I wanted to see Asuna. I wanted to be held in her warm, healing embrace, and to set all of my thoughts and emotions free. But I couldn’t reach her anymore.
The seconds ticked down. I couldn’t remember what exactly would happen when the timer reached zero.
Whatever the case, there was only one thing I could do: crawl back to this place and challenge the guardians again. No matter how many times I lost, no matter if it was even possible or not, I’d keep doing it until the moment my very existence was permanently scraped out of this world for good…
It was then that a shadow glinted across my vision, which was pointed straight downward.
Someone had come through the still-open entrance and was racing upward at astonishing speed. I tried to shout at them not to come, but of course, there was no sound. I looked upward to see the guardian knights dripping out of those windows again.
The white giants passed right by me, screeching in that skin-crawling way, bearing down on the intruder. I’d just learned from experience that they were too much to tackle alone. I prayed the person would run away, but my would-be rescuer was making a beeline straight for me.
Several of the frontmost guardians swung their enormous blades downward. The intruder nimbly darted away, but one of the delayed swings found purchase. Even that mere graze sent the fragile challenger tumbling away.
But the intruder used that momentum to speed even faster around the line of knights and onward. As the figure grew closer, the number of guardians protecting the dome grew and grew, thick in the air, their screeches echoing.
The attacker swung a long katana but used it only for defense, guiding the enemy into clumps and using them as a barrier to avoid attack from afar. The valiant flight of the mystery invader was touching, and more than a little painful to watch.
Once within range, I heard a passionate, teary-eyed scream.
“Kirito!!”
It was Leafa. The sylph reached out with both hands and enveloped me.
We were already close to the gate, and the knights crowded the space above to block us out, a multilayered wall of flesh. But once Leafa had me safe and sound, she turned and sped back downward toward the exit.
The chanting of a spell echoed forth from behind us, and promptly a hailstorm of bright arrows roared past. Leafa spun right and left, trying to evade the projectiles, but they were as thick as monsoon rain, and I felt the vibration of each one that landed.
“Hrg!!”
Leafa held her breath but did not slow her descent. The arrows thudded heavily into her, and I could see her HP bar fall below half. But the follow-up was not just arrows of light: Two guardian knights closed in from either side, their swords crossed at right angles.
She took evasive maneuvers via a right-hand tailspin, and successfully avoided one of the blades. But the other massive metal bludgeon caught her square on the back.
“Ah…”
Leafa was tossed as easily as a ball and slammed into the approaching ground. After several bracing bounces, she slid across the floor and came to a hard stop. Several of the guardians descended to the ground to finish her off.
She propped herself up with a hand and beat her wings once. That was enough to roll her across the ground—and suddenly my vision was full of bright sunlight. We were outside the dome.
Leafa threw her body against the cobblestones and panted heavily, chilled with fear. Somehow, despite the desperate odds, they’d made it out. She looked back to see the giant stone doors beginning to close and the white giants leaping back up to their dome. The event’s timer must have run out.
There was a small, rippling black flame in her arms. She wanted to cradle Kirito, to whisper reassurances, but now was not the time for indulging in emotion. She sat up and crawled over to the stone statue nearby, resting her back against its feet as she waved a hand and opened her menu.
Leafa hadn’t mastered water and holy magic yet, so she couldn’t cast the high-level resurrection spell. Her only option was to extract a small blue bottle called “Dew of the World Tree.”
She closed the window and popped the cap on the bottle, pouring the sparkling liquid onto Kirito’s Remain Light. A three-dimensional magic sigil very similar to that of a resurrection spell formed, and a few seconds later, the familiar shape of the spriggan reappeared.
“…Kirito,” she called out tearfully, still sitting down. Kirito returned a sad smile of his own, knelt on the stones, and put his hand on top of Leafa’s.
“Thank you, Leafa. But please don’t push yourself like that for my sake. I’ll be fine…I don’t want to put you through any more trouble.”
“Trouble? No…”
She wanted to explain to him that it wasn’t like that, but he was on his feet already. He spun around—and headed right back toward the door into the World Tree.
“K-Kirito!” Leafa called out, shocked. Somehow, she got her trembling legs upright. “W-wait…You can’t go alone!”
“You might be right…But I have to do it anyway…” he murmured, his back turned. Leafa felt like a glass statue bearing its absolute weight limit. She desperately sought the right words, but her throat felt burned; no voice would emerge. She reached out at the last moment and grabbed him tight.
She could tell that she was drawn to him. Perhaps this was just an escape, a different route for her feelings for Kazuto, but at the same time, she didn’t mind that. She knew this feeling was true.
“Please…don’t…Come back to the old Kirito…I…I want to tell you something…”
Kirito enveloped the hand that was holding him. His soft but firm voice flowed into her ears.
“I’m sorry, Leafa…If I don’t go there, nothing is over, and nothing can begin. I have to see her one more time…”
“I have…to see Asuna again.”
For a moment, she didn’t understand what she’d heard. The echo of his words rattled around in the blank space they’d created in her mind.
“…What…what did…you say…?”
He repeated himself, looking a bit curious.
“Oh…Asuna? That’s the name of the person I’m looking for.”
“But…but she’s—”
Leafa faltered a step, her hands on her mouth.
Images were blotting their way into her frozen brain.
Kazuto in the dojo after their sparring a few days ago.
Kirito’s defeat of the salamanders in the Ancient Forest—their first meeting.
Both boys would swipe their swords to the right at the end of their fights and put them over their backs. The images aligned perfectly.
The two silhouettes melted into a spray of light. Leafa opened her eyes wide, the words barely escaping her trembling lips.
“…Big…Brother…?”
“Huh…?”
Kirito’s brows suddenly knotted in suspicion. His jet-black eyes stared straight into Leafa’s. The light in his pupils rippled, quavered, like a reflection of the moon in water.
“Sugu…? Suguha?”
The spriggan’s voice was barely a whisper.
Leafa took several more faltering steps backward. The cobblestones, the town, the World Tree, the very universe around her—all seemed to be collapsing.
Over the last few days of adventuring with her new friend, Leafa had felt color and life return to this virtual world. Just flying next to him sent her heart leaping.
She’d be lying if she claimed that loving Kazuto as Suguha and being attracted to Kirito as Leafa didn’t fill her with guilt. But it was Kirito who had taught her that the world of Alfheim didn’t have to be just an extension of a virtual flight simulator, but another true reality. Because of that, Leafa had realized that the feelings she felt here were true, not just digital data.
She thought that maybe she could freeze the heart that beat for Kazuto, bury it deeply, and eventually forget that pain by being with Kirito. But now the human being who gave the fairy character life, the one who helped make this world its own reality, had co
me into a very sharp and unexpected clarity.
“…This can’t be happening…This is so wrong,” Leafa wailed to herself, shaking her head. She couldn’t stand to be here for a second longer. She had to turn away and open her menu.
There was no need to even look at the button in the bottom-left corner of her window, or the confirmation prompt it created. Eyes closed, she passed through the ring of rainbow light and was soon plunged into darkness.
When she woke up in her own bed, the first thing she saw was the deep blue of Alfheim’s sky. The color that had always filled her with longing and nostalgia now caused her nothing but pain.
Suguha slowly pulled off the AmuSphere and held it in front of her.
“Hih…huu…”
The sobs came pouring from her throat. Her hands impulsively clenched the fragile device, no more than two thin circles of plastic. It began to bend, creaking faintly with the pressure.
She almost wanted to break the AmuSphere, to permanently sever her pathway to that other world—but she couldn’t. She felt too sorry for Leafa, the girl living on the other side of the ring.
Suguha put the device on top of the bed and sat up. She put her feet on the floor, closed her eyes, and hung her head. She just didn’t want to think about anything.
A quiet knock on the door broke the silence. It was followed by a voice with the same inflection, though different from Kirito’s.
“Can I come in, Sugu?”
“No! Don’t open the door!” she shouted abruptly. “Just…let me be alone…”
“What’s wrong, Sugu? I mean, I was sure surprised, too…” he continued, clearly confused. “If you’re mad that I was using the NerveGear again, I apologize. But I had to do it.”
“No, it’s not that.”
She couldn’t stop the current of emotion from tearing through her. Suguha leaped to her feet and strode to the door. She turned the knob and pulled, and there was Kazuto. He looked at her with obvious concern.
“I…I…” Her feelings turned into tears and tears into words before she could stop them. “I-I betrayed my own heart. I betrayed my love for you.”
At last she had spoken the word love to his face, but it slashed her chest, her throat, her lips, like a knife. The pain seared at her, but she kept going.
“I was going to forget, to give up, to fall in love with Kirito. In fact, I already had. And yet…and yet…”
“Huh…?”
For several seconds he gaped at her silently. Then he whispered, “You love…? But…we’re…”
“I know.”
“…Huh…?”
“I already know.”
Oh no, she thought. But she couldn’t stop. She put all of her raging emotions into her stare and pushed on, lips trembling.
“We aren’t real siblings. I’ve known that for over two years!!”
No. Suguha hadn’t asked her mother to hold back on revealing that she knew the truth to Kazuto just so that she could hurl her feelings at him like this. She wanted time to properly consider what it meant, and what she could do about it.
“When you quit practicing kendo and started avoiding me years ago, it was because you learned the truth, wasn’t it? You were keeping your distance because you knew I wasn’t your real sister. So why have you decided to be nice to me now?!”
No matter how much she knew she ought to stop, she couldn’t. As Suguha’s words echoed through the cold hallway, Kazuto’s black eyes gradually lost their expression.
“I…I was so happy when you came back from SAO. I was so happy when you started treating me the way you used to. I thought you finally saw me for who I was.”
At last, two teardrops hit her cheeks. She rubbed at them fiercely and strained to push the voice from her lungs.
“But…after this, I’d rather you kept being cold to me. Then I wouldn’t have realized that I love you…I wouldn’t have been sad to learn about Asuna…and I wouldn’t have fallen in love with Kirito to replace you!!”
Kazuto’s eyes grew just a bit wider, and then his expression froze. After several seconds in which everything seemed to have stopped, his eyes wavered, then looked down. A single word came from his mouth.
“…Sorry…”
In the two months since he’d awakened, Kazuto’s eyes had always been full of a tender, gentle light when he looked at Suguha. Now that light was gone, and a deep darkness had taken its place. Suguha felt sharp regret pierce her chest as painfully as any blade.
“…Just leave me alone.”
She couldn’t stand to look at him any longer. Suguha slammed the door to escape the guilt and self-loathing that threatened to crush her. She stumbled back several steps until her heel hit the bed, and she fell over onto it.
Suguha curled up into a ball on top of the sheets, her shoulders shaking with the force of her sobs. The tears poured forth, leaving small blots on the white sheets as they soaked into the fabric.
I stood for a long moment in front of the shut door. Eventually I turned around, leaned back against it, and slid down to a sitting position.
Suguha’s suspicion that I’d been keeping my distance because she wasn’t my real sister was basically correct. But I was only ten when I’d noticed the blank field in the census data and asked my parents what it meant. But there hadn’t been a direct intention behind my estrangement with her.
That was the point when I’d lost my perspective of personal distance with everyone, not just Suguha.
I had no memories of my actual parents, and Minetake and Midori Kirigaya had loved me exactly the same both before and after I knew the truth, so it wasn’t an external shock to my system. Instead, the event planted the seed of a very odd sensation deep inside of me, where it took root.
It was a kind of suspicion, a constant question in every interaction: Who is this person, really? No matter how long I’d known them, no matter how well I knew them—even my own family members—I couldn’t prevent that thought from running through my brain: Who is this person, exactly? Do I really know them?
Perhaps that was one thing that drove me to the world of online games. On the Net, it was natural for every character to have a secret inner side. No one really knew anyone. Interacting in this world of falsehood where that was taken for granted just seemed comfortable to me. I plunged headfirst into Net gaming around fifth or sixth grade, and never looked back. It would eventually take me into a world that I wouldn’t escape for an entire two years.
If it weren’t for the whole “game of death” thing, Sword Art Online could have been my paradise. A world of false dreams from which I’d never wake. An unending virtual realm.
I tried to play the role of Kirito, just an unfamiliar nobody.
But being trapped in that full-dive experience and unable to escape eventually led me to one pure truth:
The real world and the false world were ultimately the same thing.
Human beings only recognized the world based on the information their brains received. The only thing that made an online game a “false” world was that it could be left behind with the simple flip of a switch.
SAO was a world that my brain recognized with electronic pulses, and a world that couldn’t be escaped.
And that description matched the real world perfectly.
Once I had that epiphany, I understood how empty the doubts that had plagued me since the age of ten really were. There was no meaning to wondering who anyone really was. All you could do was trust and accept them. The people you knew really were the people you knew.
I could hear the faint sound of Suguha sobbing through the door.
When I first saw her face after returning alive from SAO, I was openly and honestly happy to see her again. I knew that in order to make up for the years of distance that my pointless issue had caused, I’d need to close the gap by treating her the way I truly wanted.
But it seemed that over those two years, Suguha had discovered her own truth about me. She’d learned that I was her cousin, not her b
rother, and the shift in the distance she felt was surely alarming and strange to her, a challenge to accept. And, assuming that she didn’t know the truth, I’d been totally unaware of what was happening to her.
I’d revealed my feelings toward Asuna on multiple occasions in Suguha’s presence. I’d even cried over Asuna in front of her. I could never have imagined that it was hurting her so much to hear that.
And that wasn’t all.
Suguha had never been one for computers and video games. It must have been because of me that she’d started on a VRMMO of her own. Suguha had spent countless hours diving into that virtual world, trying to know more about me, creating another version of herself. Leafa, the girl who’d helped me time and time again in Alfheim…was Suguha.
Yui had said the reason I ran into her first thing after logging in was possibly due to another person in the vicinity being logged in to ALO. It wasn’t just the local vicinity, it was from the same damn house; our global IP was the same. Leafa and I had been fated to meet this way, but even as Kirito, I couldn’t think of anyone but Asuna, and I hurt Leafa just like I hurt Suguha.
I squeezed my eyes shut and opened them so hard it was practically audible, then jumped vigorously to my feet.
Now was the time to do something for Suguha. If there was one thing the people of SAO had taught me, it was to reach out when words weren’t enough.
The loud knock jolted Suguha out of her detached haze, and she hunched tighter in response.
She wanted to shout out not to open the door, but the only thing that left her throat was ragged breath. But Kazuto didn’t turn the knob—he spoke through the door.
“Sugu…I’ll be waiting on the northern terrace of Alne.”
His voice was calm and gentle. She could sense him leaving her door. Farther down the hallway, the door to his room opened and shut, and silence descended.
Suguha shut her eyes tight and hunched up again. The tears that squeezed out made little plips as they hit the floor.
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