Chapter 1

Disclaimer: I don't own anything.

XXX

After the strange system-failure ended, the first clue they had that something had changed was the game's menu.

It didn't open. No matter how many times the players swiped their fingers at it, it wouldn't open. Almost as if it'd been entirely removed from the game.

And then there was the weight of things in their pockets, and the sudden removal of the Immortal Object pop-up. Or any pop-up at all, actually.

It was only later that they started to realize that people bled. That the players within the game suddenly had arteries and vital organs within their previously empty shells, and that the monsters had them as well.

Almost three-hundred people died in either complications during the system-failure or in the aftermath due to the way that the rules of the game had changed.

Nearly two years spent locked within the game, a bit over seventy Floors cleared, and suddenly everything seemed to have gone to hell.

The NPCs didn't seem to react overly much, though suddenly the specifics surrounding their quests became a bit more complex, a bit more geared towards something that made sense instead of something that followed MMO game-mechanics. Not to mention that something about them had shifted determinedly into 'creepy valley' territory.

Only one player would be able to gain the quest to 'slay a mid-boss' unless that player failed, and the cool-down periods surrounding the 'gather ingredients' could last for days. At the same time, NPC shop-keepers were suddenly heavily limited by the actual raw material that was being turned in on these quests.

And the places that should've been Safe Zones were just as dangerous as the rest of Aincrad.

It was madness, it was completely against what Kayaba had seemed to wish to achieve, and yet it was so horrifically similar to 'reality' that the players trapped within the death-game could do nothing but believe he'd somehow managed to grow even more insane than previously.

Then the monsters started to migrate, switching between floors if the stairs leading between them were left unguarded. And the monsters truly begun to come alive, already switching their attack-patterns into something unique for every individual of the species.

To the Clearers, the front-line groups seeking to clear the game as soon as possible, it was a horrific setback. Suddenly levels didn't matter as much as they should, and experience points didn't seem to be awarded at all, even if the stats gained from levels that had already been gained appeared to remain roughly the same.

The setback was even worse when looked on in the contest of how the Clearers had been one of the groups that had been heavily culled by the deaths. There were always some of them out in the field, and they'd been out in the field even as the system-failure had left them terrifyingly vulnerable to the monsters that they'd surrounded themselves with. And they'd been among the first players who'd really begun to explore the full extent of the monster-changes, and had lost even more as they'd been caught unaware by the changing attack-patterns.

The only reason that the death-toll hadn't been higher had been Argo's vocal announcement that with the Safe Zones gone, high-level players were needed to reinforce the defenses surrounding the non-active players. Both to protect the non-combatants from monsters who no longer considered the cities as 'off limits', but also to protect them from PK-guilds who saw the removal of the menu as a golden opportunity to kill as many people as they wanted without getting labeled as a 'red player'.

Only once they'd all gathered, did they realize just how vulnerable they were to the sudden shift in the game-mechanics. And that's when people started to panic.

However, that wasn't the end of it.

Aincrad was a floating castle. It wasn't really something people thought about, being more of an abstract memory for the players trapped within the game. They were already within the castle, and there weren't many places to find an opening from which to see out into its surroundings, and yet they were surrounded on all sides by trees and mountains and parks and cities and desserts, so it felt absurd to recall that all of the many things they could see within Aincrad were all placed within a castle that was floating in the sky.

But now-... rather than the endless clouds, now there was suddenly something below them.

There were villages and farm-land, and mountains and castles, and forests and rivers. And they were so very high up.

They were so far up that it'd taken somebody putting together a rudimentary spy-glass for them to realize that there were people down there, small as ants even through that enlarged view.

And there were flying monsters within Aincrad, who seemed more than happy to escape the castle and emerge into the true sky outside. And then attack those people so very far below them.

Some players felt guilty about that, but even if they could've found some way of helping the people down below, they didn't even have the manpower to consider culling the winged beasts. And that didn't include how, through monsters and PK-guilds both, they were already under siege.

Then there was the way that the players were also under the slowly dawning suspicions that they weren't within the game any more, and as people started to wonder if they weren't actually in a new world entirely, the ones who had once been filled with hope at the thought of returning home to their families were left with the despair of finding that hope crushed.

Despite everything that had happened, Kayaba had promised to free them from the game, if they merely cleared it first. But if they weren't within the game, then he had no power to release them with. They were trapped, and there were already warnings of the suicide-rate beginning to climb again. Just like it had back then, during the first few months, before the Clearers had proven that the game could be beaten, had proven that there truly was a way to get back home.

Of course, it wasn't as bad now, not when people had grown used to living in Aincrad, had grown fond of the friendships and makeshift families that they'd cobbled together for themselves over the years. But it was going to happen, and it was going to be more horrible than before, since this time around the survivors wouldn't merely be left with a horrible image of a death. They'd also be left cleaning up the corpses.

Still, some took the transition easier than others, and the more active players were quickly piecing together some kind of guard-patrol. After all, even if the NPCs still functioned – in an eerily golem-like way – the guards of Aincrad had never been programmed to patrol the streets, only to keep the people within the prison imprisoned.

It took them nearly a week to realize that the guards hadn't been feeding their prisoners at all, but by then the food-shortage already present amongst the other players since the transition had forced the administrators' hands. The prison was retroactively and with great reluctance classified as a death-sentence. The people already within its walls were already dead, and they well and truly simply didn't have any food to spare.

It was in the middle of this that it happened. In the middle of the siege of the monsters against the walls of the towns, the loss of much-needed farmland to mobs who'd once left those very farm alone, the rampant PK-guilds who no longer seemed anywhere near as hindered as they'd been before, and the borderline starvation of the players.

A sailing ship that emerged from behind the clouds, making its way straight towards them. No, not one ship, dozens of ships. Flying impossibly through the air, the people on them appeared fairly competent in battle, as they batted away the attacks of a few of the more curious of the flying mobs surrounding the floating castle.

It was immediately clear to most everyone why they had come, though the specifics of how still eluded them – since, according to every law they'd ever heard of anything physics-related, the sight of those ships should've only come-about in the fever dreams of an unusually traumatized physics-student. They were there because the flying monsters of Aincrad still attacked the people on the ground far below them.

They were here to deal with the source of the attacks.

And that's how the players of Aincrad were first introduced to the people of Halkeginia, and found to their relief that they at the very least had a shared language.

However, perhaps needless to say, the meeting included blame, confusion, disbelief, and a whole lot of posturing from both sides of the diplomatic equation.

The players of Aincrad wanted to get away from the death-trap of a world that they'd found themselves in. Once upon a time, perhaps they would've been more reluctant to abandoning the homes that they'd made for themselves over the last two years, perhaps some amongst them might've even wanted to stay in Aincrad over returning to their lives outside of the game. But now, with the continuous and escalating war against the monsters, and the desperate lack of material and food beginning to truly take its toll on the towns that were still standing, they wanted to be anywhere else.

And a place that wasn't hopelessly infested with monsters sounded awfully tempting to their ears.

The way that corpses were so horrifically often being found in alleys across Aincrad certainly didn't endear it to them any more. It was one thing to know that the PK-guilds were making full use of the lack of proper safe-zones, but to see the proof day in and day out in the form of dead faces staring up at you from various garbage cans was quite a bit more than anyone had the stomach for.

After all, the PK-guilds were still quite new to the prospect of actually dealing with the dead bodies of their victims.

Thankfully, there did seem to be some former members who were starting to back away from said guilds, suddenly squeamish in the face of the lives that they'd been ending all this time.

Despite that, despite all of the bad things going on around them, Aincrad was familiar. This was the place where they'd made memories and friends for the last few years. And though they would've been happy to leave the game and return to the real world, to leave it for something completely unknown left many people wary.

On the other side of the table, the Halkeginia people wanted the floating castle cleared of the flying monsters attacking its citizens. And had not arrived with the intention of arguing diplomatic semantics. They'd been sent to deal with the problem. By any means necessary.

The only thing that kept the discussions from devolving into an outright battle between the two parties was a mixture of wariness, ethics, and curiosity.

Obviously, the ones in charge of the talks were the leaders of the bigger guilds. In particular, the guilds helping out the non-active players, a few of the extremely numerous Middle Floor guilds, and the Clearing groups. Those were the ones who'd banded together into a rather peculiar type of government in the face of this latest crisis, and that meant that this was their problem to solve.

The Clearers were in charge of the monster-threat and the PKers, the middle-floor players kept an eye on the gathering of raw materials and general policing, and the low-level guilds focused their attention on keeping everyone fed and clothed.

It was a dysfunctional government, and would most likely fall apart at a moments notice, should it be allowed to do so, but it was all they had.

Unfortunately, that kind of thing-... words like that were spoken far too regularly and on far too many wide-spread subjects in Aincrad for the comfort of anyone within its walls.

Their 'government', the safety against the advancing monsters, the lack of food, the mental health of the remaining survivors-... far too many situations explained with those simple words. It was fractured and broken, prone to catastrophic failure at a stray gust of wind, and it truly was all that they had.

XXX

Louise had woken up to the clinical walls of the healer's room.

She could remember failing time and time again to summon her familiar. And she could remember desperation, and her vision turning dark.

Willpower exhaustion.

And no familiar to show for it.

Just this-... this slowly dawning resignation to what she was. What she had always been. What she had tried to escape from, but failed.

She was a failure, a nobody, someone who deserved none of what had been granted to her by her birthright.

She was a Valliere in name only. The Valliere were nobles, the Valliere were friends with the royal family of Tristain, the Valliere were powerful.

Louise was just Louise. A zero, a pathetic hopeless nobody, that had somehow been born into this impossibly perfect family. And now the world knew, as she herself had secretly known for a long long time now. A knowledge that she'd hidden away from even herself. Hidden in hope, in desperate hope, and in cowardly denial.

So Louise cried. Because she wasn't a Valliere, and everyone she'd ever known, everything she'd ever had, all the things that had been hers, could never belong to her. She wasn't a noble, and commoners weren't allowed to be friends with the princess, they weren't allowed to be hugged by nobles, they weren't allowed to have legendary war-heroes look at them with pride.

She didn't have family, she didn't have friends, she didn't have a mother to acknowledge her, she didn't have a sister to comfort her, she didn't have a friend to tease her. She was nothing. She was a zero, and she was a coward for not daring to face it.

So she cried, and she cried, and she kept her sobs as quiet as she could, because a nobody shouldn't disturb a noble. And she was even worse than a nobody, because she had pretended-... she had pretended to be somebody.

And now the masquerade had fallen, and those that she'd loved, those that had loved the somebody that she'd pretended to be, would turn to her in disgust and betrayal. Because she was nothing.

XXX

The headmaster had been distracted even as he signed the papers that would expel her from the academy – gracefully, of course, it wouldn't do to cause offense to the Valliere name for something as simple as their supposed daughter in fact being a commoner who'd spent all this time pretending otherwise. But that distracted air was understandable, Louise admitted to herself as she stared ahead with blank eyes.

She'd been unconscious for nearly three days, and on the morning of the fourth day reports had started coming in of monster-attacks. By now, there'd been dozens of them, and rumors were running amok amongst the student populace.

Apparently, a sliver of land had broken off Albion – or simply risen to the sky, much like Albion had in ancient times – and it'd become a nest to all manner of foul flying beasts. And that sliver of land now hovered far above Tristain's borders, allowing the monsters free reign of the sky.

It was a very unpleasant scenario, especially with the civil-war brewing in Albion, and the planned marriage between the Princess of Tristain and the Emperor of Germania. All connected together, it was a very inconvenient time to have monsters running rampant around the countryside.

In comparison, the final acceptance that Louise was a failure and a commoner and should never have been allowed within the academy's walls in the first place-... it was quite lackluster, for someone who was, if not officially in charge of dealing with the problem then at least high enough on the hierarchy of nobility that he was forced to pay attention to it.

Louise bowed low as the man handed her the papers, still keeping her face perfectly blank.

No, her face merely was perfectly blank. She didn't feel anything. She was too drained to feel. Too empty. Just an empty shell of nothing-...

Holding the papers of her expulsion in her hands, her face still expressionless, Louise made her way out of the headmaster's office.

She was to return to the Valliere estate, so that they may decide her fate. Decide her punishment for disguising herself as a noble, for reaching above her station.

XXX

She couldn't wear the cloak of a noble, nor the emblem of the academy.

But with neither of those things present on her body, there was no telling what might befall her on her way to the family estate. Of course the Valliere family might send a carriage, but such a thing-... such a thing was not for a commoner to demand. Especially not a commoner who had pretended to be their daughter, pretended to have been of their blood.

No, she would reach the Valliere estate by her own power, pathetic and nonexistent though it was.

But again, that left her with the complications of not having an emblem marking her as something for bandits and thieves to avoid. And though they didn't belong to her – they were of the Valliere family, bought for their supposed daughter, never for herself, the commoner – the clothes available to her were of obviously wealthy make. A prime target for greedy bandits if there ever was one, not to mention the recent monster-attacks.

No, she would need something to dissuade those who might decide to try their luck.

It was for the Valliere family to decide her punishment, whatever that might be, not for monsters and commoners and bandits. Though, she supposed, it was possible that aforementioned punishment would be lenient enough that it could include exile from the estate – there would be no point in banishing a corpse from their land – and from there it was highly likely that she would indeed be left to the mercies of exactly those things.

But that was later, once those she'd deceivingly called family had decided on how to deal with her unfortunate existence.

So she would need a deterrent. And she could not wear the cloak of a noble – for that was not her place, never had been, she'd just pretended all this time, tried so desperately hard to pretend – so she would be forced to resort to other ways of doing so.

Her conclusion had been displeasing to her, though again it'd been the only conclusion she could admit to.

She would need a sword, something to wear in full view of those who might consider her a target, something which would dissuade all from approaching her, without declaring her a noble – because she wasn't, had never been, would never be, she was nothing, nothing. It was a displeasing choice, for she didn't have a sword readily available to use in such a manner, meaning that she would have to use funds that didn't belong to her in order to purchase such a thing.

The horses of the Academy belonged to the students, and she wasn't a student. So she would have to ask for assistance from the commoner servant staff who would regularly take a carriage into town for the sake of purchasing food and other necessities.

She pretended not to notice the shock on the maid's face as she made her requests, but she didn't have to feign her empty expression as she explained her purpose and reasoning. She pretended not to notice the way the maid's eyes teared up, the way her finger's twitched as if to reach out and grab her as she began to realize just why this tiny noble with a hollow expression didn't wear a cloak.

Whether by pity, sympathy, or disinterest on the matter, the staff-member allowed for her presence on the carriage into town.

XXX

The shopkeeper was a sleazy kind of man, and once he realized that she truly had no interest in purchasing anything of any actual worth, he dismissively gestured her towards a barrel of swords.

Most of them were rusty, or almost broken, or some combination of both.

But then, she didn't need a sword that could be used, just something that looked like it could still be wielded. It was purely meant as a deterrent.

One of the swords spoke up when her hand brushed against its hilt, and she startled a bit, never having seen a talking sword before.

The shopkeeper yelled at the sword to keep quiet, to not scare his customers away, but the sword was rude enough to not worry about the man's opinion on the matter.

Lifting the sword from the barrel, Louise admitted that it looked like it could be intimidating enough, like it could still be used despite its rusty appearance. Upon seeing her interest, the shopkeeper promptly began a sales-pitch, suddenly praising the sword he'd previously insulted, probably in an attempt to be rid of it.

Louise didn't overly care either way, but the sword was within her budget, and fit the criteria she had placed for herself. So she turned dead eyes towards the sleazy man, and told him that she'd be taking the sword a long way away, that it would never darken his doorstep again, and that she'd only be willing to do so for the right prize.

The sword, Derflinger, bickered and argued and grumbled and muttered at the shopkeeper actually considering the offer. But when she moved into the open air once more, the money pouch that the Valliere family had given to their daughter, was barely a single coin lighter than it had been.

It took the sword several city-blocks before it began to realize what the shopkeeper already had.

The girl carrying it was empty. She moved with the same rigid efficiency as a golem made by an amateur mage, and her expression was as emotional as that of a corpse.

It took until she'd found another carriage going in the right direction – hours after that – before the sword finally realized why.

It had been bought by a girl that was marching voluntarily to her own execution.

When asked for her reasoning, why she wasn't attempting to escape and survive, she'd bluntly replied that there would be no reason for such actions, since she was nothing. Nothing at all.

Derflinger wasn't physically capable of frowning – it didn't have eyebrows or a face to distort – but upon hearing that answer, for the first time in a very very long time it made a valid attempt. The sword had been sold to a young girl, suicidal with guilt and despair-driven apathy.

And it wondered if it might not actually pity her, a bit, despite of how it lacked a heart with which to feel. But of course, Louise was too busy staring blankly ahead to register or care to even notice the underlying importance behind her new sword's sudden silence.

XXX

It'd happened so fast.

One moment, the carriage had continued to rattle down along the dirt-road, and the next the horses were panicking. Panicking in a way that the driver had immediately realized was due to them picking up a smell on the wind.

Then there was a screech that sounded a bit like a gryphon, and suddenly a monster whose species she didn't recognize at all had appeared from the sky. It had wings, and a beak, and a lot of claws, but it also seemed to have scales were a proper gryphon should've had fur, and the coloration was strange.

If asked about it, Louise could never have explained why she drew her rusty sword against it. Why she stepped in between it and the old man on whose carriage she'd paid to hitch a ride. Or how she'd managed to pull the rusty sword from its sheath in the first place.

She could give excuses, and she could make assumptions, but she didn't think she'd ever truly be able to explain it.

But, in the face of a monster almost three times her size, and with her own scrawny arms trying to wield a sword that was probably more than a bit too big for her, Louise had never stood a chance.

Still, from the way she'd waved the blade in the monster's face, it'd grown far more interested in killing her, than it seemed interested in attacking the commoner. Something which the sensible man took advantage of, by urging his horses onwards down the road and far away from the eerily empty little girl and what was soon going to be her death. Leaving Louise alone with the monster that she stood no chance of defeating.

Talking sword or no, Derflinger couldn't wield itself, and Louise had never been talented with physical activities. The outcome hadn't come as a surprise for either of them.

However, as Louise stared up at the sky, trying to ignore the pain in her side of what might very well have been a lethal wound, and the monster turned to her downed form. Something odd happened.

Or... well, maybe it wasn't so odd. Louise had grown up with Cattleya Valliere after all, even if she wasn't truly that beautiful woman's sister. She had grown used to admiring predators that would've most likely left many others her age scared out of their wits.

Instead of flinching backwards, or trying to escape, or reaching for a sword in order to fight, Louise patted the monstrous beast on its beak.

Despite the strangeness of its appearance, it was quite beautiful in its own way. Sharp and deadly, graceful and dangerous. And despite how she ought to have feared it for the danger it posed, how she ought to have hated it for the damage it'd already caused her, Louise couldn't help but admire it.

The monster stared down at her, eyes merciless.

But that was okay. She wasn't really sure if she wanted to survive anyway, and at least she'd died protecting another. Perhaps her life, pathetic and insignificant and deceitful and hopeless though it had been, had served some minor purpose in that.

She closed her eyes, a brief sigh of something almost resembling contentment slipping past her lips. She felt her consciousness begin to fade, and she wondered briefly if the monster would eat her, or if it'd merely killed her for sport.

Then everything turned black.

XXX

Kayaba had designed them to react to human words.

Not to the point of understanding even if they were unable to speak it, but enough that they had a... 'foundation' of sorts. They understood inflictions in voices, and they were intelligent enough that they could learn to pick up on repeated phrases, and they would react accordingly.

To Kayaba, they'd merely been another tiny little piece of his masterwork. But they'd grown since then. After all, the rules that had once controlled them, had forced them to obey, were no longer present.

If they had no reason to remain on their assigned Floors, then they wouldn't remain there. If they were curious enough to explore, then they would explore. If they were hungry, they'd find something edible. If they were tired, then they'd rest.

Broken off from the system that had forced them into mindless obedience, the monsters had grown flesh and bones.

And whilst some had used that to hunt and kill those whom they still considered 'enemies', others had used it to slip away from sight, or to turn against those other monsters who'd once been their allies as hunger convinced them that they were the best prey to hunt. There were hundreds of species, and whilst many of them were predators, some of them weren't.

But – impossible though it might've seemed – when a pathetically weak human child had attempted to distract one of the predators from the appetizing non-monster and the older human, when it had failed so pathetically easily, when it had been dying, when it had patted the monster on its beak, when it had smiled even as it began to die... when a monster met a human who it didn't have to fear and who in return seemed so content in its presence... something had changed.

There weren't any programming to demand mercilessness. There were no powerful humans to mercilessly protect itself from. There was just the two of them. One dying, the other watching the first.

Until a strange disembodied voice that it could almost understand, asked it to help the child.

It had no reason to do so, it had no reason to listen, it had no reason to watch over the dying child in the first place. But even so, the monster began to lick the child's wound clean as best as it could.

XXX

Louise woke to a metallic voice, and coldness.

She was so very very cold. And in pain. But she was almost more cold than she was in pain. And she was more tired still than she was cold.

But the voice was telling her to grab on. No, it was ordering her to grab on. So, she allowed herself to be shifted according to the voice's instructions, and she held onto the feathers. Big feathers, and she could feel dry scales shifting underneath her.

When whatever she was resting on finally seemed to deem the position correct, it started to walk. Every step was painful, and made her entire body throb in an almost feverish haze.

By the time she heard the beating of wings, she was already slipping back into the darkness, despite the metallic voice's continued orders of remaining awake, commanding her to hold on.

But before she completely succumbed, she caught the briefest of glimmer of rusty metal held in a gigantic bird-like claw.

XXX

The landing woke her again, the heavy thud causing pain to blast through her body in a way that nearly knocked her right back out again.

The metallic voice was shouting now, words that blurred together into an unintelligible mass, but with an undertone of urgency.

She was so very cold, but the dry scales she was lying on were warm, and she still hurt, everything hurt now. As if the pain from the wound was echoing even down into her fingertips.

Louise eyes slipped open briefly, giving her a glimpse of warily frightened faces, of commoners. Like she was. A useless, deceitful, commoner. A shameful blot upon a noble family's good name.

Her eyes slipped closed again.

At least they could perhaps hide away her disgusting existence from the world, now that she was dying. It shouldn't be too difficult to pressure the headmaster into giving a different official reason for her expulsion from the academy, something that fit with the way she'd died.

Perhaps she might simply go down in history as a little girl running off to try and fight monsters, despite her teacher's attempts to dissuade her? It would be a lie – she was nothing – but at least such a tale might serve as a deterrent for future generations of the Valliere family.

There'd at least be some use to be had in her, if she could just die fast enough, before anyone managed to bring her back to health.

But she wanted to live-...!

A last, defiant thought, before she was swallowed again by darkness.

XXX

Derflinger wasn't sentimental. After six-thousand years of existence, being passed from hand to hand, participating in war after war, the sword honestly didn't much care about the people wielding it.

Oh, it might still remember its first wielder fondly, but the Gandalfr had always been special.

And really, when it came down to it, Derflinger was a sword, it had no reason to think of things in the same manner as regular people did.

But still... it would much rather be wielded, or at least be carried around, than to be forever trapped in the mangy little barrel in the shop of that sleazy little man. So, when it realized that the monster that had so easily defeated its current wielder had no intentions of actually finishing her off – instead actually seeming to try and keep her warm and protected – it decided to help.

It'd taken a lot of talking before the monster had figured out what it needed to do, and then it had carried them both to the nearest human settlement. Most places usually had some kind of way to contact a water-mage, and the girl wouldn't last for long unaided.

Convincing the villagers of said settlement to actually provide the aid necessary for the sake of its current wielder's survival proved nowhere near as challenging. Apparently, one of the civilians recognized her face as belonging to a nearby noble family, and though her current wardrobe caused some confusion, it hadn't stopped them from contacting the local healer.

However, the monster didn't want to let the girl out of its sight, and so the healer had reluctantly been forced to try and heal her out in the open air.

From the person's mutterings, they weren't very pleased with that situation at all, but they were professional enough to not let such things stop them. Or even, in fact, for their hands to shake from the nervousness of having such a strange and lethal-looking monster staring down at them and carefully tracking their every move.

XXX

The Valliere family was an old one.

Well known for their ability with magic, and their fierce rivalry with the Germanian family, the Zerbst, they were closely linked to the throne of Tristain. Some of the royalty's closest and most loyal supporters.

Perhaps they would've managed to grow even more famous had it ever been publicly known that the legendary Karin of the Heavy Wind was indeed the family's duchess these days. But it wouldn't have an especially big leap in renown, and would've most likely caused far more trouble than such a thing would be worth.

She was retired, anyway. So there truly wasn't any need for her name to be spread around. That was Karin's own feelings on the matter.

However, should her fame in any way have eased – or perhaps even removed – the burden from her youngest daughter's shoulders, she would've used it in a heartbeat.

She'd long since known that Louise was having... difficulties with magic. But she'd assumed that Tristain's Academy of Magic would be able to clear away any such problems, allowing her to step up into the role as the youngest Valliere without complications.

For her to be expelled. No, for her to be expelled because of lacking magic, was absurd. Commoners didn't make things explode into smithereens at the wave of a wand. Louise's magic was difficult to understand, and despite herself Karin had found herself at a loss on what to do about it, but there was no doubt that her youngest daughter was magical.

Even so, that ability to explode things had apparently not been enough for the teachers of the Academy. And now Karin would be dealing with the political fallout of her youngest daughter not being a 'proper noble'.

Of course, this meant that quite a number of blustering fools would be hinting at her having invited another man into her bed than her husband, but thankfully a few glares generally at least kept them from doing so in her presence. And beyond that, there were of course some of the more devout who assumed that Louise's 'lack' of magic was a sign from the Founder Brimir about the Valliere family losing his favor.

All in all, it was a political nightmare, only kept at bay by the rather timely distraction in regards to the strange floating island that had appeared above Tristain, and which appeared to be completely infested with flying monstrosities of a nature none had ever seen or heard of before.

That was a rather pleasant distraction actually. Though it wasn't something she could truly approve of, with how the monsters were going after commoners who couldn't do anything to defend themselves.

But yes, if it could've given Louise control over her magic-... There were few things that Karin could imagine herself refusing to do in order to achieve that.

It wasn't just for the sake of removing the rumors of her activities in the bed-chamber, but also a desire to ease her youngest daughter's burden. Louise had always been the one daughter who'd reminded Karin of herself the most. The passionate spitfire who was probably more than a bit too stubborn for her own good, and loyal to a fault. And when it came down to it, Karin could so easily tell how hard she took every single one of her failures, and her heart ached at the sight of it, even as she knew that it would be those very failures that would allow her daughter to grow.

Except now, she was almost assuredly quite distraught. Though, knowing Louise, she was probably already halfway into coming up with an elaborate plan to prove everyone wrong, to show them just how much magic she truly had. Which was unfortunately, not at all what her sister Cattleya would be doing.

Karin allowed herself the smallest of sighs as she recalled some of her middle-daughter's many schemes. And the dawning resignation to dealing with the fallout of Cattleya attempting to 'prove' to the rest of the world that Louise was magical.

Cattleya was the kind of person who wouldn't hesitate for a moment to deceive the entirety of Tristain, if it would help protect her younger sister. Which in this context would mean to find a way to convince everyone involved that Louise could indeed do magic. Even if she couldn't.

Hopefully, the gentlest of her daughters wouldn't be doing anything truly heretical in order to help. Or break Louise's heart by letting the girl ever find out that her much-adored older sister didn't believe enough in her own ability to not concoct a backup plan that would be based on an attempt to pull the wool over the eyes of the Church.

Still, the monster-attacks needed to be dealt with, and Karin fully supported the Crown's decision to send what little navy they had to attack the source, even if it meant depleting any possible reserve in the likely case that the Reconquista decided to venture beyond Albion's borders.

Now, if she could just figure out where in the world her youngest daughter had disappeared to...

XXX

Henrietta frowned down at the report in front of her.

She was a princess, still most definitely not a regent, not yet anyway, so it was highly doubtful that she'd be able to make any true decisions on how to deal with the situation. But she had to keep herself informed of what happened in her kingdom, and this had most definitely classified as important. Aside from that, it wasn't as if the Cardinal currently working in the crown's name wouldn't listen to her opinion at all.

There were more than enough records of those in charge of grooming the new king or queen trying to make their own changes on the kingdom, regardless of the wants or needs of said future king or queen. Or rather, there were enough records of the many many many gruesome and sometimes downright horrific punishments that her ancestors had doled out at being usurped, once they'd managed to reclaim their crown.

No, he'd listen to her opinion. From what she knew of him, he was actually more inclined to follow along as her advisor rather than try to handle things on his own. Which was probably why she hadn't even needed to specifically ask for this report.

But that didn't make the report any easier to make any sense of.

There'd been monster-attacks all across Tristain. The monsters were of a type that had never been seen before, and were all capable of flight. When trying to locate the source of the monsters, a floating island had been spotted, far smaller than Albion, but impressively sized nonetheless. In response to this discovery, the Tristain fleet had been amassed to wipe out the monsters at the source.

Thus far, everything made sense. The problem stemmed from the fact that upon arriving at the island, the fleet had found that it wasn't an island.

It was a castle. A floating castle. A floating castle the size of a mountain, a very large mountain.

Ignoring the floating bit – because that could easily be explained by wind-stones – the question that quickly became obvious was 'why?'. Why would anyone build – or carve, the report hadn't been clear on the exact methods of fabrication – a castle the size of a mountain? What possible reason could there be to either hollow out an entire mountain, or to build something so immensely large?

There were possible explanations, of course. It could've once been a mountain unusually rich with precious metals or gems, that had been hollowed out through mining, and then transformed into a castle. Or it could've been designed by a disturbingly ambitious ruler who wanted it to be capable of comfortably housing the population of an entire country.

In the end, even the fact that the island was in fact a castle could be explained away. It could be made sense of.

The problem really started when the captains of the ships had moved closer to the 'ground floor' of the castle. And had seen people.

It'd been shocking enough that some had voiced thoughts of the monster-attacks merely being the prelude of an invading army. Thankfully though, calmer and more diplomatic minds had prevailed, and so one of the ships had approached a balcony of sorts that looked reasonably suitable for docking-purposes.

Which had been when things apparently became really strange.

The inhabitants of the floating castle spoke their language, though their accents sometimes sounded a bit off. They were dressed in armor, and equipped with swords and weapons of all kinds. And they apparently had absolutely no idea where they were, or how they'd gotten there.

From what the spokesperson had been able to convey, it seemed as if the castle had been designed by a genius madman of some sort, who had trapped them – all ten thousand of them – within it for over two years. The castle had always been filled with monsters, but the madman had promised them that on the uppermost floor of the castle there would be a way to escape.

They'd reached the seventy-second floor when something had malfunctioned in the madman's design. Something had changed, and the monsters had started to run completely amok, instead of following their usually set patterns. Which had led to the remaining survivors occupying the lowest thirteen floors, and rapidly losing ground.

They were in fact losing so much ground to the advancing monsters that they no longer had enough food to feed themselves.

But no, even if such events were horrifying and disturbing on equal levels, what truly bothered both Henrietta and the author of the report that she was currently frowning at, was one final detail.

There were people who weren't people. The entire castle was populated with eerily humanoid golems. Golems who were capable of farming, crafting, shopkeeping, and all manners of associated things.

And that should be impossible.

There was no magic that could possibly create something like what the soldiers described. At least not without necromancy involved. Which was forbidden. Very much forbidden.

Nobody with whom the chosen diplomats had spoken to had given them any clues as to where the floating castle had come from, or of a way to track down the probably-heretic mage of a madman who'd trapped them in this floating castle which he'd apparently named 'Aincrad'.

There was of course also the interesting lack of any mage whatsoever within the population of those who'd been trapped. Interesting mostly because the monsters that the castle was inhabited with weren't exactly easy to kill, even for a trained mage. And these commoners had somehow managed to kill their way through seventy-two floors filled with them. There'd been casualties, of course, but it was still an immensely impressive feat, especially since amongst the ten-thousand trapped, a bit over six-thousand had managed to survive for over two years.

It was an even more impressive number when it was put into the context of around two-thousand people having willingly leapt over the edge in a hopeless attempt to escape during those first few months of their capture. Which would've only left around eight-thousand commoners to finish fighting their way through the monsters.

Impressive numbers, considering how they didn't have magic on their side. Impressive enough numbers that the author to the report suspected that they were either lying through their teeth about something – the amount of floors cleared, or the amount of people who'd participated originally – or they were impossibly skilled with their weapons. And not just that there were people of skill caught up within the group, but rather that the entire population was somehow unnaturally predisposed to being good at wielding weapons.

Either way, the whole situation was giving Henrietta a headache.

XXX

Louise didn't wake up on a bed.

There were feathers, and dry scales, and for one moment of confusion she wondered if she'd fallen asleep amongst a pile of Cattleya's more unique pets.

Then she heard the not-gryphon's cry. Much softer than before, but still distinct enough that her memory came flashing back.

She'd been dying. Dying. Dying like she ought to have done, because she was a failure, a deceitful commoner pretending to be a noble, a disgusting blot upon the Valliere family's good name.

And yet she'd lived.

Louise stared blearily up at the dark sky above her.

She'd failed, even at dying, and yet-... and yet she was happy? Relieved? Relief so powerful that she felt her eyes watering long before she felt the pain of her wound seeping past the general chill of what she guessed was blood-loss.

A choked sob slipping past her lips, Louise wondered at her selfishness.

She was a commoner, a useless deceitful commoner, and yet-... she wanted to live. She wanted to survive. Her death was the only way to repent for her deceitfulness, for dragging the Valliere name through the mud, but she didn't want to die.

And for the first time since she'd failed her summoning and finally proven beyond doubt that she was a 'zero', Louise wanted to run away. To turn around and disappear, to escape into nowhere and never face the rightful punishment that should be applied to her by the Valliere family for the slight of a mere commoner using their name.

It wasn't a proper feeling, it wasn't something that she should feel, after all of her deceitfully selfish actions. But that didn't make it any less true.

She wanted to live.

XXX

It would scar.

How laughable, the way the water-mage tried to break it to her gently. Louise was probably going to be executed for impersonating being of noble birth, and he was worried over a scar that wasn't even visible underneath her clothes?

Oh, certainly, it wouldn't be an even remotely subtle scar. It being something that stretched across both her abdomen and back in a thick jagged line, but that still didn't make it any less of a non-issue.

Dismissing the man in the politest way possible – she was a commoner, being anything less than absolutely polite was an outrageous breach of protocol – since he quite clearly didn't want to be in the strange gryphon's presence, Louise picked up her talking sword and turned her attention to the scaled beast.

She hesitated for a long moment, not entirely sure what she wanted to do, before she bowed deeply. "You spared my life, thank you."

The almost-gryphon didn't seem to understand her words, but at the same time she had the feeling that it understood her perfectly.

Louise straightened, staring down the monster that could've so easily killed her. "But you scared away my carriage." She channeled everything she'd ever seen Countess Valliere – never mother, never again, she wasn't her daughter, she wasn't a noble, the legendary woman wouldn't ever be proud of her, Louise was nothing, she was a zero – into as stately an expression as she could manage. "I would ask for compensation for that."

She heard whispers breaking out amongst the commoners who'd arrived to watch the spectacle, but she paid them no mind. The only thing that mattered was if the gryphon in front of her would bend itself to her will.

The moment stretched on, long and awkward, before the gryphon took a step closer, its sharp beak awfully close to Louise's all-too-vulnerable face.

Then it turned slightly, taking a position that was bizarrely familiar. She'd seen enough of the gryphon knights to remember what it signified.

"You have my thanks." She accepted the offer.

It was both easier and harder than she would've thought to mount it. On the one hand, she'd seen knights do it witch such fluid ease that she couldn't imagine it being 'difficult', but on the other hand she was both far shorter than those same knights, and the almost-gryphon in question didn't have a saddle.

Still, in seemingly no time at all, she watched from high in the air on the back of a scaled gryphon as the town where her life had barely been saved shrunk into the distance.

Fighting against the irrational urge – to live, to survive, to escape, to run away – to turn the gryphon away from the direction of the Valliere estate, Louise resolutely continued onwards.

She might be a commoner, a deceitful nobody not worthy of anything that she'd been granted, but she most certainly wasn't a coward.

She would face the Valliere family, she would apologize and accept her punishment for her actions against their family's reputation, and for her sins towards the Church for impersonating a noble. And even if she would bow her head, for she had been in the wrong, she would face those punishments with her back straight.

XXX

When Louise had arrived at the Valliere estate, flying in on some sort of scaled gryphon, Karin had been severely tempted to both sigh in relief and roll her eyes in exasperation.

It made perfect sense for the girl to recklessly decide to attempt the Springtime Summoning Ritual on her lonesome, despite how the Academy had already classified her attempt as a pointless failure. And of course she would've done it halfway to the estate out in the middle of nowhere without any potential assistance, desperately wanting to arrive in smug defiance of their attempts to smear her good name.

Yes, that had been the thought that had passed through her mind right then, leaving her to begin thinking of a proper punishment for such a childish lapse in conduct, even as she prepared some kind of proper compliment for her accomplishment in summoning such a familiar. Even if it really would've been better that she'd done so before being expelled.

Then she'd noticed the lack of her cloak. The cloak that Louise had always been somewhat obsessive about wearing. And she was wearing a sword – with no signs of any wand – old and rusty, and far too large for her small frame.

Then she saw the rip in her clothes.

The bandages visible through her shirt, the careful way she walked, as if she hadn't quite healed enough to travel properly yet.

Karin prepared to scold her youngest daughter for her recklessness, because going gallivanting across the countryside when she should be in bed and healing from whatever encounter had caused that was quite a far bit beyond general childishness.

Then Louise turned to the beast, and bowed. Deeply.

There was a moment where the gryphon-like creature tilted its head as if in thought, before it simply took to the air once again, almost dismissively.

Louise straightened with the slightest of winces, and turned towards her mother.

By now, Karin's original impression had begun to crumble. But it was only when she saw Louise's face that it finally fell apart completely.

This was not a girl returning home in victory. This was something-... something else. Something broken, hollow, and yet somehow defiant.

It took her a long moment to realize from where she recognized that expression.

It'd been a man. A warrior really. He'd betrayed the army to their enemies, because his loved ones had been kept hostage. Even when he'd done it, he'd known that they were already dead, that there wasn't any real hope of ever seeing them again. But he'd done it anyway. And when she'd furiously glared at him from behind bars – the night before his public execution for treason – he'd looked up at her with that same expression.

It wasn't quite suicidal, nowhere near the reckless hatred that sometimes cropped up amidst the ranks in wartime. The man had accepted his execution as his due, as deserved, even as he couldn't help but cling to the hope of surviving.

There was definitely steel in that expression, but it wasn't a kind of face that she'd ever wanted to see be worn by her children.

Louise was marching to her gallows. She was doing it with her back straight, her steps sure, and her expression blank. But she was marching to her gallows, to her death, and she didn't want to be there.

Louise had nearly reached her, when Karin finally managed to disbelievingly connect the dots.

Her daughter believed that she would be calling for her execution.

Her daughter thought that Karin was going to kill her.

Not yell at her, not punish her, not humiliate her, not hurt her. She thought that she was going to willingly order her death.

Clutching at straws, Karin wondered if her daughter had somehow managed to kill the pope, because then perhaps that kind of thinking might be due. She would in all likelihood probably consider handing over her youngest daughter to her executioners if she'd murdered the pope.

Except, surely someone would've mentioned that? That wasn't the kind of thing that would've been swept under the rug. Not when the killer remained at large.

She wasn't wearing a noble's cloak. She wasn't wearing a wand.

It clicked.

Her daughter had failed the Summoning Ritual.

Her daughter had failed at her last hope to prove herself as a mage.

Her daughter had failed at proving that she had magic.

Her daughter had failed at proving that she was worthy of having the title of 'noble'.

And despite that Karin knew for a fact that her daughter couldn't possibly not have magic – not with the explosions that her every spell resulted in. She came to the startling and slightly horrifying realization that Louise didn't understand that.

Her daughter had given up. And with that final surrender, something within her had broken beyond repair.

It didn't matter what Cattleya might be planning, it didn't matter if Eleanor would rage about it, it didn't matter even if Karin tried to explain her own reasoning for the faith she'd placed on her youngest daughter's shoulders. None of that mattered, because her daughter had stopped believing.

But even so, that surrender shouldn't have broken her. Karin knew far too well how stubborn Louise could be, and there was no doubt in her mind that even if magic was proven to forever be beyond her reach, she would've still found some way to try and rub it in the faces of everyone who doubted her.

And yet, Louise was broken enough that she'd willingly walk into what she for some reason believed to be her death. And why would she ever even consider that thought? How could she imagine that Karin would ever have her daughter executed for something like this?

Another piece of the puzzle slid into place.

Her daughter didn't have magic. Without magic, she couldn't prove that she was a noble. Without being able to prove that she was a noble, she was a commoner. If she was a commoner, she was a blot on the Valliere family's good name.

Even if Karin didn't approve – couldn't approve – she could follow the circular leap of logic that had led her youngest daughter to this moment.

In the midst of horror and guilt, a peculiar sense of pride bloomed in her chest.

Louise had come here, unquestioningly believing that it would mean to be executed, and even if she wanted to live, she had been willing to accept that punishment.

Few people had enough steel in them to willingly walk with their back straight towards their own gallows.

Eleanor was skilled beyond Karin's wildest dreams, Cattleya was both kinder than she herself would've ever managed and just as fiercely stubborn, but perhaps Karin had always favored Louise just a little bit over her sisters. Silently. In the depths of her heart where her Rule of Steel didn't hold enough sway to silence such unbecoming thoughts in their entirety.

"Louise Francois la Blanc de la Valliere," she started, causing the girl to straighten imperceptibly. "welcome home."

There was a shiver, a kind of furious refusal to move from the girl as she visibly struggled to open her mouth and deny that welcome. To deny her own right to that welcoming.

Karin unfastened her own cloak with practiced ease. "I have three daughters." She stated with absolute conviction, draping the cloak of a noble across the girl's shoulders in a move carefully calibrated to be too fast for her to resist. "Do not make me a liar, Louise Francois la Blanc de la Valliere."

She didn't step back, remaining close enough that she could simply reach out and pull her into a hug, but still refusing to do so. Magic or no magic, her world crashing down around her ears or not, their relationship was what it was, and to attempt to change it now would merely be pointlessly patronizing.

But she remained at that distance, too close to allow her daughter to forget about her presence, as she could almost feel Louise tensing awkwardly through the air between them.

This was her daughter, and she refused to let the girl believe anything different.

After a very long moment, Louise opened her mouth again. "I'm home, mother." Her voice wavered and broke, and there were tears falling down her face, but she'd accepted it.

Magic or no magic, Louise was her daughter. And anyone who ever tried to imply otherwise would soon remember why people still spoke in fearful reverence of the 'Heavy Wind'.

XXX

A/n: There's been a few ALO crossovers playing with the 'summoned world' idea, but I haven't seen any SAO ones, so I wanted to try it out.

Yeah, Louise here is pretty depressing, but she's kind of just realizing that her entire way of life is a lie. As in: every friend she's ever had, everyone who's ever put faith in her, everything that her life is built on, has just come tumbling down like dominoes. Because she bet everything on being able to summon a familiar, and (as far she knows) she failed. Not exactly a pleasant place to be in, emotionally.

The second chapter (which will include the Epilogue, because this fic really isn't all that long) is focused more on the SAO-end of the spectrum, and politics and stuff. It'll also include what happened to Kayaba, and hopefully answer any other questions you might have.