“All done!”
“Finished!”
Our voices overlapped, right at the same moment that the grasses rustled and parted behind us. I spun around, hiding what I was holding behind my back.
Standing there and looking bewildered was a boy with soft flaxen hair cut short to keep it under control—Eugeo.
His pure-green eyes blinked, and he said suspiciously, “I didn’t see either of you all morning. You’ve been here the whole time? What are you doing here?”
Alice and I hunched our shoulders and shared a look.
“Well, I guess he figured it out.”
“See? I told you. Now it’s all for nothing.”
“It’s not ruined. Here, just hand it over.”
Alice grabbed the newly finished wooden sword from me and slipped it into her leather sheath neatly—and behind her back.
Then she hopped forward toward Eugeo, gave him a smile as radiant as the sun, and shouted, “It’s three days early…but happy birthday, Eugeo!!”
The boy stared wide-eyed at what she offered him: a short sword of platinum oak, in a sheath with white dragon stitching on it.
“Uh…it’s…for me…? This incredible thing…?”
All I could do was chuckle now that Alice had stolen the best part of the surprise away from me. “You said the wooden sword your dad bought you is broken, right? So we decided…Look, I know it’s not like the real one that your brother has, but this wooden sword’s better than any you’ll find at the general store!”
Eugeo reached out uncertainly and took the short sword in both hands, then arched his back in surprise when he felt its weight. His face broke into a smile just as big as Alice’s.
“You’re right…this is heavier than my brother’s sword! This is amazing…I…I’ll take such good care of it. Thanks, you two. This is great…I’ve never gotten such a wonderful birthday gift before…”
“H-hey…don’t cry, man!” I shouted when I saw the shine in the corners of his eyes. He rubbed at his face, claiming that he wasn’t crying.
Then Eugeo looked right at me. He smiled again.
All of a sudden, his smile blurred and blotted.
There was an abrupt pain in my chest. A feeling of unstoppable nostalgia, homesickness, and loss. The tears flowed without stopping, soaking my cheeks.
Alice and Eugeo were crying, too, standing side by side.
We all spoke together.
“The three of us lived the same era together.”
“Our paths separate here…but our memories remain eternal.”
“I will continue to live…within you. So, look…”
The vision of sun and shade vanished, and I was back on the top floor of Central Cathedral.
“So, look…don’t cry, Kirito.”
Eugeo’s arms went limp. His right hand hit the floor, and his left landed on his chest. The prism’s glimmering had nearly died out.
The scene that had just played out on the screen of my mind was my own memory. I only remembered a single scene, but the truth of it, that Alice and Eugeo and I had been childhood friends who grew up together and were connected by an unshakable bond of friendship, filled my body with a warmth that eased the pain of loss just a bit.
“Yeah…the memories are in here,” I sobbed, pressing my fingers into my chest. “They’ll be here forever.”
“That’s right…And it means we’ll be friends forever. Where…Kirito, where are you? I can’t see you…,” Eugeo called, his fading eyes wandering, though the smile never left his face.
I leaned over and clutched Eugeo’s head with my one hand. My tears dripped down onto his forehead. “I’m here. I’m right here.”
“Oh…” Eugeo was gazing somewhere far into the distance now. His smile looked very satisfied. “I can see it…glittering in the darkness…like stars…The starry sky…that I looked up at…every night…from the foot of…the Gigas Cedar…Just like…the shine…of your…sword…”
His voice was growing clearer, more transparent by the moment. It caressed my very soul.
“In fact…I think your black sword…should be called…the Night-Sky Blade. What do you…say…?”
“Yeah…it’s a great name. Thank you, Eugeo.”
I clung to my friend’s body, which was getting lighter by the second. Our minds were in contact, his final words rippling into the air like a droplet into water.
“Envelop……this…little world…as gently…as the night……sky……”
The clear liquid trapped in his eyelashes transformed into light and disappeared.
With what little weight he had left, Eugeo leaned back into my arms and slowly closed his eyes.
6
Eugeo was standing in a dark, unfamiliar hallway.
But he wasn’t alone.
Holding his left hand was Alice, wearing her blue dress, beaming back at him.
He squeezed her hand a bit harder and told his childhood friend, “I guess…this was for the best.”
Alice nodded vigorously, shaking the ribbon that held her golden hair in place. “Yes. We can leave the rest to those two. I’m sure they’ll guide the world in the right direction.”
“Yeah. So…shall we go?”
“Okay.”
Somehow, he was back to his youthful form again. He and the girl his age and height walked hand in hand down the hallway in the direction of the distant light.
And in that instant…
The durability value of the human unit designated NND7-6361 dropped to zero.
Upon receiving that signal, the program that controlled the Lightcube Cluster issued a single order to the cube that held the corresponding fluctlight. The interface faithfully executed its order, reinitializing the praseodymium crystal structure.
Over ten billion cubits of photons glowed at once and dispersed.
A soul named Eugeo, who hadn’t lived even twenty years of subjective time, was freed forever from the little cube.
And at the same time, another lightcube located far away from his own was similarly processed.
That lightcube, produced through improper system operation using memories extracted from the soul named Alice Zuberg, was also freed from its crystal prison.
Where the amalgamation of photons that made up those two souls disappeared to was a question no one could answer.
7
I knelt in that exact spot where I’d been, until Eugeo’s body and Alice’s memory fragment resting on his chest vanished into motes of light, the same way Cardinal’s body had.
How long was I there? The next thing I knew, the swirling tempest that represented isolated space outside of the windows was gone, and the full starry sky was back. Over the End Mountains on the far eastern horizon, the faintest bit of violet heralded the coming dawn.
I lifted myself up, mind barely functioning, and approached Alice the knight where she lay.
Alice’s wounds were terrible to behold. Fortunately, most of the damage was from her burns and not from blood loss. Her life had stopped its steady decrease. I propped her up with my left hand, and although she didn’t wake up, her eyebrows did twitch, and a faint breath exhaled from her lips.
With Alice on my good arm, I slowly, slowly headed for the north end of the room.
At this point, the crystalline system console there, sparkling artificially, was the only object in the room that was undamaged in any way.
I laid Alice down on the floor and hit one of the see-through glowing keys. The monitor lit up, displaying a complex management screen. The user interface was almost entirely in “sacred script”—English—but a few presses of the screen led me to what I sought.
CALL EXTERNAL OBSERVER
I stared at the tab for a while. “Observers”—the ones who created, operated, and watched over this world.
These people, the staffers at the tech start-up named Rath, had lied to me only once—but it was the biggest lie imaginable.
In June 2026 in the real world, which felt like an
eternity ago, I’d participated in a long-term continuous test of their next-generation full-dive machine, The Soul Translator, or STL.
The test period was three days. Through the Fluctlight Acceleration (FLA) feature, the subjective time I spent in the VR world would be 3.3 times as long as real time, or ten days in total. At the end of the test, they had blocked my memories of the event to protect company secrets, or so they’d explained to me.
But that was a lie. I hadn’t dived into a test environment; they had sent me into the same Underworld I was in now. And it wasn’t ten days I spent here. I estimated it was over three hundred times that amount…for a span of ten years.
Yes, during that three-day test, I experienced an entire second childhood, from infancy to the age of eleven, in a tiny village at the northern end of the world. I spent every day playing in the mud with my best friends, the flaxen-haired boy and the golden-haired girl, and at the end of each day, we trudged home along the riverbanks to the village, side by side.
Two years ago, when I’d just woken up in this place, I saw a vision of that sunset at the bank of the river in the woods. When fighting against Eugeo, I had a sensation of kids swordfighting. And just now, at the moment of Eugeo’s death, I saw the scene about the platinum-oak sword. These things weren’t illusions.
They were fragments of the memories that had been deleted, things I had really experienced. I grew up with Eugeo and Alice in the village of Rulid, and I had forgotten all about it until today.
Eugeo and Alice, too, couldn’t access their memories of living with me. They both got synthesized by the supreme ruler, but perhaps that memory issue was responsible for both of them recovering their own free will from the process, unlike the other Integrity Knights.
It didn’t matter to me anymore why Rath would have inserted an outside element like me into their civilization simulation. But there was one thing I couldn’t forgive.
I’d been there eight years ago.
I’d been there when Deusolbert had taken young Alice away.
Eugeo had blamed himself for that for years. He’d never stopped regretting that he couldn’t save her. And half of that regret should’ve been mine to shoulder. But I’d forgotten the past…and I’d never understood the depth of Eugeo’s suffering until the moment he gave up his life…
“Nn…guh…khf…!”
Bizarre sounds escaped from my throat. I clenched my jaw shut as hard as I could, my molars creaking and groaning with the pressure.
My stiff left hand rose, the fingers trembling, and pressed the button to call an observer. A dialogue box in Japanese appeared with a warning sound.
Performing this operation will fix Fluctlight Acceleration rate at 1.0. Are you sure?
I hit the OKAY button without thinking twice.
Instantly, the air around me felt viscous. Sound, light, all sensation extended into the distance, then followed behind me. It was as though my actions and even my thoughts were in super-slow motion for one brief, disorienting moment—and then the sensation was gone.
In the center of the screen was a black window. In the middle of that was a volume meter, just below the blinking words SOUND ONLY.
The meter twitched, producing a rainbow-gradient bar. Then it shot upward, just as a rustling static noise reached my ears.
This was sound from the real world, I sensed.
The world on the “other side,” where things were no doubt peaceful and totally unconnected to the madness happening in the Underworld. The real world, where this blood and pain and even death were merely events of interest, at best.
A great storm of numerous emotions that I’d been keeping under control came bursting up from inside me, rocking me where I stood. I leaned toward the monitor and, in as loud a voice as I could manage, called the man who had brought me to this place.
“Kikuoka…Can you hear me, Kikuoka?!”
If my hand could reach Seijirou Kikuoka or any of the other managers right now, I might actually attempt to strangle them to death. Such was the helpless rage I felt as I slammed my left fist against the marble table and screamed, “Kikuokaaaa!!!”
Then a noise came from the screen.
It wasn’t a human voice. It was a crisp series of percussions, tatatak, tatatatak.
The first thing that popped into my head was a memory from years ago—the sound of automatic submachine-gun fire in the VRMMO called Gun Gale Online. But the other side of the screen was just a laboratory for Rath, a small tech start-up. Why would I be hearing that from there?
But then I did hear a human voice. More than one…carrying on a tense, shouted conversation.
“…can’t, they’ve got position in the A6 corridor! I’m pulling back!!”
“Fight them off at A7, then! Give me time to lock the system!!”
There was more rattling. Here and there were sporadic explosions.
What is this…? A movie? Were the staffers streaming a movie in the lab, and was I just picking up the audio from the speakers?
But then an unfamiliar voice said a very familiar name.
“Lieutenant Colonel Kikuoka, it’s too late! We’re abandoning Maincon and shutting the pressure-resistant barrier!!”
A sharp, rich voice replied, “Sorry, hold out for two more minutes! We can’t lose this place now!!”
Seijirou Kikuoka. The man who’d brought me to this world.
I’d never heard him under such duress before. What the hell was happening on the other side of the screen?
Are they under attack? Rath? But why…?
Kikuoka spoke again. “Is the locking process still going, Higa?!”
The voice that answered him was another one I remembered. That was Takeru Higa, the Rath engineer who’d performed the test dive on me.
“Another eighty…no, seventy seconds to go…Ah…aaaaaah!!”
All of a sudden, Higa’s voice turned into a shriek. Something had startled him.
“Kiku!! It’s a call from inside! I mean, inside the Underworld!! This is…Ohhh! It’s him! It’s Kirigaya!!”
“Wh…what?!”
Footsteps approached. Someone grabbed the mic.
“Kirito, are you there?! Are you in there?!”
That was definitely Seijirou Kikuoka. Holding back my confusion, I shouted, “Yeah! Listen, Kikuoka…you monster…What you’ve done is—!”
“I’ll listen to every last name you can call me later! Right now, you need to listen to me!!”
He was in such a pressing panic that I actually stopped in my tracks.
“Listen very carefully, Kirito…You must find a girl named Alice! When you do…”
“Find her…? She’s right here!” I shouted back, and now it was Kikuoka’s turn to be stunned into silence. Then he rushed back into his explanation, faster than before.
“M-my God…that’s a miracle! G-good…Then once this transmission ends, I’m going to return the FLA rate to a thousand. You take Alice and head for the World’s End Altar! The internal console you’re using now connects directly to Main Control, but that’s about to fall!”
“To fall…? What’s going on there…?”
“I’m sorry—I don’t have time to explain! Listen, to get to the altar, you have to leave the Eastern Gate and head far to the south…”
Then the very first voice I heard came in again, very close by.
“Lieutenant Colonel, I closed the A7 barrier, but that only bought us minutes at……No, wait, oh no! They’ve started severing the main power line!!”
“Oh man, that’s bad! That’s real bad!!” shrieked not Kikuoka but Higa. “Kiku, there’ll be a surge if they cut the main power now! The Lightcube Cluster’s protected…but the surge will hit Kirigaya’s STL in Subcon…It’ll fry his fluctlight!!”
“No…that can’t be! There are numerous safety limiters on the STL…”
“But they were all deactivated! He’s recuperating, remember?!”
What in the world were they talking about?
What wa
s this about my fluctlight if the power went out?
A split-second silence fell, until Kikuoka broke it.
“I’ll handle the locking here! Higa, you take Dr. Koujiro and Asuna and evacuate to the Upper Shaft. Keep Kirito safe!!”
“B-but what about Alice?!”
“I’ll raise the FLA rate to its max limit! We can think about the rest later! Right now his protection is paramount…”
I hardly listened to any of the rest of their shouted exchange. One of the names Kikuoka had mentioned struck my mind, rocking it like a storm.
Asu…na?
Asuna’s there? At Rath…? But why?
I leaned closer to the console to ask Kikuoka. But before I could say anything, the original voice let out a pitiful scream.
“I can’t…They’re cutting the power!! The screw propellers are going to stop—all units brace for impact!!”
And then…I saw something strange.
White pillars of light, silently falling from far above and piercing the ceiling of the cathedral.
All I could do was look upward at all the beams of light intersecting on me.
There was no pain, no impact, no sensation of any kind.
But I understood on instinct that I had suffered too much damage to recover from. The light wasn’t piercing my flesh; it was piercing my soul itself, it seemed.
Something very important, something that made me me, was ripped into pieces and vanished.
Time, space, even memory melted into an empty void.
I simply was…
Even that word lost its meaning.
And just before the ability to think itself was lost, I heard a distant voice.
“Kirito…Kirito!!”
It was a voice so nostalgic I wanted to cry, a sound that was maddeningly precious.
It was…
Whose voice is that…?
(To be continued)
AFTERWORD
Hello, everyone. Thank you for reading Sword Art Online 14: Alicization Uniting.
The Alicization arc has gone from Beginning to Running to Turning to Rising to Dividing to Uniting, and this arc marks a turning point for it.
Alicization Uniting Page 20