Sword Art Online - Volume 18 - Chapter 22.1

Chapter 22.1 – The Decisive Battle
7 July 2026 / Eighth Day of the Eleventh Month of the Human Empire Calendar, 380

“Damn!” came an abrupt expletive from Critter, the information warfare operative of the Ocean Turtle raid team, as he scrutinized the large monitor directly above the console.

The red dot, which had numbered 30,000 at its peak, was rapidly vanishing from the inside out.

This meant that, by one way or another, the Chinese and Korean VRMMO players thrown into Underworld through Vassago’s secret plan were being annihilated and automatically logged out.

A thousand survivors still remained among the blue-colored Human Empire army and white Japanese troops in the middle of the red circle. It was a conspicuously large number, and if this thousand people had the power to vanquish a combined Chinese-Korean force of 30,000, that made them all the more dangerous.

“…What the hell is that dolt Vassago doing?…”

Critter clucked his tongue, fixating on one point in the screen.

There was one final red dot positioned exceedingly close to the Japanese troops, glowing intensely. That was Vassago, who had converted his own account earlier and dived in through the STL in the adjacent room. He was right next to the enemy, but instead of engaging them, he did not appear to be moving at all.

Had he been taken prisoner somehow and immobilized? Or did he have his own secret plan of defeating an enemy army of thousands─?

Critter repressed the urge to storm into the STL Room, slap Vassago awake, seize his shirt collar, and shake him.

He could not reset the account while Underworld administrator privileges were locked; if he logged Vassago out by force, he would never be able to use that account again. All Critter could do at the moment was change the time acceleration rate, which was separate from The Seed program, but anything involving that had to be timed with extreme care.

Critter inhaled sharply and zoomed out the onscreen map.

Deep into the Underworld south, he saw another red dot still moving at full speed. That would be the raid team captain, Gabriel Miller.

What he had to consider now was the likelihood of the Human Empire army catching up to Captain Miller, who had either already captured Alice or was currently in pursuit of her.

Sending in large quantities of American, Chinese, and Korean players had proved a significant impediment to the Human Empire army’s southward advance. By now Captain Miller had a several-hundred-mile head start in Underworld. A fighter jet would clear that in the blink of an eye, but it was difficult to imagine something like that within Underworld. They would have winged creature units at the very most. 

─No way they’re gonna catch up.

Critter decided after a long three seconds of consideration.

He glanced at a watch on his left wrist. It was July 7, 9:40am.

Eight hours and twenty minutes remained until the JSDF’s commando unit was scheduled to come storming in from the destroyer. Captain Miller had ordered them to restart the acceleration at the eight hour mark ─ 10:00AM. But with all of their external troops completely eliminated, there was no meaning in waiting any longer.

In that case, it would be wise to bring Underworld’s time acceleration back to 1,000 times right now and buy Captain Miller some time to secure Alice.

“No way around it… Just hold on a bit longer, Vassago.”

Speaking to the still utterly immobile dot on the main battlefield, Critter reached his right hand towards the lever that controlled the Fluctlight Acceleration rate.

He peered up at the rate meter on the main monitor, but his eyes suddenly came to a halt on the scale at its side.

The sliding needle was currently positioned on ×1, at the very bottom. From there, each ×100 marked a gradation, and at ×1000 a red line was painted across as a border.

Then the scale continued to rise, with another border at ×1200. This would appear to be the safety limit for real live humans when they dived in through STLs.

But the rate meter continued to rise even further, finally stopping at ×5000. If no humans were diving ─ if the world were only populated by Artificial Fluctlights, then the internal time could be accelerated up to this point.

One adjusted the time acceleration rate by operating a physical lever on the console and then pressing the covered button beside it. Taking care not to touch the button, Critter slowly pushed the control lever upwards, treating it like a ship or airplane’s horizontally-moving throttle.

The slider on the monitor rose smoothly, and the digital numbers beside it began jumping staccato-like.

At ×1000 he suddenly encountered resistance.

He shoved hard and the lever gave, but stopped again at ×1200. This time it did not show any signs of wanting to move no matter how much force he applied.

“Unf……”

Critter’s curiosity got the better of him. He began inspecting the sizable metallic lever.

And then he immediately noticed a shining silver keyhole beside the confirmation button.

“I see.”

His face split into a grin as he scratched his close-cropped hair.

If the safety limit was 1,200 times, then the actual danger zone had to be somewhere above that. It didn’t seem like a bad idea to try unlocking the safety mechanism first, just in case they became extremely pressed for time inside.

Spinning his chair around, Critter snapped his fingers at the other team members who had returned to the main control room.

“Hey, anyone here a lockpicking specialist?”

***

─So soft… smells good…

This had to the best sleep he’d had in months. That was why Higa Takeru resisted until the very end the unknown voice in his ear trying desperately to wake him up.

“…ey, Higa-kun! Listen to me! Hey, open your eyes!!”

─This sounds overly desperate, though. Almost like I’m about to die or something.

─Whatever’s going on, this has got to be blowing it outta proportion. It’s not like I was stabbed, or I was… shot…

“───AHH!!”

His memory reviving with his consciousness, Higa cried out as his eyes snapped open.

Whereupon he saw before him the face of a thirty-something man, black-rimmed glasses flashing.

“Whoaaa?!”

Higa screamed again.

Instinct told him to scramble backwards, but his body didn’t respond to his commands. Instead, excruciating pain assailed his right shoulder and Higa let loose a third bizarre noise.

─Right.

I got shot by that guy in the cable duct.

I lost a lot of blood but ignored it, prioritizing the STL operation instead. I fed the three girls’ Fluctlight outputs directly into Kirigaya-kun’s STL, but still couldn’t wake him up… and I think something happened after that…

“… Ki-Kirito-kun, is he─”

Higa demanded, keeping his distance from the bespectacled man watching him at close range.

A cool female voice answered him.

“Kirigaya-kun’s Fluctlight activity has been completely restored. In fact, it’s almost too active.”

“I.. I see…”

Higa’s murmur mixed with a sigh.

A self-image recovery from that state was nothing short of a miracle. But surviving blood loss of that volume was a genuine, bona-fide, inexplicable─

As he thought, he examined his own situation once more.

He was lying on the floor of the sub control room. His upper body was naked and his right shoulder was bandaged. A blood transfusion catheter ran into his left arm.

To his left was the bespectacled man, Kikuoka Seijirou. Sitting directly on the floor to his right was Dr. Koujiro Rinko; she had taken off her white gown. Opposite the catheter was Sergeant First Class Aki Natsuki, registered nurse, changing his blood bag. She must have been the one tending to his wounds.

Higa looked back at Kikuoka, who after remaining silent all this time, finally sighed heavily and spoke:

“Goodness gracious… I told you not to be reckless… ─No, it’s my fault for not realizing there was a spy among the technicians…”

Kikuoka’s bangs were a mess and beads of perspiration were visible on his glasses. Closer inspection revealed that Rinko was also drenched in sweat. it seemed that both of them had been trying to revive him. So that comfortable sensation he had felt between wakefulness and sleep was from…

───Huh?

Which person had given him chest compressions, and which had given him mouth-to-mouth?

Higa almost asked, but shut his mouth at the last moment. There were truths in this world that should remain undiscovered.

Instead, he raised a question many times more important.

“How’s Underworld… How’s Alice?”

Kikuoka nudged Higa’s left shoulder as he replied:

“The players connecting from America, China, and Korea have all logged out. ─Also, there were nearly 30,000 players from China and Korea, but they’re all gone…”

“Huh?… China and Korea came too?! Not reinforcements… but enemies?!”

He leapt up on reflex but moaned from excruciating pain that shot from his right shoulder right to the top of his head. SFC Aki’s scolding without delay.

“Take it easy! The bullet passed right through you, but it took a lot to stop the bleeding.”

“G-Got it…”

Higa relaxed his body, and Rinko updated him on the situation.

“─About China and Korea, it looks like social media was cleverly used to incite resentment and conflict among the online gamers, then lure them here.”

“Is… that right…”

Higa sighed softly. He joined Project Alicization because… he was inspired after a Korean friend was killed by a terrorist bomb attack during his military service in Iraq. But even if this whole ordeal was the attackers’ fault, things still ended up spinning out of control and worsening the hostility between Japanese and Korean players.

He shook his head without thinking, and after grimacing from pain again, Higa asked something else:

“How many people came from China and Korea?”

“Seemed to be 30,000 at its peak. Almost all of the 2,000 players coming to help from Japan were wiped out.”

Kikuoka shut his eyes for a second, then continued:

“At that point, there were still more than 20,000 Chinese and Korean players, so it was fortunate that Kirito-kun awoke then and, in the blink of an eye…”

“Wait, what?”

Higa could not help but interrupt the commander.

“Kirito-kun, by himself… in the blink of an eye, incapacitated a great army of 20,000 people? That’s impossible. There aren’t any weapons or commands in Underworld able to inflict an attack of that much power or scale. Or… so I think…”

Just then, he finally recalled in clear detail the conversation that had went down before Yanai shot him in the cable duct.

Sugou Nobuyuki’s original henchman Yanai hadn’t just been the attackers’ spy. He was also deeply obsessed with the Artificial Fluctlight «Administrator». What kind of experience had driven things that far for him?

Moreover, the «fourth person» that had connected to Kirigaya Kazuto’s STL ─ the anomalous Fluctlight in the Main Visualizer. Even if it, no, he or she had become the key to Kazuto’s revival, Higa had never expected a subjectless, normal object to express or even simply mimic human consciousness.

“… Hey… Kiku-san…”

Higa muttered to the commander, feeling a chill that was not part of the blood loss.

“We… may have… created something unthinkable…”

At that moment.

A shrill alarm came blaring from an embedded speaker in the sub control room.

It was something Higa had installed: the sound of the time acceleration rate being changed.

***

Gray clouds raced past me and Asuna at incredible speed. The blood-red sky overhead and jet-black wilderness underfoot expanded as far as the eye could see.

There’s only one person capable of the Art of airborne flight in all of the vast Human Empire, and that’s the Highest Minister ─ that was what Integrity Knight Alice once told me. Since Highest Minister Administrator and her «counterpart», the sage Cardinal, had both left Underworld, there was no way to find out exactly how they had learned the Flight Art. That’s why it struck me that my ability to fly in midair above the Dark Territory like this had nothing to do with an Art; it was the result of me directly manipulating things with my imagination… the power that the Integrity Knights called «Incarnation».

Cardinal’s familiar Charlotte had protected me ever since I left Rulid Village, and now I heard the giant spider’s words once more, deep within my ear.

—Every Art is naught but a tool to channel and adjust your Incarnation… your imagination, as you call it. You don’t need incantations or mediums anymore.

—Now dry your tears, and stand up. Then, feel them. The flowers’ prayer.

—The truth of the world.

In the time that I shut myself out of the world around me following the battle against Administrator on the topmost floor of the Central Cathedral of the Axiom Church, all the way until I recovered some tens of minutes ago, somehow or other I think I established an incredibly deep connection with the «truth» of this world.

I could feel, quite clearly, the Sacred Power swirling in the space around me, and I could convert it, quite easily, into elements without the need of an Art. Although I had used an incantation when I healed Klein and Lisbeth’s Lives back there, I should have been able to achieve the same just with my imagination.

I was now flying by coating Asuna’s and my body with Aerial Elements to counteract air resistance while continuously discharging Aerial Elements behind us, much like a jet engine. We were several times faster than a dragon but it would still take us at least five minutes or so before we could catch up to Alice and Amayori, the dragon she was riding into the far south.

There were a mountain of words, apologies, and thanks I wanted to give Asuna during this respite. But no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t look to my right, look her in the eye as we flew side by side, hand in hand.

The reason was—

After I awoke, after all of the blood in my body seemed to transform to light as my sensation of invincibility ebbed away, every recent memory in my head reorganized itself and became distinct.

There was one problem: a scene from late last night.

Having positioned my supine body at the center of a tent, Asuna, Alice, Ronye, and Sortiliena-senpai were sitting in a circle around me. Each one of them was chatting about their memories of me… Actually, they were taking turns staging a one-act play of each and every single one of my misdeeds. How else could you describe it than a “living hell”?

—Kirito-senpai regularly snuck out of the Academy to buy bags of honey pies from the Deer Leap or fruit cookies from the Sunflower, and shared them with me and Tiese.

—Which reminds me, when I graduated he actually brought me some Zephyria flowers, which you normally only find in the western Empire. He told me that they took an entire year to bloom.

When Ronye and Sortiliena-senpai shared these anecdotes—

—When we were climbing the outer wall of the Cathedral, Kirito took a meat bun from his pocket and shared half of it with me. He heated it too quickly with a Thermal Element and nearly charred it.

—When I first met him, he gave me a piece of black bread with cream on it. And then we had blueberry tart, these huge roll cakes, and ate lots of different things together…

For some reason Alice and Asuna began responding with food-themed stories. Then ensued an endless conference about things I’ve done and said…

“Ugh…”

I involuntarily clutched my head and moaned as we flew at high speed.

“Aarrrrgh!”

At that moment my mind’s focus was muddled, and the generation and discharge of Aerial Elements ceased. Harsh wind resistance immediately besieged my entire body and we plunged into a nosedive.

Crap, I muttered, opening my coat into a pair of giant wings to rebalance myself. But before I had a moment’s breather—

“…Yaaaaaah!!”

Asuna was shrieking and dropping like a stone from above; I threw my arms as far apart as I could and caught her.

Having avoided imminent peril, I stared point-blank into her widened hazel eyes. Any apologies had to be said now.

“Asuna, it wasn’t like that!!”

—It was more of an excuse than an apology, but there was no turning back now.

“Absolutely nothing happened between me, Liena-senpai, Alice, and Ronye, really! I swear to Goddess Stacia, absolutely N-O-T-H-I-N-G!!”

Hearing my desperate explanation, Asuna’s face—

Broke into a warm smile. She took my cheeks in her slender hands, replying in a half-amazed, half-wistful voice:

“…You haven’t changed at all, Kirito-kun. They say you’ve been here for two years, and I thought you would have become… a bit more… mature……”

Suddenly, Asuna’s eyes were brimming with tears. Her lips trembled a bit, then let out something hoarse.

“Thank goodness… You’re Kirito-kun… You haven’t… changed at all… My… Kirito-kun…”

Her words dug their way deep into my chest, where something hot threatened to gush upwards, but I just managed to hold it back in my throat:

“… I’m… me. I can’t have changed.”

“Because… you’re almost like a god. Back there you instantly froze a whole entire army just like that… You fully healed 200 people all at once… and also, you can fly…”

All I could manage was a strained grin.

“I’m just a little more familiar with the workings of this world. As for flying, well, with a little practice you can do it too, Asuna.”

“…I don’t have to.”

“What?”

“I just want you to hold me like this while you fly.”

Asuna replied with a watery smile, then wrapped her arms around my back in a tight hug. I hugged her back, hard, and spoke again:

“Thank you, Asuna… I mean it. Even when you were so badly hurt, you still tried to protect the people of Underworld… It must have hurt so bad…”

Two years ago, when I was cut by a mountain goblin at the Mountain Range at the Edge, I truly understood for the first time how realistic the pain in this world was. It had only been a flesh wound on my left shoulder, but it was so painful that I almost couldn’t stand back up.

But Asuna had faced PoH’s army head-on, pulling through to the very last minute even with terrible wounds blanketing her body. Without Asuna’s struggle, Tiese, Ronye, and the rest of the Human Empire army would have been obliterated long ago.

“No… It wasn’t just me.”

Asuna said after listening to me, gently shaking her cheek sideways against mine.  

“Sinonon, Leafa-chan, Liz, Silica-chan, Klein-san, Agil-san… and the Sleeping Knights and everyone in ALO, all did their very best. Renri-san the Integrity Knight, the Guardians of the Human Empire army, Sortiniena-san, Ronye-san, Tiese-san, too…”

At this point, Asuna’s body tensed as if she had suddenly realized something.

I realized why before she even continued.

“…Oh right, Kirito-kun! The Knight Commander… Bercouli-san went after the enemy Emperor alone…”

“……”

I nodded silently, then slowly shook my head.

For a while now, I’d been aware that the imposing swordsmanship of the eldest Integrity Knight I’d never gotten the chance to talk directly with, Bercouli Synthesis One, was no longer present in this world.

Before the war began, we met for the first time through the clashing of imagination blades — «Incarnation blades». As much as my gradually awakening memory would allow, I believe that Bercouli could already feel his impending death back then.

As the final destination of his 300 year life, he chose to fight for Alice’s safety.

Comprehending the meaning behind my actions, Asuna tightened her arms around me, racking with tiny sobs. But she swallowed her weeping fast and asked:

“… Is Alice-san… safe…?”

“Yeah, she hasn’t been captured yet. She’s just about to reach the southern edge of the Dark Territory… the third system console. But something huge is chasing after her…”

“I see… Then we must protect her, for Bercouli-san.”

Asuna’s face slowly parted from mine, dampened with tears but filled with ironclad determination. I gave her a slow nod. Then there was a spark of doubt in her eyes.

“But, for now… Just for a little bit, just for a little bit longer, you’re mine and mine only, Kirito-kun.”

Her lips murmured as they grew closer and closer, and pressed against mine.

Beneath the otherworld’s crimson sky, my black wings fluttered gently as I shared a long, long kiss with Asuna.

At that moment, at long last, I understood why I had awoken in this world two years ago.

The last Monday of June in the real world.

When I was walking Asuna home, I was attacked by the third accomplice in the «Death Gun incident», Johnny Black, a leader of the red guild «Laughing Coffin». My memories broke off after he injected me with succinylcholine from a gun-shaped, high pressure syringe. I’d probably stopped breathing or suffered some sort of brain damage, so I was placed into an STL and Underworld for treatment.

By one way or another, PoH, the leader of Laughing Coffin, was among the band of people attacking the Ocean Turtle and now he was frozen into a tree on Dark Territory soil like a miniature Gigas Cedar. If the time was accelerated again before he got disconnected by force from outside, I don’t know how many weeks he would have to ensure in that blind deaf state, but no doubt it would deal quite a bit of damage to his sanity. He might even become like how I’ve been for this past half year. It felt very cruel, but didn’t seem like overkill to me.

That man had tried to kill Asuna… and the people who mean so much to me.

After many spellbinding minutes during which our existences seemed to fuse together, Asuna’s and my lips finally parted.

“It reminds me of back then…”

Asuna said, then quickly shut her mouth. I understood in an instant.

She was remembering the kiss we had shared under the setting sun, against a background of the crumbling floating castle, after the death game SAO had been completely cleared. That had been, indeed, a farewell kiss.

I smiled, and firmly tried to clear away her anxiety:

“Let’s go, then. Let’s beat Emperor Vector, rescue Alice, and return with everyone to the real world…”

But before I could finish that sentence.

I heard an urgent voice directly in my mind.

“Kirito-kun!! Kirigaya-kun!! Can you hear me?! Kirito-kun!!”

That rusty tone—

“Hey… is that you, Kikuoka-san? How did you contact me without a system console…”

“No time to explain! Something bad has happened!! The time acceleration rate… the FLA, those bastards…!!”

***

Brigg’s face was ruddy and unshaven as he inserted two metal wires into the keyhole and turned, while Critter looked on with some unease.

Leave the picking to me, he had volunteered gutsily, but what could only be the design of a time acceleration safety mechanism had resulted in a complete difference from any old cylinder lock. Brigg’s finger movements grew more violent as he cursed nonstop, his voice rising too.

Hans was standing behind him, gleefully staring at a watch on his left wrist:

“Riiight, that’s three miiinutes! Two more and you owe me fifty bucks!”

“Shut the fuck up! Two minutes is enough for me… to open this thing… and swim to Hawaii… and back…”

When the noise of the wire rotating inside the keyhole began to sound more like vandalism than lockpicking, Critter was ready to say “Let’s give it a rest.” But once those two starter betting against one another, there was no stopping them before one emerged triumphant.

“One minute leeeft. About time to get out your walleeet.”

“Holy shit!”

Brigg yelled suddenly, standing and throwing the snapped wire to the floor.

Finally giving up? Critter thought with a moment’s relief.

Without another word, the stubbled, red-faced soldier drew a giant sidearm from his holster and aimed it at the keyhole.

“Hey, wait…”

A roar. And another.

Everyone stared blankly as Brigg stuffed his pistol back into its holster, looked at Hans, then towards Critter, and shrugged.

“It’s open.”

Critter gaped at the new two inch hole in the control panel.

The blackness inside sparked two or three times, and then the frozen, angled control lever began to slowly tilt. It moved about five inches, then stopped again with a quiet clunk. Critter checked the monitor, but instead of seeing a number slightly above 1,200 like he had originally wanted — the upper limit was displayed in crisp numbers: ×5000.

“… F-Five thou……”

Just as Critter was instinctually calculating how much time one second in the real world converted to in Underworld — another dull clunk of metal.

The control lever, supposedly stopped at its upper limit, continued to fall downwards.

“What… the hell……”

Critter muttered, when before his eyes, the digits on the monitor exceeded 5000 — 10000…

—No, we’re still okay. The rate won’t actually change unless I press the confirmation button. We can still move the lever back where it was, nice and quiet, like nothing happened.

“Hey… Don’t touch it!! Nobody touch anything!!”

Critter gasped, motioning Hans and Brigg away from the console.

He inched towards the lever, cautiously reaching out his right hand.

Bang.

There was a small explosion before his hand could touch the lever.

The translucent protection cover over the red confirmation button in front of him was completely blown off.

A speaker cried an earsplitting alarm as the giant monitor installed into an entire wall of the main control room went bright red. A 15 minute countdown immediately appeared on the monitor and began decreasing with dizzying speed.

***

When he heard the alarm again, a sign that someone was tampering with the time acceleration for a second time, for a split-second Higa couldn’t help but try to sit up, only to wince from scorching pain.

“Higa-kun! I told you to take it…”

Dr. Koujiro rushed over and pressed her hands to Higa’s back, but just then—

The sub control room monitor went completely red.

“What… What’s going on?!”

Kikuoka screamed. Higa pushed up his upper body with help from Rinko’s hands, squinting as hard as he could from behind as the commander flew to the console.

A message in thick gothic font informed them that all three layers of security on the time acceleration mechanism had been fully disabled, and the entire Underworld was about to enter maximum acceleration phase.

“What’s……”

Lost for words, Higa could only pant, so Dr. Koujiro asked sharply in his stead:

“What’s the ‘maximum acceleration phase’?! Isn’t the FLA’s upper limit 1,200 times?!”

“…That’s the limit on people from the real world diving inside… the actual limit is 5,000 times if only Artificial Fluctlights are present…”

Higa replied almost automatically. The professor’s eyes widened even further.

“5,000?! You mean… one second here would be about 80 minutes inside… 18 seconds would be an entire day!!”

It was an impressive amount of mental calculation, but Higa and Kikuoka shook their heads in stiff unison.

“What? …Where am I wrong?”

“1,200 times is the safety limit we decided on when taking into account the «soul lifespan» of a real world human… 5,000 times is the limit of what can be observed in Underworld from outside… Neither is a hard limit…”

Higa desperately squeezed the words from his throat, which was so dry it seemed ready to catch fire. Dr. Koujiro’s hand jerked on his back.

“Th-Then… What in the world… is the hard limit…?”

“Well, as you know, Underworld is constructed and calculated with photons. The transmission speed of photons is theoretically limitless inside the Main Visualizer… meaning, the limit is determined by the equipped subordinate server architecture…”

“All right, just spit it out! How many times is the limit?!”

Higa turned his eyes from the monitor to Rinko’s face:

“In the maximum acceleration phase… the FLA rate is a hair above 5,000,000 times. The STLs connected by satellite from the Roppongi branch can’t support that kind of speed, so they should disconnect automatically… but as for Kirigaya-kun and Asuna-san, who are using the STLs in the Ocean Turtle…”

One minute in the real world — would be ten years in Underworld.

Probably completing the mental calculation in an instant, Rinko’s eyes stretched open as far as they would go, appearing to spasm slightly.

“Oh… my god… Quickly… Quickly, we need to get Asuna-san and Kirigaya-kun out of those STLs!”

The professor was just about to stand up before it was Higa’s turn to grab her arm.

“No, Rinko-san! Preliminary acceleration has already begun, if we drag them out of the machines now their Fluctlights will be damaged!”

“Then hurry up and start the disconnection procedure!”

“Why do you think I wanted to crawl down the cable duct?! The STLs can only be operated on from the main control room!”

Higa shouted, his voice raising too. Then he looked at the commander in front of the console.

Kikuoka seemed to already know what Higa was about to say.

“… Kiku-san. I’ll go down there again.”

At this, SFC Aki opened her mouth with a concerned expression, but quickly closed it. Then she walked over, murmuring “I’ll take out the catheter.”

The commander nodded bitterly:

“Understood. I’m coming too. I believe I’m still strong enough to carry you down the ladder.”

“No… No, lieutenant colonel!” came the shout of Captain Nakanishi, the leader of the escort team. His face greatly perturbed, he walked over with heavy bootfalls.

“It’s too dangerous, please allow me…”

“No, we still need you all to defend the stairs. We’ll be opening the partition again… We can’t use Ichiemom and Niemom can’t move.”

Those words caused everyone’s eyes to fall upon the left corner of the sub control room.

The humanoid silhouette supported by a structural frame akin to a coat hanger was not a real person, but a humanoid mechanical body researched on and developed by Higa as a part of Project Alicization: Electroactive Muscle Operative Machine Mark II, or «Niemom» for short. Mark I was damaged as bait during their partition-opening operation from before, and compared to that, this was much more slender; Niemom was designed from the start to carry a Light Cube.

Nothing was plugged into the port on its head at the moment, so it could not move in this state even if its power was turned on. In other words, it could not serve as a walking shield like Ichiemom had.

Looking away from the soulless robot, Kikuoka delivered a command, or rather an order to Nakanishi with a stern expression never seen before.

“In terms of danger, you all would be in more danger when you’re in a firefight with the enemy. But we need you to do it.”

Nakanishi tucked in his chin and saluted at his commander’s order.

“Sir, yes, sir!”

Higa listened to the JSDF officials’ conversation and raised a meek right hand. It was still painful, but his fingers could definitely move.

The countdown on the monitor still showed around 10 minutes before the maximum acceleration phase.

But no matter how he estimated it, opening the partition again, climbing down that long ladder, and initiating the STL disconnection procedure from the connector would take a total of 30 minutes.

That 20 minute difference equated to — 200 years in Underworld.

Exceeding the 150 year age of a human soul.

Worse still, people from the real world… were most likely unable to withstand a duration of — practically infinite — magnitude within Underworld…

Within Underworld…

“Ri… Right!!”

Higa yelped, waving his left hand complete with catheter at Kikuoka.

“Ki-Kiku-san!! When I was working on the STL just now, I secured a transmission channel with Kirito-kun! Please call him on Line C12!”

“B-But… what should I say…?”

“Tell him to get out!! Get to the system console within 10 minutes, or zero out his own HP and his STL will automatically begin the disconnection process!! But as soon as he enters the maximum phase the console will be useless, and dying then will be the worst-case scenario!! He’ll have to spend 200 years in sensory deprivation… Please just warn him especially of that!!”

***

“Two……”

Two hundred years?!

I barely swallowed the words before they left my mouth.

By now, Asuna was looking puzzled. She couldn’t hear Kikuoka’s voice.

“Listen to me, Kirito-kun: You have 10 minutes! In that time, you must reach the console from where you are and manually log out!! If you are unable to do so no matter what, you can exhaust all of your HP… but that way is full of uncertainties and extremely dangerous, because…”

Because there’s the risk of me spending 200 years in a death-like state.

I understood. Interrupting Kikuoka, I demanded:

“I got it, I’ll try to get out through the console! I’ll be bringing Alice of course, so prepare for that!”

“…If it’s not too much trouble. But right now, both of your escapes take priority over Alice’s safety. Listen to me: even though we can delete your memories after you log out, 200 years of this kind of time far exceeds the age of a human soul! The likelihood of a normal consciousness recovery is… equivalent to zero…”

Hearing Kikuoka’s pained voice—

I replied quietly.

“Don’t worry, we will return. Also, Kikuoka-san. Half a year ago… no, last night, I’m sorry I said such awful things to you.”

“It’s fine… We deserve the criticism. We’ve prepared bandages here for the beating you’ll give us when you get back. …I think Higa-kun’s ready, I need to go too.”

“Okay. See you in 10 minutes then, Kikuoka-san.”

And then the line cut off.

I kept flapping the hem of my coat to hover in midair as I gazed down at Asuna in my arms.

“… Kirito-kun, did Kikuoka-san contact you? Is… something wrong?”

I shook my head slowly, and replied.

“No… the time acceleration will start again in 10 minutes, so he wants us to get back as soon as possible.”

Asuna blinked a few times, smiled a little and nodded.

“Agreed, we really shouldn’t be staying here all day, for Alice-san’s sake. Come on, let’s go save her!”

“Yeah. I’m taking off again.”

Hugging Asuna tightly, I generated another heap of Aerial Elements. Green light immediately surged and encased us both.

To capture Alice, who had been advancing perpetually into the southern sky, and the enormous, aberrant presence pursuing her — I flew.