5

“Papa!!”

A small person leaped onto me the moment I logged in to ALO. I caught her with both hands, lifting her high up first, then clutching her to my chest. She rubbed her cheek against me, purring like a cat.

Yui was an advanced AI of the top-down variety—and my adopted daughter with Asuna. Since I’d been allowed to use an AmuSphere for a week now, I’d been seeing her every day. It seemed like she was more needy and affectionate each time I saw her.

I wasn’t going to scold her for that, of course. Yui had helped track down my location after I vanished, predicted that the people who attacked the Ocean Turtle were going to use VRMMO players from other countries, and helped set up countermeasures. She’d played a massive role.

Once she had gotten her fill of physical contact, her childlike form in the white dress vanished in a burst of light, replaced by a palm-sized pixie. She fluttered translucent wings and rose to alight on my left shoulder, her favorite seat.

I took another look around my house: the log house on the twenty-second floor of New Aincrad within ALO. This place, too, I had visited every night, and the wave of nostalgia it gave me hadn’t dimmed yet.

Perhaps it was because it was a bit similar to the cottage on the outskirts of Rulid in the Underworld where I had lived with Alice for half a year. At the time, I was in a largely unconscious state, so my memories of it were vague, but the gentleness of that period of time still lingered in my heart.

Alice’s sister, Selka, had come with food just about every day. Apparently, she had chosen to be frozen long-term so that she could see Alice again one day, and that was the one thing I had told Alice before my memories were deleted.

Since then, Alice had been awaiting an opportunity to return to the Underworld, although she did not speak of this. I wanted to make it come true for her. But as of this moment, the Ocean Turtle was on lockdown near the Izu Islands, and there was no satellite connection to reach it. We could only wait for Kikuoka’s plan to bear fruit.

I sighed, putting the thought out of my head, and turned around, Yui still sitting on my shoulder. Asuna met my gaze with a gentle, all-knowing smile. The blue-haired girl took my hand and led me out of the house.

Alfheim’s curtain of night was beginning to fade. We spread our fairy wings and took flight into the first rays of sun peeking through the outer aperture.

Many players were already together at the open space before the massive dome at the roots of the World Tree. I spotted a group of familiar faces and sped over to land among them.

“You’re late, Kirito!”

I lifted my fist to strike Klein’s incoming knuckles, which shot at me the moment I made contact with the ground. The katana user was grinning, wearing his usual ugly bandana. “You can’t go teleporting around here, so you gotta give yourself more time for travel, hero!” he teased.

“That wasn’t teleportation. It was ultra-high-speed flight.”

“Same damn thing!!”

He smacked me on the back. Next to him, Agil unfolded his arms and extended a huge fist toward me. I gave him a knuckle salute, and the bearded man smirked and added, “Did you get too used to that superpowered character, and now you’ve gone on us? We can give you a little refresher after the meeting.”

“Ugh,” I grunted guiltily. If I fought in ALO now, I would probably forget I didn’t have Incarnation attacks and element generation, and I would end up trying to block sword blows by yelling at them.

“A-actually, you’d better prepare yourself, because I’ve got some Underworld tricks you haven’t seen yet,” I bluffed back. Then I turned and saw Leafa, her long ponytail glimmering in the morning sun, and Sinon, who was smiling with a huge bow slung over her shoulder. We traded quick high fives.

I’d seen both of them several times since waking up, too, of course. Leafa—Suguha—told me how she’d saved Lilpilin, chief of the orcs, and fought at his side. I rubbed her head and told her she did well, and she scrunched up her face and cried. It was hard for me to reconcile that with the mental image of the furious Green Swordswoman whom the Dark Territory soldiers would go on to speak of in legend. But at the same time, I could totally buy it. Suguha was the one who’d continued with kendo long after I’d dropped out. She was a true devotee of the sword, unlike me.

At the peace talks, the orcs announced that they would wait eternally for the return of the one they called the Green Swordswoman. I was certain that even now, two hundred years later, that tradition was continuing strong.

Sinon described her one-on-one combat with Gabriel Miller in brief terms and revealed that he was none other than Subtilizer, who’d defeated her in the fourth Bullet of Bullets tournament. Gabriel’s Incarnation attacks numbed her and nearly sucked her mind away, except that her good-luck charm protected her—and she wouldn’t tell me what that was when I asked.

I told her about the path of my battle with Gabriel, too, as well as the fate of the man in the real world. After the attackers fled in their submersible, Gabriel and the other enemy—PoH, leader of Laughing Coffin—were not found in the STL room, but the STL logs told some of the story.

After Gabriel Miller’s duel with me, the majority of his fluctlight was lost in the pressure of a tremendous flood of information. His heart stopped immediately after that; he was surely dead.

PoH’s situation was a bit more complex. His mental activity was retained for about ten years of internal time after the maximum-acceleration phase began. From that point on, his fluctlight activity lowered over time, until he essentially lost all conscious thought around the thirty-year mark.

It was frightening to consider, but after I had defeated PoH, I transformed the structure of his avatar into a simple tree, to prevent him from logging back in to use it, and left him there. In other words, he spent decades with no sensory inputs beyond the sensation of “skin.” Of course his fluctlight would break down; Higa said that even if he was physically alive, his mind would no longer be present.

Although it was only an indirect consequence in each case, I was clearly responsible for taking their lives. I could accept that sin, but I did not want to regret it. To do so would be an insult to Administrator, whom I’d also killed, and the many Underworlders who’d died in the course of acting on their beliefs.

After greeting Sinon and Leafa, I shook hands with Lisbeth and Silica next.

“I heard you were the one who recruited the Japanese players, Liz? I wish I could’ve heard that speech,” I said.

Lisbeth just chuckled nervously. “Speech? Oh, gosh, it wasn’t anything that fancy. Honestly, I wasn’t even conscious of what I was saying…”

“It was amazing!” Silica interjected. “Her speech was masterful!” Lisbeth grabbed her triangular animal ears and pulled.

“Thank you, too, Silica,” I said, bowing to the little beast-tamer. She grinned, revealing small, sharp fangs.

“Um, in that case, give me a present,” she said, rushing to hug me. Her little blue dragon, Pina, trilled and leaped off her shoulder to land on my head.

“Hey, you! What do you think you’re doing?” Lisbeth demanded, pulling Silica’s tail this time. The smaller girl let out a bizarre yelp like “Hgyuh!” sending the others into fits of laughter.

There were several groups of players nearby, in fact. Lady Sakuya and the sylphs. Alicia Rue and the cait siths. Eugene and the salamanders. Plus Siune, Jun, and the Sleeping Knights.

I’m back.

It was the strongest I’d ever felt that statement to be true since waking up in Rath’s Roppongi office.

This wasn’t a complete and total happy ending, not at all. The route back to the Underworld was unclear at best; repairing the damage in online relations with American, Chinese, and Korean VRMMO players was crucial; and there were other problems beyond that.

Lisbeth hung on my other arm in playful competition with Silica. I asked her quietly, “Do you think there’s any way to get back the items that were lost in the Underworld?”

“Oh…um…”

Her cheerful face clouded over a bit. Thankfully, the accounts of the players who’d converted over from ALO, GGO, and other Seed worlds hadn’t been totally lost after death, and they were able to convert back to their original VRMMOs.

Unfortunately, however, their weapons and armor that were destroyed or stolen in the battle did not come back. As they’d gone in with their finest gear, these were items that could not be easily replaced, and Lisbeth was leading a group of players negotiating with the operators of the different VRMMOs to try to find a way to restore that data.

“Most of the developers have a hands-off stance that says, if you lost items as a result of conversion, it’s your own responsibility. But Mr. Higa from Rath says that if the data is still on the Underworld server, it might be recoverable, so I asked him to check that out when he can. That just means waiting for the connection to come back online…”

“I see…I’m sure Higa will find a way to work it out. And…what about the Chinese and Korean players…?”

“It’s a very bad situation,” Lisbeth said, looking gloomy. “It was a really awful battle…But people are agreeing that we bear some responsibility for things being that bad before the incident. I mean, The Seed Nexus cuts off all connections from outside Japan. There’s some discussion about opening ALO as a means of facilitating talks with them. I’m sure it’ll be a topic of debate today.”

“That sounds good. Walls can make relations worse, but the reverse is never true,” I replied, thinking of the End Mountains, which had separated the human realm and the dark realm in the Underworld for hundreds of years.

I gazed at the hazy horizon of Alfheim for a while, then turned back to the roots of the World Tree. The marble gates were wide open now, ushering the players into the dome within.

“C’mon—let’s go,” I said to my friends. But before I could take a step toward the doors, I noticed a flashing icon that indicated I was getting a voice-chat signal from outside ALO. “Oops, I’m getting a call. You guys go ahead.”

Asuna and the others continued onward while I took a few steps in the other direction and tapped the icon. “Hello?”

A very familiar voice answered. “Kirito…it’s me…Alice.”

“Alice! Hey…it’s been a while. I heard that you were coming to the meeting in Alfheim, too…”

“I’m sorry…I can’t. This party isn’t going to be ending anytime soon…Tell everyone that I’m sorry.”

“…Okay,” I murmured.

But I was a bit perturbed. As the first true artificial general intelligence, Alice was put on a busy schedule that had her in attendance at receptions and parties every single day in an attempt to place her at the forefront of society’s attention. Dr. Koujiro apologized for it, and Alice seemed to know that she didn’t really have a choice anyway, but I knew there was no way the proud knight would enjoy being treated like some sideshow.

“All right, I’ll let everyone know. Don’t hold it in too much, Alice. If you don’t like something, let them know.”

“…I am a knight. I exist to fulfill my duty,” she said rigidly, although not with her usual crispness. Still, there was very little that I could do for her at this point in time.

“Well, Kirito…until later.”

“All right…talk to you then,” I replied, waiting for her to disconnect the call.

Instead, there was a brief silence, and then I heard her say faintly, “Kirito…I feel…as though I may wither away.”

The voice chat disconnected before I could answer.