Alicization Lasting

by Reki Kawahara

  This was only going to be a repeat of that legend.

  “No…you can’t let it get away!! You have to burn all those things!!” Stica found herself shouting.

  But the dual swordsman and the fencer did not seem capable of moving yet. And no wonder, after the tremendous exhibition of Incarnation they’d just managed.

  The shards of the Abyssal Horror squirmed away, seemingly mocking the humans.

  And yet—suddenly the swarm of flies scattered. They buzzed and fled, disjointed, all in a panic.

  Stica held her breath and touched the main vision board, magnifying its image.

  She saw golden light.

  Something was there, shining bright and pure like a tiny Solus. She magnified it further.

  “……A person……”

  Yet another swordswoman.

  Hair like flowing gold. Armor of the same color. A brilliant-white skirt. And eyes that stared down her foes with the color of the blue sky.

  ……I know her.

  “I…I know this swordswoman…I mean, this knight,” Stica whispered. She heard Laurannei whisper back, “Me too.”

  The golden knight looked exactly as she was painted in the huge portrait hung in the throne room on the fiftieth floor of Central Cathedral. She was one of the greatest Integrity Knights in history, who’d achieved great feats in the ancient Otherworld War and disappeared in the midst of the fighting. In fact, her name was…

  “…Alice…?”

  The knight’s hand moved, almost in recognition that her name had been called. She drew a longsword from her side with a smooth motion.

  The yellow blade reflected the light of Solus to an almost blinding degree. In their fear, the minute fragments of the spacebeast lost whatever controlling force they might have had, fizzling away in random directions.

  The knight held the sword before her body. She called out in a voice like wind that blew through space. The dragoncraft’s Incarnameter burst right off its mount.

  “Release Recollection!!”

  The sword blazed even brighter. Its body made a sound like scraping metal and fragmented into a million tiny pieces.

  The hilt was still in the knight’s hand, however, and she swung it easily. The fragments spilled forth into the void, spreading like flower petals on a light breeze.

  It turned into a golden meteor shower.

  Each and every little bit of light exhibited frighteningly precise aim, piercing the fleeing scraps of the dark beast. Each bit of darkness, once shot through, was burned away into nothing by the brilliance of the golden line.

  “……Incredible…”

  It was all that Stica could find the words to say. You could line up every last craft in the Integrity Pilothood, fire all their main cannons at once, and not hope to exhibit this much precision and power.

  When the last little scrap of the Abyssal Horror, the deadliest spacebeast in all of the Underworld, succumbed to a golden arrow, it let out a scream that put all its others to shame.

  Gyeeeiiieeeooooo………

  And with that, the creature was finally, truly gone.

  Stica watched, dumbfounded, as the golden swarm of shooting stars gathered at the knight’s hand and returned to being a whole sword again.

  But if the golden knight really was the very Integrity Knight Alice of old, then who were the other two people? On the vision board, the knight returned the sword to her sheath and flew through space toward the warriors in black and pearly white.

  The three had a brief discussion, then turned to face Stica and Laurannei.

  They were too far away for Stica to see their faces clearly. But she could tell that all three of them were smiling.

  Then the swordsman with the white and black swords put them behind his back again and waved to the pilots.

  In that moment, Stica felt some tremendous emotion she couldn’t describe piercing her heart deep, deep inside its core. A kind of lonely pain that took her breath away.

  “Ah…ahhh…,” she murmured.

  Quietly, Laurannei murmured, “Sti, I know him. I know who that is.”

  “Yes, Laura. So do I…so do I.”

  She nodded again and again.

  It wasn’t something she knew because she’d seen his portrait in the throne room. It was something else.

  Her heart. Her fingers. Her soul knew him.

  She felt the scent of honey pie, sweet and fragrant, tickling her nostrils.

  A calming breeze blowing across the field. The warm light of the gentle sun.

  Faint laughter in the distance.

  In a daze, Stica put on her airtight helmet and pulled a handle on the right side of the pilot’s seat. The temperature-controlled air squeaked and escaped. The layer of armor protecting the dragoncraft’s control seat moved away, revealing the sea of stars overhead. Her second was opening her own cockpit as well.

  Stica stood up in her seat, staring at the three warriors standing thirty mels away, waving at her.

  But in fact…

  …there was another.

  Stica’s maple-red eyes beheld the figure of a fourth person flickering into existence.

  He stood just to the left of the one in black, smiling gently. He was wavering like heat haze, translucent and fragile, like he might vanish if she took her eyes off him for an instant.

  The flaxen-haired young man looked at Stica and nodded firmly, just for her.

  She felt tears burst from her eyes.

  The warm liquid trickled down her cheeks, spilling into her airtight helmet.

  In time, the sight of the young man melted away into the light of Solus as it appeared around the edge of Cardina.

  At that moment, the young Integrity Pilot understood: This instant, right now, was the starting of the new age that the Star King had prophesied.

  They were messengers, appearing from the past to open the door to the future.

  Starting from here, the world was going to change.

  The door to the other world would open, and the tide of a new age would rush through it.

  That would not be the arrival of an age of paradise. This would be a time of revolution and turbulence in the Underworld, an age that none of them could imagine.

  But Stica was not afraid.

  She couldn’t be—not when her heart was leaping with joy.

  This encounter was something her soul had been dying to experience.

  She blinked the tears away and stared straight ahead.

  From a standing position, she reached to tilt the control rod forward.

  The damaged dragoncraft wing took on a blue glow.

  The eternal flame elements breathed, putting a tiny bit of life into the craft.

  She looked over to Laurannei, and the two of them shared a knowing glance.

  The girl of the Underworld, Integrity Pilot Stica Schtrinen, gently flew her dragon along.

  Onward toward the unfamiliar strangers waving at her.

  Toward the door to the new era.

  Toward the future.

  AFTERWORD

  Thank you for reading Sword Art Online 18: Alicization Lasting. And a huge, heartfelt thanks to you for following along with all ten volumes of the Alicization arc, starting with Volume 9.

  To repeat something I wrote in the afterword of Volume 1, the story of Sword Art Online (SAO) was originally something I wrote in the fall of 2001 to submit for the Ninth Dengeki Novel Prize. I finished it by the deadline in spring of 2002 but was far over the page limit, and because I didn’t know what to cut out, I gave up on submitting it.

  In other words, when I started writing SAO, the only thing in my head was the Aincrad story—just the few weeks before the game was beaten on the seventy-fifth floor, in fact. But when I set up a website after that and published SAO as an online novel, I was fortunate enough to hear from many readers asking for more of the story. I wrote Fairy Dance as the second arc and Phantom Bullet as the third arc (titled Death Gun in the online version), with shorter stories sandwiched
in between them. I remember starting the fourth arc, Alicization, in January 2005.

  Writing this now, I cannot actually recall why I decided to leave the boundaries of VRMMOs I had been writing about to tackle concepts like bottom-up AI, drone weaponry, quantum brain theory, and simulated reality. All I can remember is writing and writing in a daze, hitting walls, and finding ways around them.

  It was in July 2008 that the Alicization arc’s online publication concluded.

  About the same time, I was writing a story called Chouzetsu Kasoku Burst Linker for a novel-submission website. After six years’ more experience, I decided to try my luck with the Fifteenth Dengeki Novel Prize, and I was lucky enough to win. I changed the title from Burst Linker to Accel World, and that was my debut as a professionally published author. When I put the notice about this on my website, my editor, Kazuma Miki, saw it and sent me an e-mail saying that they wanted to read SAO.

  I sent over all the data files I’d compiled over eight years of writing to them. Between their editing duties, they managed to read it all in a week. I still vividly remember when they said to me, “Let’s publish this with Dengeki Bunko, too.”

  At the time, Miki said, “Let’s make it our goal to get to the end of the Alicization arc.” It seemed like a total pipe dream to me. If you converted the word count from the online version into a book manuscript, it would be over fifteen volumes. Even going at a pace of three books per year, it would need to capture reader interest for five whole years to get to that point.

  I wasn’t thinking about getting all the way to the end of the Alicization arc. I didn’t think that my career as an author was going to last that long. But Miki’s passion for making books, his work in recruiting abec to provide clean and powerful illustrations, and of course, the support of so many readers made it possible for the series to continue. Now, in August 2016, about seven years after Volume 1 came out, I’ve been able to release the final volume of the Alicization story.

  As a matter of fact, there was a lot of added writing that went into the Dengeki Bunko version of SAO. This book is the eighteenth volume—the twenty-second if you include Progressive. It’s the forty-fifth if you include my other series. It’s been seven and a half years since my pro debut, and about fifteen years since I started writing SAO. It feels impossibly long, and it feels like it passed by in the blink of an eye.

  Now that I’ve reached the end of it, what I’m left with in my chest is a vague question of why I wrote SAO, and this Alicization story in particular.

  Because I liked online games and the idea of games turned deadly? That was probably all it was at the start. I don’t know what would’ve happened if I’d turned in my Aincrad story to the Dengeki contest the way I’d planned, but I do feel it’s likely I would have put just the Aincrad story on my website in installments and called it a day. The scene I really wanted to write fifteen years ago was Kirito and Asuna sitting in the sunset, watching Aincrad collapse, then going back to the real world, where Kirito would start off in search of Asuna.

  But I didn’t stop there. I wrote Fairy Dance, Phantom Bullet, and Alicization, and perhaps the engine that kept me going was not just all the people visiting my website, but the story itself—the characters who laughed, cried, and fought together. I kept following, pacing behind Kirito and Asuna as they sought out new worlds and new adventures, until it brought me to today, I think.

  If I stop typing and close my eyes right now, I feel like I can still see the backs of Kirito and his friends as they run toward the distant light. Their journey will not end, and I’m certain that many adventures still await them, in ALO and the rest of The Seed Nexus, in the sealed-off Underworld, and in the real world.

  A part of me wants to follow along with those new stories, of course. But at the same time, the map of the future is so vast and uncertain, a part of me is hesitant. Before I step into the next world, I want to think about what the lengthy story of Alicization meant to Kirito, Asuna, Alice—and me—and soak in that feeling. That’s my plan.

  Over the course of the SAO series, I’ve come into the debt of a great many people.

  Those who have handled the manga adaptations: Tamako Nakamura, Minamijyujisei, Tsubasa Haduki, Neko Nekobyou, Kiseki Himura, Koutarou Yamada, Shii Kiya.

  Those who have taken part in the animation series: director Tomohiko Itou, character designers Shingo Adachi and Tetsuya Kawakami, action-animation director Takahiro Shikama, all the people from A-1 Pictures, producers Atsuhiro Iwakami, Nobuhiro Oosawa, Shinichirou Kashiwada, Jun Katou, Masami Niwa. Kirito’s voice actor, Yoshitsugu Matsuoka; Asuna’s voice actor, Haruka Tomatsu; Leafa’s voice actor, Ayana Taketatsu; Sinon’s voice actor, Miyuki Sawashiro; and all the other cast members. The singers for the theme songs: LiSA, Eir Aoi, Luna Haruna. Sound director Yoshikazu Iwanami, sound designer Yasuyuki Konno, composer Yuki Kajiura.

  Those who made so many games: Yousuke Futami, Yasukazu Kawai. Takeshi Washizaki, who did promotion on the radio and at events.

  My editors, Kazuma Miki and Tomoyuki Tsuchiya. Tatsuya Kurusu, who drew my little maps and such. abec, who brought the story to life with such beautiful illustrations.

  And lastly, to all you readers who followed along with the story to this point, my undying gratitude.

  Thank you all so much. I hope you’ll continue to love the SAO series.

  Reki Kawahara—July 2016

  Thank you for buying this ebook, published by Yen On.

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