“Wha…what’s with you, Kirito-kun?”
Asuna called out in a panicked manner, but Kazuto just remained silent. After a while, his lips let out a hoarse voice.
“I…I know that person.”
“Eh…?”
“And I met her before…”
Kazuto immediately looked at Asuna’s eyes. His black iris looked like they went through time and space as he looked as if he was staring at a certain other world.
“When Heathcliff dived…that person took care of him. Both of them researched the FullDive technology in the same lab in the university…in other words, the real provider for Medicuboid’s basic design was…”
“…”
At this moment, Asuna couldn’t talk.
Does this mean—Medicuboid and «The Seed Nexus» were both born out of the seed that person grew?
Shi En and Doctor Kurahashi tilted their heads in a puzzled manner, but Kazuto couldn’t answer their question. He could only look completely bewildered as he stared at the sakura petals that continued to float by his eyes.
Suddenly, Asuna felt a large torrent of time flowing through.
This world called «reality» is basically one of the many truths.
Besides it, there were also high tectonics that formed the earth like numerous flower petals gathering.
And right now, a large force that covered the world and continued to move forward was slowly showing its shape—
Asuna used her arms to hug her body tightly. At this moment, a strong gust of wind blew, causing the petals that were floating nearby to be taken into the distant sky.
(END)
Author’s Notes
I’m Kawahara Reki. Thank you for reading this «Sword Art Online 7—Mother Rosario» volume. (There will be many mentions with regards to the content in this volume. Please take note!)
It was about 10 years ago when I started to write light novels seriously. I knew of a professional author and became friends with him, and I discussed my work with him many times.
Even now, I’m still rather grateful for plenty of his indispensable advice, and amongst them, what impressed me the most was ‘even if it’s a novel, when writing about humans’ misfortune, you have to consider carefully why you are writing it’.
I actually had a flaw of ‘focusing on the development of the story and ignoring the possibility of it happening in real life’ I couldn’t correct (or it could be said to be that I’m taking the opportunity about it…) anyway, I would normally give the characters great misfortune to define their natures and motives. For example, I’ve never mentioned the details about the background of how the lead in the SAO series Kirito lost his biological parents in an accident at all. In other words, I created the reason why Kirito was distant from others and ignored the 2 characters, Kirito’s parents, who were involved in the accident and were directly killed by it. (The female lead in the compilations of short stories in volume 2 «Red-nosed Reindeer» Sachi may also be like this).
Of course, I knew that I had such a bad habit when writing, so I felt somewhat troubled when refining the script for the publishing of the 7th volume. Even though there’s the theme of «VR technology and medicine», does the female lead in this volume, Yuuki, really have to die? Could there be another kind of ending? Did I just write this ending to rile up the readers’ emotions?
However, as I was troubled, I found that I could only write such stories. It may sound like an excuse, but my bad habit of ‘underestimating the character’s misfortune’ is still a part of the work. Thus, what I could do was to try and deeply understand the thoughts of the characters in my work that had misfortune (including the antagonists). Of course, if the readers can think of what kind of effect Yuuki’s 15 years of life would bring to Asuna and the rest, I’ll be really grateful.
To the editor Miki-san, who was rather bothered as I messed up the work progress after the New Year, abec-san who drew large character illustrations in this volume, and of course, to all the readers, I’ll hope that we’ll get along in 2011! Thank you for your support!
January 27 2011 Kawahara Reki
Sword Art Online - Volume 7 - Mother's Rosario Page 21