7

I looked around my room for the first time in two whole months.

A very plain computer desk and wall rack. A pipe-frame bed and simple curtains.

I would have found it nostalgic…if I hadn’t been put off by how barren it all was. In subjective terms, it had actually been two years and eight months since I was last in here—I’d spent two and a half years in the Underworld.

My room at the North Centoria Imperial Swordcraft Academy had had heavy wooden furniture, beautiful carpet, painting frames, flower arrangements, and all manner of pleasing and comfortable details. And of course, I’d always had Ronie, Tiese…and Eugeo’s smile nearby.

Though they were just memories now, a painful and vivid sting hit my chest and put a lump into my throat.

I dropped my bag full of clothes onto the floor and walked a few steps to sit down on the bed. I lay down on my side and smelled the fresh linen of the sheets. They must have just been cleaned.

I closed my eyes.

I heard a faint voice.

If you’re going to nap, you should finish your sacred arts lesson first. Or are you going to copy mine again?

Oh, listen, I added a wrinkle to that technique you taught me. Let’s go to the training hall later.

Hey, you snuck out to buy sweets again! You’d better have some for me!

C’mon, wake up, Kirito.

Kirito…

I rolled over slowly and buried my face in the pillow.

Then I did something I’d been resisting ever since I woke up in the Roppongi lab.

I clutched my sheets, gritted my teeth, and cried. I bawled like a baby, the tears coming and coming, my body shaking.

Why…?

Why couldn’t I have had all my memories removed?!

All of those two and a half years, starting from waking up in the forest, walking along the brook, hearing the ax, and meeting that boy at the foot of the great black tree!

I cried and cried and cried, and still the tears wouldn’t stop.

At last, there came a soft knocking on my door.

I didn’t reply. The knob turned, and I heard quiet footsteps. My face was still pressed into the pillow. Then the bed sank a little.

Fingers hesitantly stroked my hair.

I didn’t want to lift my head. A voice spoke that was gentle and soft but with a firm insistence at its core.

“Tell me, Big Brother. Tell me what happened there—the fun things, the sad things, all of it.”

“………”

I held my silence for a few moments more. Eventually, I turned my face to the right and, through teary vision, saw Suguha—my only sister—smiling at me.

I was back. Back home. With my family.

The past gets further away, and the present continues. Onward and forward.

I shut my eyes, wiped the tears, and through trembling lips said, “When I first met him…right at the start, in the deepest part of the woods…he was just a lumberjack. It’s impossible to believe, but they’d spent generations—over three hundred years—trying to cut down a single cedar tree…”

It was August 16th, 2026, when I finished my physical therapy and returned home to Kawagoe in Saitama Prefecture. I spent that entire night telling Suguha about the things that had happened in the Underworld.

The next morning, I was awakened by a phone call.

It was an alert that Alice had vanished from Rath’s Roppongi office.

Monday, August 17th, nine AM.

“V…vanished?! Like…electronically speaking?!” I said into the phone, dressed in my nightwear of a T-shirt and boxers.

Dr. Koujiro was on the other end of the line. She kept her voice level, but there was clearly a considerable amount of anxiety in it. “No…I mean her entire machine body. According to security footage, she undid the security locks herself at nine o’clock last night and snuck past the guards to get outside.”

“All by herself…?” I asked, letting out the breath I’d been holding.

There were enough formal organizations and loose groups in Japan who did not think highly of Alice that you couldn’t count them on just two hands. Beyond that, I couldn’t begin to guess how many individuals might seek to destroy her for practical, religious, moral, or emotional reasons. She didn’t have a sword or sacred arts to defend herself; if someone like that captured her now, she would be helpless.

Rath had upped their security protocol at Roppongi to fortress-like tightness in recognition of the danger. The one thing they hadn’t counted on, apparently, was Alice vanishing on her own.

The only other question was why Alice would do such a thing. I recalled something I’d heard her mumble a week earlier, right before our voice chat was cut off when I was in ALO.

With great distress, Dr. Koujiro said, “I was worried that we were putting too much stress on Alice. But every time I asked her ‘Are you tired? Do you need a break?’ she would just smile and shake her head…”

“Well…of course. She’s a proud and noble knight—she would never admit weakness to anyone.”

“Except for you, that is. Kirigaya, I think that she’s going to contact you. So…I hate to ask this, considering that you just got out of the hospital, but…”

As she trailed off, I stepped in and said, “Yes, of course, I understand. If I hear from Alice, I’ll rush to her location. But, Doctor…is it even possible for her to get that far?”

“That’s what we’re worried about. On her internal battery, a full charge will last for about eight hours of walking, and half of that if she runs. If her power runs out somewhere around Roppongi…and some unfriendly person happens across her…”

“And she does stick out,” I noted, grimacing. That was another thing to worry about: Alice’s bright-blond hair, pure and pale skin, and painstakingly crafted features made her quite visible in a crowd, even before you got to the robot part.

“We have every available employee out searching the area now. We’re tracking Internet posts, too, and even have a bot infiltrating public camera networks and looking at the recordings.”

“Then I’ll just go to the office for now. If anything happens, I want to be able to get there ASAP.”

“That would be a great help. Thank you, Kirigaya,” she said and promptly hung up.

I pulled a random outfit out of the closet; stuck my arms and legs through it; grabbed my backpack, smartphone, and motorcycle key; and rushed out of my room.

Down the stairs, the first floor was quiet. My dad and mom were on vacation for the Obon holiday and had gone somewhere together, and Suguha was probably at morning kendo-club practice. We were supposed to be celebrating my discharge from the hospital as a family tonight, but this was more important.

I chugged some orange juice straight from the bottle while standing by the fridge, popped the bagel sandwich Suguha must have left for me into my mouth, and raced for the door. I stuck my feet into my riding shoes and was just turning the doorknob when the intercom right next to me on the wall rang.

My heart nearly skipped a beat. Had Alice somehow found a way to get to my location on her own?

“Ali…”

I opened the unlocked door, the name catching in my throat.

Instead, it was a young man in the blue uniform and cap of one of the major delivery companies. It was exquisitely bad timing, but I couldn’t help but notice the beads of sweat on his face as he said “Hello, home delivery!” so I couldn’t just ask him to come back later.

I leaned over to grab the official family stamp left on top of the shoe cubbies to stamp his shipping forms, but then he delivered the bad news: “Payment on delivery!”

“Oh…right.”

I started to get my wallet out of the backpack but then remembered that this world had a convenient thing called electronic funds. Instead, I pulled my phone out of my pocket and held it up to the tablet the man was carrying.

“Thanks!” he said, trotting off. I took a look at the box he’d left in the doorway.

It was surprisingly large. The cardboard box had to be over two feet to a side. If it wasn’t perishable, I was going to leave it and continue on my way, but I checked the sender just in case. It was labeled ELECTRONIC GOODS. And the sender…

“What…?”

OCEANIC RESOURCE EXPLORATION & RESEARCH INSTITUTION. That had to be one of the shipping labels they kept around the Roppongi Rath office. My address was right there in the destination field. I didn’t recognize the awkwardly angular handwriting.

If Dr. Koujiro had sent this, she would have mentioned it in the call. So perhaps it had come from Kikuoka or Higa. Which would mean…it was some kind of electronics related to the Underworld or the STL?

I bit my lip, made up my mind, and reached for the edge of the tape seal, carefully peeling it off. Then I lifted the two flaps out to the side, and…

“…Aaaaah!!”

…screamed in horror.

Packed tightly into the box, bent at awkward, unnatural angles, were human hands and feet. I bolted backward, eyes bulging, and then screamed a second time.

“Eyaaaaaa?!”

In the shadows beneath the hands and feet, a single eye stared back at me.

I flopped backward, but my right hand was still holding the edge of the cardboard box. A pale hand reached up out of the box and grabbed my wrist.

Before I could scream a third time, an annoyed voice said, “Stop making noise and pull me out already, Kirito.”

Three minutes later, I was sitting on the lip of the wood floor in our entranceway, holding my head in my hands.

I was valiantly attempting to come to grips with the real-life actualization of that trope from popular fiction, “beautiful girl robot delivered to your door.” But it was not going well.

“…I can’t!!” I shouted, giving up and jumping to my feet.

I turned around to see a beautiful girl robot dressed in a familiar uniform rubbing the pillar in the hallway with a finger out of great curiosity.

Eventually, the robot—Electroactive Muscled Operative Machine #3—housing a true bottom-up AI, the third-ranked Integrity Knight of the Axiom Church, Alice Synthesis Thirty, smiled at me.

“This house is built of wood,” she said. “It’s just like the house in the woods of Rulid. But much, much larger.”

“Ah…yeah…It’s probably been around for seventy or eighty years,” I said weakly.

Her blue eyes widened. “I am amazed that its life lasts for so long! They must have used quite a mighty tree…”

“I suppose…I mean…Hang on!”

I stomped across the hallway, grabbed Alice by the shoulder, and tried to ask her what the hell was going on, when she gave me a smile like a flower blooming.

“Speaking of life, might I recover the life of this steel-element body? Let’s see…I believe that in your words, it is called ‘recharging.’”

Allow me to elaborate on my earlier point: beautiful girl robot delivered to your door who recharges using a standard home power socket.

While I’d been away in the Underworld, the real world had apparently advanced quite a ways into the future.

“Oh…you need to recharge…? Go ahead, take as much as you need…,” I said, prodding her shoulder toward the living room.

She pulled a charging cable out of her uniform pocket; stuck one end into her left hip, near the waist, and the other end into the wall socket; then sat on the sofa with her back perfectly upright. From there, she continued to swivel her head, looking around.

I guess I should make some tea for her, I thought, getting up—and then I realized that Alice couldn’t eat or drink anything here. I was still rattled by this experience, I could tell.

The best way to calm down would be to solve some of the more basic questions, so I asked, “Um…first of all, can you tell me how exactly you pulled off the feat of putting yourself through the mail…?”

The golden-haired, blue-eyed girl shrugged her shoulders as if this was a very stupid question and said, “It was simple.”

According to her, she found pay-on-delivery shipping forms, packing tape, and a reinforced cardboard box at the Roppongi office, and then she made sure the security cameras recorded her leaving her living quarters.

Later, she put the box together away from the view of the camera at the entrance, filled out the shipping form with my address, pasted it on, then undid the joint locks of her body and got inside the box. She placed the tape on just one side of the top lid, then pulled it down from the inside to seal it and ran another line of tape on the underside for reinforcement.

Then she sent a message to the shipping company, announcing a package for pickup. The deliveryman would have stopped at the security gate, but the message was sent from the building’s premises, and the package was there at the entrance. Without realizing that a beautiful robot was hiding inside, the courier redid the insufficient tape job and placed the box in his truck, where it waited until it was delivered in Kawagoe, Saitama, the next morning…

“……I see……,” I murmured, sinking back into the sofa.

Now it made sense that they hadn’t been able to track her. She hadn’t actually taken a step outside the Roppongi building. What was most surprising to me wasn’t the sophistication of the trick but the fact that Alice had come up with the idea after spending only a month in the real world. When I brought that up, the uniformed girl just shrugged again.

“When I was a newly minted novice knight, I once snuck out of the cathedral and went to visit the city.”

“…I…I see.”

What would happen once Alice was intimately familiar with information technology? She could dive into virtual spaces without an AmuSphere; in a way, she was already a child of the network.

But I pushed that frightening thought aside and sat up on the couch. It was time to get to the real question.

“But…Alice, why did you do this? If you just wanted to visit my home, you could have told Dr. Rinko, and she would have set aside time for you.”

“I suppose so. She is a good person…She is very concerned for my well-being. And therefore, if she had given me the chance to visit your home, it would have been with a small squadron of men-at-arms in black.”

Her long, delicate eyelashes lowered. It was hard to believe that they were artificial.

“…I feel bad that I essentially fled from there. I’m sure that Dr. Rinko is very worried and searching for me now. I will make whatever apologies are necessary when I return. But…I just wanted this bit of time very badly. Time to be with you…not in an assumed form, but in your real body, face-to-face, where we can speak to each other alone.”

Her large blue eyes were staring right into me. I knew that they were just optical devices made of CMOS image sensors and sapphire lenses, but there was something breathtakingly beautiful about them. Perhaps it was the light of her fluctlight itself, shining through the brief circuit to those eyes.

Alice stood up in one smooth motion, motors whirring quietly. She rounded the glass table and approached me, step by step.

Then the charging cable plugged into the wall went taut, preventing her from walking farther. A faint look of frustration settled over her features.

I breathed in deep and stood up as well. Two steps put me right in front of Alice.

Her eyes burned and flickered with intent, just below the level of mine. Her lips moved, emitting a voice that was sweet and clear, but with a slightly electronic aspect to it.

“Kirito. I am angry.”

I didn’t have to ask her what she was upset about. “Yes…I suppose you are.”

“Why…why did you not tell me? Why did you not tell me there was a possibility that we would never see each other again? That it could have been an eternal farewell? If you had simply said that we would be separated by a wall of two centuries, never to see each other again, when I was there at the World’s End Altar, then I…I would not have fled on my own!!” Alice shouted at me. Her expression was such that if her body had had the ability to cry, tears would have adorned her cheeks.

“I am a knight! To fight is my lot in life! So…why did you choose to face that terrible foe alone, and why did you not wish to have me there beside you?! What am I…what is Alice Synthesis Thirty to you?!”

She lifted a small fist and smacked it against my chest. And again. And again.

She tilted her small head down, trembling, and bumped her forehead against my shoulder.

I enveloped the back of her golden hair with my hands.

“You are…my hope,” I muttered. “And not just mine. You’re the irreplaceable hope of all the people who lived and died in that world. So I just wanted to protect you. I didn’t want to lose you. I wanted to make sure that hope lasted…into the future.”

“…The future…,” she repeated tearfully in my arms. “And what exactly does the future look like? When I have suffered and persevered through the meaningless banquets and events of the chaotic real world, in this inconvenient steel body, battling endless loneliness, what will I find?”

“…I’m sorry. Even I don’t know that yet.”

I squeezed her body harder and tried to put everything I was thinking and feeling into whatever words I could find.

“But your being here will change the world. You will change it. And wherever that leads, there will come a time when Cardinal’s and Administrator’s and Bercouli’s and Eldrie’s…and Eugeo’s wishes will be fulfilled. That’s what I believe.”

And it didn’t stop there. That other alternate world, the castle that floated in a virtual sky, where many young people lived and fought and died—it was connected to this place and this moment, too.

Alice left her forehead on my shoulder and held her silence for a long, long time.

Eventually, the otherworldly knight pulled away from me and gave a slight but noble smile, just like she had when I’d met her at that chalky-white tower.

“…I must make contact with Dr. Rinko. It would not be good to cause her to worry,” she said.

I continued staring into Alice’s eyes. It didn’t feel as though the tension within them was resolved yet. But what more could I do? Perhaps it was a problem that could be solved only through the passage of time.

“…Yeah, good idea,” I said, pulling my phone out of my pocket.

When I told her what had happened, Dr. Koujiro was indeed stunned for a good five seconds, but her first words when she found her voice were an apology to Alice. She really was a good person. I could see why she was the one woman to whom Akihiko Kayaba had ever opened his heart.

“I suppose I was taking things for granted,” Dr. Koujiro said. “If anything, we’ve been relying on Alice too much.”

She followed that by giving me surprising instructions. After I hung up, I gave Alice a reassuring smile—she was looking at me with concern.

“It’s all right—she wasn’t mad. If anything, she was sorry about the situation. She also said that you could spend the night tonight.”

“R-really?!” Alice’s face lit up.

“Yup. But she asked that you turn your GPS tracker on, just in case.”

“That would be a very small price to pay,” Alice agreed. She blinked slowly and got to her feet. “Now that that’s decided, please guide me around your home and yard. This is my first time seeing traditional buildings in the real world.”

“Yeah, of course. But…this is just a normal family home—there’s not much to see…,” I mumbled. Then I had an idea. “Oh, hey, let’s go outside, then.”

Once Alice had put away her cable—she was done charging up—we headed out the front door and around the gravel-covered yard. I showed the knight our pond with koi and goldfish—and the gnarled pine tree, which she seemed quite interested in.

But eventually, we wound up at the aging dojo building sitting quietly in the northeast corner of the lot. As soon as she took off her shoes and stepped up onto the wood-slat floor, Alice seemed to intuit what this building was for.

She turned to me and asked breathlessly, “Is this…a training hall?”

“Yeah. We call it a dojo here.”

“Doe-joe…,” Alice repeated. She faced the back wall and performed the knight’s salute of the Underworld: right hand to her chest, left hand to her waist. I bowed in the Japanese style and stood beside her.

My late grandfather had built this kendo dojo, and only Suguha used it now. The floor was polished to a shine. Despite it being midsummer, the wood was cool on the underside of my feet. Even the air seemed to be different in here.

Alice first examined the hanging scroll on the wall, then walked to the shelf set up next to it. She reached out and carefully lifted an aged shinai from it.

“This…is a wooden sword for practice. But it’s quite different from those in the Underworld.”

“That’s right. It’s made of bamboo and built so that it won’t injure you if you get hit with it. The wooden swords over there could knock out a third of your life if they landed in the right spot.”

“I see…You have no instantaneous healing arts here, after all. I suppose that training with the sword must involve quite a lot of difficult work…,” Alice murmured. She paused, thinking, for several moments.

Then, without warning, she spun around and, to my shock, pointed the shinai handle right at me.

“Huh? What are you…?”

“Isn’t it obvious? There’s only one thing to do in a training hall.”

“Wh…what?! Are you for real?!”

Alice already had another shinai in her left hand. I had no choice but to grab the handle she was offering me.

“B-but, Alice, in that body you’ve—”

“No need for a handicap!”

Crack! She had thrown down the gauntlet.

My mouth hung open as the mechanical girl walked across the wooden floor.

Yes, Alice’s machine body was an extremely high-quality example of what was possible by the standards of the year 2026. Her mobility was far greater than that of the first and second test models on the Ocean Turtle. Apparently, the big secret to how the third was so much more advanced was the fact that her presence in it removed the need for a balancing function.

Every moment that human beings stand on their feet, they unconsciously balance their center of gravity between their right and left feet. If that function is re-created in a mechanized program with sensors and gyros, the size of the devices involved no longer fits within a realistic human form.

Alice was not subject to those limitations, however. Her fluctlight already contained the same auto-balancing function found in any human being. All that the actuators and polymer muscles in her frame needed were the fine control signals from her lightcube.

And yet…

At present, she still couldn’t keep up with the ability of a flesh-and-blood human. I could tell as much from the clumsiness of the writing on the package’s shipping form. It was unimaginable to me that she could control swinging a shinai—a practice sword—with the complex and speedy motions the action required.

That was my snap judgment, and it left me concerned. But Alice took a position with absolute assuredness five yards across from me and held the shinai above her head in both hands, perfectly still.

That was the stance for Mountain-Splitting Wave, from the High-Norkia style.

Suddenly, a chill wind brushed my skin. I gulped and pulled back half a step.

Sword spirit.

Before I could even think about how impossible this was, my body was moving on its own. I had my shinai, also doublehanded, at a level grip on the right. Then I dropped my center of gravity and pushed my left foot forward. That was the stance for Ring Vortex, from the Serlut style.

On the other hand, I was not only physically recovering, I was also just a weakling gamer in the real world. I wasn’t in any position to worry about the ability of a machine body. Decorum required that I give this competition my all.

I found that a grin was crossing my lips, which Alice returned.

“It does remind me…of the first time we met in combat, in the garden on the eightieth floor of the cathedral.”

“And you destroyed me back then. It won’t go so well for you this time.”

We didn’t have a judge to give us a cue to begin—but our smiles vanished at the same time anyway.

Without breaking our stances, we began to inch closer to each other. The air positively crackled between us, and the buzzing of the cicadas out in the yard grew distant.

The silence grew louder and denser by the moment, until it was truly painful.

Alice’s blue eyes narrowed.

There was a flash deep within their core, like a glimpse of lightning—

“Yaaaaah!!”

“Seeaaaaa!!”

We unleashed piercing battle cries in unison, and I found myself dumbfounded by the sight of that golden hair whipping as the knight’s sword cut down at me.

Vweem!! Her actuators roared at max output, and a tremendous shock ran through my hands. A dry smack filled the dojo. The two shinai fell out of our hands and clattered left and right, spinning away over the floorboards.

Alice and I had failed to neutralize the force of the impact, so we collided and toppled to the right. Out of pure instinct, I rotated so that I fell first.

My back hit the floor. Two dull impacts came afterward: The first was Alice’s forehead hitting my forehead—and the second was the back of my head against the wooden floor.

“Aaah……,” I grunted.

Alice looked down at me from inches away and grinned. “I win. The clincher was my ultimate technique, Steel Headbutt.”

“I’ve…never heard of…”

“I’ve just invented it,” she said, giggling with delight. Her pale cheek descended and pressed against mine. Her voice was in my ear like a spring breeze.

“I’m fine now, Kirito. I can survive in this world. No matter where I am, I will be myself as long as I can swing a sword. I’ve just realized that…my fight isn’t over. Neither is yours. So I will look forward, and only forward, and keep moving.”

That night was a tense, nerve-racking affair, for reasons different than our impromptu duel.

We held a family party to celebrate my hospital discharge, a gathering so long in the making that I couldn’t remember the last time we’d done so—with one extra-special guest.

Suguha and Alice were already friends in ALO, and they got along quickly on this side, too, bonding over kendo. Alice found it easy to relate to my mom by telling stories about things I’d done.

On the other hand, there was a terrible tension between my dad and me on the other side of the table. My adoptive father, Minetaka Kirigaya, was almost the polar opposite of me in every regard. He was serious. Hardworking. Talented. He graduated from a top college and went to business school in America, then found work at the largest securities business there. He’d barely spent any time in Japan the last several years. It was a wonder that he didn’t have any issues with my rather outgoing mother—if anything, they still seemed to be madly in love.

Despite having had plenty of beer and wine, Dad didn’t seem any different from his usual self. He gave me a serious look and got right to the most important topic of the night.

“Kazuto, there’s lots to talk about, but first of all, there’s something I need to hear directly from you.”

The left side of the dining table suddenly went quiet. I set down the chicken wing I was eating, cleared my throat, and stood up. I placed my hands on the edge of the table and lowered my head.

“…Dad, Mom, I’m sorry for putting you through all this heartache again.”

My mother, Midori, just beamed at me and shook her head. “We’re used to it by now. And it was a really big, important thing you did this time, right, Kazu? When a person takes on a job, they have to see it through to the end. If you say you’re going to write a novel, you write it. If you say you’re going to stick to a deadline, you do it!”

“Mom, you’re taking that in a more personal direction,” Suguha teased. Things relaxed briefly before my dad tightened the screws again.

“Now, your mother says that, but while you were missing, she was under an incredible amount of stress. The people from the Oceanic Resource Exploration & Research Institution explained the situation, and from that young lady’s presence, it’s clear that you played a big role in this, but you mustn’t forget one crucial question. What are you, Kazuto?”

It would’ve felt good to say, A swordsman! But that wasn’t the right answer for this situation.

“A teenager in high school.”

I was deflated, a child being lectured by his parents. I could sense Alice’s stunned gaze on my cheek, and it stung. After all the tremendously powerful foes I’d fought in the Underworld, this was my truth in the real world.

Dad nodded and continued sternly, “That’s right. And therefore, it should be clear where the brunt of your effort should be going.”

“…To studying and focusing on getting into college.”

“You’re at the summer of your second year. Your mother told me you want to study abroad, in America. Have you been making progress toward that end?”

“Ah…well, about that,” I mumbled, looking at Mom, then Dad. I bowed again. “I’m sorry. I want to change my focus.”

Behind his metal-framed glasses, Dad’s eyes narrowed. “Explain,” he commanded.

I steeled myself and revealed the goal that I’d told only Asuna about so far.

“I want to enter an electrical engineering program at a Japanese school…preferably Tohto Industrial College. Then after that, I’d like to get a job with Ra…with the Oceanic Resource Exploration & Research Institution.”

Ka-thunk!

Alice bolted upright from her chair.

She had her hands clutched together before her, and her eyes were wide open. I glanced briefly at those blue pools and gave her the tiniest smile.

A long, long time ago—or two months, depending on how you measured it—I’d told Asuna that I wanted to go to America to study brain-implant chips. That was because I’d thought BICs were the proper evolution of full-diving that began with the NerveGear. I had a familiarity and an attachment to classic polygonal 3-D modeling spaces, rather than the STL and its fundamentally different Mnemonic Visualizer system.

But…the time I’d spent in the Underworld had totally flipped my perception around.

I couldn’t drift away from that world now, and I had no intention of doing so. I’d finally found the theme I could make my life’s work.

The melding of the Underworld and the real.

Alice stared at me, smiling like a blooming flower, then turned to Dad and said, “Father…”

That earned a shocked look from Suguha.

“My father never did give me his blessing to become a knight. But I no longer have any regrets about that. I made what I felt clear through my actions, and I believe that my father understood that. Kirito—I mean, Kazuto—is someone who can do that, too. He may only be a student in this world, but in the other world, he is the mightiest swordsman of them all. He fought bravely and valiantly to rescue the lives of so many. He is a hero.”

“Alice…,” I said, trying to stop her. I knew that talking about knights and battles wasn’t going to mean anything to the man.

But to my shock, there was a tiny smile on his stern lips. “Alice,” he said, “his mother and I both know that already. Kazuto’s already a hero in this world. Isn’t that right, Black Swordsman?”

“Ack…” I grimaced, pulling away. Had they both read Full Record of the SAO Incident, as full of hearsay and nonsense as they were?

Dad’s smile disappeared, and he fixed me with that American-style direct stare. “Kazuto, deciding your path, studying, taking tests, advancing to college, and getting a job are only a process you go through, but at the same time, they are the fruit of life. You can be unsure and change your mind, but make sure you live your life without regrets.”

I closed my eyes, took a deep breath—and bowed a third time.

“I will. Thank you, Dad, Mom.” I lifted my head and smirked a bit. “It’s not exactly payment for that valuable advice…but if you happen to have any stock in Glowgen Defense Systems or their affiliates, I would sell them as soon as possible. I hear they gambled big and lost.”

It was a tiny bit of payback, but the only response my dad had was a little twitch of an eyebrow.

“Ah. I’ll have to keep that in mind.”

I guess this is how ordinary life gets back to being ordinary, I thought, rolling back onto my bed.

Our little home party was over. Dad and Mom retired to their bedroom on the first floor, and Alice slept in Suguha’s room upstairs. Imagining what they might be talking about together was frightening, but at least they were getting along. It was a good thing for Alice to get used to the real world like this, one step at a time.

Summer vacation would be over soon, and second term would begin.

I was over two and a half years away from high school classes in subjective time, so I was going to spend the last two weeks of vacation in study boot camp with Asuna. It was time to overwrite all those memorized sacred arts from the North Centoria Imperial Swordcraft Academy with equations and English vocab.

Despite what Alice had said, I probably wasn’t ever going to engage in a true sword fight again. It was time for me to expend all my time and energy on fulfilling my goals in the real world. I had to study, graduate, and get a job—whether my first choice or not—in as straightforward a path as I could.

That was a very important battle, too. Even if it left me feeling a bit lonely.

The years of my youth were always going to end someday.

By the time I was able to recognize the precious nature of my teenage years with their sunlight and breeze, cheers and excitement, adventure and the unknown, they would already be in my past, never to return.

I was probably a very fortunate child.

How many alternate worlds had I raced through, heart pounding, sword in my right hand, blank map in my left? So many memories, like precious jewels, that my soul could barely contain them all.

Outside my window, somewhere in the distance, the final train of the night crossed the metal bridge.

In the grass of the yard below, the insects sang the song of summer’s end.

A chilly breeze blew through the screen, rustling the curtain.

I breathed deep of the scents and sounds of the real world and shut my eyes.

“…Good-bye,” I murmured.

Bidding farewell to a passing age.