8

Or so I had thought.

Up until the moment I drifted off to sleep in my bed, late at night on August 17th.

“…Kirito. Wake up, Kirito.”

Someone was shaking my shoulder, pulling me back from a bittersweet sentiment.

“………Mm…,” I grunted, my eyelids rising against my will.

Right in front of me were pure-blue eyes framed by golden lashes. I froze atop my sheets.

“Fhwah…?! A-Alice?!”

“Shh, don’t raise a fuss.”

“L-listen, I don’t know what you’re thinking, but this isn’t really appropriate behavior for…”

“What are you thinking?” she said, pulling on my earlobe until my brain began to function properly at last.

Blearily, I looked over at the clock next to my bed: It was just past three in the morning. The moon was still round and bright, high in the sky through the window.

I looked back to my room.

Under the dim moonlight, Alice knelt at my bedside, dressed quite inappropriately in a plain blue T-shirt and nothing else. Her white legs extended from its long hem, so bright that they seemed to be giving off a light of their own. With as dark as it was, I couldn’t see the seams in the silicone skin, and it was impossible to believe that those graceful lines were man-made.

“D-don’t stare at me like that,” she said, pulling the shirt hem lower. I jerked upright, breath catching in my throat. I forced my eyes to rise, but that only revealed a rising curve through the thin fabric and, above that, shining hair like molten gold. Altogether, the sight dulled my ability to think.

In fact, my flustering was so obvious that it started to embarrass Alice. She pouted and turned her face away. “You may not remember this, but we slept in the same bed for half a year. You needn’t be so self-conscious after all this time.”

“Wha…? W-we did?”

“Yes, we did!!” she shouted, then covered her mouth with her hands. I hunched my neck, listening for sound from the adjacent room; fortunately, Suguha didn’t seem to have woken up. She was the kind of person who could sleep through an earthquake or a typhoon, provided that it was more than thirty minutes before the time she usually woke up for morning practice.

Alice cleared her throat and glared at me. “I haven’t been able to get to the point because you keep acting strange.”

“Oh…s-sorry about that. Um, I…that is…I’m fine now.”

She sighed, got to her feet with a faint motor whir, composed herself, and announced, “Roughly five minutes ago…I received a message via remote relayed arts—or what you would call, er…‘the network’—with most alarming content.”

“An e-mail, you mean? From whom?”

“There was no name. As for the content…I suppose it would be faster for you to read it yourself.”

She turned and looked at the printer sitting atop my desk. To my disbelief, the printer’s exhaust fan suddenly whirred to life. Alice had just given it a remote signal to print. When did she learn to do such a thing?

But the shock of that revelation was knocked clean over the horizon when I picked up the piece of paper the printer spat out and saw what was actually written on it.

Written horizontally on the white sheet was the following:

Climb the white tower, and ye shall reach unto yon world.

Cloudtop Garden.Great Kitchen Armory.Morning Star Lookout.Holy Spring Staircase Great Hall of Ghostly Light

For at least five full seconds, I could not process what I was reading.

As my half-working brain continued getting up to speed, I finally understood why Alice had called this “alarming content.”

The first part was one thing.

But the big problem was the second. It was a string of place names…that I recognized.

Cloudtop Garden…Morning Star Lookout…these were the names of floors in the Axiom Church’s Central Cathedral, the main feature of Centoria, human capital of the Underworld.

But then, who had sent this message?

There were only two people in the real world who had intimate knowledge of the inner details of the cathedral: Alice and me.

Rath personnel like Kikuoka and Higa could monitor the names of organizations like the Axiom Church from the outside, but they had no way of knowing the names of individual floors of the building. And there were many VRMMO players who’d logged in to help in the fight to save the Underworld, like Asuna and Klein, but they had all been in the Dark Territory, miles and miles from Centoria, and had logged out there as well. None of them would have even gotten a chance to glimpse that structure for themselves.

But…

When I read through the message again, I noticed something even more bizarre.

Near the end of the second part was the name Holy Spring Staircase. I couldn’t recall having passed such a floor. That meant that whoever had sent this e-mail had written information even I didn’t know.

I glanced at Alice, who looked nervous, and asked, “Is this…Holy Spring Staircase a place in the cathedral?”

“Yes…it absolutely does exist,” the knight confirmed. She wrung her hands with nervous energy. “But…it is a hidden place. It’s a structure from long before the cathedral was a hundred-story masterpiece—back when it was only a tiny three-story church! It was sealed below the great stairs on the first floor, so it was almost impossible to ever see. The only people who ever even knew about it were Uncle, me, and…the pontifex, Administrator…”

“Wha…?” I gaped, even more stunned.

Alice stepped forward and clutched my hand. Her fingers were actually trembling, possibly a malfunction of her electroactive-polymer cylinders.

“Kirito…you don’t think…you don’t think…she’s alive, do you…? That half goddess…the pontifex…?”

Her voice shook with deep, deep fear.

I put a hand to her delicate shoulder and squeezed. “No…that’s not possible. Administrator is dead. I saw her and Chudelkin get blasted into light and dissipate. Here…look at this,” I said, lifting the printout to show her.

“This is what the first part says: ‘Climb the white tower, and ye shall reach unto yon world.’ The white tower is Central Cathedral, and I assume that ‘yon world’ is the Underworld. If Administrator was sending this, she wouldn’t write ‘yon world’—she would write ‘my world.’”

“That…is true, I suppose. I can confirm that,” Alice said, her face so close to mine that her golden bangs nearly brushed my cheek. “But then…who would have written this…?”

“I don’t know. There’s too little here for me to guess. My suspicion is…that if we crack the meaning of the message, we’ll understand who sent it…”

“Meaning…?”

“Yeah. If you look closer, there are a couple odd things about it.”

I motioned for Alice to sit next to me on the bed, then traced the printed message with my finger.

“It says to climb on the first line…but then the second part doesn’t make sense, does it? It starts with Cloudtop Garden—that’s the floor where you and I first fought. That was really high up there. But next it says Great Kitchen Armory. I don’t know what this kitchen is, but there was an armory way down at the bottom, on the third floor. And then the next item is the Morning Star Lookout. That was the floor where we climbed back up the outside wall and finally got back inside the cathedral. That was practically at the top of the building. So the order is going back and forth.”

“Yes…that’s right…Ah, so many memories…I seem to recall that when we were hanging from a sword on the outside of the tower, you called me an idiot about eight times.”

“Y-you don’t have to hold on to details like that, you know,” I muttered, hunching my shoulders.

Alice smiled, though. “It actually meant something to me. That was the first time in my life I ever truly argued with someone with all of my being.”

Her smile was so pristine, so transparent, that I couldn’t help but stare. Was it my imagination, or were those sapphire-lensed eyes actually moist?

It took all my willpower to tear my eyes away from those deep pools. I resumed my explanation, my throat a bit hoarse.

“And then there’s the location of the periods—that doesn’t make sense. Why is there no dot between ‘Great Kitchen’ and ‘Armory,’ or ‘Holy Spring Staircase’ and ‘Great Hall of Ghostly Light’?”

Alice looked back to the sheet, her fine motors whirring. “I don’t suppose…they merely forgot them…”

We inclined our heads at the same angle out of curiosity, but no ideas came to us.

Eventually, I gave up and took a small device off my wall rack so that I could summon a helper who was extremely good at cracking codes.

The black half sphere, small enough to fit in my palm, was a very high-quality network camera called an AV interactive communication probe. I mounted the probe on my shoulder, powered it on, tested that it had a wireless connection to my desktop PC, then spoke into it.

“Yui, are you awake?”

Two seconds later, a sleepy-sounding voice came through the probe’s speaker.

“Yesh…Good morning, Papa.” Then the camera inside the little dome swiveled to catch the person sitting next to me. “Good morning, Alice.”

“Oh…g-good morning, Yui.”

It was Alice’s first time seeing the probe, but she’d spoken with Yui several times in Alfheim. Alice must have figured out that the device on my shoulder was Yui’s real-world body, because she smiled right away.

Yui’s camera rotated back and forth a few times, and when she spoke again, her voice was grave.

“Papa…what am I looking at?”

“T-trust me, it’s nothing out of the ordinary. Nothing suspicious here. At all.”

“The time is 3:21 AM, and you are alone in your bedroom with Alice. I cannot identify a scenario in which this would be considered a normal set of circumstances.”

“W-well, we…All right, I’ll admit, it’s not normal, but it wasn’t something I asked for…,” I protested desperately.

Instead, Alice stepped in to explain, trying to hide a gleeful smile. “Yui, it’s really nothing. I received a strange missive—an ‘e-mail’—and I asked Kirito what it could mean.”

“If you say so, Alice, then I will record it as such. But, Papa, you shouldn’t keep secrets from Mama.”

“Why, of course,” I agreed, relieved. Alice held up the sheet of paper so that Yui could see it, then explained its contents.

Watching them interact gave me a very strange, indescribable feeling.

Yui was a top-down AI, a program made possible by pushing traditional computing architecture to its limits. And Alice was a bottom-up AI, a model of the human brain built into a totally new kind of architecture called the lightcube.

Two artificial intelligences, created from completely opposite approaches, interacting naturally and enjoyably. It seemed like an impossible miracle…

The two girls exchanged ideas and comments, totally ignoring the fact that I was getting a little teary-eyed. Eventually, Yui picked up on something.

“Oh…I’m noticing that the spacing of the first and second parts is a bit different.”

“What, really?” I leaned over the paper in Alice’s hand to stare at the teeny-tiny black spots.

Yui was right. There was a comma and a space after the word tower in the first part. But in the second part, the three instances of periods separating different items were squished in there, with no space. It was almost like they weren’t periods, but dots or pixels.

Pixels……

“Oh………Oh!!” I gasped, rising from the bed. “Th-that’s it. The cathedral only goes to a hundred floors…and that’s why they stuck two together…which makes this…”

I felt around my headboard for a pen, popped the cap off, and asked in a voice high-pitched with nerves, “Alice, what floor was the Cloudtop Garden?”

“…Have you truly forgotten? The very place where you and I first fought?”

“N-no, I didn’t forget. It’s, uh…”

“The eightieth floor,” she replied, sounding a bit peeved.

I wrote the number on a blank part of the paper. “Right, right, of course. And…the Great Kitchen?”

“Tenth floor.”

I wrote each number down in order, filling up the blank space.

“And the lookout was…And then…the Holy Spring Staircase was the first floor…and the Great Hall…”

When I stopped writing, there were four numbers in a row, separated by three dots.

It wasn’t just a familiar structure. It was a particular kind of written protocol that people like me were used to seeing just about every day.

Yui recognized it at once, too. “Oh…Papa, that’s an IP address!”

“Yes, it’s gotta be.”

It wasn’t an IPv6 address, which nearly everything had switched to using by 2026, but the older IPv4 protocol. It was still possible to use v4, however, so…

In other words, this e-mail was pointing us toward a server somewhere in the real world.

I got out of bed and sat in the mesh chair at my desk, grabbing the mouse. When the monitor popped out of sleep mode, I opened the browser and tried to reach the address via http first, then FTP. Both methods refused access.

“Maybe RTSP…or telnet…?” I muttered.

The next step would be to open up the command prompt, but at my shoulder, Yui suddenly warned, “Papa! Remember the content of the message again!”

“Huh…?”

Alice held out the paper. When it was within Yui’s view, she said, “The ‘white tower’ to be climbed would seem to be indicating the address in the second part.”

“Uh-huh.”

“And once climbed, it leads to ‘yon world.’ Which would mean that this address points to…”

“Oh…! Th-that’s it…of course!!” I said, feeling my fingertips going cold and numb. I spun around. “Alice, this is the way…This is the path that leads to the Underworld!!” I hissed.

Her eyes were wide with shock. “The path…that leads…In other words, this is how we can go—I mean, get back. To that world…to my world…,” she whispered. I nodded, sure of my answer.

Alice’s actuators buzzed to life as she leaped straight toward me. I caught her in my arms. There were sobs in my ear, and a wet sensation on her cheek where she touched me, but that was probably just an illusion.

Her body of metal and silicone wasn’t capable of producing such things.

Neither Alice nor I had the patience to wait for a more sensible hour to take the next step. So I liberally interpreted four AM as “early morning” rather than “middle of the night” and placed a call to Dr. Rinko’s phone.

Fortunately, she was staying at the Roppongi office. At first, she seemed totally bewildered by what I was telling her, but once I got to the end of my explanation, she practically shrieked into the phone, “Is this t-true?!”

“It is. I don’t think we can trace the source of the message, but the contents tell me that it has to be real.”

“Oh…oh. In that case, we should get to the bottom of this at once,” the scientist said.

I promptly said, “Please let me and Alice be the ones to test it.”

“What…?” She let out a breath that sounded like half shock and half exasperation. “Kirigaya…after what you went through…”

“If I was going to learn my lesson from that, I would never have agreed to work with Rath in the first place!” I protested.

She exhaled again. “No…I suppose not. And it’s that nature that helped you do what you did and that same nature that will help confront what lies ahead. But this time…please get your parents’ permission.”

“Of course, don’t worry. But…I do need to confirm something first. If Alice connects to the Ocean Turtle from over there, will she need to use an STL?”

“No, it won’t be necessary. Alice’s lightcube package combines the exact capabilities of your biological brain and the STL together. All she’ll need is a single cable.”

“Ah, that’s good. In that case…um, hold on a moment.” I glanced over at Alice, who was wringing her hands nervously. “Alice, I know this is asking a lot, but…do you mind if we bring Asuna along, too?”

One of her eyebrows twitched and rose. Instead of a sigh, there was a quiet motor buzz.

“…I suppose not. If something unforeseen should happen, there is no harm in having extra power on our side.”

“Th-thanks, that’s great…Well, you heard her, Doctor…”

After a few more comments, the call was over. I got in touch with Asuna, waking her up so I could explain the situation. All I had to do was tell her that we’d found a route to connect to the Underworld for her to understand what was going on.

Within a minute or two, we were done talking. I took the probe off my shoulder and looked into the lens. “I’m sorry, Yui…We still haven’t found a way to take you into the Underworld.”

My daughter listened patiently…but a bit sadly, too. “Yes, Papa, I understand. Please be careful.”

“We’ll find a way to take you there someday,” I promised, placing the probe on the desk. Next to it was a stack of manuals and textbooks that I’d been planning to look through later today. Sadly, they would have to wait a little longer.

I pulled a blank sheet of paper from the printer tray and scribbled on it with the pen. Alice went over to Suguha’s room to get her uniform. We turned our backs to each other to get dressed, then snuck out of the room.

When we got down to the living room, I left my note on the table. Then I carefully, quietly slid open the old-fashioned door, and the two of us headed out into the chilly air of early morning.

To avoid causing too much noise, I pushed my 125cc motorcycle a good distance away from the house before straddling the seat. Suguha’s helmet went onto Alice’s head, and I put my own on before starting the engine; it kicked to life nicely for having been abandoned for three months.

Then I revved it a little and called out to my tandem rider, “Hold on tight! I’m gonna gun this thing like a dragon!”

Alice put her hands around my stomach and said, “Who do you think I am?!”

“Ha-ha, of course, Miss Integrity Knight. Then…let’s go!!”

The note I left in the living room said, Dad, Mom, Sugu: I’ve got one little adventure left. I’ll be back right away. Don’t worry about me.

The roads were empty before dawn. We headed down Kawagoe Highway, then Kannana-Dori Avenue, then Route 246 in quick order. When we got to Rath’s Roppongi branch, Asuna had already arrived via taxi.

She started to wave with a big smile, then froze when she noticed that Alice was riding behind me.

“…Kirito…what exactly does this mean?”

“W-well, uh…To put it briefly, some things happened…but nothing happened…The end…”

“Define ‘some things’ and ‘nothing.’”

I’d known this was going to happen. I’d known it would, but I’d shown up here without a plan anyway. There was no innocent way to explain the situation.

“I’ll explain everything later, I promise! We’ll have plenty of time…when we’re old and sipping tea…,” I murmured, parking my bike in the employee lot.

When I turned around, what I feared was already coming to pass.

There was Asuna, hands on her waist. Alice had her arms folded. The air crackled like lightning between the two of them.

Very, very carefully, I said, “Pardon me…but I thought you two were past that…You know, at the Human Guardian Army’s campsite…”

“It was only a cease-fire, nothing more!”

“And a cease-fire signals an intent for the battle to resume!” the two women said before glaring at each other again.

I observed the two warriors, their hostility and rivalry blazing—and did the one thing that I could do in this situation.

I made myself as small as possible, backed away, and tried to evacuate into the building. But when I submitted my ID card, fingerprint, and retinal scan at the door’s security terminal, it let out a high-pitched beep, drawing their attention.

“Ah! Hey! Kirito!!”

“You shall not run from us!!”

But I was already rushing into the building. Asuna and I arrived at the STL room sweating and out of breath, and while Alice had no respiratory system to speak of, her mechanical body was giving off more heat than usual. Dr. Koujiro looked at us with alarm.

“I understand that you want to hurry, but you didn’t have to sprint here. The Soul Translators and Underworld aren’t going anywhere in the next few minutes,” she said, a bit annoyed.

I flashed her a very snarky smile. “Oh, gosh, we just wanted to get connected without a moment to waste! After all, whether or not we can successfully dive will have a huge influence on the future security of the Under-wuaaa!!” Asuna pinched me hard on the side.

After that, I retreated to the nearby changing room so I could get into the sterilized robes for diving with the STL—and not just so that I could avoid a follow-up attack from Alice.

As a matter of fact, what I’d told the scientist was my honest opinion. The Ocean Turtle was still anchored out at sea in the Izu Islands, and its future was uncertain, to say the least. At the moment, there was only one strategy for ensuring its operation and independence.

We had to promote exchange between the artificial fluctlights of the Underworld and humans from the real world and breed friendly relations. If we could get a majority of people in the real world to accept the Underworlders as human beings, countries and corporations would not be able to simply have their way with the tech.

But…while it was extreme, there was another way as well.

Seizing actual defensive power. Arming the Ocean Turtle with the lightcube-bearing unmanned fighter drones that the nation was already developing, so that it could go independent as its own nation.

For now, that was just a pipe dream. How would the Ocean Turtle get the UAVs? How would they fund basic functions and be self-sufficient? How many months—if not years—would it take for Underworlders to transition from flying their dragons to properly operating supersonic jets? There were just too many challenges to overcome.

In either case, one absolute requirement for continued existence would be a high-capacity wireless connection aside from government-owned communication satellites. Only then could the Underworlders dive into the brand-new world of The Seed Nexus and allow people of the real world to understand them. Whether this would be possible depended entirely on the IP address written down on the paper in my pocket.

I finished changing, left the room, and held the memo out to Dr. Rinko. She hesitated for a moment, then lifted her hand and took the piece of paper.

“…I’m guessing he has something to do with this,” she murmured. I gave her a little nod.

I didn’t know how he knew about the names of the various floors of Central Cathedral. But there was only one man who could have set up a secret connection to the Internet from the Ocean Turtle.

Akihiko Kayaba…Heathcliff.

In a sense, my battle couldn’t end without a direct confrontation between him and me. Heathcliff had passed very close by the STL where I slumbered, then vanished back into the darkness of the network. He would show himself again, though. He would gather all the fragments born of that floating steel fortress to one place and bring a conclusion to it all.

I faced away from Dr. Koujiro, who was setting up for the dive, and booted my smartphone. “Yui, have you figured out anything about that address?”

Her cute little face shook side to side on the screen. “The location of the server is in Iceland, but I think it’s only a relay point. Its defenses are very strong, and I can’t search for any route beyond that.”

“I see…Thanks. Were you able to trace the source of the message to Alice?”

“Well…I spotted traces that resembled it on Node 304 of The Seed Nexus, but I lost the signal there, too,” she said, drooping her shoulders.

I rubbed the touch screen with a fingertip. “No, you’ve done enough. If it’s in the three hundreds, that would be the United States…You don’t need to search any further. Even for you, making direct contact would be dangerous. He’s essentially the same kind of being as you now.”

“Well, I’m better!” she protested, puffing out her cheeks.

I smirked and poked her. “At any rate, I’m going now. This time it’s not going to involve all these dangers…I think.”

“If anything happens, I’ll come to help you at once!”

“And I’m counting on that. So long.”

She held up a tiny hand on-screen, and I brushed it with a finger, then turned off the device’s power. Alice and Asuna were just emerging from the women’s changing room at that moment. Fortunately, they seemed to have forged a second cease-fire; their faces were shining with expectation.

I shared a look with each of them in turn and said, “Remember, two hundred years have passed. We can’t begin to guess what the human and dark realms look like at this point. That’s shorter than the three centuries Administrator ruled over things, of course, so it probably won’t be dramatically different, but…”

Alice’s head bobbed. “At the very least, it seems certain that Central Cathedral will still be standing. So I think we can assume that the Human Empire will be the same.”

Asuna brushed Alice’s arm and grinned. “And we have to go and wake up Selka first thing.”

“That’s right!”

We shared a moment of firm resolution—then headed over to the two STLs and one reclining seat. I lay back against the chilly gel bed. Dr. Rinko operated the control that lowered the large headblock down over the top of my head.

“All right…here we go,” she said.

The three of us replied in unison. “Right!”

The enormous machine began to hum. My fluctlight—the light quantum network that constituted my very consciousness—split off from my flesh, removing me from my bodily senses and gravity.

My mind was translated into electronic signals and thrown into a vast network without boundaries.

I flew at ultra-high speed down a high-capacity optical line, soaring toward another familiar world I considered home.

Into a new adventure.

Into the next story.

First, I saw a light.

A tiny little speck of white that stretched and grew into rainbow gradient, until it covered my entire vision—and beyond.

Within it a space of pure dark appeared.

I dived straight through the tunnel of light toward the darkness.

But it was not, in fact, total darkness.

Black was only the background, with a frightening number of colored dots that quietly flickered against it.

They were stars. A night sky……

But not quite. No, because…

“…Aaaaah!!”

I screamed when I looked down at my feet.

Because there was no ground beneath them.

I flailed and swung my legs, but the bottoms of my boots touched nothing. The boundless starry sky continued in every direction—sides, top, bottom. Stars, stars, stars.

“Eeeeek!!”

“Wh…what is this?!” said other voices to my sides.

Other hands grabbed my outstretched ones. On my right floated Asuna, dressed in the clothing of the goddess Stacia: pearl-white half armor and skirt and a beautiful rapier.

On my left, Alice was in her golden breastplate and long white skirt, with a white whip and a golden-yellow longsword at her sides.

Both of them were in a panic, gazing wide-eyed at the endless sky of stars before us.

But in truth…this was not even a sky.

“…Outer space…?” I mumbled, hardly daring to say it.

Suddenly, I was aware of a ferocious chill. Alice and Asuna both sneezed spectacularly. The temperature was so low here that I could easily feel the rapid decline of my life value by the moment.

The fact that I could hear their voices meant that we weren’t in the actual vacuum of space, but it must have been very close. And we were simply floating there, without protection.

I focused hard, generating a defensive wall of light elements in a sphere large enough to surround all three of us. Once the thin shining layer was enveloping us, that piercing chill finally began to subside.

Once the immediate danger was behind us, I looked around at the stunning sight before me again. A tight belt of stars ran from the upper right of my field of view to the lower left. It was like the Milky Way—but no matter how I tried to connect the brightest stars, I couldn’t find a single familiar constellation.

This was the Underworld.

But in that case, where was the land…and where was the sky over it?

I felt a terrible chill steal over me and shivered.

It couldn’t have…vanished, could it?

After two hundred years, had the very earth that made up the human realm and the Dark Territory simply run out of its own life? Had the tens of thousands of people who lived on it all ceased to exist when it happened…?

“No way…It can’t be…,” I murmured in a trembling voice.

Suddenly, Alice squeezed my hand so hard it creaked. “Kirito…look there.”

I turned to my left. The golden knight had turned herself around to look behind us. Her arm was outstretched, gesturing toward a single point.

Breathlessly and oh so slowly, I turned to see.

There was a star.

Not a true stellar star, like those twinkling in the great distance—but a planet, vast and close, taking up a large part of our view.

The upper half of the sphere was sunk into thick darkness. But around the middle, the black transitioned to navy, then to ultramarine and azure. And on the lower half of the sphere, right at its lip, the planet shone bright blue.

The blue was steadily growing brighter and brighter. A white orb bulged from the center of the curve, spraying rays of light in a straight line.

It was dawn.

The sun—Solus—hiding on the far side of the planet was coming into view.

I shielded my eyes from its brilliance and examined the surface of the planet again. The parts of the curve that had been deep navy blue before were transitioning into brighter hues already.

Through scraps and trails of white cloud, I could see the outline of a continent.

It was shaped like an inverted triangle, wider across than it was from top to bottom.

At the upper right of the continent was a concentrated mass of lights. At the top left, an even larger spread of light.

This was a clear sign of civilization. And upon further examination, there were several glowing lines extending from those two central sources, grids stretching farther downward.

From the locations of the cities on the continent, I instantly knew exactly what I was looking at.

The city on the right was Obsidia, capital of the dark world.

The city on the left was Centoria, capital of the human realm.

That continent—the planet it was on—was the Underworld where I’d lived and fought for so long.

I tore my eyes from the planet and looked over at Alice. The only thing I saw in her face was deep shock and profound awe.

Then her eyes bulged. She let go of my hand and rummaged in the small pouch attached to her sword belt, then drew out two eggs small enough to fit in the palm of her hand.

One was faint green, while the other shone blue. The light they gave off pulsed stronger and weaker in two-second cycles. Like breathing. Like a heartbeat.

Alice clutched the two eggs to her chest and closed her eyes. Tears ran silently down her cheeks and fell free, floating as little droplets.

I could feel tears coming to my own eyes. I looked over to the person still holding my right hand and saw that Asuna’s eyes were damp, too.

As the two of us watched, Alice took one step forward across the sea of stars. She held the two eggs in her left hand and reached toward the vast planet with her right.

Her eyes the same color as the dawning star and sparkling with unlimited brilliance, the golden Integrity Knight called out in a voice pure and crisp and regal, “Hear me, land!! Underworld where I was born and land that I love!! Is my voice reaching you?!”

The stars in the endless universe trembled, and the blue planet below briefly shone brighter, as though taking a breath.

I closed my eyes and listened well.

I listened to the words that ushered in a new era, carving them into my memory for all eternity.

“I have returned to you! ……I am here!!”