CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

SHOWDOWN, JULY 7TH, 2026 AD / NOVEMBER 7TH, 380 HE

1

“Dammit!!”

Critter, the information-warfare specialist on the Ocean Turtle assault team, slammed his hand on the console as he stared at the results coming through on the monitor.

The amalgamation of red dots, nearly thirty thousand at its peak, was rapidly disappearing, starting in the middle and trickling outward. In other words, the Chinese and Korean VRMMO players brought into the Underworld through Vassago’s scheme were being wiped out somehow and automatically logging off the system.

In the center of the red circle, the human army in blue and Japanese troops in white still remained at around a thousand. It was too large of a number to ignore entirely—and if those thousand had the strength to wipe out a combined army of thirty thousand, they had to be even more dangerous.

“…What the hell is that moron doing…?” swore Critter, clicking his tongue and staring at a point on the monitor.

There was just one bright-red dot remaining very close to the Japanese squad. That would be Vassago, who had used his own personal converted account to dive from the STL room next door. He was directly adjacent to the enemy, but he wasn’t even moving, much less fighting them.

Perhaps he was being held prisoner or immobilized. Or maybe he still had a secret trick up his sleeve that would allow him to take care of this army of a thousand…

Critter wanted to rush into the STL room right now, slap Vassago awake, and yank him around by the collar, but he held that urge in. With the admin controls to the Underworld currently locked, they couldn’t reset any accounts. So if he forcefully logged Vassago out, the account he was using would not be usable again. About the only thing Critter could do was operate the time-acceleration feature, since it was isolated from the Seed program core. But that required some careful timing.

He took a deep breath and zoomed out on the map. At the far south end of the Underworld, another red dot was still rapidly on the move. That was the captain of the assault team, Gabriel Miller.

If Captain Miller either had captured Alice or was in close pursuit, the question now was: How likely was it for the human army to catch up to him?

The insertion of the American, Chinese, and Korean players had severely impeded the human army’s southward advance. In terms of internal distance, Captain Miller had to be several hundred miles ahead of them. A jet fighter could close that gap in a blink, but that technology wasn’t likely to exist in the Underworld. At best, they might have some kind of winged mount to ride on.

They’re not going to catch him, Critter decided after three seconds of consideration.

He glanced at the watch on his left wrist. It was 9:40 AM, July 7th.

The SDF commandos were supposed to be sent in by the defense ship at six in the evening, giving them eight hours and twenty minutes. Captain Miller had left instructions to resume acceleration when the time remaining hit eight hours—meaning ten AM. But now that essentially all the external players had been wiped out, there was no reason to maintain real-time speed.

Which meant that it would be better to accelerate Underworld time by a thousand again, giving Captain Miller time to secure Alice.

“Here goes nothing…Best of luck in there, Vassago,” Critter said to the stationary red dot on the battlefield and reached for the lever that operated the Fluctlight Acceleration (FLA) rate. When he glanced up at the slider on the main monitor that corresponded to the lever’s placement, his eyes stopped on the scale markings next to the gauge.

The slider needle was at the bottom, next to the ×1 indicator. The scale was marked in ×100 increments, and a red line cut across at ×1,000. But as a matter of fact, the scale continued upward until another partition at ×1,200. That, apparently, was the safety line for a biological human diving with an STL.

Yet, the rate slider continued even farther, until it ultimately reached ×5,000. If no human being was in a dive—meaning only artificial fluctlights were present in the world simulation—the internal time could be accelerated that fast.

Changing the FLA involved using the physical lever on the console board, then pressing a nearby button with a plastic cap that opened and closed over it. Being careful not to press the button, Critter slowly pushed the lever, which looked like the throttle on a ship or an airplane.

The slider graphic on the monitor smoothly rose, and the digital number readout rotated rapidly. When he got to ×1,000, there was a strong resistance on the lever. He pushed it again, harder, and it moved farther before stopping at ×1,200 again. It didn’t seem as though it was going to budge beyond that, no matter how hard he pushed.

“Hmm…”

His curiosity piqued, Critter examined the large metal lever. He quickly noticed that, next to the activation button, there was a shining silver keyhole.

“Gotcha.” He grinned, scratching his bald head with a finger.

The safety limit being twelve hundred times regular speed meant that the real danger area was a bit beyond that. It couldn’t be a bad idea to test unlocking the safety mechanism, just in case internal time was in a major crunch.

Critter spun his chair around and snapped his fingers to draw the attention of the team members who had just returned to the control room.

“Anyone here good at lock picking?”

What a soft…and wonderful scent…

It was the best sleep he’d had in months. So when Takeru Higa heard a voice in his ear desperately trying to wake him up, he resisted to the best of his ability.

“…I said, Higa! Hello?! Open your eyes! Come on!!”

This person sounds really frantic, though. It’s not like I got stabbed or shot or anyth…ing……

“…Aaugh!!”

As his mind regained consciousness, his memory flooded back in a rush, and Higa bolted awake.

Right before him was a thirty-something man with black-framed glasses.

“Whoa—?!” he screamed.

He tried to lurch backward to get away, but his body wouldn’t listen. Instead, a terrible pain seared his right shoulder, and Higa screamed a third time.

That’s right. I got shot by that man in the cable duct. I knew I was bleeding bad, but I focused on controlling the STLs instead. I connected the output of the three girls’ fluctlights to Kirigaya’s STL, but it didn’t wake him up…and then…something else happened…

“…Wh-what about Kirito?” he said, trying to wriggle away from the face of the man in glasses, who was peering at him very closely.

Instead, his answer came from a smooth female voice. “Kirigaya’s fluctlight activity has returned to full status. In fact, if anything, it might be too active right now.”

“Oh…th-that’s…good…,” Higa said, exhaling.

It was nothing short of a miracle that his self-image had recovered from the state it had been in. And speaking of miracles, the fact that Higa was still alive after how much blood he’d lost…

These realizations gave him reason to examine his surroundings and condition.

He was resting on the floor of the sub-control room. His upper body was uncovered, and his right shoulder was bandaged. There was a catheter in his left arm, supplying him with blood.

On his left side, in the glasses, was Lieutenant Colonel Seijirou Kikuoka. Sitting directly on the floor to his left was Dr. Rinko Koujiro, her white coat removed. On the other end of the catheter tube was Sergeant First Class Natsuki Aki, a registered nurse, who was exchanging blood packs. She must have been the one who had seen to his wound.

Higa looked back to Kikuoka, who exhaled deeply and finally spoke.

“Good grief…After all my warnings not to do anything too reckless…But then again, I guess this is my fault for failing to catch the fact that we had a mole on the engineering team…”

His bangs were bedraggled, and there were sweat marks on his lenses. Rinko appeared to be drenched in sweat, too. They must have been hard at work saving Higa’s life. Then that wonderfully pleasant feeling while he dreamed must have been…

Hmm?

Who tried to pump my heart, and who gave me mouth-to-mouth?

He nearly asked the question of them, but he caught himself in time. Some truths were better off unknown.

Instead, he asked a much more important question: “What’s the state of the Underworld…and of Alice?”

Kikuoka brushed Higa’s left shoulder and said, “All the players connecting from America, China, and Korea have been logged out. In fact, there were nearly thirty thousand from China and Korea alone, but…”

“What…? From China and Korea, too?! Not as reinforcements…but as enemies?!” Higa blurted out. He tried to get up again, but the shock of the pain from his right shoulder stabbed him in the brain.

“Don’t get up now!” Sergeant First Class Aki scolded. “The bullet went all the way through, but I only just got the bleeding to stop.”

“Y-yes, ma’am…” Higa relaxed and let Rinko fill him in on the situation.

“Apparently, they recruited the Chinese and Koreans on social media, riling them up by playing on their natural rivalry as online gamers.”

“Oh…I see…,” Higa lamented. His participation in Project Alicization was partially spurred on by the death of a Korean friend who’d been blown up in a terrorist attack while serving his military years in Iraq. It was galling to think that the project had now led to further inflammation of the hostilities between Japan itself and Korean gamers—even if it was the attackers who were doing it.

He found himself shaking his head, then grimaced at the pain. “How many from China and Korea, again?” he asked.

“It seems they hit nearly thirty thousand. The two thousand players who came to our side from Japan were essentially wiped out,” Kikuoka said. He closed his eyes for a moment before continuing, “At that point, there were still over twenty thousand hostile troops present. Fortunately, that’s when Kirito awoke and took care of them in one blow…”

“W-wait, what?” Higa stammered, cutting off his superior. “Kirito neutralized an army of twenty thousand, all alone…in a single instant?! That’s impossible! The Underworld doesn’t have a weapon or command capable of attacking on a physical scale or intensity of that sort. Or at least…it shouldn’t…”

Only then did Higa recall the conversation he’d had with Yanai right around the time the man had shot him in the cable duct.

Nobuyuki Sugou’s former employee Yanai not only was a spy for the attackers invading the ship but was obsessed with the artificial fluctlight known as Administrator, the pontifex of the Axiom Church. How had it come to that?

And then there was the question of the “fourth”: the irregular fluctlight connected to Kazuto Kirigaya’s fluctlight from the Main Visualizer itself. That—he or she—had become the key to Kazuto’s recovery. But Higa had never even imagined that an inanimate object without a mind of its own could function as a human consciousness, even a simulated one.

“…Hey…Kiku…,” he said, feeling a chill that had nothing to do with his blood loss. “Do you think…we’ve been creating…something much, much bigger—?”

Right at that moment, the speaker in the command console issued a piercing alarm.

It was the sound that Higa had programmed to alert him to a change in the time-acceleration rate of the simulation.

Ashen clouds rushed past Asuna and me with blinding speed. A bloodred sky hung above us, and blackened wasteland stretched out forever below.

In all the vast human-owned lands, only the pontifex herself had mastered the art of flying, according to Alice the Integrity Knight. Now Administrator was gone from the Underworld, as was her counterpart Cardinal, so there was no way to know exactly what the command to perform the flying art was. In other words, my flight through the Dark Territory was not a function of any sacred art, but direct control of events through the power of imagination…what the Integrity Knights would call Incarnation.

I could hear the words of Charlotte the giant spider, the familiar sent by Cardinal to observe me on my trip all the way from the remote village of Rulid.

The formal arts are nothing but a tool to harness and refine Incarnation—what you call a mental image. At this point, you need neither chants nor catalysts.

Now wipe your tears and get to your feet. Feel the prayer of the flowers.

Feel the ways of the world…

From the moment I fell into a closed-off state immediately after fighting Administrator on the top floor of Central Cathedral of the Axiom Church, to the moment I recovered just minutes ago, I had been deeply connected to those “ways of the world.”

I could clearly sense the sacred power floating in the air around me and easily convert its elements without requiring any elaborate commands. I had spoken the spell’s words earlier when healing Klein, Lisbeth, and the others, but I probably could have produced the same effect with my imagination alone.

At the moment, I had wind elements forming a protective barrier around Asuna and me, and I was also popping those wind elements in succession from behind to propel us like a jet engine. It was many times faster than a dragon, I was sure, but it was still going to take at least five minutes to catch up to Alice on Amayori to the south of us.

There were so many things I wanted to say to Asuna, so many things to apologize and thank her for, while we had this time. But as we flew together, hands clasped, I found I could not look at her.

The reason was that just after I reawakened and the omnipotent sensation of my body’s blood turning into light finally faded, the memories of what had happened to me recently started coming back to me, clarifying and ordering themselves.

The big problem was what had happened late last night.

As I lay in the center of the tent, Asuna and Alice and Ronie and Sortiliena sat around me, each of them telling stories about me…Specifically, revealing stories of my many bad behaviors and incidents over the years. Recalling it was a living hell.

Kirito snuck right out of the academy to buy honey pies from the Jumping Deer and nut cookies from the Sunflower and brought them back for Tiese and me, Ronie had said.

And when I graduated, he gave me a whole bunch of zephilia flowers that only bloom in the western empire. He said it took an entire year to make them bloom here, Liena had bragged.

When we were climbing the outer wall of the cathedral, Kirito pulled a steamed bun out of his pocket and gave me half. He tried to warm it up with heat elements and nearly burned it to a crisp, Alice had added.

The very first time I met him, he gave me cream to spread on black bread. And there were the blueberry tarts and huge roll cakes and all the other things we ate together…, Asuna had finished wistfully.

For some reason, they’d kept competing to one-up the others with food-based stories. After that came all the things I’d done and the things I’d said, one after the other, without end…

“Ah…”

I put my head in my hands, despite the fact that we were flying at high speed, and screamed.

“Aaaaaah!”

Instantly, my concentration was lost, and the generation and activation of wind elements stopped. My body was blasted with sudden, ferocious wind resistance, and I started to go into a tailspin.

I muttered a panicked curse and spread out my wide, long coat into the form of black wings that gave me aerial stability again. But my relief was highly temporary, because—

“Eyaaaaaa!!”

—Asuna came plummeting from above, screaming. I reached out to catch her. The attempt was successful—but not by much—and she looked back at me with big hazel-brown eyes, face-to-face. If I was going to apologize, now was the time.

“Asuna, it’s not what you think!!”

That was an excuse, not an apology, but it was too late to stop now.

“Liena and Alice and Ronie, there was nothing between us! I swear to Stacia, nothing at all happened!!” I pleaded.

Asuna stared at me…and her face crinkled into a smile. She placed her slender hands on my cheeks and said, with both exasperation and fondness, “You haven’t changed, Kirito. They say you were fighting and fighting in here for two years, so I wondered if maybe that would have made you…more mature…but…”

Clear liquid suddenly sprang from Asuna’s eyes. Her lips trembled, and her voice grew hoarse. “I’m so glad…It’s really you, Kirito…You haven’t changed at all…You’re still my Kirito…”

Her words penetrated deep into my chest. I felt something hot begin to rise within me, but I caught it before it could reach my throat.

“…I’m just me. Of course that won’t change.”

“But…but you’re like a god now. You froze that entire huge army all at once…then fully healed two hundred people in a single moment…and now you can fly…”

I couldn’t help but chuckle at that. “No, I’ve just figured out how this world works better than most. Once you get used to the concept, you’ll be able to fly very quickly, too, Asuna.”

“…I don’t need to.”

“What?”

“I’d rather have you fly and carry me in your arms like this,” she said, smiling and sniffling, and took her hands off my cheeks to circle my back instead, where she squeezed me tight. I returned her embrace.

“Thank you…thank you, Asuna. You suffered all those terrible wounds to help protect the people of the Underworld…I’m sure it must have been agony…”

It was two years ago, when a goblin captain slashed me in a cave under the mountains, that I had learned just how real the pain was in this world. The blade had only carved a little bit of the flesh of my shoulder, but it had hurt so bad I couldn’t even stand up for a while.

Asuna, however, had faced an army summoned by PoH and never stopped fighting, even as she suffered gruesome wounds all over her body. Without Asuna’s hard effort, Tiese and Ronie and the rest of the Human Guardian Army would have been eliminated long ago.

“No…it wasn’t just me,” she said, her cheek moving against mine. “Shino-non and Leafa and Liz and Silica and Klein and Agil…and the Sleeping Knights and everyone from ALO—they all did incredibly. And Renly the Integrity Knight, the guards of the human army, Sortiliena, Ronie, Tiese…”

Suddenly, Asuna gasped, and her body went tense. I had a feeling I knew why, even before she said it.

“Oh…Kirito! The commander…Bercouli went chasing after the enemy emperor, all on his own, and…”

“……”

I nodded to her without a word, then shook my head.

I was already aware that the massive strength of Bercouli Synthesis One, the oldest of the Integrity Knights, whom I’d never had the chance to speak to in person, was already gone from this earth.

Just before this war started, we’d shared a brief clash of imaginary swords—Incarnate Swords. As the memory came back to me, I realized that Bercouli had already sensed his coming death at the time.

For the conclusion of his life of three hundred years, he’d chosen to fight to protect Alice.

Asuna understood the meaning of my gesture, clutched me even harder, and wept. It did not last long, however; she stifled her sobs to ask, “Is Alice…all right…?”

“Yeah, he hasn’t caught her yet. She’s going to reach the southern end of the Dark Territory very soon…and get to the third system console. But there’s a massive presence chasing after her…”

“I see…In that case, we have to protect her. For Bercouli.”

When Asuna pulled away, her face was wet with tears but firmly resolved. I gave her a slow nod. Her eyes wavered a tiny bit.

“But for now…just for this brief moment, be my Kirito alone,” she whispered. Her lips approached and met mine.

Beneath the red sky of another world, flanked by black wings that flapped slowly, Asuna and I shared a long, passionate kiss.

In that moment, at last, I recalled why I had awakened in this world two and a half years ago.

It was the last Monday of June in the real world.

As I walked Asuna back home, we were attacked by the third perpetrator of the Death Gun incident, the principal member of the red guild, Laughing Coffin: Johnny Black. My memory of the scene ended when I was injected with a muscle relaxant by his high-pressure injection gun. I probably went into respiratory arrest, suffered some kind of brain damage, and was put into the Underworld with the STL for restorative purposes.

Through whatever twist of fate, Laughing Coffin’s leader, PoH, was among the group that attacked the Ocean Turtle, and he was now stuck in the ground of the Dark Territory, transformed into a miniature version of the Gigas Cedar. When the time acceleration started again, he would be stuck without vision or hearing for days, possibly weeks, before he was pulled out of the system. However long it would be, he would suffer some kind of mental damage—possibly as bad as mine had been the last six months. It was cruel, I believed—but not unnecessarily so.

He had tried to murder Asuna…and other people I truly cared about.

After many seconds where our existences felt like they were melting together into one, our lips came apart.

“Doesn’t it remind you of back then…?” Asuna said, her look pensive. I knew why.

She was remembering the moment right after SAO, the game of death, had been beaten, when we’d shared a kiss under a sunset sky, against the backdrop of the collapsing castle. But that had been a kiss of parting.

To sweep away any hint of foreboding, I grinned and said, “C’mon—let’s go. Let’s beat Emperor Vecta, save Alice, and get everyone back to the real wo—”

Before I could finish that last word, a panicked voice spoke directly inside my head.

Kirito!! Kirigaya!! Can you hear me, Kirito?!

That gravelly voice…

“Uh…is that Mr. Kikuoka? How are you talking to me without a system console around…?”

I don’t have to explain that to you! We’ve got major trouble!! It’s the time acceleration…They’ve tampered with the safety limiter on the FLA!!

Critter watched, slightly uneasily, as Brigg’s bearded face turned red and sweaty as he tweaked the two wires around in the keyhole.

Brigg had eagerly nominated himself for the lock-picking job, but given the importance of the time accelerator’s safety function, it wasn’t just some simple old-school cylinder lock. With time, his finger movements got more and more violent, and the volume of his curses rose.

Right behind Brigg, Hans checked his digital wristwatch and gleefully announced, “That’s three minutes. Two more, and you owe me fifty bucks.”

“Shut the hell up! Two minutes is nothing…Once I get this open, I’ll be able to spend a night in Hawaii on the way…home…”

The sound of the wires rotating the lock was sounding less like unlocking and more like destruction. Critter wanted to interject and tell him to stop there, but now that the other two had put a bet on the result, there was no stopping them.

“And one minute left! Get ready to pay up.”

“For fuck’s sake!!” Brigg finally shouted. He got to his feet and threw the wires to the floor.

Critter was relieved that he had finally given up on picking the lock—until the red-faced soldier drew his massive handgun from its holster and pressed the muzzle to the lock.

“Hey, hey, whoa……”

One blast. Then another.

Brigg put the pistol back in his holster, then looked at the stunned Hans and Critter and shrugged.

“Lock’s picked.”

Critter stared at the two-inch hole left in the console panel with his mouth hanging open. Two or three little bursts of sparks lit up the darkness of the hole, and then the operating lever, which was still in its tilted position, began to move again. After about five inches, it came to a stop with a little thunk. On the monitor, the readout was not just above ×1,200, where Critter had wanted to test it. The number on the screen glowed ×5,000, the maximum value.

“…F-five……”

He tried to calculate on the spot how many minutes one second of real time would take at that speed—when there was another dull metallic sound.

“N…no way……”

Critter gaped as he saw the number on the monitor go past five thousand, then past ten thousand…

No way, we’re still fine. As long as nobody touches the activation button, it won’t actually change the acceleration rate. I can still pull the lever back, and it’ll be like nothing ever happened.

“Don’t…don’t touch it!! Nobody touch it!!” he shrieked, waving Hans and Brigg away from the console.

Then he snuck closer and carefully reached out.

And just before his hand could touch the lever—boom.

There was a soft little bursting sound.

The red activation button and its plastic cover blew off.

Then the huge monitor on the wall of the main control room turned red, and an unpleasant alarm blared out of the speakers. A countdown appeared, starting at fifteen minutes and spinning downward with alarming speed.

When he heard the alarm that indicated the acceleration rate was being altered again, Higa tried to jump up once more and grimaced in pain.

“Higa! We just told you to calm down,” Dr. Koujiro said, rushing over and putting a hand to Higa’s back.

At that very moment, the main monitor of the sub-control room turned red.

“Wh-what’s that?!” shouted Kikuoka. With Rinko’s support, Higa could see past the commander’s shoulder to the screen.

Displayed in a bold font were a fifteen-minute countdown and a warning message that all three safety-limit stages on the FLA system were unlocked and that the entire Underworld was heading into a maximum-acceleration phase.

“Wha………?”

Higa was speechless. Instead, Dr. Koujiro took it upon herself to ask, “What does that mean, maximum acceleration?! Wasn’t the limit of the FLA twelve hundred times the normal speed?!”

“…That’s the limit when a flesh-and-blood human is in a dive…but artificial fluctlights can go up to five thousand…,” Higa said mechanically, pulling the number from memory.

The scientist’s chilly eyes tightened dangerously. “Five thousand?! Then that means…one second here is about eighty minutes…Just eighteen seconds will correspond to an entire day!!”

Her mental arithmetic was impressive. But Higa and Kikuoka shared a look and shook their heads awkwardly.

“Huh…? What do I have wrong?”

“Twelve hundred is a safety limit taking the life span of the human soul into account…and five thousand is just the limit of what we can observe as it’s happening in the Underworld. But neither of them is the actual limit of the hardware…”

Higa’s throat was burning, bone-dry. Dr. Koujiro’s arm twitched as it held him around his back.

“Th-then,” she asked tremulously, “what is…the hardware limit…?”

“As you know, the Underworld is constructed by and calculated with light quantums. Its transmission speed within the Main Visualizer is theoretically limitless…meaning that the actual limit is placed on it by the architecture of the lower server…”

“Get to the point! What’s the number?!”

He pulled his gaze away from the screen to look at Rinko. “In the maximum-acceleration phase…the FLA rate is just a bit over five million to one. The two STLs in Roppongi can’t manage that sort of speed over the satellite connection, so they’ll get cut off automatically…but Kirigaya and Asuna in the STLs onboard the Ocean Turtle…”

A minute of real-world time would be equal to ten years in the Underworld. Rinko calculated the number instantly, and her eyes went so wide they twitched with shock.

“My…my God…We have to…we have to get Asuna and Kirigaya out of those STLs right away!!” she gasped, attempting to stand, but this time Higa held her arm back.

“No, Rinko! It’s already in an early acceleration phase—if you try to pull them out of the machine now, they’ll suffer fluctlight damage!!”

“Then perform the operation to disengage them!!”

“Why do you think I went down the cable duct?! You can only perform STL operations from the main control room!!” shrieked Higa, his voice rising.

He looked at the commander, who stood before the console. Kikuoka already seemed to understand where Higa was going with this.

“…Kiku, I’m going down there again.”

Sergeant First Class Aki looked horrified by this notion and opened her mouth to say something, then stopped herself. Instead, she approached and murmured, “I’ll take out the catheter now.”

The commander scowled bitterly but nodded. “All right. I’ll go, too. I’m strong enough to carry you down that ladder, I think.”

“N…no, Lieutenant Colonel!!” shouted Lieutenant Nakanishi, the leader of the security team. He strode forward crisply, his face pale. “It’s too dangerous. I’ll—”

“We need you to defend the stairs. This will require opening the pressure barrier again…and we don’t have Ichiemon this time, plus Niemon’s not operational.”

Everyone in the sub-control room looked to the left back corner.

The human silhouette hanging from a coat-hanger-like support frame did not belong to an actual human. It was a humanoid machine body that Higa had researched and developed as a part of Project Alicization called the Electroactive Muscled Operative Machine #2, nicknamed Niemon. Compared to Ichiemon, which had been used as a decoy in the previous barrier-opening mission and destroyed, Niemon had been given a greatly improved appearance, as it was developed to hold a lightcube on board.

Naturally, the socket on its head was currently empty, so even if turned on, it would not move. It couldn’t be an autonomous shield the way that Ichiemon was.

Kikuoka looked away from the soulless robot and back to Nakanishi. With a tremendously stern look, he gave the officer orders.

“You will be engaging directly with the enemy, so your danger is clearly higher. But I need you to go.”

Nakanishi clenched his jaw and snapped off a salute. “Sir, yes, sir!”

While the military officers were talking, Higa timidly lifted his hand. It hurt, but at least his fingers were capable of moving.

The countdown to the maximum-acceleration phase on the monitor was down to ten minutes and change. But to reopen the pressure-resistant barrier wall, climb down that endless ladder, and perform the STL disengagement from the monitoring port there would take at least thirty minutes.

And in the extra twenty minutes, two hundred years was going to pass inside the Underworld. That would easily surpass the 150 years that were the life span of the human soul. And even before that point, it would still be an unbearable, seemingly infinite length of time for real-world people to suffer inside the Underworld…

Inside the Underworld………

“Yes…that’s it!!” cried Higa. He swung his left arm, from which the blood-transfusion catheter had just been removed, toward Kikuoka. “K-Kiku!! When I operated the STL earlier, I set up a communication channel to Kirito! Talk to him on line C-12!!”

“B-but…what should I say…?”

“Tell him to escape from inside!! If he either reaches a system console or loses all his HP in the next ten minutes, the STL will automatically begin disengagement protocol!! But once the maximum-acceleration phase begins, the console won’t function, and dying would be even worse!! You’d have to live out two hundred years with all your sensory organs blocked…Just warn him all about that!!”

“Two…”

Two hundred years?!

I barely caught the words before they flew out of my mouth. Inches away from my face, Asuna looked befuddled; she couldn’t hear Kikuoka’s voice the way I could.

“Listen to me, Kirito—you have ten minutes! You need to get to the console and log out in that time!! And if that’s impossible, you can also reduce your HP to zero…but that’s not as certain, and it’s more dangerous. That’s because…”

We might be forced to live out two centuries in a simulated state of death, I already knew. So I cut Kikuoka off and said, “Got it. I’ll try to find a way to escape through the console! With Alice, of course—so be ready for that outcome!”

“…I’m sorry. In fact, I want you to prioritize your own escape over Alice’s status. Listen, even if we could erase your memory after you log out, two hundred years is far beyond the life span of the human soul! The likelihood we could bring you back to consciousness is…almost zero…,” Kikuoka said, the bitterness clear in his voice.

“Don’t worry—I’ll come back,” I stated softly. “And, Mr. Kikuoka, I apologize for what I said to you half a year ago…I mean, last night.”

“Don’t. We deserve every last bit of criticism. I’ll make sure we’ve got bandages for all the punches you owe us…All right, looks like Higa’s ready. I’ve got to go.”

“Okay. I’ll see you in ten minutes, Mr. Kikuoka.”

The signal ended there.

I was still hovering in midair, coat hem flapping to keep us aloft, Asuna held tight in my arms.

“…Kirito, did you get some kind of message from Mr. Kikuoka? Was it…something bad?” she asked.

I shook my head from side to side. “No…he just said that the time rate’s going to accelerate again in ten minutes, so he wants us to hurry it up.”

Asuna blinked, then gave me a little smile. “Of course. It wouldn’t be fair to Alice if we’re just floating around doing this. Let’s go save her!”

“Yeah. I’m going to start flying again.”

I clutched Asuna and generated another huge mass of wind elements. A gust of glowing-green wind arose to envelop us.

And so I flew to the south, sensing Alice’s distant presence—and the massive abnormality that pursued her.