Day of Month, Year?
Unexpected Delays…
For those who had come in this way, it was a comforting thought to know that they were leaving the Spirit World and would only be seven or eight more days from Sendai and the comfort of their own homes – or even less, once Kirito recovered enough to use Teleport again.
Then something unexpected happened. As the group passed through the invisible barrier that separated the two worlds, the landscape before them suddenly changed. While they were still in the same spot, the ground and Spirit Willows were now covered in a light dusting of snow and the there was no longer any leaves on the willows – just small red buds, like one would see in the early spring.
Looking back the way they had come, they saw that it too was snow swept, though there were no tracks left where they had just passed – as the tracks left by the company began only a short distance from them.
Kirito’s Earth Elemental looked around; then without a word, it set Kirito down, bowed, and then evaporated suddenly into nothingness. Kirito realized that the link to his Elemental had abruptly been broken by something and, as it was no longer bound to him, it had simply returned from whence it came.
Yuki meanwhile, looked back at the Spirit Barrier with her Sorcerer’s Sight, and could see an odd wrinkle running through it, like the ripples on the surface of a pond when one tosses in a pebble. Straining to comprehend what she was seeing, Yuki correlated a similarity between the phenomenon she was now observing and the temporal distortion she noticed whenever she looked at Kioko’s aura...