2

Ten minutes had passed.

Rinko Koujiro clenched her sweating palms, staring at the digital readout that continued to ascend without mercy.

A hundred years had passed within the Underworld since the initiation of the maximum-acceleration phase. It was impossible to imagine how Kazuto Kirigaya and Asuna Yuuki had experienced that length of time. All she knew was that the memory capacity of their fluctlights was running out, and soon.

According to Higa’s assessment, the human soul stopped functioning properly once it had accumulated about 150 years of memories, and then it began to collapse. This hadn’t been tested in an experiment, of course. The limit might actually be higher—or significantly lower.

All she could do now was pray that they finished the logging-out process before Kirito’s and Asuna’s souls imploded. If they could just avoid that, there was still hope that the two of them might return to their original selves.

Higa, Mr. Kikuoka…please.

So intent was she on her prayer that Rinko failed to notice that the frequent sounds of gunfire in the distance had stopped. She realized it only when Lieutenant Nakanishi rushed back to the sub-control room.

“Doctor! The enemy has begun to withdraw from the Ocean Turtle!”

“W…withdraw?!” she repeated, stunned.

Why now? With the barrier wall open, this would be the attackers’ last chance to recover Alice. It was too early for them to give up. They still had eight hours until the Aegis warship Nagato arrived.

Rinko typed some commands on the keyboard to call up the status windows for various ship conditions and asked the lieutenant, “Did anyone get hurt in the fighting?”

“Yes, ma’am…We’ve got two light injuries, one more serious. He’s being treated now, but I don’t think it’ll be fatal.”

“I see…”

She let out the breath she’d been holding and glanced over at the man. There was a large medical patch stuck to Nakanishi’s chiseled cheekbone, which had a small trace of blood blotting through. He was one of the two who were lightly injured.

They had to save those two kids so that this fighting wasn’t all for nothing. At the very least, the news that the enemy was pulling out was good. On the status window, Rinko confirmed that the bay door to the submerged dock on the underside of the Ocean Turtle was open. That was how the attackers had gotten in the first time.

“Looks like they’re going to escape with their submersible again. They’re really in a rush, though…,” she said, staring curiously. Then a vibration shook the entire Main Shaft.

A whining howl, like a dry breeze through branches, burst through the gigantic megafloat. Her pen rolled off the table and fell onto the floor.

“Wh…what is this?! What’s happening?!”

“It sounds like…Ohhh…No, they couldn’t—!!” Lieutenant Nakanishi groaned. “This vibration must be the main engine at full power, Doctor!!”

“Main engine…?”

“The pressurized water reactor at the base of the shaft.”

When Rinko just sat there in muted horror, the lieutenant leaped to the console and awkwardly interacted with the status screen, bringing up new windows until one of them showed a blurry image.

“Holy shit! All the control rods are raised!! What have they done?!” he demanded, slamming the console with a fist.

“But…there must be safety measures, right…?” Rinko asked.

“Of course. Before the reactor core reaches a critical state, the control rods automatically get inserted to stop fission from occurring. But…just look at this…”

He pointed at the spot on the monitor where it displayed real-time footage of the containment chamber. It was hard to tell through all the red light, but it looked like some small white object was stuck to one large yellow-painted piece of machinery.

“That looks like C4…plastic explosives. At that size, it’s probably not enough to destroy both the containment structure and the pressurizer, but right below this spot is the CRD…That’s the control-rod drive, which inserts the control-rod cluster into the core. If that gets destroyed, then the rods won’t be able to drop on their own…”

“And…we won’t be able to stop nuclear fission? What happens then…?”

“First, it’ll heat up the primary cooling fluid until it results in a steam explosion, destroying the pressurizer…In the worst-case scenario, the core will melt down and break through the containment chamber and the ship’s bilge into the seawater, thus evaporating lots more water and blowing up the entire shaft. Including Main Control, the Lightcube Cluster, and Sub Control.”

“Wha…?”

Rinko looked down at the floor beneath her feet. Superheated steam, bursting up through this thick metal floor? It would mean that all the Rath employees, who’d done their best to avoid casualties; Kazuto and Asuna connected to The Soul Translators; and the thousands of artificial fluctlights in the Lightcube Cluster—all of them would be obliterated in an instant…

“I’ll go and remove the C4,” Lieutenant Nakanishi announced. His voice was low and determined. “They’ll have set the timer for long enough that they can escape to a safe distance on their submersible. We should have five minutes…That’s enough time for me.”

“B-but, Lieutenant, the temperature in the engine room is already…”

“You think I’ve never been in a sauna before? It’s not hard to run in there and pull off a detonator.”

Assuming you have safety clothing on. But there’s no time to arrange something like that, Rinko thought. She couldn’t tell him that, though; there was steel resolve in his figure as he headed to the door.

But his high-laced black boots stopped just short of the sliding door.

There was a sound in the room that Rinko had never heard before. Nakanishi promptly reached for his holster, and they both looked to their left.

It was a high-pitched metal whirring coming from a right foot stepping out of its protective frame—belonging to the metal-and-plastic machine body of Niemon.

To the disbelief of Rinko and Nakanishi, the humanoid machine walked slowly toward them, its head sensors glowing red.

But it shouldn’t be moving.

Higa had designed it, so he knew how it functioned better than anyone. Unlike Ichiemon, which was loaded with many ambulatory balancers, Niemon was designed to be an artificial fluctlight carrier, so without a lightcube inserted, it couldn’t walk at all. Alice was the only fluctlight ejected from the cluster, and she was still held in the case on the desk. Niemon’s head socket should be empty.

“Wh…why is Prototype Two moving…?” Nakanishi gasped, drawing his pistol. Niemon ignored him and walked straight toward Rinko, stopping about six feet away from her. A tinny electronic voice issued from a speaker somewhere in its head.

“I will go.”

That voice.

The tang of the oil lubricating Niemon tickled her nostrils.

She had heard the same voice and smelled the same odor on the night that she landed on the Ocean Turtle, when she was dreaming in her cabin.

Rinko got to her feet, trembling slightly, and walked up to Niemon. In a tremulous voice, she asked, “Is that you…Akihiko…?”

The dim light of the sensors flickered, as though blinking, and the robot’s head smoothly bobbed. She closed the space between them without thinking and touched its aluminum body with shaking hands. The robot’s hands rose, whirring quietly, and touched her back.

“I’m sorry for leaving you alone for so long, Rinko.”

Electronically generated or not, the voice undeniably belonged to the one man Rinko Koujiro had ever loved: Akihiko Kayaba.

“So this…is where you been,” she whispered, not even realizing that she’d reverted to the hometown dialect she’d largely forgotten. Tears pooled in her eyes, blurring the lights of Niemon’s sensors.

“There’s no time. I’ll only say what I need to say. You brought joy to my life, Rinko. You were the only thing keeping me connected to the real world. If possible…I want you to keep that connection going…Fulfill my dream…and connect these two worlds that are still apart…”

“Yes…of course. Of course…,” she said, her head bobbing up and down. The machine seemed to smile. Then it let go of her body and smoothly changed its center of gravity, practically running out of the sub-control room.

Rinko started to follow it automatically, until the sliding door closed in her face. Then she inhaled deeply and clenched her jaw. She couldn’t leave this room now. It was her job to monitor the situation around the ship.

Instead, she watched the feed of the engine room and clutched the locket around her neck. She heard Lieutenant Nakanishi murmur in a daze, “Why did he wait until now…?”

There had been many perils before this point. Yet Kayaba had waited until this moment to break his silent observation and act. Rinko thought she understood why.

“…It’s not for the Underworld. He has no intention of interfering with the simulation. He made himself known so that he could protect Kirigaya and Asuna…”

When Takeru Higa heard the groaning of the heavy turbines echoing up from the bottom of the duct, he finally understood the worst-case scenario Kikuoka was afraid of.

“K…Kiku, I think they’re setting off the—,” Higa groaned, but Kikuoka cut him off.

“I know that. Just put all your attention into shutting down the STLs,” he ordered.

“O-okay…but…”

Higa felt a cold sweat break out all over his body when he inserted the cable into the maintenance panel at last. If the reactor went haywire, none of this would matter. The Underworld and Alice’s lightcube would be utterly destroyed in a blast of superheated steam and radiation, and many human lives would be lost along with them.

But causing a reactor explosion wasn’t actually that easy. You couldn’t break the two thick metal containment layers surrounding the core with small arms, and there were multiple layers of safety systems on the controls. Even if it did continue to run at a reckless full output, the safety measures would kick in very soon, lowering the control rods to prevent fission from occurring.

Just then, in his usual laid-back manner, Kikuoka asked, “Hmm…Higa, do you think you can manage on your own from here?”

“Uh…yeah, if you attach my harness to the steps, I should be able to work…but, Kiku, you can’t be considering going down…”

“Oh, I’m just going to check on things. I’m not going to make some heroic last stand. I’ll be right back,” Kikuoka reassured him, slipping out of the harness that connected the two of them and hanging the nylon belts over the ladder rungs, then snapping the buckles shut. When he was certain that Higa was firmly in place, he descended several steps.

“The rest is up to you, Higa,” he said, his narrow eyes beaming through the black-framed glasses.

“B-be careful down there! They might still be around!” Higa shouted after him. Kikuoka gave him an uncharacteristic thumbs-up, then shot down the rungs with incredible speed. When he got to the bottom, where the hole led out to the hallway, he carefully checked the perimeter before sliding out.

It was only after Kikuoka had disappeared entirely that Higa noticed something was wrong.

While he typed away on the laptop’s keyboard with his right hand, Higa tried to adjust the harness where it was biting into his stomach with his left hand, and he felt something slick and wet. He looked down at his palm in shock and saw, under the illumination of the orange emergency lights, a blackish liquid on his skin.

It was painfully obvious that the blood did not belong to him.

In the Lower Shaft, which the attackers had controlled until a few minutes ago, most of the security cameras were destroyed, but they were still intact in the engine room that housed the reactor.

On the main monitor, Rinko had the feed zoomed in all the way. She clutched her locket in both hands and waited. On her left, Lieutenant Nakanishi had his hands clenched and resting on the console. Behind them, the security team that had come back from the defensive perimeter and the technicians were praying in their own individual ways.

Rinko asked them to evacuate to the bridge, but not a single one of them left the Main Shaft. Everyone present had given everything they had for Rath, the mysterious organization conducting top-secret R&D. They had their own hopes and dreams for the new age that true bottom-up artificial intelligence would bring.

Up to this point, Rinko had thought of herself as merely a guest temporarily visiting the ship. She’d had no intention of linking her goals to that of Seijirou Kikuoka, a man as impenetrable as any.

But she also realized now that she had come here to Rath because she was meant to. Artificial fluctlights weren’t meant to be funneled into a narrow purpose like unmanned-weapons AI. And the Underworld was not just some highly advanced civilization simulator.

They were the beginning of a massive paradigm shift.

A new reality, a revolution from the closed-off nature of the real world. A world made incarnate by the invisible power of all those young people who had sought to break free from the existing system of reality.

That’s what you really wanted, isn’t it, Akihiko? What you discovered in your two years in that castle was the endless possibility they represented. The blindingly bright power of the heart.

The worst criminal act in history—locking up ten thousand people in a virtual prison and causing four thousand lives to be lost—was unforgivable in every way. Rinko’s part in helping him carry out that crime would never be expunged from her history.

But just for now…just this once, let me wish.

Please, Akihiko. Save us…Save the world.

As if in answer to her prayer, there was movement at last in the remote feed on the screen. A silver mechanical body had appeared in the narrow hallway leading to the engine room containing the cutting-edge pressurized water reactor.

The machine’s steps were duller now, perhaps because its battery output was already dimming. It clanked forward, step by heavy step, fighting its own weight.

Rinko couldn’t imagine when and how Kayaba’s thought-mimicking program had slipped into that body’s memory. One thing was clear, however: The program contained within the robot had to be the one and only original copy. No intelligence could truly withstand the knowledge that there were identical copies of it in existence.

How long would the prototype’s electronic circuits hold out? It surely hadn’t been treated with special heat-resistant protection. All they needed to do was unplug the detonator to prevent an explosion, but if Niemon’s memory should get destroyed somehow, Kayaba’s consciousness would cease to exist.

Please, defuse the bomb safely and come back to me, Rinko prayed, biting her lip.

But Akihiko Kayaba probably intended for this to be his end. He’d fried his own brain in the act of writing a copy of his mind—and now he had found his purpose, his reason for dying.

The actuators of Niemon’s mechanical joints whirred.

Its metal soles thudded against the floor.

With determined, careful strides, the machine body reached the door of the engine room at last. It reached out and awkwardly operated the control panel. The light turned green, and the thick metal door opened inward.

At that very moment, she heard high-speed rifle fire through the speakers. Niemon retreated awkwardly, lifting its arms to protect its body. A soldier dressed in black fatigues shouted something and leaped through the open doorway.

It was obviously one of the attackers. He wasn’t covering his face with a helmet and goggles like before. The man had a soft-looking face with a narrow mustache, but even on the grainy security camera, the extreme expression on his face was clear.

“Wha…?! One of them stayed behind?!” Nakanishi exclaimed. “Why?! Does he want to die?!”

Niemon maintained a defensive posture as the man unloaded bullets on it. Sparks flew, and holes opened in the aluminum exterior. Nerve cables tore here and there, and lubricant spilled out of its polymer muscle cylinders.

“S-stop it!!” shrieked Rinko. But the enemy soldier on the screen screamed something in English and pulled the trigger a third time. The robot wobbled, taking step after step backward.

“Oh no! Number Two’s exterior can’t withstand this!” Nakanishi said, reaching for his pistol, even though he knew he wouldn’t make it in time.

Then a fresh series of gunshots rang out through the speakers.

A third figure came running down the hallway from the front, firing a pistol wildly. The enemy’s body jolted left and right. Somehow this new person was hitting his target without mistakenly putting a single bullet into the robot body. But who…?

Rinko forgot to breathe. On-screen, blood burst from the enemy’s chest, and he flew backward and stopped moving.

The mystery savior slowly descended to a knee in the middle of the hallway—and then sank to the floor on his side. With trembling fingers, Rinko rolled the mouse wheel to zoom in.

Bangs covered his forehead. Black-framed glasses slid off his ear. It looked like there was a slight smile on his lips.

“K…Kikuoka?!”

“Lieutenant Colonel!!” shouted Rinko and Nakanishi together.

This time, the SDF officer bolted out of the room for good. A number of the security staffers followed him. Rinko couldn’t stop them now.

Instead, one of the technicians leaped to the console, typing a few keys and bringing up what appeared to be a status window for Prototype Number Two.

“Left arm, zero output. Right arm, sixty-five percent. Both legs at seventy percent. Battery remaining, thirty percent. We can do it. It can still move!!” the staffer shouted. Number Two seemed to hear him and resumed forward progress.

Zrr, chak. Zrr, chak. With each awkward step, its severed cables spit out sparks. When the ragged body passed through the doorway, Rinko switched the camera view to the angle from the engine room interior.

The second heat-resistant door was physically locked with a large lever. Niemon’s right arm grabbed the lever and tried to push it down. Its elbow actuators spun, spraying more sparks.

“Please,” Rinko murmured, just before cheers of encouragement burst out of the observers in the control room.

“You can do it, Niemon!!”

“That’s it, just a bit more!!”

Ga-kunk. The lever shifted downward heavily.

The thick metal door burst open from the pressure on the other side. Even on the monitor, it was clear that a huge blast of heat was pouring through the doorway.

Number Two wobbled. The especially thick cable hanging from its back sparked worse than before.

“Oh…oh no!!” shouted one of the staffers suddenly.

“What…what’s wrong?!”

“The battery cable’s damaged!! If that gets cut off, it’ll lose power to the body…and cease to move…”

Rinko and the other techs watched in silence. Even Kayaba, the brain controlling Niemon, seemed to realize how bad the damage was. The robot pinned the swinging cable down with its elbow and resumed walking, slowly and carefully.

The interior of the engine room was full of excess heat the reactor was putting off at maximum output, at a temperature that no human being could withstand in the flesh. Most likely the safety functions would kick in soon, automatically inserting the control rods back into their housing.

But if the plastic explosives went off first and destroyed the drive for the control rods? Then the neutrons coming off the nuclear fuel would destroy the uranium atoms in a chain reaction until it reached a critical point.

A core meltdown would then cause a steam-pressure explosion in the primary coolant, destroying the pressurizer, and the core would then break through the containment vessel from sheer gravity, then the bottom of the ship, and would leak into the water…

Rinko had a sudden vision of a pillar of smoke rising from the center of the Ocean Turtle.

She closed her eyes and prayed again. “Please…Akihiko…!!”

The cheers and chants resumed. Pushed onward by their encouragement, Number Two approached the nuclear reactor.

She switched to the final camera angle.

There was suddenly a terrible roar coming through the speakers. The footage on the screen was red with emergency lights. Number Two was practically dragging one foot as it proceeded through the searing heat. Only five or six yards until it reached the plastic explosives stuck to the upper part of the containment chamber.

The robot’s right hand rose toward the detonator. Sparks were flying in streams from all over its body, and pieces of its exterior fell to the floor.

“You can do it…You can do it…You can do it!!”

One simple statement echoed around the control room. Rinko balled her hands into fists and screamed with them, nearly losing her voice.

Four more yards.

Three yards.

Two yards.

Then there was a veritable explosion of sparks from Number Two’s back.

The black cable split and hung loose, like some exposed entrails.

All the sensors on the robot’s head went out. The right arm slowly lowered.

Its knees shook and bent—and Number Two went silent.

On the monitor, the output graphs that had been bouncing up and down now sank to the bottom and turned black.

One of the techs whispered, “It’s…lost all power…”

I don’t believe in miracles, Akihiko Kayaba had said to Rinko on the day he’d woken in his bed in the mountain villa after SAO had been cleared earlier than expected and all its players had been released at last. His eyes were gentle and shining, and there was a faint smile playing around his scraggly, overgrown jaw.

But you know what? I saw a miracle today, for the first time in my life. My sword went through him and destroyed the last of his hit points, but it was like he refused to obey the system and go away…and he stuck his swords into me instead.

Maybe it was that moment I’ve been waiting for all this time…

“…Akihiko!!” shouted Rinko, not even noticing that blood was dripping from the hand that clenched her locket. “You’re Heathcliff, the man with the Holy Sword!! You’re the ultimate rival of Kirito the Black Swordsman!! You’ve got to have one miracle of your own in you!!”

Flick.

Flick-flick.

Red lights flickered. The lateral sensors on Number Two’s head.

Exposed muscle cylinders jittered.

A faint, purple light bobbed at the very bottom of the blacked-out status window. Then all the bars on the graph displaying limb and core output shot upward. Sparks flew as the robot’s joint actuators spun into life.

“N…Number Two’s active again!!” a staffer shrieked, right as the utterly ragged machine stood upright.

Tears poured from Rinko’s eyes.

“Gooooo!!”

“Keep going!!”

Shouts filled the sub-control room.

One foot stepped forward, slick with oil that ran like blood.

The other foot dragged forward next, and it reached out its arm.

One step. Another step.

The battery compartment popped. Its body lurched—but it took another step.

The fingers of its fully extended arm made contact with the plastic explosives strapped to the containment vessel.

The thumb and index finger pinched the electric detonator.

Sparks erupted from wrist, elbow, and shoulder like death screams. Number Two pulled the detonator loose, timer and all, and raised its arm high.

The screen flashed white.

Number Two’s fingers blew off where the detonator had burst. Then the robot tilted to the left and, like a lifeless puppet, dropped to the floor. The sensor lights blinked and went out, and the output graph on the monitor blacked out again.

No one said anything for quite some time.

And then the sub-control room rocked with raucous cheers.

The whining of the engine turbines weakened and grew distant.

Higa let out the breath he’d been holding. The nuclear reactor was finally starting to lower its output instead of continuing at a disastrous full-power clip.

He wiped his sweaty forehead with his sleeve and squinted at the laptop screen through dirty lenses. The shutdown process for the two Soul Translators was about 80 percent finished. Over seventeen minutes had passed since the maximum-acceleration phase had been initiated—that would be over 160 years in the Underworld.

By Higa’s conjecture, that was over the theoretical life span of the fluctlight. In simple logical terms, it was highly likely that the souls of Kazuto Kirigaya and Asuna Yuuki had disintegrated.

But at this point, Higa also admitted to himself that in truth, he knew nothing about fluctlights in the Underworld. He had planned the simulation, constructed it, and operated it. But within the machine, the alternate world that had been built up by artificial souls had apparently reached heights that no one in Rath could have envisioned.

Right now, the real-world person with the deepest understanding of that world was undoubtedly Kazuto himself. Just a seventeen-year-old high school student, hurled into the Underworld without any preparation. And he had adapted, evolved, and exhibited power greater than that of the four super-accounts meant to be gods.

That wasn’t just some preternatural power that Kazuto was born with. It was because Kazuto Kirigaya—unlike the Rath members, who saw the artificial fluctlights only as experimental programs—acknowledged that the fluctlights were just as human as he was. He interacted with them, fought them, protected them, loved them—as human beings.

That was why the Underworld—all the people who lived in it—chose him. To be their protector.

Then perhaps, through some miracle that even Higa could not have anticipated, he might be able to withstand two hundred years.

I bet that’s right, Kirito. Now I understand exactly why Lieutenant Colonel Kikuoka was so insistent on working with you. And why you’ll continue to be needed.

So…

“…Please come back to us,” Higa whispered, watching the shutdown process approach 100 percent.

Rinko was left all alone in the sub-control room.

The other staff members had left to rescue Lieutenant Colonel Kikuoka and restore control to the main control room. For her part, Rinko wanted to rush to the reactor containment unit and find the collapsed Niemon so she could secure its physical memory and the thought-simulation model of Akihiko Kayaba contained on it. But she couldn’t leave this spot yet. Not until Higa finished the STL shutdown process and she could confirm the condition of Kazuto Kirigaya and Asuna Yuuki next door.

Rinko had faith that they would wake up as though nothing had gone wrong. She wanted to place Alice’s lightcube in their hands and tell them that the Rath team had kept her safe. And she wanted to tell them about the person who had saved the Underworld from the real world—to tell them that Akihiko Kayaba, the man who’d imprisoned them, forced them to fight, and put them through hell, had operated a mechanical body with its battery cable cut and protected the Lightcube Cluster and the Ocean Turtle.

She couldn’t ask their forgiveness. There was no way to remove the crime of the deaths of four thousand young people from Akihiko Kayaba’s story.

But she wanted Kazuto and Asuna to understand the idea that Kayaba had left behind and the goal he’d been striving for.

Rinko placed her hands on the duralumin case containing Alice’s lightcube and waited for Higa’s voice to come in over the intercom.

“…Rinko, the log-out process is going to be complete in sixty seconds.”

“All right. I’ll make sure to send someone for you soon.”

“Please do. I don’t think I can get up this ladder on my own…Also, Kiku went down below to check on things. How is he doing? I think he’s got an injury.”

At the moment, Rinko couldn’t tell him. Nakanishi had gone in to rescue Kikuoka after the gunfight in the hallway to the engine room about three or four minutes ago, but she hadn’t heard back from him yet.

But Kikuoka wasn’t going to succumb before his mission was complete. He was the man who remained aloof at all times and easily overcame whatever challenges he faced.

“The lieutenant colonel put on quite a show down there. In fact, I’d say he put Hollywood to shame when it comes to action scenes.”

“Wow, I can’t even imagine that…We got thirty seconds left.”

“I’m going over to the STL room now. Get in touch if anything happens. Over.”

Rinko switched off her comm and left the console, clutching the case, as she made her way to the adjacent room. Before she touched the sliding door, the speaker in the room crackled with a report from the staff members who’d gone below.

It wasn’t from Lieutenant Nakanishi or from the technicians who’d gone to Main Control. It was the security officer who had gone to remove the plastic explosive itself, now that the temperature was dropping in the reactor containment chamber.

“Engine room, coming in! Do you read me? Dr. Koujiro!”

Rinko felt her heart leap in her chest and switched the intercom channel. She shouted, “Yes, I read you loud and clear! What is it?!”

“W-well, ma’am…I removed the C4 safely, but…it’s gone.”

“Gone…? What’s gone?”

“Number Two. I’m not seeing Niemon anywhere in the engine room!”

The timer on the cheap digital watch reached zero and beeped.

Critter huddled in a corner of the submersible’s passenger bay, listening intently for sound from outside. After many seconds without hearing the death-scream explosion of the megafloat, he exhaled a long and heavy breath.

Even he couldn’t say whether it was out of relief or disappointment.

All he knew was that the C4 he’d placed on the Ocean Turtle’s reactor had not exploded for some reason, and thus the control-rod drive was not destroyed, and there was no meltdown.

If Hans was still okay back in the engine room, he’d be able to set off the device on his own, so the fact that it hadn’t happened meant that he’d been eliminated.

Critter was stunned that a mercenary working for money would choose to stay behind rather than get on the sub. Hans had nearly lost his mind when he’d heard that his partner Brigg was dead; apparently they’d been close enough that he’d chosen to die in the same place.

“People always have a longer history than you think…,” he muttered to himself, placing his watch back on a time readout.

In fact, Captain Miller and Vassago, who died before Hans did, had their own motives and circumstances outside of money. And it was those complicating factors that killed them.

In that sense, Critter and the other team members on the submersible had really gotten screwed over by this operation ending in failure. Glowgen DS, their client, had gotten to its current size by undertaking wet works for the NSA and CIA, and they wouldn’t think twice about hanging personnel out to dry. They might even be silenced to the very last man the moment they stepped on US soil again.

As a bit of personal insurance, Critter snuck a micro–memory card out of the Ocean Turtle, taped to his chest with skin-colored waterproof tape. He had no idea how much good that would do him, but at the very least, if they were going to kill him, they’d just put a bullet in his brain, which was a much better way to go than whatever gruesome fate Vassago and Captain Miller had suffered.

“Good grief.” He snorted and glanced unhappily at the two body bags at the back of the passenger section. The sight of Miller’s horrible death rictus flashed into his head, and he shivered.

“…Huh? Two?”

He squinted into the darkness at the rear of the craft—there were only two body bags. But that didn’t add up. Hans had stayed behind, but there had been three casualties on the team: Captain Miller, Vassago, and Brigg.

“…Hey, Chuck,” he said, elbowing a nearby man chewing on an energy bar.

“What?”

“Your team collected the bodies, right? Why are we down one?”

“Huh? We got Brigg from the corridor and Captain Miller in the STL room. Who else died?”

“But…there was another one in the room there…”

“Nope, only found the captain. Gonna remember that goddamn face in my nightmares.”

“……”

Critter pulled back and looked around the little cargo section. There were nine men sitting in the cramped space, all of them looking exhausted. Vice-Captain Vassago Casals was not among them.

Critter had definitely confirmed Captain Miller’s death in the STL room, but he’d only looked at Vassago. His skin had been totally pale, though, and his hair had been bone white. He couldn’t have been alive. If he was alive, why wasn’t he on the submersible?

Critter’s brain refused to consider this topic any longer. He wrapped his arms around his knees. The loquacious hacker did not say a single word until they returned to the Seawolf-class sub Jimmy Carter many minutes later.

Nineteen minutes and forty seconds after the start of the maximum-acceleration phase, the shutdown of Soul Translator Unit Three and Unit Four in the Ocean Turtle’s STL Room Two was complete.

Three minutes later, the acceleration process itself finished, and as the cooling system wound down, quiet returned to the ship interior again.

Dr. Rinko Koujiro and Sergeant First Class Natsuki Aki released the boy and girl from the STLs—but Kazuto Kirigaya and Asuna Yuuki did not open their eyes.

It was clear that their fluctlight output was nearly at a minimum and their mental activity was all but lost.

But Rinko clutched their hands, tearfully calling and calling out to them.

There were the faintest of smiles on Kazuto’s and Asuna’s faces in the midst of their deep, deep sleep.