S.A.O Project Alicization - OC/Male Reader Insert

Project Alicization ----- Chapter Nineteen

March 378 HE, Underworld Human Realm
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By the time I blinked again, the vision was gone, evaporating as quickly as it had come.

What was that? The image was gone, but the sensation of nostalgia it brought stayed with me, clutching my heart agonizingly tightly.

A memory of youth...In the vision of the four children walking along the riverside, I was absolutely certain that the boy with black hair on the right was Kazuto, but even more than that, I knew that the white hair boy was obviously me, the chance of Kazuto knowing another boy who looks almost identical to me as a kid who also has white hair is close to zero.

But that was impossible. There were no forests this thick or rivers this pristine in Kawagoe, Saitama Prefecture, where I grew up. And I'd certainly never been friends with a blond boy and girl. Plus, all four of us in the image were wearing the same rustic fantasy clothes.

If this was the STL, did that mean the vision was a memory of my extended dive test last weekend? That seemed likely, but even with the fluctlight acceleration of the STL, I would have experienced only ten days at most. And the aching nostalgia that throbbed in my heart could not be caused by such a brief amount of time.

Things were truly turning in a bizarre direction. I glanced down into the nearby river, wondering if I was really myself, but the stream was too warped to recognize the finer features in its reflection.

I decided to forget about the prickling aftereffect and focused on that steady, repeating sound. This, too, had a familiar feel to it, but I still didn't know whether it was the sound of a woodcutter's ax. I shook my head to clear my mind and headed back upstream toward the noise.

By the time the steady pace of walking allowed me to enjoy the beauty of the scenery again, I noticed my path was taking me farther to the left. It seemed the source of the noise was not at the riverside but deeper in the forest.

As I walked, I counted on my fingers and realized that, oddly, the sound was not constant. After exactly fifty times, it would stop for three minutes or so, then resume for another fifty on the dot. It had to be coming from a human source.

I would walk with a vague sense of direction during each three-minute interval, then recalibrate when the sound returned. Soon I had left the water behind and ventured back among the trees. Silently I passed by the now-familiar dragonflies, blue lizards, and enormous mushrooms.

"...Forty-nine...fifty," I counted, just as it became noticeably brighter among the trees ahead. It could be the forest's exit or even a village. I quickened my pace toward the light.

Climbing a set of rising roots like stairs so I could peer around an ancient trunk without exposing myself, I was met with a sight that was nothing short of breathtaking.

It wasn't the end of the forest or a human settlement. But the scope of the sight was so jaw-dropping that I didn't have time to feel disappointed.

It was a circular clearing in the middle of the forest, far larger than the little patch of grass where I'd awoken-about a hundred feet across, I guessed. The ground was covered in that pale-green moss, but unlike what I'd been walking over all this time, there were no ferns, vines, or low bushes at all.

Just one thing, standing in the middle of the clearing, commanded my gaze:

What an enormous tree!

The trunk of the tree couldn't have been less than thirteen feet across. Unlike the gnarled, broad-leaved trees of the forest, this was a conifer that stood absolutely straight. The bark was so dark it was nearly black, and numerous layers of branches spread out far, far above. It reminded me of the ancient Jōmon Sugi tree on Yakushima or the giant redwoods of western America, but the sheer presence of this tree gave it an unnatural air. It towered imperiously over everything.

I slowly lowered my gaze from the impenetrable branches above to the roots of the tree. A lattice of massive roots thick as anacondas stretched in all directions, right up to the boundary of the rest of the forest. It seemed to me that the sheer life this tree sucked up was the reason for the clearing-nothing but moss could grow where the roots devoured all nutrients.

It was a bit nerve-racking to step into the garden of an emperor like this, but I couldn't resist the urge to touch such a tremendous thing. I made my way forward, tripping here and there over the mossy roots, because I couldn't stop gazing up.

Nearly every breath out of my mouth was a gasp. I had lost all caution for my surroundings, so enchanted was I at the sight. So, naturally, I didn't notice until it was far too late.

"?!"

When I dropped my gaze to ground level, I met the eyes of someone peering around the trunk. My breath caught in my throat, and I twitched, stumbled, and crouched. My hand started to reach over my back, but there was no sword there.

Fortunately, the first human I had seen in this world was not hostile or even cautious. He just stared at me, mystified.

He looked to be my age-about seventeen or eighteen. His ash-blonde hair had just a hint of waviness. Like me and Kazuto, he wore a simple tunic and trousers. He was sitting on a root like a bench, holding something round in his right hand.

The odd part was his appearance. His skin was cream-colored, but he appeared neither fully Western nor Eastern. His features were fine and gentle, and his eyes looked dark green.

The moment I saw his face, something deep in my head itched again...deep in my soul. But the instant I tried to seize the feeling, it vanished. I pushed aside that odd hesitation and decided to speak, to make it clear I had no hostile intentions. But before I could do so, I needed to know what language to say it in. I stood there for so long with my mouth agape that the other boy spoke first.

"Who are you? Where did you come from?"

There was something just barely alien about his accent, but it was otherwise perfect Japanese.

I was just as stunned as when I'd first seen the pitch-black tree. For whatever reason, I hadn't expected to hear my mother tongue in this clearly foreign world. There was something unreal about hearing familiar words come from the mouth of an exotic, Middle-Ages-European boy, as if I were watching a dubbed version of a foreign film.

But I couldn't stand there dumbfounded. It was time to think. My brain had been getting rusty recently, and I needed to get it percolating.

If this was the STL's Underworld, that meant this boy was most likely either (1) another test player in a dive, with memories from the real world like me, (2) a test player, but with memory limitations that made him just another resident of this world, or (3) an NPC being run by the program itself.

The first possibility would make things easy. I'd just explain the abnormality happening to me, and he could tell me how to log out.

But the second or third possibilities would not be so simple. If I started listing off a bunch of incomprehensible jargon about Soul Translator anomalies and log-out methods to a human or NPC who was functioning as a resident of the Underworld, it would only put them on edge and make collecting information more difficult.

So I decided I needed to open a conversation using only safe terminology, until I could ascertain just who or what this boy was. I wiped my sweaty palms on my pants and tried to put on a reassuring smile.

"Umm...my name is..."

I paused. I wondered whether the names of people in this world were Japanese or European. I prayed that my own name could fit either case.

"...Shi"