But there was no retreat, not even against the most unfathomable of opponents. I had to hold off this enemy until Asuna and Alice could finish climbing that staircase hundreds of yards tall.
“Let’s go, Gabriel!!” I said, choosing to speak his name. The wing-shaped ends of my coat flapped powerfully, pushing me upward. I crossed the swords before my body.
“Generate All Elements!”
Using the air around me itself as a terminal, I generated dozens of each and every type of element, then activated all of them at once as I fell.
“Discharge!!”
Flaming arrows, spears of ice, blades of wind, and many other elements raced through the air. My swords swung downward, following the spells.
Gabriel Miller did not move a muscle to evade any of it. He just grinned thinly and spread his hands.
Omnicolored light stabbed through the blue-tinged darkness covering his body.
I didn’t miss the way he faltered briefly above the waist. I slashed his torso with my right sword and thrust through his chest with my left. The sticky darkness burst aside, leaving a chill on my skin where it brushed me.
My momentum took me past him a good distance before I turned back toward him.
I caught sight of the darkness pulling back in from its undefined shape—and Gabriel turning to face me as though nothing had happened. There wasn’t a single scratch on his jacket.
I knew it.
He had the ability to absorb and drain slashes, thrusts, flames, ice, wind, water projectiles, steel arrows, crystal edges, light beams, and dark curses.
And my right shoulder, which his sword of nothingness had brushed when we passed each other, sprayed blood from the place where both coat and flesh had simply vanished.
Gabriel Miller glanced down at the Priestess of Light, Alice, and the other girl with her as they ran up the white staircase hanging in the air. He gauged their time of arrival at the system console to be five minutes from now.
That meant he couldn’t be wasting time with this bothersome interloper. The logical choice would be to neutralize the young man and proceed to the floating island quickly. But Gabriel found himself just the tiniest bit interested in his opponent and chose to hover here.
At first glance, he was nothing but a child. Compared to the aged swordsman he’d fought to mutual death earlier, there was nothing imposing about this boy. Like Sinon, he was probably some Japanese VRMMO player cooperating with Rath somehow, but even that girl had more presence than he did.
For one thing, the boy was exuding barely anything you might call fighting spirit.
There had been a brief moment when Gabriel was able to glean his will, when he asked who he was, but that circuit had closed instantly. Since then, he’d deflected all of Gabriel’s mental feelers as completely as though he was covered in a transparent shell. There was no joy in fighting an enemy whose mind he couldn’t taste.
Better to eliminate him at once and go after Alice, Gabriel thought briefly.
But when the young man transformed the ends of his coat into wings, then wielded all kinds of magic at once, Gabriel changed his mind a bit. He sensed that the boy was accustomed to this world.
Once Gabriel acquired Alice and the Soul Translation tech and fled to a third country, he still had to do the work of building a virtual world just for himself and to his exact liking. Stealing this young man’s level of control wouldn’t be a bad idea, to ensure that he could perform the task efficiently.
So the first step would be to crack the shell of his imagination.
Gabriel smiled almost imperceptibly, then spoke in Japanese to the boy in black.
“I’ll give you three minutes. Entertain me.”
“How very generous of you,” I muttered, sealing the wound on my shoulder with a single trace of a finger.
There was plenty backing up Gabriel Miller’s confidence, however. For one thing, the fact that he was immune to basically any kind of attack.
No, there must be at least one kind of attack that works on him. I’m sure that it was Sinon who blew his arm off—she was fighting him first. She must have imagined her Hecate II rifle and shot him with it. That would mean that even Gabriel can’t absorb a bullet attack.
It couldn’t be a coincidence that he was also wearing a military jacket. He would know the power of an antimateriel sniper rifle from real-life experience, and perhaps that meant he couldn’t completely negate the thought of the damage he would suffer with willpower alone.
But Sinon would be able to materialize a gun in the Underworld only because it was as familiar to her as her own arms and legs. I couldn’t repeat an accomplishment like that, and even if I could somehow make a pistol, it wasn’t going to have the power to stop him.
In other words, I had to find something aside from a gun that this eerie man would recognize as a source of damage. And that would mean knowing Gabriel as a person. I had to figure out how he lived, what he wanted, and why he was here.
I held my swords perfectly still before me and let a smile curl the corners of my mouth.
“All right. I’ll give you some entertainment.”
Where was his confidence coming from?
Clearly he had spent a long time logged in to the Underworld and was very familiar with the systems that underpinned this world, but he was still just a child. A gamer. He’d just been shown that his flashy swordsmanship and fanciful magic attacks were completely meaningless. How could he still wear that impertinent smile?
Gabriel found the fearless attitude to be mildly unpleasant and came to the conclusion that it must be a bluff to buy time.
The boy knew that dying in this world would have no ill effects on his real-life body, and he was relying upon that knowledge. All he wanted to do was draw out their fight until his companion could escort Alice away safely.
He was just a stupid child, after all. Three minutes was more time than he deserved.
Gabriel raised the empty blade he held in the hand built of willpower—and stuck it into the back of the winged creature that he rode upon.
The monster was, like his sword and stonebow, simply the repurposed form of the jetpack that his converted character had brought over. While he could control it at will, it was slightly unstable with him being able to touch it with only his feet. A more logical choice would be to turn it into wings only, like the boy was doing.
The monster screeched briefly at the skewer in its back before it was sucked into the void. Gabriel moved the data that came through the blade from his arm to his back and focused his mind.
With a great flapping, black wings just like the boy’s sprouted from his shoulder blades. These were not the membraned wings of a bat, but those belonging to a bird of prey, covered in sharp feathers. They were much more suitable for a man bearing the name of an archangel.
“…I’ve already stolen one thing from you,” Gabriel whispered, pointing his empty blade at the young man.
I’d been planning to get rid of the man’s flying disc–shaped mount with my next attack, so I was briefly taken aback when got rid of it himself.
He didn’t miss his chance. He slid into sword range with a flap of his black eagle wings. The speed of his thrust without any windup was astonishing. I’d taken him for an amateur when it came to swordplay, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. I swept my swords upward, aiming their intersection at the point of attack.
Gzyrk!
The sword of inky darkness came to a halt just before my nose with an eerie sound.
The Blue Rose Sword and the Night-Sky Blade rattled violently. While my weapons weren’t being corroded, it did feel like I was trying to cut emptiness itself. It wasn’t hard to imagine that the actual swords were being put under terrible strain.
But the choice of a Cross Block rather than a backstep was intentional on my part. Rather than pushing back against Gabriel’s downward swing, I pushed it to the right and gave him a tremendous high kick.
“Raaah!!” I screamed. The
toe of my boot glowed orange as it shot upward and caught his pointed chin. The darkness burst outward, and Gabriel’s upper half rocked backward.
How about that?!
I beat the air with my wings, darting backward to add distance between us and give me time to watch him. Maybe it wasn’t a gunshot, but if he really was a special-ops commando, he would have taken some combatives training and should recognize the damage of a good blow.
Gabriel’s head rocked back into position, but on the surface at least, he was totally unharmed. The darkness that splattered from his chin reformed at once into smooth skin. He rubbed it with his hand and grinned.
“Ah, I see. Unfortunately, that kind of showy action only looks good on TV. Real martial arts are more—”
Fwip!!
The air cracked, and in midsentence, Gabriel rushed at me so fast he was nothing but a blur of black. His sword came down from the left, and I used the Blue Rose Sword to block it on instinct, swinging back with the Night-Sky Blade. The edge caught the top of the enemy’s shoulder and, with a sensation like being surrounded by dense liquid, came to a stop.
My right arm was stuck in full extension. Something slithered around it: Gabriel’s left arm. It wrapped around me like a thick snake until it had full control of the joint—and with a horrible gurnch, I felt agony assault my brain like lightning.
“Aaagh…,” I gasped.
Right up close, Gabriel whispered, “—Like this.”
That was just the start of a ferocious rush.
The sword of emptiness lashed out with a blinding combo of what felt like infinite strikes. I tried to defend against them with just my left sword, but they slipped past my block here and there, carving out little pieces of me. I had no time to focus on recovering from my broken right arm.
“Hrg…oahg…,” I grunted, beating my wings in an attempt to put distance between myself and Gabriel. As I bolted backward, I ran the fingers of my left hand across my other arm, which was just barely able to hold on to its sword.
Right when the light began to gather there, Gabriel raised his hand, curved the fingers like claws, then opened them wide.
Over ten bolts of black lightning spread outward, then bent at sharp angles and bore down on me. I gritted my teeth and put up an imaginary wall for defense. I’d had total confidence when I’d used the same technique to protect Alice’s dragons from the lightning, but half of my concentration was going to healing my arm now—and it was that very understanding that weakened the strength of the shield.
Dull vibrations rattled my body in several places. Three bolts of darkness penetrated my shield and drove into my torso and legs. Before the pain, I felt only a ferocious chill running through my senses. There was blue-black nothingness clinging to the places where I was zapped, eating away at my very existence.
“Rrrgh!!” I grunted again, then sucked in a breath and screamed for energy. It dispersed the emptiness, but fresh blood gushed from the new wounds that remained.
“Ha-ha-ha.”
I looked up to see Gabriel’s empty features twisting with mirth.
“Ha-ha-ha, ha-ha-ha-ha-ha.”
It wasn’t laughter. His lips were upturned, but the muscles around his eyes were still, and those marble-like eyes swirled only with hunger. Gabriel crossed his arms and made a gesture of gathering power.
The dark aura around him shuddered heavily. It flickered like a violent flame, growing thicker.
“Haaaaaah!!” he roared, throwing his arms wide.
Two new black wings grew above the ones he already had, and they spread themselves outward. Another pair grew from below, too.
Gabriel beat his six wings in order, top to bottom, and gradually gained altitude. A black ring appeared over his head, and his camo jacket lost its shape, transforming into a thin cloth of wriggling darkness.
Somehow, his eyes were no longer human, either. The sockets were filled with nothing but dark light.
He had become an Angel of Death.
A transcendental being that hunted the souls of humans and stole them. What attack could possibly work against a self-image like this?
I tore my eyes from this personification of horror and checked on Asuna and Alice, who were racing up the midair staircase, hand in hand. They had just crossed the halfway point. It would take another two or three minutes for them to get to the floating island.
At this point, I was already losing confidence in my ability to buy that much time.
Sheer omnipotence.
Gabriel laughed a third time at the fabulous power that rippled through his very being.
So this was what imagination—or what the elder swordsman had called Incarnation—could accomplish in this place.
Now he had the same level of power as the swordsman who cut backward in time or the dark general who transformed into a whirlwind giant—even more power, in fact. Gabriel had assumed their abilities were the effect of some system command he didn’t know about, but that wasn’t true. They simply knew exactly how strong they were. And it was because this black-haired boy had exhibited all his little tricks that Gabriel understood how it really worked.
I shall give you one more minute as a sign of my appreciation.
Gabriel spread his six wings and raised his sword of darkness.
Within the next minute, he would carve up this boy’s flesh, extract his soul, and devour it—to gain even greater power.
With dark-purple sparks shrouding his form, Gabriel went into a charge.
I looked up at an enemy that was no longer even human.
There was nothing I could imagine now that he would fear and consider a threat. Even the right arm that Sinon had blown off was perfectly regenerated, a sure sign that even bullets would no longer harm him.
In the end, I just didn’t have the willpower.
I hadn’t underestimated Gabriel Miller. His eerie, alien nature deserved the highest level of caution. But in a sense, perhaps I had given up on winning this fight before it even started for that very reason. I was thinking only of buying time, extending the fight until Alice and Asuna could escape, so that both he and I would be trapped in Hell for two hundred years, never to return to reality.
Oh…that’s it.
Maybe…I wanted this to happen?
A true other reality, something greater than even Aincrad. The utopia that Akihiko Kayaba wanted and tried to create. Wasn’t that what the Underworld really was?
In the two years I’d spent trapped in SAO, I’d constantly asked myself whether I really wanted to escape. The reason that I was a hesitant member of the frontier group that pushed to clear the game was because I felt a vague premonition that there was a hard time limit on how long I could live there. With my body stuck in a hospital bed and living off only fluids, it was just a matter of time before I wasted away physically.
But in the accelerated time flow of the Underworld, that wasn’t a concern. With five million seconds passing here for each one second in reality, there was no need to think about my physical body. I would remain in this world until the life span of my soul reached its end. Could I really claim that I wasn’t entertaining that thought, even if only in my subconscious?
And for what result? I wasn’t thinking about them.
Suguha, Mom, Dad.
Yui, Klein, Agil, Liz, Silica…all the many other people who’d saved me.
And Alice.
Asuna.
All those people who would mourn my loss and shed tears of grief.
In the end, I was a person who was incapable of truly knowing another person’s mind.
Nothing about me had changed from the time I’d abandoned that friend in need during middle school…
You’re wrong, Kirito.
A familiar voice.
A faint warmth in my frozen left hand.
If you don’t want to leave this world, then it’s not for your own sake. It’s because you love the people you met here.
Selka, Tiese, Ronie, Miss Liena, the people in Rul
id, the people you met in Centoria and at the academy, the Integrity Knights and men-at-arms…and Cardinal, and maybe even Administrator…and probably me.
Your love is huge and wide and deep. Enough to bear the weight of the entire world.
But the same can’t be said of your opponent.
That man is the one who doesn’t know others. He cannot understand them. That’s why he seeks. And tries to steal. And tries to destroy. It’s because…
He fears us.
Gabriel Miller saw the delicate tears trickle down the boy’s cheeks. His sword-bearing hands curled inward toward his chest in fright.
He had succumbed to fear at last.
The fear and despair of death was the one emotion that Gabriel actually shared with other people.
From the day that he’d taken Alicia Clingerman into the woods behind his house to kill her, Gabriel had ended the lives of many people, seeking the shining brilliance of the soul. But he never again saw the cloud of light that he’d witnessed emerging from Alicia’s forehead. Instead, he slaked his thirst by tasting the fear of his victims.
What flavor would he taste in the fear of this boy, who was so endlessly confident in himself? The old hunger and thirst roared up from the foundation of his being. Gabriel licked his lips and held his outstretched fingers high.
Little black orbs appeared and buzzed like flies. He lowered his fingers, and the orbs surged with very fine lasers that jabbed into the boy’s body from all angles. Moments later, blood sprayed from him in a red mist.
“Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!!” bellowed Gabriel, rushing downward with his empty sword at the ready.
He easily thrust it through the boy’s stomach.
The torso covered in a black shirt and coat was ripped apart by the howling, hungering void and split effortlessly in two.
Alicization Lasting Page 10
