“Correct…That’s how he forced me to participate in his awful project and manage his physical body while he was in that long-term dive…At least, according to the rest of society. That’s how I avoided prosecution or having my identity made public, and I got to escape to America…”
Rinko put her necklace and shirt back in place, then summoned the courage to continue. “But the truth is different. The explosive they detected at the police hospital was real, and it could have gone off. But I knew that it wouldn’t. It was just camouflage. He put that weapon inside me as a bluff, to ensure that I wouldn’t be tried for my part in the scheme after it was all said and done. It was the only present he ever gave me.”
Asuna’s expression never changed. Her pure, clear eyes seemed to penetrate to the deepest layers of Rinko’s heart. Staring, ever staring.
“Kayaba and I started dating my first year of college, and we were together for six years, until I finished my master’s. But…I suppose I was the only one who believed that. I was older than you are now but far, far stupider. I had no idea what was going on in his mind. I never, ever realized the one thing that he really wanted.”
She glanced out the window at the endless night sea and slowly, bit by bit, began to utter the things that she’d been holding in for the last four years. The name that had brought a sharp pain to her chest just at its recollection slid out of her mouth with surprising ease.
Akihiko Kayaba was already in charge of Argus’s third development team when he went straight into one of the most prestigious engineering schools in Japan. As a high schooler, he had sublicensed a number of game-creation programs that had launched Argus from being a third-tier company to an internationally renowned one, so it wasn’t hard to believe that he’d be placed in a management position there soon after beginning college.
Kayaba’s income at age eighteen was said to be in the hundreds of millions of yen, and the sum total of all his licensing fees thus far had to be astronomical. Inevitably, a number of female students on campus had gone after him in their own ways, but none of them could withstand the liquid-nitrogen gaze that he turned upon anything that did not pique his interest.
So even now, Rinko didn’t understand what it was about a plain, boring, younger girl from the mountains that Kayaba did not reject immediately. Because she was totally unaware of his fame? Because she was smart enough to take part in the Shigemura seminar as a first-year, when he was a year older than her? It was obvious it wasn’t just a physical attraction.
Rinko’s first impression of Kayaba was of a malnourished bean sprout. His face was pale, he wore a ratty old lab coat, and he was almost never seen without observation devices of some kind attached to him. The memory of the day that she’d dragged him to the beaches of Shonan in her little beater car was so vivid, it might as well have been yesterday.
“Some ideas won’t occur to ya till ya see the sun!” she had scolded him in her accent from back home. Kayaba just stared at her in a daze from the passenger seat. Eventually, he had muttered something about needing to emulate the skin sensation of natural sunlight. She had groaned.
It wasn’t until later that she learned about Kayaba’s celebrity, but she wasn’t socially skilled enough to be able to treat him differently because of it. To her, he was just a scrawny guy who needed more nutrition, and every time she visited his apartment, she made sure to feed him some home-cooked food.
Afterward, Rinko often asked herself if the reason he never rejected her was because he wanted her help, and she just never realized it. But every time, she decided the answer was no. Akihiko Kayaba was a man who never sought anything from anyone else. All he wanted was a “world away from here,” the door to a realm that mere mortals could not reach.
Kayaba spoke a few times about a gigantic flying castle in his dreams. That castle was made of countless floors, with each floor containing its own towns, forests, and fields. If you climbed up the long staircases that connected floor to floor, you would eventually reach the top and a dreamlike, beautiful palace…
“And who is there?” Rinko had asked.
Kayaba had smiled and said he didn’t know. “When I was very small, I went to that castle every night in my dreams. Each night, I would climb a different set of stairs, getting closer and closer to the top. But one day, I was no longer able to go there. It was a stupid dream; I almost forgot all about it.”
But the day after Rinko finished her master’s thesis, he left on a journey to that castle in the sky and never came back. He made the castle real with only his own hands, taking ten thousand players up with him and leaving Rinko alone on earth…
“When I found out about the SAO Incident on the news and saw Kayaba’s name and face on the report, I still couldn’t believe it. It wasn’t until I drove past his apartment and saw all the cop cars there that I understood it was real.”
Rinko felt an ache in her throat; it had been ages since she had talked continuously for this long.
“He never said anything to me, all the way to the end. Not a single e-mail when he left. I guess…I was just stupid. I helped with the basic design of the NerveGear, and I knew about the game he was building at Argus. And somehow, I never realized what he was thinking about…When he went missing, and all of Japan was going crazy searching for him, it took a miracle for me to remember. Somehow, I recalled that I had once noticed a strange set of coordinates in the mountains of Nagano in his car nav history. Instinctively, I knew that was the place. If I’d told the police about it right then and there, the SAO Incident might have played out differently…”
Perhaps, if the police had stormed that cabin, Kayaba would have killed all those players with him, as he had originally threatened. But Rinko sensed that it wasn’t her place to say that aloud.
“I evaded police detection and went to Nagano alone. It took me three days to reach the cabin itself, using nothing but my own memory. I was completely covered in mud by the time I found it…But I wasn’t going to those desperate lengths so that I could be his accomplice. I…I was going to kill him.”
Kayaba had greeted her with a look of total bewilderment, the same expression he wore when they had first met. She could still recall the sensation of the heavy, cold survival knife in the hand she held behind her back.
“But…I’m sorry, Asuna. I couldn’t kill him.”
Her voice trembled despite her best efforts, but at least she managed not to cry.
“I feel like anything I say after this will only sound like a lie, no matter how I phrase it. Kayaba knew I was holding a knife. He just said, ‘What am I going to do with you?’ like he always did, put the NerveGear back on, and returned to Aincrad. He’d been in his dive all along, so he was filthy and unshaven, and I saw several IV marks in his arm. I…I…”
Rinko couldn’t go on. She could only breathe, over and over.
Eventually, Asuna said, “Neither I, nor Kirito, have ever once hated or blamed you.”
Rinko looked up with a start into the face of the girl ten years her junior. There was a faint smile there.
“In fact…while I can’t speak for Kirito in this regard, I’ll admit…I don’t even know for certain if I truly hate the guild commander…er, Akihiko Kayaba.”
Rinko recalled that Asuna had been a member of Kayaba’s guild in that fantasy world.
“Yes, it’s true that four thousand people lost their lives in that event. Imagining the sum of all their fear and despair before they died…makes it clear that his actions were unforgivable. But…if I can voice my own very selfish opinion, I think of the short time I spent with Kirito in that world as the very best memories of my life,” Asuna said. Her left hand moved to her waist, making a squeezing motion. “Just as he is guilty of his sin, so am I; and Kirito; and even you, Rinko…And it is not a sin that can be absolved through someone else’s idea of punishment, in my opinion. There might never be a day of forgiveness for them. And that means we must continue to face those sins and acknowledge them.”
&nb
sp; That night, Rinko dreamed of that long-lost time—when she was just an ignorant student.
Kayaba always slept lightly and got up before Rinko. He had slipped out of bed to read the morning paper with a cup of coffee. Once the sun was up, Rinko awoke at last. He gave her the exasperated look of a parent to a child who slept in.
“What am I going to do with you? I can’t believe you came all this way.”
The sound of that gentle voice caused Rinko’s eyes to peel open. She got the sense that a tall figure was standing next to her bed in the dark.
“It’s still the middle of the night…” she grumbled with a grin, and closed her eyes again. The air shifted, and crisp footsteps proceeded toward the door, which she heard open and shut.
Just before she could slip back into sleep, Rinko gasped and shot up to a sitting position.
“!!”
Her pleasant slumber was gone in an instant, her heart pounding away in her chest like an alarm. She couldn’t tell where the dream ended and reality had started. She reached around for the remote to turn on the lights.
The windowless cabin was empty, of course. But Rinko could sense the last vestiges of some human scent.
She got out of bed and hurried barefoot to the door, smacking the control panel hastily to disengage the lock and rush through the opening to the hallway.
The interior corridor, bathed in dim orange light, was empty as far as she could see in both directions.
Was I just dreaming…?
But she could still hear that low, soft voice in her ears. Without realizing it, Rinko clutched the locket she always wore around her neck.
Brazed and sealed inside the locket was the micro-bomb that they’d extracted from above Rinko’s heart. The pendant felt hot against her hand, as if it were giving off a heat of its own.
CHAPTER THREE
ZAKKARIA TOURNAMENT, AUGUST 378 HE
1
What strange children.
The view of those innocent sleeping faces from the wooden beam high overhead prompted the sudden thought.
Two boys were fast asleep on hay piled thick on the floor of the rickety old barn. There wasn’t anything particularly noteworthy about their appearances. The boy on the right, sleeping on his side, had flaxseed blond hair and deep-green eyes, when they were open. Those colors were common enough here in the NNM (Norlangarth Northern Middle) area. His height and weight were within average values for a boy his age.
But the boy on the left, his limbs thrown about with abandon in his sleep, had both hair and eyes of pure black. That was different. Those dark colors were designated to appear with much higher likelihood in the E and S areas. While it was rare for a child to be born with those colors in the north, the probability was still greater than zero. With the total population of the Human Empire as high as it was now, it wasn’t out of the question. His size was so similar to the other boy’s that they might as well have been twins.
Master had given the order to directly observe these two boys 163 days ago, and the result was a bit of a letdown after the long trip from Centoria. Nothing about their appearance or actions suggested talent greater than other units of the same gender, region, and age range. In terms of planning and ability to avoid danger, they seemed below average, in fact.
But now it had been half a year of carefully following their travel, making sure not to be spotted. The rains had passed, and now that summer was waning as well, Master’s interest in these particular boys was becoming clear at last.
That lack of planning and regularity could also be called healthy curiosity and love of adventure. Even after more than two centuries of life, few things had surprised the observer as much as the ingenuity and agency of the black-haired boy. He had nearly broken the Taboo Index’s laws on a number of occasions in the period since the observation had begun and seemed likely to continue doing so.
In a sense, it had to be this way, or else he could not have done what he did. After all, it was otherwise unthinkable that someone could break down one of the eternal barriers that Master’s archrival had placed around the world—and do so in just a matter of days, no less…
Whatever the black-haired boy was dreaming about, his limbs jerked into movement. The hem of the shirt he wore as a pajama top pulled upward. He stopped wriggling, oblivious to his now-exposed stomach. The observer rolled its eyes.
Even in late summer, here at the border of Norlangarth’s north region, the night breeze could chill. The barn was drafty to begin with, so sleeping with exposed skin on top of a bed of hay could very easily cause an illness effect that would slightly downgrade his total life. And tomorrow—August 28th in the year 378 of the Human Era—was the biggest event of the boys’ journey thus far.
They’d made a fair amount of money working at this farm over the summer, so the observer had wanted to tell them to at least spend some of it to stay at an inn on this particular night. But direct contact was absolutely forbidden, and so they were sleeping in this rickety old barn yet again. And look at him now.
…Oh well. I’m sure Master will overlook a tiny bit of meddling.
Atop the beam, the observer waved an arm, muttered an incantation in a tiny voice, and produced a little point of green light, hovering at the fingertip—a wind element.
The observer carefully guided the light downward. It descended right next to the black-haired boy and buried itself about thirty cens into the hay, where it was silently released.
The resulting gust of wind was enough to lift an armful of hay into the air, where it gently settled over the boy’s exposed midriff. It wasn’t much of a blanket, but it would at least shield against the chill of the breeze seeping through the walls.
The observer watched the oblivious boys as they continued to sleep and reflected on this action.
In over two centuries since Master had frozen its life and recast it as a familiar, it had undertaken similar tasks a number of times. But never had there been any attachment to the target above the level of interest. In fact, the observer was not supposed to have emotions at all. It was not, after all, even a human unit of the type that ruled over the human realm or the Underworld as a whole.
It was fine to anticipate that the boy would catch a cold the night before a major test. The problem was, why use arts to interfere, rather than simply stand back and watch? In fact, if the boy fell ill, failed the test, and had to return to his original village, the observer’s stint would be over, allowing it to return to that corner of the bookcase in the great library where it liked to be.
Did that mean…it valued the travel with these boys over the prospect of going home?
It was impossible. It was irrational. It was as though the irregular nature of the youths had infected it.
Enough thinking. This was not part of the job. The only thing that mattered was sticking close and watching until blond Eugeo and black-haired Kirito reached their journey’s destination.
The observer shrank its body down to the minimum size of five mils and leaped off the rafter beam. At this size, there was no life penalty for falling, so arts would not be required. It landed on a straw of hay without a sound and scurried on little legs to its usual spot: the shaggy black hair of the boy named Kirito.
It grabbed a few hairs its own color and fixed itself in place, then felt its small body fill with that inexplicable emotion again.
Peace, calmness, relief, and, somewhere beneath all that, something tiny but rising…No matter how much it pondered, it would never know why.
What strange children, the observer thought again, closed its eyes, and settled into a light sleep.
2
On the morning of the last day of August, the sky was clear.
Kirito stretched and opened his eyes, picked up a single piece of the hay covering him, regarded it with suspicion, then bolted upright. That movement was enough to shake his mind awake. In his hair, the observer stretched, too.
It slid around near the base of the hair and stopped just before th
e bangs. This was the ordinary position. Kirito had a tendency to scratch his head, so care had to be taken on those occasions. Its life was frozen only in the sense of the natural aging process, so bodily damage still took its toll. On the other hand, its maximum life value was far higher than a human’s, and its body retained its toughness even when shrunken, so a little impact would not be a problem.
Kirito rolled out of the pile of hay, unaware that an observer the size of a wheat grain was hiding in his own hair, and placed a hand on his partner’s shoulder to shake him. “Hey, Eugeo, wake up. It’s morning.”
The other boy’s eyelashes, the same color as his hair, fluttered and opened. His green eyes were dull at first, then blinked and crinkled into a weak smile.
“Morning, Kirito…Somehow you always wake up earlier on the important days.”
“Better than the alternative! Come on, up and at ’em! Let’s get the morning work over with so we can practice our forms before we eat. I’m still a little worried about number seven.”
“Why do you think I always tell you we should practice forms, rather than just mock fights all the time? I can’t believe you spent the last night cramming before the day of the tournament…the last morning, even!”
“Noon-cramming, moon-cramming, I don’t care,” Kirito said enigmatically. “You only have to do the form demonstration the one time!”
He picked up a huge armful of the hay that had been his bed a minute earlier and moved it to the large wooden barrel along the wall. Once the barrel was full, he lifted it up and started walking for the entrance.
As soon as he exited the barn, the morning sun blazed into two pairs of eyes. The observer retreated, hiding among the hair. It had spent so long living in dim corners of the great library that it was sensitive to sunlight. But Kirito happily breathed in a lungful of early mist. To no one in particular, he said, “The mornings are a lot cooler now. Good thing I didn’t catch cold before the big day.”