Only when the two objects were nearly overlapping did it become clear which of the two had won.
With a sharp crack, the entire cube of ice split, going white. Then the block, which was the size of a small shed, burst tremendously into a vast number of little shards. The air was instantly colored white, and I had to hold up my left arm to shield myself from the onslaught of cold.
“Hkyaaaa?!” shrieked Chudelkin. His outstretched limbs trembled. “Th…this is preposterous…My superbly impressive and ultimate sacred art, which was bequeathed to me by Her Holiness…”
That mocking smile had vanished from his venomously red lips, but despite the feat of obliterating the massive ice block, Alice wasn’t unscathed, either. She swung her arm to return the cone of shards to the form of her sword once again but had to valiantly hold firm to maintain her balance. I guessed that she’d probably taken some of the impact of the flying ice at close range.
“Alice!” I cried, but she held out her free hand to stop me and pointed the tip of her blade toward the distant Chudelkin.
“Chudelkin, your faithless acts are nothing more than a paper balloon filled with air—just like you!!”
“Wha…wha—haah—wha…?!”
Her cutting remark was so devastating that for once, the man couldn’t come up with a response. His round face was distorted beyond belief and twitching violently as greasy sweat poured in rivers down his upside-down features.
Just then, Administrator broke her silence from the back of the room, speaking to her level of boredom.
“No matter how many years pass, you’ll never not be stupid, Chudelkin.”
The prime senator’s limbs promptly withdrew. He shrank like a sulking child, while the pontifex gracefully turned on her side and lay down in the middle of the air, as though there were an invisible sofa there. She floated upward, crossed her legs, and continued, “Alice’s Osmanthus Blade has the highest level of physical priority of any existing Divine Object. And she utterly believes in that fact. And yet you attempt to use a physical-type attack art against her. Have you forgotten the most basic fundamentals of sacred arts?”
“Hah…hoh-hoh-hah-hee…,” Chudelkin giggled nervously. Tears burst from his eyes without warning. Since he was balancing on his head, they ran down his forehead and sank into the carpet where his scalp met it.
“Oh-hoooo…Oh, what an honor, what glory, what privilege!! Her Holiness herself, offering lessons to the lowly likes of me! I shall rise to the occasion…Humble Chudelkin will prove himself worthy of this tender mercyyyyy!!”
Somehow, Administrator’s statement had been more effective than any healing art. His disbelief had been wiped clean in an instant, and the prime senator was now glaring boldly at Alice with his own bizarre brand of proud confidence.
“Number Thirty! You just likened me to a paper balloon filled with nothing but hot air!”
“…Are you saying you’re not?”
“Nooooot! Not, not, not, not!!” Chudelkin’s eyes seemed to light with visible flames. “I do have strong beliefs of my own! And one of those is love!! I am driven by pure and selfless love for my wise and beauteous Holiness!!”
At any other time, in any other place, this would come off like third-rate theater. But somehow, in this moment, the statement reverberated powerfully through the room. It was almost kind of touching, in a pathetic way—even if it was coming from a half-naked clown man balancing on his oversize head.
Chudelkin glared at Alice with burning eyes, spread his limbs wide, and screeched, “Y-Y-Y-Your Holiness!!”
“What is it, Chudelkin?”
“After so many long years of faithful service, I, Prime Senator Chudelkin, do finally, for the first time, make a most impudent request of you!! I shall henceforth risk life and limb to vanquish the brazen traitors, and all that I ask—nothing more!—is that upon my successful completion of this weighty duty, I at last be allowed…to place my hands…to place my lips…upon your blessed figure…and to spend a…a…a night of dreams fulfilled together!!”
Well, that’s one way to make a bold request of the absolute ruler of all humanity.
But there was clearly no doubt that this was a scream from the heart, an absolutely true confession of real emotion from the very depth of Chudelkin’s soul.
It was so far beyond pathos now that it was genuinely heroic. Neither I, nor Eugeo, nor Alice could move a muscle.
Floating on the other end of the room, Administrator reacted to Chudelkin’s request by…curving her pale lips into a smile that suggested nothing could be funnier. Her mirror eyes, which reflected all light, now wavered between scorn and mockery. But when she spoke, covering her mouth with her hand, the voice that emerged was full of benevolence that was at odds with her expression.
“…Very well, Chudelkin,” she murmured. “I swear to Stacia, goddess of creation. When you have fulfilled your duty, you shall have an entire night to do with my body whatever you wish.”
Because I came from the real world, with all its lies and deceptions, it was laughably obvious to me that she didn’t mean a word of that promise.
But the people of this world, probably due to the structure of their artificial fluctlights, were unable to disobey the laws and rules that existed on a higher level of importance than them. These laws ran from local precepts of villages and towns to Basic Imperial Law to the Taboo Index and even to personal oaths sworn to the gods.
The higher up in the ruling structures one was, the fewer number of laws that applied, but even Cardinal and Administrator, the very highest of managers in this system, were still subject to them. The range of activities that their parents had limited them to in their youth was still active. Hence, Cardinal couldn’t put her teacup directly on the table, and Administrator couldn’t kill human beings.
But Administrator had just proven to me in person that she was no longer bound by her own oaths to her gods. It was clear evidence that she did not have a shred of belief in Stacia, Solus, or Terraria, the three goddesses at the center of the Axiom Church’s influence.
Naturally, Chudelkin was unable to see through his master’s deception. He heard what she said, her words dripping with derision, and his eyes filled once again with bulging tears.
“Oh…ohhh…I am filled…I am enshrouded in limitless joy…In this moment, I am supremely enabled, sublimely motivated…In short, I am unstoppable!!”
His tears sizzled and evaporated, and suddenly Chudelkin’s entire body was glowing a furious, flaming red color.
“Sys! Tem! Caaaall!! Generate…Therrrmaaal…Elemennnnnnntoah!!”
His limbs sliced the air, fully extended and straight, down to the fingertips, at the ends of which appeared a multitude of burning red dots. From my position standing behind Alice, I could keenly sense that this was Chudelkin’s last and greatest attack.
Like the ice, the number of glittering ruby heat elements was twenty in total. Chudelkin’s balancing entirely on his head meant that his legs no longer had to support his body. But clearly, having the strength of mind and imagination to separately envision and control all ten toes in addition to his fingers required great practice.
While his eccentric appearance and personality drew all the attention, Prime Senator Chudelkin clearly had as much training as the oldest of the Integrity Knights—if not more—and was a tremendous foe in his own right.
His eyes narrowed in a gloating manner, as if he sensed my fear—and then they bulged as far as they could. His tiny pupils shone with red light, turning my fear into shock. At first, I almost thought he was like a classic heroic protagonist whose blood burned so passionately that his eyes turned into literal flames…but then I realized my mistake.
The “flames” I saw burning right in front of Chudelkin’s eyes were actually large heat elements. He could use even his own two eyes as control vectors…They were the twenty-first and twenty-second elements under his control.
Before being expended, the elements in waiting did release a small
amount of their resources into the nearby air. Having heat elements an inch or two away from your fingertips caused a bit of a prickling sensation, but I could tell that having larger elements so very close to one’s eyeballs couldn’t be safe. Soon the skin around his eyes was fizzling and charring.
But the prime senator didn’t seem to feel any heat or pain. With his eye sockets blackening, his strange face looked downright demonic. He grinned wickedly and screamed in ear-piercing falsetto, “Witness, my greatest of sacred aaaaaarts…Come forth, genie, and burn these rebels into ash!!”
He pulled his limbs in, then swung them about with blinding speed. The twenty elements didn’t change form immediately but flew into the air in parallel lines of five each, hurtling through the space between him and us with startling velocity.
To my stunned disbelief, the glowing red lines came together to depict a very large human. It had short legs. A bulging gut. Oddly long arms. And a head wearing a crown with several spikes on it. It was an enormous clown, as if Chudelkin’s original puffed-up form had grown to several times its size.
The last of the elements filled in the crimson stripes that made up the suit of the twenty-foot-tall burning clown, and then they vanished. Its face, which was so high I had to crane my neck to see it, was based on Chudelkin’s features but looked many times more cruel. A tongue of flames licked out of its heavy lips, and the fissures that represented its eyes exuded a gaze that was paradoxically freezing cold.
Now that he was done waving his limbs around to create the flaming clown, Chudelkin at last closed his eyes so hard it was audible. The last two heat elements shot forth and took hold in the dark sockets of the clown to form burning red eyes.
The enormous clown glared at us with horrifying malice—it was as though Chudelkin’s very soul had transferred to it. It lifted the pointed boot of its right foot and pressed it down on the ground in front of it. The floor rumbled, and a great billow of flame erupted from the giant’s foot, singeing and hazing the air around it.
Eugeo and I were stunned into silence during the entire display. It wasn’t until Alice’s interjection that we snapped out of it and brandished our swords once more.
“…I’ll admit that I did not know he was capable of such a thing,” she whispered. Her words were as precise and controlled as ever, but I didn’t miss the slight wobbliness in her voice.
“It seems we misread Chudelkin. Sadly, my flowers cannot destroy that bodiless flame giant. Even on defense, they will not withstand a direct attack for long.”
“…Meaning that in the meantime, we’ll have to do the job of attacking Chudelkin’s actual body,” I whispered hoarsely.
“Precisely right,” Alice returned. “I’ll find a way to block him for ten seconds. Kirito, Eugeo, you must find a way to vanquish Chudelkin in that time. But you cannot approach within sword-strike range. That is what the pontifex is waiting for.”
“Ten…”
“…seconds.”
Eugeo and I shared a look and groaned.
When we’d fought on the floor below, Eugeo had overpowered me with his icy impassiveness, but after his knighthood had been undone, he’d gotten his emotions back. Oddly enough, the sight of fear and hesitation in his face made me a bit happy. It was reassuring.
But this was time to think. If Alice just wanted us to rush Chudelkin while she handled the fire clown, we had several options. I’d taken on that role many times against floor bosses in Aincrad, and Chudelkin ought to be defenseless while he was controlling the clown.
On the other hand, there was no guarantee that Administrator would stay still and watch while we charged. So we had to keep our distance as we attacked. Being swordsmen, there were only two ways for us to attack from a distance.
One was using sacred arts. But with the level of arts that Eugeo and I were capable of casting, I couldn’t imagine that we could break through Chudelkin’s defenses to actually do serious damage to his life.
The other was the ace up our sleeve, Perfect Weapon Control—but this had a weakness. Activating it demanded the chanting of the extremely long command that Cardinal put together for us. It would take well over ten seconds. As an Integrity Knight, Eugeo had used Perfect Control without a vocal command, but I didn’t think he could do it again now. I certainly couldn’t.
“…!”
I ground my teeth in frustration. The burning clown moved forward mockingly, its body swaying and wavering in the heat. The movement was far from agile, but its size was all that mattered. Each step brought it several feet closer.
Once it was close enough that I could feel the heat radiating against my skin, Alice moved at last. She swung the Osmanthus Blade high overhead. Her free left hand was straight backward, and her legs were wide apart front and back, as tense as bowstrings.
A whirlwind gust erupted at Alice’s feet, fluttering her long white skirt and golden hair. The Osmanthus Blade shone with golden light and split into hundreds of petals that began to glide through the air in a line.
“Spin, my flowers!!” she shouted, so loud I had to wonder how her body could produce such a sound.
The golden petals swirled at such a high speed that they became individually invisible, melting into a blur that grew into a huge tornado.
When grinding the ice cube, she’d created a cone with a sharp, focused point, but this was now the reverse. It was like a funnel that grew into the air at a diagonal from Alice’s hand, over fifteen feet across at the widest end. The rotating golden storm sucked in the air around it, sending out random gusts that buffeted my body and Eugeo’s.
The flame clown was so close it could practically flatten us. Smirking all the while, it launched itself into a jump nearly to the ceiling and came down fearlessly into the middle of Alice’s tornado. There was a sizzling sound like a furnace bubbling away, so loud that it drowned out all other sound.
The fire clown’s feet were swallowed up in the nearly vertical golden tornado. Ripped apart by the rapidly spinning blades, the flame burst apart in all directions like sparks, singeing the air.
But the clown maintained its enormous size, still holding that hideous smile that stretched from one side of its face to the other. Ever so slowly, it began to stomp on the tornado. Directly underneath, Alice’s legs were trembling, and there was ferocious concentration on what I could see of her face.
The tiny petals began to take on the heat, turning red from the clown’s powerful flame. Even now, Alice and her Osmanthus Blade were undoubtedly taking steady, solid life damage.
Eight seconds left.
It was impossible to defeat Chudelkin with sacred arts. There wasn’t enough time for Perfect Control. The only things I had on my side were the black sword in my hand and the techniques that were fully committed to muscle memory.
During the two years I’d spent here, I’d practiced and repracticed countless sword skills so that I could teach Eugeo all about the Aincrad style. In the process, I’d realized that in this world, sword skills could sometimes exhibit a power that far surpassed their original specs in the game of SAO.
That was because in the Underworld, much of the outcome of actions was determined not by system calculation but by the strength of the user’s will and imagination. The little spider named Charlotte and Alice the Integrity Knight had called this power Incarnation.
In other words, here, the power and range of sword skills that were strictly defined in the old Aincrad might actually be augmented by the power of Incarnation.
But on the other hand, it also meant that negative emotions like fear, timidness, and hesitation could weaken the same skills.
There was a strong, fundamental desire within me to distance myself from the Kirito avatar I had cultivated in the SAO days: the Black Swordsman and the Dual Blades master. I wasn’t able to analyze the precise cause of that feeling. Maybe it was a desire not to be treated like a hero. Maybe it was guilt over those people whose lives I’d failed to save or ended. Either one could be true, but it might a
lso have been something completely different that I had yet to figure out.
All I knew for certain was that no matter how much I might dislike it, Kirito the Black Swordsman was a part of me, had helped shape who I was now, and was giving me strength.
The same man who’d fought in that world—the same me—was still here.
Seven seconds left.
With the heat of the giant stomping on Alice’s tornado plastering my cheeks, I turned my stance to the right and lowered my waist.
I lifted the black sword to the level of my shoulder, laid it perfectly flat, and pulled back.
My left hand provided catapulting leverage.
I hadn’t used this skill or taught it to Eugeo or even attempted re-creating it yet. And I knew why: Because this sword skill was the one the Black Swordsman knew best of all and used the most often. It was his symbol.
On a straight line from the end of the slightly translucent black sword and about fifty feet away was the upside-down Prime Senator Chudelkin. His seared eyes were still closed, but he was obviously using some means of sharing the sight of his flaming clown. He should have noticed my motion already.
There would be only one shot at an attack. I couldn’t let him defend or evade it. In that sense, fifty feet was such a tremendously long distance. Balancing on his head meant Chudelkin couldn’t move quickly, but I’d already seen plenty of the little clown’s resilience in a pinch. I needed his attention diverted away from me, if just for a quarter of a second.
Six seconds left. With as few words as possible, I whispered to my partner, “His eye.”
“Got it.”
His response was so immediate, so primed to go, that I glanced at him and saw that there was now a shining arrow of ice in Eugeo’s right hand. It wasn’t all that big, but the brilliance of its light was a sign that it had a high system priority. I supposed he must have taken the ice resources in the air from Alice and Chudelkin’s fierce battle and converted them for use without anyone noticing.
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