5

Eugeo…what are you going to do? I wondered, my eyes darting.

The flaxen-haired youth, my unquestionable best friend, Eugeo the swordsman of the Aincrad style, looked back into my eyes for just a moment and smiled. Then he turned to Cardinal and said, “With what strength you have left, turn me—turn my body into a sword. Just like that puppet.”

As though it were bringing her mind back to the surface, this statement caused Cardinal’s eyes to sharpen again, widening in surprise.

“Eugeo…are you…?”

“If we escape this place…then Administrator will turn half the people of the world into those horrible monsters. We cannot let that happen. If there’s any way to prevent that tragedy, any last hope remaining, then it must be in that sacred art…”

His smile had the serenity of understanding and acceptance. He wrapped her left hand in both of his and whispered, “System Call…Remove Core Protection.”

I’d never heard that command before.

Eugeo closed his eyes when he was finished. On his forehead appeared a complex series of glowing purple lines, like some kind of electrical circuit board. They stretched downward, across his cheeks and his throat, to his shoulders, his forearms, his fingers.

The little pathways of light pushed a small amount of the way into Cardinal’s left hand where he held it, their ends flickering as though waiting for an input.

Remove Core Protection.

Based on the definition of the English in that command, I assumed that Eugeo had just given Cardinal limitless privileges to manipulate his own fluctlight. I didn’t know how he knew that art, but at the very least, it was a trio of words that spoke to his utter determination and acceptance.

The dying sage’s eyes bulged—one fine, one burned—and her lips trembled. Her uncertain thoughts traveled through skin contact.

“Are you sure…Eugeo? I don’t know…if you can be turned…back.”

Eugeo closed his eyes, his forehead and cheeks covered in glowing lines, and bobbed his head. “It’s all right. This is my role…This is the reason I’m here right now. In fact, there’s one thing I need to tell you here at the end. Cardinal…Kirito, and Alice. Metal weapons cannot reach Administrator’s body. It’s why I wasn’t able to stick her with the dagger you gave me.”

“…!”

Alice and I gasped and held that breath.

But Cardinal didn’t seem surprised at all—or maybe she just didn’t have the strength to show that much emotion. Her only response was to blink.

Eugeo bobbed his head and prompted, “Please…do it. Before Administrator notices.”

“…No, Eugeo. Stop,” I demanded, my throat dry and hoarse. “If you don’t…make it back…then…then your dream…”

If we actually won this fight and Eugeo didn’t get turned back into a human, then the hopes he’d been holding on to for the last eight years—his dream of getting Alice back and taking her home to Rulid—would never come true.

Administrator and Cardinal were the only two people in the world capable of this ultra-advanced ability to convert people’s flesh into weapons. One of them was the ultimate enemy, and the other was at death’s door. If this gambit actually succeeded, it could very well leave him with no means to return to human form.

I wanted to continue arguing, but Eugeo turned his purple-lit face up to the ceiling and interrupted, “It’s okay, Kirito. This is what I was meant to do.”

“…!”

My best friend’s mind was made up, and there was nothing I could say to him.

And what could I say in such a situation?

One single defeat had me shaken to my core. I couldn’t swing my sword or even step forward closer to danger.

Instead, I looked pleadingly at Alice. Her blue eyes were full of pain and respect in equal measure. In the next moment, her head hung low. She bowed to the criminal whom she’d struck without hesitation just two days ago at the academy’s great hall.

I bit my lip hard enough to draw blood. In my arms, Cardinal struggled to keep her eyes open. “Very well, Eugeo. Then I dedicate the very last art of my life…to your decision.”

Like a candle before it burned out, her voice regained a valiant bit of strength inside my mind. Purple glimmers lit up the middle of her brown eyes.

The pathways of light that ran from Eugeo’s hands to Cardinal’s suddenly flashed. That light raced through Eugeo’s body, and when it reached the pattern on his forehead, it emerged as a pillar of light that blazed all the way to the ceiling.

“What—?!”

That was Administrator, who was still looking drunk with exultation on the far side of the room. Instantly, her triumphant expression vanished. Fury crossed her silver eyes, and she bellowed, “You half-dead little whelp! What are you doing?!”

She pointed her rapier at me, Eugeo, and Cardinal. White sparks shot from the body of the weapon.

“No, you don’t!!” shouted Alice.

The Osmanthus Blade, which had to be near the end of its remaining life, disintegrated loudly into a golden chain that flew through the air. At the same time, an earsplitting blast from a giant bolt of lightning came toward us.

The tip of the chain brushed the white bolt. The enemy surge was directed down the length of the chain toward Alice.

But by that point, the golden chain was stretching behind her as well, the far end jammed into the floor. Locked into the ground wire and unable to escape back into the air, the massive burst of energy flowed directly into the tower itself, producing a roar and white smoke before it vanished.

Alice leveled her index finger at Administrator and declared, “Your lightning will not affect me!!”

“Why, you little puppet knight…Don’t you dare speak back to me!!” the supreme ruler spat, snarling. Just as quickly, her sublime smile returned, and she held the shining rapier on high. “What about this, then?!”

A multitude of red dots popped into being around the weapon, well over thirty. If they were all heat elements, then their number was certainly over the element-controlling limit of twenty for a human being.

The Osmanthus Blade’s Perfect Control weakness against shifting flames had been made clear in the battle against Chudelkin earlier. But the golden knight did not give way; in fact, she took one loud, bold step forward, boot clacking against the ground. The golden whip, sensing its master’s determination, disintegrated into shards and reformed in a grid pattern.

While the two women faced off, the purple light shining from Eugeo only grew brighter and brighter, until he suddenly slumped powerlessly. Instead of falling to the floor, however, he began to float into the air.

He went into a horizontal position, eyes closed, and all his clothes vanished as though they’d evaporated. The beam of light rising from his forehead touched the ceiling. As though answering his call, one of the pictures in the mural began to twinkle—the little bird soaring through the ancient skies, its eye crystal shining.

The roughly thirty crystals embedded in the ceiling, the memory fragments taken from all the Integrity Knights, should have been active in owning the Sword Golem. Only the bird’s crystal was different, pulsing with light as it came free from the ceiling and descended through the beam of light.

And that crystal, perhaps—no, almost certainly—was the memory fragment belonging to Alice.

I suspected that when Alice was synthesized, she’d lost the memory of her sister, Selka. But if that were the case, then Selka would’ve already been abducted and turned into a sword here by the time I first met her in Rulid two years ago.

So if it wasn’t Selka…then who were the memories saved in that crystal about?

The hexagonal prism crystal, pointed on both ends, descended silently, offering no answers. The Blue Rose Sword rose from the floor, rotating, and came to a stop with the tip pointed at Eugeo’s heart.

Eugeo’s muscled body, the translucent blade of the Blue Rose Sword, and the crystal prism formed one straight line.

Meanwhile, the distant Administrator screamed and swung down her rapier.

“Then you can all burn!!”

Thirty heat elements floating around the rapier fused, forming a giant fireball that shot forth.

“And I said…no you don’t!!” cried Alice, her voice ringing loud and clear. She pointed her right hand at the swirling flame.

The tiny blades forming a cross in midair swarmed together into a giant shield. The knight leaned against it and pushed off the ground, rushing straight toward the coming fireball.

A crash.

A short silence.

The resulting explosion was big enough to rattle the entirety of the enclosed space. Fire whipped, light flashed, shock waves burst across the chamber, and most of the carpet on the floor burned into nothing. Even the massive Sword Golem, inactive across the room, buckled with the force, and Administrator herself shielded her face with her arm.

But safe behind Alice’s shield, the worst I felt was a wave of heat that caused me to gasp. Neither Eugeo floating in the air nor Cardinal in my arms seemed to have been affected by the blast.

Within a few seconds, the maelstrom of flame was gone, as quickly as it’d come…and at its center, Alice fell to the ground with a thud. A second later the Osmanthus Blade, back to its original form, slumped next to its master, point stuck in the ground.

Alice’s white-and-blue knight’s uniform was charred and smoking here and there. Large burn scars ran over her arms and legs; it was clear from a glance that she was catastrophically wounded. She didn’t get up—possibly unconscious—but in the valuable few seconds she bought us, Cardinal managed to finish her command.

Within the pillar of purple light, Eugeo’s body lost its solidity and turned invisible. The Blue Rose Sword, also becoming transparent, moved into the center of his chest, fusing with him.

There was another flash.

I squinted against the brightness, and Eugeo unraveled into a million ribbons of light.

Fiercely swirling, they condensed back into a new shape.

What was left floating there was not human in appearance.

It was one mammoth sword, stark white with the faintest hint of blue, and a cross-shaped guard. The blade was as long and wide as Eugeo’s actual body. Its slight curve was beautiful, ending in a fiercely sharp point. A little furrow in the raised ridge on the flat of the blade was perfectly sized for the floating crystal to fit inside, and it did, with a little click.

Cardinal’s arm fell limply to the floor. Her lips quivered, and the final part of the command escaped like the slightest of breezes.

“Release…Recollection.”

Keeeeennn! The double-edged, six-sided crystal, Alice’s memory fragment, shone and reverberated. Eugeo’s sword rang on its own to answer that call and floated even higher.

Now the white greatsword was moving on its own, using the same logic that powered the Sword Golem. A sword forged from a human body, the fragment of memories that owned the sword, and the energy that bound them together: the power of love.

But there was one thing the Sword Golem had that Eugeo’s sword didn’t: the Piety Module prism that Administrator had placed in the heart of the golem. That was the tool that twisted the love powering the creature, driving it to murder.

“You’ll pay for this meddling, Lyserith!!” shouted Administrator, flinching away from the shine of the greatsword as though it was blinding her. “You can mimic my great creation…That one flimsy sword cannot withstand the might of my killing machine! I’ll break it in two!!”

She swung her left hand, and the silent Sword Golem’s eyes lit up again. It emitted an unpleasant metallic whine and began to shuffle forward at high speed.

Eugeo’s sword rotated until the flat was entirely level, with the point trained straight on the five-mel-tall giant. Its white length shone brighter and brighter, casting off motes of light into the air around it.

Then the greatsword flew, ringing like a bell. It soared, a sharpened comet, leaving a long white trail behind it.

“…Beautiful…,” Cardinal thought audibly from my arms. “Human…love. And the radiating light…of purpose…So…beautiful…”

“Yeah…it is,” I whispered, feeling more tears coming to my eyes.

“Kirito…I leave this to you now…Protect this…world…and its…people…”

With her last bit of strength, Cardinal turned her head to look at me with eyes crystal clear and smiled. Once she saw me nod my understanding, the little girl who was the world’s wisest sage closed her eyes, exhaled—and never drew breath again.

As I fought against the sobs, I felt the weight in my arms grow lighter and lighter. In a world blurred by tears, the white sword that bore Cardinal’s last wish flew straight and true on wings of light.

The golden giant spread its arms and ribs wide to welcome this oncomer. The blades took position like gleaming jaws, surrounded by an aura of darkness.

In terms of sheer numerical priority, there was no way that a greatsword based on Eugeo and his Blue Rose Sword alone could compete with a golem converted from three hundred human beings. But Eugeo’s sword sped up regardless, charging into the waiting fangs of the beast.

Its tip was pointed right at the middle of the golem’s spine—which was made up of three swords in alignment—at the purple light spilling from the cracks between the swords.

The Piety Module.

Gold and white collided for the briefest of moments. White and black light tangled, swirled, burst.

The overlapping metal collisions sounded like some beastly roar, and the golem’s arms and ribs slid down to an intersecting point. But just before they could close, the white sword plunged deep into the tiny gap in its backbone.

My ears caught the faintest crackling sound. The purple light seeping from the spine burst into nothing.

From the point where the white greatsword struck, the thirty gigantic blades held together with thick darkness began to sparkle and lighten. It almost felt like Eugeo and Alice’s love was repairing the sorrow of all those separated lovers.

Greeeee! A discordant scream came from the creature, gradually resolving into clean, clear harmony, a beautiful musical chord that rang long and loud before dispersing.

Then the killing machine, the creature that had nearly pushed us to death, fell apart into its individual swords and burst. Thirty different swords spun out following thirty different arcs, sticking and clattering on various surfaces around the room in a deafening clamor.

One of them stood directly behind me like a gravestone. It was from the left arm of the golem, the one that had sliced into me, but the aura of evil around it was gone now, and it was just smooth, cold metal again.

The glittering crystals on the ceiling that were controlling the golem blinked unsteadily and lost their light until they were still again. I didn’t know what had happened to the “minds” inside of them, but at the very least, Administrator’s Perfect Control, which had abused their emotions for power, was broken—never to return, I assumed.

The white greatsword that had destroyed the Sword Golem in a single swing was still levitating flat in the air, beams of light shining off it.

Glistening in the center of the blade was Alice’s memory fragment. Like a bolt from the heavens, I suddenly understood what was contained within it.

Thirty-one Integrity Knights. But only thirty swords in the Sword Golem. The fusion with Eugeo’s sword made it clear that the only memory fragment that hadn’t been used for that purpose was Alice’s.

So why couldn’t Administrator forge a sword that would pair up with Alice’s memories?

It must’ve been because Alice’s memories…her love…was too great. Young Alice loved Eugeo, loved Selka, loved her parents, loved everyone who lived in the village, loved Rulid itself, and even loved the time in which the people she loved lived and would continue to live.

Even the almighty pontifex couldn’t convert time and space into solid matter. So she wasn’t able to make a sword she could link to Alice. And it was why the sword that Alice and Eugeo made was so beautiful and radiant.

“Yes…it really is beautiful,” I whispered to Cardinal’s soul, which was now traveling to a place much farther than anywhere in the Underworld or the real world, as I clutched her body.

She didn’t speak back, but I felt her tiny body taking on a faint phosphorescence in my arms. It was the exact same kind of purity of being that I felt from the white sword’s miracle light.

This, to me, was the proof that Cardinal, who was once a girl named Lyserith, was not simply a program, as she claimed so many times, but a true human being with real emotions and love.

The glow brought a gentle warmth that penetrated my freezing flesh, even as her body began to lose its solidity. It was becoming transparent, until at last the contours broke apart, and she vanished in a spray of light.

The waves lit every surface of the isolated chamber, purifying it all—until they were ripped apart by a voice like a blade that resisted everything.

“That was a very vexing stunt to play right at your death, little one. You’ve put a very nasty scar on my long-awaited memory of triumph.”

Even after the destruction of her ultimate weapon, Administrator was as haughty as she’d ever been, a cold smile on her lips. “But the best she could do was destroy one measly prototype. I can make hundreds of them, thousands.”

The way she boasted about this with her rapier in hand was so mechanical, so utterly artificial, that it truly made me wonder, despite her having the same origins as Cardinal, whether she had actually lost her ability to feel emotion. Her shining white skin and dazzling silver hair exuded pulses of darkness like some kind of miasma.

Deep inside me, the cold serpent of fear bared its fangs once again. On instinct, I clutched my now empty arms together.

The seemingly invincible Sword Golem was destroyed, but at a tremendous cost. We’d lost the sage who was the only person in the world capable of counteracting Administrator’s overwhelming power.

All I could do was stare up at the pontifex in silent horror—but Eugeo’s sword kept rising, and with a smooth ringing sound, it pointed directly at our last and greatest foe.

“Oh?” Administrator’s mirror eyes narrowed. “You still want to fight, little boy? A little bit overconfident, just because you managed to stick in the gap and destroy my puppet, don’t you think?”

I couldn’t even be sure whether her words were registering with Eugeo while he was in sword form. But the pure-white blade steadfastly held its tip in her direction. The shine that surrounded the weapon grew stronger, its vibrating pitch growing higher and higher.

“…Stop it, Eugeo,” I rasped, reaching out toward the shining sword. “Don’t…don’t go alone.”

Driven by a burning panic, I shuffled over the charred carpet on weakened knees. I stretched as far as I could toward the sword and touched one of the motes of light that came off it, but the mote burst and vanished.

Out of the handle of the greatsword, another set of wings made of light grew. The wings flapped hard, pushing the white weapon directly at Administrator.

A wicked grin appeared on her pearly lips. Her mirrored rapier creaked as she swung it down, and another blast of lightning, perhaps even bigger than the ones that killed Cardinal, burst forward to meet the rushing sword of light.

The instant the lightning touched the tip of the sword, there was an even greater shock wave than the one that had started upon the Sword Golem’s destruction. Even at my distance, it buffeted my weakened body.

I tensed against the shock and did my best to keep my eyes open, which is how I saw that Administrator’s bolt of lightning erupted into millions of tiny tributaries.

Baaaam!! A peal of thunder accompanied the flying sparks, which in turn created their own, much smaller explosions around the room. And even through the tremendous deluge of energy that it shattered, the sword flew on. The white surface of its blade was covered in fine cracks, and pieces began to fall off. They were parts of Eugeo’s body, pieces of his very life.

“Eugeo!!” I screamed, my voice lost in the storm.

“Boy…!!” The smile was gone from Administrator’s lips.

The white greatsword reached the source of the lightning at last. Its point hit the needle end of the rapier right on the nose.

An ultra-high-pitched resonance arose, shaking the isolated chamber. For a few moments, Administrator’s silver rapier—the source of her godly power—and the white blade that was the fusion of Eugeo and the Blue Rose Sword grappled for supremacy. It looked like total stillness, but I could feel on my skin that this was only the precursor to the coming wave of destruction.

What happened next passed as though it were happening in slow motion.

Administrator’s rapier shattered into tiny pieces.

The white greatsword split in two, spraying motes of light.

The front end of the blade shot off, spinning, and silently sliced Administrator’s right arm clean off at the shoulder.

The image burned itself into my retinas until sound and vibration finally caught up.

Sacred resources burst forth from the shattered rapier and exploded in a colorful array that engulfed the room.

“Eugeooooooo!!”

Again, my scream was swallowed by the storm that buzzed and squealed like analog static. An oncoming shock wave smashed into my body as it hurtled toward the southern windows. I just barely managed to take cover behind one of the giant swords stuck into the ground that had been part of the golem just minutes ago.

When I could at last stand again, I saw Administrator standing on the ground on her own two feet, clutching her shoulder with her remaining hand…and two large shards of metal at her feet.

Eugeo’s broken sword still contained a faint trace of its glow. But even as I watched, it was growing weaker, pulsing like a beating heart, until it disappeared.

The pieces of the white sword began to lose their sense of being, gradually reverting to human form.

The piece from the tip to the middle of the blade became the legs.

And the part including the guard and hilt became the torso and head.

Eugeo was clutching the crystal prism to his chest, his eyes shut. His flaxen hair and milky skin were back to their full, solid texture.

Then, the cross sections where his body was split in two erupted with blood, immediately flooding Administrator’s bare feet.

“Ah……ah………”

The sound that croaked from my throat came to my ears as though from a very far distance.

The entire world lost color, lost smell, lost sound. Everything paled.

In the midst of this existence without sensation, only the color of the blood that continued to spill out had any vivacity to it. Something sparkling descended right next to Eugeo, who was lying in a crimson sea.

It landed and stuck in the liquid, sending a ripple outward—a slender blue-silver longsword, the Blue Rose Sword. I thought it was unharmed, but only for a moment; it promptly shattered, the pointed half of the sword breaking apart into ice crystals.

Without its support, the handle half of the sword tipped over and landed next to Eugeo’s face. It sent up a splash of blood flecks that hit Eugeo’s cheek, only to roll back down his skin.

I managed a few wobbling steps before I fell to my knees. With glassy eyes, I clutched my own sides, clinging to what warmth of Cardinal’s body still resided in my arms. But that faint heat did nothing to fill the growing void within me. It was like my mind, my body, and even my soul were going hollow.

Let’s end this already.

The thought rose from the emptiness like a bubble and popped.

We—no, I—had lost, in every sense of the word.

My one single reason for being in this place was to help free Eugeo’s soul into the real world. Instead, he’d sacrificed himself to protect me, and I was powerless, on my hands and knees—the man who would simply log out to reality when he died in the Underworld.

I just want to fade out, to vanish from the world. I don’t want to see any more, hear any more.

All I prayed for was my own obliteration.

But the Underworld was its own reality, and its master was not a program designed to stop once you hit the bad ending.

As she stood in the sea of blood, Administrator’s pale, featureless beauty took on the slightest bit of color, which vanished just as quickly. Her gorgeous voice brushed aside the silence of the room.

“I have not suffered such injury in two hundred years. Since my fight with Lyserith.”

It almost seemed like there was a note of praise, of admiration, in her voice.

“In terms of priority, Eugeo’s converted sword shouldn’t have been able to match my Silvery Eternity. I’m surprised at the result. I suppose it was my mistake not recognizing that his sword wasn’t metallic in nature.”

Drops of blood dripped from her right shoulder, creating more ripples in the puddle at her feet. She caught one in her left palm, converted it to light elements, and rubbed it on the wound. Instantly, the severed cross section sealed over into smooth skin.

“Well,” she said, turning her mirror eyes and their long lashes toward me now that she was done with her emergency treatment, “I’ll admit that I’m a bit surprised that you were the one who lasted this long, little boy. I’m mildly curious as to why you came here without administrator privileges…but I’ve also grown tired of this. I will ask the one from the other side about how this came to be later. For now, I’ll let your blood and screams round out this confrontation.”

She began to stride gracefully forward, betraying no sign that she was suffering from her severed arm. She stepped over Eugeo’s split body and proceeded toward me, leaving bloody footprints on the bare marble floor.

As she walked, she reached out sideways, and something white flew up from the ground behind her. It was a slender right arm—the limb that Eugeo’s sword had cut off her.

I thought she was going to reattach it to her shoulder, but instead, she lifted it up to her face, holding it by the wrist, and blew on it. Instantly, the arm was wreathed in purple light, shuddering mechanically as it underwent matter conversion.

What appeared was a silver longsword, simple in design but beautifully elegant. Its finish wasn’t the perfect unbroken mirror that the rapier’s was, but given the fact that it was using the arm of the most powerful person in the world as its resource, I was certain that the power it contained was more than enough to separate my head from my shoulders.

Death approached on quiet footsteps. I awaited it from my knees.

In just a few seconds, the administrator of this world arrived before me, dazzlingly beautiful despite her missing arm, and gazed down at me.

I looked up and met the colorful reflection of her mirror eyes. There was just a hint of mirth in them, and a gentle cast to her voice.

“Good-bye, little boy. Let’s meet again someday on the other side.”

She raised the sword, which caught the light of the moon.

A blade as sharp as a razor cut a blue arc through space toward my neck.

And then there was a silhouette occupying the space before me.

Long hair fanned through the air.

All I could do was watch as the wounded knight held her arms out wide.

I had seen this before.

Was I going

to repeat

the same

mistake…

…yet again?!

The thought flashed into my head, stopping time.

In a monochrome world without sound or color, a number of things happened in quick succession.

A small hand brushed my right arm where it dangled lifelessly.

The cold fear and resignation that consumed my entire being melted just a bit with the warmth of that palm.

The negative thoughts hadn’t vanished. But the owner of the hand was telling me that it was okay to admit that weakness.

“You don’t have to always win every time. If you lose eventually, if you fall, you just need to connect your heart, your will, to someone else.

“I am certain that is how all of those who shared time with you and moved on felt. Even I.

“Which means you can stand again.

“To protect someone you love.”

I was conscious of a mild heat emanating from my body, or perhaps my mind, sending circuits of light into my frozen fluctlight.

From the center of my chest, through my right shoulder, down my arm, into my fingers.

My tense fingertips were suddenly engulfed in a burning heat.

With speed I’d never experienced before, my right hand shot to the handle of my black sword nearby and grabbed it.

Then time flowed once more.

Administrator’s sword plunged down at the left shoulder of Alice, who stood with arms outstretched to take the blow for me. The sharp blade ripped the sleeve of the charred knight’s uniform and was just about to sink into her pale skin.

I swung my sword as I rose to my feet, and I caught the end of the silver sword just in the nick of time, sending up a shower of sparks. The resulting shock pushed Administrator away from Alice and me.

My free hand slipped around to steady Alice as she fell back against me, while the force of the impact pushed me toward the wall—it took both feet holding firm to prevent a collision. She rested her head against my right shoulder, then turned to look up at me with her blue eyes.

“Oh…” Her cheeks, still ugly and burned from the fire attacks she’d suffered, crinkled into a smile. “You can still move…after all,” she whispered.

“…Yeah,” I said, giving her as close to a smile as I could manage. “Now leave the rest to me.”

“I think…I will.”

And with that, Alice fell unconscious and slumped to her knees.

I lowered her to the floor and set her back against the window. I sucked in a deep breath and stood again.

Get some rest and leave this to me. Charlotte, Cardinal, and Eugeo have given their lives for mine…so I’ll make sure to pass it on to you.

The one thing that was most important was to get Alice out of this enclosed space somehow. I had to fight this woman and at the very least tie if I couldn’t win. Even if that meant losing all my limbs, getting stabbed through the heart, or getting my head chopped off.

I leveled my gaze, keenly aware of these possibilities, and stared at my foe.

Administrator’s grin was as faint as ever as she gazed at the hand holding her sword. There was a part of her soft palm that was rubbed red and raw, probably from the earlier shock wave.

“…I’m starting to get truly cross,” she said with glacial ferocity. Her mirror eyes, too, were as icy as though frost had gathered on them. “What is wrong with you people? Why do you struggle so hideously for no gain? The outcome of the battle is clear already. What meaning can there be in the process of reaching that foregone conclusion?”

“The process is what’s important. The part where you either die crawling or die with a sword in your hand. That’s what makes us…human beings.”

I closed my eyes and imagined my past self again. The self-image of Kirito the Black Swordsman that I’d kept defining for myself for years. The part of me that could never lose—the curse that said if I ever fell in battle, I’d lose everything I ever had.

But now I needed to free myself from that fear and fixation.

When my eyelids rose, long bangs hung over my eyes. I brushed them away with a gloved hand and swept my long black coat aside to brandish my longsword.

A short distance away, Administrator raised an eyebrow, then put on a cruel smile like the one she’d worn when she took Cardinal’s life.

“That black outfit…You look just like a black knight from the Dark Territory. Very well. If you simply must suffer, then I will ensure that your fate is very, very long and torturous. The kind that will make you beg for death’s merciful release.”

“That won’t be enough to atone for my stupidity,” I muttered, dropping my stance and keeping my eyes on the tip of the silver sword in her left hand.

I’d seen plenty of Administrator’s superlative power with sacred arts today, but given that her rapier—apparently named Silvery Eternity—was broken, I assumed she could no longer use that valuable resource as a power reserve to execute her rapid-fire arts. It was why she’d had to convert her own severed arm into this sword.

Sword-on-sword fighting was exactly what I wanted, but her skill was a total unknown. I assumed that, like the Integrity Knights, she would gravitate toward major single-attack skills, but if my fight against Alice on the eightieth floor had taught me anything, it was that this wasn’t the weakness it might sound like.

My weapon’s priority value was probably the lower of the two, so if our swords clashed enough, my already-damaged black sword would break. I had to keep close and try to seize victory with a combination attack, something that Administrator wouldn’t know about.

With that in mind, I lowered my center of gravity farther, ready to charge. I slid my right foot forward and pulled my left back, tensing them against the hard floor.

For her part, Administrator coolly raised her sword high behind her head. As I’d suspected, she was using a stance of the traditional High-Norkia style. The attack that would be unleashed was certain to be so fast and heavy that I couldn’t shrug it off with a deflection. I had to avoid it entirely and get past her defense.

“…!”

I sucked in a deep breath, tensing my stomach.

The instant I saw her sword waver, I leaped off the floor.

My enemy’s sword glowed blue. Detecting that it was the sword skill known to me as Vertical, I pushed harder off my left foot, veering my course right. Vertical was as straight as the name suggested, which made it difficult to aim at targets fleeing to the sides.

The blue trail of the silver sword approached at terrifying speed. I turned to my left, trying desperately to make myself a small target and get past the blade. The end of my coat flapped wide and was severed clean off.

I dodged it!

Next I pushed off my right leg, reversing the sideways drift of my progress, and pulled back my sword…

But the shine in Administrator’s sword did not vanish.

“…?!”

As I yelped in shock, her sword completely ignored all inertia and bounced back with a speed that made no sense. There was no way I could avoid it. Instead, I pushed my sword forward, trying to get it into the path of the swing.

Gyaiiing! A cloud of sparks burst with the tremendous impact. I’d successfully blocked the attack, but the pressure was so intense that I felt my right wrist creak. The momentum was strong enough that I had to jump backward to keep from losing my balance. I could use footwork to dodge her upward swing and throw in a counter—

—but once again, her skill with the sword surpassed my imagination.

After tracing a V shape back to an upright position, her sword again roared downward. My weight was held forward, so I couldn’t evade the third attack and caught a shallow slice on my left breast. It was only a scratch, but worse than the pain was the fear and shock that jolted through my body.

If the sword skill Administrator was using was the one I knew, then trying to dodge or half-heartedly block it would only get me killed.

“Yaaaah!!” I roared to dispel my fear, activating a sword skill from a posture that wasn’t really meant for it. It was the single diagonal slash Slant.

This time my expectations were dead-on, and Administrator’s sword practically teleported upward to an overhead position before striking for a fourth time, its deadliest blow yet.

My black sword met the silver one as it came straight down. The special light effect that happened when two sword skills clashed lit up our faces.

The fourth of a four-attack combination couldn’t be neutralized with a normal single skill. Fortunately for me, Administrator didn’t have her right arm now. Her balance was off, and the slash slipped to the left as it descended.

Gyarinnng! When our swords separated, this time I leaped purposefully outside of swing range.

I touched the cut on my chest and came away with a bit of red on my fingers. It wasn’t enough damage to need healing from sacred arts, but I was less concerned with my own flesh than I was horrified about the vivid slice across my leather coat, which was much higher quality than it looked—although it was produced only through the sheer power of my imagination.

Since I was left speechless, Administrator took it upon herself to describe what she had done.

“That was the One-Handed Sword’s four-part sword skill Vertical Square…wasn’t it?”

There was a brief mental lag before my mind fully processed the meaning of what I’d just heard.

She was correct about the name of the attack. But…

Sword skill.

She’d said the proper name.

Yes, sword skills did exist in the Underworld, just as they did in old SAO. But here, they were “ultimate techniques,” and their dramatic effects were seen not as active system assistance but as simply the power unlocked from the sword once the user had undergone enough training.

But those techniques these humans used were limited to single-attack skills like Vertical, Cyclone, and Avalanche. It was how I’d won so many duels and battles with my Aincrad-style continuous blade, and I assumed that it would be my only chance at victory here in the final battle, too.

But if Administrator could utilize sword skills and execute combination skills of four parts or more, then my advantage was gone.

I inched backward, consumed by confusion and panic—and then I caught sight of Eugeo’s maimed body. Blood was still seeping from where he’d been cleaved in half. He had minutes at best before his life ran out.

That beset me with even more to worry about. I needed to think.

Eugeo had been turned into an Integrity Knight, which had temporarily blocked his memory and caused him to fight me. So she must have done a pass on his memories when she did the Synthesis Ritual. In other words, it was possible that she’d scooped the name and movement of Vertical Square from Eugeo’s memories.

If that was correct, then Administrator could do One-Handed Sword skills only up to mid-level expertise. I’d never shown my partner the highest skills, after all.

So if I used an attack with over four parts, I still had a chance. The highest of One-Handed Sword skills was actually ten swings in total. And this wasn’t the time to be holding back.

I opened my stance and shifted the way I held my sword, and Administrator took note of this and giggled.

“Oh…you’ve still got that feisty look in your eyes? Very good. Then show me a bit more fun, little boy.”

Despite losing one arm, and the major damage to life value that entailed, the pontifex never seemed anything less than confident and in control. I didn’t rise to the bait; I just sucked in a deep breath and held it.

The mental image of the sword skill burned into my body and memory came flooding back, vivid and fresh. Already, my sword was beginning to glow with a pale effect.

From the right, it swung around in a circle until it was directly overhead.

“Haaaah!!” I screamed, activating the highest-level One-Handed Sword skill, Nova Ascension.

My body blazed through the air at an impossible speed, pushed by an invisible force. The first blow of the skill was a quick high slice that could get the jump on just about any other skill. No other longsword skills were faster.

Half a second until my slice caught Administrator’s left shoulder.

My senses were so accelerated that passing through time was akin to moving through a viscous jelly.

The tip of the silver longsword pointed right at me.

Silver steel shone in a cross shape.

Dak-ka-ka-ka-ka-ka!! Six light-speed thrusts riddled my body, first vertically, then horizontally.

“Guh……”

Blood shot from my mouth.

My ten-move combo, its first attack interrupted, simply vanished into the air as the ice-blue glow around my blade dispersed.

I couldn’t even register what had happened, much less theorize how it had happened. Bewildered by pain and shock, I stumbled backward, staring at Administrator’s sword as it pulled free from my stomach.

Six consecutive thrusts.

There was no such skill in the One-Handed Sword category.

Hot blood was gushing from small holes in my shoulders, chest, throat, and stomach. The strength went out of my knees, and I thrust my sword into the ground in an attempt to stay upright.

Administrator neatly stepped back to avoid the splashing blood and covered her mouth with the blade of her sword, which suddenly appeared to be much thinner.

“Ha-ha-ha-ha…Too bad, little boy.” The beautiful pontifex’s lips curled upward in mocking fashion over the fierce edge of the sword. “That was the six-attack rapier skill Crucifixion.”

No way.

I had never shown Eugeo that move. More importantly, I could never use that move. The most I’d done was see it used a few times all the way back in Aincrad.

I felt the world warping around me. Unless it was actually me that was warping. I was struggling to find an answer that described the impossible situation I was facing.

Did she peer into my memories? Did she steal that move from my fluctlight…? And if so, does that mean she perfectly executed a skill that I myself had nearly forgotten…?

“That can’t be…,” I croaked, in a voice that didn’t even sound like my own. “That’s impossible…”

My teeth creaked with the pressure of my grinding jaw. I yanked my sword out of the ground, trying to forget an anger that I didn’t understand and the fear that refused to release me from its clutches. I tensed my legs, taking a wide, firm stance despite my weakness.

My left hand went out front, and my right hand pulled in close. This was the stance for Vorpal Strike, the single-attack skill that had defeated Chudelkin.

The distance between us was five yards. Well within my range.

“Raaaah!!” I bellowed from deep in my gut, trying desperately to draw on more of the imagination power that had recently wilted. My sword glowed a ferocious crimson color where it rested on my shoulder. It was the color of blood—of naked intent to kill.

In response, Administrator stretched her legs front and back, sank down, and, like I had, smoothly moved her rapier over to her right side. There she paused.

As if just to prove that my eyes hadn’t been playing tricks on me seconds earlier, her slender rapier changed shape again. It was wider and thicker now. One sharp edge, long and smoothly curved. Why, it was just like a…

No. No more thoughts. Just rage.

“Ruoaaahh!!” I bellowed with animalistic fury and swung.

“Hsst!!” spat Administrator with a short but sharp hiss. The sword at her right side shone bright silver.

It was faster than the straight-line Vorpal Strike and beautifully curved. Her abrupt motion slashed across my chest.

A brief instant later, an impact like a giant’s fist smashed me backward. I flew high through the air, much of my remaining life spraying into the air as a red mist.

With her left arm held in place at the end of her swing, Administrator spoke so quietly that I barely heard her.

“Single-attack katana skill Zekkuu.”

I didn’t recognize that sword skill—but I had to guess that it meant Severed Void.

It was more than shock. I felt like the world itself was crumbling around me as I crashed to the floor. Blood splashed everywhere at the impact.

But it wasn’t my blood. I’d fallen into the frighteningly large pool of blood that flooded from the two halves of Eugeo’s body. My body was frozen, leaving only my eyes capable of movement. I strained them as far as they could go to see Eugeo’s top half lying right nearby.

My partner of two years was facing my direction, his skin pale and eyes closed. Little bits of blood still seeped from the grisly wound. Whether his life was already gone or on the verge of running out, it was clear that he wouldn’t be regaining consciousness like this.

Only one thing was clear: I had wasted the life that he’d given his to keep alive.

I couldn’t beat her.

Not in sacred arts, of course, but not in sword battle, either. She was far superior to me in every way.

There was no way I could know how she’d learned such a wide variety of sword skills. At the very least, it was clear she hadn’t gotten them from Eugeo’s memories nor my own.

Sword skills weren’t a part of the basic Seed package that the Underworld was built upon. The only game that used them was ALfheim Online, which was built into the old SAO server. But there was no way that the Rath engineers who’d built the Underworld, much less Administrator herself, would have stolen the sword-skill system from the ALO server.

Any further conjecture was pointless. Even if I discovered the truth somehow, nothing about it would change the obvious reality of my situation.

Charlotte’s sacrifice, Eugeo’s determination, Alice’s resolution…and Cardinal’s last will. And all I’d achieved with them was…

“Yes. That’s the face I like to see.”

A voice like a frozen blade caressed my neck. Administrator walked, barefoot and languid, across the marble floor toward me.

“I suppose people from the other side must have richer expressions. I wish I could save that despair of yours for all eternity.”

She chuckled to herself. “And while I assumed fighting with swords would be a terrible bore, I have to say, it’s not bad. You get to feel yourself inflicting that agony upon the opponent. Since we’re doing this, I want you to try a little harder, boy. I want to have more fun with you, slicing you to pieces, starting with your fingers and toes.”

…Do your…worst, I mouthed. Hurt me, torture me, kill me…

At least make sure that before I vanish from this world, I suffer ten times, a hundred times, worse than Eugeo and Cardinal.

I lost the strength to speak. Even the hand still stuck to the handle of my black sword was about to lose its grip…

Until just then, when I heard a whisper at my ear.

“This isn’t…like you. To just…give up.”

It was a halting voice, one about to fade away forever—but one I would never mistake for another.

My eyes rolled upward again. My mind was a blank.

Green eyes, so familiar and comforting they made me want to cry, looked back at me through barely lifted lids.

“Eu…geo,” I gasped. My partner gave me a faint smile.

When the Sword Golem had nearly sliced through my stomach, I couldn’t move from the pain and terror. But what I’d suffered was nothing next to Eugeo. He was severed clean through—bones, organs, everything. The agony should have been enough to utterly destroy his fluctlight. And yet…

“Kirito,” Eugeo said, his voice stronger this time, “I remember…when they took Alice away…how I couldn’t move…But you…you were so brave at that young age…standing up to the Integrity Knight like that…”

“…Eugeo…”

It was immediately clear to me that he was referring to when Alice had been taken away from Rulid Village eight years ago. But I hadn’t been there at the time. At first, I thought he was confusing it with some other memory, but the look in his green eyes was so crystal clear and lucid that it obliterated any doubts I had that he was telling the truth.

“…So this time…I’m going…to give you that push. Go on, Kirito…I know you can…stand again. You can stand…as many times…as it…”

His right hand twitched. Through the tears that flooded my eyes, I saw his fingers scoop up a piece of blue-silver metal from the sea of blood—the handle of the Blue Rose Sword.

Amid the pool of his own lifeblood, Eugeo squeezed the handle of the sword, which had lost its blade, and closed his eyes. A warm orange glow abruptly engulfed the area. The red sea beneath us shone and pulsed.

“What did you—?!” Administrator raged. But the invincible overlord covered her face with her remaining hand and backed away, almost as though she was afraid of the orange light.

The sea of blood grew brighter and brighter, until it was a blanket of tiny lights that floated off the ground all at once. The levitating motes then descended and began to swirl, funneling down into Eugeo’s sword.

A new blade began forming out of the cracked base of the sword.

Matter conversion.

This was a miracle that should only have been possible for the two managers of this world. My breath caught in my throat. A fearsome roil of emotions surged in my chest, bursting out of me in the form of a fresh wave of tears.

Soon the Blue Rose Sword was its old length again. The fine carving of the rose that was its namesake was now a deep-red color. The blade, guard, grip—everything was turning a brilliant red.

With trembling arms, Eugeo held out the beautiful weapon—now more like the “Red Rose Sword”—to me.

Despite having no sensation in it a moment ago, my left hand extended toward the sword, as though pulled by it, and closed around both Eugeo’s hand and the weapon handle.

Energy instantly surged deep into my body.

I didn’t believe it was sacred arts.

This was the power of Eugeo’s will itself. Pure Incarnation power.

I felt the resonance of the soul from his fluctlight to mine, crossing the boundary of worlds.

His hand went limp and left the sword to me, then fell to the floor. Through his faintly grinning lips, from his mind to mine, came a few short words.

“Now stand, Kirito. My friend…My…hero…”

The pain of the wounds all over my body vanished.

The cold emptiness at the center of my breast evaporated in the midst of blazing heat.

I stared at the side of Eugeo’s face, his eyes now closed, and whispered, “Yes…I will stand for you. As many times as it takes.”

Just seconds ago my arms felt no sensation whatsoever. Now I held them high, black sword in one hand and red sword in the other, and propped myself up off the floor with the blades to get to my feet.

My body did not want to listen. My legs trembled, and my arms felt as heavy as lead. Still, I managed to walk, step by agonizing step.

Administrator stopped averting her face as I approached, and she stared me down with white-hot fury in her eyes.

“…Why?” she demanded, her voice deep and distorted with a metallic edge. “Why do you foolishly resist your fate?”

“…That’s why…,” I replied hoarsely. “Resisting is the only reason I’m here right now.”

I didn’t stop walking, despite the many times I nearly toppled over. I just kept moving.

The swords I was holding were unbelievably heavy. But the weight of their existence gave me strength and willed my legs to keep moving.

In the long, long past, in a different world than this one, I had engaged in battles of life and death with two swords, just like this. This was the real me…the real Dual-Bladed Kirito.

Again, the power of my memory, my vision, overwrote reality, and the black coat that was sliced to pieces here and there became whole again. The bodily damage I’d suffered wasn’t gone, but whatever my remaining life value was now didn’t matter. As long as I could move and swing my swords, I could fight.

Administrator, eyes blazing with fury, took a step back. A second later, she realized that she had retreated, and her white features took on all the wrath of some demon god.

“…How dare you.” Her lips didn’t even move. The words just rippled her mouth like heat haze. “This is my world. I will not stand for an uninvited intruder acting this way. Kneel. Expose your neck. Acquiesce!!”

The air rumbled, and an aura of darkness rose from the pontifex’s feet, swirling in many layers. The silver sword shifted from a katana back to a longsword, and she pointed it, shrouded in darkness, right at my face.

“…Wrong,” I said, planning for this to be my final statement. I stopped just before the range of her sword skills. “You are merely a plunderer. One who does not love the world, nor the people who live in it…has no right to be called a ruler!!”

I took a stance. The Red Rose Sword in my left hand went in front, and the black sword in my right went to the rear. I pulled back my left leg. I lowered my waist.

Administrator slowly brandished the silver sword, raising it overhead. Her pearly lips uttered a phrase she was very familiar with, this time in the most menacing way.

“To love is to rule. I love all. I rule all!!”

The silver sword grew larger, overflowing with thick darkness. Instantly, the blade was the size of a two-handed sword, its black aura mixed with streaks of brilliant red. Then the hefty weapon came hurtling furiously downward. That was the High-Norkia technique Mountain-Splitting Wave—otherwise known as the Two-Handed Sword skill Avalanche.

That attack was the symbol of the Underworld’s nobility and had caused hell for me and Eugeo on many occasions. I blocked it with the intersection of my two swords: the Dual Blades defensive skill Cross Block.

“Gahhhh!” I bellowed, summoning all my strength to knock back the enemy’s weapon. The pontifex’s eyes seemed to widen just a bit.

“Enough tricks!” she shouted, jumping back a step. She steadied her weapon, which was back to being a normal longsword again, at shoulder height.

I pulled back my black sword to an equivalent position on my right. Matching vibrations thrummed from both our swords, like combustion engines overlapping and harmonizing. Black and silver swords shone crimson.

Administrator and I leaped at the same time, activating the same sword skill simultaneously: Vorpal Strike.

Like two sides of a mirror, our swords pulled back like arrows, held for an instant to glow twice as bright, then shot forward.

The tips of the two swords followed straight lines, brushing just the tiniest bit before they passed each other.

With a heavy jolt, my right arm was cut clean off below the shoulder.

But likewise, my sword severed Administrator’s left arm at the joint.

Two arms, each holding a sword, soared through the air, spraying red.

“Damn youuuu!!”

Administrator was now armless, and her eyes burned with rainbow fires. Her long silver hair stood on end like a living creature, waving in the air in countless locks. The ends of those bunches of hair turned to sharp needles that bore down on me.

“Not yet!!” I roared, sending crimson light jetting down the length of the Red Rose Sword still held tightly by my left hand.

The second blow of the Dual Blades Vorpal Strike, something that would’ve been impossible in Aincrad, broke through the swarm of silver hair—

—and sank deep into Administrator’s chest.

A sensation unbelievably heavy and solid rang in my palm. A feeling so vivid, so harrowing, that I forgot all about the pain of being stabbed by the rapier, or being sliced by the katana, or losing my arm to the longsword.

The edge of the blade sliced through Administrator’s smooth skin, broke her breastbone, and blasted her heart behind it—sensations that I was painfully cognizant of.

I had destroyed a human life. It was an act I’d been terrified of since I came to the understanding that the people of this world had true human fluctlights. I’d felt that fear when I used my sword skill on Chudelkin, too.

But in this one instance, I didn’t have an ounce of hesitation. Cardinal had left the future in our hands, and faltering was not an option.

And for the sake of the proud overlord Administrator, too.

I had only a second to indulge in that kind of thinking.

The Red Rose Sword, buried deep within her breast, shone with a light far more powerful than that of the sword skill itself. The blade, constructed from the resource of Eugeo’s own blood, twinkled as if it were a piece of a star.

And in the next instant, all the resources burst—causing a gigantic explosion.

Her eyes were bulging as far as they could go, a silent scream erupting from her mouth. All over the most beautiful naked body in the world, fine lines of light spread and burst forth.

An explosion of pure energy ballooned outward, swallowing everything in its midst.

I got tossed up like cotton fluff and slammed into the southern window. When I bounced off it and hit the floor, I could feel the blood gushing out of the wound on my right shoulder.

It was a wonder that I still had that much blood to lose after all the cuts I’d taken already. For a moment, I wondered whether my life really was going to run out, but there was still work to be done. I had to live at least a bit longer.

I glanced at the sword in my hand. The blade was back to its previous half length, and the rose decoration on the side was blue once more. I placed the sword on the ground and squeezed my right shoulder hard.

Strangely enough, white light flooded from my palm and sank into the wound, warm and soothing, without needing any command. The instant I felt the bleeding had stopped, I let go. The spatial resources had to be nearly dried up, and I didn’t want to waste what was left.

I put my left hand, not glowing anymore, on the floor and pushed myself up.

Then I gasped.

Through the floating little bits of lights that I assumed were the aftermath of the explosion, I saw the silver-haired girl—who should’ve been obliterated into nothing—standing unsteadily on her own two feet.

It was a wonder that her shape was still human at all. Her arms were gone, a gaping hole sat in the middle of her chest, and there were cracks running all over her skin, as if it were porcelain that was ready to break.

And what flowed from that multitude of wounds was not blood.

Something like silver and purple sparks was sputtering and shooting from her body, filling the air. It was a sight that made it seem like the people she’d turned to swords weren’t the only ones whose bodies had been changed—hers didn’t seem to be biological, either.

Her melted-platinum hair had lost its shine and hung in a bedraggled state. Through the shadows they cast, I saw her lips move, emitting a croak that I could just barely hear.

“…Not just one…but both swords…not made of metal…hah…ha-ha…” She laughed, shoulders bobbing like a broken puppet. “What a surprise…what an unexpected…outcome…I’ve suffered a wound…that I cannot heal…even by gathering up the remaining…resources here…”

I had been in the grips of a nightmare vision of Administrator healing herself instantly and entirely, but now I was able to exhale at last.

The supreme ruler, on death’s door now, slowly turned her collapsing body. She tottered forward like a toy losing its battery charge, sparks shooting from various parts of her body.

She was heading for the north end of the room. There was nothing I could see there, but she must’ve been going for something. Whatever it was, I had to finish her off before she reached it.

With desperate effort, I got to my feet and stared carefully at her backside, which seemed smaller than before. I followed, dragging my foot, my gait even more awkward than hers.

She was a good twenty yards in front of me and heading for a specific spot. But without any resources here, she shouldn’t have been able to escape this isolated space. Cardinal had said it was not easy to patch such a thing back together, even if separated for only a few minutes. And Administrator hadn’t denied it.

Many seconds later, she came to a stop in an empty spot. But when she turned around, naked and wounded, there was a grin on her face. She looked at me, trying to catch up to her.

“Heh-heh…At this point, I have no…choice. It is a bit…earlier than I planned…but I suppose…I will be…going now.”

“Wh…what are you…?”

…saying, I wanted to ask. But Administrator cut me off by stomping the floor with her cracked right leg.

There was a strange circular symbol on the burned carpet beneath her feet. It was extremely similar to the spot marking the location of the levitating platform behind me, but something about this one was different.

This circle, about a foot and a half across, was the familiar purple color of the user interface.

The floor vibrated subtly and rose up to reveal…a white marble pillar.

And a laptop computer sitting atop it.

“Wha…?”

I was so stunned that my legs gave out and I fell to my knees.

It wasn’t exactly the same as a real-life laptop. The body looked like some kind of partially translucent crystal, and the screen was see-through and faintly purple. It was very, very similar to the virtual system console I saw once in Aincrad.

That was it.

That was the connection mechanism to the outside world I’d been searching for these past two years.

An almost violent urge overtook me, making me scrape the floor with my hand in an effort to move forward. But my progress was devastatingly slow, and my destination was definitively too far.

Without any arms to use, Administrator instead brandished a lock of her silver hair like a living creature to strike at the keyboard. A small window opened on the holo-screen, containing some kind of indicator that began a countdown.

Then a purple pillar of light appeared from the ground where she stood—and Administrator’s battered body rose into the air.

At last, she lifted her face and looked directly at me.

Her perfect beauty was in a dreadful state. The left side of her face was badly cracked, and the place where her eye should be was filled with impenetrable darkness. The lips that gleamed a shade of pearl looked more like paper now—but the thin smile on them still carried an arctic frostiness to it.

Her intact right eye narrowed, and she cackled. “Hah…hah…So long, little boy. Until…we meet again. In…your world…this time.”

At last, I understood what it was she was intending to do.

She was trying to escape into the real world.

She wanted to escape the Underworld, with its absolute limit on existence in the form of her life value, so that she could preserve her fluctlight—the exact same way I had hoped to do with Eugeo’s and Alice’s souls.

“W-wait!!” I cried, crawling for all I was worth.

If I were her, I’d destroy the console just before the moment of escape. If she did that, then all hope would be lost.

Administrator’s naked form climbed, slowly but surely, up the ladder of light.

Her smiling lips mouthed a silent farewell.

Good-b—

But before they formed the final vowel, someone who had crawled to the base of the console without either of us noticing screamed.

“Your Holiness…Pleaaaase! Take me with youuuuu…”

Prime Senator Chudelkin.

The clown whose torso my sword skill had penetrated, and who’d been scrapped for good by Administrator, was right there all of a sudden, his bloodless face twisted in desperation, reaching upward with fingers bent like claws.

His small body burst into searing flames. Through some kind of sacred arts—or perhaps Incarnation—Chudelkin turned his own body into a flaming clown this time and began to spiral into the air.

Even Administrator looked shocked, and possibly even frightened. Just as she was nearly up to the exit of the pillar of light, Chudelkin’s flaming hands caught the pontifex’s feet.

His thin, elongated clown’s body wrapped itself around and up her naked form, clinging to her like a snake. The ferocious flames engulfed both of their bodies.

Even her hair caught fire, the pointed ends of it melting away. Her lips twisted, and she screamed in frustration.

“Unhand me! Let go of me…you fiendish ingrate!!”

But Chudelkin’s round face only beamed with bliss, as though his master’s words had been a confession of her love for him.

“Aaaah…At last…at last I can be one with Your Holiness…”

His short arms clung fiercely to her body. The cracks in the woman’s skin turned red with the heat, and small pieces began to fall away.

“I would never…bother with…a hideous clown…like you…!” she screamed. Silver sparks from the pontifex’s body mixed with Chudelkin’s flames, illuminating the vast chamber.

Chudelkin’s body had no form anymore; he was a mass of flame alone, with only a blissful expression left in the middle to utter his final words.

“Ahhh…Your Holiness…my…Adminis…tra…tor…”

And then Administrator’s body began to burn from the extremities.

The supreme ruler’s face caught on fire, and the fear and rage there vanished. Her silver eyes looked skyward. Even in the moment of her utter destruction, she was unfathomably beautiful.

“……I……my own……world……”

I couldn’t hear anything after that.

The wild conflagration rapidly contracted. The flames converted to a platinum flash of light that further contracted and then expanded.

It wasn’t quite an explosion. It was more like everything was returned to a state of light that filled the space. There was no sound or vibration, simply the conceptual phenomenon of the oldest living soul in the Underworld perishing, an event that expanded past the walls of this enclosed, isolated space.

The silver light shone and shone for so long that I began to wonder whether the world would ever return to its original state.

But eventually, the light did indeed begin to abate, and color returned to my sight at last.

I blinked several times to clear the tears—surely because of the light that burned my eyes—and I looked closely at the point that had been the heart of the explosion.

I couldn’t find a single piece of evidence that the woman and the clown had ever been there. The pillar of light was gone, leaving behind only the marble pedestal sticking up from the floor and the crystal console on top of it.

At last, both logic and intuition told me that Administrator, who had once been a girl named Quinella, was utterly gone. Her life had reached zero, and the lightcube that held her fluctlight was reinitialized. So too, I expected, would be the lightcube of Cardinal, located adjacent to it.

“…So…it’s over…,” I mumbled from my knees, hardly realizing the words were coming from my own mouth. “……Was this…the right thing to do…Cardinal…?”

There was no answer.

But it seemed as though a tiny breeze from the depths of my memory brushed my cheek.

It was the scent of Cardinal when we’d made bodily contact on the floor of the Great Library—old books, candle wax, and sugar candy, mixed into one.

I wiped my tears aside with my left arm and realized my sleeve had reverted from the leather coat back to my black shirt. Then I turned to crawl toward Eugeo, who was nearly at the center of the room.

My partner’s brutally severed body continued dripping blood at long intervals, drop by agonizing drop. He had minutes to live at best.

When at last I reached his side, my first idea was to stop the bleeding by picking up his lower half and fitting it back against the spot where he’d been sliced. Then I placed my palm against the cut and imagined that healing light.

The glow that appeared below my hand was so faint that I had to squint to see it. Still, I pushed it against him anyway, hoping it would seal the cut.

But the red liquid that was Eugeo’s life itself continued to seep from his halves. The priority of my healing was definitively inadequate for the severity of his wound, I knew. But I waved my hand around anyway and shouted, “Stop…just stop! Why won’t you work?!”

The power of imagination determined everything in the Underworld. If I just wished hard enough, I could make any miracle happen. Right?

I prayed, begged, wished so hard that I could’ve wrung every last drop of strength from my soul.

But still, another drop of Eugeo’s blood dripped from his wound. And another.

The overwriting ability of one’s imagination could affect only the locations and appearances of objects. It couldn’t alter values like priority level, durability, and other numerical attributes. I was aware of this fact, but I didn’t want to acknowledge it. Not now.

“Eugeo…come back to me, Eugeo!!”

I stuck my wrist into my mouth, ready to bite it off. I knew it wouldn’t be enough, but in the moment, I needed to give all my available resources to him. Even if it meant that both of us lost our lives in the end.

My canines sank into my skin, ready to tear flesh and blood loose, when I heard a faint whisper call my name.

“……Kirito.”

I looked up with a start.

Eugeo’s eyelids were just barely lifted. He was smiling.

His face was paler than the moonlight itself, and his lips were totally bloodless. It was obvious that his life was continuing to drain away. But his green eyes were the same as when I first met him, gentle and warm and bright.

“Eugeo…!” I exclaimed. “Hang on—I’ll heal you right now! I’m not letting you die…It’s not going to happen!”

I put my wrist in my mouth again. But then a hand, cold as ice yet as warm as a patch of sunlight, closed over my wrist and squeezed gently.

“Eu…,” I grunted, but Eugeo kept his grip. From his lips tumbled an English phrase I’d taught him back at the academy, a little secret mantra just between the two of us.

“Stay cool…Kirito.”

“…!”

I took a ragged, quivering breath. I had told Eugeo that it was a parting phrase. I hadn’t taught it to him so that I could hear him say it here and now. Absolutely not.

I shook my head over and over, but Eugeo kept whispering: “It’s…all right. It’s meant…to be this way…Kirito.”

“What are you talking about? Of course it’s not all right!” I yelped. Eugeo just kept smiling. He almost seemed satisfied.

“…I…fulfilled…my role…to play…This is where…our paths…split apart…”

“That’s not true! I don’t believe in fate!! I don’t accept that answer!!” I screamed, sobbing like a child. Eugeo wisely shook his head. Even that tiny gesture should have required intense concentration, but he showed no signs of suffering.

“…If this…hadn’t happened…then we would’ve had to fight each other…both for the sake of Alice. I would fight…to take back Alice’s memories…and you would fight to protect the soul of Alice the Integrity Knight…”

I held my breath.

It was the very thing I’d been terrified of, deep down, but chosen not to think about. That when all the fighting was over and it came time to insert Alice Zuberg’s memory fragment into Alice the knight’s fluctlight, the question would be posed: Was I going to agree to that?

Even now, when the moment came, I had no answer.

Instead, I tearfully hurled it back at Eugeo.

“Then…fight me!! Restore your full strength and fight me!! You’re already stronger than I am!! So you need to get back on your feet and fight me…for Alice…!”

But Eugeo’s serene smile never wavered. “My sword…is already…broken. Plus…it was…my weakness…that led me to open my heart…to Administrator…and to try to fight you. I have…to pay…for that sin…”

“It’s not a sin! You’re guilty of nothing!!” I sobbed, grabbing his wrist this time. “You’ve fought valiantly the whole way! If it wasn’t for you, we’d never have beaten Chudelkin or the Sword Golem or Administrator! You have nothing to blame yourself for, Eugeo!!”

“……You…think so…? I…hope so…,” he mumbled, eyes full of large tears that ran down his cheeks. “Kirito…I’ve always…been jealous of you. You were stronger…and more beloved…than anyone…A part of me was afraid…that even Alice…would prefer…W-well, anyway…I finally…understand. Love isn’t something…you seek…It’s something you…give. Alice…taught me…that…”

He stopped talking and lifted his left hand. His palm, ragged and torn from all the fighting, held a tiny crystal: a translucent, double-ended hexagonal prism. Alice’s memory fragment.

The clear prism glowed as it brushed my hand.

The world filled with light.

I no longer felt the hardness of the floor or the pain of my severed arm. A gentle flow carried my soul somewhere distant. Even the terrible sadness engulfing my heart simply melted away in that warm light.

And then…

Something bright and green was waving far overhead.

Sunlight through leaves.

Fresh shoots were spurting out of the tree branches, soaking in the long-awaited spring sun and swaying in the breeze. The smooth black branches rustled as unfamiliar little birds flitted and chased one another around.

“Your hands are idle, Kirito.”

The sound of my name yanked my attention down from the branches.

The blond hair of the girl sitting next to me glimmered in the light falling through the leaves. I blinked a few times and shrugged. “Well, you were staring openmouthed at that family of cottonrabbits, Alice.”

“I did not have my mouth open!” protested Alice Zuberg, the girl in the blue-and-white apron dress. She lifted what she was holding up to the sunlight.

It was a finely crafted leather sheath for a short sword. The surface had been polished to a shine with an oil rag, and a decorative dragon had been stitched on with white thread. It was a somewhat familiar, rounded dragon, with the tail only half-done, a needle dangling from the end of the unfinished loose thread.

“Look, mine’s going to be finished very soon. How’s yours coming along?”

I looked down at my knees. Resting there was a short sword carved from a branch of platinum oak, the second-toughest wood in the forest. Old Man Garitta, who knew more than anyone about the forest, had shown me how to carve the iron-tough material, and it had taken me two months to get it to this state. The blade was already finished; I just had to put the finishing touches on the handle.

“I’m further along. Almost done with it,” I told her.

Alice grinned and said, “Then let’s hurry and finish up the last bit.”

“Mmm.”

I looked up to the sunlight coming through the branches again. Solus was past the middle of the sky now. We’d been working in our secret spot here all morning, so it seemed like we should probably head back to the village soon.

“Hey…we should get going back. Or we’ll get busted,” I said, shaking my head.

Alice pouted like a little child. “We’re still fine. Let’s stay a bit longer…just a bit?”

“Well, fine. But only for a little while, got it?”

We called it a deal and spent the next several minutes absorbed in our work.

“All done!”

“Finished!”

Our voices overlapped, right at the same moment that the grasses rustled and parted behind us. I spun around, hiding what I was holding behind my back.

Standing there and looking bewildered was a boy with soft flaxen hair cut short to keep it under control—Eugeo.

His pure-green eyes blinked, and he said suspiciously, “I didn’t see either of you all morning. You’ve been here the whole time? What are you doing here?”

Alice and I hunched our shoulders and shared a look.

“Well, I guess he figured it out.”

“See? I told you. Now it’s all for nothing.”

“It’s not ruined. Here, just hand it over.”

Alice grabbed the newly finished wooden sword from me and slipped it into her leather sheath neatly—and behind her back.

Then she hopped forward toward Eugeo, gave him a smile as radiant as the sun, and shouted, “It’s three days early…but happy birthday, Eugeo!!”

The boy stared wide-eyed at what she offered him: a short sword of platinum oak, in a sheath with white dragon stitching on it.

“Uh…it’s…for me…? This incredible thing…?”

All I could do was chuckle now that Alice had stolen the best part of the surprise away from me. “You said the wooden sword your dad bought you is broken, right? So we decided…Look, I know it’s not like the real one that your brother has, but this wooden sword’s better than any you’ll find at the general store!”

Eugeo reached out uncertainly and took the short sword in both hands, then arched his back in surprise when he felt its weight. His face broke into a smile just as big as Alice’s.

“You’re right…this is heavier than my brother’s sword! This is amazing…I…I’ll take such good care of it. Thanks, you two. This is great…I’ve never gotten such a wonderful birthday gift before…”

“H-hey…don’t cry, man!” I shouted when I saw the shine in the corners of his eyes. He rubbed at his face, claiming that he wasn’t crying.

Then Eugeo looked right at me. He smiled again.

All of a sudden, his smile blurred and blotted.

There was an abrupt pain in my chest. A feeling of unstoppable nostalgia, homesickness, and loss. The tears flowed without stopping, soaking my cheeks.

Alice and Eugeo were crying, too, standing side by side.

We all spoke together.

“The three of us lived the same era together.”

“Our paths separate here…but our memories remain eternal.”

“I will continue to live…within you. So, look…”

The vision of sun and shade vanished, and I was back on the top floor of Central Cathedral.

“So, look…don’t cry, Kirito.”

Eugeo’s arms went limp. His right hand hit the floor, and his left landed on his chest. The prism’s glimmering had nearly died out.

The scene that had just played out on the screen of my mind was my own memory. I only remembered a single scene, but the truth of it, that Alice and Eugeo and I had been childhood friends who grew up together and were connected by an unshakable bond of friendship, filled my body with a warmth that eased the pain of loss just a bit.

“Yeah…the memories are in here,” I sobbed, pressing my fingers into my chest. “They’ll be here forever.”

“That’s right…And it means we’ll be friends forever. Where…Kirito, where are you? I can’t see you…,” Eugeo called, his fading eyes wandering, though the smile never left his face.

I leaned over and clutched Eugeo’s head with my one hand. My tears dripped down onto his forehead. “I’m here. I’m right here.”

“Oh…” Eugeo was gazing somewhere far into the distance now. His smile looked very satisfied. “I can see it…glittering in the darkness…like stars…The starry sky…that I looked up at…every night…from the foot of…the Gigas Cedar…Just like…the shine…of your…sword…”

His voice was growing clearer, more transparent by the moment. It caressed my very soul.

“In fact…I think your black sword…should be called…the Night-Sky Blade. What do you…say…?”

“Yeah…it’s a great name. Thank you, Eugeo.”

I clung to my friend’s body, which was getting lighter by the second. Our minds were in contact, his final words rippling into the air like a droplet into water.

“Envelop……this…little world…as gently…as the night……sky……”

The clear liquid trapped in his eyelashes transformed into light and disappeared.

With what little weight he had left, Eugeo leaned back into my arms and slowly closed his eyes.