Alicization Dividing

by Reki Kawahara

  It just didn’t sit right with me. Normally when you got into the ultimate enemy’s stronghold—the final dungeon, if you will—the design and furnishings got fancier and more imposing. And just one floor below, the Morning Star Lookout had been extravagantly outfitted. So why would it suddenly get so cramped and unpleasant, right before the very end?

  “Is this…the senate you mentioned earlier…?” I murmured.

  “It should be,” she replied uncertainly. “It will be clear when we go in, at least.”

  She strode down the hallway, flicking her golden hair aside to blow the hesitation away. I was starting to think this might be a trap and was tempted to reach out and stop her. But then I thought better of it; the Axiom Church wouldn’t set up a trap for intruders this high in the tower. And even if they did, it would be a bold projection of its power, like those minion statues on the walls outside.

  The twenty-yard-long hallway did nothing to block our way. In moments, we reached the little door and shared a glance. As the up-close attacker, I grabbed the tiny doorknob to take the lead. It clicked open, no lock, and smoothly swung outward.

  There was a sudden gust of cold air from the darkness within, suggesting the thick presence of something. It was the kind of foreboding sensation I got when opening the door to a labyrinth boss chamber in Aincrad—and it made my spine crawl.

  I wasn’t going to beg Alice to take the lead, of course. I pulled the door all the way open, ducked my head, and looked inside. The hallway continued a short way through, then turned into what looked like an open space with hardly any light. All I could see was a faint, flickering purple light, though the source was unclear.

  The moment I moved through the doorway, I heard what sounded like mumbled chanting. I stopped to listen harder: It wasn’t just one voice. There were several, perhaps dozens, all in unison. Behind me, Alice murmured that it was sacred arts, and I realized she was right.

  I tensed, preparing for multiple attacks all at once, then realized I was mistaken. From what I could hear of the spell words, none included the “generate” command that was a virtual requisite of any attack art.

  If I was curious, Alice was downright proactive. “Let’s go in. If the senators are preparing some major unrelated sacred art, that suits our purposes. We can sneak through the darkness and get within sword range before they realize it.”

  “…Oh, good thinking. I’ll go first, like we said. Watch my back,” I whispered, quietly drawing my black sword. The Blue Rose Sword was only likely to weigh me down in combat, but I wasn’t going to just leave it on the ground there. Once Alice had her Osmanthus Blade drawn as well, I resumed sneaking forward.

  The closer we got to the dim chamber, the more I noticed a nasty smell in the cold air. It wasn’t a fetid odor like animals or blood, but more like the stink of rotting food. I tried to ignore it as I pressed my back to the wall of the corridor and peered into the dark space that I assumed was the senate.

  It was large—but more than that, it was tall.

  At its base, the chamber was a circle about twenty yards across. The curved walls stretched up about three floors to a ceiling hidden in darkness. The structure of it reminded me of Cardinal’s Great Library.

  There were no lamps in the room, only a flickering purple light coming from the walls here and there. There was also a series of many round objects placed at set intervals, but I couldn’t tell what they were.

  Then a new light source appeared very close to us. It was a square board glowing light purple—a Stacia Window. And the sphere within it was…

  A human head.

  Did that mean every last round object here in the cylindrical chamber was…

  “…A…h-head…?” I gasped.

  “No, they seem to have bodies,” Alice noted, as quietly as she could. “But it’s like they’re growing out of the walls…”

  I squinted as best I could. There were indeed necks and shoulders beneath the spheres, but that was all I could make out—their bodies were stuffed right into square boxes mounted into the walls.

  Based on the small size of the boxes, I had to assume their limbs were folded into an absolutely minimal space. It didn’t look comfortable in the least, but I couldn’t actually tell how the people in the boxes felt about it, because their faces showed zero emotion.

  Their pale, exposed heads had no traces of hair on their scalps, chins, or brows, and their beady, glassy eyes gazed at nothing but the Stacia Windows right before them. There were complex strings of letters appearing on the windows, at the end of which the box-people would intone, “System Call…Display Rebelling Index” with washed-out, bloodless lips.

  I froze. Their voices didn’t sound like they belonged to living people. “Are…are these the ones who…?!”

  “You’re familiar with them?!” Alice snapped. I glanced at her and nodded.

  “Yeah…There was this window that opened in the corner of the room right after we had that big fight at Swordcraft Academy two days ago. There was a white face watching me and Eugeo from it…and no doubt about it, it was one of these…”

  Alice paused to listen to the box-people chant, then frowned. “The sacred art they are reciting is completely unfamiliar to me…but it seems they have the realm divided into sections. I am not certain what all those numbers are supposed to mean, however.”

  “Numbers,” I repeated to myself, hearing a voice in my head.

  Among those hidden parameters is a value called the violation index. Administrator quickly discovered that she could utilize this value to sniff out people who were skeptical of the Taboo Index she had set forth…

  That had been from wise little Cardinal in the Great Library. This proved it: The Rebelling Index, as the box-people called it in the sacred tongue, was that very violation quotient she mentioned. All the dozens of “boxen” in this chamber were monitoring the values of every man, woman, and child in the world.

  If they detected abnormal values, they would open a portal and peer into the location, identifying and reporting the violator. Then whoever received that report would order an Integrity Knight to bring that individual to justice. That was how Eugeo, Alice, and I were brought to the cathedral in the first place…

  I was broken out of my stunned stupor by the sound of some kind of buzzer. Alice and I both tensed and raised our swords, but we hadn’t been spotted. The boxen stopped their chanting and all looked upward.

  Until now, I hadn’t noticed that, on the walls just over their heads, faucet-like objects jutted upward. The box-people all opened their mouths, and a thick brown liquid abruptly flowed out of the spigots. They caught the liquid in their gaping mouths and swallowed it mechanically. Some of the liquid spilled out of their lips, staining necks and collarbones. That was likely the source of the stench.

  Soon the buzzer sounded again, and that was the end of the liquid feeding. Their faces snapped forward again, and the chanting resumed: System Call…System Call…

  This is no way to treat human beings.

  In fact, even cattle and sheep shouldn’t have been treated this way, I recognized with a surge of anger pulsing up from my gut. I clenched my teeth.

  Alice grunted, “Are they…the senators who help the Axiom Church rule over the human realm…?”

  I looked over to see that her one visible eye was shining with fury. I hadn’t put that idea together, but it seemed accurate now. All of these dozens of people stuffed in boxes were the senators, the high administrative officers of the Axiom Church.

  “And was it…the pontifex who created what I am seeing now?” she continued.

  “I reckon it was,” I said. “I bet she found people from all over the realm who were weak in combat skills but excellent in sacred arts, then stole their thoughts and emotions and turned them into this senatorial security system…”

  System was right. These weren’t people; they were devices. Their job was to maintain perfect peace—or stagnation—across the realm under the Axiom Church’s rule. Even
the Integrity Knights, with their most precious memories stolen, didn’t suffer such an ignoble fate. It was atop centuries of this sacrifice that Administrator had reigned.

  Alice slowly hung her head, until her dangling hair hid her expression.

  “…This is unforgivable.”

  The Osmanthus Blade in her right hand rang softly, as though channeling its master’s rage.

  “No matter the crime, these are still human beings. But she did more than steal their memories—she removed the very intelligence and emotion that makes them human, stuffed them into these cages, and now feeds them worse than beasts…There can be no honor or justice here.”

  She raised her head to a noble tilt and strode willfully into the chamber. I rushed after her.

  The senators’ eyes did not move from their Stacia Windows, even with the shining presence of a beautiful lady knight in the darkness. She walked to her left and stood before one of the boxes. I watched the pale face of the senator over her shoulder.

  Up close, there was no way to tell even a gender, much less an age. The endless period of captivity in this lightless prison had robbed all traces of humanity.

  Alice lifted the Osmanthus Blade. I thought she was going to destroy the box at first, but instead she rested the tip right around the location of where the senator’s heart would be. I gasped and hissed, “Alice!”

  “Wouldn’t it be a mercy…to end this life?”

  I couldn’t answer.

  Even if we returned their memory fragments—assuming such things had even been saved—it seemed impossible that it would return them to their former selves. I had to assume that the senators’ fluctlights had been broken beyond repair, twisted into something unrecognizable and wrong.

  But even then, perhaps Cardinal or even Administrator herself could grant them some wish aside from death. It was this thought that made me reach out for her shoulder guard to stop her.

  But just as I did, a strange sound from farther into the chamber caused us to freeze.

  “Aaah…Aaaaah!”

  It was a high-pitched, grating screech.

  “Aaah, oh my, ohhh, Your Holiness, what a waste…Ohhhh, ahhh, you musn’t, aaah, ooooh!!” howled the bizarre voice. Alice and I shared a suspicious look.

  I didn’t recognize it. It didn’t sound young, but it didn’t sound elderly, either. All I could tell from its voice was that it seemed to be in the throes of some kind of maniacal excitement.

  Her anger temporarily forgotten, Alice lowered her sword and stared in the direction of the sound. The screeching voice was coming from another hallway in the wall, just like the one we came through but deeper inside the cylindrical room.

  “…”

  Alice pointed toward the hallway with her sword, motioning me on. I nodded, and we began to lurk toward it.

  There were no pillars or furniture of any kind in the wide-open chamber, so crossing it was mildly terrifying, but none of the dozens of senators along the walls paid us any mind or seemed capable of recognizing our presence at all. Their entire world was the system window in front and the food spigot overhead, and that was it. I remembered feeling twinges of pity at the lives of the basement jailer and the girl controlling the elevated platform, but the word pity on its own was entirely inadequate to describe the plight of these creatures.

  As for whoever was moaning and screeching at the top of their lungs right near this dehumanizing place, I couldn’t begin to fathom the mindset. Whoever it was, I couldn’t imagine them being an ally of any kind.

  Alice felt so, too, and there was a different kind of anger now creeping over her pale face. She crossed the chamber on a straight line and peered around the side of the corridor, while I stole a look over her shoulder.

  At the end of the similarly cramped hallway was another large room, albeit much smaller than the circular chamber. The light inside was soft but bright enough to make out its contents.

  And they were absolutely bizarre.

  Every last fixture of the room shone in garish gold, from cabinets and beds to little round chairs and storage boxes, all reflecting the light in equal measure. Even from this distance, I could feel it penetrating my eyeballs to the back of my head.

  A plethora of toys in every size was scattered all over—in some cases spilling out of—this furniture. Most were stuffed animals in bold primary colors. There were dolls with button eyes and yarn hair, familiar animals like pets and livestock, even some hideous monsters I couldn’t begin to identify, heaped into piles all over the floor and beds. There were building blocks, a wooden horse, instruments—like the entire stock from the District Five toy maker had been dumped here.

  And sitting half-buried in them, facing away from us, was the voice’s owner.

  “Hoooooo!! Hooooooo!!” it screamed, over and over. This figure, too, had a bizarre appearance.

  It was round, almost a perfect sphere of a torso, with a round head on top, like a snowman. But rather than being white, the body was clad in a clown’s outfit, with the right half bright red, and the left blue. The short-armed sleeves had red-and-blue stripes, as well. It was making my eyes hurt.

  The round head was completely white, and from the rear it looked no different from the senators’, except that the skin was oily and shiny. Resting atop the head was a golden cap the same shade as all the furniture.

  I leaned over Alice’s ear and whispered, “Is that the prime senator…?”

  “Yes, it’s Chudelkin,” she whispered back, but with an audible loathing. I stared at the clown’s back again.

  The prime senator was a kind of counterpart to Bercouli the commander of the knights, the greatest caster of sacred arts in the Axiom Church and one of its chief officers. And yet, he seemed totally defenseless. Whatever was in his hands, it had his entire attention.

  From what I could make out beyond his very round back, Chudelkin was gazing into a large crystal ball. With each flash of color inside, he flopped and kicked his little legs and shrieked, “Haaa! Hohhh!”

  I’d been expecting a tense and uncertain lead-up to a spectacular battle, like with Deusolbert and Fanatio, so I had no idea how to react to this. But while I wasn’t sure how to proceed, Alice had no such hesitation. She raced toward him, not even bothering to sneak.

  But her feet hit the ground only five times. She easily brushed me off and raced like a golden gust into the toy room, and by the time Chudelkin’s fat head started to turn, she already had the frilly collar of his clown outfit clutched in her fist.

  “Hooooo?!” the round object howled. Alice yanked him out of the sea of plushies and held him high. At last, I caught up to her and, glancing around the entire room, looked for any sign of Eugeo—but wherever Chudelkin had brought my partner after the Great Bath, it wasn’t here. Disappointed, I turned back to the middle, where the crystal ball that had so enraptured the strange little man caught my eye.

  A somewhat three-dimensional image wreathed in swirling light was projected in the center of the large glass ball, which was about a foot and a half across. It displayed a girl sprawled on her side atop lustrous bedsheets. Her face was hidden behind long silver hair, but it was clear from a glance that she wasn’t wearing a stitch of clothing.

  Both disappointed and fulfilled that this was what Chudelkin had been exclaiming over, I then noticed that there seemed to be someone else with the girl. I tried to lean in for a closer look, but the spell vanished, the images inside the ball abruptly flashing into whiteness.

  Alice had no interest in the crystal ball to begin with. With her free hand, she thrust the tip of her sword toward the dangling man and threatened, “If you try to start chanting an art, I’ll cut your tongue out from the root.”

  The little man clamped his mouth shut before any complaints could arise. Given that all sacred arts in the Underworld had to begin with the System Call prefix, the caster was essentially at our mercy now. Still, I paid close attention to his stumpy arms for any movement and glanced up quickly to get a view of Prime S
enator Chudelkin.

  I couldn’t imagine a more enigmatic human face. His bright-red lips dominated the lower half of his round face, with a large bulb of a nose, and eyes and brows as curved as an iconic smiley face.

  Those beady eyes were bulging now, though, the small, dark pupils jittering as they stared right at Alice. Eventually he relaxed his heavy lips from their trumpeter’s sour pucker and screeched in tones of rusted metal, “You…Number Thirty…What are you doing here? You fell out of the tower with the other rebel and plummeted to your death!”

  “Don’t call me by a number! My name is Alice—and I am not Thirty any longer,” she snapped, her voice freezing air. Chudelkin’s greasy face twitched, and for the first time, he looked at me. His crescent-shaped eyes bulged out to half-moons, and he gurgled a series of gasps.

  “You…Why—what is this?! Number Thir…Alice, why do you not attack this boy?! He is a rebel against the Church…an agent of the Dark Territory, as I warned you!!”

  “He is indeed a rebel. But he is no soldier of the dark lands. He is just like me.”

  “Wha…? Wha…?”

  Chudelkin’s stumpy arms and legs flopped around in midair like the toys that filled the room. “You—you would dare to rebel against us, you little piece of shit!!”

  His round white head instantly turned beet red, and his scream reached an even higher register than before, the sword pointed at his throat entirely forgotten.

  “You Integrity Knights are nothing but mindless puppets!! You don’t move until I command you to move!! And now you have the gall to rebel against our glorious leader, my lady Administrator herself?!”

  Alice snapped her head to the side to avoid the spittle flying from Chudelkin’s apoplectic lips, but she did not otherwise react to his insults. “It was the Axiom Church that turned us into puppets,” she stated coldly. “The Synthesis Ritual blocked our memories, instilled loyalty into us by force, and made us believe the lie that we were knights summoned to earth from Heaven.”