She wrapped the restraints around them as they stood at attention. The leather straps went around their arms, chest, and waist, and soon they were completely immobilized. She then returned to her dragon, still holding the chains connected to their backs, and fixed one chain to each of the large armor clasps on the beast’s powerful haunches. Kirito was tied to the dragon’s right leg and Eugeo to the left.
The Integrity Knight named Deusolbert had tied Alice to his dragon’s leg the same way. But it was a day’s flight from Rulid all the way to Centoria. If she was just dangling in thin air the entire time, it was hard to imagine a more terrifying, strenuous experience for an eleven-year-old.
Somehow, Alice was now an Integrity Knight herself, tying Eugeo to her dragon just as she had once been tied. The lack of any hesitation in her actions forced Eugeo to face the truth: Alice the knight was both Alice Zuberg and a different person entirely. Some great and terrible power had changed her.
Like Kirito said, they might be able to learn the secret behind this change if they went to Central Cathedral. But the real question was, could they actually turn Alice back?
And even more pressing—what if the same thing happened to him? What if he forgot everything and turned into someone else? What if he forgot his life in Rulid, the journey to Centoria…even his memories at the academy…?
For a moment, he was plunged into deep fear and panic.
Then a pair of footsteps approached from behind, and both he and Kirito turned to look.
Stumbling forward, uncertain and yet insistent, was a pair of primary trainees in their gray uniforms: Tiese Schtrinen with her long red hair and Ronie Arabel with her brown hair cut short.
The hesitance of their footsteps was actually due to the objects they were carrying. Tiese had a longsword in a white leather sheath, while Ronie carried a similar weapon in black. It was clear at a glance that these were their personal swords, which had been left behind in Raios’s bedroom.
Tiese’s palms were split and bloodied where they held the sheath, and it was no wonder—even Eugeo and Kirito had to steel themselves to lift the swords, they were so heavy.
“Tiese…”
“Ronie!”
The girls responded with faint smiles through the pain. But it also drew the attention of Alice, who left the dragon’s side to examine the girls. Eugeo recalled the stinging pain of the blow on his still-numb cheek, and he shouted, “No, Tiese! Don’t come closer!”
But the trainees did not stop. They crossed the last ten mels of distance, blood dripping on the cobblestones, then fell to their knees in front of Alice.
After a lot of heavy breathing, Tiese was first to look up, face resolute, and said, “L-Lady Knight…we beg of you!”
Ronie followed in a quavering voice. “We ask your permission…to return their swords!”
Alice stared down at the girls until, eventually, she bobbed her head. “Very well. However, weapons cannot be given to the guilty. I will take them. If you wish to speak to them, you will have one minute.”
She took the Blue Rose Sword in her right hand and the black sword in her left and easily lifted them up, apparently not feeling the weight whatsoever, then returned to the dragon and stashed the weapons in the storage bag from which she had pulled the restraints.
Tiese and Ronie clasped their bloodied hands before their chests, relief seeming to numb them to any pain. They unsteadily got to their feet and rushed to their tutors’ sides.
“…Eugeo…”
Tiese leaned close, her red eyes puffy from crying. It took all of Eugeo’s willpower to meet her gaze, rather than look away.
He had cut off Humbert’s arm right in front of them last night. When the same fate befell Raios, he screeched in an unearthly manner before perishing. Tiese and Ronie were physically unharmed by the experience, but the mental shock and trauma had to be great.
To her, Eugeo was no longer a trustworthy mentor, but a criminal who had broken the Taboo Index. He was locked in chains, the only just fate for someone guilty of his sins.
But then—
Fat tears welled up in Tiese’s maple-red eyes and spilled down her cheeks.
“Eugeo…I’m so sorry…This is…all my fault,” she squeaked, clenching her hands. “I’m sorry…If only I hadn’t…been so stupid…”
“No…that’s not true,” Eugeo said, stunned. “You did nothing wrong, Tiese…In fact, what you did for your friend was right. All of this…is my fault. You have nothing to apologize for.”
She stared back into his eyes, so straightforwardly that she seemed to glimpse the very depths of his soul, and put on a brave smile.
“Next time,” the young page said, quavering but resolute, “next time I will save you. I…I’ll work my hardest, become an Integrity Knight, and come save you…so just be patient. Wait for me. I swear…I swear…”
A sob stuck the words in her throat. Eugeo could do nothing but nod.
On the other side of the dragon, Ronie and Kirito finished a similarly short conversation. She put a small package into Kirito’s chained hands and tearfully said, “This is…a lunch for you. If you get hungry, please eat…”
Whatever Kirito said in reply was drowned out by the sound of the dragon’s wings flapping.
“It is time. Step away,” Alice commanded from the saddle. She whipped the reins, and the dragon stood. The chains pulled upward and left Eugeo nearly in the air.
Tiese and Ronie took a few steps backward, tears tumbling from their eyes. The silver wings beat the air, whipping the girls’ hair around.
The dragon took a few rumbling steps to pick up speed. The girls sprinted after them, but soon they stumbled and dropped to all fours. Then the beast’s powerful legs launched off the surface and into the air.
As it ascended in a spiral, Tiese and Ronie grew smaller and smaller. Eventually they disappeared into the gray blur of the cobblestones, and even the entirety of the North Centoria Imperial Swordcraft Academy began to fade.
The dragon, Integrity Knight on its back and criminals hanging from its legs, started a direct flight to the Axiom Church’s towering Central Cathedral at the heart of everything.
INTERLUDE III
In the middle of the massive Ocean Turtle marine research facility was a vertical shaft sixty feet across and over three hundred feet deep.
This Main Shaft, which was reinforced with titanium alloy, both supported the ship’s various floors and protected its central functions. In addition to the ship’s control and propulsion systems, it housed the mysterious Rath’s many advanced machines.
There were four Soul Translators (STLs)—incredible full-dive machines capable of reading and writing the human soul—and, connected to them, one Lightcube Cluster that served as their mainframe.
The cluster was installed right in the center of the shaft. STL Units Two and Three were in the Lower Shaft, while Units Four and Five were in the Upper Shaft. STL prototype Unit One wasn’t on the ship but in Rath’s Roppongi office far away.
Kirito—Kazuto Kirigaya—was currently in Unit Four, connected to the system as a means of repairing his neural network while he struggled to recover from his coma. So in order to reach him, they had to enter the shaft at the bottom and take an elevator to the upper portion.
It was 7:30 AM on Monday, July 6th, 2026.
Asuna Yuuki adjusted the collar of the loose summer sweater she wore over her T-shirt as she climbed the dim spiral staircase.
Her feet sounded loudly on the galvanized metal steps, lit by the orange emergency LED lights. The experience couldn’t help but remind her of a place far, far from here, in a metal castle floating in an infinite sky, where she climbed many staircases like this one—those spiral stairs that connected the boss chamber of each floor of Aincrad with the next one above…
In most cases, she had walked behind Heathcliff, leader of the Knights of the Blood, with the other guild members celebrating their triumph behind them, but there were exceptions. Before she joined the K
oB, near the very start of the game of death, she walked with a solo player dressed all in black.
With his easy, aloof manner that belied the exhaustion of battle, he would tell bad jokes to annoy her or give her information on the next floor. On those few occasions, he was the one to guide her onward when she felt crushed by the fatigue of their endless quest.
“…Kirito…”
She mumbled the name of her lover under the sound of her clanking footsteps.
There was no answer, of course.
She pushed down the welling sensation of loneliness that threatened to overcome her. Unlike just two days ago, Kazuto was no longer missing. He was waiting for her in that little room at the top of these stairs. She couldn’t converse with him yet—but even if she couldn’t hold his hand, she knew his awakening was approaching, moment by moment. Natsuki Aki, his nurse, said that if the STL’s treatment continued well, his neural network might be repaired within a day or two, moving him toward the stage of consciousness again.
Asuna hadn’t explained everything to her parents about the journey to the Ocean Turtle floating off the Izu Islands. She’d enlisted the help of Dr. Rinko Koujiro to explain to them that she would be assisting the doctor on an observation of a high-tech research facility for the next few days—an explanation that wasn’t entirely untrue.
She knew it was a weak excuse, but her mother, Kyouko Yuuki, just gave Asuna a searching look, then said, “Take care.” Perhaps she instinctually understood everything that was going on.
At any rate, Asuna had only three days of time here, from July 5th to the 7th. That meant that tomorrow evening, she had to be on the regularly scheduled helicopter going from the Ocean Turtle to the heliport back in Shinkiba. She didn’t know if she’d be making that return trip to Tokyo with Kazuto yet, but if Nurse Aki was right, she’d at least be able to talk to him.
When that happened, she’d get her chance to rage at him, to cry, and to laugh.
She stopped in the middle of the staircase, took a deep breath, then resumed climbing.
After another twenty steps, the stairs came to an abrupt end. It wasn’t a dead end; there was a heavy round hatch in the ceiling, through which she needed to climb a retracting ladder.
That layer of metal, eight inches thick, was the titanium composite wall that split the upper and lower halves of the Main Shaft. Lieutenant Nakanishi bragged that it was strong enough to protect against rifle fire at close range, but it was unclear why such a situation would arise on a nonmilitary mega-float.
Between him and Mr. Kikuoka, these people sure like to make grandiose statements, Asuna thought as she ascended the aluminum alloy ladder through the hatch. The dark spiral staircase continued after that, but the lights were green up above. It really was as if she’d ascended to a new floor in a game.
Now she was in the Upper Shaft, where they kept the Lightcube Cluster, the physical center of the entire Alicization Project. It was probably just on the other side of the staircase wall, in fact.
The Lightcube Cluster was top secret, so she didn’t really know how it worked other than that it was a literal cluster of an extreme number of lightcubes, as the name stated.
Lightcubes were the physical media that stored the artificial fluctlights—the “souls” of the Underworldians who functioned as bottom-up AIs—and they had lined up hundreds of thousands of them around one enormous cube. Instead of souls, that cube contained the massive amount of mnemonic visual data for all the Underworldians. It was the core of the STL, the Main Visualizer…
Takeru Higa, Rath’s chief researcher, had explained the Underworld’s workings to Asuna in a general sense, skipping over some company secrets here and there, but to be honest, it still sounded like a bunch of gibberish to her.
When she suggested they let her see the Lightcube Cluster itself, given all the things they were telling her, Higa seemed a bit flustered and said the cluster’s metal shell just made it look like a big box. And nobody could open it now—not Higa, not the other staff members, not even project overseer and SDF Lieutenant Colonel Seijirou Kikuoka.
So all Asuna could do was imagine a vague concept of the cluster. Endless rows of tiny crystals, lined up in darkness. Between the perfect square of their array and the larger crystal in the center, fine little lines of light were threading to and fro, like the stars clustered at the center of a galaxy…
She was so lost in thought envisioning the image that Asuna was slow to notice someone coming down the stairs from above.
“Oh, sorry,” she said automatically, dodging to the left. The other person continued by without a word. With each descending stair, the footstep made a zshunk, vweem sound.
“Hmn…?”
A part of her brain latched on to that strange sound, and just as the figure passed her position, she looked up and stared to the right.
“Ah…?!”
Instantly, she backed away, pressing herself against the wall.
The question wasn’t who was coming down the stairs but what. Because whatever it was, it was not a human being.
The overall silhouette was humanoid, but instead of a skeleton, it had a bare metal frame with resin-cased cylinders attached to its limbs and waist. Fine exposed gears made up its joints, and colored signal cables ran up and down its length like arteries.
On its back was a large box, while its “face” was just three lenses: large, medium, and small. Asuna subconsciously wondered why they hadn’t just put two identically sized lenses for eyes, then realized what she was thinking.
She let out the breath she was holding and whispered, “A…robot…?”
Instantly, the mysterious bipedal machine stopped moving. The gears in its legs whirred, pulling back the foot to its previous perch. Once it was standing on the same step as Asuna, it rotated its body in place to the left to face her. The two bigger lenses were dark, but there was a red light in the small one, flickering unevenly as though watching her.
“Mm—!”
A little squeak escaped from her throat. She tried to back away, but she was already pressed against the wall of the stairwell. Asuna leaned right, then left, but the red light continued tracking her face.
Monsters aren’t supposed to pop up on the staircases between floors—and there’re no robot mobs in the first place—and anyway, I’m in real life, not a game! Her mind raced from thought to thought, and she was about to turn and dart back down the way she had come when there was a voice from above.
“Hey! Knock it off, Ichiemon!”
A man was descending the stairs with an expression of alarm. He wore a print T-shirt, shorts, thick metal-framed glasses, and had his short hair spiked back—this was the lead researcher on Project Alicization, Takeru Higa himself. He had a well-used laptop in his hand.
The machine-man pulled its lenses away from Asuna and rotated ninety degrees toward Higa, as though reacting to his spoken command.
Asuna finally relaxed, then looked at the researcher on the next step upward and demanded, “Mr. Higa…what is this?”
“Er, well…it’s Ichiemon. The official name is Electroactive Muscled Operative Machine, or EMOM, and it’s the first of its type, so 1EMOM—which we’ve nicknamed Ichiemon,” he answered, his expression shifting between embarrassment and pride.
She glared at him and asked, “And…what is Ichiemon doing here?”
It wasn’t Higa who answered the question. “Higa’s just helping me fine-tune my program. I don’t know why—it’s not like we’re cohorts back at the college seminar anymore.”
That answer came from a woman descending the stairs behind him. She had a white lab coat over her denim shirt and jeans, and her hair was parted straight down the side, a look that screamed intellectual. This was Dr. Rinko Koujiro, the very person who helped Asuna infiltrate the Ocean Turtle.
“Good morning, Asuna.”
“Good morning,” she replied, then gave Ichiemon another examination from top to bottom and asked the researchers, “This…isn’t part of
Project Alicization, too, is it?”
Ichiemon took the lead back up the spiral staircase until they reached the sub-control room, where Asuna finally pushed her questions aside and rushed down the hallway to the STL room.
She couldn’t go in the door at the end of the narrow tunnel, but the left-hand wall was made of clear reinforced glass. She pressed her hands and forehead against the window and peered into the barely lit storage room.
The two massive rectangular objects were Soul Translator Unit Four and Unit Five. Unit Five was powered down, but there were a number of soft lights, some of them blinking, active on Unit Four. If she squinted, she could see a thin silhouette on the gel bed connected to the main device.
That was Kirito, aka Kazuto Kirigaya. Asuna’s partner in so many different ways.
A week ago, a suspect in the Death Gun incident had attacked Kazuto on the street in Setagaya Ward. The attacker injected him with deadly succinylcholine, temporarily paralyzing his heart.
Emergency measures were successful at preventing his death, but the stoppage of blood flow had damaged his brain—the doctor said that Kazuto might even be in a permanent vegetative state. In the end, it was Lieutenant Colonel Seijirou Kikuoka, leader of the Alicization Project, who flew him here to the Ocean Turtle on life support. He claimed that it was a difficult decision that he’d made with the belief that the STL could help heal Kazuto.
Apparently, Kazuto’s mind was currently in a medical-use VR environment called the Underworld. By activating his consciousness—his fluctlight—they hoped to regenerate his neural network. It was hard to understand everything they were trying to explain to her, but she at least understood that he wasn’t in a simple coma now.
She was looking at only his body; his mind was in a far-off virtual world. She supposed this was how Kazuto had felt while Nobuyuki Sugou held her captive in the fairy world of Alfheim.
If only I could do what he did back then and go dive into the Underworld to save him…
After over a minute of watching and thinking, Asuna pulled away from the glass. She gave him a silent promise to return by midday, then returned to Subcon.
Alicization Turning Page 11
