Alicization Rising Read online

  But actually, that made me think of something…

  “Wait, Cardinal…What about that stuff you were saying about the one-hundred-and-fifty-year life span of the fluctlight? It was that very limit that caused Administrator to copy her own soul…So how have you managed the two hundred years since that split?”

  “A very reasonable question,” Cardinal said, leisurely lowering her emptied cup to the table. “Administrator might have chosen which parts of her she was going to copy to my fluctlight, but it did not leave room for such an enormous memory extension. So the first thing I did after I confirmed I was safe in the library was to undertake the process of arranging my memories.”

  “A-arranging…?”

  “Yes. Direct-editing a file without a backup, according to the analogy I made earlier. If I committed a single mistake in the process, my consciousness would have melted within the lightcube, I daresay.”

  “So, uh…you’re saying that even isolated within this Great Library, you still have the user authority to modify the Lightcube Cluster in the real world? Couldn’t you access Administrator’s fluctlight somehow and find a way to blow up her soul or whatever…?”

  “Then the inverse would be true as well. But sadly—or fortunately—any kind of sacred art that causes a change in the status of an external target, as a fundamental rule, requires either physical contact or visual confirmation of the target unit or object. Regardless of any ‘casting range,’ in fact. It is why Administrator had to bring that furniture-maker’s daughter up to the cathedral, and why she needed to have you and Eugeo brought to the Church.”

  I felt an involuntary shiver. If our reckless prison escape hadn’t been successful, who knows what kind of torture we’d have suffered during the interrogation.

  “In other words, while isolated inside the library like this, I had no means of attacking Administrator’s fluctlight, but it also meant I had successfully escaped her wrath,” Cardinal said, her long eyelashes lowered. “Organizing my own soul…was truly a horrifying task. A single command simply obliterates a memory that might have been vivid right until the moment of deletion. But I had to do it. Under the circumstances, I could easily imagine that it would take an unfathomable length of time to completely eradicate Administrator. Ultimately, I was able to remove all my memories as Quinella and ninety-seven percent from the moment I became Administrator…”

  “B-but…that’s almost all your memory, period!”

  “Correct. That long, long story of Quinella I told you was not actually from my own experience but a written record I left before deleting it from my mind. I cannot recall the faces of the parents who gave birth to me. Or the warmth of the bed I slept in or the flavor of my favorite sweetbread…Remember what I told you? I have no human emotion. I have erased virtually all my memories and sentiments, leaving only a program that follows a desperate soul-etched order to stop the out-of-control main process. That is all I am.”

  “…”

  And yet, in Cardinal’s downcast smile, I saw an unspeakable loneliness. I wanted to tell her that she wasn’t a program, that she must have the same emotions as me and other people, but I couldn’t put it into words.

  She looked up into my eyes, grinned again, and resumed speaking. “…After the process of self-deleting my memories, I had secured a healthy amount of fluctlight space. With the vast amount of time ahead, I began to work on a plan that would allow me to strike down Administrator in one righteous blow and avenge my miserable defeat. At first, I intended to catch her by surprise in direct combat. She cannot connect to this library from the outside, but as you now know, the reverse is possible. There is a range limit to the command to create a door, which means that I can place it anywhere from Central Cathedral gardens to the middle floors. On rare occasions, she does visit the lower floors, so I could have taken advantage of that to open a door and ambush her. Plus, to my surprise, I had adjusted to this body’s control quickly.”

  “…I see. If you could guarantee the initiative, it seems worth trying…but it’s still a huge gamble, right? You’d expect Administrator to make arrangements of her own…”

  Ambushes were surprisingly hard to pull off when the target already anticipated a possible attack. I’d been through both sides of ambushes with orange players in SAO, and in virtually every case, an ambush from a “perfect” ambush location would fail to take a wary target by surprise. Cardinal grimaced and nodded.

  “Quinella was always skilled at identifying others’ weaknesses, even before she declared herself pontifex. In the same way she promptly isolated my size disadvantage in our separation battle, she identified an advantage she possessed in a different set of circumstances and made use of it.”

  “But…don’t you essentially have the same attack and defense values? And, uh, mental capabilities. How could she have an advantage?”

  “I don’t like the way you say that…but you are correct.” She snorted. “She and I are essentially identical in terms of single combat. But only in a one-on-one battle.”

  “One-on-one…Ohhh, I get it.”

  “Indeed. I am a solitary warrior hiding in my refuge, while she rules over the largest organization in the world…But I shall explain events in order. After she created me and was driven to the brink of death for it, Administrator recognized the great danger of copying her own fluctlight. Yet she was still faced with the peril of her logic circuits collapsing under the weight of her overflowing memories. She had to do something, but unlike me, she was not able to delve into the risky experiment of editing her memories directly. Instead, she aimed for a compromise. She chose to delete a relatively safe, surface-level category of memories to create a minimal sliver of free space, and then aggressively pruned any newly recorded information after that.”

  “Pruned…? But won’t the memories build up anyway, even over the span of a single day?”

  “It depends on how you spend it. If you see, do, and think a lot, you will have a larger input. But if you stay entirely within your canopy bed, passing the time with your eyes closed, it is a different story, is it not?”

  “Ugh…I couldn’t handle it. I’d rather spend an entire day just swinging a sword over and over.”

  “I am well acquainted with your restlessness at this point.”

  I had no comeback to this. If, for whatever reason, Cardinal had been monitoring my activity all along, she would already know about my habit of wandering away from Eugeo for a stroll whenever I had the free time.

  The sage let her wry little grin fade before resuming her story. “But unlike you, Administrator is not bound by feelings such as boredom or ennui. If needed, she would stay in a prone position for days or even weeks at a time. All the while, drifting in a half-sleeping state through her fond memories leading up to ruling the world…”

  “But she’s the top boss of the Axiom Church, right? Doesn’t she have stuff to do for that? Managing things, giving speeches, and the like?”

  “She did, up to a point. She would accept a visit from the four emperors at the Great Solemnity to start the year, plus periodic visits to the middle and lower floors to ensure that the world was being controlled the way she wanted. Each and every time, she was on guard for an ambush from me. So Administrator played a new hand. She delegated the majority of her duties and arranged for powerful, loyal servants who would help protect her…”

  “So that’s the advantage she had as the head of a huge ruling force, as opposed to you being on your own…But wouldn’t that just create more variables for her to have to deal with? If her group of guards was capable of fighting off the one with as much strength as her, how would she control it if they decided to turn on her?” I wondered.

  Cardinal shrugged, repeating, “What did I say? Absolute loyalty.”

  “Look, I know people can’t disobey orders from above, but you already showed me that those aren’t absolute. What if the guards somehow decided that their pontifex was actually acting on behalf of the Dark Territory…?”
r />   “Naturally, she was aware that the possibility of that was greater than zero. She had been experimenting on people with a high violation index, after all. Blind obedience is not the same as loyalty…And even if those guards truly swore to protect her with the utmost faith, she would not believe it. Remember, she was betrayed by her own copy,” Cardinal said with a devilish grin. “If she was going to give them equal authority and equipment, she needed a guarantee that they would not disobey her under any circumstances. How does one do that? Simple: alter their fluctlights to make it so.”

  “…Uh…what?”

  “She completed the complex, lengthy commands to achieve this end. In other words, Synthesis Ritual.”

  “That’s…fusing memories to a soul, right?”

  “Yes. And she had plenty of high-quality subjects with powerful souls to use. All those individuals with the high violation index values who she experimented upon and then froze were also universally gifted with significant talent…In fact, you might say it was their excellent intellect and physique that led them to doubt the power of the Taboo Index and Axiom Church in the first place…Among those she captured first was an unparalleled swordsman who drifted to the frontier with his companions out of distaste for the Church’s rule and founded his own village. He was arrested when he attempted to cross the End Mountains that separate the human world from the Dark Territory, and Administrator chose him to be the first of her faithful servants.”

  For some reason, this story tickled at my memory, though I couldn’t recall where I’d heard it. Before I could remember, Cardinal continued, “The majority of the swordsman’s memory was damaged from the experiments, but that was actually to Administrator’s benefit—she didn’t want his precapture memories interfering. So she created an object called a Piety Module that forces absolute servitude—it looks like a purple prism about this big…”

  She held out her fingers about four inches apart. The instant I could picture it in my head, every hair on my body stood on end. I had seen one of them. Just hours ago, in fact.

  “…The Synthesis Ritual involves embedding the prism into the center of the target’s forehead. This fuses the memory-stripped soul with the generated memories and prime directive, thus creating a brand-new persona. A superwarrior that is absolutely loyal to the Church and Administrator, acting only to uphold the status quo of the world…When the ritual was successful and her subject awoke, she gave him the title of Integrity Knight, symbolizing his role in correcting chaos, furthering the Church’s rule, and upholding the integrity of the world order. If you climb the cathedral, you and Eugeo may very well come across the oldest of the knights. You ought to know his name.”

  She looked solemnly into my eyes and announced, “The name of the knight is…Bercouli Synthesis One.”

  “…No. No, no, no, that can’t be right,” I blurted before Cardinal’s mouth had even closed.

  Bercouli.

  The legendary hero Eugeo had told me about, his face shining with awe and reverence. He was one of the original pioneers of Rulid, an explorer of the End Mountains, and the fearless adventurer who attempted to steal the Blue Rose Sword from the white dragon that protected the human realm.

  Eugeo hadn’t known anything about Bercouli’s final years. I just imagined that he had lived in Rulid until he was old—but never guessed that he’d been abducted by Administrator and turned into the original Integrity Knight.

  “Um, Cardinal…you realize that Eugeo and I had to team up against Eldrie Synthesis Thirty-One—meaning the thirty-first of the series—and barely held our own, right? There’s no way we could tackle the first one and win.”

  But the sage merely shrugged off my protest. “You cannot afford to quake at the idea of Bercouli alone. As you just mentioned, there are thirty-one knights in total now.”

  “For there being so many, I sure haven’t seen much of them. Since coming to Centoria, I’ve only even seen an Integrity Knight flying on their dragon once, at night.”

  “Naturally. The duty of the knights is to protect the End Mountains. The only time they appear in the city is when someone commits a major violation of the Taboo Index, and that doesn’t happen even once a decade. Not even nobles or emperors witness Integrity Knights regularly, much less the common folk…In fact, you might say their isolation is intentional…”

  “Hmm…So does that mean the majority of the other thirty knights are in the mountains?” I asked, clinging to faint hope, but Cardinal dashed it at once.

  “Not the majority. At present, the awakened knights in the cathedral number at least twelve or thirteen. If you and Eugeo are to accomplish your individual goals, you must expect to defeat them all on the way to the top of the tower.”

  “Must expect to, huh…?”

  I sank into my chair and exhaled. In RPG terms, it felt like I was about to charge into the final dungeon woefully underleveled and poorly equipped. It was true that I’d journeyed all this way to reach the top of Central Cathedral and make contact with someone in the real world, but even this close to my goal, I was at an overwhelming disadvantage against the Integrity Knights.

  I looked down at my chest without comment. Thanks to Cardinal’s magical meat buns, the wounds I suffered from Eldrie’s Perfect Weapon Control were totally healed, but the lingering sensation of that tingling pain still remained.

  If the Integrity Knights ahead were stronger than Eldrie, our chances of solving this in the orthodox way were extremely slim…and then I recalled that strange phenomenon that happened at the end of the battle in the rose garden.

  When Eugeo had told the knight about his past and his mother’s name, the knight had suddenly fallen to his knees in pain. While he was barely conscious, a translucent purple prism, glowing brightly, had emerged from his forehead. That must have been the Piety Module that Cardinal was just talking about. It controlled the knights’ egos and memories, forcing them to be perfectly loyal to the pontifex.

  But was the effect really as irreversible as Cardinal claimed? Just hearing his mother’s name caused Eldrie’s module to begin ejecting—or so it seemed. If the same effect happened with other knights, then that meant there was a way outside of crossing swords with them, and it made possible Eugeo’s dream of turning Integrity Knight Alice back to regular Alice.

  Then I heard Cardinal say, “My story is nearly over. Shall I continue?”

  “…Oh, yeah. Please.”

  “Good. By creating a number of Integrity Knights, starting with Bercouli, Administrator had vastly decreased my chances of a successful ambush. The knights had excellent attack and defense skills, if not quite as high as Administrator, enough that even I could not eliminate them instantly. It forced me to confront the reality that my battle with her would last an unfathomably long time…”

  It seemed that Cardinal’s long, long story was reaching its conclusion. I straightened up in my chair and focused on the little sage’s sonorous voice.

  “With this change in the situation, it became clear that I would need an accomplice. But naturally, there are few who will willingly choose to help one battle against the absolute ruler of the world. Such a person would need a high enough violation index to break any taboo, as well as enough combat or sacred arts ability to counteract the Integrity Knights. So, dangerous as it was, I opened a door as distant as possible, cast spells of Sensory Sharing and such on the birds and bugs, then let them loose into the world…”

  “Ha-ha…So those are your eyes and ears, huh? Is that how you were keeping tabs on me…?”

  “Yes,” she said with a smirk, reaching out. Her palm uplifted, she made a beckoning motion with her finger.

  “Whoa!”

  Abruptly, something very small leaped out of my hairline and onto Cardinal’s palm. It was a black spider smaller than the tip of my pinkie. It spun around, looked up at me with four crimson eyes, and lifted its front right leg in what seemed like a salute.

  “This is Charlotte. From the moment you and Eugeo left Rulid, she
has been hiding in your hair, or your pocket, or the corner of your room, watching and listening to everything you two did. And apparently…doing more than that at times,” Cardinal said. The spider tucked in its legs and seemed to shrink.

  This cute little gesture suddenly caused me to recall the tug on my bangs pointing me in the right direction while we were running from the knight on the dragon. Perhaps that was the spider? In fact, that had happened more than once. After we left Rulid, during the tournament and garrison days in Zakkaria, even after starting at the academy in Centoria, I’d felt the same sensation at a number of crucial moments.

  “…You mean that tugging sensation wasn’t just my instincts talking to me? It was something literally pulling on my hair…?” I murmured, aghast. After all those memories, an extremely important one replayed in my mind. I bolted upright and leaned over the little black spider resting on Cardinal’s palm.

  “W-wait…When they cut down all my zephilia flowers, was it you trying to cheer me up…? The one who told me to believe in the zephilias’ vitality and the other flowers’ wishes…”

  The voice in my memory had been a slightly older woman’s. That would suggest that the black spider, as the name Charlotte suggested, had a female personality. Was that even possible? Could an insect have a soul—a fluctlight?

  Charlotte answered my question with nothing but the gaze of her red eyes at first. Then the spider ran off Cardinal’s palm and scurried across the tabletop, jumped to the nearby bookshelf, and disappeared.

  Cardinal watched the little familiar go and said gently, “Charlotte is the oldest of the observation units that I cast spells on and unleashed into the world. Now her long, long mission is at an end. Because I froze the natural degradation of her life value, she’s been working for over two hundred years…”