Asuna clenched her teeth and raised the rapier in her right hand high.
Concentrating her imagination onto the sword’s tip, she forcefully swung it downwards. Divine, variegated light shot straight out and struck squarely onto the giant god statues lining both sides of the sando.
Even as excruciating pain shot through her head, almost enough to blow her consciousness flying, she concentrated her imagination. The stone statues shook the ground as they stood up, opening their rectangular mouths, waving their short hands, and began attacking the players choking the temple rooftops.
The red soldiers at the very front hurriedly retreated and collided with their friendly forces squeezing in from behind. They fell down like dominoes. Seizing the opportunity, eight carriages, the two-hundred member Ascetic team, and the supply team all began to move.
Asuna could only control the statues for around 30 seconds before the pain became too much for her to endure, and she dropped to her knees. But the rear of the Human Empire Army had managed to escape disaster and successfully retreated to the wide wilderness north of the ancient ruins. Around 500 Guardians and 2,000 Japanese players advanced forward and adopted a formation that defensively flanked their rear troops from both sides, preparing to engage.
But since this area had hardly any suitable terrain, their only option was to mount a despair-inducing omnidirectional defense against several tens of thousands of enemies. They had been able to painstakingly drive back the American players, who far outnumbered them, solely because they had used the walls of the palace ruins to restrict the front line to one place, and complemented it with a generous healing rotation. But now that they were surrounded by nearly forty to fifty thousand Chinese and Korean players, it was only a matter of time before the front line collapsed.
“Urgh……”
Squeezing out the last of her little remaining strength, Asuna pushed herself up and raised her rapier again.
— Please, last one… Let me build a strong wall that can protect everyone.
She prayed as she attempted to concentrate her imagination.
But.
Accompanied by an extraordinary impact surging through her body like an electric current, Asuna was thrown to the ground again. Something welled up in her throat and she spit it out, only to realize that it was a small amount of blood.
“Don’t push yourself too hard, Asuna! Let us have some of the spotlight as well!”
Klein shouted at her heartily.
“Yeah, leave it to us now.”
Agil responded in a deep voice.
As the two men standing in front of Asuna raised their katana and two-handed battleaxe —
The crimson legion that had recovered from the chaos began leaping down from the palace rooftops again. Since they were 20 meters above ground, a great many of them did not land safely and suffered injured limbs, with some not even being able to move, but the soldiers coming after them used the injured as human trampolines and landed safely on the ground.
“DOLGYEO —— G!!“
“TU —— JI!!“
Asuna had never learned either Korean or Chinese, but instinct told her that those two screams meant assault.
The crimson legion fanned out left and right, approaching ever closer, but the first ones to engage them were Klein and Agil.
“Zeiryaaaaaaaaahhhhh!!“
“U…. raaaaaaaaahhhhh!!“
Accompanied by simultaneous bellows that shook the air, wide range Sword Skills launched by the katana and battleaxe erupted. White and blue rays of light shone and enveloped each other as the blood of several tens of enemies flew into the air.
On both sides of the two men, the ALO Lords, their aides, and the heroes of the Sleeping Knights began to fight with all their might.
The continuous striking of metal pierced the battlefield like machinegun fire. A single explosion roared clearly and deeply. Swords, axes, and spears howled as each polychromatic Sword Skill exploded from them, cutting down the red soldiers without end.
The compressed air around them screeched and the army’s assault halted for an instant.
But it was only —
Effort as meaningless as attempting to stop with his bare hands a muddy surge of water that had broken its banks and was rushing towards him.
Lying on the ground, Asuna seemed to hear faint, shrill, mocking laughter coming from above the battlefield engulfed with screams of pain and roars of rage.
She swiveled her cloudy eyes, and caught sight of a man in a black poncho standing on the rooftop of the palace ruins, twisting his body as though he were dancing.
***
Higa listened to the sporadic gunfire coming from the other side of the main shaft while climbing down the ladder as quickly as he could.
Finally, he arrived in front the fuse box that dully reflected the orange lamps, and pried open the cover with stiff fingertips.
Inside was a wiring board stuffed full of a web of fiber optic wires, momentarily weakening him a bit, but Higa pulled back wire after wire, and finally located the maintenance port.
The moment had finally arrived.
He sucked in a deep breath to calm his thoughts, then retrieved a cable and the laptop from his backpack. He plugged one end of the cable into the maintenance port, the other end into the computer, and launched the STL control program with a mood that was almost like prayer.
A completely black window was opened, and a cursor at its top left began blinking tantalizingly. Finally, the cursor moved right and displayed a status message.
STL #3, Connecting…… OK.
STL #4, Connecting…… OK.
The first to return normal signals were the two units inside STL Room 2, bordering the sub control room.
Then, connections by way of satellite link from the Ocean Turtle to STL #5 and #6 at the Roppongi branch were also confirmed.
“… Yes!”
Higa murmured. Now he should be able to operate on the four STL units that Kirigaya Kazuto and the three girls were using.
Regrettably, it was only possible to block the line connecting STL Room Two and the satellite antenna from the main control room, so he couldn’t do anything to the two units inside STL Room 1. If that were possible, he would be able to eject the attackers diving in STL #1 and #2 from Underworld.
Suspending these turbulent thoughts, Higa placed his right hand onto the tiny keyboard and prepared to begin operating at once.
— Let’s do this!
Just as he prepared himself, a shrill yell came from above his head.
“… F… Freeze!”
It was Yanai’s voice. What on earth was he saying in this sort of situation?
Higa looked up, annoyed, but found himself staring straight down the barrel of a gun, gleaming blue-black, three meters away from his face. Behind the barrel, Yanai, staring at him with bloodshot, beady eyes, shouted again:
“Take your hand away from the computer! Or I’ll shoot!”
“……… Huh?”
He only blanked for half a second.
Higa instantly grasped the situation and began to speculate why Yanai was doing this.
— It’s him!
This Yanai man was the spy who had been leaking Project Alicization intelligence to the Americans.
But unfortunately, Higa was unable to come up with any countermeasures. The only thing he did manage to do was articulate a completely meaningless question from his parched mouth:
“… Yanai-san. Why?”
A layer of cold sweat appeared on the technician’s white forehead. His lips trembled for a bit, and then he mustered a weak voice.
“First… First of all, you’re barking up the wrong tree. Don’t think of me as a traitor.”
— What do you mean, “think”? You are a traitor!
As if he had heard Higa’s silent scream, Yanai continued:
“I’m just carrying out my original plan. I inherited my boss’s final mission… and that’s why I infiltrated Rath.�
�
“Your… Your boss’s final mission? Who are you talking about?….”
Higa asked blankly. Yanai brushed away a lock of hair that landed on his forehead with his left hand, and replied with a grin that looked ever-so-slightly insane:
“Someone you’re familiar with… Sugou-san.”
“Wh…”
— Whaaaat?!
The impact hitting Higa was greater than that when he had first seen the gun, and his eyes went wide.
Sugou Nobuyuki. A man who had worked in Touto Technical University’s Shigemura Laboratory during the same period as Higa, Koujiro Rinko, and Kayaba Akihiko. He had always been very blatantly competitive with Kayaba, the super-genius, but was ultimately unable to surpass him. Whether it was because of that or not, in the end, he went so far as to commit the crime of kidnapping hundreds of SAO players for illegal human experimentation.
Due to the actions of Kirigaya Kazuto, Sugou’s plot was brought to light. After being detained, he appealed the judgment by the first instance of law, and was still disputing it in the Tokyo Supreme Court.
“… He’s still not dead yet.”
Higa couldn’t help but mutter under his breath, and Yanai laughed shrilly.
“What’s the difference? He’ll be locked up for at least ten years, and for a researcher that’s equivalent to death. I was almost caught too, but I pushed all the blame to the other guy and eventually managed to slip through the long arm of the law.”
“Then you… were associated with Sugou’s human experiments?”
“Associated? I was the one actually collecting the data. That was a fun bit of research… Like the virtual tentacle play and stuff…”
— Why didn’t Lieutenant Colonel Kikuoka properly check the background of a criminal like this?!
Higa thought, his breathing rapid, but then he sighed because he couldn’t really blame Kikuoka in the first place.
The reason that the front company Rath was created was to clear a new made-in-Japan line on top of the foundation of defense technologies nearly dominated entirely by the US. In other words, it would have threatened the interests of zaibatsu24 manufacturers and defense contractors.
Therefore, it was extremely difficult to find and hire technicians. Almost no one was willing to job-hop from a large company to this place, and it was no wonder that they would be very welcoming to Yanai, who had once worked for a FullDive technology research company as large as RECT.
Yanai seemed to be temporarily lost in reminiscence in front of Higa, but he very quickly pulled himself together and raised the gun again. The safety switch on the left side of the firearm had already been released. In the beginning, Kikuoka had thoughtfully put all technical workers through firearms training, but now, ironically, he’d ended up shooting himself in the foot.
Luckily, Yanai seemed to still have a lot on his mind to pour out; he continued shrilly:
“… Anyway, my boss’s life is over, but his connections are still up and running. So If I don’t properly use them, then I’ll be wasting his hard work.”
“Connections… Where?”
Higa demanded automatically. Yanai seemed to hesitate for a moment, but he eventually grinned and answered:
“The US National Security Agency.”
“Wha… What did you say?!”
Higa put on a look of shock, but inside, this had been expected.
Their activities, including spying and telecommunications surveillance conducted in Japan by the US National Security Agency, were already open secrets, so they were naturally uninterested in Japan’s world leadership with regards to FullDive technology. Ever since they had gotten intel on Project Alicization from Yanai, Sugou’s subordinate, the NSA, even went to the lengths of borrowing a Navy submarine to come and steal «A.L.I.C.E.».
Yanai still continued flaunting his own achievements without a shred of guilt:
“… If those Americans under us can successfully retrieve Alice, I’ll be paid a handsome amount and a position in America can be secured for me. That’s the American success story that Sugou-san was dreaming of.”
— The price being that the entire world will have to tremble under the shadow of the high-performance autonomous weapons that the US military will develop.
Higa desperately resisted the urge to retort like that. Right now he had to try his best to drag this out, to seize his only opportunity left.
— Realize what’s happening, Rinko-san!
Just as Higa beseeched inwardly, the laptop in his left hand almost slipped off, and he hurriedly grabbed hold of it.
“F-Freeze!!”
In the next instant, Yanai’s distorted shout entered Higa’s ears as he pointed the gun barrel towards the wall of the duct and pulled the trigger. A yellow streak of light flashed by and the expanding air sharply numbed his ears.
Sparks exploded from the metal wall of the duct —
A fierce impact struck Higa’s right shoulder.
“Huh?”
Higa uttered a surprised noise.
***
Sinon stared dumbly into those blue eyes, which were almost close enough to touch, with pitch-black whirlpools swirling inside like black holes.
It was as if it were early morning and she was waking from a dream.
She had to do something. But it all felt like a dream, while in reality she was doing nothing. Merely a cycle of repeating illusions.
Fingers cold as ice caressed her neck. Intense revulsion and terror arose from within her heart, but even those were immediately sucked from her consciousness and replaced with a gray void.
— No.
This was no longer an imaginary event taking place in a virtual space.
This realization flashed at the edge of her consciousness like a flashing red alarm. She tried to concentrate on it, but that black, sticky, viscous liquid had already risen past her waist, unnoticed. Nowhere to run. No way to resist.
The man’s face grew closer and closer. His thin, thin lips parted, sucking in air. With it went her emotions, thoughts, and even her soul.
— Stop.
— Don’t steal it.
Yet even these pleas were quickly seized, leaving only that dull numbness.
“Sto…… op………”
The man’s lips slowly, gradually drew closer to Sinon’s trembling mouth —
Crack!!
An impact suddenly gave a violent jolt to Sinon’s consciousness.
She widened her eyes and saw dazzling silver sparks spraying from the collar of her top.
— It burns!!
In an instant, a scalding sensation like an electric shock surpassed that man’s absorption. Sinon blasted her slightly-recovered consciousness to life like a bullet primer and threw her entire weight against the man’s arms, slipping away.
She used Solus’s flight ability to greatly widen the distance between them.
“……… Urgh…”
Gasping for breath, she reached her right hand into her top to pull out the object that was continuously spitting sparks.
It was a blanched metallic strip hanging from a thin chain. A disc about 1.5 centimeters in diameter, with a hole in its edge through which the chain looped.
“Wh… y, is this…”
— Here?
Sinon murmured hoarsely, astounded.
It was a necklace that Asada Shino always kept around her neck in the real world. It was nothing valuable. The chain was surgical stainless steel, and the metallic strip was merely an ordinary piece of silver-plated aluminum.
However, to Sinon, it possessed a great deal of meaning.
At the end of last year, Sinon was involved in the «Death Gun Incident».
One of Sinon’s male classmates was a member of a criminal group, and just as he attacked her with a high-pressure injector full of the poison succinylcholine, Kirigaya Kazuto — Kirito rushed over and protected her, but his own left chest was shot by the drug.
He was only able to prevent the deadly p
oison from entering his body because he had forgotten to peel an ECG electrode from his chest.
After the incident passed, Sinon found that the electrode had fallen on the floor in her room. She cut the tape from it and processed the silver metallic component into a pendant. She had been secretly wearing this homemade necklace all this time, not even telling Kirito or Asuna. She had dived fully clothed in Rath’s Roppongi branch, and not even that worker named Hiraki had the chance to see it.
That was why this necklace could not have materialized within Underworld.
— But.
Kirito had once said so in the Dicey Cafe: the virtual world created by the STL was not simply comprised of polygonal objects.
He said that — it was a different reality generated through memories and imagination.
That being the case, this necklace must have been realized through Sinon’s own imagination.
Sinon softly touched the pendant to her lips, and placed it back under her clothes.
Then, she directed her completely-regained consciousness towards the black, winged creature hovering in the sky far away.
Subtilizer stood atop the creature’s back, looking at his own right hand in silence. Sinon could see wisps of white smoke rising from his fingertips.
Seemingly detecting her eyes on him, Subtilizer looked up, and the corners of his mouth curled with a trace of dissatisfaction. Sinon stared right at that man’s face and spoke:
“You’re not a god, and you’re not a demon either. You’re just a human.”
Indeed, Subtilizer was overwhelmingly powerful. He likely possessed an insanely strong imagination that had interfered with Sinon’s consciousness… in other words, her Fluctlight.
— But if we’re talking imagination and concentration, there’s no way I’d lose to you.
Because those were a sniper’s greatest strengths.
Sinon gripped the Solus account’s GM equipment with both hands, the longbow «Annihilate Ray», and directed her stare at it.
The center of the gleaming white longbow began to take on a black hue with a blue tint.
As the range of the color shift widened, the bow’s smoothly curved body began to transform into completely straight edges. That long, shining blue-black cylinder was the steel body of a firearm. The muzzle, handle, and stock appeared one by one, and finally, a gigantic scope seemed to surge from the gun body as it materialized.
Sword Art Online Volume 17 - Alicization Awakening Page 18