Alicization Turning

by Reki Kawahara

  I slowed down, looking around, and noticed that just ahead and to the right was a small door I hadn’t seen before. Peering out and beckoning us over was a girl, who was indeed maybe ten years old, wearing a black hat.

  The round glasses on her nose flashed, and she disappeared through the door. For a moment, I wondered if it was a trap. Then my bangs tugged me onward harder than ever before. It was as if they were saying, What are you doing? Get in there!

  Eugeo and I raced toward the darkness within that door.

  3

  The space beyond was much larger and deeper than I had expected.

  “Aaaah!”

  I wailed as I suddenly did three forward flips through empty air, then landed on my back on a fairly resilient surface. My body bounced, and I landed on my butt a second time.

  A moment later, Eugeo landed next to me in a similar manner. We both shook our heads to clear the internal cobwebs, and once my sense of equilibrium had returned, I looked at our surroundings.

  “…Huh?” Eugeo mumbled. I couldn’t blame him. We’d just leaped through a gate in the middle of the rose garden, so we should have still been in the garden on the other side of it.

  But now we were sitting in a hallway, with aged-wood walls, ceiling, and floor. The bounciness of my landing was thanks to the wood. If I’d landed on the paving stones of the garden, I would have lost some life on impact.

  The corridor continued a fair ways onward, with a warm orange light flickering at the far end. Even the air had turned from the chilly, damp night to the dry tang of aging paper.

  Where are we? I wondered. Then I heard the sound of clinking metal from behind me, far above. I turned around to see a very steep staircase right behind us and, near the top, a small door and smaller person.

  I wearily climbed to my feet, the pain in my whipped chest and pierced foot briefly forgotten as I carefully ascended the wooden stairs. The door up there had been bronze fence when we passed through it, but now it was the same wooden material as the rest of the hall. Except that, unlike the antique style of the wood in the hallway, the door itself stood out as looking completely fresh and new.

  Once I was three steps from the top, the figure facing the door held out a hand and stopped me. There was a very large cast-iron key ring in her hand, which she had apparently just removed from the door’s lock. That clink of metal had been her locking the door, then.

  “…Excuse me…”

  Where are we? Who are you? I was going to ask, when I noticed a sound. Just beyond the closed door, I heard what made me think of a small, tough creature scratching and scuttling back and forth. I felt the hair on my forearms stand.

  “…We’ve been detected. So much for this back door,” the mysterious person muttered, and waved me off again. I had to give up on my questions and descend the stairs again. When I returned to stand next to Eugeo, the person was just coming down behind me.

  There were no lights in the hallway, nothing but the faint illumination seeping through from the far end of the hall, so I could make out only a silhouette. She had on a large, bulky hat and a robe like the sort a magician would wear draped around her small body. The keys were in her right hand and a staff taller than she in the left.

  That magic staff swung forward, pushing us onward.

  “Go on, get down there! Gotta delete this entire hallway now.”

  The voice was still unmistakably that of a young girl, but for some reason, there was an authority even greater than Miss Azurica’s there, and we found ourselves marching quickly toward the light without an argument. At the end of the short hallway, we found ourselves in an extremely strange space.

  It was an enormous square chamber, with a number of wall sconces providing warm-toned light. There were no other fixtures but a thick wooden door on the far wall, straight ahead.

  On the other three walls were a dozen or more hallways, just like the one we came from. I peered down the one next to ours and saw a dead end, stairs, and a little door.

  While Eugeo and I looked around curiously, the robed girl followed us out of the hall, then turned back to face it and raised her staff.

  “Hoy!”

  She swung the staff with a cute little shout that also sounded like something an old man would say. Nothing should have surprised us at this point, but each successive phenomenon left us stunned. From the far end of the tunnel, the boards on the side walls yanked free one after the other, reassembling as the ground rumbled.

  Within a few seconds, the thirty-foot hallway was completely covered, and when the last boards finished placing themselves, it was just a smooth wall. There wasn’t a single bit of evidence that there had ever been a hallway behind it.

  For sacred arts, this was quite an elaborate, advanced spell. To manipulate a volume of objects that high, you’d need a very long chant and very high System Access Authority. And yet, this strange little girl did all that with a simple “Hoy!” She hadn’t even announced a system call first. At the academy, they taught us that every single sacred art required that to initiate.

  “Hmph,” she snorted, tapping the base of the staff into the ground matter-of-factly, then turning to us at last.

  Seen in proper light, she was as cute as a little doll. The black robe shone like velvet and the large hat made of the same material made her look more like an elderly scholar than a magician, but the chestnut-brown curls of hair and milk-white skin under the brim of her hat were youthful.

  Most striking of all were her eyes. Behind the round glasses perched on her nose and framed by her long eyelashes were brown eyes the same color as her hair and somehow full of an overwhelming intelligence and wisdom. Looking into them, I felt like I was gazing into an unfathomable depth. There was no way to tell what she was thinking.

  But whoever she was, she’d saved us from the Integrity Knight’s attack, so I bowed my head to her. “Um…thank you for rescuing us.”

  “Don’t know if it was worth the trouble yet,” she muttered, all business. Based on ample experience over our travels, Eugeo was the better choice to negotiate with strangers, so I elbowed him and motioned up front.

  He obediently stepped forward and bowed, hair still dripping, and said, “Um…it’s nice to meet you. I’m Eugeo, and this is Kirito. Thank you so much for saving us. Um, do you…live here?”

  He was clearly disoriented as well. The girl looked annoyed and pushed her glasses up the bridge of her nose. “Of course I don’t live here…Come.”

  She cracked the staff against the stone, then started walking toward the large door on the far wall. We hurried after her, watched as she waved the staff to remotely open the door—and received yet another shock.

  When we passed through the door after her and found ourselves in another mysterious new space, all we could do was stare.

  It was a stunning sight. The only way to describe it in one phrase was “a gigantic library.”

  A world of infinite shelves and books. It was circular as a whole but with numerous staircases and walkways along the walls, which were lined on one or both sides with massive bookshelves. The span from the floor to the ceiling over the maze of shelves was tall enough to fit a ten-story building inside. I couldn’t even imagine the total number of books contained in all these shelves.

  There was no way a structure large enough to house this library could be in the rose garden. I gazed up at the gloomy ceiling far above and asked, “Is…is this inside the Central Cathedral?”

  “You could say that. And you could say it’s not,” the girl said. I thought I detected a note of satisfaction in her voice. “Because I removed its original door, this great library exists within the cathedral, but none can enter—without my invitation.”

  “Great…library…?” Eugeo mumbled, looking around in disbelief.

  “Aye. This library contains all historical records dating back to the creation of this world, the formulas that govern its every working function, and all the system commands that you call sacred arts.”

>   …System commands?!

  I couldn’t believe the words I was hearing at first. I stared at the girl, and through half-open lips, I heard my own voice say, “Wh-who…are…you?”

  She looked at me, clearly understanding the shock I had received and the reason for it, and introduced herself.

  “My name is Cardinal. I was once the coordinator of this world, but now I am merely the sole librarian of this facility.”

  Cardinal.

  To me, that word held three meanings.

  First was the senior rank in the Catholic Church of the real world.

  Second was the name of a bird, so named because its plumage was the same vivid red as the robes worn by the aforementioned priests.

  And third was from “Cardinal System,” the highly advanced autonomous program that Akihiko Kayaba developed to run his VRMMO game. The original version was utilized in SAO, where it held the players in the palm of its hand, fine-tuning the economy, items, and monster generation to exacting effect.

  After we beat SAO, Kayaba fried his brain by scanning it with a prototype STL, but before doing so, he created a bite-size version of the Cardinal System and included it in a suite of VRMMO development tools called The Seed.

  The thought-simulation program Kayaba left behind in cyberspace helped The Seed spread throughout the Net, where it controlled many other games such as Gun Gale Online. I had a part in The Seed’s free distribution, and for a long time, I’d wondered what Kayaba’s true goals were, but I had never come to a satisfying answer. Knowing him, there was no way he’d release his dev kit for free just to absolve his sins in creating the SAO Incident…

  That all aside, could this girl here be a personification of that very same Cardinal System?

  It was possible, of course, that within the Axiom Church there was a senior rank that they named after the real-life cardinal. But she mentioned that she was once the “coordinator” of the world. Not the leader, not the ruler: Cardinal the Coordinator.

  But why would the Cardinal System be here? Was the Underworld built using The Seed? And if that were the case, why would the coordination system, the “invisible hand of God,” take human form? Unlike with Yui, the counseling program, the Cardinal System wasn’t supposed to be able to talk with players, I thought.

  I was totally paralyzed with questions, and Eugeo seemed fairly stunned himself. He managed to mumble, “All…of history…? You mean an entire chronology from the founding of the four empires to now? Here…?”

  “And not only that. There’s even a record of the Creation, when Stacia and Vecta split the world between the human empire and the Dark Territory.”

  He swayed back and forth, looking ready to pass out—Eugeo was a history buff. The mysterious girl named Cardinal pushed her glasses up again and grinned mischievously. “What do you say? My stories can run a lil’ long, so why don’t you have a meal and a rest first? If you want to read, all the books are open to you. However many you want, for as long as you want.”

  She swung her staff with another “Hoy!” and a small, round table simply pushed its way up out of the floor next to her. It was piled high with steaming food—sandwiches, meat buns, sausages, fried pastries.

  The sight prompted immediate pangs in my stomach after a night of sipping water and nibbling on hard bread, but Eugeo seemed to feel guilty about chowing down and reading books while we were on our mission to rescue Alice. He looked to me with misgivings plain on his face, so I had to shrug and explain. “We had enough trouble against Eldrie, and there’s no way we can push through against an archer knight on his dragon. Let’s rest, recuperate, and work on a new plan. It seems safe here, and we’ve lost a lot of life already.”

  “Indeed. I’ve placed a charm so that if you eat, your wounds will heal. But first, hold out your right hands,” the girl commanded. We did as she said, holding out the arms that still bore the shackles. With two waves of her staff, the heavy rings split apart and fell to the floor.

  We rubbed our bare wrists, freed for the first time in two days. Eugeo still looked conflicted, but then he scrunched up his face and sneezed. He’d fallen headfirst into the fountain during the fight with Eldrie and was still soaking wet. If we didn’t get that addressed, he’d wind up with a “Head Cold” negative status effect.

  “You seem like you could use a good warm-up before you eat,” the girl said. “At the end of that hall there, you’ll find a small bath. You can eat and read after that.”

  I didn’t think we were going to end up sleeping here, but Eugeo did at least seem to accept her offer.

  “…Thank you. I’ll do that, C-Cardinal. Um, and…where would that record of the Creation be?”

  Cardinal lifted her staff and pointed toward a particularly large cluster of shelves situated quite high up in the library.

  “From that staircase upward is the history wing.”

  “Thank you! Well…I’ll be off now.”

  He bowed again, sneezed again, then disappeared down the narrow path between the bookcases. Cardinal watched him go, then muttered, “Sadly, the record of Creation here is an artificial one, dictated by the Axiom Church’s pontifex to a scribe.”

  I leaned over toward the girl’s hat and asked quietly, “So…are the gods of this world a fiction? No Stacia, no Solus, no Terraria…no Vecta?”

  “None,” Cardinal said simply. “The religious myths the people of the Underworld believe are merely stories spread by the Church to maintain its stranglehold. The gods’ names are registered as supervisor accounts in case of emergencies, but the people outside have never once logged in using them.”

  That answer cleared up a portion of my questions, at least. I stared into those burnt-brown eyes and said, “You’re not an Underworldian, though. You’re more like an outsider…like the system admins.”

  “Indeed. And so are you, Kirito the Unregistered.”

  “…Yeah. So am I.”

  At long last, after two years and two months, I had unshakable certainty that this was not some alternate dimension but a virtual world created by human beings in base reality. I felt a powerful sensation rising, taking me by surprise. I sucked in a deep breath and exhaled. There were so many things to ask that I didn’t know where to start. But there was one thing I had to confirm.

  “The name of the ones who created the Underworld is Rath, R-A-T-H. Correct?”

  “Indeed.”

  “And you are the Cardinal System, the autonomous program that operates and manages the virtual world.”

  As soon as I said this, the girl’s eyes widened. “Ahh, you know about me? Have you interacted with my kind on the other side?”

  “…Er, sure.”

  Interaction didn’t cover the half of it. I spent two years in Aincrad fighting for my life, and the greatest enemy of all, in a way, was the Cardinal System. I didn’t think that would make much sense to her, though.

  “But…as far as I knew, the Cardinal System never had a personified interface like you. So…what does that make you? What do you do here?”

  Cardinal smiled faintly at the succession of questions. She pushed a curly lock of hair from her forehead back under her cap and, in that strange voice that was both young and old, said, “It will be…a very, very long story. Why did I isolate myself in this library…? Why did I wait to make contact with you…? It is a very long story indeed…”

  She paused, appearing to lose herself in reminiscence, then looked up. “I can sum it up as quickly as I can. But first, eat. Your wounds must be plaguing you.”

  The succession of wild experiences had pushed the pain to the back of my mind, but as soon as she pointed it out, I felt an instant throb in my chest where Eldrie had whipped me and in my right foot where the knight had shot me.

  On her instructions, I grabbed a piping-hot steamed bun from the table and took a hearty bite. The meat was every bit as delicious as the stuff in the buns I slipped out of school to buy from Gottoro’s in town. Enraptured, I continued stuffing it into my face. W
hatever commands she had put on the food, each bite caused the pain to dim and the wounds to close up and heal.

  “Just like a true admin…you can adjust the food settings to anything you want,” I marveled.

  Cardinal snorted and said, “Two mistakes. I’m not an administrator. And I can only manipulate objects within this library.”

  She turned away and started walking down the aisle along the curved wall. I picked up all the buns and sandwiches I could carry and cast a glance at the hallway toward the bath. He’d need a good long soak to avoid getting a cold, so Eugeo wouldn’t be emerging anytime soon…

  “…Hmm? Wait…if you can heal wounds with food, shouldn’t it protect against sickness, too?” I pointed out. Cardinal looked back and grinned. Apparently the bath was just an excuse to get Eugeo away from us.

  I followed the scheming sage down the library path, through fork after fork, ascending and descending, until I no longer had any idea where in the library we were. Just as I was finishing up my meal of magical food—eating while walking, a major breach of etiquette—we came to a circular space surrounded entirely by shelves. There was a table in the middle and two old-fashioned chairs.

  Cardinal plopped herself down on one of the chairs and pointed at the other with her staff. I obediently sat down.

  Instantly, there were two cups of tea on the tabletop. Cardinal lifted her mug, took a sip, and said, “Have you ever wondered why it is that this peaceful, artificial world contains a feudal system?”

  It took me a few seconds to remember the unfamiliar word. Feudalism—the social system whereby local landowners were effectively nobles who had complete control over their territory. It was the system of the Middle Ages, with emperors, kings, barons, dukes, and the like, and so common in fantasy-themed books and games that the few exceptions were notable in their own right.

  The Underworld fit right into that medieval European mold, so it seemed perfectly natural to me that it had its own nobles and emperors and such. Cardinal’s question took me by surprise.