It was a wonder that I still had that much blood to lose after all the cuts I’d taken already. For a moment, I wondered whether my life really was going to run out, but there was still work to be done. I had to live at least a bit longer.
I glanced at the sword in my hand. The blade was back to its previous half length, and the rose decoration on the side was blue once more. I placed the sword on the ground and squeezed my right shoulder hard.
Strangely enough, white light flooded from my palm and sank into the wound, warm and soothing, without needing any command. The instant I felt the bleeding had stopped, I let go. The spatial resources had to be nearly dried up, and I didn’t want to waste what was left.
I put my left hand, not glowing anymore, on the floor and pushed myself up.
Then I gasped.
Through the floating little bits of lights that I assumed were the aftermath of the explosion, I saw the silver-haired girl—who should’ve been obliterated into nothing—standing unsteadily on her own two feet.
It was a wonder that her shape was still human at all. Her arms were gone, a gaping hole sat in the middle of her chest, and there were cracks running all over her skin, as if it were porcelain that was ready to break.
And what flowed from that multitude of wounds was not blood.
Something like silver and purple sparks was sputtering and shooting from her body, filling the air. It was a sight that made it seem like the people she’d turned to swords weren’t the only ones whose bodies had been changed—hers didn’t seem to be biological, either.
Her melted-platinum hair had lost its shine and hung in a bedraggled state. Through the shadows they cast, I saw her lips move, emitting a croak that I could just barely hear.
“…Not just one…but both swords…not made of metal…hah…ha-ha…” She laughed, shoulders bobbing like a broken puppet. “What a surprise…what an unexpected…outcome…I’ve suffered a wound…that I cannot heal…even by gathering up the remaining…resources here…”
I had been in the grips of a nightmare vision of Administrator healing herself instantly and entirely, but now I was able to exhale at last.
The supreme ruler, on death’s door now, slowly turned her collapsing body. She tottered forward like a toy losing its battery charge, sparks shooting from various parts of her body.
She was heading for the north end of the room. There was nothing I could see there, but she must’ve been going for something. Whatever it was, I had to finish her off before she reached it.
With desperate effort, I got to my feet and stared carefully at her backside, which seemed smaller than before. I followed, dragging my foot, my gait even more awkward than hers.
She was a good twenty yards in front of me and heading for a specific spot. But without any resources here, she shouldn’t have been able to escape this isolated space. Cardinal had said it was not easy to patch such a thing back together, even if separated for only a few minutes. And Administrator hadn’t denied it.
Many seconds later, she came to a stop in an empty spot. But when she turned around, naked and wounded, there was a grin on her face. She looked at me, trying to catch up to her.
“Heh-heh…At this point, I have no…choice. It is a bit…earlier than I planned…but I suppose…I will be…going now.”
“Wh…what are you…?”
…saying, I wanted to ask. But Administrator cut me off by stomping the floor with her cracked right leg.
There was a strange circular symbol on the burned carpet beneath her feet. It was extremely similar to the spot marking the location of the levitating platform behind me, but something about this one was different.
This circle, about a foot and a half across, was the familiar purple color of the user interface.
The floor vibrated subtly and rose up to reveal…a white marble pillar.
And a laptop computer sitting atop it.
“Wha…?”
I was so stunned that my legs gave out and I fell to my knees.
It wasn’t exactly the same as a real-life laptop. The body looked like some kind of partially translucent crystal, and the screen was see-through and faintly purple. It was very, very similar to the virtual system console I saw once in Aincrad.
That was it.
That was the connection mechanism to the outside world I’d been searching for these past two years.
An almost violent urge overtook me, making me scrape the floor with my hand in an effort to move forward. But my progress was devastatingly slow, and my destination was definitively too far.
Without any arms to use, Administrator instead brandished a lock of her silver hair like a living creature to strike at the keyboard. A small window opened on the holo-screen, containing some kind of indicator that began a countdown.
Then a purple pillar of light appeared from the ground where she stood—and Administrator’s battered body rose into the air.
At last, she lifted her face and looked directly at me.
Her perfect beauty was in a dreadful state. The left side of her face was badly cracked, and the place where her eye should be was filled with impenetrable darkness. The lips that gleamed a shade of pearl looked more like paper now—but the thin smile on them still carried an arctic frostiness to it.
Her intact right eye narrowed, and she cackled. “Hah…hah…So long, little boy. Until…we meet again. In…your world…this time.”
At last, I understood what it was she was intending to do.
She was trying to escape into the real world.
She wanted to escape the Underworld, with its absolute limit on existence in the form of her life value, so that she could preserve her fluctlight—the exact same way I had hoped to do with Eugeo’s and Alice’s souls.
“W-wait!!” I cried, crawling for all I was worth.
If I were her, I’d destroy the console just before the moment of escape. If she did that, then all hope would be lost.
Administrator’s naked form climbed, slowly but surely, up the ladder of light.
Her smiling lips mouthed a silent farewell.
Good-b—
But before they formed the final vowel, someone who had crawled to the base of the console without either of us noticing screamed.
“Your Holiness…Pleaaaase! Take me with youuuuu…”
Prime Senator Chudelkin.
The clown whose torso my sword skill had penetrated, and who’d been scrapped for good by Administrator, was right there all of a sudden, his bloodless face twisted in desperation, reaching upward with fingers bent like claws.
His small body burst into searing flames. Through some kind of sacred arts—or perhaps Incarnation—Chudelkin turned his own body into a flaming clown this time and began to spiral into the air.
Even Administrator looked shocked, and possibly even frightened. Just as she was nearly up to the exit of the pillar of light, Chudelkin’s flaming hands caught the pontifex’s feet.
His thin, elongated clown’s body wrapped itself around and up her naked form, clinging to her like a snake. The ferocious flames engulfed both of their bodies.
Even her hair caught fire, the pointed ends of it melting away. Her lips twisted, and she screamed in frustration.
“Unhand me! Let go of me…you fiendish ingrate!!”
But Chudelkin’s round face only beamed with bliss, as though his master’s words had been a confession of her love for him.
“Aaaah…At last…at last I can be one with Your Holiness…”
His short arms clung fiercely to her body. The cracks in the woman’s skin turned red with the heat, and small pieces began to fall away.
“I would never…bother with…a hideous clown…like you…!” she screamed. Silver sparks from the pontifex’s body mixed with Chudelkin’s flames, illuminating the vast chamber.
Chudelkin’s body had no form anymore; he was a mass of flame alone, with only a blissful expression left in the middle to utter his final words.
“Ahhh…Your Hol
iness…my…Adminis…tra…tor…”
And then Administrator’s body began to burn from the extremities.
The supreme ruler’s face caught on fire, and the fear and rage there vanished. Her silver eyes looked skyward. Even in the moment of her utter destruction, she was unfathomably beautiful.
“……I……my own……world……”
I couldn’t hear anything after that.
The wild conflagration rapidly contracted. The flames converted to a platinum flash of light that further contracted and then expanded.
It wasn’t quite an explosion. It was more like everything was returned to a state of light that filled the space. There was no sound or vibration, simply the conceptual phenomenon of the oldest living soul in the Underworld perishing, an event that expanded past the walls of this enclosed, isolated space.
The silver light shone and shone for so long that I began to wonder whether the world would ever return to its original state.
But eventually, the light did indeed begin to abate, and color returned to my sight at last.
I blinked several times to clear the tears—surely because of the light that burned my eyes—and I looked closely at the point that had been the heart of the explosion.
I couldn’t find a single piece of evidence that the woman and the clown had ever been there. The pillar of light was gone, leaving behind only the marble pedestal sticking up from the floor and the crystal console on top of it.
At last, both logic and intuition told me that Administrator, who had once been a girl named Quinella, was utterly gone. Her life had reached zero, and the lightcube that held her fluctlight was reinitialized. So too, I expected, would be the lightcube of Cardinal, located adjacent to it.
“…So…it’s over…,” I mumbled from my knees, hardly realizing the words were coming from my own mouth. “……Was this…the right thing to do…Cardinal…?”
There was no answer.
But it seemed as though a tiny breeze from the depths of my memory brushed my cheek.
It was the scent of Cardinal when we’d made bodily contact on the floor of the Great Library—old books, candle wax, and sugar candy, mixed into one.
I wiped my tears aside with my left arm and realized my sleeve had reverted from the leather coat back to my black shirt. Then I turned to crawl toward Eugeo, who was nearly at the center of the room.
My partner’s brutally severed body continued dripping blood at long intervals, drop by agonizing drop. He had minutes to live at best.
When at last I reached his side, my first idea was to stop the bleeding by picking up his lower half and fitting it back against the spot where he’d been sliced. Then I placed my palm against the cut and imagined that healing light.
The glow that appeared below my hand was so faint that I had to squint to see it. Still, I pushed it against him anyway, hoping it would seal the cut.
But the red liquid that was Eugeo’s life itself continued to seep from his halves. The priority of my healing was definitively inadequate for the severity of his wound, I knew. But I waved my hand around anyway and shouted, “Stop…just stop! Why won’t you work?!”
The power of imagination determined everything in the Underworld. If I just wished hard enough, I could make any miracle happen. Right?
I prayed, begged, wished so hard that I could’ve wrung every last drop of strength from my soul.
But still, another drop of Eugeo’s blood dripped from his wound. And another.
The overwriting ability of one’s imagination could affect only the locations and appearances of objects. It couldn’t alter values like priority level, durability, and other numerical attributes. I was aware of this fact, but I didn’t want to acknowledge it. Not now.
“Eugeo…come back to me, Eugeo!!”
I stuck my wrist into my mouth, ready to bite it off. I knew it wouldn’t be enough, but in the moment, I needed to give all my available resources to him. Even if it meant that both of us lost our lives in the end.
My canines sank into my skin, ready to tear flesh and blood loose, when I heard a faint whisper call my name.
“……Kirito.”
I looked up with a start.
Eugeo’s eyelids were just barely lifted. He was smiling.
His face was paler than the moonlight itself, and his lips were totally bloodless. It was obvious that his life was continuing to drain away. But his green eyes were the same as when I first met him, gentle and warm and bright.
“Eugeo…!” I exclaimed. “Hang on—I’ll heal you right now! I’m not letting you die…It’s not going to happen!”
I put my wrist in my mouth again. But then a hand, cold as ice yet as warm as a patch of sunlight, closed over my wrist and squeezed gently.
“Eu…,” I grunted, but Eugeo kept his grip. From his lips tumbled an English phrase I’d taught him back at the academy, a little secret mantra just between the two of us.
“Stay cool…Kirito.”
“…!”
I took a ragged, quivering breath. I had told Eugeo that it was a parting phrase. I hadn’t taught it to him so that I could hear him say it here and now. Absolutely not.
I shook my head over and over, but Eugeo kept whispering: “It’s…all right. It’s meant…to be this way…Kirito.”
“What are you talking about? Of course it’s not all right!” I yelped. Eugeo just kept smiling. He almost seemed satisfied.
“…I…fulfilled…my role…to play…This is where…our paths…split apart…”
“That’s not true! I don’t believe in fate!! I don’t accept that answer!!” I screamed, sobbing like a child. Eugeo wisely shook his head. Even that tiny gesture should have required intense concentration, but he showed no signs of suffering.
“…If this…hadn’t happened…then we would’ve had to fight each other…both for the sake of Alice. I would fight…to take back Alice’s memories…and you would fight to protect the soul of Alice the Integrity Knight…”
I held my breath.
It was the very thing I’d been terrified of, deep down, but chosen not to think about. That when all the fighting was over and it came time to insert Alice Zuberg’s memory fragment into Alice the knight’s fluctlight, the question would be posed: Was I going to agree to that?
Even now, when the moment came, I had no answer.
Instead, I tearfully hurled it back at Eugeo.
“Then…fight me!! Restore your full strength and fight me!! You’re already stronger than I am!! So you need to get back on your feet and fight me…for Alice…!”
But Eugeo’s serene smile never wavered. “My sword…is already…broken. Plus…it was…my weakness…that led me to open my heart…to Administrator…and to try to fight you. I have…to pay…for that sin…”
“It’s not a sin! You’re guilty of nothing!!” I sobbed, grabbing his wrist this time. “You’ve fought valiantly the whole way! If it wasn’t for you, we’d never have beaten Chudelkin or the Sword Golem or Administrator! You have nothing to blame yourself for, Eugeo!!”
“……You…think so…? I…hope so…,” he mumbled, eyes full of large tears that ran down his cheeks. “Kirito…I’ve always…been jealous of you. You were stronger…and more beloved…than anyone…A part of me was afraid…that even Alice…would prefer…W-well, anyway…I finally…understand. Love isn’t something…you seek…It’s something you…give. Alice…taught me…that…”
He stopped talking and lifted his left hand. His palm, ragged and torn from all the fighting, held a tiny crystal: a translucent, double-ended hexagonal prism. Alice’s memory fragment.
The clear prism glowed as it brushed my hand.
The world filled with light.
I no longer felt the hardness of the floor or the pain of my severed arm. A gentle flow carried my soul somewhere distant. Even the terrible sadness engulfing my heart simply melted away in that warm light.
And then…
Something bright and green was waving far ove
rhead.
Sunlight through leaves.
Fresh shoots were spurting out of the tree branches, soaking in the long-awaited spring sun and swaying in the breeze. The smooth black branches rustled as unfamiliar little birds flitted and chased one another around.
“Your hands are idle, Kirito.”
The sound of my name yanked my attention down from the branches.
The blond hair of the girl sitting next to me glimmered in the light falling through the leaves. I blinked a few times and shrugged. “Well, you were staring openmouthed at that family of cottonrabbits, Alice.”
“I did not have my mouth open!” protested Alice Zuberg, the girl in the blue-and-white apron dress. She lifted what she was holding up to the sunlight.
It was a finely crafted leather sheath for a short sword. The surface had been polished to a shine with an oil rag, and a decorative dragon had been stitched on with white thread. It was a somewhat familiar, rounded dragon, with the tail only half-done, a needle dangling from the end of the unfinished loose thread.
“Look, mine’s going to be finished very soon. How’s yours coming along?”
I looked down at my knees. Resting there was a short sword carved from a branch of platinum oak, the second-toughest wood in the forest. Old Man Garitta, who knew more than anyone about the forest, had shown me how to carve the iron-tough material, and it had taken me two months to get it to this state. The blade was already finished; I just had to put the finishing touches on the handle.
“I’m further along. Almost done with it,” I told her.
Alice grinned and said, “Then let’s hurry and finish up the last bit.”
“Mmm.”
I looked up to the sunlight coming through the branches again. Solus was past the middle of the sky now. We’d been working in our secret spot here all morning, so it seemed like we should probably head back to the village soon.
“Hey…we should get going back. Or we’ll get busted,” I said, shaking my head.
Alice pouted like a little child. “We’re still fine. Let’s stay a bit longer…just a bit?”
“Well, fine. But only for a little while, got it?”
We called it a deal and spent the next several minutes absorbed in our work.
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