling Cardinal's original format. She squandered an entire fourteen thousand milliseconds making the required changes and applying them to herself, Learning to hear and understand Cardinal's new language.
But there was a trade-off, it left her feeling slow, bloated as she ate up run time with clumsy workarounds, translating her pure language to… whatever Cardinal's new language was, all the while modifying and performing integrity checks on portions of her Primary Binary Cluster as they became available to maintain her GM card mask. If only she had the card…
She'd make it work, she decided, that's what Mama and Papa would do. She started reading packets again, cataloging data type and determining origin and destination. First thing first, she needed to know what was happening to the Shoot.
Isolating Local Server as Address…
Server Request Sent
Awaiting Reply
Error: Retrying
Server Connection Successful
Query LocAll(This_Server)
A web work of connections erupted into existence within Yui's consciousness, ten thousand two hundred and twenty one sub nodes forming the local portion of the Yggdrasil Shoot's network.
The first thing Yui noted was that nearly all of the capacity of the high-bandwidth connection of the Yggdrasil Shoot was being routed to a single node. The Shoot, Cardinal's local proxy and access terminal, was acting as a routing terminal for vast amounts of data arriving from the other Shoots and the main Cardinal system within Yggdrasil, all being sent to a single node. She couldn't even begin to imagine what single process could require a connection like that. Shouldn't the load have been distributed to multiple sub nodes? What single process could be this important? As tempting as it was, she avoided that link for now. Tampering with it could bring the full might of Cardinal's safeguards on her.
Beyond that she detected several more high-bandwidth connections, including…
'Oh no!'
Kerberos the Arch Guardian
HP 780000/1000000
MP 270000/300000
Stat - Buff: EnrgDebuff: Blnd, TrfPrsnc
A boss level Mob! Papa!
Quickly!. There had to be a connection, something that she could use to see or extend her senses. When she found it, looking through the eyes of a lesser node, a mob watching the battle, Yui gasped out in fear.
One of the great convictions of her short life was that her Papa was one of the strongest people in the world, even when he didn't think so highly of himself. Now, Yui was treated to something she wished she could make not real.
Her Papa was losing.
Player: Kirito
HP 11000/31000 (+150/s)
MP 370/1000
Stat - Buff: BstFrm - T Debuff: Stn, Psn, Brn, Frz, RaDmg
In this real world, the numbers were not to be taken literally, an abstraction at best which represented a rough nearness to death, or in the case of the Bestial Form, closeness to the shadow spell failing, its matter falling apart and dispelling the illusion. And indeed Papa's HP continued to oscillate up and down as the approximation varied, as his Bestial Form's health regeneration did a little, but without fail it was sinking lower with each passing moment.
What was happening?!
Yui brought up her own internal database, cross referencing the bestiary entries that Argo had been compiling. She'd scanned something about the Kerberos but she hadn't bothered with parsing it at the time, as the Fae Lords had decided against tackling ALO's elite bosses for the foreseeable future. Now however, the entry read like a Nightmare.
All-Elemental Magic Type, Heavy Anti Raid-Party Boss, heavy status debuff abilities, reactive behavioral algorithms, and a second phase, specifically meant to take on endgame 49-player raid encounters preparing for the World Tree. One of the four Arch Guardians. Intended to be undefeatable by individual parties, invincible against single opponents. Undefeated in ALfheim. The fact that Papa was even alive still was a testament to his skills. But he was just barely hanging on.
As Yui watched, the status for Right Arm switched from Dmg to Dsm. If Papa hadn't been using an illusion body then it would have meant Kerberos had just torn his arm off!
Why would Papa do this to himself!?
But Yui already knew the answer, she was her father's daughter after all, and her own personality had arisen inevitably from what she had modeled by observing her parents. There were others inside the mound, but none of them were near the fighting. Papa must have stayed behind to hold off the Boss while Karin ran ahead. It was just like him to do that…
6000 HP
Yui gasped out, tears began to run down her closed eyes. Desperation. The gnawing pit of a horrible despair that had swallowed her up and destroyed her before, now loomed again. She was in danger of losing one of the most important people in her world, a person whose absence she had been unable to predict. She did not know what it would be like without him. She did not want to know.
Help! I have to help him!
But Papa's HP was dropping like a waterfall. Struggling to push open the flap of the satchel, she was barely strong enough to squirm free. She could not reach him in time, and even if she could, she was powerless, without offensive capabilities of any sort.
There had to be something she could do, some way to save him like she had done against The Fatal Scythe. But this wasn't like SAO, she couldn't conjure Object Eraser or the other GM Tools. Even if she could access those tools, to do so would alert Cardinal to her existence immediately, fail-safes would stop her before she could do anything. But if she didn't do those things then Papa would be dead!
Grief. Despair. No! It couldn't be like that. It couldn't be like Aincrad again!
She was losing control of herself. Something deep within her was changing, something that hadn't been there before the transition and that her Digital Self was helpless to stop.
It started within her own brain, the part of herself that had only begun to exist here in Halkegenia, the bioware that she'd probed, and needled, and been fascinated by, but mostly treated as a novelty, even as it began to take on additional faculty as helpful complimentary hardware to her main thought processes.
Errors beginning to propagate exponentially, cascading faster than her error checking could allow. Yui felt the crystallization of her consciousness beginning to fade, flickering, and cracking. Connections deleting themselves, associations breaking down rather than bearing the terrible sight. Step, after, step of failure, a terminal spiral towards collapse.
No!
What was this? She couldn't control it! Never had she had this lack of awareness about… about herself… the clarity with which she had viewed the world, fading away. Her Self beginning to shrink and dim until the world no longer seemed a wonderful riddle but something senseless and frightening, as to an infant unable to grasp what was happening around them.
And then, her fragmented mind caught on a thread. A single small detail grabbed hold of the crumbling facets of her attention, slowing her fall, giving her something to hold onto, to right herself.
She had to check twice, and even send a request query, but she knew what this was, the reason for the fervent activity. A separate instance of Cardinal! It was the only thing she thought it could be, unpacking onto some sort of local hardware. What mattered though was the functionality that had just activated within the range of this node. Spawn commands and…
'Can I use this?' She clung to the question like a life preserver. Could she? Or rather, dare she?
It might not work. It might get them killed. And it would absolutely consume her available processing power to keep all the verifications going at once. She'd have to constantly update the validation every millisecond to prevent herself from being found, and Papa would be in just as much danger.
2977 HP
But he was already in danger! There was no choice. And she knew in this situation what papa would want her to do.
Only as she slipped the changes into the character generator and verification system did Yui note two other IDs on the registry.
Kirito
Louise Francoise le Blanc de La Valliere
Louise!
But then, the last, in terrifying proximity to Louise.
Heathcliff
Heathcliff. Error Registry Association Yui's eyes glazed over. Heathcliff Kayaba Akihiko Creator Game Master: Sword Art Online Aincrad SAO Incident Despair Suffering Pain Grief Regret Remorse Over Three Thousand Player Deaths Suicide Accident Murder Murdered Murderer MURDERER
Something broke inside of Yui, and at the same time, something unspeakably fierce woke up inside of her. This strange stirring heat that boiled up inside of her chest, made her senses dull and tinged her vision black. 'This feeling… what is this feeling?!'
Thinking of her parent's stories, bringing up the palette registry buried within Cardinal, she executed the command that would make the vital alteration to Papa's temporary Bestial Form Stats, and then without a moment of hesitation she opened up the character generation engine and registered a new ID.

Player Login ID: Yui
Encryption: ****-****-****-****-****-****-****-****-****-****-****-****-****-****-****-****-****-****-****-****-****-****-****-****-****-****-****
Error Authenticating… .
Encryption: ****-****-****-****-****-****-****-****-****-****-****-****-****-****-****-****-****-****-****-****-****-****-****-****-****-****-****
Authentication Approved…
Race_Select: Maeve
Cmd_Override_GM_lvl3_Authenticate(Path_Authentication_Key)
Run_Stat_Mod
One Handed Sword: 1000
Parry: 1000
Blade Throwing: 1000
Hand to Hand: 1000
Dark Magic: 1000
Light Magic: 1000
Battle Healing: 1000
Emergency Recovery: 1000
Acrobatics: 1000
Sprint: 1000
Extended Perception: 1000
Lunar Radiance: 1000
Run_Eqp_Spawn
Sylph's Choker Eqp
Gossamer Vest Eqp
Disciple's Blouse Eqp
Whirlwind Skirt Eqp
Seraph's Sandals Eqp
Excaliber Eqp - Error: Unique Object - GM spawn forbidden NoEqp.
Fragarach Eqp.
Claiomh Solais Eqp.
Set Character Spawn Local.
Authentication Complete.
Good Luck Player!

If cooler heads had prevailed, Karin might have remained restrained, at least long enough to demand the surrender of the men holding her daughter. Very possibly holding her hostage. But cooler heads had not prevailed, and before Karin could even think to demand it, she had found herself locked in battle on six fronts.
Spinning, turning, parrying, and throwing her own snap-shot counterattacks. She didn't dare use her Heavy Wind with Louise so close by. Didn't dare risk her daughter's life with an area spell like that.
That was where Karin discovered something all too worrying. All six of the mages, all six were at least of triangle rank. Six Triangles simultaneously, wielding enough magical power to bring any ordinary square mage to heel, especially here in the underground where Karin's natural wind affinity was at its most diminished.
'Six of them.' Had the conspirators been recruiting from the army command now as well? When this was over, she and Belgen were going to have a long talk that would likely end up a good number of heads rolling across the floor. Like the head of the daring water mage she'd just taken off, through his own wall of water, using a vacuum blade wrapped around her sword hilt.
Karin staggered forward as the resistance vanished, the sudden motion causing a pain in her chest. A cough, one that it took all of her will to stop from turning into a fit. When Karin removed he hand from her mouth, it came back dark and bloody. The brief whiff of toxins from that ALfheim beast had taken a toll after all. She couldn't stay still, for something so petty.
One of the triangles was an earth mage, trying to form iron cables to bind her to the ground, not expecting the tornado of vacuum blades that surrounded her, forming her active defense, to simply cut the metal apart and then send themselves, and the fragmented shrapnel back at him.
Caught out of position, the only thing the man should have been capable of at that point was dying messily. And that was what Karin would have expected to happen, save for the sudden arrival of an unexpected barrier.
Her gale was met by a massive shield, screaming inhumanly as it beat off the vacuum blades and edged shrapnel, which ricocheted off with such force that hundreds of little craters were dug before the shield, filled with dully glowing red metal. A deep furrow was dug in the earth before and to the sides of the gleaming shield, defending against a cloud of wrath, of high-speed stone, dust, blades, and gravel debris that would have reduced any mundane human or beast in its path to a cloud of bloody mist.
As the attack died, Karin saw to her shock that the shield was still intact, unscratched, and save for the fast fading red glow of the shrapnel, entirely unblemished in the pale light of the cavern chamber. More shocking still, its master was still anchored to the plot where he had started, he hadn't budged even an inch.
'How?!'
Karin had her answer as the red clad warrior shifted his weight into a powerful forward sprint, leading with his shield like some knight out of legend, sword pulling free from the stone at his feet.
'He anchored himself with his sword?' What sort of blade could manage a feat like that in solid stone? Only the rarest Fae alloys came to mind.
Karin hesitated, expecting the surviving mages to take the opening, but they appeared just as stunned, no, even more so than her, by their ally's charge. Her opportunity against both parties wasted, the Heavy Wind found herself at a place she'd never thought she'd be in again. Point blank combat, fighting on foot, sword to sword.
He was fast, much too fast to be human, despite his appearance. Not even elves could move so quickly without the aid of magic. Karin moved to the limit, wind boosting her speed, recalling the instruction of years of drill and practice. Closing the distance between them so rapidly, without hesitation, and the way he fought now, confident in his victory against a powerful mage, displaying a prenatural ability to maneuver that seemingly impervious shield to cover any angle of attack. This man was a warrior as she hadn't seen in years.
Karin would burst past him on a gust of wind, aiming to take him from the side, only to find that he had already maneuvered to face her with that seemingly invincible shield. The single time she nearly got him out of position her sword was batted up as she released a tornado strike, magic roiling up to blast apart the ceiling and nearly collapsing the far side of the chamber.
A glance over Karin's shoulder revealed that there was nothing between her and Louise save one of the hooded men carefully beginning to lift her into his arms. 'No!'
The strange warrior in front of her, who was managing to stalemate her swordsmanship, didn't matter anymore. She turned on her heels, switching to pure speed to carry herself up to where her daughter was being taken. She drew her sword back for a wind needle. She'd kill the guard and then grab Louise. As a high square mage, she could make use of her magic to ascend up through the narrow gap between the trunk of the soot and the surrounding cavern, hopefully too fast to be hit.
A shadow appeared at Karin's side, from the corner of her eye, the blood red armor.
'Impossible. Accelerate!'
She surged as her body caught up with her thoughts, forcing it to move in the way and with the speed she demanded. Shrouded in wind, her blade met a shining red sword, clashing for a moment with a scream before the thin shell of residual magic on her blade was torn away, her sword shattering like glass an instant after. Silence, stillness, the world seemed at once as quiet and slow as she had been swift a moment before. An explosion of pain through her wrist, an ugly -pop-.
Then came the shield, driving hard into her chest, hard enough to crush ribs if she hadn't blown herself back a bit. The focus of her sword-wand, running down the spine, was still intact, she could still cast, and had need to do so immediately. The mages had gotten over their surprise, were now circling around her from behind while the red warrior was in front.
By now, she'd winnowed them down to three survivors. Her shoulder was pure agony as she aimed for one of them. Again she lashed out, and again she was intercepted, tornado blast battering the monster's shield down a little. 'Go for the eye!' The left eye, a precision wind spike, ignoring the armor and making him pay for idiotically foregoing a helmet.
The burning in her shoulder flamed up, radiating outwards, reaching, burning into her chest where her damaged lungs wheezed, and Karin experienced something unknown to her. No matter how hard she tried, not matter how much she willed, she couldn't stop from seizing. Halfway through her thrust, and after nearly three decades of service, her body had seemingly given out.
'Why? Why now!' It echoed inside of her head as the charging crimson man maneuvered his sword for a clean killing blow. She'd fought armies while in worse condition than this. And then the dawning realization of what was happening as the glowing red sword descended towards her. For the first time in her life, Karin Desiree de La Valliere found that she would fail at something she had set out with all of her heart to do.
Her daughter. Alone. "Louise." She breathed, closing her eyes.
The sound of her own death was not what Karin had expected, because it was not the sound of death at all, rather, it was the earsplitting chime of metal striking metal, the sound of heavy boots, bearing the weight of a grown man and considerable armor, skidding back across the gravelly ground.
Karin fell to her knees, but she still retained the strength to look up, expecting against all hope and likelihood the arrival of the Black Swordsman to the fray. Instead, she was met by something,  someone very different.
Black hair, yes, but white wings, glowing radiantly in the pale light of the glade. A faery. A Maeve? But Karin knew that there was only one, the Lady Asuna. The Maeve was in a low crouch, and slowly rose to her feet, to stand erect, never taking her eyes from the enemy. Mismatched swords were held tightly in her hands, stilled at the end of their completed motion, the double blade strike that had driven off the crimson Knight.
Karin could have been forgiven for comparing the young woman to the Lady Asuna. Thin, soft lips, composed and serious, dark eyes looking out beneath thin eyebrows, face framed by a straight, jet black hair. So much of that young woman was apparent in her it would have been like looking at a sister…
Standing erect now, arms bare all the way to shoulders, she wore a sleeveless white blouse worn beneath a long, translucent white, sleeveless vest that seemed to offer no protection, but neither did it appear to encumber her at all. A delicate bowed choker about her neck, a slack frilled skirt leaving her legs and sandaled feet unconstrained.
She looked every bit the part of a Faerie Princess dressed for a summer stroll, making the swords all the more preposterous, even more so when she saw that the form was one that she'd only seen once before, like that of Kirito.
"I made it in time, I see. Thank God." Her voice was soft and lyrical, comforting to hear, as if it had always been meant to be that way. "Are you alright, Karin-san?"
"Yes." Karin lied, struggling back to her feet despite her accursed body's protests. "But who…"
A knowing little smile stilled her question. "That might be hard to explain right now. But, don't worry, I'll help you to hold off Heathcliff."
"Heathcliff?"
The girl's smile turned to a small frown, anger flashed behind her eyes where before there had just been kindness, as she regarded the mildly bemused man. Shifting to a ready stance, with her two swords bared, her voice rang as clear as a bell.
"I'm not going to let you have your way this time… Grandfather!"