Sword Art Online - Volume 25 - Chapter 5

5

Thursday, October 1st.

The autumn sun shone down from a clear blue sky, brightening the left half of the classroom. The open windows ushered in a slight breeze carrying the sounds of the city outside, which in turn mixed with the sound of the students’ ceaseless styluses.

Long ago, before I knew who I really was, I felt excited about the arrival of October. I was allowed to request the two big presents I got each year, so I started thinking in August about what to get for my October 7th birthday. Sometimes I got my very first choice, and sometimes they nixed all the way through my third backup option, but regardless, I always counted down the days with anticipation.

But the year that I learned I wasn’t actually born as a member of the Kirigaya family, I stopped asking for presents. When Mom would ask what I wanted, I’d brush her off by saying, “Anything’s fine.” When she went to the trouble of picking out new sneakers or a backpack, I’d stick the gifts in my closet and refuse to use them. That attitude lasted until my second year of middle school, when I was trapped in SAO a month after my fourteenth birthday.

In November, two years later, I was freed from the death game. The day before my birthday last year, Mom and Suguha asked me what I wanted for my birthday. Even now, I could feel the stabbing pang of remorse that overtook me at that moment. At the time, I very nearly apologized for my childish attitude but realized it wasn’t something that should be done out of sheer momentum. So I considered their question carefully and replied, “Anything’s fine.” I believed that although my words were the same, they understood that the emotion behind those words couldn’t have been more different. Whatever the present was, I would treasure it for life. Not by preserving it on a shelf, but by actually using it…just as I used the bike they gave me to celebrate starting the semester at the returnee school in April.

“Next…Kirigaya, why don’t you read?”

“Y-yes, ma’am!” I said automatically, my attention pulled back to the class. I got to my feet.

Mrs. Yorita, the teacher of our required world history class, had explained during her introduction that she was born the year that President Kennedy was assassinated. Her tall and slender form did not look like it was sixty-three years old, however. Her lower, husky voice and masculine manner made her popular with the girls, but her primary skill was detecting mental distraction in her students, because she had a very strong track record of calling on people who weren’t fully concentrating on the lesson.

Sadly, my desk neighbors were not nice girls who would whisper the section to read under their breath for me, but guys who thought it was funny when you got called on by the teacher. I’d seen a number of my classmates get witheringly embarrassed in front of the class for this sort of thing already, so I made sure to keep half of my mind focused on the lesson at all times. I cleared my throat and began to read from the digital textbook on my tablet.

“…Meanwhile, in America, President Franklin Roosevelt, elected in 1932, pushed for his New Deal movement, which would strengthen governmental control over the banking industry…”

After the morning classes, Asuna quickly put away her tablet and left the classroom in a hurry, carrying the large insulated bag under her arm.

The bag was keeping five homemade sandwiches cool. She didn’t have enough time to make anything fancier than ham, cheese, and tomato; egg and broccoli; and olive and tuna, but she knew her friends would love them.

She offered to bring lunch for the group partially to repay everyone for their birthday surprise last night and partially so they could make good use of their valuable lunch break. Buying lunch at the crowded cafeteria would take at least ten minutes. But this way, they could spend a full forty minutes out of the fifty-minute lunch period on their strategy meeting.

The five-minute travel time to and from the meeting was because it was being held not in the cafeteria or the “secret garden,” but in the computing lab on the third floor of Building Two. It wasn’t the ideal location for a lunch, but secrecy was of the utmost importance today. There was still a greater-than-zero chance that one of those hundred ALO players compelled to join Mutasina’s army was a student at our school, and the last thing we wanted was for them to find out the details of the plan to fight them off.

To get to Building Two, Asuna had to go down from the third floor of Building One to the second floor, then cross the elevated walkway. She made haste along the way, looking for Lisbeth (Rika Shinozaki) and Argo (Tomo Hosaka) along the same route, but they must have gotten ahead of her while she was putting her tablet away and getting the insulated bag from her locker.

They’re both so impatient. She chuckled to herself, right as she was about to descend the stairs.

“Miss Yuuki,” said a voice, causing Asuna to stop.

She turned around, feeling slightly nervous, to see a girl wearing a uniform that did not belong to this school.

She wore a gray blazer with navy blue lapels. A pleated skirt so crisp that the folds were like knife blades. Shiny black hair, reserved features…It was the transfer student who had come to the returnee school just four days ago: Shikimi Kamura.

“Hello, Miss Kamura,” Asuna replied with a smile and a bow. Shikimi grinned and returned the greeting.

“Are you having lunch now? If it’s not a bother, would you mind if I joined you?”

“Um, well…”

Asuna had to think quickly about how to respond.

She couldn’t be absent from the lunch meeting. It was a crucial opportunity to sit face-to-face and discuss their plan, and if she didn’t bring her sandwiches, Kazuto and the others would go without any lunch.

On the other hand, she couldn’t invite Shikimi to the computing lab. The girl wouldn’t be a Unital Ring player—or any VRMMO, surely—so it would be very poor form to bring her along and then ignore her to talk about strategy. She’d have to decline for today.

Asuna sucked in the breath she would use to apologize and say she already had plans, but the air caught in her throat.

She’d noticed a pin on Shikimi’s uniform lapel, a stylized combination of the letter A and a rose. It was the insignia of Eterna Girls’ Academy, the private school Asuna had previously attended.

Shikimi claimed that she had transferred from Eterna to the returnee school because it would give her a topic for the English essay she’d need to attend college in America. The essay required a strong personal angle, so the choice to experience the returnee school, which was perhaps unique among all schools in the entire world, made a kind of sense. But the content of Shikimi’s essay would probably end up being about how she came into contact with a student who’d suffered mental trauma from the SAO Incident and how she helped them cope—or something like that. She might even write about this experience today. “I thought we were friends, but she refused to eat lunch with me. You can see how tall the defensive walls these SAO survivors build around their hearts are…”

It was a stupid thing to think, and she knew it. But she couldn’t stop the thoughts that came flooding out of her.

The Unital Ring incident was a truly astounding shake-up, but it was still just a game. Asuna was using a game as the reason to refuse to spend time with a transfer student who still had few friends at this school. When she was in Eterna Girls’ Academy’s middle school, before the SAO Incident, would she have made the same choice? No, she would have prioritized spending time with a new friend in real life over something in a game, no matter how impactful it was…

The actual amount of time that Asuna spent unable to respond couldn’t have been more than half a second. But it was enough for Shikimi to shrug, seeing directly through Asuna’s mind at her thoughts.

“I’m sorry to have bothered you. It was coming out of nowhere, wasn’t it?”

“Uh…no…”

“Don’t let it bother you. What about lunch tomorrow, instead?”

“…Yes, I’d love to,” Asuna replied. Shikimi beamed, then bowed again and stepped nimbly down the stairs.

Asuna waited until she had gone down to the landing and back around before starting downward herself. Everyone was surely at the computing lab already by now, but her legs felt heavy.

Why did talking with this girl make her feel so confused and conflicted? Shikimi was nothing less than gentle and polite, and nothing she did seemed malicious in any way. It had to be a problem with Asuna. There was something in Shikimi’s profile, as a student hoping to go from Eterna Girls’ Academy’s high school to a university overseas, that made her think, That could have been me.

Asuna had no regrets over the impulsive decision to put on her brother’s NerveGear helmet in the fall of her third year of middle school. She’d experienced the fear of death many times in Aincrad and gone through many hard and painful things, but there had been just as many fun and happy memories. If she hadn’t been trapped in SAO, she’d never have met Lisbeth, Argo, Yui, and Kirito.

She didn’t feel the tiniest bit of dissatisfaction over who she was now. Whatever the future held in store for her, she knew she could make her way directly through what lay ahead, as long as she had her connections to her friends, Yui, and Kirito.

And yet…why?

But this wasn’t the time to be asking that question. It might only be a game to Shikimi, but to Asuna, the Seed Nexus was another reality entirely. She had no choice but to win the battle tonight to ensure that they protected the log cabin that had played host to so many memories and got it back home to Alfheim at some point.

Once she reached the second floor of the school building, Asuna made her way through the foot traffic of students walking toward the cafeteria and rushed down the connecting hallway.

Welcome back; you’re late, Big Brother!

I opened the glass door to our house, expecting to hear Suguha’s voice as soon as I got inside.

But my sister wasn’t at the door. Her shoes weren’t in the lowered entryway, either, so I had gotten home first today, it seemed.

That was normal, though. Her commute time was only half of mine, but Suguha was a regular on the kendo team, so naturally she had practice after school. She’d been taking rest days and leaving early recently to ensure she got home before five o’clock, but as the vice captain of the team, she couldn’t skip out on the others like that all the time.

Fortunately, she seemed to be getting along with the rest of the team, as far as I could tell. But on the other hand, I’d never seen Suguha in her official capacity as a kendo team member; I felt my resolve to cheer her on at the newcomer competition next month renewed. I used the restroom, washed my hands and face at the sink, and headed to the kitchen. I’d bought three fruit puddings at a dessert shop on the way home, so I stuck two in the refrigerator and took the third to the table to eat. Ordinarily, I almost never bought snacks to eat for myself, but I needed all the energy I could get before our big battle in a few hours.

Argo hadn’t sent a warning from monitoring the social media accounts of Mutasina’s army members, so they hadn’t left the Stiss Ruins yet. Since there were students and workers in that group, they’d probably be leaving around eight o’clock, and if we counted three hours or so for travel, the fight should happen around eleven. I had to wonder what they would do if they attacked at that point and we weren’t there…But Mutasina would probably prefer to destroy an empty Ruis na Ríg, for all I knew.

That was a big question: Why did that witch want to crush us anyway? Was it simply because we were the ALO players who were the closest to the “land revealed by the heavenly light”? Or did she have another reason? I wanted to ask her myself, but because our victory was sealed by killing her, the only chance I would have to ask was if we lost the battle, but I survived. As a frontline damage dealer, losing usually meant being the first to die—so in any case, I doubted I’d have the chance to talk.

Once again, I heard Mutasina’s words at the Stiss Ruins ringing in my ears.

The darkness SAO gave birth to has only spread throughout the Seed Nexus and multiplied. Now those infinite worlds have coalesced into one. In Unital Ring, the darkness will be compressed again, and when its density surpasses its peak, something new will result…something even darker and deeper. And I want to see that.

I found it hard to take her words seriously, but it was true that there had been both light and darkness in SAO. If the links between Asuna, Lisbeth, Silica, Klein, Agil, Argo, me, and so many others were the light, then things like the PK guild Laughing Coffin were the malicious darkness.

And because Laughing Coffin had become a kind of legend, its followers—its cultish believers—could be found in all kinds of VRMMOs. The Seed Package allowed for PKing as a general rule, but killing another person was much harder to do, mentally speaking, in a full-dive environment. So if some today found it fascinating that a few people were killing players left and right in SAO, where death was permanent, then that might indeed represent the “darkness SAO gave birth to,” in my opinion.

When Mutasina prophesied that the darkness would be compressed in Unital Ring, what did that mean? That the multitudes of Seed VRMMO players arranged at the rim of this vast continent would fight each other harder and harder as they grew closer to the center of the world.

First players from the same world would fight one another, then they would grapple with players from adjacent worlds, with everyone killing each other until the winner reached the land revealed by the heavenly light: the final group…or perhaps final individual.

It reminded me of the legendary Chinese poison supposedly created by pitting various poisonous creatures against each other, until only the last survived with the most potent form of all. Hundreds of thousands of players converted over from other games, all dead, with only one winner standing tall in the end. Was that what Mutasina wanted? To absorb into herself that “something even darker and deeper,” and become “something new”…?

“…It’s just a game,” I muttered to myself, lifting the final spoonful to my mouth. The pudding cost a whole 350 yen per serving, and it was rich enough to be worth it; I focused on the flavor to reset my thoughts. Whoever set up the Unital Ring incident, the winner wasn’t suddenly going to develop superhuman powers. The statement in the announcement about “all shall be given” was probably just referring to in-game items or stats or, at most, some real money.

My reason for seeking out the land revealed by the heavenly light was different from Mutasina’s. I wanted to know who had done this thing, and I wanted to send the data for my character and my friends’ back to ALO, along with our log cabin. While combat with other players might be unavoidable, I had no intention of living out Mutasina’s prophecy. Yes, we’d wiped out Mocri’s and Schulz’s groups in the prior three days, but we’d also met Hyme’s group from Insectsite and made friends with them.

Of course, a big part of that was the fact that Hyme was Agil’s actual wife, but I wanted to keep working with other ALO players and, if possible, folks from other worlds as well. That was why we built Ruis na Ríg.

I got to my feet, washed out the glass pudding container in the kitchen, brushed my teeth at the sink, and headed upstairs to my room.

Once there, I changed into more comfortable clothes, then sent Suguha a text saying I’M DIVING IN FIRST; THERE’S PUDDING IN THE FRIDGE, and went to lie down on the bed. After a moment, I reached up to grab the AmuSphere, put it over my head, and with a breath said, “Link Start.”

The falling circle of rainbow light whisked my soul away to another world, where the biggest battle since being converted awaited me.