CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

AWAKENING (CONT.), JULY 7TH, 2026 AD / NOVEMBER 7TH, 380 HE

6

“I…will never…! For…give…you……”

Krsh!!

A second sword pierced Klein’s back.

More tears flooded from Asuna’s eyes. It was a wonder that she had any left.

Despite being pinned to the ground by the blades, Klein continued to scrabble at the soil. Over him loomed the one-time agitator in the black poncho—the former leader of Laughing Coffin, PoH.

“Oh, man, I can’t watch this. You should’ve stayed put like the small fry you are. This is what happens when you mess with the big dogs,” he chided, spreading his hands and shaking his head. In a moment, he spoke to the red knights standing behind Klein in a language Asuna couldn’t recognize. One of the players nodded and raised yet another sword.

The third blade gleamed, ready to eliminate the last of Klein’s remaining HP.

“Hajimaaaaa!!”

A scream that sounded like Korean emerged from a lone red soldier who raced through the crowd from the rear. He made it just in time to block the downward strike with a blade of his own.

No way…Why does it hurt so much?

Wol-Saeng Jo, under the player name Moonphase, slumped to the ground and braced himself against the agony of having his back sliced by the man in the poncho.

Wol-Saeng’s AmuSphere was supposed to be able to transfer only a tiny amount of physical pain signals to the brain. In Silla Empire, the game he was used to playing, even an enormous dragon crushing your avatar’s head in its jaws produced nothing more than a slight numbing shock.

But Wol-Saeng felt like stove burners were being pressed against the skin of his back. And yet, the pain of suffering the same physical blow in reality would probably be even worse. Wol-Saeng considered himself somewhat of a VRMMO veteran, and even he could barely react in time to the black-poncho man’s speedy attack with the thick, heavy kitchen knife. If he suffered that kind of blow in real life, it would probably be instantly fatal or, at the very least, painful enough to knock him unconscious. That meant this was still nothing more than virtual, simulated pain, but that realization didn’t help him very much. Unbearable pain was still unbearable, no matter the source. He wished he could log out immediately, circumstances be damned.

Instead, Wol-Saeng curled into a ball on the dark earth and endured.

After all, he couldn’t accept the story he had been told:

Supposedly, Japanese hackers had attacked a test server belonging to a new VRMMORPG under development by a team of American, Chinese, and Korean gamers and were killing the testers within the server. And now those testers needed help from outside players to stop the Japanese barbarism.

At least, that was the message going around on social media to get them to dive in. They saw scenes of a group of Japanese players attacking another group of what appeared to be Americans.

But was the video really depicting what the messages claimed it did?

To Wol-Saeng’s eyes, the Japanese players were the desperate ones, and the Americans looked more like players in a game. Thanks to thousands upon thousands of Chinese and Korean “reinforcements,” the tide of battle had turned, and now the Japanese were powerless—but the discrepancy of their attitudes remained the same. Even with their gear destroyed and HP nearly gone, they were desperate to do something…Not to destroy, but perhaps to protect something?

Indeed, just moments before, a woman speaking fluent Korean had emerged from the pack of Japanese players and said:

You are being lied to!! This server belongs to a Japanese company! We are not hackers! We are connected legitimately!! …Those were Americans, who were brought here under false pretenses, just like you! You’re the ones who are being used as tools of sabotage!!

She had called herself Siune. Something in her tone had resonated with Wol-Saeng; he had made his way over to her through the combat and asked, Do you have any means of proving what you’ve told us?

One of Siune’s companions was about to say something in Japanese when the man in the black poncho slashed Wol-Saeng across the back, knocking him to the ground.

Everything after that happened in the blink of an eye, and it was entirely one-sided. The Japanese group was overwhelmed by the crimson soldiers, the majority of the former logging out from HP loss, with less than two hundred survivors being stripped of their weapons and rounded up.

The man in the poncho appeared at the front line again, seemingly to make a victory speech—but instead, he did something quite unusual:

He had one player, who was sitting in a wheelchair and clutching two swords, wheeled forward from the Japanese rear guard and began to speak to him in fluent Japanese.

Once again, Wol-Saeng felt that something was wrong.

What did it mean for someone to be in a wheelchair in a virtual game?

In Silla Empire, which Wol-Saeng was most familiar with, localized leg damage could cause a Crippling Debuff, which affected your ability to walk, but you eventually recovered with magic, medicine, or time. If a player couldn’t walk long enough that he needed a wheelchair, it wasn’t really a game anymore.

Plus, the young man in black seemed to have some kind of mental disability. He gave no reaction to the poncho man’s speech and simply sat there when the wheelchair was shoved. He almost seemed like an empty husk of an avatar, like a rag-doll body belonging to a player who wasn’t logged in.

Eventually, the man in the black poncho grew annoyed, put his foot on one of the wheels, and kicked the chair over. Wol-Saeng gasped, forgetting the pain in his back. Even the other Koreans around him seemed a bit stunned by this.

The young man toppled onto the ground, where he finally performed some kind of voluntary action: He reached for the white sword, one of the two he’d been cradling. He used his left hand, because his right arm was missing from the shoulder down, Wol-Saeng now realized.

But he couldn’t reach it. The aggressor had lifted the sword up, just a bit out of reach, the way an adult might pick on a helpless child. The young man strained, not getting off the ground, reaching for the object, but his tormentor grabbed his arm and yanked him upward. He yelled something at the helpless young man and slapped him a few times on the face.

Suddenly, there was a new voice shouting. One of the apprehended Japanese players, a man wearing samurai-like armor and a bandana around his head, attempted to grab the aggressive man in black.

But one of the Korean players behind him raised his sword and drove it deep through the samurai’s body. That had to have hurt even more than Wol-Saeng’s injury, but the Japanese warrior tried to keep crawling forward until a second sword prevented his advance.

The man in the black poncho gave the skewered samurai a twisted smile. He issued an order in Korean to the red knights: “Kill him. He’s just in the way.”

One of the knights obeyed and raised a third sword.

It was impossible to sit back and watch any further. There was no guarantee that Siune’s explanation was the truth, but at the very least, the way this man would kick over a wheelchair was revolting—and the earnest desperation in the samurai’s actions carried the conviction of one trying to protect his friends.

Wol-Saeng didn’t have a particularly positive image of Japan. Beyond the history and territorial arguments between the countries, there was an insular nature to the island nation, a derisive kind of arrogance, as if to say that they were the only East Asian country worth caring about. The fact that The Seed Nexus was open to Europe and North America but closed off to Korea and China was an excellent example of that attitude.

But…

Japan as a whole did not represent every single individual from Japan. Going back to pre-VRMMO PC-gaming days, there were a few titles with international servers where you could play with people around the world. He’d had bad experiences with Japanese players, but also many good ones.

Wol-Saeng felt disgusted by the actions of the man in the black poncho, and he wanted to believe in Siune and the samurai man. Not because they were Japanese or Korean. It was just his personal conscience telling him this was right.

The instant he moved, more blinding pain stemming from his back shot through his head, but he gritted his teeth and got to his feet. Then he drew his sword, took a deep breath, and…

“…Hajimaaa!!” (“…Stoppp!!”)

…rushed forward, yelling with as much force as he could muster.

Wol-Saeng’s default avatar had average stats and felt slow and heavy compared to his agile Silla Empire character, Moonphase. But throughout whatever bonus effect it was, he now raced across the wasteland like the wind and just barely succeeded in blocking the sword meant to end the samurai’s life.

“What…what are you doing?!” demanded the Korean attacker, his voice a mixture of shock and, much more so, anger. Wol-Saeng wouldn’t have been able to communicate if it had been a Chinese player, so he knew he had to make use of this good fortune and state his case.

“Don’t you think there’s something strange about this?! The battle is already won! What reason could there be to torment and torture these people?!”

His compatriot was briefly silent. His eyes traveled to the samurai below, then to the youngster tossed from the wheelchair nearby. Behind his visor, his eyes blinked frequently in surprise. Now that the fervor of battle was waning, this player, too, was slowly realizing the wrongness of what was happening. The force pushing against his blade began to soften.

But before Wol-Saeng could say anything else, a sharp cry issued forth from the crowd around them.

“Baesinja!!” (“Traitor!!”)

“Kill him, too!!”

With the anger of his fellows spurring him on, the red knight put more strength back into his sword arm. But the next words to be spoken came as a surprise.

“Wait! Let’s hear him out!”

“He’s right—the guy in the poncho’s going too far!”

Other Korean players in the crowd were arguing on Wol-Saeng’s behalf now. Those little fires spread across the mass of players, dividing the crowd into hard-liners who demanded the slaughter of the remaining Japanese and moderates who preferred to wait for a proper explanation before any action was taken. That same dynamic spread to the Chinese players, too, and even more angry shouts—these indecipherable to Wol-Saeng—echoed across the wasteland.

How was the one man seemingly in charge going to contain this chaos? Wol-Saeng spun around to find out.

The one who’d started all this was standing over the one-armed youth from the wheelchair, spinning his large, thick dagger in his fingers. Shaded beneath his hood, his mouth was wide and twisted.

It took a while for it to be apparent that he was not gnashing his teeth in anger but stifling laughter. A cold sensation ran up Wol-Saeng’s back, strong enough to numb his pain.

There was no way the man in the black poncho had anything to do with any game made by Chinese, Korean, or American developers. In fact, the existence of such a game seemed suspicious at this point. Whoever he was, there was real blood and pain in this battle, and he was trying to get players of various countries to fight…and kill one another. That was his only goal.

Though it sounded as if it came from another person’s mouth, Wol-Saeng felt the Korean word for “demon” pass through his lips.

“……Angma……”

Vassago Casals was born to a Hispanic mother and a Japanese American father in the Tenderloin, a lower-class neighborhood in San Francisco.

In America, baby names that seemed likely to limit the opportunities of the child, who didn’t have a choice in the matter, were often rejected at the stage of the birth certificate. That was the only reason his mother had named him Vassago instead of Devil or Satan. Vassago, the prince of hell, was a name with only minor recognition, so the city clerk accepted the name, none the wiser.

There was only one reason a mother would give her child the name of a demon, and that was because she never wanted him—because she hated him.

He didn’t know how his parents had met, nor did he want to, but as far as he understood, it was a monetary relationship. The pregnancy wasn’t planned, and his mother wanted to abort him, but his father forced her to go through with it. That didn’t mean that he loved the son who was born; he checked in every now and then on the child’s health but never even brought so much as a gift. About the only thing he ever gave Vassago was the ability to speak Japanese.

It was only when Vassago was around fifteen years old that he finally understood why his father had forced his mother to give birth and then had made only the bare minimum of child support payments.

That was when he was told that there was a child with congenital kidney failure on his father’s side of the family—and they wanted him to be a donor. He had no choice in the matter. But Vassago gave his own condition: He wanted to live in his father’s country, Japan. Once he had donated a kidney, his father would have no use for him, so the status of his financial support would be in limbo. If he had to stay in the slums and deal drugs to survive, he knew where that story would end—so he preferred to start over in a new country entirely.

His father accepted, and in exchange for his left kidney, Vassago received a passport and airfare. He left for Japan without saying good-bye to his mother. When he arrived, fate was even crueler than he could have realized.

By Japanese law, international adoption involved complicated paperwork and stringent requirements, and even if the adoption process was successful, children above the age of six were not automatically given the right to stay in the country. Vassago had no choice but to live outside of the law from the moment he arrived.

So he wound up in the care of a Korean crime syndicate. Because he could speak English, Spanish, and Japanese, they provided Vassago with a fake ID and trained him to be a hit man.

Vassago completed nine successful jobs in the five years before he turned twenty. The tenth job was something he could never have imagined.

His job was to reach and kill a target that could never be found in the real world—the target was in a virtual world instead.

When it was first described to him, he didn’t know what it meant. Only when he was given an explanation of the SAO Incident, which had arisen just a few days earlier, did it make sense to him. The target was a victim of the Incident, stuck at home under strict security, never to emerge. If they waited for the deadly game to kill him, there was no telling when that would happen or if he might survive and escape eventually. But if they could get into the same game and kill his character, the NerveGear would kill him in real life.

That still left three major problems to solve.

For one, Vassago the hit man would not be able to leave the game until it was beaten. If he died in the game, he was dead for real. And Vassago himself could not attack the target. If anyone got their hands on a game log of who attacked whom, they could potentially trace back the assassination attempt.

The price the syndicate offered to complete this near-impossible mission was astonishing. Vassago thought it unlikely that he would actually get it, even if he succeeded, but he didn’t have the right to refuse either way.

Nearly all the unused NerveGears had been confiscated by police, but somehow, the syndicate acquired one. As long as he had the SAO software and the will to go in there, neither the police nor the software company could prevent him from logging in. The only real question after that was his character name. Vassago had never played a video game, and he wasn’t sure what to go with at first. Deciding to keep it in-line with the name of the prince of hell his mother had given him, Vassago chose the handle PoH.

Vassago’s first experience with virtual reality altered his personality—it set him free. He saw his long-forgotten father and distant relatives in the other Japanese players and was keenly reminded of just how much he loathed all Asian people.

He would kill his target, since that was his job. And along the way, he’d kill as many other people as he could.

It was with this thought in mind that Vassago founded the biggest guild of murderers in SAO, Laughing Coffin, and took many, many lives in total, not just that of his original target. When the guild got too big and he grew tired of running it, he had it clash headlong with the game’s elite players to wipe it out so he could engage directly in the job of killing those he’d identified as the greatest targets of all: the Flash and the Black Swordsman. Not long after that, the game was beaten, releasing them all.

When he returned to the real world from the game of death, Vassago felt not joy but emptiness and disappointment. He knew that he would never again experience the dream come true that was Aincrad, so he chose to return to America in search of a similar experience. He murdered the boss, who was reluctant to pay what he’d promised, made off with the money, and crossed the Pacific. Over in San Diego, he found a place in the cyber-operations wing of a private military contractor.

In VR combat training against the National Guard and the Marine Corps, Vassago’s SAO-honed skills shone brilliantly. He was promptly chosen to be an instructor, but the stable life and income that came along with it did not satisfy him.

One more time. I want to go back there, just one more time. Back to that false world of truth, where everything is digital, bringing true human nature to the surface.

For all his wishing, Vassago finally found himself in the Underworld, a terrifyingly real virtual world, where he came across the Flash and the Black Swordsman again. It wasn’t a miracle; it had to be considered fate at this point.

For some reason, the Black Swordsman had undergone some kind of change in mental state, but Vassago knew that if he killed enough people around him, he’d wake up again. It was exactly because the Black Swordsman was that kind of man that Vassago was drawn to him in the first place. It was such a singular desire that Vassago would be happy to kill himself once he’d killed the swordsman.

First, he’d lure the Chinese and Koreans in with false information, then have them slaughter one another en masse. He’d never expected that impromptu story to hold up under scrutiny for very long anyway. More than a few of them were skeptical of the situation already and were arguing with the more fervently patriotic members of the crowd. Once that tension reached its peak, all he needed to provide was a little spark.

Not far away, the Korean he’d given a good punishing was still stubbornly trying to argue with his compatriots. If he shouted to them to cut that man’s head off and slaughter all the cowards, the patriots would surely be driven into a bloodlust and draw their swords.

“Just you wait, man…I’ll get you up and on your feet in no time,” Vassago whispered to the empty-eyed swordsman in black on the ground nearby. Belatedly, he realized that something in the young man’s profile reminded him of the glimpse he’d gotten of his half brother just before the kidney-transplant surgery. Something sharp surged in his chest.

First, he’d kill the Black Swordsman and the Flash to log them out, then disengage himself. The next step would be to find wherever the two of them were on the Ocean Turtle and kill them again with the utmost relish.

Only imagining that moment could temporarily ease the dull ache in his left side that had been with him since having his kidney stolen when he was fifteen.

Beneath the hood, he grinned and muttered to the young man, “If you keep spacing out, everyone’s gonna die. C’mon—you gotta wake up soon.”

He took slow, deliberate steps, twirling the Mate-Chopper around in his fingers.

Scritch.

Asuna heard the dry sound of boot soles scraping on parched ground, even as her soul threatened to leave her ears.

Scritch, scritch. It was mechanical, artificial, and yet rhythmic, almost dancing. That was something she’d heard several times before in the old floating castle: the footsteps of Death.

She moved her head to the side and saw, twenty yards away near where Kirito lay, the silhouette of the man in the black poncho stalking toward her.

But it wasn’t actually Asuna he was walking toward—it was Klein, two swords stuck through his back. The samurai seemed to be staving off death through willpower alone, and now the man was going to finish the job himself.

Or so she thought at first, but soon she sensed this wasn’t correct, either.

Near Klein, two knights in red armor were squabbling in Korean. In fact, all around the army of thousands surrounding the surviving Japanese players and Underworld warriors, violent arguments were breaking out.

It was probably the players who still believed PoH laying into those who had figured out it was all a lie. At this rate, it was going to take only a minor trigger for the former to draw their swords on the latter. Once that happened, the built-up hatred between the Chinese and Korean players would probably be the next thing to explode. PoH was heading over to stop them from…

No…

No. Oh no.

He was heading over to start the fire himself.

Just the same way he had when he leaked the location of his own murdering guild’s hideout to the frontier group so they could launch a bloody battle to wipe the guild out.

It wasn’t clear what he stood to gain by halving the power of the force at his command. The only thing she knew for sure was that something terrible would happen.

As he strode forward, PoH gave instructions in Korean. The two knights holding Klein down turned on the one who’d failed to execute him, sweeping aside their momentary hesitation and grabbing his arms.

The Grim Reaper in black flipped his knife and snatched it out of the air again with a loud smack.

He was going to execute the “traitor” and display his head to the crowd, driving those Chinese and Korean players who believed him to betray their skeptical companions.

She couldn’t allow him to do that. In terms of the ultimate goal of protecting the Underworlders, preventing the red knights from killing one another probably wasn’t what she should worry about. But even half of them was still at least ten thousand—and when they were done, they would be even more furious and hateful and would be seeking to channel those feelings toward the Japanese and the Underworlders.

More importantly, the Chinese and Korean players who were in danger of being killed were the ones who were beginning to see the truth…the ones who believed what the Japanese players told them. She couldn’t give up and allow them to suffer this painful fate.

She had to move. Had to stand, draw her sword, and stop the execution ordered by PoH.

But her hands and feet wouldn’t obey. With each breath she took, the plethora of wounds all over her body ached and sapped her willpower.

……It’s no use………I can’t get up.

Asuna could only exhale weakly, her knees stuck to the dusty ground.

Her back arched slowly. Dirty, bedraggled hair slid down over her shoulders, blocking her vision.

Tears filled her eyes, and she tried to shut them against the approach of Death’s footsteps.

And then…

It’s all right.

You can make it, Asuna.

Someone’s voice was in her ear, soft but clear.

Someone’s hands squeezed her shoulders, gentle but strong.

Warm light flooded into her body—into her heart. A fresh gust of air blew all her pain away.

Stand up now, Asuna.

Stand to protect what you truly care about.

Her right hand twitched, slid across the surface of the earth, and grabbed what lay there: the handle of Radiant Light, the rapier belonging to the Goddess of Creation.

When she raised her head, the Grim Reaper in black had a blade that gleamed bloody crimson held high above him. The pinned-down red knight tensed with terror. The furor around them seemed to vanish momentarily, all eyes trained upon that merciless edge.

Asuna held her breath, gritted her teeth, and put all the strength she still had left into her legs.

She pushed off the ground.

“Raaaaaaaaah!!”

With a bloodcurdling scream, she drew back the rapier. Brilliant-white light shone from its tip. The basic fencing sword skill Linear was one she’d performed thousands of times, if not hundreds of thousands.

PoH’s reflexes were sharp enough that he noticed the surprise attack.

“Oh—,” he grunted, leaning backward. She thrust her hand straight for the darkness of the hood, which was now moving away from her.

There was a small bit of feedback in her arm. One lock of curly black hair flew into the air, and a few droplets of fresh blood sprayed from dark skin.

He dodged it!

The Underworld was no different from Aincrad in that there was an unavoidable pause after a sword skill. Asuna was frozen for a brief, fatal instant—and PoH’s knife came rushing straight for her torso.

But at the same time, she focused her mind on the ground under PoH’s feet.

A faint rainbow of light glowed there and vanished. She used the power of Stacia to generate a little bump of earth, just inches tall, under his feet.

Despite being the smallest possible manipulation of the terrain, it felt like lightning struck her brain. And for that heavy price, the dark reaper lost his balance, and his knife did nothing but rip her dress a little.

“Rrgh…!”

Free from her paralysis, Asuna pulled back the rapier again.

“Whoa!” PoH’s poncho swung up into the air as he raised his knife to block it.

The divinely quick thrust and the powerful slice met in midair, creating a mixture of white and crimson sparks. Asuna put all her strength behind her weapon, trying to push through PoH’s blade.

“What…do you want?” she demanded, her voice hoarse.

With a smirk and a snarl, PoH said from beneath his hood, “Isn’t it obvious? The one in black…the one I first tried to kill on the fifth floor of Aincrad and never could. He’s the only one I really want.”

“…Why do you hate Kirito so much? What did he ever do to you?”

“Hate?” PoH repeated, affronted. He leaned in closer and whispered, “I thought you, of all people, would understand how much I truly love him. In this world full of assholes, he’s the only person you can unconditionally believe in. He never broke down, no matter how much I tormented him. Never gave in to temptation, no matter how much I invited him. He always brought me hope and joy. That’s why I can’t stand that he ended up like that…while I wasn’t around. I’m gonna be the one to wake him up. And I’ll kill anyone I need to in order to make that happen. Thousands…Millions.”

As the personification of death exhaled these words, they became a black miasma that clung to Asuna, sapping her will to fight.

“Hope…? Joy…? As if you had any idea…of how much he had to endure because of you!” she snapped back, but the point where their weapons met and scraped sparks into being was slowly, slowly tilting back toward her.

In fact, it wasn’t just that Asuna’s willpower was weakening. PoH’s wicked Mate-Chopper was trembling like a living creature in his hand, growing slightly thicker and larger with every passing second.

PoH noticed her shock. A smile emerged from the darkness beneath his hood.

“I finally figured out how this world works, too. In here, spilled blood and spent life converts straight into energy. Just like how the Priestess of Light burned up the Dark Army with that huge-ass laser beam.”

Asuna had been given an explanation of the core system of the Underworld, too, before she dived in. These “spatial resources,” as they were called, couldn’t be used without complex commands or weapons that absorbed them from the air. But even if the Mate-Chopper’s enlargement was an effect of spatial resources, PoH hadn’t spoken any commands, and the knife itself had to be a converted item from his SAO character data. It couldn’t be equipped with the Underworld’s resource-absorption function.

PoH continued, reading Asuna’s thoughts.

“This dagger, the Mate-Chopper, was designed so that every time it kills monsters in Aincrad, its stats go down, and the more you slice up players—other people—the higher its stats get. But if you kill an obnoxious number of mobs, eventually the curse is supposed to wear off, and the weapon transforms into some special katana with a similar name. Obviously, I wasn’t interested in that. The point here is that the way its strength grows as it slashes human beings still works in the Underworld. The lives of the Americans you people killed, and the Japanese the allied Chinese and Koreans killed, swirl around this battlefield. If the Chinese and Koreans kill one another after this, there will be even more life in the air.”

As the Grim Reaper whispered, his Mate-Chopper creaked and groaned, growing larger. Asuna’s Radiant Light, top-level GM equipment, seemed unable to withstand its pressure. All the sound in the background faded away, leaving Asuna with only her breath and her pulse in her ears.

PoH’s very presence seemed to weigh on Asuna, as though the evil weapon’s effect also applied to his height.

“Once I suck up every last one of those lives, I’m going to kill all the artificial fluctlights in this entire world, from end to end. I’m not just talking about those pathetic people trembling behind you—I mean all of them: the monsters in the dark lands and the humans from the dark empire. However many thousands of people that is, I’m sure he’ll wake up in response to it. If he is the Black Swordsman I believe in.”

A cold gust of wind rustled his leather hood, revealing the eyes underneath for a brief moment. They were red and dimly glowing.

A devil. He was not human, but a true devil.

That was the true nature of PoH. The mask of the cheerful agitator he wore in Aincrad and the mask of the harsh commander he wore here were both just that: lies. In truth, he was a cold, cruel agent of vengeance who sought only to inflict pain, to torment, and wipe out all traces of humanity…

The strength went out of Asuna’s knees. Her rapier creaked in its struggle, and the knife’s blade edged closer to her throat.

“Don’t worry. I won’t kill you yet. I’m just going to make sure you can’t interfere anymore. You need to be around to watch…when he wakes up and dies in my arms.”

The Mate-Chopper was close to twice its original size now. Radiant Light issued a high-pitched scream, and a fine crack ran through its length.

With her right knee having fallen to the ground, Asuna watched a black mist spilling from the hood covering her eyes. Through the darkness shone only the thick steel blade and her crimson eyes.

Just before Asuna completely lost all strength, someone’s small hand touched her back, providing support.

It’s all right.

I’ll always be at your side.

A pure-blue light shot from the center of Asuna’s chest, piercing the darkness.

In the reflection of the flat surface of the Mate-Chopper, Asuna could see pristine white wings extending from her own back.

All the sound came back—the clamor and chaos of the battlefield mixing in again, along with the voices of her friends.

“Asuna!! You can do it, Asuna!!”

“Asuna!! Asunaaaaaa!!”

“Get up, Asuna!!”

“Asunaaaaa!!”

Lisbeth. Silica. Agil. Klein.

And not just her closest companions. She could also hear the surviving ALO players, like Sakuya, Alicia, and Siune and the other Sleeping Knights, as well as the soldiers from the Human Guardian Army, like Renly, Tiese, Ronie, Sortiliena, and the many other guards and friars, all chanting her name.

Thank you, everyone.

Thank you, Yuuki.

I can still fight. Your hearts united give me strength.

“I won’t give in…I will never allow myself to succumb…to someone like you…who is only capable of hatred!!” she screamed. A surge of white light issued from her being, jolting PoH backward.

Asuna returned to her feet and drew back her rapier hand. Waves of pale-purple light reminiscent of the color of thyme flowers emerged from the weapon, coloring the entire world.

“Hrrrng…!!”

The reaper attempted to stand his ground, but that just left him wide open to attack.

Asuna activated the Original Sword Skill she’d received from Yuuki, the Absolute Sword.

Five attacks from the upper right, lightning-fast thrusts in a diagonal line.

Five attacks from the upper left, another line of glowing points intersecting with the first.

“Gaaah…” PoH gasps were flecked with bright blood, but his giant knife still glowed red. If he caught her flush with a direct counterattack, it would easily wipe out what health she had remaining.

But Asuna’s onslaught wasn’t over.

“Raaaaaaah!!”

She focused all her remaining energy into the tip of the rapier for the last—and biggest—attack, right at the intersecting point of the two lines.

It was the end of the eleven-part OSS, Mother’s Rosario.

A purple flash like a shooting star penetrated PoH’s chest. The black-clad personification of death flew high into the air and came crashing down heavily a good distance away.

Asuna fell to a knee again, having spent all her mental strength. Inside her head, she said once again, Thank you, Yuuki.

She did not hear a response this time. Perhaps it was only ever a phantom hand and phantom voice created from Asuna’s memories. But given that this was a world built out of memories, that meant it was no illusion.

Normally, the OSS Mother’s Rosario shouldn’t be usable. Even if Higa and Kikuoka implemented the sword-skill system from the original SAO, it was Asuna the undine from ALO who’d inherited Mother’s Rosario. Stacia-Asuna hadn’t been converted from that character and wouldn’t contain the data of that skill.

Yet, the OSS executed properly, visual effects and all. If that was the power of Asuna’s imagination bringing it to life, then the encouragement from Yuuki coming back from her memory was real, too. Memories never vanished.

PoH’s avatar was still lying prone on the ground. But it was impossible to imagine that he had taken an eleven-hit combo skill with GM equipment and survived. Unlike the other players, he was connecting with the STL, so even if he died, his body wouldn’t disintegrate. It would remain here for a time, like those of the humans and the darklanders from the Underworld.

She got to her feet, using her rapier for support, then turned to check on Klein. He still had the swords in his stomach, but the three players keeping him captured had taken their distance, and like the fourth knight who’d rushed to intervene, they watched her in disbelief.

Asuna wanted to go to Kirito as soon as possible, but first she headed for Klein to remove the swords and heal his wounds. But no sooner had she taken a step or two than she sensed a faint rumble through the earth.

She held her breath and turned around again.

PoH was on the ground, completely immobile. But the Mate-Chopper, still in his hand, emitted an eerie light with swirls of red and black. In fact, it seemed that the air of the entire battlefield was slowly rotating around the knife.

“Oh no…it’s absorbing the sacred power!!” shouted Sortiliena, who stood at the front of the human army.

Asuna gritted her teeth and started to move toward the malignant blade so she could destroy it once and for all. But before she could get there, the Grim Reaper in black rose to his feet, as though pulled upright by the floating weapon.

The front of the poncho was greatly damaged, exposing his figure and his tight leather suit. There was a huge hole in his chest where the final blow of the OSS had struck, through which the background behind him was visible.

The Underworlders exclaimed in fright when they saw PoH standing despite his entire heart having been blasted out of his chest. Even the Chinese and Koreans were unnerved by it, and they assumed this was just another VRMMO world.

Most likely, the Mate-Chopper was absorbing the tremendous amount of spatial resources in the air and converting them into HP for PoH. But even with that assumption in mind, Asuna couldn’t stop herself from trembling.

PoH was diving through The Soul Translator. He had to be feeling the exact same level of pain as he would in the real world. Asuna felt mind-obliterating pain from being pierced through the side with a spear. She couldn’t imagine what it would feel like to have an enormous hole blasted through the middle of her chest.

But the god of death just grinned with blood dripping from his lips—and bellowed in a voice loud enough to shake everything within hearing distance:

“My brethren! This is the true nature of our foe! Kill every last one of your feeble traitors…and every filthy Japanese, too!!”

He spoke in Korean, but somehow Asuna was able to accurately recognize the meaning of his every word.

PoH’s Mate-Chopper shot its dark-red aura from its raised position to the ends of the wasteland.

Ohhhh…

Ohhhhhhhhh!!

Half of the combined Chinese and Korean army raised their swords in similar fashion and roared with ferocious gusto. There was nothing Asuna could do now to stop them from attacking the more peaceful faction…or from attacking the few Japanese survivors and the remaining Underworld soldiers.

Suddenly something pushed her, and she fell to the ground. The damaged rapier came loose from her grip and tumbled onto the dry soil.

Far, far ahead, a black-haired young man reached his one arm toward her, struggling with every fiber of his being.

“……Kirito,” she whispered.

Asuna reached out to her beloved in return and awaited the end.