CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

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

1

Rinko Koujiro sat in the control seat at the console of Subcon, staring at the glass hatch placed just to the left of the board.

The LCD screen at the top of the hatch flashed a message in red letters: EJECTING…

There was the deep sound of pressurized air leaking. Eventually a small black quadrilateral shape appeared beyond the glass window. The LCD screen changed to COMPLETE.

Rinko reached out a trembling hand to open the little hatch and take out its contents.

It was a hard metal package, a cube a little over two inches to a side, and surprisingly heavy. A six-digit number was carved on its sheer face, and there was a very small connector port on it.

Trapped in this tiny cube was Alice’s soul.

Following the commands of the system, the Lightcube Cluster installed in the center of the Ocean Turtle’s Main Shaft ejected a single specific cube, sealing it in a protective package and then shooting it through a pneumatic tube.

At the same time, it was a journey from the interior Underworld to the exterior real world.

Rinko was speechless for a moment, struck with an indescribable sensation, but recovered and picked up the cube carefully with both hands. She turned to the mic and shouted, “Asuna, Alice has been ejected! Only you and Kirigaya are left! Make it quick!!”

She glanced at the crimson countdown on the main monitor and added, “You’ve only got thirty seconds until the maximum acceleration starts!! Log out now!!”

There was a moment of silence.

Then words she never expected to hear came out of the speaker.

“I’m sorry, Rinko.”

“Huh…? F-for what…?”

“I’m sorry. I’m…staying here. Thank you for everything. I will never forget what you did for us.”

Asuna Yuuki’s voice was calm and gentle and full of purpose, from what Rinko could hear through the speaker.

“Please take care of Alice. She’s a very sweet person. She holds great love within her, and she is loved by many. For the sake of the souls who vanished for her sake…and for Kirito’s sake, please don’t let them turn her into a weapon.”

Rinko was speechless again. All she could do was listen to Asuna’s final words.

“And tell everyone else, too, that…I’m sorry…and thank you…and good-bye…”

The countdown hit zero.

A long siren blared, and the heavy groan of machinery echoed throughout the cramped cable duct.

It was ten o’clock in the morning on July 7th. The fifteen-minute countdown was over, and the cooling system on the other side of the wall was running at full capacity. Huge fans desperately tried to suck out the incredible heat output of the machines supporting the Underworld simulation. If you looked at the Ocean Turtle from the sea, you would see heat haze rising from the top of its pyramid structure.

“……It’s started…,” grunted Takeru Higa.

“Yeah,” replied Seijirou Kikuoka, who was carrying him down the narrow ladder.

When they’d determined that preventing the maximum-acceleration phase was impossible, they’d immediately prepped and headed into the maintenance cable duct again, but since Higa was injured, it had taken them eight minutes to get him strapped into a support harness.

Despite the fact that Kikuoka descended the rungs with such force that sweat poured off him, the maximum-acceleration phase started in the Underworld before they reached the pressure-resistant isolation barrier. Praying, Higa hit the intercom button to speak to Dr. Koujiro in the sub-control room.

“Rinko…how’s it going?”

There was some static, followed by a connection sound, but all he received was heavy silence.

“…Rinko?”

“…I’m sorry. We’ve safely retrieved Alice’s lightcube. But…,” she said faintly and then delivered what came next.

Higa held his breath and closed his eyes tight.

“…All right. We’ll do all we can. I’ll get in touch to tell you when to open the connection hatch.”

He released the button and expelled all the air in his lungs over a long, slow period.

Kikuoka didn’t ask what he’d heard, sensing enough from Higa’s reaction already. He continued to bound downward in silence.

“…Kiku…”

Several seconds later, Higa finally found the voice to tell the team commander what Dr. Koujiro had related to him.

Critter stared in silence at the new window on the main monitor and the message it contained.

It said, in very brief detail, that one lightcube had been ejected from the cluster and delivered to the sub-control room on the other side of the pressure-resistant barrier. Meaning that Rath had control of Alice now.

Or in other words, the entire ten-plus-hour operation to find Alice in the Underworld and abduct her had ended in total failure. Vassago and Captain Miller had dived in themselves, led the Dark Army in a military invasion of the human lands, fought in battle scenes that would make any Hollywood producer faint, even lured in tens of thousands of Americans, Chinese, and Koreans to fight with them—and all of it had been for nothing.

He scratched at his shaved head, exhaled through his nose, and thought about something else. If there were still over eight hours remaining until the defense ship arrived, could they physically steal Alice back now?

The barrier was extremely thick and made of a powerful composite metal, so they had no means of destroying it. But if Rath opened it up, like they had not long ago, that would be a different story.

In fact, why had they opened the barrier earlier? Did they really think they could overpower the team with one ugly, clumsy robot and a couple of smoke grenades?

Unless that had been a distraction…? If they had some other reason for opening the barrier, what in the world would that be?

Critter turned back to the team members who had resumed their card game and called out, “Hey, about that robot they sent in from above. It wasn’t even loaded with any explosives or anything, right?”

Tall, lanky Hans twisted his mustache and said, “Oh, we looked it over, sweetie. No explosives, not even a single type of fixed weapon. I think they were using it as a ballistic shield, but we shot it to shit so bad it broke down, and the soldiers behind it had to retreat.”

“Okay…By the way, their SDF members aren’t called soldiers—they’re technically ‘personnel,’” Critter added, a pointless bit of trivia, as he turned the chair back around.

So it was possible that the robot maneuver was just a diversion. But even with smoke grenades, those stairs were tight, and there was no way anyone could have slipped by Hans and Brigg without them noticing.

Which would mean…

Critter picked up the tablet computer on the desk and brought up an interior map of the Ocean Turtle.

“Let’s see…Here’s the Main Shaft, and here’s where the barrier splits it…and this is the staircase where they sent the robot through…”

Just then, the countdown on the monitor reached zero, and a high-pitched alarm began to sound. The Underworld’s time acceleration was resuming. And because that muscle-bound idiot Brigg had broken the control lever, the acceleration rate was going crazy.

But whatever happened in the Underworld now didn’t matter. The Alice retrieval plan was a failure, so Vassago and Captain Miller had probably “died” during their dives and would be logging out and coming out of the adjacent room soon.

In that case, it would be a good idea to think of the next tactical option to take before the captain got back. Critter zoomed in on the ship map and scrolled through it until he noticed something.

“Hey, there’s a little hatch here, too. What is this…a cable duct…?”

After she was done relaying the situation to Takeru Higa, Rinko leaned back in the mesh chair and let out a heavy breath.

Asuna Yuuki’s decision to stay in the Underworld once it became clear that Kazuto Kirigaya would not be able to escape before the acceleration started was so youthful, so earnest—and so tragically beautiful.

She couldn’t help but recall something from her own life: when the man she loved left her behind in the real world and vanished into cyberspace.

What would she have done if she’d been given the option to go with him? Would she have destroyed her brain with a prototype STL, too, and chosen to live on solely as an electronic copy of her consciousness?

“Akihiko…did you…?” she whispered, closing her eyes.

She’d thought that building the floating castle Aincrad and creating a true alternate world with ten thousand players trapped inside it was Akihiko Kayaba’s only desire. But during that two-year period in the castle, he found something, learned something. And that thing changed his thinking.

There was more, something further beyond.

SAO was not the final destination, but only the beginning, he realized. And that led him to develop a higher-density version of the NerveGear in that villa in the forest of Nagano and to eventually kill himself within the prototype.

Using the data he’d left with her, Rinko designed the high-precision medical-user full-dive system, Medicuboid. With the vast data provided to the project by a girl’s three-year test stay in the first Medicuboid prototype, Takeru Higa and Rath were able to put the finishing touches on their Soul Translator.

So depending on how you considered it, the Underworld—this ultimate example of an alternate reality—was born from the cornerstone of Akihiko Kayaba’s grand vision. Did that mean that with the completion of the Underworld, Kayaba’s desires had come to fruition?

No, that couldn’t be the case…because that still didn’t explain where the other element he left behind, The Seed Package, was supposed to fit into the puzzle.

VRMMOs based on The Seed’s architecture had become the standard, which was how the Japanese players were able to convert their accounts and help fight back against the foreign assault. But there was no way that even Kayaba would have foreseen such an event years before it happened. The conversion function being used to save someone was only a secondary effect of its presence.

So what was the point of it? Why was it necessary for all those VR worlds to have a shared architecture that allowed them to be linked this way…?

On top of the console desk, Alice’s lightcube package was held in a special aluminum-alloy case. The lightcube itself, a collection of light quantum gates, was nonvolatile in nature, but the gates’ drive circuits in the package required power to run, so while it was in the case, Alice’s soul was inactive.

Rinko brushed the silver case with her fingers and glanced into the left corner of the sub-control room to the humanoid silhouette there: the machine body Niemon.

In theory, if she put Alice’s lightcube package into the robot’s cranial socket, Niemon would become Alice’s body and move and speak as she willed it to.

Rinko had to shake her head to dispel the momentary impulse to test it out and actually speak with Alice. Kazuto and Asuna were in a perilous situation at the moment, so this wasn’t the time for indulging her curiosity. And though Niemon was more advanced than Ichiemon, Alice would likely be shocked to appear in a body that bore not a shred of femininity.

A few moments later, she took her hand off the aluminum-alloy case.

“Dr. Koujiro,” said a voice behind her, and she spun around.

It was Lieutenant Nakanishi, who had returned to the sub-control room without drawing her attention.

“We’re ready to reopen the barrier hatch. You can go ahead at any time.”

“Oh…thank you,” she said, checking the time on the monitor. One minute had passed since the activation of the maximum-acceleration phase. In internal time, that was…ten years.

It was unbelievable. The age of Kazuto Kirigaya’s and Asuna Yuuki’s souls was now greater than Rinko’s. They had to be logged out as soon as humanly possible. If they could just be ejected before their soul life spans ended, it might be possible to erase all the memories that had accumulated since the start of the max-acceleration phase. But in theoretical terms, they had less than twelve minutes to actually execute such a thing.

Higa, Kikuoka…hurry!! Rinko prayed, biting her lip.

Lieutenant Colonel Kikuoka wheezed with ragged breath. A cascade of sweat discolored his shirt and seeped into Higa’s clothing.

Higa wanted to tell him he could get down on his own from here, but he kept stopping himself from doing so. Yanai’s bullet had penetrated Higa’s right shoulder, which still throbbed despite the maximal level of painkillers, and his body felt as heavy as lead after losing so much blood. He didn’t feel capable of supporting his own weight.

And more importantly, Higa realized, it was a bit surprising that the lieutenant colonel would be so desperate in this situation.

The final goal of Project Alicization, acquiring the limit-surpassed fluctlight code-named A.L.I.C.E., had been met. All that was left was to analyze Alice’s structure and compare it to that of other fluctlights, and they would be well on their way to mass-producing true bottom-up AI. The purpose of Rath’s existence—to establish a foundation for Japanese defense in the coming age of drone warfare and to escape the control of America’s military industry—would be fulfilled at last.

That was the dearest goal of Seijirou Kikuoka. He had gone to the Ministry of Internal Affairs, gotten involved in the SAO Incident, and maintained a connection to VRMMO players through his own avatar, Chrysheight, for that very reason.

So in terms of Kikuoka’s priorities, keeping the pressure-resistant barrier sealed and protecting Alice’s lightcube until the defense ship could arrive should be the obvious choice. Even if that meant the collapse of the fluctlights of Kazuto Kirigaya and Asuna Yuuki. And if Dr. Koujiro protested against it, he could confine her if needed.

“Do…you find this to…be a…surprise?” Kikuoka asked out of the blue between heavy breaths. Higa actually gurgled in alarm.

“Er, I…uh…I guess I’ll admit…that it seems a bit out of character for you…”

“No…kidding.” Kikuoka groaned, rushing down the rungs—only a few dozen feet to go. “But…let me tell you…this. I’ve got a…good reason…for doing this.”

“O-oh yeah…?”

“I make it…a point to always consider…the worst outcome. And for now…I want the enemy…to think…they have a chance at taking…Alice back.”

“The worst outcome, huh?”

Could there be anything worse than the enemy finding out about the cable duct and attacking from below while the barrier was open?

Before Higa could extrapolate that idea any further, Kikuoka’s soles finally landed on the titanium alloy of the hatch. While the commanding officer stopped and panted, Higa pressed on the intercom and said, “Rinko, we’ve made it! Open the barrier lock!!”

“Whoa…they really opened the damn thing!” shouted Critter, seeing the PRESSURE BARRIER OPEN warning on the main monitor.

But why? For what purpose?

It just didn’t add up. Now that they had possession of Alice, what reason could Rath have for loosening their defenses?

There wasn’t time to debate the question, though. Critter rotated his chair and instructed the other members, “Let’s see, uh, Hans! You go to the stairs with everyone except for Brigg! Take your guns and seize control of the barrier!”

“You make it sound so simple,” Hans complained, clicking his tongue and hoisting his assault rifle. A dozen or so men followed his lead.

“H-hey, what the hell am I supposed to do, then?” complained Brigg.

Critter snapped his fingers. “Don’t worry—I’ve got a job for you, too. A very important one that will require your skills.”

On the inside, Critter was thinking something else entirely: I need this muscle-bound idiot where I can see him, so he doesn’t screw anything else up.

“Listen, pal, you and I are gonna check out this cable duct. I’ve got a feeling that this is what the enemy’s really after, for some reason.”

“Oh yeah? Well…that’s more like it.” Brigg grinned. He walked off, loudly checking the ammunition in his rifle, and Critter did his best not to sigh out loud.

Before he went running out of the main control room and down the hallway, in the opposite direction from Hans’s group, Critter glanced at the door on the back wall—STL Room One.

Damn, why’s Vassago taking so long to log out? He better not be relaxing in there, smoking a cigarette or something.

He considered going back just to check, but Brigg was already hustling into the hallway. Critter had no choice but to follow him now.

In a few minutes, they were at their destination. It looked just like a hallway that ran along the inner wall of the Main Shaft. But according to the ship map, there was a little hatch on the left side of the wall that led to a cable duct that connected to the upper half of the shaft. The shaft was split by that powerful barrier as well, of course, but if Critter’s suspicions were correct…

He grabbed the rotating handle with sweaty hands and turned it left. After opening the heavy metal door, the first thing Critter saw was a tunnel about six feet deep and less than three feet tall, lit by dim orange lights. At the back, the tunnel went upward, and there were simple steps set into the wall.

And then he noticed, just below the steps, a mound of what looked like fabric…

“Whoa!!”

When he realized what it was, Critter pulled back abruptly, cracking the back of his head against the chin of Brigg, who was standing right behind him. But neither the pain in his skull nor the large man’s swearing registered, he was so stunned.

The mysterious fabric was actually clothing. Clothes with someone inside them, a skinny body folded in on itself. Brigg pushed Critter aside and raised his rifle, but it took only a second or two for him to grunt, “He’s dead.”

The man’s neck was twisted at an unnatural angle. Critter grimaced, then hesitantly leaned into the tunnel so that he could examine the dead man’s face.

“Hey…isn’t this that guy? The mole inside Rath…? Did they execute him when they found out he was a spy? It’s a weird way to kill someone…”

He touched the man’s skin, thoroughly grossed out, and felt how clammy it was. Based on the temperature, he had probably died the first time they opened the barrier. So did that mean the first time it opened was so this man could try to escape down to the lower part of the shaft? Had he missed a step and fallen to his death?

Then why had they opened the barrier again?

He wanted to check the state of the barrier hatch leading to the Upper Shaft, but to do that, he’d have to pull the body out, and he didn’t want to do that.

He backed out of the tunnel and into the hallway, then told Brigg, “Go in there and see what’s going on up in the duct.”

The large bearded man snorted and crawled into the tunnel, then yanked the spy’s body out of the way. That done, he went back into the tunnel again and peered up the vertical duct, twisting his upper half for the right angle.

Critter didn’t know much about tactics, but he had to wonder whether it was safe to stick your head right into the vertical duct like that.

“Oh, shit!!” cried Brigg, then he lifted his assault rifle and fired.

Yellow flashes burned Critter’s retinas, and two types of gunfire rattled his eardrums. He managed not to scream but watched as Brigg’s massive body bounced off the floor of the tunnel as though it had been smashed by an invisible hammer.

“Aaaah! What the hell?!” shrieked Critter, falling onto his butt in the hallway. Brigg was collapsed and unmoving, in the same spot where the spy’s body had just been. Critter didn’t need to see the pooling blood on the floor to know that he’d suffered the same fate as the spy. One of Rath’s combat members had been waiting up above and had shot him.

So what do I do now? Critter wondered, feeling a wave of sweat break over him. Should I grab the assault rifle from Brigg’s hand and win a shoot-out with the unseen enemy above to avenge his death? Hell no! I’m just a computer geek—my job is to think and hit keys.

Critter practically crawled back to the main control room, thinking rapidly the whole time. At the very least, this indicated that Rath intended to be aggressive on the attack. But the assault team’s side had the obvious advantage in strength. If they fought, the other side would suffer losses—and at worst, lose control of the Upper Shaft and possession of Alice.

Was Rath’s commander envisioning a worst-case scenario beyond even that? Did he think that the assault team had enough firepower to blow up the entire Ocean Turtle? All the C4 they had couldn’t even blow up one pressure-resistant hatch…

Firepower…

Then Critter inhaled sharply. The two bodies behind him in the hallway completely vanished from his mind.

They did have it.

There was one method they had to destroy the entire Ocean Turtle and sink Alice’s lightcube and the Rath team to the bottom of the ocean.

The client had ordered them to destroy Alice if they determined that she was unrecoverable. But should they destroy this massive autonomous megafloat and the dozens of crew members aboard it just to fulfill that goal?

Critter couldn’t make such an awful decision on his own. He’d have nightmares for the rest of his life.

He got to his feet and ran for the main control room, hoping to get his commanding officer’s opinion.

“K…Kiku! You all right, Kiku?!” hissed Higa as quietly as he could. The enemy had appeared at the bottom of the cable duct and fired off at least three rifle shots.

He got no response. Lieutenant Colonel Kikuoka had his shoulder pressed against the wall of the duct, Higa on his back, with one hand on the ladder step and the other holding a pistol.

No way, man. You can’t be serious. We still need you!

“Ki…”

He was about to yell Kikuokaaaaaa!! when the lieutenant colonel coughed violently.

“Koff…eurgh…Oh, man. I am so glad I wore this bulletproof vest…”

“O-of course you did! Were you seriously thinking of wearing your aloha shirt down here…?” Higa asked, sighing with relief. He glanced down at Kikuoka’s back again. “So you’re not hurt, then?”

“Nope, but I did take one shot to the vest. Are you okay, though? There were a lot of ricochets.”

“Y-yeah…Neither I nor the terminal got hit.”

“Then let’s hurry. We’re almost to the maintenance port.”

As Kikuoka rocked back and forth down the rungs again, Higa thought how surprising this was.

He’d always assumed that Lieutenant Colonel Kikuoka was not one for physical activities, but the muscles under his broad back were as hard as steel. And as for his marksmanship…he had been hanging by one hand from the ladder and had shot down the duct twice, one-handed, and double-tapped the enemy in the throat and chest.

I feel like I’ll never run out of surprises from this guy for as long as I know him, Higa thought, shaking his head. He pulled the cable for the maintenance connector out of his pocket as the port came into view.

As Critter raced back down the hallway and into the main control room, he heard rifle fire coming from the stairs.

Neither Captain Miller nor Vassago were in the room. They probably hadn’t left the STLs yet. Even though it had been over five minutes since the acceleration had started.

Critter still wasn’t sure whether he should really describe his idea to them, mostly because he could sense that if he did, they would tell him to carry it out immediately. They were not the kind of people who cared about the fate of innocent civilians who lay between them and their mission.

He yanked open the door to the STL room, still uncertain of what he should do.

“Captain Miller! Alice is under enemy…”

Any further words caught in his throat.

Right in front of him, lying on the gel bed of STL Unit One, with the machine covering his forehead and everything above it, was Gabriel Miller. His face wore an expression that Critter had never seen on him before.

In fact, Critter had never seen it on any human being.

His blue eyes were bulging so much they threatened to pop out of his skull. His mouth was open wide enough that the jaw joints almost had to be dislocated—and it was diagonal, not straight. His tongue extended far out of his mouth, as if it were an entirely separate living thing.

“C…Cap…tain…?” Critter gaped, his knees shaking. He knew that if he happened to see one of those protruding eyeballs move, he would scream.

It took him more than a few seconds to control his breathing and then reach out, slowly and hesitantly, to touch the man’s left wrist where it hung from the side of the bed.

There was no pulse.

His skin was as cold as ice. Despite the lack of any external wounds, the assault team’s commanding officer, Captain Gabriel Miller, was dead.

Critter clenched his stomach to keep its contents from rising and rasped, “Vassago…get up! The captain’s d…dea…”

He made his way on trembling legs around the gel bed to the second unit, which was farther into the room.

This time, he did scream.

The second-in-command, Vassago Casals, was asleep peacefully, at first glance. His eyes were closed and his expression was placid. His hands were extended, resting at his sides.

The only difference was in that long, flowing black hair of his.

It was as white and shriveled as if he were over a hundred years old.

Critter backed away. He didn’t even bother to check the pulse this time. Despite being a hacker who believed only in reason and source code, Critter truly thought in that moment that he was going to meet the same end that these two did if he stayed in the accursed room.

He tumbled backward through the open doorway and slammed the door shut with his foot.

Critter panted heavily and tried to put together what this meant. There was no way to know what had happened to Miller and Vassago, and he didn’t want to know. All he could assume was that something had happened in the Underworld and that, most likely, it had totally destroyed their fluctlights.

In the end, the operation was a failure. Now that the team leader was dead, there was no way to get a decision on whether to destroy the whole ship with Alice in it. There was no reason to stay here any longer.

Critter picked the communication device up off the console and croaked, “Hans…come back. Brigg, Vassago, and the captain are dead.”

Within a minute, the biggest dandy on the team came rushing back to the control room, his expression as sharp as a knife. “You said Brigg is dead?! How?!”

“H-he got shot from above…in the cable duct…”

Hans listened no further before rushing off with his rifle at the ready. Critter called out, “Stop! They’ve got Alice’s lightcube. There’s no reason to fight anymore…”

The soldier was silent for a while. Then he abruptly punched the wall with an incredible clatter and came stomping back to Critter. “No…there must still be orders. If we can’t steal it, we destroy it. You’ve got an idea of what to do, don’t you?”

Critter was overwhelmed by Hans’s imposing presence and trembling mustache. He nodded nervously. “I…I do, kind of…but we can’t. I can’t make that kind of decision on my own.”

“Say it. Tell me now!!” yelled Hans, pressing the muzzle of his assault rifle to Critter’s throat. The mercenary and Brigg had been a duo for years, since long before Glowgen hired them. The ferocity of his gaze was too much for Critter.

“The…the engine…”

“Engine? Of the ship?”

“Yeah…this huge thing runs on a nuclear reactor…”