9

“That’s all for today’s class. I’ll be sending you files twenty-five and twenty-six for homework, so make sure you complete and upload them by next week.”

An electronic chime mimicking the sound of a bell signaled the end of the morning classes. The teacher turned off the widescreen monitor, and the mood in the classroom relaxed.

I used the old-fashioned mouse plugged into my computer unit to open and view the downloaded homework files. The wall of text that popped up made me sigh. I unplugged the mouse, flipped the screen closed, and tossed them both into my pack.

The sound of that chime was dangerously close to the bells of the chapel in the Town of Beginnings on the first floor of Aincrad. If that was by design, whoever had put together this school had a sick sense of humor.

None of the students in their matching uniforms seemed to notice or care, though. They chattered happily, leaving the classroom in small groups and heading for the cafeteria.

I closed the zipper on my backpack and was slipping it over my shoulder when the boy who sat next to me looked up and said, “Going to the cafeteria, Kazu? Save me a seat, yeah?”

Before I could respond, the student on the other side of him grinned and piped up, “Nah, man. Today’s Kazu’s audience with the princess.”

“Oh, right. Lucky sap.”

“Yep, that’s right. Sorry, guys.”

I waved a brief good-bye and left the classroom before their usual complaints could pick up steam.

Only once I’d hurried down the light green hallway and out the emergency exit into the courtyard could I breathe a sigh of relief away from the bustle of the lunch hour. A fresh new brick path started at the door and wound through lines of sapling trees. The plain concrete building that loomed over the branches was nothing special to look at, but for a school thrown together using an old building left unused after school district consolidation, it was an impressive campus.

After I spent a few minutes walking through the tunnel of greenery, the brick path led me to a small, circular garden. The outer perimeter was decorated with a number of flower beds and plain wooden benches. Sitting on one of them was a female student, looking up at the sky.

Her long brown hair fell straight down the back of her deep green school blazer. Her skin was a pale white, but a rosy blush had recently returned to her cheeks.

Her slender legs were extended forward, held neatly together, and covered in long black socks. Her brown loafers were tapping in rhythm on the bricks as she stared into the azure sky. The sight was so endearing that I had to stop at the entrance of the garden, hang on a tree branch, and watch.

When she looked down and noticed me, her face cracked into a smile. Then she closed her eyes and turned her face away in a satisfied pout.

I grimaced and approached the bench.

“Sorry to keep you waiting, Asuna.”

Asuna glanced at me and frowned. “Why do you always have to watch me from the shadows?”

“Sorry, sorry. Maybe it turns out I have some stalkerish qualities after all.”

“Ugh…” She drew back, looking disgusted, as I plopped down next to her and yawned.

“Man…I’m so tired…and hungry…”

“You sound like an old man, Kirito.”

“Well, I sure feel like I aged five years in the past month. Plus”—I folded my hands behind my head and shot her a sidelong glance—“it’s Kazuto, not Kirito. It’s against proper etiquette to use character names here.”

“Oh, right. I always forget…Hey, what about me? Everyone knows mine now!”

“That’s what you get for using your own name for a handle. Not that mine is that well hidden…”

All the students at this special school were former players of Sword Art Online who had been in middle or high school at the time of the incident. The actual orange players who had actively engaged in murder within the game were forced to submit to at least a year of counseling and monitoring for the sake of their mental health, but there were many players—including me—who’d been forced to attack others out of self-defense, and there was no official record or means of determining who had engaged in crimes like theft or extortion.

So it was considered taboo to mention one’s name within Aincrad, in order to avoid the settling of old scores. On the other hand, our faces were the same as they’d been in SAO. Asuna was discovered as soon as she stepped into the school building, and among some of the old high-level players, my nickname was common knowledge.

Naturally, it was impossible to expect that everything could be swept under the rug as though it never happened. The things that happened over there were real, not a dream, and every person here would have to find their own way to come to terms with those memories.

Asuna was holding a woven basket in her lap. I reached over and took her left hand in both of mine. It was still too thin, but it had filled out quite a lot since the day she’d awakened.

Her physical rehab had been quite fierce in order for her to make the start of the school term. She’d only recently been able to walk without crutches again, and she was still forbidden from any exercise, including running.

I visited her in the hospital after her awakening just as often as before, and it had been agonizing to watch her struggle to walk with the supports, teeth gritted and tears in her eyes. I rubbed her slender fingers over and over, remembering how hard it had been.

“…Kirito.”

I looked up. There was color in Asuna’s cheeks.

“Are you aware the cafeteria looks directly down onto this garden?”

“Wha…?”

Sure enough, on the top floor of the building over the tops of the trees were the tinted windows of the cafeteria. I let go abruptly.

“Honestly,” she sighed, then turned away in a huff again. “Forgetful people don’t get to have their lunches.”

“Aaah, I’m sorry!”

I apologized profusely for several seconds, until Asuna finally smiled and opened the basket sitting in her lap. She pulled out a round object wrapped in kitchen paper and handed it to me.

I hurriedly opened the paper to find a large hamburger with lettuce jutting out from the sides. The scent hit me directly in the stomach, and I jammed it into my mouth.

“Mm…dif fwavor…”

I chewed ravenously, swallowed to clear my throat, and then gave Asuna a wide-eyed look of surprise. She smiled and said, “Heh-heh. You remember it?”

“How could I forget? It’s the hamburger we ate at the safe haven on the seventy-fourth floor…”

“It was really hard to re-create the exact flavor, actually. It’s just not fair, you know? I worked myself to death trying to copy a realistic taste back there, and now I’m working myself to death trying to re-create it again back here.”

“Asuna…”

I stared at her, a storm of emotions raging in my chest at all of those happy memories. She looked right back at me and grinned.

“You have mayo on your cheek.”

By the time I’d finished my two large sandwiches and Asuna had eaten her small one, the lunch period was nearly over. She was holding a paper cup full of steaming herb tea from her thermos when she asked, “What’s on your schedule after lunch?”

“I’ve got two more classes, I think. It’s so weird. We’ve got EL panels rather than blackboards, tablets rather than notebooks, and our homework gets sent through wireless LAN—at this rate, we might as well just take our classes from home,” I grumbled. Asuna giggled.

“The screens and PCs might only be temporary. Pretty soon everything will be holographic…Besides, coming to school means we can actually meet up like this.”

“Good point…”

We made sure to share all of our electives, but since we were in different years, our main curriculum kept us apart. We only actually saw each other in class three days a week.

“Plus, Father says this is a model case for the next generation of schools.”

“Ahh…How is Shouzou?”

“Well, he was pretty bummed for a while. Said he was no judge of character after all. He’s been half-retired since leaving the CEO position, so I think he’s looking for a good way to deal with the lack of pressure on his shoulders. He’ll be fine once he finds a hobby.”

“I see…”

I took a sip of tea and joined Asuna in gazing up at the sky.

Asuna’s father, Shouzou Yuuki, had long ago decided on Asuna’s future husband—Nobuyuki Sugou.

After he was arrested in the hospital parking lot on that snowy night, Sugou continued to struggle and wriggle to avoid what he deserved. He kept his silence, he denied all wrongdoing, and he ultimately tried to pin everything on Akihiko Kayaba.

But once one of his subordinates was called in for questioning, everything came out into the open. He revealed that the three hundred victims of SAO who had not returned were held captive within a server in the Yokohama office of RCT Progress, victims of inhumane mind control experiments. Sugou was truly done for, but he did appeal for a psychiatric examination when the trial started. His primary charges were based on assault, but the public was curious to see if they could tag him with abduction.

It soon became clear that his shocking experiment on full-dive brainwashing was only possible through the first-generation NerveGear unit. They had all supposedly been destroyed, and with the results of Sugou’s experiment, it would be possible to design protection to ensure it could never happen again.

There was at least one piece of good news: None of the newly released survivors had any memory of the experiment. They suffered no physical tissue damage nor any psychological scars, so with the benefit of proper recuperation and counseling, all three hundred would be able to reassimilate into society.

But RCT Progress and ALfheim Online, if not the VRMMO genre as a whole, suffered a fatal blow.

Society was already wary enough after the SAO incident. So when ALO came along, the implicit promise to consumers was that the incident had been the work of a lone madman, and the VRMMO concept itself was still safe. But after Sugou’s handiwork, the public opinion was that any VR game could be used to commit a heinous crime.

Ultimately, RCT Progress was disbanded and RCT itself suffered heavy losses, but with a changing of the guard in senior management, the company was attempting a recovery.

ALO was shut down, of course, and five or six other VRMMOs in service, though losing only a slight number of members, were taking massive heat from the public sphere. Most speculated that they would all eventually be canceled as well.

It was only through a surprise twist of fate that this state of events was overturned…

…by the “seed of the world” Akihiko Kayaba left to me.

The issue of Kayaba must be addressed.

It was two months ago, in March 2025, that the suspicions were confirmed: Akihiko Kayaba had indeed died with the collapse of SAO in November 2024.

For the two years that he ruled over Aincrad as Heathcliff, Kayaba had been staying in a secluded mountain cabin deep in the woods of Nagano Prefecture.

Of course, his personal NerveGear had no deadly shackles built into it, and he was able to log out whenever he wanted, but there were records of continuous log-in time of up to a week as he carried out his guild leadership duties.

Assisting him during those times was a fellow researcher and graduate student at the industrial college he’d been affiliated with, even as he worked at Argus.

Both she and Sugou had been students at Kayaba’s lab, and by all outward appearances, Sugou had both respected Kayaba and felt a powerful rivalry toward him. Sugou had pursued the assistant romantically as well, a fact I learned from her after she was released on bail last month.

I forced the agent from the emergency response team to cough up her e-mail address and, after much careful consideration, sent her a message claiming that I didn’t want to blame her for anything, I only wanted to ask some questions. Her response came a week later. The woman’s name was Rinko Koujiro, and she traveled to the city from her home in Miyagi, to meet me at a café near Tokyo Station.

Kayaba had decided, even before he put his plan into motion, that he would die when the world of SAO collapsed. However, his choice of method was quite bizarre. He used a modified full-dive machine to perform a high-powered scan of his entire brain, frying it in the process.

The odds of the scan working successfully were only one in a thousand, she claimed. I found her to be both fragile and yet inwardly tough at the same time.

If all went according to his plan, he would be copying his memories and thoughts in the form of digital code so that he could exist within the network as an electronic brain.

I grappled with this information a bit, but eventually told her that I’d spoken with Kayaba’s consciousness in what had once been the SAO server. That he’d spared me and Asuna, and left something with me.

She looked at the ground for several minutes, shed a tear, and said, “I visited his mountain retreat with the intent of killing him. But I couldn’t do it. And because of that, many young people lost their lives. What he and I did cannot be forgiven. If you hate him, please delete what he gave to you. But…if you do happen to feel any emotion other than hatred…”

“Kirito. Hello, Kirito? About today’s IRL meet-up…”

The elbow in my ribs brought me back to my senses.

“Oh—sorry. I was spacing out.”

“No matter which world we’re in, when you get lost in thought, you really have no idea what’s going on.”

Asuna shook her head in exasperation, then unleashed a smile like a ray of sunlight and plopped her head against my shoulder.

With a most unladylike sound, I sucked the last remnants of the strawberry yogurt drink through my straw. We were seated against the west-facing cafeteria windows, at the third table in—at least, as measured by the adjoining southern wall. Keiko Ayano, who was sitting across from me, looked peeved.

“Can’t you drink that any quieter, Liz—I mean, Rika?”

“Well, how else am I supposed to—oh geez, can you believe how close Kirito’s sitting to her?”

A boy and girl were sitting shoulder to shoulder on the bench down in the courtyard, which was only visible through the tree branches from this exact table.

“Shameless. Right in the middle of school…”

“A-and you don’t think it’s rude to spy on them?!”

I gave Keiko a glance and remarked, “Remind me again who was just watching them very intently a moment ago, Silica?”

Silica the dagger wielder, also known as Keiko (or should that be the other way around?), went bright red and shoveled her shrimp pilaf into her mouth to avoid having to respond to that.

I crushed the empty drink pack and tossed it into the trash can several feet away, then rested my chin on my hands, sighing dramatically.

“Sheesh…If I’d known this would happen, I wouldn’t have agreed to that one-month cease-fire.”

“That was your idea, Liz! You said we should give them a month to enjoy their company…You should have known this would be the result.”

“You have rice on your cheek.”

I sighed again and stared up through the skylight at the clouds passing overhead.

Kirito had sent me an e-mail out of the blue in mid-February. I don’t know how he got my address.

At first I was shocked, but then I heard the bell inside my head ring, signaling the start of round two. I headed to his meet-up spot, where he told me something even more shocking.

He’d gotten himself wrapped up in that shocking ALO Incident. And not only that, Asuna was a victim of it as well, though that was a secret from the public.

Asuna wanted to see me, so naturally, I rushed to visit her. When I saw how tender and fragile she looked, like a pale snow fairy, I felt that familiar urge to protect her that I’d experienced so many times in Aincrad.