The exertion of my wild throw hurtled me off the hook I had been balancing on. If Alice didn’t hold firm up on the ledge to support my weight, we’d both plunge off the side of the building.
Thankfully, the Integrity Knight sensed what needed to be done: She grabbed the chain with both hands and dug in her feet, although the first brief moment of weightlessness sent a shiver down my back.
“Why…youuuuuu!!” she raged, pulling as hard as she could. Just as Alice had, I flew through the air, and though the impact of my back slamming against the marble wall knocked the breath from my lungs, I’d never been as relieved as when I felt the terrace floor under my feet. I could’ve lain there on the flat surface forever, until Alice kicked me in the ribs.
“Wh-what in the world were you thinking, you madman?!”
“I didn’t have a better choice to…We can talk later! Here they come!”
I drew my weapon again and pointed the tip at the gargoyle trio rising toward us. With what little time we had before combat resumed, I looked left and right to get a grasp of the arena.
The high-wire circus act we’d executed to get up there granted us a ledge about three feet wide around the building. There was no decoration, just flat, simple marble jutting horizontally out of the tower wall. In fact, it literally served as a shelf, and it occurred to me that this was just meant to be a resting place for the gargoyles.
Since Alice hadn’t known about the terrace, I maintained hope that there might be some special door or window along the wall nearby, but sadly, there was nothing. The only features in sight were the other monstrous statues that hadn’t come to life yet, lined up all the way down to the corners of the building. It was a horrifying thing to see, but fortunately the only ones currently active were the three flying up toward us.
With her confidence returned from being on solid ground, Alice slid her Osmanthus Blade from its sheath. But that hadn’t solved all her questions. “Yes, I’m sure of it,” she rasped. “But why…would they be here…?”
The gargoyles were back on our level again, but they were keeping their distance, wary of our weapons. Without taking my eyes off the hovering creatures, I asked Alice, “What has been bothering you? Do you know something about those monsters?”
“…Yes…I do,” she replied, to my surprise. “They’re wicked beasts that serve the evil sorcerers of the Dark Territory that created them. We know them to be called minions. It is a word in the sacred tongue that means follower or subordinate.”
“Minions…Well, I can tell they’re from the Dark Territory based on their looks—but why would they be lined up on the walls of the holiest place in the world?”
“That’s what I want to know!” Alice grunted. She bit her lip. “Obviously, they should not be here. It’s inconceivable that these minions would cross the End Mountains without attracting notice, converge on Centoria, only to fly this high and land on Central Cathedral itself. And…”
“And it’s completely impossible that someone powerful within the Church might have intentionally placed them there…?” I asked, filling in the blank. Alice shot me a nasty look but did not offer a rebuttal.
I looked at the gargoyles hovering close by and asked, “Just tell me one thing. Are those minions intelligent? Do they understand human words?”
Alice shook her head. “That would truly be impossible. Minions are not living things like goblins or orcs. They are agents without souls, created by sorcerers who worship the god of darkness, Vecta. The only things they understand are a few simple commands from their master.”
“…Ah,” I said, breathing a secret sigh of relief. I knew that I was overlooking the present danger, but I still couldn’t help but feel resistance at the thought of killing a being with the same kind of fluctlight as a human.
Cardinal had told me that babies were born only to men and women whose marriages had been ratified by the Axiom Church—probably because they had the particular system command that executed it. The denizens of the Dark Territory had to work the same way. Therefore, the minions generated by dark arts would run on the same program code as wild animals, rather than artificial fluctlights.
With that in mind, the hostility I sensed from those insectoid eyes had the same kind of digital fakeness that I’d experienced with so many monsters in the SAO days. Something in their routine switched from hang back to attack, and they beat their wings and rose in unison.
“Here they come!” I shouted, holding up my sword. The minion with the golden rod stuck in its chest swooped toward me first, thanks to the accumulated hate value.
This time, it started by swiping at me with its claws rather than its tail. It wasn’t particularly fast, but it’d been so long since I’d fought a monster that it was hard to judge the distances involved. I was focused on blocking the claws, waiting for a good opening to strike, when, out of the corner of my eye, I caught sight of the other two descending on Alice.
“Watch out—the other two are going for you!” I warned.
“Who in the world do you think I am?” she snapped, holding the Osmanthus Blade at her left side.
With a tremendous slice, the golden blade flashed outward, practically lighting up the night. It wasn’t a feint or a combination attack, just a single, medium-height slash: In the Aincrad style, it would be known as Horizontal. But it was so fast and devastating that I could feel a subconscious cold sweat break out on my skin from standing next to it. The utter perfection of this single attack had me entirely overmatched, with no room for defense or evasion, in our battle on the eightieth floor. My years of VRMMO life had turned me into a permanent proponent of combination attacks, but her single attack had absolutely crushed that conviction.
Alice paused at the end of her swing, and the four arms of the minions toppled off. Even their trunks, which were well out of her sword range, silently separated across the chest.
The monsters toppled without even a death scream, filthy black blood spurting from the clean-cut stumps. Not a single drop so much as touched Alice, of course. She straightened up, quite matter-of-fact, and looked over at me as I stood there struggling with defense.
“Do you need any help?”
“…N-no, I’ll manage,” I protested. I’d seen all of the minions’ attacks now and sidestepped a claw-and-tail combination attack. Before the monster could pull away to a safe distance, I executed a familiar combo of my own.
For a long time, I found it mysterious that the Underworld had the same sword-skills concept as SAO. After two years of internal debate, I still hadn’t arrived at a completely satisfying answer. Perhaps the Rath engineers utilized SAO’s Seed platform to build the foundation of their virtual world, but as far as I knew, The Seed didn’t actually have the sword-skills function built in. If it did, I would’ve been able to use sword skills when I converted to Gun Gale Online.
Perhaps wise Cardinal in her hidden library knew the truth, but I didn’t ask her when I had the chance. Cardinal knew that she and all other Underworldians were living in an experiment designed by Rath, a reality she grappled with deeply. I couldn’t bring myself to make her confront the fact that everything she knew was a kind of artifice. And at this point, the reason that sword skills existed here wasn’t that important. As long as they worked properly and were tools I could use, that was all that mattered.
The sword in my hand glowed blue and engaged in the four-part attack Horizontal Square.
“Rrraaaahh!” I bellowed. My sword lopped off the minion’s arms and tail, then severed it clean across the chest with the final swipe, not that I was trying to compete with Alice. The momentum of the attack nearly took me off the ledge, but I managed to hold still in time, watching the pieces of the monster fall separately through the clouds below.
I figured that if the pieces didn’t evaporate into thin air during the fall, some monk wandering the cathedral grounds below would eventually get a real scare.
“Ooooh,” Alice murmured with the approval of a teacher observing her p
upil’s exhibition. I swiped my blade left and right before returning it to the sheath at my side—I’d have preferred to stash it over my back, but there were no shoulder harnesses in the armory—and looked at her sidelong. “What?”
“Nothing. It was a rather odd skill—that is all. I daresay you could attract quite a crowd if you exhibited it on a stage during the summer solstice festival.”
“Gee, thanks.”
I had to chuckle to myself from being with such a sardonic knight. Then a thought manifested, and I asked, “Have you ever even seen Centoria’s solstice festival? If anything, it’s a holiday for the common people. At Swordcraft Academy, hardly any of the upper noble children went to it…”
There were exceptions to the rule, of course; Sortiliena was a noble, and she looked forward to the festival every year, I recalled fondly.
Alice snorted. “Do not take me for one of those nobles with their airs. Of course…I…have…,” she protested, before trailing off prematurely.
Her mouth was hanging open, her brow knitted in confusion, searching for some answer. She lifted her bare left hand and pressed her fingertips to her smooth forehead. Then she shook her head several times and mumbled, “No…One of the monks told me…there was such a festival. Integrity Knights are forbidden…from mingling with the common folk…outside of duty…”
“…”
That made sense. The Integrity Knights believed they were summoned from Heaven by their pontifex, but that wasn’t true. Administrator brought human beings who excelled in wisdom or strength to the cathedral and performed a Synthesis Ritual that locked their memories away and turned them into knights. Therefore, if any knights wandered around the cities below, they might run across their former family, leading to chaos.
Alice was number thirty, making her the second-newest knight after Eldrie Synthesis Thirty-One, who’d been converted this spring. Logic dictated that she’d probably been synthesized within the past year as well, and yet she’d been taken from Rulid eight years ago—leaving a blank period of seven years.
What kind of life had Alice lived here during that time? Was she learning sacred arts as an apprentice sister? Did Administrator have her frozen as a prisoner the whole time?
Perhaps she had actually visited Centoria’s summer solstice festival before being turned into a knight. Maybe that little scrap of conversation was peeling away at an old memory hidden behind her memory block…
If I kept asking her little questions about the solstice festival, perhaps I could cause her Piety Module to eject, the way it had with Eldrie. I opened my mouth to speak, only to quickly clamp it shut.
Cardinal had said it would take more than just removing the Piety Module from Alice the Knight to turn her back into Eugeo’s friend Alice Zuberg. I needed the fragment of her “most precious memory,” which Administrator had removed entirely. So if I removed Alice’s module now, it would cause her to go entirely unconscious. I didn’t want to do that, especially when there was no saying when the next enemy might attack.
And for one thing, Alice hadn’t even blinked when she ran into Eugeo, her childhood friend for years back in Rulid. That indicated the comprehensiveness of her memory block. It was unlikely that a minor topic like the festival would dislodge the module, and it would probably backfire by making her more suspicious of me.
She watched me mulling this over, a questioning look on her face, then switched gears and said, “Minion blood brings disease with it. We must clean it off.”
“Hmm? Oh…”
Alice pointed at me, and for the first time, I realized that a few drops of the monster’s blood had landed on my left cheek. I was going to wipe off the foul-smelling liquid with my sleeve when she snapped, “Don’t do that!”
Stunned, I had to wonder how many years it had been since someone scolded me that way.
“Ugh, why must all men be this way?” she lamented. “Don’t you at least have a hand towel of some kind?”
I stuffed my hands into my trouser pockets. The right one was empty, and the left was stuffed with things that weren’t a handkerchief. I had to sheepishly admit, “I don’t have one…”
“…Forget it. Use this,” she said, producing a white handkerchief from somewhere in her skirt and handing it to me with a look of disgust.
If she was going to treat me like a little boy, I might as well lift up her skirt and rub my cheeks on it, but I realized she could easily kill me for that. Instead, I gratefully accepted the lace-edged kerchief and carefully wiped my cheek. It took the minion’s blood clean off, as if the fabric had some sacred art of cleansing cast upon it.
“Thank you very much,” I said, resisting the urge to call her teacher. I tried to hand back the cloth, but she turned her head away and said, “You will clean that before you return it, or I will cut you in two.”
Dark days ahead. What could I possibly say to someone like this to avoid combat once we’re back inside the tower, so that I can reunite with Eugeo? I looked around, imagining my partner climbing the stairs inside. By then, the light was totally gone from the sky, replaced by twinkling stars. We’d defeated the minions, but there was no way to generate new climbing hooks until the moon rose and gave us its meager resources.
I stuck Alice’s handkerchief in my pocket and examined the terrace. As long as we didn’t get any closer to them, it seemed that the minion statues would remain in stone form along the wall. If I rushed up to it and swung my sword at a vital spot before it could fully transform into flesh, I could probably beat it, but there was nothing to be gained by exposing myself to that danger.
We’d just have to wait here for the next few hours while the moon rose. I was perfectly happy to sit down and rest for a while, but I wasn’t sure that I could avoid angering Alice for that entire time. I decided to hold my tongue until I could think of a way to improve the mood of the testy Integrity Knight.
CHAPTER TEN
BERCOULI THE INTEGRITY KNIGHT COMMANDER, MAY 380 HE
It’s been so long, I’ve forgotten what being alone is like, Eugeo thought as he climbed the long stairs.
Since that summer day eight years ago when he’d watched as Alice was chained to a dragon’s leg and taken away, Eugeo had lived a life consumed by swinging his ax in the woods, with his eyes, ears, and heart effectively closed off from the world. Everyone in the village, including his family, refused to discuss the Integrity Knight’s arrest of the village elder’s daughter, as though even acknowledging it was a taboo of its own. In fact, they’d even begun to shun Eugeo for having been close to her in the first place.
But just as the villagers avoided him, so did Eugeo avoid others, as well as his own memories of the incident. Unable to admit his weakness and cowardice, he descended into the murky swamp of resignation, hoping to ignore both his past and future.
But then, two years ago, a boy who wandered into the forest without a single possession to his name had found Eugeo and dragged him out of that bottomless swamp. They defeated a band of goblins together and cut down the Gigas Cedar, and the boy helped give Eugeo confidence and a purpose.
Throughout the journey from Rulid, through the town of Zakkaria, and at last to Centoria, where they trained at Swordcraft Academy, Kirito had always been at his side. They had even made their way into the Axiom Church’s Central Cathedral—though not the way they had originally planned—and had overcome numerous obstacles to reach high into the tower. It was all because Eugeo’s black-haired partner was there, guiding and encouraging him.
But just before they were going to reach the final floor, Kirito had vanished. In the midst of a terrible battle against Alice Synthesis Thirty, an Integrity Knight created by implanting false memories into his childhood friend, Alice Zuberg, Kirito and Alice’s Perfect Weapon Control arts intertwined abnormally, blowing a hole in an exterior wall.
The two combatants were instantly sucked outside, and the hole repaired itself soon after. Eugeo did everything he could to punch another hole in the wall, but nothing
his Blue Rose Sword or his most powerful flame-based attack arts could do would affect the marble.
Most likely the walls were under a permanent kind of self-repairing art. As far as Eugeo knew, that would be an enormously high-level skill, the first line of which he couldn’t even imagine. So even if he managed to damage the wall at great pains, it would seal itself back up just as quickly. The only reason that hole had opened in the first place must have been because the power created by the mixture of Kirito’s and Alice’s arts had surpassed anything the caster of the wall-enhancing spell could have imagined.
On the other hand, if they had enough power to create the hole, they would surely find a way to survive being sucked through the wall. In particular, Kirito’s transcendent ability to react to sudden circumstances was surely greater than even the Integrity Knights’. He would find a way to stop their fall. He was probably climbing that wall from the outside even now. And that meant Alice was, too.
In her current state, Alice was a steadfast protector of the Axiom Church, so it was hard to imagine her helping Kirito, but if he could climb the wall, she would at least follow. If Eugeo could meet up with him above, they’d have another chance to use the dagger Cardinal had given them.
With that thought in mind, Eugeo passed through the door on the south end of the Cloudtop Garden, the eightieth floor of the cathedral, and proceeded up the stairs. He had to fight off the feeling of loneliness and futility that crept up on him once he was alone.
He started off slow and cautious, ready for an attack at any moment, but there was no sign of anyone else on the eighty-first or eighty-second floors. To get to that point, they’d defeated nine knights in total: Eldrie with his Frostscale Whip, Deusolbert with his Conflagration Bow, the apprentices Fizel and Linel, Fanatio of the Heaven-Piercing Blade, and the Four Whirling Blades who followed her. But there was still the commander of the knights and someone called the prime senator left to deal with, not to mention Administrator herself.
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