AFTERWORD

Thank you for reading Sword Art Online 21: Unital Ring I!

As of Moon Cradle, the previous story arc, I have completely run through all the material previously published on my website, so from this volume onward, SAO is officially in uncharted territory, both for you readers and for me. Technically, Progressive is also new material, but it’s also taking place in the past. In other words, ten years after the end of my web serialization of SAO, time is finally moving forward in the story. The Unital Ring arc starts on September 27th, 2026, which is about a month after the end of the Alicization arc. In three days, it will be Asuna’s nineteenth birthday, and one week after that will be Kirito’s eighteenth. When you consider that they were both in middle school at the time they met on the first floor of Aincrad, it really does make you think “Wow, time’s really flown by…”

While this might be the first wholly new work in the series in a decade, the key word of Unification in this volume is a development that I’ve had planned since the point I introduced the concept of The Seed back in the Fairy Dance arc. I had some hazy ideas about what kind of game world would exist after the Unification (such as the focus on crafting or needing to eat to avoid starvation) but the emergence of the open-world survival genre in the past ten years gave me lots of terminology to borrow. I haven’t actually played any of those games yet, but once I’m done with this book, I’d like to try one out. Now that I think about it, the only game I’ve dedicated serious time to this year is Fatal Bullet…

As a story about starting over from the beginning, this one involved Kirito and friends figuring out what to do by trial and error without any help. I also introduced two suspicious new characters at the end, so I think the next volume should dig a little deeper into what the game world actually is. Maybe we’ll even see some of the characters who only got name-dropped in this volume, like Kikuoka and Agil, or others who didn’t get mentioned at all, like Klein…

I’d give you an update on my personal life…but I haven’t done anything but work for so long, I have nothing new to share (cries). But at least the Alicization anime has started, so I’ve got a huge source of energy charging my batteries every week. It’s scheduled to be a four-cour series, so I hope you’re all ready for a long haul!

Because of the pressure of writing a totally new story for the first time in ten years, the production of this book behind the scenes was more thrilling than ever before. Unfortunately, I caused plenty of trouble for my editors Miki and Adachi, the proofreaders, and the printing company. I forced abec to produce those wonderful illustrations on an insanely tight schedule. I’m so sorry. One of these days I’ll apologize in material terms! And now, I hope I’ll see you again in the next volume!

Reki Kawahara—October 2018