3

Hurry.

Hurry down to the surface. To Kirito.

When Asuna Yuuki had logged in to the Underworld using Super-Account 01, “Goddess of Creation Stacia,” she’d floated downward in the slow-fall function enabled only on your first login, as the name of her lover echoed repeatedly in her head.

In the real world, nearly an hour had passed since the marine research megafloat known as the Ocean Turtle had been attacked by an unidentified armed group. Asuna had elected to go into the simulation and entered a full dive with Soul Translator Unit Five. According to Takeru Higa’s reassurances, he would spawn her directly over Kirito’s present location. She knew that where she fell, her beloved would be waiting.

Asuna’s mind was racked with almost crazed longing and lovesickness, as well as a sensation like stabbing needles. She winced against the pain.

The admin privileges given to the Stacia account included unlimited landscape manipulation, the side effects of which she had been warned about ahead of time. The massive amalgamation of mnemonic data that made up the landscape, traveling between Asuna’s STL and the Main Visualizer, which contained all of the Underworld’s data, placed a great amount of strain on her fluctlight.

Higa, the chief engineer of Rath, warned her not to engage in too much manipulation of terrain—and if she felt a headache, to stop doing it at once.

But as soon as Asuna could see about a thousand humans directly below and a huge number of darklanders approaching from north and south, she immediately began reciting the command for altering the landscape.

She stopped the army coming from the north by carving a very long ravine into the ground. But to eliminate the thirty or so in the act of approaching Kirito’s location, she had to remove the ground itself.

They were people with real souls. True bottom-up AIs whom Kirito had spent two and a half years in this world fighting to protect. Perhaps it was the fear and hatred from those dying souls that was surging back through her STL and inflicting this pain on her.

She shut her eyes briefly, then yanked them open again, dispelling her moment of hesitation. Her order of priorities had been set in stone years ago. She would commit any sin to protect Kirito—Kazuto Kirigaya. She would accept any punishment.

At last, the few dozen seconds that lasted an eternity came to an end, and the tip of her pearl-white boot touched black earth. She was in the middle of woods featuring oddly twisted shrubs. There was no moon, just eerie red starlight twinkling faintly down.

She shook her head several times to dispel the last bits of her lessening headache, then stretched her back. Directly nearby was the hole that she had created to swallow up the darklanders and their knightlike armor. It was a danger, left that way, but she couldn’t bring herself to alter the land again anytime soon.

A horse whinnied nearby. She glanced in the direction of the sound and saw several large carriages parked among the woods in a way that was meant to conceal them.

Where…? Where are you, Kirito?

She was about to shout out the name of her beloved in sheer haste when she heard a quavering voice behind her ask, “Lady…Stacia…?”

Asuna spun around and saw two girls huddled together, dressed in gray jackets and skirts that resembled high school uniforms. Their looks were curious—neither Japanese nor Western. Their skin was smooth and cream-colored, and the girl on the right had red hair like maple leaves, while the girl on the left’s was a dark coffee brown.

And on each one’s belt, a well-used sword…

The red-haired girl’s lips parted, and again she breathed, “Are you…the goddess…?”

It was perfect Japanese—and yet, there was just the slightest bit of foreignness to the pronunciation. Asuna felt as if she were brushing up against three hundred years of the Underworld’s own history and cultural evolution, right in that moment.

Mr. Kikuoka, Mr. Higa, what have you created? Maybe this was all just a simulation to you, but this world and the people who live in it are undoubtedly alive.

“…No…I’m sorry. I am not a god,” Asuna said, shaking her head.

The girl with the dark-brown hair clutched her hands to her chest and protested, “But…but you worked a miracle and saved my life. You saved everyone from the horrible soldiers of the land of darkness…The soldiers, the priests…and even Kirito.”

Asuna gasped at the pulse that tore through her heart at the mention of that name. She struggled to regain her balance before she fell, and while her lips worked to speak, the most she could eventually produce was a whisper.

“I…I only came here…to see him. To see Kirito…,” she pleaded, desperately holding back tears. “Please…where is he? Let me see him…Take me to where Kirito is.”

The girls seemed stunned by this, but they soon glanced at each other, then nodded together. “Of course…Right this way.”

They guided Asuna ahead through the distant circle created by swordsmen wearing matching armor. They soon reached the rear end of one of the carriages. A canopy made of heavy canvas hung over the bed, hiding its contents from view.

“Kirito’s in—”

Before the red-haired girl could finish her sentence, Asuna opened the canopy with both hands and leaped into the bed of the wagon, stumbling farther inside.

A small lantern hanging from the canvas ceiling provided dim light, revealing stacked boxes and barrels. She made her way through them, farther and farther back. A familiar scent wafted out.

It smelled like the sun. Like the breeze traveling through forests and meadows.

As her eyes got used to the gloom, they caught sight of light reflecting off silver. The source of the light was a wheelchair built of a metal frame and wooden parts.

And hunched over the seat like a living shadow was a figure dressed in black.

“……!”

A storm of irresistible emotion rooted Asuna to the spot. All the words of reunion she had thought and thought about caught in her throat, refusing to come forth.

Here was the soul of the man she loved more than any other, whose body in the real world lay prone in STL Unit Four on the Ocean Turtle.

Battered, incomplete, but living and breathing.

Surely when Kirito had seen Asuna again at the hospital in Tokorozawa, freed from deadly SAO at last but still unwaking, he must have felt the same pain, the anguish, and made the same vow that she did now.

It’s my turn to save you, to do whatever it takes, pay whatever price to bring you back.

Asuna let out the breath she was holding and whispered, “Kirito…”

His body was painfully thin, and his right arm was missing. His left arm clutched two swords, white and black, and it twitched when she spoke. His downcast face and empty eyes began to tremble and ripple.

“Aa…,” his faint voice croaked through a cracked throat and dry lips. “A…aaa…ah…”

The wheelchair began to rattle quietly. His arm was incredibly tense. The tendons in his neck stood out. Two tears tracked down his cheeks and dripped onto the scabbards he clutched to his chest.

“It’s all right, Kirito…It’s all right now!!” shouted Asuna. She knelt and tenderly, powerfully embraced her beloved.

Hot droplets were spilling from her own eyes now, flowing without end.

It would be a lie to deny that she’d been hoping the moment of their reunion would miraculously heal Kirito’s soul and return him to consciousness.

But Asuna was aware that the damage to Kirito’s fluctlight was not so easily undone. His subjective sense within the fluctlight, his self-image, was shattered. Unless it was rebuilt somehow, no informational input from the outside was going to restore his proper output.

She recalled what Higa had said: It turned out that he had a number of helpers—artificial fluctlights, of course…He had friends. Most of them died in the battle against the Church, but when he finally succeeded in opening the circuit to the outside, he was strongly blaming himself. In other words, he was attacking his own fluctlight.

A massive source of loss, regret, and despair had torn a deep and terrible hole in Kirito’s heart.

But I’m going to fill that hole, even if it’s a bottomless void. If I can’t do it alone, I’ll borrow the help of all those people whose hearts he touched. I refuse to believe there’s a sense of loss that no amount of love can fill.

Asuna could feel fresh, powerful determination fill her being. She would not let him feel a single further ounce of sadness.

I’m going to protect this world that Kirito loved and lived in. I’ll protect it from these mysterious invaders…and from Rath itself.

She hugged her boyfriend tight once more, then got to her feet. When she turned around, the two girls were watching them, tears in their own eyes. She gave them a smile. “Thank you. You must have been keeping him safe.”

The girl with the burnt-brown hair let her face droop a bit and asked, voice trembling, “Um…may I ask something…? If you are not Lady Stacia, then who are you…?”

“My name is Asuna. I’m a human being, just like you. Like Kirito, I came from the ‘outside world’…to fulfill the same purpose that he did.”