Through whatever twist of fate, Laughing Coffin’s leader, PoH, was among the group that attacked the Ocean Turtle, and he was now stuck in the ground of the Dark Territory, transformed into a miniature version of the Gigas Cedar. When the time acceleration started again, he would be stuck without vision or hearing for days, possibly weeks, before he was pulled out of the system. However long it would be, he would suffer some kind of mental damage—possibly as bad as mine had been the last six months. It was cruel, I believed—but not unnecessarily so.
He had tried to murder Asuna…and other people I truly cared about.
After many seconds where our existences felt like they were melting together into one, our lips came apart.
“Doesn’t it remind you of back then…?” Asuna said, her look pensive. I knew why.
She was remembering the moment right after SAO, the game of death, had been beaten, when we’d shared a kiss under a sunset sky, against the backdrop of the collapsing castle. But that had been a kiss of parting.
To sweep away any hint of foreboding, I grinned and said, “C’mon—let’s go. Let’s beat Emperor Vecta, save Alice, and get everyone back to the real wo—”
Before I could finish that last word, a panicked voice spoke directly inside my head.
Kirito!! Kirigaya!! Can you hear me, Kirito?!
That gravelly voice…
“Uh…is that Mr. Kikuoka? How are you talking to me without a system console around…?”
I don’t have to explain that to you! We’ve got major trouble!! It’s the time acceleration…They’ve tampered with the safety limiter on the FLA!!
Critter watched, slightly uneasily, as Brigg’s bearded face turned red and sweaty as he tweaked the two wires around in the keyhole.
Brigg had eagerly nominated himself for the lock-picking job, but given the importance of the time accelerator’s safety function, it wasn’t just some simple old-school cylinder lock. With time, his finger movements got more and more violent, and the volume of his curses rose.
Right behind Brigg, Hans checked his digital wristwatch and gleefully announced, “That’s three minutes. Two more, and you owe me fifty bucks.”
“Shut the hell up! Two minutes is nothing…Once I get this open, I’ll be able to spend a night in Hawaii on the way…home…”
The sound of the wires rotating the lock was sounding less like unlocking and more like destruction. Critter wanted to interject and tell him to stop there, but now that the other two had put a bet on the result, there was no stopping them.
“And one minute left! Get ready to pay up.”
“For fuck’s sake!!” Brigg finally shouted. He got to his feet and threw the wires to the floor.
Critter was relieved that he had finally given up on picking the lock—until the red-faced soldier drew his massive handgun from its holster and pressed the muzzle to the lock.
“Hey, hey, whoa……”
One blast. Then another.
Brigg put the pistol back in his holster, then looked at the stunned Hans and Critter and shrugged.
“Lock’s picked.”
Critter stared at the two-inch hole left in the console panel with his mouth hanging open. Two or three little bursts of sparks lit up the darkness of the hole, and then the operating lever, which was still in its tilted position, began to move again. After about five inches, it came to a stop with a little thunk. On the monitor, the readout was not just above ×1,200, where Critter had wanted to test it. The number on the screen glowed ×5,000, the maximum value.
“…F-five……”
He tried to calculate on the spot how many minutes one second of real time would take at that speed—when there was another dull metallic sound.
“N…no way……”
Critter gaped as he saw the number on the monitor go past five thousand, then past ten thousand…
No way, we’re still fine. As long as nobody touches the activation button, it won’t actually change the acceleration rate. I can still pull the lever back, and it’ll be like nothing ever happened.
“Don’t…don’t touch it!! Nobody touch it!!” he shrieked, waving Hans and Brigg away from the console.
Then he snuck closer and carefully reached out.
And just before his hand could touch the lever—boom.
There was a soft little bursting sound.
The red activation button and its plastic cover blew off.
Then the huge monitor on the wall of the main control room turned red, and an unpleasant alarm blared out of the speakers. A countdown appeared, starting at fifteen minutes and spinning downward with alarming speed.
When he heard the alarm that indicated the acceleration rate was being altered again, Higa tried to jump up once more and grimaced in pain.
“Higa! We just told you to calm down,” Dr. Koujiro said, rushing over and putting a hand to Higa’s back.
At that very moment, the main monitor of the sub-control room turned red.
“Wh-what’s that?!” shouted Kikuoka. With Rinko’s support, Higa could see past the commander’s shoulder to the screen.
Displayed in a bold font were a fifteen-minute countdown and a warning message that all three safety-limit stages on the FLA system were unlocked and that the entire Underworld was heading into a maximum-acceleration phase.
“Wha………?”
Higa was speechless. Instead, Dr. Koujiro took it upon herself to ask, “What does that mean, maximum acceleration?! Wasn’t the limit of the FLA twelve hundred times the normal speed?!”
“…That’s the limit when a flesh-and-blood human is in a dive…but artificial fluctlights can go up to five thousand…,” Higa said mechanically, pulling the number from memory.
The scientist’s chilly eyes tightened dangerously. “Five thousand?! Then that means…one second here is about eighty minutes…Just eighteen seconds will correspond to an entire day!!”
Her mental arithmetic was impressive. But Higa and Kikuoka shared a look and shook their heads awkwardly.
“Huh…? What do I have wrong?”
“Twelve hundred is a safety limit taking the life span of the human soul into account…and five thousand is just the limit of what we can observe as it’s happening in the Underworld. But neither of them is the actual limit of the hardware…”
Higa’s throat was burning, bone-dry. Dr. Koujiro’s arm twitched as it held him around his back.
“Th-then,” she asked tremulously, “what is…the hardware limit…?”
“As you know, the Underworld is constructed by and calculated with light quantums. Its transmission speed within the Main Visualizer is theoretically limitless…meaning that the actual limit is placed on it by the architecture of the lower server…”
“Get to the point! What’s the number?!”
He pulled his gaze away from the screen to look at Rinko. “In the maximum-acceleration phase…the FLA rate is just a bit over five million to one. The two STLs in Roppongi can’t manage that sort of speed over the satellite connection, so they’ll get cut off automatically…but Kirigaya and Asuna in the STLs onboard the Ocean Turtle…”
A minute of real-world time would be equal to ten years in the Underworld. Rinko calculated the number instantly, and her eyes went so wide they twitched with shock.
“My…my God…We have to…we have to get Asuna and Kirigaya out of those STLs right away!!” she gasped, attempting to stand, but this time Higa held her arm back.
“No, Rinko! It’s already in an early acceleration phase—if you try to pull them out of the machine now, they’ll suffer fluctlight damage!!”
“Then perform the operation to disengage them!!”
“Why do you think I went down the cable duct?! You can only perform STL operations from the main control room!!” shrieked Higa, his voice rising.
He looked at the commander, who stood before the console. Kikuoka already seemed to understand where Higa was going with this.
“…Kiku, I’m going down there
again.”
Sergeant First Class Aki looked horrified by this notion and opened her mouth to say something, then stopped herself. Instead, she approached and murmured, “I’ll take out the catheter now.”
The commander scowled bitterly but nodded. “All right. I’ll go, too. I’m strong enough to carry you down that ladder, I think.”
“N…no, Lieutenant Colonel!!” shouted Lieutenant Nakanishi, the leader of the security team. He strode forward crisply, his face pale. “It’s too dangerous. I’ll—”
“We need you to defend the stairs. This will require opening the pressure barrier again…and we don’t have Ichiemon this time, plus Niemon’s not operational.”
Everyone in the sub-control room looked to the left back corner.
The human silhouette hanging from a coat-hanger-like support frame did not belong to an actual human. It was a humanoid machine body that Higa had researched and developed as a part of Project Alicization called the Electroactive Muscled Operative Machine #2, nicknamed Niemon. Compared to Ichiemon, which had been used as a decoy in the previous barrier-opening mission and destroyed, Niemon had been given a greatly improved appearance, as it was developed to hold a lightcube on board.
Naturally, the socket on its head was currently empty, so even if turned on, it would not move. It couldn’t be an autonomous shield the way that Ichiemon was.
Kikuoka looked away from the soulless robot and back to Nakanishi. With a tremendously stern look, he gave the officer orders.
“You will be engaging directly with the enemy, so your danger is clearly higher. But I need you to go.”
Nakanishi clenched his jaw and snapped off a salute. “Sir, yes, sir!”
While the military officers were talking, Higa timidly lifted his hand. It hurt, but at least his fingers were capable of moving.
The countdown to the maximum-acceleration phase on the monitor was down to ten minutes and change. But to reopen the pressure-resistant barrier wall, climb down that endless ladder, and perform the STL disengagement from the monitoring port there would take at least thirty minutes.
And in the extra twenty minutes, two hundred years was going to pass inside the Underworld. That would easily surpass the 150 years that were the life span of the human soul. And even before that point, it would still be an unbearable, seemingly infinite length of time for real-world people to suffer inside the Underworld…
Inside the Underworld………
“Yes…that’s it!!” cried Higa. He swung his left arm, from which the blood-transfusion catheter had just been removed, toward Kikuoka. “K-Kiku!! When I operated the STL earlier, I set up a communication channel to Kirito! Talk to him on line C-12!!”
“B-but…what should I say…?”
“Tell him to escape from inside!! If he either reaches a system console or loses all his HP in the next ten minutes, the STL will automatically begin disengagement protocol!! But once the maximum-acceleration phase begins, the console won’t function, and dying would be even worse!! You’d have to live out two hundred years with all your sensory organs blocked…Just warn him all about that!!”
“Two…”
Two hundred years?!
I barely caught the words before they flew out of my mouth. Inches away from my face, Asuna looked befuddled; she couldn’t hear Kikuoka’s voice the way I could.
“Listen to me, Kirito—you have ten minutes! You need to get to the console and log out in that time!! And if that’s impossible, you can also reduce your HP to zero…but that’s not as certain, and it’s more dangerous. That’s because…”
We might be forced to live out two centuries in a simulated state of death, I already knew. So I cut Kikuoka off and said, “Got it. I’ll try to find a way to escape through the console! With Alice, of course—so be ready for that outcome!”
“…I’m sorry. In fact, I want you to prioritize your own escape over Alice’s status. Listen, even if we could erase your memory after you log out, two hundred years is far beyond the life span of the human soul! The likelihood we could bring you back to consciousness is…almost zero…,” Kikuoka said, the bitterness clear in his voice.
“Don’t worry—I’ll come back,” I stated softly. “And, Mr. Kikuoka, I apologize for what I said to you half a year ago…I mean, last night.”
“Don’t. We deserve every last bit of criticism. I’ll make sure we’ve got bandages for all the punches you owe us…All right, looks like Higa’s ready. I’ve got to go.”
“Okay. I’ll see you in ten minutes, Mr. Kikuoka.”
The signal ended there.
I was still hovering in midair, coat hem flapping to keep us aloft, Asuna held tight in my arms.
“…Kirito, did you get some kind of message from Mr. Kikuoka? Was it…something bad?” she asked.
I shook my head from side to side. “No…he just said that the time rate’s going to accelerate again in ten minutes, so he wants us to hurry it up.”
Asuna blinked, then gave me a little smile. “Of course. It wouldn’t be fair to Alice if we’re just floating around doing this. Let’s go save her!”
“Yeah. I’m going to start flying again.”
I clutched Asuna and generated another huge mass of wind elements. A gust of glowing-green wind arose to envelop us.
And so I flew to the south, sensing Alice’s distant presence—and the massive abnormality that pursued her.
2
He’s going to catch me.
Alice, atop Amayori’s saddle, looked over her shoulder and bit her lip.
The eerie black dot in the red sky was clearly larger than it had been five minutes ago. It wasn’t that the enemy’s speed had picked up; Amayori and Takiguri were simply running out of strength.
That only made sense, because they’d been flying consecutively without any breaks. If anything, it was a miracle that they’d brought her this far. They’d traveled a distance many times greater than the length of the human territory—from Centoria to the End Mountains—in just half a day. Both dragons were clearly expending great amounts of life to continue flying at this point.
But why wasn’t her pursuer losing stamina, then?
From what she could tell upon performing a farseeing art with crystal elements, he was riding an odd creature that was not at all like the dragons. It would best be described as a disc with wings. She’d never seen such a thing in the human realm or the Dark Territory.
According to the archer named Sinon—another visitor from Kirito’s “real world”—her pursuer was indeed the emperor of the Dark Territory, the God of Darkness, Vecta, but at the same time, he was a real-world person in an antagonistic position to Kirito and Sinon.
Emperor Vecta had lost earlier to Commander Bercouli’s sacrificial attack—the Memory Release art of the Time-Splitting Sword, most likely. But he had come back to this place in a new form to continue his pursuit of Alice.
That horrifying resurrection, which seemed to mock Bercouli’s death, filled her with a rage that would never be quelled. But as she flew alone, Alice found the time to discover what she truly ought to do.
If the enemy was immortal in this world, then he would need to be killed in the real world. And to do that, she would need to reach the World’s End Altar.
Ahead, far across the red sky, she could see the faint outline of a cliff face on an impossible scale. It was the Wall at the End of the World, as spoken of in the founding myth. Unlike the mountains around the human realm, which a dragon could fly over, the cliff that surrounded the Dark Territory was said to have an immeasurable height.
Just before the sheer wall, at about the same height at which Alice was flying, hovered a small island in the air, all alone.
It looked like a little cup with a pointed bottom. She couldn’t guess what force was keeping it floating in the air like that. Upon closer examination, there appeared to be some kind of artificial construction in the center of its flat top. That was probably none other than the World’s End Altar. The exit of th
is world, and the entrance to the real world.
Fewer than ten kilors remained between her and the altar, but Emperor Vecta was likely to catch up to her just a bit before she reached the floating island, sadly.
Alice took a deep breath and exhaled. Then she brushed the neck of her dragon. “Thank you, Amayori and Takiguri. This is far enough. Take me down to the ground,” she commanded.
The beasts crooned weakly and began a parallel spiral descent. The ground below had turned into a chilly-looking dark-gray desert not long ago. It was just an empty sea of sand, as though the gods had gotten bored of creation and stopped there. The dragons came to a lengthy landing and practically collapsed.
Alice immediately jumped off the back of Amayori, who trilled, frululululu, from deep in its throat. She rummaged in the leather saddlebag and pulled out the one little bottled elixir still left. Then she poured half of the blue liquid into Amayori’s slack mouth and the rest of it into the mouth of the older brother nearby. Even the Axiom Church’s spiritual elixir wasn’t nearly enough to recover the massive life total of the majestic dragons, but it should at least give them the strength to take off again.
She reached out with both hands to scratch the soft hair beneath the chins of both dragons at once.
“Amayori. Takiguri.”
Just saying their names brought tears to her eyes. She fought the urge to cry and continued, “This is good-bye. My final order to you…Fly back to the human world and return to your dragon nests in the west. Amayori, find yourself a husband—Takiguri, find yourself a wife. Bear many children and raise them to be strong. Strong enough that they can carry knights, too.”
Amayori suddenly raised its head and licked Alice’s cheek. Takiguri nuzzled her waist and sniffed at the Frostscale Whip hanging there, which had belonged to Eldrie.
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