Mother's Rosary

  As she faced the group, all three of them nodded simultaneously. Silica’s tail wagged happily through the space on the back of the chair as she piped up, “Of course! I wouldn’t miss this fight for the world.”

  “I don’t know how much of a fight it’ll be…but that’s settled, then. The little island on the twenty-fourth floor at three o’clock, you said? Let’s meet up here at two thirty, then,” Asuna suggested, clapping her hands and bringing up her menu to check the time.

  “Oh crap, it’s already six. I’m going to be late for dinner.”

  “Shall we call it a day, then?” Leafa asked, saving her homework progress and cleaning up. As the others followed her lead, the sylph snuck over to the rocking chair, grabbed the back, and violently shook it back and forth.

  “Wake up, Big Brother! We’re leaving!”

  Asuna watched the scene with a grin, but a sudden thought wiped it away. She turned to Lisbeth.

  “Hey, Liz.”

  “What?”

  “You said the Absolute Sword might be a converted player,” she began quietly. “With that much strength, it makes me wonder…could it be a former SAO player?”

  Liz nodded seriously. “Yeah, I wondered that myself. After Kirito’s fight, I asked him what he thought…”

  “And what did he say?”

  “He said there was no way that the Absolute Sword could have been an SAO player.”

  “…”

  “Because if that were the case…it wouldn’t have been him who won the Dual Blades skill.”

  2

  Chi-chik.

  A short electronic tone signaled the powering off of the AmuSphere.

  Asuna opened her eyes slowly. She felt the chilly damp of the room’s air before her eyes could focus on the ceiling of the dim room.

  She’d set her air conditioner to provide a bit of warmth but forgot to disable the timer, so it had run its cycle and turned off while she was in the dive. The room, which was a bit too big for her, was now at thermal equilibrium with the outside temperature. She heard the sound of rain and turned to the large window at her right to see countless droplets clinging to the outside of the dark glass.

  Asuna shivered and sat up in bed. She reached for the room environment controller embedded in the set of drawers at her side and tapped the “automatic” button on the touch panel. That was all it took for two curtain motors to quietly buzz to life and shut out the windows, the air conditioner to come awake, and the LED lights on the ceiling to emit an orangey glow.

  Her room was outfitted with the latest interior systems offered by RCT’s home division. They’d installed all of these things while she was hospitalized, but for some reason, Asuna couldn’t bring herself to appreciate them. It was completely natural to control everything about an inside room with a single menu in VR, but something about that concept coming to the real world left her cold. She imagined she could feel on her skin the machine gaze of all the sensors embedded into the floor and walls.

  Or perhaps she felt it was so cold because now she could compare it to the warmth of Kazuto Kirigaya’s traditional home, which she’d visited several times. Her grandparents’ house on her mother’s side was like that one. When she went there during summer vacations, she’d sit facing the back garden, her legs dangling off the wooden porch in the sunlight, eating her grandma’s shaved ice. Those grandparents had died years ago, and the house had since been torn down.

  She sighed and stuck her feet into her slippers before getting up. The motion made her head swim, and she tilted over. There was no avoiding the powerful gravity of the real world.

  The virtual world simulated the same level of gravity, of course. But the Asuna in that world could leap nimbly and allow her soul to wander freely through the air. The gravity of the real world wasn’t just a physical force; it contained the weight of many different things that dragged her down to earth. She was tempted to fall back onto the bed, but it was nearly time for dinner. For every minute she was late, she’d get an extra rebuke from her mother.

  She dragged her heavy feet to the closet, where the door folded itself open without any prompting on her part. She took off her loose polar fleece wear and threw it rebelliously on the floor. Once she had changed into a spotlessly white blouse and a long, dark cherry skirt, she sat down on the stool of the nearby dresser, which automatically deployed a three-sided mirror and a bright overhead light.

  Even around the house, Asuna’s mother did not suffer her to dress casually. She picked up a brush and tidied the long hair that had gone messy during her dive. As she did, she wondered what sort of scenes were playing out at that moment at the Kirigaya home over in Kawagoe.

  Leafa (Suguha) had said that she and Kazuto were both on dinner duty tonight. Suguha would drag a sleepy-looking Kazuto downstairs. They’d stand in the kitchen, Suguha with the knife and Kazuto cooking a fish. Before long, their mother would return and enjoy an evening beer as she watched television. The meal would come together as they chatted back and forth, until steaming dishes and bowls were placed on the table, and the three said their grace.

  Asuna let out a trembling breath and tried not to cry. She put down the brush and stood up. After taking a step into the dim hallway, the lights behind her went out before she could even close the door.

  She descended the semicircular staircase to the first-floor hall, where the housekeeper, Akiyo Sada, was about to open the front door. She was probably on her way home after fixing dinner.

  Asuna bowed to the woman, a petite figure in her early forties. “Good evening, Mrs. Sada. Thank you for coming again. Sorry to always keep you so late.”

  Akiyo shook her head, her eyes wide in consternation as she bowed deeply. “N-not at all, Mistress. It is my job.”

  The last year had taught her that saying, “Call me Asuna” would be pointless. Instead, she approached the housekeeper and quietly asked, “Are Mother and Brother home already?”

  “Master Kouichirou will be home late. Madam is already in the dining room.”

  “…I see. Thank you; sorry to keep you.”

  Once again, Asuna bowed and Akiyo bent over deeply at the waist before pushing the heavy door open and scurrying out.

  She knew the woman had a child in elementary or middle school. Their home was also in the ward of Setagaya, but she wouldn’t get home after shopping until at least seven thirty. That was a long time for a growing child to wait for dinner. She’d tried suggesting to her mother that they could have precooked dinners, but the idea was never entertained.

  Asuna spun on her heel, hearing three different locks click on the door behind her, and crossed the hall to the dining room. The instant she pushed open the heavy oaken door, a quiet but taut voice said, “You’re late.”

  She glanced at the clock on the wall, which was at exactly six thirty. Before she could protest this fact, the voice continued. “Come to the table five minutes before the meal.”

  “…I’m sorry,” Asuna grunted, stepping onto the thick rug with her slippers as she approached the table. She lowered herself into the high-backed chair, eyes downcast.

  At the center of the three-hundred-square-foot dining room was a long, eight-legged table. Asuna’s seat was the second from the northeast corner. To her left was her brother Kouichirou’s chair, and on the short, adjacent east end was her father Shouzou’s, but both were empty now.

  In the chair across the table and to the left was her mother, Kyouko Yuuki, a glass of her favorite sherry in hand, glancing through an original edition of a book on economics.

  She was quite tall for a woman. She was thin, but her solid structure kept her from looking fragile. Her shiny, dyed-brown hair was parted evenly on both sides and cropped straight across her shoulder line.

  Though her features were attractive, the sharpness of the bridge of her nose, the line of her jaw, and the fine but deep wrinkles around her mouth gave her an undeniable air of severity. Then again, perhaps this effect was intended. Through her sharp tongue and
political shrewdness, she had dispatched her department rivals and achieved tenure as a professor at just forty-nine years of age last year.

  Kyouko shut the hardcover and did not look up as Asuna sat. She spread her napkin over her lap, picked up her knife and fork, and only then did she glance at her daughter’s face.

  For her part, Asuna looked down, mumbled a formality, then picked up her spoon. For a time, the only sound in the dining room was the faint clinking of silverware.

  The meal was a greens salad with blue cheese, fava bean potage, grilled white fish with herb sauce, whole-wheat bread, and so on. Kyouko selected each day’s meals for maximum nutrition, but naturally, she cooked none of it.

  Asuna continued to eat, wondering when these lonely meals with her mother had become such tense, unpleasant affairs. Perhaps they had always been this way. She remembered being scolded sharply for spilling soup or leaving vegetables behind. It was just that in the past, Asuna had never known what a fun and pleasant meal was, by comparison.

  As she mechanically ate her meal, Asuna’s mind wandered far away through her memory to her virtual home, until Kyouko’s voice brought her back. “Were you using that machine again?”

  Asuna glanced at her mother and nodded. “Yes…We made an agreement to do our homework together.”

  “It’s not going to sink in and do you any good unless you do that studying on your own.”

  Clearly, telling Kyouko that she was doing the work on her own in that virtual environment was not going to convince her. Asuna kept her face down and tried a different tack. “Everyone lives very far apart. In there, we can meet one another instantly.”

  “Using that machine does not count as ‘meeting.’ Besides, homework is meant to be done alone. With your friends, you’re bound to end up cavorting around,” Kyouko said, her speech picking up steam as she tilted back the sherry. “And you don’t have the leeway for fun and games. You’re behind the others, so it’s obvious that you need to study even harder to make up those two extra years.”

  “…I am doing my studies. Didn’t you see the printout of my second-term grade report I left on your desk?”

  “I did, but I put no stock in the grade reports from a school like that.”

  “A school like…what?”

  “Listen, Asuna. I’m giving you a home tutor in addition to school for your third term. Not one of these popular online tutors, but a proper one who comes to the house.”

  “W-wait…This is so sudden…”

  “Look at this,” Kyouko commanded, cutting off Asuna and picking up a tablet computer off the table. Asuna took it from her and looked at the screen, frowning.

  “…What is this…? A summary of a…transfer exam?”

  “I called in a favor from a friend who’s a high school director to allow you to take a transfer exam for their senior program. Not a slapped-together school like your current one, but a real school. It works on credits, so you could fulfill the graduation requirements in the first semester. That way, you can be in college starting in September.”

  Asuna stared at her mother’s face in shock. She put down the tablet and raised her hand to keep Kyouko from continuing. “W-wait. You can’t just decide that on your own. I like my school. The teachers there are nice, and it’s a good, proper school. I don’t need to transfer,” she squeaked.

  Kyouko sighed and made a show of closing her eyes, holding her temples with her fingers, and leaning back against the chair. This was her finely honed conversation technique to convince the other person of her superior position. No doubt any man who witnessed this trick on the sofa of the professor’s office would shrink up. Even her husband, Shouzou, seemed to avoid offering any antagonistic opinions around the house.

  “Your mother looked into this properly,” Kyouko lectured. “The place you’re attending now can hardly be called a school. Their curriculum is slapdash and the subjects are shallow. They scraped together anyone they could get for a faculty, hardly any of which have experience. It’s less of an academic institution than a correctional facility.”

  “You…you can’t say that…”

  “It all sounds very nice when you call it a school that accepts students whose education has fallen behind due to an accident. But in reality, it’s nothing more than a place where they can gather potential future problem children to keep an eye on them. Perhaps there’s a function for such a place, when some of those children have spent all that time killing one another in some bizarre game, but there’s no reason for you to be there.”

  “…”

  It was such an avalanche of withering criticism that Asuna could not speak.

  The school campus situated in western Tokyo that she’d been attending since last spring was indeed a hastily built school, constructed just two months after it was announced. The purpose of it was to educate those players who had been trapped in the deadly Sword Art Online and lost two years of their education. Any former SAO player under the age of eighteen could attend without an entrance test or any tuition, and a graduate automatically earned the right to sit for a college entrance exam—treatment that was so favorable, some people even complained about it.

  But Asuna knew from her attendance at the school that it was more than just a safety net. All students were required to undergo individual counseling once a week, where they were subjected to questions meant to detect antisocial behavior or thoughts. Depending on the answers, they could be reinstitutionalized or given drugs to take. So Kyouko’s accusation that it was a “correctional facility” was not entirely untrue.

  Even if that was the case, Asuna loved her “school.” No matter the government ministries’ intentions, the teachers who worked there were all volunteers who earnestly sought to connect with the students. There was no need to hide her past from the other kids, and she got to spend time with the friends she’d made: Lisbeth, Silica, a number of the frontline warriors—and Kirito.

  She bit her lip, still clutching the fork, and struggled with a sudden urge to reveal all of her most fervent inner feelings to her mother.

  I’m exactly one of those children who spent all that time killing others. I was living in a world where lives were taken and lost by the sword every day. And I don’t regret those days even the tiniest bit…

  But Kyouko did not seem to detect her daughter’s inner conflict. “You’re not going to advance into a good college coming out of a school like that. You’re already eighteen, don’t you see? And at this rate, I can’t begin to imagine when you’ll be in college, if you stick with that place. Every one of your friends from middle school is about to take the standardized college exam next week. Don’t you feel pressured to catch up?”

  “There shouldn’t be a serious problem if I’m a year or two late to get into college. Besides, going to college isn’t the only kind of career path to go down…”

  “That’s preposterous,” Kyouko rebuked sternly. “You have talent. You know what incredible pains your father and I have gone through to bring out that talent to the fullest. And then you lost two years to that crazy game…I wouldn’t be saying this to you if you were an ordinary child. But you’re not ordinary, are you? It would be a sin to let the talent you have go untapped. You have the ability to go to a great college and receive a first-class education—and that’s what you ought to do. You can take your talents to the government or a business, or you can stay in school and make a living in academia. I’m not going to interfere with your choice. The one thing I will not allow you to do, however, is completely abandon those opportunities.”

  “There’s no such thing as hereditary talent,” Asuna managed to squeeze in when Kyouko stopped her speech for a breath. “You have to seize your own life, don’t you? When I was younger, I thought that getting into a good college and finding a good job was all there was to life. But I changed. I don’t have an answer yet, but I think I’m close to finding out what I really want to do. I want to attend this school for one more year so I can find it.”

 
“Why would you limit your own options? You could spend years at that place and never create any kind of opportunity for yourself. But this transfer location is different. The college it feeds into is excellent, and if your marks are good, you can even get into my graduate school. Listen to me, Asuna—I just don’t want you to make your life miserable. I want you to have a career that you can be proud of.”

  “My career…? Then what was up with that man you forced me to meet at the house over New Year’s? I don’t know what sort of story you fed him…but he seemed to think that we were already engaged. The only one who’s limiting my life options is you, Mother.”

  Asuna couldn’t keep her voice from trembling a bit. She was trying to keep her gaze as level and powerful as possible, but Kyouko only put the sherry to her lips, completely unperturbed.

  “Marriage is a part of a career. Put yourself into a marriage that limits your material freedom, and you’ll regret it in five or ten years. You won’t be able to do those things you say you want to do. You won’t have any trouble with Yuuya in that regard. And there’s much more stability in a family-run regional bank than a megabank with all the internal competition that it involves. I happen to like Yuuya. He’s a good, honest boy.”

  “…You haven’t learned a thing, have you? Don’t forget that the one who started that terrible crime spree, hurt me and many others, and nearly destroyed RCT was your personal choice for me: Nobuyuki Sugou.”

  “Don’t even start,” Kyouko said, grimacing and waving at the air as though swatting an invisible fly. “I don’t want to hear about him. Besides…it was your father who was so enamored with that man that he wanted him for a son-in-law. He’s never been a good judge of character. Don’t worry about Yuuya; he might not be as ambitious or forceful, but that just makes him safer and more stable.”

  It was true that Shouzou, her father, had a bad habit of ignoring those who were closest to him. He focused on running the business first and foremost; even after leaving the CEO position, he was too busy tweaking deals with foreign capital sources to come home anymore. He admitted that it was a weakness of his that he’d been too obsessed with Sugou’s development skills and vast ambitions and didn’t pay any attention to the toxic human personality behind the business acumen.