SAO 15 - Alicization Invading

by Reki Kawahara

  Novel Illustrations

  Chapter 14 - Subtilizer (The One Who Steals Souls)

  June ~ July AD 2026

  A sniper with light blue hair.

  The slender frame of the girl formed a strange harmony with the gigantic fifty caliber rifle.

  I could not see her face as she laid in the prone position with her back to me. However, it must be as imposing as a lynx, adorned with beautiful features.

  Her concentration was worthy of praise, aiming below without the slightest quiver, her right eye pressed against the scope and her index finger touching the trigger. I would love to continue gazing upon her from behind for a little more, but I had little time left too.

  Leaving my concealed shelter, I began walking across the ruined building’s floor. Cautiously avoiding the pebbles, wood chips, and metal scraps, those small objects scattered about my feet, I drew near the girl’s back in perfect silence.

  The girl’s back abruptly jerked.

  Did she sense something that made neither noise nor vibration? That intuition was marvelous, but unfortunately, it was too late.

  My extended right arm twisted around her slender neck as my left hand pinned her head down from the back.

  They constricted her with quiet yet clear intent.

  The «Army Combative» skill showed its results; the girl’s visible life–her HP bar–began falling rapidly. The sniper squirmed desperately, but in this VRMMO game, «Gun Gale Online», it was near impossible to escape from a successful rear choke, while barehanded without a significant difference in STR. That was no different from the real world, however.

  I had predicted that this sniper with light blue hair, whom I had most looked forward to fighting… no, hunting down among the twenty-nine participants of this tournament named «Bullet of Bullets», would try sniping from above in this five-story building.

  The problem was, the main street on this map was within range from both the fourth and fifth floors. I needed to swiftly decide which floor to ambush her on.

  Logically, she would choose the fourth floor where she could prepare to snipe quicker. However, my intuition and judgement whispered to me the moment I saw the library on the fourth floor. My intuition told me that sniper was likely still a young student in the real world. My judgement told me a student might avoid a library that would bring up memories of real life.

  That prediction was spot-on. The sniper with light blue hair wasted tens of seconds needlessly ascending that one floor and showed herself on the fifth floor’s warehouse.

  And now, her transient life would dissolve like that of a butterfly that went astray into a spider’s web.

  Aah, if only this was not a mere reduction of binary data in the virtual world, but the deprivation of an actual life and soul.

  If only it was a live body squirming in my arm instead of an avatar.

  «That moment» would truly be ever so sweet.

  The sniper’s HP shown at the top-right of my vision cut through the five percent mark. But the girl continued struggling in desperation to escape from the choke.

  Even as her enemy, I felt her stance precious, trying her best despite her certain defeat, neither letting out useless utterances nor turning limp in resignation.

  While I embraced the girl tight, like a loved one, my mouth drew closer to her ear from behind and whispered.

  –Your soul will be so sweet.

  Part 1

  He slowly raised his eyelids.

  It seemed he had fallen asleep unaware. The sofa of Italian make he brought in last week was apparently too soft. With his body still engulfed in the supple leather, he glanced at the smartwatch on his left wrist.

  Afternoon, two-twenty.

  Getting up, he gently straightened up his back while walking closer to the glass wall in the south. As its entire surface was switchable glass and presently transparent, it permitted an unbroken view of the waterfront from this executive room on the forty-third floor.

  The harbor quietly glittered in the illumination from the neighboring skyscrapers. Numerous large ships were moored at the long wharf.

  These intimidating silhouettes with their sharp edges were not of luxurious cruisers. They were the warships of the Third Fleet under the United States Pacific Fleet.

  San Diego, California’s second city, had long been its base. The economy circled around the gigantic naval base where over twenty-five thousand affiliated to the military resided.

  However, new industry sectors experienced a boom in recent years. High-tech industries dealing with information, communication, bio-technology, and such.

  And there were those corporations who fused military affairs with high technology as well. Primarily entrusted with security services and training by the military, large companies, and other related sectors, these so-called private military companies even deploy manpower to fight directly on the front lines.

  Gabriel Miller, the chief technology officer of «Glowgen Defense Systems» that had its headquarters in Downtown San Diego, gazed down upon the port’s night view and revealed an unconscious smile.

  The dream he saw in his short nap earlier was invigorating, however slight.

  A dream of a full-dive game’s event that he had participated in days ago in this executive room.

  Gabriel rarely dreamed, but whenever he did, it would be a detailed recount of some scene in his past.

  The exhilarating sensations of that light blue haired sniper’s desperate struggle still remained in his arms. As if it was no dream, but reality…

  No, that was off. That battle happened not in reality, but in the virtual world.

  Full-dive technology was a marvelous invention. Praises to its inventor, Akihiko Kayaba. He would have been headhunted if he was still alive, even if it took millions of dollars. Even if he was the worst criminal of the century—no, precisely because he was such a person.

  However, while the experiences brought about by the AmuSphere became increasingly lifelike, the inadequacy felt from the realization that they were fake became all that stronger. Like how one’s thirst could not be satiated with salt water, no matter how much one drank.

  As the youngest among Glowgen DS’s staff and a major stockholder, Gabriel led his life without worries over his material needs. However, money could not fulfill that craving he held deep in his heart.

  “…Your soul will be so sweet…”

  He voiced out the words uttered in his dreams once more.

  He wanted to whisper that in Japanese which he had been studying since three years ago. But they must have thought him American with that US tag on his HP bar and he had to avoid leaving them an impression stronger than necessary. There would be opportunities to speak at length eventually. He would leave his many questions for then.

  Wiping off the faint smile that emerged on his lips without his notice, Gabriel touched the various touch sensors embedded on the window and increased its opacity. Upon which the darkened glass projected himself.

  His loose, blonde hair was swept back, with his eyes blue. His 6 feet, 1 inch body was covered by a white dress shirt and dark grey slacks. His shoes were cordovan, custom-made. It was almost the very image of the white establishment, embarrassingly enough, but Gabriel saw no more reason for his appearance than a means for others to identify him. At the end of the day, the flesh is nothing more than a hull for the soul.

  The soul.

  Almost all religions adopted some notion of the soul. Of course, Christianity advocated that the soul would be sent to heaven or hell upon death dependent on one’s actions in life. However, it was neither due to Protestantism nor Catholicism that Gabriel believed in the existence of the soul and sought it out.

  It was a
fact. One personally witnessed, visually.

  That cluster of light, beautiful beyond compare, soaring from the girl’s forehead the moment she met her demise in his arms.

  Gabriel Miller was born in the district of Pacific Palisades in the suburbs of Los Angeles, California, in March, 1998.

  He had no siblings and he grew up engulfed in love from his affluent parents, both emotionally and financially. The mansion he lived in was grand and there was no end to his playgrounds, but what the young Gabriel loved most was his father’s collection storage.

  His father, the owner and manager of Glowgen Securities, the predecessor of Glowgen Defense Systems, had the hobby of collecting insect specimens and countless glass cases lined the vast storage. Gabriel would seclude himself in there when he found time, viewing the multicolored insects with a magnifying glass in a hand and immersing himself in absentminded fantasies as he sat on the sofa in the middle of the room.

  Curious, deep emotions assailed the young Gabriel at times when he was alone in that dim room with its high ceiling, surrounded by tens of thousands of mute insects.

  Every one of these insects lived up until a certain moment. In the grasslands of Africa, the deserts of the Middle East, the jungles of South America, they energetically made their nests and hunted for food.

  However, they were caught by a harvester at some point, treated with chemicals, and exchanged hands numerous times through commerce before neatly arranged in these glass cases at the Millers. In other words, while this room was a collection room of insect specimens, it was also a gigantic cemetery filled with tens of thousands of massacred corpses…

  Gabriel lowered his eyelids and imagined what would happen if the insects around suddenly came back to life.

  Their six legs would desperately scrape the air, their haptic perception and wings quivering. The myriad buzzes overlapping and surging towards Gabriel as parched ripples.

  Buzz, buzz.

  His eyelids flashed open. The legs of the green rhinoceros beetle fixed in the corner of the case before him seemed to move; he leapt off the sofa. He rushed over to the case, absorbed in the sight, but the insect was a lifeless specimen once more by the time he reached.

  Its carapace, legs with sharp thorns growing over them, and compound eyes that resembled a miniscule mesh were emerald green and as glossy as metal. Gabriel pondered on exactly what once powered that delicate body, granting it mobility.

  His father told him that insects lacked a brain like that of humans. He asked, how did they think then, and his father showed him a certain video.

  It captured praying mantises in the act of mating. The small male had held down the plump female from her back, their reproductive organs joined. The female remained motionless for a moment, but then abruptly grasped the male’s upper body with her two scythes, crunched down on his head, and began feeding without any prior warning. The male persisted in his mating even while Gabriel watched on in shock, finally withdrawing his reproductive organ once his head had been utterly devoured. The female then shook her scythes and fled at once, as fast as she could.

  Despite the complete lack of its head, the male praying mantis walked along the grass blade, up a branch, and mechanically continued its escape. His father spoke while pointing at the clip.

  The nerves spread over the entire bodies of insects, including praying mantises, served a purpose similar to a brain. Hence, they could live for some time even after they lost their head which was no more than a sensory organ.

  Gabriel spent the several days after he watched that video wondering exactly where praying mantises had their souls then. If they could live on even with their heads eaten, losing all of their legs should be of no particular issue. Then perhaps their abdomen? Or their chest? But even with their soft abdomen crushed or their chests pierced through by a pin, insects would continue struggling for a time, their legs squirming vigorously.

  If they did not die immediately no matter which part of their body they lost, could it be that the praying mantis’s soul was faintly spread out through its entire body? Eight or nine years old then, Gabriel concluded so after numerous experiments conducted on the insects he caught around his home.

  The soul, that mysterious power that moved these partially mechanical beings known as insects, stubbornly remained within them no matter which part of their body was demolished. But it would consider it a lost cause and surrender after a certain point, deserting its vessel.

  Gabriel fervently desired to see that fleeing soul, and to capture it if possible. However, he couldn’t even see «that something» slipping out from the insects’ bodies, let alone capture it, no matter how hard he stared into the magnifying glass, no matter how carefully he carried out his experiments. His modest wish showed no results even after spending much time and zeal in the secret laboratory he made deep in the dense forest behind his mansion.

  The young Gabriel instinctively knew his wish would not be agreeable to his parents. That was why he made no further questions in a similar vein to his father after that one praying mantis incident and made sure to divulge nothing about his experiments. But his desires seemed to heighten with his attempts to keep them under wrap.

  Gabriel had a friend of the same age with whom he was on extremely good terms back then.

  The girl was named Alicia Klingerman and the only daughter of the entrepreneurs living in the mansion erected on the adjacent plot of land. They attended the same elementary school and got along well, as did their families. She was shy and obedient, preferring to read books or watch videos at home than to play until muddy outside.

  Naturally, Gabriel hid his secret experiments from Alicia and spoke nothing of insects and souls.

  Nevertheless, he couldn’t stop thinking about it. Gabriel’s imagination pondered, time after time, where Alicia’s soul could be as he quietly peered into her face from the side while she smiled like an angel, absorbed in reading her novels.

  Insects were different from humans. Humans could not live on without their heads. Thus, a human’s soul should be in their head… in their brain.

  But Gabriel had already learnt that brain damage did not lead directly to loss of life via the internet on his father’s computer. There was a construction laborer who survived with a thick iron pipe piercing in from the chin and out the head; there was a doctor who tried to cure mental illness by ablating a portion of a patient’s brain.

  So, was it somewhere in the brain? Gabriel wondered so as he looked at Alicia’s brow, fringed by her fluffy blonde hair. Alicia’s soul lay hidden beyond that smooth skin, beyond that hard skull, and beyond even those soft brain tissues.

  He would definitely end up marrying Alicia, or so the Gabriel childishly envisioned. Then he might get the chance to see Alicia’s soul with his own eyes one day. Words couldn’t possibly describe how beautiful the soul of the angelic Alicia was.

  Half of Gabriel’s wish was granted, sooner than he ever expected.

  In September 2008, widespread bank failures pulled the trigger to the Global Financial Crisis.

  The waves of recession swallowed even Pacific Palisades on the suburbs of Los Angeles. A great number of stately mansions were offered for sale and the number of high class automobiles driving down the streets visibly fell.

  It was fortunate Glowgen Securities had solid administration and managed to restrain the effects to a minimum, but the corporation managed by the neighbors, the Klingermans, fell under heavy debt as their investments were in real estate. With their fortunes, including the mansion, gone by April the next year, they decided to depend on their kin who worked in agriculture and move to Kansas City far in the Midwest.

  It saddened Gabriel. Intelligent beyond his years as a child aged ten, he understood he could not help Alicia as a ten-year-old child and could clearly imagine what severe circumstances she would face from now on.