The original Cardinal System in the old Sword Art Online was a soulless management program. Did it actually recognize its players as human beings…as living things with individual wills of their own?
The answer to that was no.
We were nothing but data meant to be managed, selected, and deleted.
Maybe Quinella, the little girl who’d existed centuries ago, couldn’t kill a person.
But to Administrator, even human beings were no more than fodder.
“Oh, you’ve all gone quiet. What’s the matter?” she said, tilting her head curiously as she surveyed us from on high. “You aren’t alarmed by a little thing like matter conversion for a measly three hundred units, are you?”
“Measly…?” Cardinal repeated, her voice barely audible.
“Yes, little one. ‘Measly,’ ‘just,’ ‘no more than.’ How many fluctlights do you think collapsed before I completed this puppet? And this is only the prototype. In order to mass-produce the finished version that can counteract that nasty stress test, I expect I’ll need about half.”
“Half…of…?”
“Half. Half is half. Half of all the human units that exist in the world…so about forty thousand units. I think that ought to be enough to put a stop to the Dark Territory’s invasion and take the fight back to them,” she said, a horror show without a hint of irony or doubt.
Then she turned her silver eyes on the knight standing to my left. “Are you satisfied, Alice?” she giggled. “Your precious realm will be quite safe, you see now.”
Alice said nothing. I noticed that the hand holding the hilt of her Osmanthus Blade was trembling, but I couldn’t tell whether it was from fear or rage.
Ultimately, her answer came in the form of a question, her voice compressed so that nothing showed in it. “Pontifex…it is clear that no words can reach you now. So I ask you as a fellow user of sacred arts. Where are the owners of the thirty swords that make up that giant puppet?”
I was momentarily confused. It was Administrator who had used Memory Release on the thirty swords, transforming them into the golem. So while it broke from the traditional pattern, it would stand to reason that she was their owner. But what Alice said next shattered that assumption.
“It is not possible for you to be the owner. Even if you were to break the basic rule that one can only achieve Perfect Control over one sword, there is no breaking the next one. To perform Memory Release, there must be a powerful bond between the sword and its owner. Like me and the Osmanthus Blade, the other knights and their divine weapons, even Kirito and Eugeo and their swords. The master must love the sword and be loved by it. If the source of the swords that make up that puppet are innocent people, then there is no way they would love you for what you did to them!!” Alice declared, her voice ringing loud and clear.
“Heh-heh-heh-heh,” Administrator chuckled, breaking the silence that followed. “What is it with you young, foolish souls that makes you so vivacious? This sentimental quality, as sour as a fresh-picked apple…Why, I could just crush you in my fist and slurp down every last drop of juice right now.”
Her mirror eyes sparkled with a continuum of color, perhaps reflecting her rising excitement. “But not yet. It is not yet the time, no. What I believe you’re trying to say, Alice, is that I cannot make use of enough imagination to overwrite all of these swords. You are correct about this. I do not have enough capacity in my memory to record highly detailed records of every one of these weapons.”
She pointed regally toward the thirty swords that made up the Sword Golem, which was still inching onward.
From what I understood, Perfect Weapon Control involved taking one’s memory of all the information about a weapon—its appearance, feeling, weight, and so on—and, with the help of spoken commands, altering the weapon itself using the power of the imagination.
In other words, to utilize that ability, the owner of the sword absolutely needed all the information about the weapon to be stored in their head.
For example, if I were to use Perfect Weapon Control with my black sword, I would first need Information A about the sword as it existed in the Main Visualizer of the Lightcube Cluster to match Information B about the sword as it existed in my own fluctlight, with an absolute minimum of discrepancy. By doing so, I could then use my imagination to change Information B and thus overwrite Information A in the process, which would then share that change in information with everyone else. This logic also applied to the strange visual transformation that had come over me earlier.
As for Administrator, her lightcube memory was compacted to its limit by the memories of three hundred years of life. She couldn’t possibly keep a picture-perfect memory of all thirty of those swords. Alice’s convictions were clearly based on emotion and belief, but unbeknownst to her, it was accurate in terms of the underlying system’s limitation as well.
So that meant that each of the swords that made up the golem would have to have its own separate owner. Souls that held those swords in their memories and that had the wicked will to use them for destruction.
But where? In every sense of the word, this space was currently isolated from the outside world. It didn’t make sense unless those owners were inside the chamber with us…
“The answer is right before your eyes,” she said, suddenly looking right at me. Then her eyes shifted sideways. “Eugeo should understand by now.”
“…?!”
I looked over at Eugeo on the other side of Alice, not daring to breathe.
My flaxen-haired partner was staring the pontifex directly in the eyes, not budging, his face completely bloodless and pale. His brown eyes were almost oddly devoid of expression, in fact. Then he craned his neck, trembling, to look up at the ceiling.
I followed his gaze. The rounded ceiling featured a mural that depicted the creation of the world, embedded with little crystals that glittered in the light.
Up until now, I’d assumed this was all decorative. But in Eugeo’s blank expression, his eyes were the only thing that emoted, staring holes into the ceiling, searching fiercely for something.
At last, words came croaking from his throat. “Oh…of course.”
“What did you figure out, Eugeo?!” I asked. He glanced over at me, his face full of profound fear.
“Kirito…those crystals stuck into the ceiling. Those aren’t just…decorations. I think they must be the memory fragments…that were stolen from the Integrity Knights.”
“Wha…?” I gaped. So did Cardinal and Alice.
The Integrity Knights’ memories.
The most important of memories, the things extracted from the subjects through the Synthesis Ritual so they could be turned into knights. In most cases, this would, rather obviously, be the memories of their most beloved person. For Eldrie, it was his mother. For Deusolbert, his wife.
So did this mean those crystals were the owners of the swords that made up the Sword Golem?
No. The crystals were just isolated information that was stored in the fluctlight. They weren’t entire souls with the independent ability to think. It just couldn’t be possible for them to link with the swords and activate Perfect Control.
But then…something prickled in the back of my head.
If all those crystals were the memory fragments taken from Integrity Knights, then that must include the memories of Alice when she was synthesized six years ago.
This was the top floor of Central Cathedral.
When we fought the band of goblins in the cave north of Rulid two years ago, Eugeo was gravely injured. While healing him, I heard a very strange voice speaking.
It sounded like a young girl who claimed that she was waiting for Eugeo and me on the top floor of the cathedral. Then a huge rush of spiritual power flowed through me and healed Eugeo.
What if that voice was coming from Alice’s memory fragment? Did that mean the stolen memory itself had some power of independent thought?
But still, all sacred arts operated on that
principle of direct contact. Even Administrator herself couldn’t send her voice and healing power from Central Cathedral all the way to Rulid, nearly five hundred miles away.
The only way a miracle like that could happen was if the same overwriting logic that Perfect Weapon Control worked on could also apply here. Which would mean the memories stored in Alice’s memory crystal were…were…
Cardinal’s furious shout cut off my train of thought. “I see…So that’s what this is! Oh, Quinella…you have gone too far…This is depraved manipulation of the highest order!!”
Jarred loose from my thoughts, I focused once again on the serene smile of the silver-haired overlord.
“Well, well…I suppose I should give you my compliments, little one. You figured it out faster than I expected for a bleeding-heart altruist. So tell me: What is your answer?”
“It’s the fluctlight’s shared pattern. It is, isn’t it?!” Cardinal said, leveling her black staff at Administrator. “By placing the memory piece you extract during the Synthesis Ritual into a mental model loaded into a fresh lightcube, you can treat it like a simulated human unit. But its intelligence is severely limited that way—essentially no more than a series of instinctive impulses—and it is far from able to execute complex commands like Perfect Weapon Control.”
I tried my hardest to process her terminology. Back in the library, Cardinal had said that babies in this world started as fluctlight prototypes loaded on new lightcubes and given a portion of their parents’ physical traits and mental and behavioral patterns. So this had to be a similar idea. But instead of starting with information from parents, these came from memory fragments taken from the knights.
In other words, the crystals shining in the ceiling were babies raised on memories of some beloved person. But if that was the case, how could that “Alice” have talked to me two years ago? No newborn child could speak as convincingly as that. The questions kept piling up in my mind.
Cardinal continued, “But there is a shortcut past that limitation. The fact that the memory piece placed in the fluctlight prototype and the structural information of the linked weapon share almost entirely identical patterns. Meaning…”
She paused to smack the butt of her staff hard against the ground and shouted, “That you created those swords using the very beloved that you stole from the Integrity Knights’ memories. Didn’t you, Administrator?!”
Once the initial confusion of this accusation died down, I was assaulted by such overwhelming fear and disgust that I felt my entire body turn to ice.
The owners of the swords that made up the golem were the fluctlights that had been made from the Integrity Knights’ stolen memories.
The swords themselves were crafted using the people in those memories—Eldrie’s mother, Deusolbert’s wife, and probably other close family members—as a base material. That was Cardinal’s accusation.
Once they belatedly understood the implications, Eugeo and Alice uttered simultaneous grunts of shock and horror.
If it was true, then perhaps it was theoretically possible to execute Memory Release. After all, Information A in the Main Visualizer and Information B in the fluctlight were coming from the exact same individual. If the newborn fluctlight with the memory fragment in it felt something strongly enough about the sword it was linked to, it was possible.
The problem was what that “something” would be. The memory fragments shouldn’t have had more advanced minds than a newborn baby. What impulse, what emotion could they be feeling that would control that mammoth Sword Golem…?
“Desire,” said Administrator, practically reading my thoughts. “Desire to touch. To squeeze. To make one’s own. Those are the ugly urges that drive this sword creation.”
“Heh-heh. Heh-heh-heh.” She narrowed her eyes. “The simulated personas made from the knights’ memory fragments all desire just one thing: to own the one person they remember, whoever it is. They’re stuck up there in the ceiling, but they can sense that person is right nearby. They just can’t touch them. They can’t be one. Afflicted by maddening hunger and thirst, all they see are enemies that keep them from what they want and need. If they just kill those enemies, then whoever they want will finally be theirs. So they fight. No matter how much they suffer or how often they fall, they’ll get back up and fight for eternity. What do you think…? It’s lovely, isn’t it? The things the power of desire can achieve…they are tremendous!”
Her voice rang out on high. The approaching Sword Golem’s eyes flickered violently. A harmonic roar—which now sounded to me like a scream of grief and despair—erupted from its vicious form.
It wasn’t just an automated weapon designed to slaughter. It was a poor, pathetic lost child, driven by nothing more than the hope to see that one person it knew again.
Administrator said desire was the power that moved the golem. But…
“—You’re wrong!!” shouted Cardinal, just as the thought entered my head. “Do not disgrace the emotion of wanting to see someone again, to touch them again, with a word like desire! This is…this is pure love!! The greatest power and final miracle of humanity…and it is not to be weaponized by the likes of you!!”
“They are the same thing, little one,” said Administrator, her lips twisted with happiness. She extended her palms toward the Sword Golem. “Love is control…Love is desire! It is nothing more than a signal that is output from the fluctlight! All I did was take that signal, the most firm and powerful of any you can get, and use it effectively. I did it much, much better than your way!!”
Her voice rose to a fever pitch, as if she was certain of her triumph. “The best that you could achieve was ensnaring two or three powerless children. But I am different. The puppet I created runs on the overflowing energy of over three hundred units’ desire, including the memory fragments! And most important of all…”
She paused for dramatic effect, preparing the final poison stinger.
“…Now that you know the truth, you cannot destroy it. Because now you know that my puppet is actually living human beings turned into swords!!” she announced, her words trailing off in the long silence.
Stunned, I watched as Cardinal’s staff slowly dropped from its position pointed at the Sword Golem. When she spoke, it was almost bizarrely calm.
“Yes…that is right. I cannot commit murder. That is a limitation I can never break…I spent two hundred years devising an art that would kill you and your inhuman form…but it would seem my efforts are for naught.”
I was stunned. She’d admitted her defeat just as simply as that.
But if the weapons in the Sword Golem were indeed living people, then Cardinal could not end those lives…She would not even attempt it. Even if, like with the teacups and soup cups, there was some way around that limitation.
“Heh-heh. Heh-heh-heh-heh.”
Administrator’s lips curled up as far as they could go, her throat convulsing with unstoppable laughter amid the shocked silence. “How foolish you were…What a tragic comedy…”
“Ha-ha-ha-ha.”
“You should’ve known. You know the true nature of this world. You know that the ‘life’ around us is just a collection of data that can be changed and rewritten. Yet you treat that data as human, binding yourself to the rule against murder…Truly, there can be no greater folly…”
“They are human, Quinella,” Cardinal remonstrated. “The people who live in the Underworld have the true emotions that we lost. They laugh, grieve, rejoice, and love. What more does one need to be human? Whether the container of that soul is a lightcube or a biological brain is of little matter. This I believe. And thus—I accept my defeat with pride.”
The mention of the word defeat gouged deep into my chest. But that was nothing compared to what she said next.
“But I have one condition. I will give you my life…but in exchange, I ask you not to take the lives of these young ones.”
“…!!”
I held my breath and started to step forward
, while Eugeo and Alice froze with shock. But the sheer willpower radiating from Cardinal’s figure stopped me short.
Administrator narrowed her eyes like a cat with her prey in her claws and wondered, “Oh…but what do I stand to gain by accepting this condition of yours?”
“As I said, I’ve been preparing an art for you. If you seek battle, I could keep your pitiable puppet at bay and tear away half of your remaining life. With that much stress, your uncertain memory capacity might be in even worse peril, no?”
“Mmmm…,” she murmured, putting a finger to her cheek and pretending to think without breaking her smile. “Well, I don’t feel that my fluctlight is threatened by a battle whose outcome is already known. But I suppose it would be a bother…and when you say to spare ‘the lives of the young ones,’ would sending them back to the lower world from this isolated space fulfill that condition? If you say I can never do anything to harm them for all eternity, I refuse.”
“No, just a momentary evacuation is all I ask. I trust in them to…”
Cardinal did not finish that sentence. Instead, she turned on her heel, robe swaying, and looked at me with kindness in her eyes.
I wanted to scream that this was ridiculous. My temporary life here and Cardinal’s one and only life were not equal. If anything, I was seriously considering throwing myself at Administrator to buy Cardinal time to escape instead.
But I couldn’t do that. I couldn’t risk Eugeo’s and Alice’s lives on my own suicidal gamble. I clutched my sword so hard my hand hurt and my foot creaked with the pressure against the floor. I was caught between impulse and reason.
“Hmph. Fine,” said Administrator, her beautiful mouth forming a smirk. “That gives me another game to look forward to later. Right? So you have my word to Stacia. I will take the little one—”
“No, don’t swear to any god. Swear to the one thing that you actually think has absolute value: your own fluctlight,” Cardinal interrupted.
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