“B-but…but…,” I stammered, staring at the tiny body in Cardinal’s palm as I fought back tears, “Charlotte’s speech and behavior wasn’t that of a mimic AI. She saved me. She sacrificed herself for me. Why…? How could she…?”
“As I’m sure I told you before, she’s been alive for over fifty years. She spent all that time in contact with me and watching over many people. It’s already been two years since I put her on you…One doesn’t need a fluctlight to develop an attachment over that much time together…”
Cardinal’s voice got firmer, more insistent. “Even if the nature of that intelligence is nothing more than an accumulation of input and output data, a true heart can reside within it. Even love, at times. But I don’t suppose you would ever understand, Administrator—you empty husk!!”
The little wise woman glared up at her two-hundred-year foe, her voice righteous and bold. But the pontifex, still watching the situation unfold from her floating position across the room, did not respond. She merely steepled her fingers in front of her mouth, mirror eyes shining enigmatically.
According to what Cardinal had said in the library, when Administrator fused with the original form of the Cardinal System, the self-correcting process—which was the basis for her second personality, the one that was in Cardinal’s form now—was powerful enough that she had to manipulate her own fluctlight to remove her emotions in order to counteract Cardinal’s rebellion.
Once the two split into separate bodies, she no longer had to worry about the subprocess taking over her body, but her emotions were still meaningless noise to her and unnecessary to bring back.
So the image of Administrator that I’d carried in my head was that of a programmed human, someone who mechanically carried out her tasks. But the pontifex I saw at the top of Central Cathedral was far from what I’d expected. She sneered at Chudelkin and toyed cruelly with our lives; something told me the grin that she constantly wore was no false simulation.
Even now, the silver-haired, silver-eyed young woman burbled and giggled behind her hands, her eyes narrowing with pleasure.
“Heh-heh-heh.”
She laughed, slender shoulders rocking, letting Cardinal know that her righteous missive was no more damaging to her than a slight breeze. Eventually, between her chuckles came a short message that made real the very thing I’d been afraid of.
“I thought you’d show up. Heh. Heh-heh-heh.”
“I figured that if I picked on these children enough, you’d poke your head out of that musty little burrow of yours. That’s the limit of what you can do, little one. You can arrange for pawns who will come after me, but you can’t bring yourself to abuse them like the pawns they are. You humans are such helpless creatures.”
I knew it…
As I feared, Administrator’s true intention was to put enough pressure on us to lure Cardinal out from her isolated library. Or in other words, she did this knowing that she still had a secret trick that would absolutely ensure her triumph.
But the Sword Golem, which ought to have been her ultimate weapon, was virtually destroyed, and now Eugeo and I were perhaps battle capable again. Even Alice was awake, pushing herself up with one hand in an attempt to get up.
Cardinal and Administrator were two sides of the same coin, and in a one-on-one fight would surely draw, so in these circumstances, our presence gave our side an overwhelming advantage, I assumed.
That meant that the instant the door to the library had opened, Administrator’s rational choice would have been to stop observing and simply attack at full power without delay. So why had she let Cardinal destroy the Sword Golem and heal Alice and me and even allowed us to have a brief conversation?
Cardinal had to be wondering the same thing—but her expression betrayed nothing but firm determination. “Hmph. In the myriad years since I saw you last, you’ve learned to affect a passable human being. Been practicing smiling into a mirror for two hundred years, have you?” she mocked.
Administrator shrugged off the comment with that very smile. “And that way of speaking, tiny one. So wise and scholarly! When I had you dragged before me two hundred years ago, you were trembling and alone…Weren’t you, Lyserith?”
“Do not call me by that name, Quinella! My name is Cardinal, and I am the program that exists solely to eliminate you!”
“Hee-hee, yes, of course. And I am Administrator, the one who manages all programs. So rude of me to have waited so long to introduce myself, my little one. It just took a while for me to prepare the formula in order to welcome you.” She gleefully raised her right hand.
Her outstretched fingers curled, as if they were grabbing and crushing some invisible object. At this point, her pure-white cheeks, which had seemed impervious to any rise in emotion, actually flushed with the faintest trace of red blood, and a ghastly look came into her mirror eyes. A chill raced up my back as I realized this was the very first time I had seen her utilizing her full focus and concentration.
But there was no time to act. In an instant, Administrator’s right hand clenched fully shut.
Craaaash!! Dozens of heavy shattering sounds burst from every direction in a deafening chorus. My first thought was that the giant glass walls that surrounded the room had all exploded at once.
But that wasn’t the case.
What had shattered was beyond the windows—the dark, roiling clouds, the blanket of stars, the cold full moon, and the very night sky itself.
The sky rained into an impossible number of fragments, which collided and burst into even smaller pieces as they fell. To my dumbfounded eyes, what appeared after the pieces of literal sky fell could only be described as “unbeing.”
A void of black and purple that seemed to have no depth, swirling and marbled, churning away. It was a world of nothing, the kind of sight that would suck away the mind of whoever stared at it for long enough.
In terms of color and beauty they were nothing alike, but I couldn’t help but be reminded of another scene I’d witnessed—when the original Aincrad had collapsed, and a veil of white had appeared to swallow the sunset that remained behind.
Had the Underworld just collapsed and vanished as well? The human realm, the Dark Territory, the villages and towns…and all the people living within them…
The only thing that saved me from this momentary terror was Cardinal’s shocked but still resolute voice.
“You…you cut the address loose.”
What does that mean…?
Despite my confusion, I couldn’t tear my eyes away from Administrator. The silver-haired woman lowered her hand and said in a whisper, “Two hundred years ago, I made the mistake of letting you get away when I absolutely had the chance to kill you. That was me who placed your stinking little hole on a nonconsecutive address, wasn’t it? So I decided to learn from my mistake. I knew that if I could lure you out, I’d trap you on this side—the rat in the cage with the cat who hunts her.”
The pontifex snapped her fingers to punctuate this statement. Instantly, there was another crashing noise, but much quieter than the last, and the dark-brown door that stood on its own in the middle of the carpet shattered. The pieces split apart before they hit the ground and vanished. Even the circle on the ground that was meant to indicate the location of the elevator platform was gone.
Eugeo was standing right next to it, and he reached out his foot to step on the carpet several times with surprise. Then he looked up, straight at me, and shook his head quickly.
In other words, what Administrator had destroyed wasn’t the outside world itself but the connection between this floor of the cathedral and the outside.
Even if we could somehow destroy the windows, there would be no way out of them—there was no space there to travel through. It was the perfect way to trap someone in a virtual space—almost too perfect—and the exact kind of thing that only someone with admin privileges could do. The prison area in Blackiron Palace on the first floor of Aincrad was child’s play compared to this.
<
br /> In short, Administrator hadn’t been wasting her time in the minutes since Cardinal had appeared. She’d been preparing this exact tremendous command for execution.
However, if the consecutive connection between spaces had been completely severed, then…
“I find your analogy lacking in precision,” shot back Cardinal, who’d arrived at my conclusion a second before I did. “It might take minutes to sever the connection, but patching it back together will not be so easy. Now you are trapped in here as well. So which of us is really the cat, and which is the rat? We have four in number, and you are alone. If you think these youngsters are beneath your notice, your mistake is grave indeed, Quinella.”
She was exactly right.
This now meant that Administrator couldn’t easily leave this place, either. And she and Cardinal had identical power when it came to using sacred arts. While her and Cardinal’s arts were at a perfect equilibrium, the rest of us could cut her to ribbons and seize victory.
But Cardinal’s correction did not wipe the little smile off the pontifex’s face.
“Four against one? No…your numbers are off. It’s actually four against three hundred. And that doesn’t even include me,” she gloated.
Just then, the upturned mass of metal—the almost totally destroyed Sword Golem—let out a discordant, eardrum-rending screech.
“What…?!” shouted Cardinal. She’d hit it with three devastating lightning bolts in a row and clearly assumed it was out of commission. I had certainly thought so, at least.
But the golem’s eyes, which had been completely dark just seconds ago, were now glittering like twin stars. It fixed us with a murderous glare, pushed itself up with its arms, and got to its four feet as though all the damage it had suffered was instantly gone. When it stood, it let out a belly-wrenching roar.
That was when I noticed that the various sword parts that had been charred and smoking from Cardinal’s lightning bolts were gleaming like brand-new weapons.
It was true that weapons with a high-priority value had natural life-restoring capabilities in this realm, but only if they were cared for and put back into their sheaths. Even then, it supposedly took an entire day to recover half of an object’s total life, and beyond any of that, the swords that made up the golem’s body had been just decorative objects stuck to the room’s support pillars—they didn’t have sheaths.
Even if every part of the golem was a Divine Object type of weapon, they still could not recover so much damage so quickly. But the giant made of swords standing behind the pontifex looked just like it had before the lightning hit it—even more powerful than before, actually. It occurred to me that if she could mass-produce these golems, she might actually rebuff a full-scale invasion from the Dark Territory after all.
I stood there in mute shock until I heard the little sage command, “Kirito, Alice, Eugeo, get behind me! Do not allow yourselves to slip forward!”
I was already behind her, so the other two rushed over. Alice seemed completely healed after being impaled through the chest, in fact. She’d lost her golden breastplate, and the blue knight’s corsage beneath was torn, but I didn’t get the sense that her flesh was injured under it.
She bravely squared her shoulders and held up the Osmanthus Blade, whispering, “Kirito…who is this person…?”
“…Her name’s Cardinal. She fought with Administrator two hundred years ago and was banished. She’s another pontifex, basically.”
And if one was Administrator, the other was Formatter—the one who would mercilessly reset the world to nothing.
But I couldn’t explain all that now, of course. Alice still seemed suspicious, so I added, “It’s all right—she’s on our side. She rescued me and Eugeo and showed us the way to get here. She loves this world with all her heart and mourns what it has become.”
That, at least, was all true. Alice wasn’t over her confusion and doubt yet, but she pressed her hand to her right breast, to the spot where Cardinal’s miraculous power had healed her, and nodded deeply.
“…I understand. High-level sacred arts reflect the heart of the caster…and after the way she healed my wounds, I trust in the warmth of her strength.”
I nodded back at her. She was absolutely right. Whether the sacred arts caster was hastily tossing off a healing effect or truly putting their prayer into it made a big difference in the effect of the healing art, even when it came to the simplest and quickest of commands.
Cardinal’s healing arts were full of true compassionate love. They engulfed and melted away all pain. That was why I hoped there was still room to talk her out of her plan to reinitialize the Underworld—but only if we actually won this battle.
First, we had to figure out the secret of how the Sword Golem had instantly healed itself of all damage, and how we could counteract that.
It began moving forward, its dark-gold body gleaming in the light. Cardinal readied her staff at once, but she couldn’t get the jump on it with a major attack in advance like she had a few minutes ago. Administrator would be waiting with eagle eyes to strike at the moment Cardinal started chanting her commands.
Think, think, think. It’s all I can do right now.
Most likely, the Sword Golem’s auto-healing ability had something to do with Memory Release. So whatever object was the source of the thirty swords that made up the golem’s body, it had properties that enabled that effect.
The first thing that popped into my head when I imagined natural healing of life was the Gigas Cedar, the source of the sword in my hand now. But that healing power was fueled by the spatial resources it sucked in from the sun and the earth.
The only resource in this place was the moonlight coming through the windows from the south. And it couldn’t possibly have accumulated enough of that to heal the entirety of its massive body in a single moment. So the source of the Sword Golem was not some natural feature like the Gigas Cedar.
That left only some kind of living object with a healing ability that did not require spatial resources. But Cardinal claimed that all the giant Named Monsters that had once existed in this world were now extinct. And ordinary animal units like bears and cattle didn’t have the system priority to achieve power like that. Even tens of thousands of them converted into a single sword would fall far short of the Integrity Knights’ Divine Object weapons—that was how little life beasts had naturally. Priority and durability were proportional, so how many hundreds, if not thousands, of massive animal units would you need to create thirty of those weapons…?
Wait.
Hadn’t Administrator just said something strange a moment ago?
Four versus three hundred.
She hadn’t used moving objects like animals to create that Sword Golem. She’d used human units—the people who inhabited this world. Three hundred of them. Enough that their loss would completely eliminate an entire village.
This thought process happened in a span so short, my brain cells were practically frying—and I innately sensed that my hunch was true. But there was no triumph in this realization. The only thing I felt was overwhelming terror. My skin was crawling, from my toes up to my spine and the back of my neck.
Underworldians weren’t just mobile objects. They had fluctlights—human souls—just like any person in the real world. And their fluctlights would be active as long as they had bodies, even if they’d been converted into something like a sword.
Perhaps the people who’d been turned into those golem parts were still conscious, trapped inside metal without eyes or ears or mouths to speak.
Cardinal reached the same conclusion as I did. Her small body tensed imperceptibly. The hand that clutched her staff was white with the pressure.
“…You wretch.” Her youthful voice cracked with rage, betraying the weight of her full age. “Wretched thing…Is there no depth to which you will not sink?! You are their ruler! Your duty is to protect the subjects you turned into those swords!!”
“Subjects…? Like…human
…beings?” gasped Eugeo, falling back a step.
“You mean…that monster is…human?” moaned Alice, putting her hand to her chest.
Cold, tense silence filled the room. Administrator drank in our shock, fear, and anger. With a gloating smile, she said, “Very good. You finally figured it out, did you? I was getting worried that you’d all be wiped out before I could reveal the big secret.”
The supreme ruler laughed, a true laugh of pure delight, and clapped her hands together. “But,” she continued, “I’m disappointed in you, little one. After two hundred years of hiding in your den, you still don’t fully understand me. In a sense, I am your mother, after all.”
“…Enough japes! I’m fully aware of just how depraved your madness is!”
“Then why would you say these silly things? About duties and subjects to be protected. Of course I would never bother with such trifling matters.”
Her happy smile did not change, but I could sense the atmosphere around Administrator growing rapidly chilly. It was like her lips were absolute zero and the words that came from them were particles of ice in the air. “I am a conqueror. As long as what I rule remains in the lower world in the state that I desire to rule it in—whether human or sword—then there is no real problem.”
“You…evil…” Cardinal’s voice creaked and cracked. I couldn’t think of anything to say, either.
Whatever form the mind of the woman—the being—known as Administrator took now was beyond my understanding. She was literally a systems manager and viewed the people of her world as nothing more than data files that could be manipulated and rewritten as she saw fit. Like some Internet addict who downloaded massive numbers of files for the sole purpose of collecting and organizing, without much fussing over what they actually contained.
In our conversation at the Great Library, Cardinal told me that the fundamental purpose burned into Administrator’s soul was “maintaining the world.” She was probably correct about that, but I felt it didn’t fully capture the truth of the situation.
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