Though I hadn’t told Eugeo all the details, I’d used Selka’s powers to give him half my life when he was gravely wounded in the fight with the goblins. It was a very risky action and sucked out my life at a much faster pace than I’d expected, but just when I was certain that I couldn’t maintain myself any longer—I had heard a voice.
“Kirito, Eugeo…I’ll be waiting for you always…I am waiting for you at the top of Central Cathedral…”
Along with the voice, I had felt a mysterious warm light fill me, restoring both my life and Eugeo’s. That wasn’t just confused memory. It must have been Alice, once taken away by the Axiom Church, using some unexplained power to save us.
We took that message to heart and had made our way down to Centoria to the Central Cathedral.
But when we finally met Alice in a most unexpected manner, she was not Alice Zuberg from Rulid but the Integrity Knight Alice Synthesis Thirty. She treated us merely as criminals to be judged and gave no sign whatsoever that she was Eugeo’s childhood friend.
Either she was a different person who coincidentally shared her looks and name or she was the real Alice with her memories altered or controlled. It seemed the only way we’d find out the truth was to escape this prison and actually get up to the top of Central Cathedral—the place where we’d find out everything about the Axiom Church.
And yet we hadn’t been able to put a scratch on the chains or bars so far and didn’t seem likely to in the future.
“Argh, this is so frustrating…If there’s a God here, I’d like to strangle that holy neck until I finally get the entire truth!” I grunted, thinking of Seijirou Kikuoka’s stupid face.
Eugeo chuckled nervously and whispered, “Come on, you shouldn’t insult Stacia while we’re inside the church. You don’t want divine retribution.”
His shift in priorities regarding the Taboo Index had not removed his faith in their religion, I noted, and added, “Hey, maybe she’ll punish these chains instead.”
Then a thought occurred to me, and I changed my tone. “Wait a second. Speaking of Stacia, couldn’t we call up a window here?”
“You know, we never thought to try that. Go on and see.”
“Right.”
I waited to ensure that there wasn’t any movement from the jailer’s station down the hallway to the left, then extended the index and middle finger of my right hand. I made the familiar status window summoning gesture, then tapped the chain tied to my left hand.
After a brief pause, a pale-purple window popped into being. I didn’t think that learning the chain’s properties was going to improve our situation, but it never hurt to have more information.
“Hey, there it is!” Eugeo grinned and checked the numbers. There were just three lines of information: the object ID, a horrifying 23,500/23,500 durability rating, and the descriptor class-38 object. Class 38 was a higher value than many fine swords, but it was lower than the Blue Rose Sword’s 45 and the 46 for the black sword made from the Gigas Cedar branch. If we had either sword, we could cut through the chains—but it was pointless to hope for that now.
Eugeo popped up the window on his own chains and groaned. “Ugh, no wonder they wouldn’t budge even the tiniest bit. We’ll need at least a class-38 weapon or tool to cut them…”
“That’s exactly right,” I said, looking around the dim cell, but all the room contained was the crude metal beds and an empty waterskin. I felt a brief moment of hope when I wondered if I could remove a leg of my bed to use as a crowbar, but upon examining the window, it was a cheap class-3 object. The iron bars looked much tougher, but the chain was too short for me to reach them.
I looked around, even more desperate for some option I hadn’t tried yet, when Eugeo said weakly, “You’re not going to suddenly find some incredible sword hiding in your cell. I mean, what’s there to find? It’s just the beds, the skin, and these chains.”
“Just…chains…” I mumbled, staring at the chain confining my arm, then the one around Eugeo’s wrist. Suddenly, I had an idea. I tried to control my excitement. “It’s not just chains. It’s two damn chains!”
“Huhhh?” Eugeo gasped, totally baffled. I waved him down off the bed, then got onto the stone floor myself so I could see my partner’s outline standing in the darkness, wearing the school uniform he’d had on since our arrest.
Around his right wrist was a crude metal ring, like mine, welded to a long chain that ran to a fastener in the wall behind his bed.
First, I ducked under Eugeo’s chain, then doubled back over it to my original spot. That crossed our chains into an X pattern. Then I motioned for him to back away, which I did as well, so that the tension at the intersection of the chains was high enough for them to creak unpleasantly.
At last, Eugeo seemed to understand what I was thinking. “Um, Kirito, you aren’t suggesting that we both pull, are you?”
“Pull, indeed. The two chains have identical priority levels, so this should essentially damage the life of both. We’ll see once we try—use both hands to pull.”
Eugeo still seemed skeptical, but he did as I said and used both hands to grab the chain connected to his right wrist, then crouched a bit. I did the same on my end.
“Wait, before that…”
I made the sigil with my left hand and called up the chain’s window again.
If we tried this method in the real world in an attempt to sever chains of this thickness, we’d maybe put a tiny scratch on the surface at best. But in the Underworld, no matter how real everything looked, the physical principles were different. As demonstrated by the way we cut through a twelve-foot-wide tree in just a few days with the divine Blue Rose Sword, when any two objects collided with a certain amount of force and velocity, the higher-priority object would eventually destroy the other.
We made eye contact to get our timing right, then yanked on the chains with all our might.
Gink! The chains rattled, dull and forceful, and it took my entire core to keep my legs planted so that Eugeo’s surprising brute strength didn’t hurtle me off my feet. He started to get into the spirit of it, too, and before long we had mostly forgotten the original idea and were having a simple tug-of-war.
In addition to the ugly scraping at the intersection of the chains, there were occasional orange flashes of sparks. Without letting up any of the pressure, I craned my neck to check the open status window.
“Oh!”
I couldn’t pump my fist with both hands occupied, so I had to smirk instead. The durability value was descending, with the ones digit rotating faster than I could see and the tens digit dropping fast. At this rate, we’d have them down to zero in mere minutes. I gritted my teeth, pulling even harder with Eugeo.
In order for this to work, we had to have two chains and two prisoners, as well as a high-enough object control authority—what would correspond to the strength stat in SAO—to override the chains’ level. So it was unlikely that eleven-year-old Alice, imprisoned alone, would have been able to do this.
She must have gone to her interrogation, and then something happened. If the two Alices were the same person, then they must have done something to her that controlled her mind, changing her into an obedient soldier of the Axiom Church…
I was so occupied by this train of thought that I forgot a very crucial part of the plan. We needed to stop tugging just before the life of the chains went down to zero. Otherwise…
Ping! That sound was much higher-pitched than the previous. The next instant, Eugeo and I were hurtling backward, and I slammed the back of my head against the hard stone wall.
I huddled on the ground, clutching my head, desperately trying to resist the pain and dizziness the STL faithfully represented. Once they abated, I looked toward the door, certain that the jailer would have heard us this time, but there was no reaction. I exhaled with relief and got up.
When Eugeo recovered and stood on his own, he rubbed his head and muttered, “Ow…that must have knocked a hundred off my life.”
“Hey, that’s a cheap price to pay. Check it out.”
I held out my right arm, the chain dangling limp from the shackle. The metal was severed clean, with about one mel and twenty cens left connected. There were four U-shaped pieces of metal on the ground, the remains of the two rings that had split simultaneously from the stress of our pulling. Before long, they tinkled and crumbled out of existence.
That gave me the idea to check the window of the broken chain hanging from my arm. It had recovered its life up to 18,000, nearly the original amount. My expectation (more like hope) was that once we pulled its life down to zero, the entire three-mel length of the chain would be obliterated as a whole, but because it was made of a long series of rings, the remaining parts had instead reconstituted as new chain objects.
Eugeo checked his own chain, following the same line of thought, then threw up his shoulders and said, “Good grief…I could never pull off a mad idea like this. It’s why I’ll never be like you, Kirito.”
“Heh! My motto is, ‘Impossible, improbable, inadvisable.’ Still…I don’t know what we’ll do about this now…”
We were free from being stuck three mels from the wall, but I had no idea how I’d remove the dangling tail of chain hanging off my wrist now. If we did the same tug-of-war, we could shorten the chain but never remove it entirely.
“I guess we’ll just have to lug these everywhere with us. It’s a bit heavy, but if you wrap it around your arm, it shouldn’t interfere with the ability to run,” Eugeo said, doing just that. I followed his lead, and soon we had matching chain gauntlets, which made us smirk at each other.
“So,” I said to Eugeo, knowing that we had to clear something up before we moved to the next step, “I need to ask you something, Eugeo. You understand that if we escape and go searching for the truth about Alice, that means open rebellion against the Axiom Church. We don’t have time to grapple with what that means, each and every action we take. If that knowledge is too much for you to handle, I think you should stay here.”
For the two years we’d known each other, this was probably the hardest thing I’d ever said to him, but it was an unavoidable issue.
He seemed calm on the surface, but Eugeo’s fluctlight—his soul as a collection of light quantums—had just experienced a violent restructuring. Ever since birth, he’d believed in the absolute authority of the Axiom Church and Taboo Index. Now he had turned his back on that and placed something else in a higher priority.
I had to assume that Eugeo was in a more unstable position than he seemed, and if I put too much strain on his shifting mental model, it might cause an aberration within his soul like Raios’s. That’s why I had tried not to mention either the Church or the Index if possible over the last thirty-five hours.
But if we were going to undertake the extreme task of escaping this cell and infiltrating Central Cathedral, I had to get some things straight beforehand so that he didn’t have to stop and grapple with a sudden existential quandary in the middle of everything. I had to get Eugeo to the top floor of the cathedral safely—the place where I should find a control console that would let us disengage the simulation and return to reality.
That’s right—I wanted to bring my partner and friend out to meet real people in the real world. The Underworld as it existed now was an experiment run by Rath, and they could turn it off or reset it at any time. That would mean deleting the fluctlights of the thousands upon thousands of people who lived in this world. I couldn’t let that happen. I needed for Rath, and Seijirou Kikuoka, to have a conversation with Eugeo and realize what they’d built.
The Underworldians weren’t just virtual NPCs. They had the same intelligence and emotions as people in the real world, and they had a right to live here.
Eugeo’s eyes went wide when I demanded that he prepare for the truth. He lowered his head, lifted his hand, and clenched a fist in front of his chest.
“Yeah…I know.” His voice was quiet but resolute, full of determination. “I’ve made up my mind. I’ll turn on the Axiom Church if it means being able to go back to Rulid with Alice. I’ll even draw my sword and fight if I have to…If that Integrity Knight is the real Alice, I’ll find out what happened to her memory and turn her back. That’s what’s most important to me.”
He looked up, staring at me with absolute resolve shining in his eyes, then grinned faintly. “When we went on that picnic, you said, ‘Sometimes there are things that must be done, even when they are forbidden by law.’ I feel like I finally understand what that means.”
“…I see.”
I took a deep breath of cold air to push down the strange feeling I was getting in my chest. I nodded, stepped forward, and patted his shoulder.
“I understand your determination. But…once we’re out of here, we’re going to avoid battle wherever possible. I don’t feel like we stand a chance against any of the other Integrity Knights.”
“You’re usually not this pessimistic, Kirito.” Eugeo smirked. I reminded him that these guys were the toughest fighters in the world, then walked over to the metal bars separating our cell from the hallway. I pulled up the window for one of the three-cen-wide rods. Its object class was 20, and its life was close to ten thousand.
Eugeo came over to look at the window and groaned. “Hmm…that should be easier than the chains, but it’ll probably take a while to bend it with our hands. What do you think? Should we body-slam it at the same time?”
“We’ll lose plenty of life on our side, too. But I think I’ve got an idea. Check this out.”
I waved him back, then undid the chain wrapped around my right arm. I made it sound like I’d had the idea all along, but in fact, it came to me only when I was first wrapping the chain up. For the first year I’d spent at the Swordcraft Academy, I’d watched my mentor Sortiliena wrap up her own signature leather whip in the exact same way when she was done with it.
Eugeo watched me shake the four-foot-long piece of chain and wondered, “Um, Kirito, are you going to try to break the bar with that? What if you mess up and hit yourself…?”
“Don’t worry, I got plenty of lessons in whip-snapping from Liena. They called her the Walking Tactics Manual, remember? Now, if we blow the bars off, it’s gonna make a hell of a noise, so we need to run straight for the stairs. Don’t fight the jailer if he comes out. Just run.”
“…Uh-huh. Plenty of lessons, eh?”
I ignored that and started waving the chain wider and wider. It was still a bit short to use as a proper whip, but that class-38 priority would help make up the gap.
You must strike by focusing on the weight of the tip, not the hand holding the whip, Liena would tell me. I pulled back the chain and, before it stretched all the way out, swung it hard.
“Seya!”
It sprang forward like a dull gray snake, striking the intersection of those thick bars directly and producing a shower of sparks.
Ba-gwaaam! The bar ripped loose from the vertical frame, top and bottom, and slammed into the cell on the far wall with a tremendous clatter. If anyone had been stored in that cell, they would’ve assumed that Solus had sent down their punishment directly.
I held my breath against the thick cloud of rising dust and tumbled into the hallway. The kettle-headed jailer had to have heard that one. He probably wasn’t as tough as an Integrity Knight, but I wasn’t going to test that theory with just a length of chain for a weapon.
I crouched and watched the hallway, but after several seconds, there was no change. Eugeo followed me out of the cell. I glanced at him and whispered, “They might be waiting in ambush. Be on your guard.”
“Got it.”
We started sneaking along to avoid drawing attention—probably a bit too late for that.
According to the information I’d frantically memorized when we were brought down here, the Axiom Church’s basement prison had eight hallways that extended outward like wheel spokes, with four cells on either side of each hallway. If all the cells held two at most
, that meant it had a maximum capacity of 8 times 8 times 2, or 128 prisoners. I couldn’t imagine that it had ever been full, however.
At the “hub” of the wheel where all eight spokes met was the jailer’s station, around which wound the spiral staircase that went up to the surface. If we could avoid the jailer’s attacks and sprint past him, that would be the best outcome. At the end of the hallway I came to a stop, checking out the area around the station.
There was a small lamp hung on the wall of the rounded station, its light meager and flickering. Nothing at all moved, but I couldn’t shake the feeling of the jailer lying in wait somewhere, readying an attack with some terrifying weapon.
“…Hey, Kirito.”
“Shh!”
“Uh, Kirito?” Eugeo insisted, tapping my shoulder as I tried to peer around the corner. I turned.
“What?!”
“Do you hear that? Isn’t it…snoring?”
“…Uh, what?”
I focused on my ears and heard a rhythmic series of faint but familiar low rumbles.
“…”
I looked at Eugeo again, then shook my head and started walking.
Out of the hallway (without so much as a mouse hiding around the corner, of course), it was a fairly open circular space, with a stone pillar in the center about sixteen feet across. The pillar was hollow inside—the jailer’s room—and was, in fact, the source of the snoring.
There was a black metal door on the side of the pillar with a small window in its top. We snuck closer and I pressed my face to the window to look inside.
In the middle of the room was a crude bed, no better than the ones in the cells, with the jailer’s barrel-like body spilling over the sides of it. He was still wearing that kettle-like mask, and the thin material vibrated with each snore.
This was our golden opportunity to escape, but I had to wonder about the circumstances of his life. The jailer stood guard over a prison that hardly ever saw any visitors, if I had to guess, and had worked here alone for years, if not decades. After all, unless you were born to a noble family, everyone in this world was given a “calling” at age ten by their local leaders, and there was no way to choose or change it on your own.
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