Sword Art Online: The Flame-Eyed Warriors
Chapter 2 — The Flame-Eyed Sword Troupe
Two months is not a long time, in the ordinary sense of things.
In the world outside, two months might pass in the rhythm of school terms and weekend routines, marked by small changes — a new season, a different haircut, a song that somehow became the sound of a particular afternoon. Two months was nothing. Two months was barely enough time to notice that anything had shifted.
Inside Aincrad, two months was a different kind of measurement entirely.
Two months was the weight of two thousand and something deaths. It was the silence that had replaced ten thousand voices, the blank spaces in player lists that no one wanted to look at too closely. It was the particular texture of grief that people who had stopped believing in a fixed endpoint learned to carry — not as a burden, exactly, but as a fact, the way a soldier learns to carry equipment. It becomes part of the silhouette. You stop noticing it until you put it down, and you never put it down.
In an open field on the fourth floor, where the light filtered through a canopy of virtual leaves in the warm gold of late afternoon, six figures moved through a pack of wild boars and dire wolves with the efficiency of people who had long since stopped thinking of this as practice.
The Flame-Eyed Sword Troupe had not named themselves lightly.
It had been Kanna's suggestion, offered one evening over a fire in a town inn while the others were still arguing about whether they needed a name at all. We've always had a name, she had said, setting down her bowl. We just never needed to say it out loud before. No one had argued after that. The name fit the way a blade fits a scabbard — not because it was designed for the space, but because it was the right size and made of the right material.
They had grown formidable in the way that the best fighters always grow: not by becoming something other than themselves, but by becoming more completely what they already were.
Kanna swung her war hammer in a wide horizontal arc, and the air cracked with the residual energy of the impact. Three monsters caught the edge of the blow and were sent tumbling, their health bars fragmenting before they hit the ground. The weapon was enormous by any reasonable standard — taller than she was, its head a slab of shaped iron that would have been impossible to lift in the real world. Here, her stats made it an extension of her arm. She handled it the way a conductor handles a baton.
"Switch!" she called, falling back with the ease of someone stepping out of a doorway.
The four who had been waiting moved in without a word exchanged.
Roy activated first, his sword trailing a comet-tail of blue light as he carved through the nearest wolf in a single clean diagonal. He moved like someone who expected to be watched — not out of vanity, exactly, but because his whole life had been conducted with an audience in mind, and he had stopped distinguishing between performing and simply being a long time ago. The result was that he was very good in a fight and very aware of exactly how good, which was sometimes useful and occasionally annoying.
Ragnarok — Ragna to everyone who knew him longer than five minutes — moved on Roy's flank without needing to be told. His style was quieter, the strokes shorter and more deliberate, the kind of fighting that did not announce itself until it was already finished. He had always been the one who thought in terms of angles and distances, who noticed the second monster before anyone else had dealt with the first.
Lyra was the youngest of them, which meant that every battle still held a small, residual charge of excitement beneath the competence. She fought with a light one-handed blade and a guard's small shield, her lavender-blue hair pinned back out of her eyes, her young face set in concentration that was only occasionally interrupted by a flash of something gleeful when a skill landed exactly right.
Sarahai — Sarai among her family — fought beside her, and the two of them together had developed a rhythm in the months since the game began that was almost uncanny to watch. They moved like a single decision expressed in two bodies, the younger protecting the flank while the older drew the attention, each of them reading the other with the fluency of people who had shared every significant experience of their lives.
Baron took the rear position, methodical and unhurried. Of all of them, he was perhaps the most difficult to read in combat — his expression never changed much regardless of circumstances, his blade moved with an economy of motion that suggested someone who had internalized the principle that effort expended unnecessarily was effort wasted. He was not cold, exactly. He simply did not see the point in drama when precision would accomplish the same thing more efficiently.
Odyn watched from the edge of the engagement, tracking the vectors of every body in motion, running the same constant calculations that had kept all of them alive for two months in a world where the cost of an error was permanent. He had designated himself their guardian before anyone had thought to formalize the role. It was simply what he had always been.
Movement, peripheral. Left of Sarai's blind spot. A wolf that had survived the initial exchange and was circling wide, low to the ground, picking its moment.
"Sarai. Lyra." His voice was quiet and absolute. "Down. Now."
They dropped without hesitation, without question, without looking to confirm why. This was what trust looked like when it had been tested often enough to stop requiring explanation.
Odyn was already moving.
The technique assembled itself in the geometry of the swing — not just a sword skill executing its programmed arc, but something that felt, in the particular physics of the moment, like a choice. The name rose in him the way a word rises when you've been trying to remember it and suddenly it's simply there.
"Beast Blade."
The strike took the shape of something larger than itself: a spectral outline, leonine and brief, that existed for exactly the duration of the impact and then was gone. The wolf's health bar collapsed all at once, and the creature resolved into a shower of geometric fragments before it had time to complete the motion it had begun.
Odyn came out of the follow-through, sheathed his blade in a single unhurried motion, and turned to find both his sisters already standing.
"Nii-san was so cool," Lyra said immediately, with the particular sincerity of a twelve-year-old who has not yet developed the habit of understating her opinions.
Odyn crouched down slightly and smoothed the stray hair back from her forehead. "You're welcome, Lyra."
"You're going to spoil her," Sarai said, though her voice carried no actual objection.
"Probably," he agreed.
Roy, Ragna, and Baron materialized behind them, having confirmed the field was clear. Roy was already adjusting the bracers on his forearms, which he periodically tugged at for reasons that were purely habitual. Ragna looked at the sky. Baron said nothing, which meant he had no complaints.
"So," Roy said, directing the question toward Kanna. "Where next?"
Kanna propped her hammer against the ground and considered. "There's supposed to be a meeting in the town near here. Something about this floor's boss."
"A strategy meeting," Ragna said. It was not a question.
"That would follow," Baron agreed.
"Might be worth attending," Odyn said. "And there's a possibility we might find—"
"Kirito," Sarai said before he could finish, with a straightforwardness that made Roy glance sideways at her.
Odyn let the interruption stand. "—information that would help us plan ahead. Yes."
The mention of the black-haired swordsman dropped a particular quality of silence over the group — not uncomfortable, but thoughtful. In the chaos of the first day, their contact with him had been brief to the point of being almost nothing: a voice explaining game mechanics in a quiet field, a small miracle of information delivered without sentiment, and then he was gone. But they were people who had learned that impressions made under extreme circumstances tended to be reliable ones, and what they had seen in that single window of observation had stayed with all of them in different ways.
Sarai had wanted to follow him into the fields that night. Kanna had stopped her then too, for the same reason she would have stopped herself: some things can only be met when the time for meeting them has actually arrived.
They set off toward the town in the amber of the late afternoon, moving through a world that was doing its best, in the way that very good visual design always does, to seem real. The grass bent convincingly in the wind. Birds moved against the sky in the organic scatter of actual birds. If you did not think too carefully about any of it, it held.
Two thousand dead. The number accompanied them the way numbers like that always do, not loudly, but with a persistence that refused to be filed away completely. They had known violence before this world, had grown up in the shadow of a conflict that had not asked their permission before making them participants. But this — this particular geometry of death, in which any one of them might simply stop existing between one moment and the next — was its own thing. It had its own texture. And they were alive, they reminded themselves, and moving forward, which was the only available response to it.
The town square had the busy, slightly desperate energy of a place where people were trying to do something productive about a situation that still felt, in its deepest register, completely uncontrollable.
Players had gathered near the central fountain in a density that suggested something more organized than coincidence. Sarai noticed him first, which was both surprising and not: her eyes had a way of finding the specific thing she was looking for within a crowd, which was either a gift or an indication that she had been looking for it quite intently.
"There," she said, her voice dropping to something that was not quite a whisper.
The black hair. The blue and brown armor. Slightly shorter than she remembered, or perhaps she had simply formed a larger impression of him in the intervening months.
She moved before she had fully decided to.
Kanna's hand closed gently around her arm.
"Not yet."
"But—"
"The meeting first." Kanna's tone was not unkind. "We'll have our chance."
Sarai exhaled through her nose and fell back into step. She did not argue. She had spent enough years deferring to Kanna's timing to know that it was generally, irritatingly correct.
They raised their hoods and positioned themselves at the crowd's edge, establishing the particular kind of visibility that was actually invisibility: present, but not conspicuous; watching, but not watched.
At the gathering's center, a young man had stepped forward.
He was perhaps nineteen, though the game made ages harder to read. Blue hair, blue eyes — the kind of self-consistency in appearance that suggested someone who either took their avatar customization seriously or had been fortunate enough to look like their own ideal concept of themselves. His armor was practical without being utilitarian: a sky-colored tunic over plate, a shield secured to his back. His posture was the posture of someone who was accustomed to rooms looking at him and had made peace with this.
"My name is Diavel," he said. His voice carried well. "And I believe it's time we started climbing."
The sentiment met with a wave of agreement — and then a collision.
The man who interrupted had a mace and the particular energy of someone who had been holding a complaint at pressure for long enough that any available opening had become equivalent to a valve. His name was Kibao, he announced, and he had things to say.
They were not new things. Kanna had heard versions of them before, in different contexts: the argument that advantage was indistinguishable from unfairness, that those who knew more than you owed you a portion of that knowledge as reparation for knowing it in the first place. There was logic embedded in the grievance, somewhere. But like most arguments born out of fear, it had chosen the wrong target.
Across the crowd, Kirito's expression had developed the particular tightness of someone who was calculating the fastest way to become invisible.
The situation was resolved by a man who hadn't said anything until he had something worth saying. Agil was large and calm, and he held up a small book with the manner of someone making a point so obvious it barely needed making.
He made it anyway, clearly and without anger: the guidebooks that new players had been using to survive their first weeks had been written and distributed by the beta testers. For free. To everyone.
The crowd absorbed this.
Kibao sat down.
Diavel smoothly reclaimed the floor and laid out the intelligence they had gathered on the first floor's boss: Illfang the Kobold Lord, four health bars, accompanied by sentinels, and — crucially — a weapon switch upon reaching critical health. A Talwar, curved, long reach, attack patterns documented.
Kirito stood very still during this part of the briefing. Kanna noticed, and filed it away.
The crowd organized itself into parties with the particular social mechanics of a group of strangers trying to be cooperative without knowing each other very well. Kirito, standing alone, moved toward another solitary figure — hooded, sitting slightly apart, radiating the very specific energy of someone who would prefer not to need anyone's company but also does not actually want to be alone.
He extended an invitation. She accepted it. The name above her HP gauge, visible to anyone paying close attention, read: Asuna.
Then Kirito looked toward the six of them, and something shifted in his expression — not recognition, not yet, but the beginning of it. A sense that he had encountered the shape of this group somewhere before and hadn't finished deciding what to do with the memory.
Kanna spoke before he could.
"No need for concern. We'll cover your blind spots and keep the smaller enemies off your formation." A pause. "We'll run alongside you two."
"R-Right," Kirito said, with the slightly off-balance cadence of someone who had just been answered before they had gotten around to asking.
The evening arrived the way evenings did in Aincrad — convincingly, completely, with the sky deepening through amber into indigo above the rooftops and the town lanterns responding automatically to the change.
Asuna had found a side street and was sitting in it, alone, doing battle with a piece of stale bread.
Kirito found her there the way people find each other in stories: not by accident, exactly, but not quite by design either. He sat a respectable distance away and observed the bread situation with the neutral expression of someone who had useful information and was waiting for an appropriate moment to share it.
He produced a small jar. A cream, light and pale, obtained from a quest in the previous town that had been named — with a specificity that was either charming or deeply strange — The Heifer Strikes Back. He placed the jar between them without comment.
Asuna touched the lid. A small light moved from her fingertip across the bread's surface, and the item transformed, its stats updating in real time.
She bit into it.
Stopped.
Ate the rest with the focused attention of someone who had genuinely been surprised.
"I can give you the recipe," Kirito offered.
She was quiet for a moment. When she spoke, her voice had a quality to it that had not been there in the crowd — something stripped down to its actual load-bearing components.
"I didn't come here for good food," she said. "I came here because I would rather be fighting than be still. Because if I stop moving — if I let this world do what it wants to do, which is wait us out until we give up — then I'm not me anymore. I fight so that I stay me." A pause. "Even if I die, I want it to happen when I'm still myself."
Kirito looked at her for a long moment with the expression of someone filing something away in a category they will think about later.
"Then try not to die tomorrow," he said. "I'd prefer my party members to survive."
In the shadows at the far end of the street, six figures were watching with varying degrees of subtlety.
"They're getting on," Roy murmured, with the air of someone narrating a documentary.
"Don't stare," Sarai said.
"I'm not staring. I'm observing."
"You're definitely staring," said Ragna.
Kanna said nothing. She was thinking about the way Kirito had reached for the healing item before he'd thought to speak, about the economy of the gesture — the instinctive, slightly reluctant kindness of someone who had decided to be alone but had not yet managed to stop caring about other people.
She had met that particular combination before.
She saw it every morning in the mirror.
The morning of the raid arrived with the particular clarity that precedes large and consequential things.
Kirito spent the time before the doors opened briefing Asuna on party tactics with the patient, methodical thoroughness of someone who had made an internal decision not to let another person die because of a gap in their knowledge that he could have filled. The Flame-Eyed Sword Troupe maintained their position nearby, listening to every word, mapping the information onto their own established formations.
"When I call 'switch,' fall back and let me draw the attention — then you come in on the exposed side," Kirito said.
"What is a 'switch,' exactly?" Asuna asked.
A pause.
"This is your first party," Kirito said. It was not quite a question.
"Yes," she confirmed.
Kirito breathed in once through his nose and began again from the foundation. Ragna, listening from a distance, made a small note in his mental inventory: she absorbs information quickly, regardless of starting point. He marked her as someone worth watching in the fight.
Diavel raised his sword before the massive doors of the boss chamber, addressed the assembled players with the concise, energizing brevity of someone who knew that too many words before a battle diluted them, and said:
"Let's win this."
The doors opened. The chamber beyond was lit in the orange of torch-fire, and from a throne of stone and shadow, Illfang the Kobold Lord rose to his full, inexorable height.
The battle moved through its stages the way good battles do — not cleanly, but with a logic that was visible after the fact, the way the structure of a storm only becomes readable once you're through it.
Diavel ran the raid with genuine skill. He called switches, managed formations, kept the mass of players moving in a way that minimized exposure and maximized the pressure on the boss's health bars. The Kobold Sentinels were the paper walls through which a storm was trying to pass, and the players shredded them in waves, Kirito and Asuna anchoring the assault with a coordination that had been assembled from scratch in twelve hours and was already functioning better than some partnerships managed in months.
Kanna took the right flank. Her hammer landed with a force that the game's physics rendered as shockwaves, small ripples in the stone floor that moved outward from impact points and made the nearby sentinels stagger. She had not learned to fight with a war hammer; she had started here, from zero, and built the skill entirely within Aincrad's engine. There was something she found interesting in that — the way necessity and repetition could manufacture fluency out of nothing.
Baron covered the opposite end of the formation without needing to be told. He had already mapped the chamber in his first fifteen seconds inside it and had identified the two positions most likely to be exploited by a floor boss's AI during a multi-party raid. He occupied one. Ragna occupied the other.
The fight proceeded through three of the boss's four health bars with the momentum of something that was working. And then Illfang's final gauge dropped into red, and the creature shed its shield and axe with the theatrical weight of a countdown reaching zero.
And the weapon it drew was not a Talwar.
Kirito's face changed.
"That's an Odachi," he said, very quietly, in the tone of someone watching a calculation they trusted arrive at a wrong answer.
He was already running.
He did not reach Diavel in time.
The Odachi moved with a speed that the guidebook had not accounted for because the guidebook had been written for a different weapon, and Illfang's attack pattern had changed between the beta and the final release in the small, brutal way that the game's designers occasionally chose to change things — not radically, not enough to make prior knowledge useless, just enough to convert confidence into liability. Diavel's weapon skill was already committed when the first strike came. The second followed it without pause.
The blue-haired player's health collapsed in two beats.
Kirito knelt beside him in the sudden, stunned quiet that followed. He produced a healing potion. Diavel's hand moved weakly and pushed it aside.
"You were a beta tester," Diavel said. His voice had the particular quality of a man who has stopped pretending anything. "Just like me."
The last attack bonus. Kirito understood now — the full architecture of it, the reason Diavel had organized the raid, the reason he had placed himself at the front. Not for glory in the way that Kibao would have assumed. For the item. For the resource advantage that the bonus would have provided to someone who was trying, in their own way, to make the numbers work out for everyone else.
"I understand now," Kirito said, and the weight in his voice was the weight of someone accepting something they would have preferred not to have to accept. "You were doing the same thing I was afraid to do. You never left them behind."
Diavel's body resolved into light — gradually, gently, the particles dispersing upward into the chamber's firelit air.
Kirito stood.
Asuna was at his side before he had finished turning.
"Ready?"
"Yes," she said.
The Odachi was long and its reach was punishing, and Illfang used it with the particular aggression of a boss whose final phase had been designed with the assumption that the players facing it would not be fully prepared. Which they weren't. But they were not unprepared in the way the designers had imagined, and there is a difference.
Kirito blocked the first committed strike and redirected it, accepting the knockback as the price of creating an opening, and carved a line across the boss's chest with enough force to drop a full quarter of the final health bar. The retaliation was immediate and severe, and he went backward fast.
More sentinels materialized. The raid's formations, already disrupted by Diavel's death, began to fray at the edges.
Asuna moved into the gap, her rapier becoming something closer to weather than weaponry — a continuous fast pressure, probing and withdrawing, hitting the same point in the boss's guard from different angles until the guard stopped being consistent. She was not following the tactics Kirito had described. She was doing something better, which was to understand the principle behind the tactics and apply her own version of it in real time.
Illfang raised the Odachi in an arc aimed at removing her from the equation entirely.
"Left!" Kirito screamed.
Asuna twisted. The blade edge caught her hood instead of her and tore the fabric clean away, and for the first time since the raid began, the players around her saw her actual face — chestnut hair catching the torchlight, eyes that were warm and very sharp, an expression that was entirely focused and not even slightly frightened. Her battle attire, red and white, was undamaged. She looked like someone who had been there the whole time and had simply been waiting for the obscuring layer to come off.
The other players stared for exactly as long as the fight allowed them to, which was not long.
Kirito's health was dropping. The boss had adapted to his blocking pattern and found the seam in it, and the hit that got through was a heavy one — enough to push his gauge into the yellow, enough to make the numbers uncomfortable.
Illfang raised the Odachi again.
The hammer connected from the side with the sound of iron meeting a structural problem and solving it through mass.
The boss staggered.
"That was close," said a voice that was both familiar and suddenly recognizable in the way that things become recognizable the moment you stop trying to place them and simply let the memory surface. "We've got him. Get some distance."
Hoods down. Six pairs of flame-colored eyes in the firelight.
Kirito stared.
Odyn had already turned back to the boss, his blade moving in the tight, economical patterns of someone managing a very large threat in a very specific way — not overpowering it, not trying to, but keeping it oriented away from the two players still drinking healing potions, keeping its attention occupied until the numbers had recovered.
Agil worked the opposite side with the unhurried competence of someone who had sized up the situation upon entry and had simply been waiting for the correct moment to join it.
The Flame-Eyed Sword Troupe held the line in the way they had been holding lines since before any of them could remember — together, the spaces between them filled by years of familiarity, each of them knowing without needing to look where the others were and what they needed.
"Do it," Kanna said.
The word landed differently when it came from someone who meant it completely.
Kirito and Asuna moved.
They came from two angles simultaneously, the coordination no longer even a tactic but something more intuitive, the product of a single day together that had contained more weight than most months. Asuna's rapier took the guard; Kirito's blade found the opening behind it. The boss moved to intercept Kirito, committed the reach of the Odachi —
Odyn stepped in.
The blade turned aside against his guard with a force that drove him back two steps and carved a significant line into his HP gauge, but it turned. And in the window that created, Kirito was already in the air.
The sword skill took shape around him — the name of it irrelevant, the geometry of it complete, a diagonal arc from high left to low right that passed through Illfang's remaining health bar like light through smoke.
The boss hung for one still moment.
Then it came apart.
The pixels rose slowly, in the particular way of things that have been very large dissolving into nothing, and the chamber filled with the soft cascade of their departure. A notification assembled itself in Kirito's field of vision: Last Attack Bonus. A rare drop. A new item.
The silence lasted exactly long enough for everyone to understand what had just happened.
Then it didn't.
"You earned it," said the blue-haired teen, standing nearby with a scrape across his left bracer and an expression of perfectly genuine acknowledgment.
"I agree," Agil confirmed.
"It's yours," Asuna said.
And then Kibao's voice cut through the room and began the process of converting relief into ugliness.
The accusations were not new. They were the recycled logic of the frightened, dressed up in the language of accountability: you knew and didn't tell us; you let Diavel die; you are the problem and we are the consequence of the problem. It was the kind of argument that moved fast through a crowd because it offered people somewhere to put their fear, which was something fear needed very badly and crowds were quick to provide.
Kirito stood in the center of it with the expression of someone who has done the calculation and arrived at an answer they find expensive but necessary.
"Would everyone please—"
The voice was sharp, feminine, and absolutely not interested in being ignored.
Every head in the chamber turned.
Kanna stood with her war hammer grounded at her side, her flame-colored eyes moving across the assembled players with the particular patience of someone who has listened long enough to determine that nothing further instructive is going to be said and who has decided to say something instructive themselves.
"Would all of you shut up."
It was not technically a question.
"Excuse me—" one of the accusers started.
"Are you under the impression that I was addressing you specifically?" Kanna asked. Her tone was academic. "Because I was addressing the room."
Odyn stepped forward beside her, and the room recalibrated its sense of the social geometry involved, which adjusted further when Ragna, Baron, Roy, Sarai, and Lyra arranged themselves in a loose arc at their backs.
"When Diavel went down," Odyn said, his voice carrying without effort, "not one of you moved for thirty seconds. I counted." He looked across the crowd without heat, without accusation. Just facts. "Kirito moved. Asuna moved. The rest of you stood where you were, which is a thing people do when they're frightened, and I don't say it as an insult." A pause. "But if you're going to talk about who let someone die, you should count your own thirty seconds before you start counting other people's."
The room did not have a good response to this.
And then laughter, low and dark and genuine, came from the direction of the black coat.
Kirito's shoulders had changed. His posture had shifted from the slightly hunched defensive geometry of someone absorbing impact into something straighter, colder, built around a decision. His hair fell across his eyes in a way that made his expression difficult to read and did not appear to be accidental.
"They're right about one thing," he said. "Don't put me in the same category as the beta players. Most of them were amateurs. I made it further than any of them. I know things about this game that no information broker has collected."
"Then you're worse than a beta tester," Kibao said. "You're a cheater!"
"A Beater!" someone added, pulling the two words together with the particular creativity of someone who wanted to wound and had found an unexpectedly elegant instrument for it.
Kirito stopped.
Turned the word over once.
Smiled.
"Yeah," he said. "I like that."
He opened his menu. The rare coat materialized across his shoulders — long and black and final, as though it had been waiting to be worn for longer than the raid had been running. He turned toward the stairway, and the coat moved with him, and the visual impression of it was of someone who had decided to become something distinct and legible and completely without apology.
"But next time," he said, not quite looking back.
"Don't lump me in with the rest."
He was halfway up the stairs when Asuna called after him.
He stopped. The others reached him and gathered in the stairway's low light, and the conversation that followed had the quality of an ending that was also a beginning, which is the quality that the best conversations tend to have.
"You called me by name," Asuna said. "During the fight."
"Your HP gauge," Kirito said, pointing to the information floating just above his own head. "Name's displayed right there."
She looked. "Kiri... to. Your name is Kirito."
"Yes."
"I never looked," she said, and something broke slightly in her face — not distress, exactly, but the particular embarrassment of someone who has just discovered they were making something more complicated than it needed to be. She laughed, briefly and genuinely. "I've been thinking of you as 'the black-haired one' this entire time."
Kirito looked at her. Then at the six flame-eyed figures behind her.
"Guilds are worth joining," he said, addressing all of them, "when you find people you actually trust. I'm not saying that about myself. I'm saying it for when the time comes." He looked at Asuna specifically. "Don't turn it down when someone asks."
"But you're alone," she pointed out.
"For now," he said. "That's a different thing."
He opened the teleport gate and stepped through it, the light closing behind him like a page being turned.
Sarai stared at the empty space where he had been. The expression on her face was not quite frustration and not quite longing — something in between, the feeling of a conversation that had been interrupted before it arrived somewhere.
Odyn put his hand on her shoulder.
"We'll see him again," he said. "I think fairly often, actually."
Behind them, a voice:
"Hi. I'm Asuna."
They turned. She was standing a few steps down, her chestnut hair still catching the torchlight, her expression openly curious in the way of someone who has just survived something large and is discovering that this has made her less cautious about small things.
One by one, the hoods came down.
"Sarai," said Sarai, with a smile that had been waiting for permission.
"Roy." A short nod, with the fractional chin-lift of someone who was trying not to seem too pleased about making a new acquaintance and succeeding imperfectly.
"Baron," said Baron.
"Ragna," said Ragna. "Most people drop the rok."
"Lyra," said Lyra, with the particular shyness of someone who was also, simultaneously, very curious.
"Kanna," said Kanna.
"Odyn," said Odyn. He offered his hand.
Asuna shook it.
"What should I call you?" she asked. "As a group. In case I need to find you."
Odyn glanced across the six of them — at Kanna's quiet certainty, at Sarai's barely-contained eagerness, at Roy's studied composure, at Ragna's careful attention, at Baron's patient steadiness, at Lyra's bright eyes — and then back at Asuna.
"The Flame-Eyed Sword Troupe," he said. "If you need us, that's how you'll find us."
Asuna looked at the six pairs of amber eyes around her, burning steady and warm in the stairway's low light, and thought that this was perhaps the most accurate name she had ever heard for anything.
"Good," she said. "I'll remember that."
To be continued — Chapter 3: Ragna and the Dragon Tamer