If Captain Miller either had captured Alice or was in close pursuit, the question now was: How likely was it for the human army to catch up to him?
The insertion of the American, Chinese, and Korean players had severely impeded the human army’s southward advance. In terms of internal distance, Captain Miller had to be several hundred miles ahead of them. A jet fighter could close that gap in a blink, but that technology wasn’t likely to exist in the Underworld. At best, they might have some kind of winged mount to ride on.
They’re not going to catch him, Critter decided after three seconds of consideration.
He glanced at the watch on his left wrist. It was 9:40 AM, July 7th.
The SDF commandos were supposed to be sent in by the defense ship at six in the evening, giving them eight hours and twenty minutes. Captain Miller had left instructions to resume acceleration when the time remaining hit eight hours—meaning ten AM. But now that essentially all the external players had been wiped out, there was no reason to maintain real-time speed.
Which meant that it would be better to accelerate Underworld time by a thousand again, giving Captain Miller time to secure Alice.
“Here goes nothing…Best of luck in there, Vassago,” Critter said to the stationary red dot on the battlefield and reached for the lever that operated the Fluctlight Acceleration (FLA) rate. When he glanced up at the slider on the main monitor that corresponded to the lever’s placement, his eyes stopped on the scale markings next to the gauge.
The slider needle was at the bottom, next to the ×1 indicator. The scale was marked in ×100 increments, and a red line cut across at ×1,000. But as a matter of fact, the scale continued upward until another partition at ×1,200. That, apparently, was the safety line for a biological human diving with an STL.
Yet, the rate slider continued even farther, until it ultimately reached ×5,000. If no human being was in a dive—meaning only artificial fluctlights were present in the world simulation—the internal time could be accelerated that fast.
Changing the FLA involved using the physical lever on the console board, then pressing a nearby button with a plastic cap that opened and closed over it. Being careful not to press the button, Critter slowly pushed the lever, which looked like the throttle on a ship or an airplane.
The slider graphic on the monitor smoothly rose, and the digital number readout rotated rapidly. When he got to ×1,000, there was a strong resistance on the lever. He pushed it again, harder, and it moved farther before stopping at ×1,200 again. It didn’t seem as though it was going to budge beyond that, no matter how hard he pushed.
“Hmm…”
His curiosity piqued, Critter examined the large metal lever. He quickly noticed that, next to the activation button, there was a shining silver keyhole.
“Gotcha.” He grinned, scratching his bald head with a finger.
The safety limit being twelve hundred times regular speed meant that the real danger area was a bit beyond that. It couldn’t be a bad idea to test unlocking the safety mechanism, just in case internal time was in a major crunch.
Critter spun his chair around and snapped his fingers to draw the attention of the team members who had just returned to the control room.
“Anyone here good at lock picking?”
What a soft…and wonderful scent…
It was the best sleep he’d had in months. So when Takeru Higa heard a voice in his ear desperately trying to wake him up, he resisted to the best of his ability.
“…I said, Higa! Hello?! Open your eyes! Come on!!”
This person sounds really frantic, though. It’s not like I got stabbed or shot or anyth…ing……
“…Aaugh!!”
As his mind regained consciousness, his memory flooded back in a rush, and Higa bolted awake.
Right before him was a thirty-something man with black-framed glasses.
“Whoa—?!” he screamed.
He tried to lurch backward to get away, but his body wouldn’t listen. Instead, a terrible pain seared his right shoulder, and Higa screamed a third time.
That’s right. I got shot by that man in the cable duct. I knew I was bleeding bad, but I focused on controlling the STLs instead. I connected the output of the three girls’ fluctlights to Kirigaya’s STL, but it didn’t wake him up…and then…something else happened…
“…Wh-what about Kirito?” he said, trying to wriggle away from the face of the man in glasses, who was peering at him very closely.
Instead, his answer came from a smooth female voice. “Kirigaya’s fluctlight activity has returned to full status. In fact, if anything, it might be too active right now.”
“Oh…th-that’s…good…,” Higa said, exhaling.
It was nothing short of a miracle that his self-image had recovered from the state it had been in. And speaking of miracles, the fact that Higa was still alive after how much blood he’d lost…
These realizations gave him reason to examine his surroundings and condition.
He was resting on the floor of the sub-control room. His upper body was uncovered, and his right shoulder was bandaged. There was a catheter in his left arm, supplying him with blood.
On his left side, in the glasses, was Lieutenant Colonel Seijirou Kikuoka. Sitting directly on the floor to his left was Dr. Rinko Koujiro, her white coat removed. On the other end of the catheter tube was Sergeant First Class Natsuki Aki, a registered nurse, who was exchanging blood packs. She must have been the one who had seen to his wound.
Higa looked back to Kikuoka, who exhaled deeply and finally spoke.
“Good grief…After all my warnings not to do anything too reckless…But then again, I guess this is my fault for failing to catch the fact that we had a mole on the engineering team…”
His bangs were bedraggled, and there were sweat marks on his lenses. Rinko appeared to be drenched in sweat, too. They must have been hard at work saving Higa’s life. Then that wonderfully pleasant feeling while he dreamed must have been…
Hmm?
Who tried to pump my heart, and who gave me mouth-to-mouth?
He nearly asked the question of them, but he caught himself in time. Some truths were better off unknown.
Instead, he asked a much more important question: “What’s the state of the Underworld…and of Alice?”
Kikuoka brushed Higa’s left shoulder and said, “All the players connecting from America, China, and Korea have been logged out. In fact, there were nearly thirty thousand from China and Korea alone, but…”
“What…? From China and Korea, too?! Not as reinforcements…but as enemies?!” Higa blurted out. He tried to get up again, but the shock of the pain from his right shoulder stabbed him in the brain.
“Don’t get up now!” Sergeant First Class Aki scolded. “The bullet went all the way through, but I only just got the bleeding to stop.”
“Y-yes, ma’am…” Higa relaxed and let Rinko fill him in on the situation.
“Apparently, they recruited the Chinese and Koreans on social media, riling them up by playing on their natural rivalry as online gamers.”
“Oh…I see…,” Higa lamented. His participation in Project Alicization was partially spurred on by the death of a Korean friend who’d been blown up in a terrorist attack while serving his military years in Iraq. It was galling to think that the project had now led to further inflammation of the hostilities between Japan itself and Korean gamers—even if it was the attackers who were doing it.
He found himself shaking his head, then grimaced at the pain. “How many from China and Korea, again?” he asked.
“It seems they hit nearly thirty thousand. The two thousand players who came to our side from Japan were essentially wiped out,” Kikuoka said. He closed his eyes for a moment before continuing, “At that point, there were still over twenty thousand hostile troops present. Fortunately, that’s when Kirito awoke and took care of them in one blow…”
“W-wait, what?” Higa stammered, cutting off his superior
. “Kirito neutralized an army of twenty thousand, all alone…in a single instant?! That’s impossible! The Underworld doesn’t have a weapon or command capable of attacking on a physical scale or intensity of that sort. Or at least…it shouldn’t…”
Only then did Higa recall the conversation he’d had with Yanai right around the time the man had shot him in the cable duct.
Nobuyuki Sugou’s former employee Yanai not only was a spy for the attackers invading the ship but was obsessed with the artificial fluctlight known as Administrator, the pontifex of the Axiom Church. How had it come to that?
And then there was the question of the “fourth”: the irregular fluctlight connected to Kazuto Kirigaya’s fluctlight from the Main Visualizer itself. That—he or she—had become the key to Kazuto’s recovery. But Higa had never even imagined that an inanimate object without a mind of its own could function as a human consciousness, even a simulated one.
“…Hey…Kiku…,” he said, feeling a chill that had nothing to do with his blood loss. “Do you think…we’ve been creating…something much, much bigger—?”
Right at that moment, the speaker in the command console issued a piercing alarm.
It was the sound that Higa had programmed to alert him to a change in the time-acceleration rate of the simulation.
Ashen clouds rushed past Asuna and me with blinding speed. A bloodred sky hung above us, and blackened wasteland stretched out forever below.
In all the vast human-owned lands, only the pontifex herself had mastered the art of flying, according to Alice the Integrity Knight. Now Administrator was gone from the Underworld, as was her counterpart Cardinal, so there was no way to know exactly what the command to perform the flying art was. In other words, my flight through the Dark Territory was not a function of any sacred art, but direct control of events through the power of imagination…what the Integrity Knights would call Incarnation.
I could hear the words of Charlotte the giant spider, the familiar sent by Cardinal to observe me on my trip all the way from the remote village of Rulid.
The formal arts are nothing but a tool to harness and refine Incarnation—what you call a mental image. At this point, you need neither chants nor catalysts.
Now wipe your tears and get to your feet. Feel the prayer of the flowers.
Feel the ways of the world…
From the moment I fell into a closed-off state immediately after fighting Administrator on the top floor of Central Cathedral of the Axiom Church, to the moment I recovered just minutes ago, I had been deeply connected to those “ways of the world.”
I could clearly sense the sacred power floating in the air around me and easily convert its elements without requiring any elaborate commands. I had spoken the spell’s words earlier when healing Klein, Lisbeth, and the others, but I probably could have produced the same effect with my imagination alone.
At the moment, I had wind elements forming a protective barrier around Asuna and me, and I was also popping those wind elements in succession from behind to propel us like a jet engine. It was many times faster than a dragon, I was sure, but it was still going to take at least five minutes to catch up to Alice on Amayori to the south of us.
There were so many things I wanted to say to Asuna, so many things to apologize and thank her for, while we had this time. But as we flew together, hands clasped, I found I could not look at her.
The reason was that just after I reawakened and the omnipotent sensation of my body’s blood turning into light finally faded, the memories of what had happened to me recently started coming back to me, clarifying and ordering themselves.
The big problem was what had happened late last night.
As I lay in the center of the tent, Asuna and Alice and Ronie and Sortiliena sat around me, each of them telling stories about me…Specifically, revealing stories of my many bad behaviors and incidents over the years. Recalling it was a living hell.
Kirito snuck right out of the academy to buy honey pies from the Jumping Deer and nut cookies from the Sunflower and brought them back for Tiese and me, Ronie had said.
And when I graduated, he gave me a whole bunch of zephilia flowers that only bloom in the western empire. He said it took an entire year to make them bloom here, Liena had bragged.
When we were climbing the outer wall of the cathedral, Kirito pulled a steamed bun out of his pocket and gave me half. He tried to warm it up with heat elements and nearly burned it to a crisp, Alice had added.
The very first time I met him, he gave me cream to spread on black bread. And there were the blueberry tarts and huge roll cakes and all the other things we ate together…, Asuna had finished wistfully.
For some reason, they’d kept competing to one-up the others with food-based stories. After that came all the things I’d done and the things I’d said, one after the other, without end…
“Ah…”
I put my head in my hands, despite the fact that we were flying at high speed, and screamed.
“Aaaaaah!”
Instantly, my concentration was lost, and the generation and activation of wind elements stopped. My body was blasted with sudden, ferocious wind resistance, and I started to go into a tailspin.
I muttered a panicked curse and spread out my wide, long coat into the form of black wings that gave me aerial stability again. But my relief was highly temporary, because—
“Eyaaaaaa!!”
—Asuna came plummeting from above, screaming. I reached out to catch her. The attempt was successful—but not by much—and she looked back at me with big hazel-brown eyes, face-to-face. If I was going to apologize, now was the time.
“Asuna, it’s not what you think!!”
That was an excuse, not an apology, but it was too late to stop now.
“Liena and Alice and Ronie, there was nothing between us! I swear to Stacia, nothing at all happened!!” I pleaded.
Asuna stared at me…and her face crinkled into a smile. She placed her slender hands on my cheeks and said, with both exasperation and fondness, “You haven’t changed, Kirito. They say you were fighting and fighting in here for two years, so I wondered if maybe that would have made you…more mature…but…”
Clear liquid suddenly sprang from Asuna’s eyes. Her lips trembled, and her voice grew hoarse. “I’m so glad…It’s really you, Kirito…You haven’t changed at all…You’re still my Kirito…”
Her words penetrated deep into my chest. I felt something hot begin to rise within me, but I caught it before it could reach my throat.
“…I’m just me. Of course that won’t change.”
“But…but you’re like a god now. You froze that entire huge army all at once…then fully healed two hundred people in a single moment…and now you can fly…”
I couldn’t help but chuckle at that. “No, I’ve just figured out how this world works better than most. Once you get used to the concept, you’ll be able to fly very quickly, too, Asuna.”
“…I don’t need to.”
“What?”
“I’d rather have you fly and carry me in your arms like this,” she said, smiling and sniffling, and took her hands off my cheeks to circle my back instead, where she squeezed me tight. I returned her embrace.
“Thank you…thank you, Asuna. You suffered all those terrible wounds to help protect the people of the Underworld…I’m sure it must have been agony…”
It was two years ago, when a goblin captain slashed me in a cave under the mountains, that I had learned just how real the pain was in this world. The blade had only carved a little bit of the flesh of my shoulder, but it had hurt so bad I couldn’t even stand up for a while.
Asuna, however, had faced an army summoned by PoH and never stopped fighting, even as she suffered gruesome wounds all over her body. Without Asuna’s hard effort, Tiese and Ronie and the rest of the Human Guardian Army would have been eliminated long ago.
“No…it wasn’t just me,” she said, her cheek moving against mine. “Shino-non and Lea
fa and Liz and Silica and Klein and Agil…and the Sleeping Knights and everyone from ALO—they all did incredibly. And Renly the Integrity Knight, the guards of the human army, Sortiliena, Ronie, Tiese…”
Suddenly, Asuna gasped, and her body went tense. I had a feeling I knew why, even before she said it.
“Oh…Kirito! The commander…Bercouli went chasing after the enemy emperor, all on his own, and…”
“……”
I nodded to her without a word, then shook my head.
I was already aware that the massive strength of Bercouli Synthesis One, the oldest of the Integrity Knights, whom I’d never had the chance to speak to in person, was already gone from this earth.
Just before this war started, we’d shared a brief clash of imaginary swords—Incarnate Swords. As the memory came back to me, I realized that Bercouli had already sensed his coming death at the time.
For the conclusion of his life of three hundred years, he’d chosen to fight to protect Alice.
Asuna understood the meaning of my gesture, clutched me even harder, and wept. It did not last long, however; she stifled her sobs to ask, “Is Alice…all right…?”
“Yeah, he hasn’t caught her yet. She’s going to reach the southern end of the Dark Territory very soon…and get to the third system console. But there’s a massive presence chasing after her…”
“I see…In that case, we have to protect her. For Bercouli.”
When Asuna pulled away, her face was wet with tears but firmly resolved. I gave her a slow nod. Her eyes wavered a tiny bit.
“But for now…just for this brief moment, be my Kirito alone,” she whispered. Her lips approached and met mine.
Beneath the red sky of another world, flanked by black wings that flapped slowly, Asuna and I shared a long, passionate kiss.
In that moment, at last, I recalled why I had awakened in this world two and a half years ago.
It was the last Monday of June in the real world.
As I walked Asuna back home, we were attacked by the third perpetrator of the Death Gun incident, the principal member of the red guild, Laughing Coffin: Johnny Black. My memory of the scene ended when I was injected with a muscle relaxant by his high-pressure injection gun. I probably went into respiratory arrest, suffered some kind of brain damage, and was put into the Underworld with the STL for restorative purposes.
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