Alicization Invading

  Copyright

  SWORD ART ONLINE, Volume 15: ALICIZATION INVADING

  REKI KAWAHARA

  Translation by Stephen Paul

  Cover art by abec

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  SWORD ART ONLINE Vol.15

  ©REKI KAWAHARA 2014

  First published in Japan in 2014 by KADOKAWA CORPORATION, Tokyo.

  English translation rights arranged with KADOKAWA CORPORATION, Tokyo, through Tuttle-Mori Agency, Inc., Tokyo.

  English translation © 2018 by Yen Press, LLC

  Yen Press, LLC supports the right to free expression and the value of copyright. The purpose of copyright is to encourage writers and artists to produce the creative works that enrich our culture.

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book without permission is a theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like permission to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), please contact the publisher. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.

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  First Yen On Edition: December 2018

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Kawahara, Reki, author. | Abec, 1985– illustrator. | Paul, Stephen, translator.

  Title: Sword art online / Reki Kawahara, abec ; translation, Stephen Paul.

  Description: First Yen On edition. | New York, NY : Yen On, 2014–

  Identifiers: LCCN 2014001175 | ISBN 9780316371247 (v. 1 : pbk.) | ISBN 9780316376815 (v. 2 : pbk.) | ISBN 9780316296427 (v. 3 : pbk.) | ISBN 9780316296434 (v. 4 : pbk.) | ISBN 9780316296441 (v. 5 : pbk.) | ISBN 9780316296458 (v. 6 : pbk.) | ISBN 9780316390408 (v. 7 : pbk.) | ISBN 9780316390415 (v. 8 : pbk.) | ISBN 9780316390422 (v. 9 : pbk.) | ISBN 9780316390439 (v. 10 : pbk.) | ISBN 9780316390446 (v. 11 : pbk.) | ISBN 9780316390453 (v. 12 : pbk.) | ISBN 9780316390460 (v. 13 : pbk.) | ISBN 9780316390484 (v. 14 : pbk.) | ISBN 9780316390491 (v. 15 : pbk.)

  Subjects: CYAC: Science fiction. | BISAC: FICTION / Science Fiction / Adventure.

  Classification: pz7.K1755Ain 2014 | DDC [Fic]—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2014001175

  ISBNs: 978-0-316-39049-1 (paperback)

  978-0-316-56107-5 (ebook)

  E3-20181113-JV-NF-ORI

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  SUBTILIZER, STEALER OF SOULS, JUNE–JULY 2026

  The sniper had pale-blue hair.

  Her delicate, girlish body fit surprisingly well with the mammoth 50-caliber rifle she used.

  She was prone, in firing position, and had her back turned, hiding her face. But she was proud and beautiful and dangerous, surely no different from a lynx.

  Her concentration was tremendous. She watched the path below with absolute stillness, her right eye pressed to the scope and index finger on the trigger. It was worth watching for longer than this, but time was limited.

  Something came out of a hiding spot and across the floor of the abandoned building. Pebbles, twigs, and scraps of metal littered the ground and had to be avoided carefully to ensure the approach was silent—or else she would hear.

  Suddenly, her shoulders twitched.

  She must have sensed something that was neither sound nor vibration. Her instincts were impeccable but, sadly, too late.

  A right hand reached out, wrapping around her slender neck, while the left pressed on the back of her head. With quiet but undeniable intent, the strangling began.

  The Army Combative skill kicked in, and the visual representation of the girl’s health, her HP bar, began to drop rapidly. The sniper struggled, but in the VRMMO Gun Gale Online, unless the victim had a clear advantage in the Strength stat, it was nearly impossible to break out of a rear naked choke barehanded. In that sense, it was just like the real world.

  Of the twenty-nine contestants in the Bullet of Bullets event, the blue-haired sniper was the most desirable target to fight…no, to hunt. She had been expected to snipe from the upper half of this five-story building.

  The problem was that both the fourth and fifth story had a clear shot at the main street of the map. The choice had to be made quickly: Which floor to wait on?

  Common sense said the fourth because it would be quicker to stop there and get into firing position. But upon seeing the library on that floor, intuition and logic both said otherwise. Intuition said the sniper was probably still young enough to be a student. Logic said that a student would want to avoid shooting in a library, which might be mentally associated with everyday life.

  That suspicion was correct. The blue-haired sniper spent the extra thirty seconds or so to climb another floor higher, and she appeared in the fifth-floor storeroom.

  And now, like a butterfly that wandered into a spider’s web, her fragile life was soon to vanish.

  Oh, but if only this was not some calculation of binary data in a virtual setting, but the taking of a real life and soul.

  If only it was not her avatar struggling against the chokehold, but her true flesh-and-blood body. How sweet the moment would be when it arrived.

  In the upper-right corner, the sniper’s HP bar went under 5 percent. But she still struggled desperately to break free.

  Though her defeat was certain, she neither wasted energy trying to shout nor went limp in submission. Her refusal to give up on escaping was even rather touching to her foe.

  And into her ear from behind, as tenderly as a lover’s embrace, came a whisper.

  “Your soul will be so sweet.”

  1

  His eyelids rose slowly.

  He’d fallen asleep at some point. The new Italian sofa he’d imported last week was a bit too comfortable. Without getting up from the smooth leather surface, he glanced at the smartwatch on his left wrist.

  2:12 AM.

  He got up, stretched, and walked to the southern-facing wall. It was entirely made of smartglass, and its currently transparent surface afforded him a gaze of the waterfront from his executive room on the forty-third floor.

  The port gleamed softly with the reflected light of the downtown skyscrapers. A number of large ships were stationed along the expansive harbor. But their angular, forceful silhouettes were not those of luxury cruise ships. They were battleships of the Third Fleet of the United States Navy under Pacific Command.

  For many years, San Diego, the second-largest city in the state of California, had been a military town. It had stationed over twenty-five thousand military personnel and their families at a massive naval base that served as the city’s primary economic engine.

  But in recent years, new industries had rapidly taken hold—high-tech sectors such as information, communications, and biotechnology.

  Some companies straddled the boundary between military and tech. Most of them were private military contractors, or PMCs, that accepted contracts from the military and other large companies for protection, training, and even direct combat on the ground.

  The chief tactical officer (CTO) of Glowgen Defense Systems, Gabriel Miller, gazed down upon the darkened port next to downtown San Diego and smiled without ev
en realizing it.

  He was still excited from the dream he’d had during his brief nap. It was a dream of the full-dive VR game event he’d participated in just a few days ago from this very executive suite.

  Gabriel hardly ever dreamed, but when he did, it always replayed some scene from his past in minute detail. He could still feel the pleasant sensation of the blue-haired sniper struggling against his grip. Almost as though it were real and not a dream…

  But it wasn’t real. That battle happened in the virtual world, not the real one.

  Full-dive technology was a revolutionary invention, and its creator, Akihiko Kayaba, was worthy of respect. If he were still alive, Gabriel would have spent millions to recruit him. Even though he was the most infamous criminal of the century—in fact, especially because of that.

  But the experience offered by the AmuSphere, as close as it came to providing truth, only made the fact that it wasn’t real that much more unfulfilling. Like salt water—never truly quenching his thirst, no matter how much he drank.

  As Glowgen’s youngest officer and major shareholder, Gabriel led a life without any unfulfilled physical wants. Yet, his gnawing mental needs could never be satisfied with money.

  “…Your soul will be so sweet…”

  He repeated the words from his dream.

  In fact, he wished he could have said those words in Japanese, which he’d been studying for the past three years. But because his player account was tagged as an American one, he didn’t want to give away any unnecessary details or make himself more memorable. They’d have a chance to speak more intimately someday. And he had many questions.

  The little smile playing across his lips went away, and Gabriel used one of the touch sensors at various spots on the glass to lower the translucency of the surface. It turned into a darkened mirror instead, reflecting his image.

  His blond hair was loosely pulled back, and his eyes were a piercing blue. On his six-foot-one frame, he wore a white dress shirt and dark-gray slacks. His shoes were custom-made cordovan leather. His image was almost embarrassingly white and white-collar, but Gabriel thought nothing of his personal appearance, instead favoring the essence held within. The flesh was nothing more than a shell that enveloped the soul, after all.

  Soul.

  Just about every religion contained the concept of the human soul. Christianity, of course, held that the soul was sent to either Heaven or Hell depending on your actions in life. But Gabriel’s belief in and fixation upon the soul had nothing to do with being Protestant or Catholic.

  He knew it. He had seen and experienced it for himself.

  He’d witnessed an indescribably beautiful collection of light particles leaving the forehead of a girl whose life was fading away as he held her in his arms.

  Gabriel Miller was born in Pacific Palisades, a suburb of Los Angeles, in March of 1998.

  He was an only child and grew up with every material and emotional expression of love from his wealthy parents. They lived in a huge mansion that provided him with many places to play, but young Gabriel’s favorite place of all was his father’s private collection room.

  His father was the owner and manager of Glowgen Securities, the precursor to Glowgen Defense Systems, and he was an avid collector of insects. He had countless glass cases arranged in the large collection room packed with the little things. When Gabriel had time, he hid in there, magnifying glass in hand, gazing at the colorful bugs as he sat on the sofa in the center of the room, daydreaming.

  Sitting in that tall, dim room all by himself, surrounded by thousands upon thousands of silent, unmoving insects, young Gabriel sometimes experienced the strangest sensation.

  Until a certain moment, all those insects had once been alive. They’d been on the plains of Africa or in the deserts of the Middle East or the jungles of South America, contentedly building their nests and foraging for food.

  And then, a collector came along and caught them, treated them with lethal chemicals, sold them through a series of transactions, until at last they wound up lined in tidy little rows in the Miller household. This was not just a room for displaying a large insect collection. It was a massive mausoleum housing thousands and thousands of defiled corpses…

  Gabriel would close his eyes and imagine what would happen if all the insects around him suddenly came back to life.

  Six legs, scrabbling in the air for freedom, feelers and wings vibrating and twitching. Skitter-skitter, skitter-skitter—individually faint but multiplied times infinity—a wave of scraping and scratching noises that engulfed and bowled him over.

  Skitter-skitter, skitter-skitter.

  His eyes flew open. He thought he saw one green beetle’s leg twitching in a corner of a case directly across from him. He leaped up from the sofa and rushed eagerly to examine the case, but the insect was just a lifeless display sample again.

  The emerald-green shell, which gleamed like metal; the legs with sharp little spikes; the compound eyes with their lattice of incredibly tiny photoreceptors. What kind of power had once operated these precise little machines?

  His father told him that insects did not have a brain, like humans did. “So how do they think?” he asked. His father showed him a video.

  It depicted praying mantises mating. The smaller male held down the much larger, rounded female from behind and pressed the end of its abdomen against hers. The female did not move for a while, until abruptly, without any warning, she grabbed the male’s upper half with her forearms and began the unforgettable display of devouring his head. To Gabriel’s shock, the male even continued mating, only disengaging once its entire head was gone. Then, when the female released her grasp, she fled the scene.

  But despite having no head anymore, the male mantis crawled across the grass, climbed branches, and nimbly continued its escape. Gabriel’s father pointed this out and said, “The entire nervous system of insects like the mantis is kind of like their brain. Losing their heads is only the loss of sensory organs. They can still live for a while.”

  For several days after seeing that video, Gabriel wondered where a praying mantis’s soul was. If they could live on even after their heads had been eaten, then losing all their legs probably wouldn’t stop them, either. Was it in the abdomen? The thorax? But the insects would still wriggle and writhe, whether you crushed their soft stomachs or pierced them with a pin.

  If no part of their body caused instant death when destroyed, then praying mantises’ souls must be spread throughout their entire being. This was eight- or nine-year-old Gabriel’s conclusion, after he had undertaken numerous experiments on bugs he caught around his home.

  Insects ran on a mysterious power that operated their machine-like bodies—a soul that stubbornly clung to its vessel even as parts of it were destroyed. But at a certain moment, it would give up and leave that body behind.

  Gabriel eagerly wanted to witness that soul leaving for himself, perhaps even catch it. But no matter how hard he stared through the magnifying glass, no matter how careful his experiments, he never caught or even saw any thing leaving an insect’s body. He spent long hours and expended immeasurable enthusiasm in his secret lab deep in the woods behind his house, but he never found the slightest bit of success for his trouble.

  Even young Gabriel had an instinctual feeling that his parents would not welcome this interest of his. So after the incident with the mantis video, he never asked his father about it again, and he never told anyone about his experiments. But the more he hid it, the deeper his obsession became.

  Around that time, Gabriel had a very close friend his age.

  Alicia Clingerman was the daughter of the corporate board member who lived next door to Gabriel’s family. The children went to the same elementary school, and their families got to know each other. She was shy and quiet and preferred staying inside and reading or watching videos, rather than going out and playing in the mud.

  Gabriel, of course, kept his experiments a secret from her and never once spok
e about insects or souls. But he never stopped thinking about them. When he gazed at Alicia’s face, smiling angelically as she read her stories, Gabriel pondered where exactly her soul was.

  Insects and humans are different. Humans cannot live without a head. So the human soul must be in the head, he thought. In the brain.

  But Gabriel already knew, from browsing the Internet on his father’s computer, that brain damage did not necessarily lead to loss of life. There were construction workers who survived despite being pierced from chin to crown with a steel pipe. Some doctors had succeeded in rehabilitating patients with mental illnesses by removing a part of their brain.

  So it has to be a specific part of the brain, Gabriel thought as he stared at Alicia’s forehead, which was framed by wispy golden locks. Somewhere past her smooth skin, hard skull, and soft brain matter, her soul was hidden.

  In his youthful naïveté, Gabriel assumed he would end up married to Alicia. Perhaps one day, he’d actually get to see her soul for himself. Given how angelic she was, it was certain to be the most indescribably beautiful thing.

  Gabriel’s wish would come true much sooner than he realized, but only half of it.

  In September 2008, a major bank collapse triggered a worldwide financial crisis.

  The resulting recession engulfed Pacific Palisades in Los Angeles, too. Several of the mansions around them were sold, and the number of luxury cars on the street visibly dwindled.

  Glowgen Securities’s cautious business model paid off, and they were able to keep the damage to a minimum, but the Clingermans’ real estate investment company suffered huge losses. By the following April, the family had lost all its assets, including the mansion, and was going to move to Kansas City in the Midwest to rely on some farm-owning relatives.

  Gabriel was sad. He was wise for a ten-year-old boy and understood that there was no way he could actually help Alicia. He could easily imagine the hardships that awaited her in the future.

  All his privileges—a large home kept safe by perfect security systems, every meal prepared by experienced cooks, schools full of other rich white children—would become things of the past for Alicia, replaced by poverty and hard labor. Worst of all, Alicia’s pure soul, which was supposed to be his one day, would now be tarnished by someone else, some stranger—and that was the hardest thing of all for Gabriel to bear.