Alicization Lasting Page 16

  “Please,” Rinko murmured, just before cheers of encouragement burst out of the observers in the control room.

  “You can do it, Niemon!!”

  “That’s it, just a bit more!!”

  Ga-kunk. The lever shifted downward heavily.

  The thick metal door burst open from the pressure on the other side. Even on the monitor, it was clear that a huge blast of heat was pouring through the doorway.

  Number Two wobbled. The especially thick cable hanging from its back sparked worse than before.

  “Oh…oh no!!” shouted one of the staffers suddenly.

  “What…what’s wrong?!”

  “The battery cable’s damaged!! If that gets cut off, it’ll lose power to the body…and cease to move…”

  Rinko and the other techs watched in silence. Even Kayaba, the brain controlling Niemon, seemed to realize how bad the damage was. The robot pinned the swinging cable down with its elbow and resumed walking, slowly and carefully.

  The interior of the engine room was full of excess heat the reactor was putting off at maximum output, at a temperature that no human being could withstand in the flesh. Most likely the safety functions would kick in soon, automatically inserting the control rods back into their housing.

  But if the plastic explosives went off first and destroyed the drive for the control rods? Then the neutrons coming off the nuclear fuel would destroy the uranium atoms in a chain reaction until it reached a critical point.

  A core meltdown would then cause a steam-pressure explosion in the primary coolant, destroying the pressurizer, and the core would then break through the containment vessel from sheer gravity, then the bottom of the ship, and would leak into the water…

  Rinko had a sudden vision of a pillar of smoke rising from the center of the Ocean Turtle.

  She closed her eyes and prayed again. “Please…Akihiko…!!”

  The cheers and chants resumed. Pushed onward by their encouragement, Number Two approached the nuclear reactor.

  She switched to the final camera angle.

  There was suddenly a terrible roar coming through the speakers. The footage on the screen was red with emergency lights. Number Two was practically dragging one foot as it proceeded through the searing heat. Only five or six yards until it reached the plastic explosives stuck to the upper part of the containment chamber.

  The robot’s right hand rose toward the detonator. Sparks were flying in streams from all over its body, and pieces of its exterior fell to the floor.

  “You can do it…You can do it…You can do it!!”

  One simple statement echoed around the control room. Rinko balled her hands into fists and screamed with them, nearly losing her voice.

  Four more yards.

  Three yards.

  Two yards.

  Then there was a veritable explosion of sparks from Number Two’s back.

  The black cable split and hung loose, like some exposed entrails.

  All the sensors on the robot’s head went out. The right arm slowly lowered.

  Its knees shook and bent—and Number Two went silent.

  On the monitor, the output graphs that had been bouncing up and down now sank to the bottom and turned black.

  One of the techs whispered, “It’s…lost all power…”

  I don’t believe in miracles, Akihiko Kayaba had said to Rinko on the day he’d woken in his bed in the mountain villa after SAO had been cleared earlier than expected and all its players had been released at last. His eyes were gentle and shining, and there was a faint smile playing around his scraggly, overgrown jaw.

  But you know what? I saw a miracle today, for the first time in my life. My sword went through him and destroyed the last of his hit points, but it was like he refused to obey the system and go away…and he stuck his swords into me instead.

  Maybe it was that moment I’ve been waiting for all this time…

  “…Akihiko!!” shouted Rinko, not even noticing that blood was dripping from the hand that clenched her locket. “You’re Heathcliff, the man with the Holy Sword!! You’re the ultimate rival of Kirito the Black Swordsman!! You’ve got to have one miracle of your own in you!!”

  Flick.

  Flick-flick.

  Red lights flickered. The lateral sensors on Number Two’s head.

  Exposed muscle cylinders jittered.

  A faint, purple light bobbed at the very bottom of the blacked-out status window. Then all the bars on the graph displaying limb and core output shot upward. Sparks flew as the robot’s joint actuators spun into life.

  “N…Number Two’s active again!!” a staffer shrieked, right as the utterly ragged machine stood upright.

  Tears poured from Rinko’s eyes.

  “Gooooo!!”

  “Keep going!!”

  Shouts filled the sub-control room.

  One foot stepped forward, slick with oil that ran like blood.

  The other foot dragged forward next, and it reached out its arm.

  One step. Another step.

  The battery compartment popped. Its body lurched—but it took another step.

  The fingers of its fully extended arm made contact with the plastic explosives strapped to the containment vessel.

  The thumb and index finger pinched the electric detonator.

  Sparks erupted from wrist, elbow, and shoulder like death screams. Number Two pulled the detonator loose, timer and all, and raised its arm high.

  The screen flashed white.

  Number Two’s fingers blew off where the detonator had burst. Then the robot tilted to the left and, like a lifeless puppet, dropped to the floor. The sensor lights blinked and went out, and the output graph on the monitor blacked out again.

  No one said anything for quite some time.

  And then the sub-control room rocked with raucous cheers.

  The whining of the engine turbines weakened and grew distant.

  Higa let out the breath he’d been holding. The nuclear reactor was finally starting to lower its output instead of continuing at a disastrous full-power clip.

  He wiped his sweaty forehead with his sleeve and squinted at the laptop screen through dirty lenses. The shutdown process for the two Soul Translators was about 80 percent finished. Over seventeen minutes had passed since the maximum-acceleration phase had been initiated—that would be over 160 years in the Underworld.

  By Higa’s conjecture, that was over the theoretical life span of the fluctlight. In simple logical terms, it was highly likely that the souls of Kazuto Kirigaya and Asuna Yuuki had disintegrated.

  But at this point, Higa also admitted to himself that in truth, he knew nothing about fluctlights in the Underworld. He had planned the simulation, constructed it, and operated it. But within the machine, the alternate world that had been built up by artificial souls had apparently reached heights that no one in Rath could have envisioned.

  Right now, the real-world person with the deepest understanding of that world was undoubtedly Kazuto himself. Just a seventeen-year-old high school student, hurled into the Underworld without any preparation. And he had adapted, evolved, and exhibited power greater than that of the four super-accounts meant to be gods.

  That wasn’t just some preternatural power that Kazuto was born with. It was because Kazuto Kirigaya—unlike the Rath members, who saw the artificial fluctlights only as experimental programs—acknowledged that the fluctlights were just as human as he was. He interacted with them, fought them, protected them, loved them—as human beings.

  That was why the Underworld—all the people who lived in it—chose him. To be their protector.

  Then perhaps, through some miracle that even Higa could not have anticipated, he might be able to withstand two hundred years.

  I bet that’s right, Kirito. Now I understand exactly why Lieutenant Colonel Kikuoka was so insistent on working with you. And why you’ll continue to be needed.

  So…

  “…Please come back to us,” Higa whispered, wa
tching the shutdown process approach 100 percent.

  Rinko was left all alone in the sub-control room.

  The other staff members had left to rescue Lieutenant Colonel Kikuoka and restore control to the main control room. For her part, Rinko wanted to rush to the reactor containment unit and find the collapsed Niemon so she could secure its physical memory and the thought-simulation model of Akihiko Kayaba contained on it. But she couldn’t leave this spot yet. Not until Higa finished the STL shutdown process and she could confirm the condition of Kazuto Kirigaya and Asuna Yuuki next door.

  Rinko had faith that they would wake up as though nothing had gone wrong. She wanted to place Alice’s lightcube in their hands and tell them that the Rath team had kept her safe. And she wanted to tell them about the person who had saved the Underworld from the real world—to tell them that Akihiko Kayaba, the man who’d imprisoned them, forced them to fight, and put them through hell, had operated a mechanical body with its battery cable cut and protected the Lightcube Cluster and the Ocean Turtle.

  She couldn’t ask their forgiveness. There was no way to remove the crime of the deaths of four thousand young people from Akihiko Kayaba’s story.

  But she wanted Kazuto and Asuna to understand the idea that Kayaba had left behind and the goal he’d been striving for.

  Rinko placed her hands on the duralumin case containing Alice’s lightcube and waited for Higa’s voice to come in over the intercom.

  “…Rinko, the log-out process is going to be complete in sixty seconds.”

  “All right. I’ll make sure to send someone for you soon.”

  “Please do. I don’t think I can get up this ladder on my own…Also, Kiku went down below to check on things. How is he doing? I think he’s got an injury.”

  At the moment, Rinko couldn’t tell him. Nakanishi had gone in to rescue Kikuoka after the gunfight in the hallway to the engine room about three or four minutes ago, but she hadn’t heard back from him yet.

  But Kikuoka wasn’t going to succumb before his mission was complete. He was the man who remained aloof at all times and easily overcame whatever challenges he faced.

  “The lieutenant colonel put on quite a show down there. In fact, I’d say he put Hollywood to shame when it comes to action scenes.”

  “Wow, I can’t even imagine that…We got thirty seconds left.”

  “I’m going over to the STL room now. Get in touch if anything happens. Over.”

  Rinko switched off her comm and left the console, clutching the case, as she made her way to the adjacent room. Before she touched the sliding door, the speaker in the room crackled with a report from the staff members who’d gone below.

  It wasn’t from Lieutenant Nakanishi or from the technicians who’d gone to Main Control. It was the security officer who had gone to remove the plastic explosive itself, now that the temperature was dropping in the reactor containment chamber.

  “Engine room, coming in! Do you read me? Dr. Koujiro!”

  Rinko felt her heart leap in her chest and switched the intercom channel. She shouted, “Yes, I read you loud and clear! What is it?!”

  “W-well, ma’am…I removed the C4 safely, but…it’s gone.”

  “Gone…? What’s gone?”

  “Number Two. I’m not seeing Niemon anywhere in the engine room!”

  The timer on the cheap digital watch reached zero and beeped.

  Critter huddled in a corner of the submersible’s passenger bay, listening intently for sound from outside. After many seconds without hearing the death-scream explosion of the megafloat, he exhaled a long and heavy breath.

  Even he couldn’t say whether it was out of relief or disappointment.

  All he knew was that the C4 he’d placed on the Ocean Turtle’s reactor had not exploded for some reason, and thus the control-rod drive was not destroyed, and there was no meltdown.

  If Hans was still okay back in the engine room, he’d be able to set off the device on his own, so the fact that it hadn’t happened meant that he’d been eliminated.

  Critter was stunned that a mercenary working for money would choose to stay behind rather than get on the sub. Hans had nearly lost his mind when he’d heard that his partner Brigg was dead; apparently they’d been close enough that he’d chosen to die in the same place.

  “People always have a longer history than you think…,” he muttered to himself, placing his watch back on a time readout.

  In fact, Captain Miller and Vassago, who died before Hans did, had their own motives and circumstances outside of money. And it was those complicating factors that killed them.

  In that sense, Critter and the other team members on the submersible had really gotten screwed over by this operation ending in failure. Glowgen DS, their client, had gotten to its current size by undertaking wet works for the NSA and CIA, and they wouldn’t think twice about hanging personnel out to dry. They might even be silenced to the very last man the moment they stepped on US soil again.

  As a bit of personal insurance, Critter snuck a micro–memory card out of the Ocean Turtle, taped to his chest with skin-colored waterproof tape. He had no idea how much good that would do him, but at the very least, if they were going to kill him, they’d just put a bullet in his brain, which was a much better way to go than whatever gruesome fate Vassago and Captain Miller had suffered.

  “Good grief.” He snorted and glanced unhappily at the two body bags at the back of the passenger section. The sight of Miller’s horrible death rictus flashed into his head, and he shivered.

  “…Huh? Two?”

  He squinted into the darkness at the rear of the craft—there were only two body bags. But that didn’t add up. Hans had stayed behind, but there had been three casualties on the team: Captain Miller, Vassago, and Brigg.

  “…Hey, Chuck,” he said, elbowing a nearby man chewing on an energy bar.

  “What?”

  “Your team collected the bodies, right? Why are we down one?”

  “Huh? We got Brigg from the corridor and Captain Miller in the STL room. Who else died?”

  “But…there was another one in the room there…”

  “Nope, only found the captain. Gonna remember that goddamn face in my nightmares.”

  “……”

  Critter pulled back and looked around the little cargo section. There were nine men sitting in the cramped space, all of them looking exhausted. Vice-Captain Vassago Casals was not among them.

  Critter had definitely confirmed Captain Miller’s death in the STL room, but he’d only looked at Vassago. His skin had been totally pale, though, and his hair had been bone white. He couldn’t have been alive. If he was alive, why wasn’t he on the submersible?

  Critter’s brain refused to consider this topic any longer. He wrapped his arms around his knees. The loquacious hacker did not say a single word until they returned to the Seawolf-class sub Jimmy Carter many minutes later.

  Nineteen minutes and forty seconds after the start of the maximum-acceleration phase, the shutdown of Soul Translator Unit Three and Unit Four in the Ocean Turtle’s STL Room Two was complete.

  Three minutes later, the acceleration process itself finished, and as the cooling system wound down, quiet returned to the ship interior again.

  Dr. Rinko Koujiro and Sergeant First Class Natsuki Aki released the boy and girl from the STLs—but Kazuto Kirigaya and Asuna Yuuki did not open their eyes.

  It was clear that their fluctlight output was nearly at a minimum and their mental activity was all but lost.

  But Rinko clutched their hands, tearfully calling and calling out to them.

  There were the faintest of smiles on Kazuto’s and Asuna’s faces in the midst of their deep, deep sleep.

  3

  Tek.

  …Tek.

  The sound stopped right before me.

  Then someone called my name.

  “…Kirito.”

  It was a voice of pure crystal, a voice I never thought I’d hear again.

/>   “As usual, you turn into a crybaby on your own. I know that about you…I know everything.”

  I lifted my tearstained face.

  There stood Asuna, hands behind her back, head tilted a little, smiling down at me.

  I didn’t know what I should say. So I didn’t say anything. I just looked up into those familiar brown eyes of hers and stared and stared.

  A little breeze picked up, and the fluttering butterfly between us rode the wind up into the blue sky. Asuna watched it go, then looked back at me and held out her hand.

  I had a feeling it would vanish into illusion if I touched it. But the gentle warmth I felt radiating from her white palm told me that the person I loved most of all was right there.

  Asuna knew the stakes. She knew this world was going to be sealed shut—and that return to the real world would come only at the end of an unfathomably vast length of time.

  And that was why she’d stayed. For me. Just for me, who she knew would probably make the same decision in her situation.

  I reached out and squeezed her delicate hand.

  With her support, I got to my feet so I could look into those beautiful eyes from up close.

  Still I had no words.

  But I didn’t feel like I needed to say anything. All I did was draw her slender body close and hold her tight. Asuna let her head drop against my chest and whispered, “When we get back there…Alice is going to be angry, isn’t she?”

  I thought of that confident golden knight, blue eyes flashing like sparks as she scolded me, and I laughed. “It’ll be fine as long as we remember her. As long as we don’t forget a second of the time we spent with her.”

  “…Yes. You’re right. As long we remember Alice…and Liz and Klein and Agil and Silica…and Yui…everything will be all right,” she said.

  We ended our embrace, nodded to each other, and looked to the empty shrine together. The World’s End Altar had ceased to function, and it slumbered silently beneath the gentle sun at the very edge of the world.

  I turned to her, held her hand again, and started to walk down the marble path. We continued past the colorful flowers until we were at the northern end of the floating island. The world seemed to continue forever beneath that deep-blue sky.