Two Administrators, May 380 HE
It was on November 7th, 2024 that I—Kazuto Kirigaya—escaped
from the VRMMORPG named Sword Art Online .
In mid-December, I finished my physical rehabilitation and
returned home to the city of Kawagoe in Saitama Prefecture. Two
months before that had been my sixteenth birthday, but while all
my old classmates were studying to get into high school, I'd been
busy delving into the labyrinth tower of the fiftieth floor of Aincrad, completely cut off from all formal education.
Fortunately (if you can call it that), my middle school sympathetically offered me a graduation diploma, despite the fact that
I'd finished only half my credits. As long as I took some cram
school courses, I should have been ready to tackle high school a
year late—until the government offered me an unexpected source
of salvation.
Of the roughly six thousand people who returned from SAO
alive, over five hundred were in middle or high school. In April
2025, the government opened a special school just for them in
west Tokyo, free of entrance requirements or tuition, with the
promise of college entrance–exam eligibility once we graduated.
They reused a condemned municipal high school campus that
had been waiting for demolition since the previous year. Many of
the teachers commissioned to work there had already been retired. It was officially classified as a national specialty school.
The comprehensiveness of this safety net paradoxically filled
me with concern, but after consulting with my family and, of
course, Asuna, I decided to enroll. Never once did I regret that
decision. Designing and creating various devices with my new
friends in the mechatronics course was great fun, and I got to see
Asuna, Lisbeth, and Silica every day. Even with the mandatory
weekly counseling session, it was a fulfilling school life.
But once again, I was unable to finish my education.
One year and two months after enrolling, in June of 2026, I
found that my mind had been whisked into the alternate realm
known as the Underworld through means unknown. After waking
up in the forest near a village named Rulid at the far northern
stretches of the human territory, I tried in vain to contact the employees of Rath, the company that developed and operated the
Underworld, and received no answer.
That left me no choice but to attempt to reach a system console that might allow me to contact the outside world—a device
that could only be in Central Cathedral, a tower that belonged to
the Axiom Church and loomed over everything in the land of Centoria, the very heart of the human realm. Thus, I set out on a long
journey from Rulid with my partner, Eugeo, the very first person
I'd met in this world.
After an entire year, by the calendar of the Underworld, we
reached Centoria but did not make it straight into the cathedral.
The Church kept its gates locked shut, letting in only the champion of the annual Four-Empire Unification Tournament.
And so Eugeo and I, chasing the same goal for different reasons, started at the Imperial Swordcraft Academy in the hopes of
winning the right to compete in that very tournament. The classes
were almost all based on swordfighting and magic (or sacred arts
, as they called them), so it was a curriculum I'd never experienced in the real world. That, combined with the novelty of living
in a dorm, made my stay at the academy an interesting one…even
enjoyable, in a way.
But a year and a month after starting school, in May of the
year 380 in the Human Empire calendar, disaster struck, and my
schooling came to an abrupt end. Two male students of elite
noble lineage set up a clever trap to abuse and assault Ronie and
Tiese, our personal pages.
When he discovered the ugly scene, Eugeo managed to break
loose from the shackles that compelled all Underworldians to follow the law, and he drew his sword. He severed noble Humbert's
left arm, and when I arrived, I fought with Raios and cut off both
his hands.
Despite these wounds, both should have survived if they
stopped the bleeding and underwent emergency sacred arts healing, but something very strange happened: Forced to choose between following the Taboo Index that dictated law in this world
and preserving his own life, Raios let out an inhuman wail and
perished…or, more accurately, froze still.
Eugeo and I were banished from the school and led to the dungeon beneath Central Cathedral by an Integrity Knight dispatched by the Church. Undeterred by my third consecutive
dropping out of school, I broke us free, and we wandered the rose
garden within the cathedral grounds in search of a way into the
tower itself. We wound up in battle against a new Integrity Knight
and, in our most desperate moment, found salvation from an unlikely source: a strange little girl named Cardinal.
Living in a mammoth library that was sealed from the inside,
Cardinal sent Eugeo to a hot bath to recover from getting dumped
into a fountain during battle, and then took me aside to reveal the
stunning truth.
The Underworld itself was a simulation of an entire civilization that had been running for over 450 internal years.
And the pontifex, the supreme commander of the almighty
Axiom Church, was once a beautiful girl named Quinella, a resident of this place just like any other.
She mastered the sacred arts—in other words, the program's
system commands—and, in her never-ending thirst for power, finally unearthed the full command list. It launched her from a
simple active agent—a unit within the simulation—into a fullblown system administrator.
With her absolute control over the Underworld, Quinella was
up on the top floor of Central Cathedral even now, looking down
on the world. But could she see me, the interloper who had wandered into her sacred garden…?
I felt a sudden chill rack my body. On the other side of the
round table, Cardinal gave me a pained look. She took a sip of tea
from her cup and adjusted her little spectacles. "It's too early to
tremble in fear."
Somehow, I managed to dispel the cold. "Right…right. Please
continue." I lifted my own cup and slurped the tea, which tasted a
lot like real-world coffee.
The small girl leaned back in her chair and resumed her explanation in her easygoing way. "Two hundred and seventy years
ago, after Quinella succeeded at calling up the entire command
list, the first thing she did was raise her own Authority level to the
maximum, which allowed her to affect the world-controlling Cardinal System itself. Next, she conferred all rights and privileges
afforded only to Cardinal to herself: manipulating terrain and
buildings; generating items; altering the durability of all mobile
units, including human beings…in other words, meddling with
their life itself…"
"Manipulating…life. In other words, changing the limit of
one's life span…" I gasped. The little sage nodded.
"She had broken through. The first thing Quinella did as administrator, at the age of eighty and on death's door, was to completely restore her own life value. Then she stopped its natural
decay process and returned her physical appearance to the radiant beauty of her late teens. You are still young, and male to boot
—I daresay you cannot fathom the nature of her triumphant
joy…"
"Well…I understand that it's one of the wildest dreams of any
woman, I suppose," I said, straight-faced. Cardinal snorted.
"I don't even have human emotions, and I'm glad that my features are fixed in this state. Though if I'm being honest, I'd like to
advance by five or six years…At any rate, Quinella's bliss at having all her ravenous desires fulfilled was nearly unfathomable.
She was able to freely control the vast reach of the Human Empire and had attained eternal youth and beauty. Her jubilation
was…sheer madness. Enough to loosen, just by a bit, her grasp on
sanity…"
Behind the lenses, Cardinal's big eyes narrowed. They seemed
to mock the foolishness of humanity—or perhaps pity it.
"She ought to have been happy with that. But the hole that had
opened in Quinella's heart was bottomless. She didn't know how
to be satisfied…and so she decided she could not condone the existence of the one with privilege equal to hers."
"Meaning…the Cardinal System itself?"
"None other. Indeed, she attempted to eliminate a program
without a conscious will of its own. But…no matter how advanced
her sacred arts were, Quinella was nothing more than an Under-
worldian, far from a resident of a scientific culture. She could not
fathom in a single night the workings of admin-level command
structures. Quinella attempted in vain to decipher the reference
materials saved for Rath engineers…and she made a mistake. One
simple but enormous mistake. She decided to absorb the Cardinal
System itself and chanted a mammoth string of sacred arts. And
as a result…"
She breathed out a sigh, the words tumbling free with her
breath.
"…Quinella burned the prime directive of the Cardinal System
into her own fluctlight, as her own behavioral principle, in a way
that can't be overwritten. She meant to steal its authority level
alone, but instead, she fused her very soul with Cardinal!"
"…Uh…wh-what…?" I mumbled, unable to grasp this concept
in the moment. "What exactly is Cardinal's…prime directive…?"
"The upholding of order. It is the very reason for the Cardinal
System's existence. I'm sure you understand, having been in the
world controlled by that system. Cardinal is constantly observing
the actions of all players like yourself. When it detects a phenomenon that disrupts the balance of the world, it acts mercilessly to
correct it."
"Yeah…that's true. I've spent plenty of time trying to get the
better of Cardinal, but every time I thought I found a hole, it was
always plugged instantly…"
I recalled all the times back in SAO when I thought I'd hit
upon a new farming technique, only for it to fail within moments.
Cardinal, the girl in front of me, grinned proudly. This expression
was the only moment when she truly went from being a wizened
sage to the mischievous girl that her appearance suggested.
"But of course. You little whelps can't possibly get the better of
me, no matter how many of you there are…But Quinella's uphold-
ing of order was far more extreme. With these orders now written
into her fluctlight, she passed out, and did not wake for an entire
day. By then, she was no longer human in any sense of the word.
Never aging, drinking, eating…her only desire was to preserve for
eternity the world she ruled over…"
"Preserve…for eternity…," I mumbled, contemplating the idea.
Every manager of a VRMMO wishes for the game world to
continue into perpetuity, not just the Cardinal System AI. It is
why they fine-tune game economies, items, and monster rates—
to maintain order. But there is one thing that a godlike administrator cannot entirely control: the players.
Could the same thing be said of the Underworld…?
Cardinal sensed my unspoken thought and bobbed her head.
"Once, the Cardinal System of this world controlled just the flora
and fauna, terrain, and climate. In other words, it managed only
the container and allowed the artificial fluctlights within it to go
about their lives unaffected…But Quinella was different. She
wanted to fix even the lives of her subjects into a permanent
state."
"Fix? You mean like…making it so that everyone does the
same thing every day, and nothing new ever happens…?"
"Well…I suppose you could put it that way. Continuing on…
Once Quinella had fused with the Cardinal System, she gave herself a new identity. Now she was the pontifex, the highest officer
of the Axiom Church…and her name would now be Administrator."
I jumped at the mention of that name. "Oh! Yeah, he said that
name, too. The Integrity Knight Eldrie Synthesis…um…"
"Thirty-One."
"Right. He said something about how Administrator, the pontifex, had summoned him from the celestial world to the land…So
he was talking about Quinella…It's, um, quite a name to give
yourself."
To me, the English term administrator was more familiar in
terms of computer control status—admin accounts, say—than its
original meaning. But I couldn't be sure which definition Quinella
had chosen it for.
Cardinal smirked briefly and nodded. "I suppose it is fitting
that she would name herself after the gods of our world…But at
any rate, she was now the administrator in both title and function, and her first edict was to elevate the four major noble lines
of the time into emperors, and split the four directions into four
empires. You have seen the walls that break Centoria into quadrants, I trust?"
I confirmed with a bob of my head. The Swordcraft Academy
was in District Five of North Centoria, the capital of the Norlangarth Empire. From the dorm, I could see the chalk-white walls
that rose higher than any building in the city. I was stunned when
I first learned that those Everlasting Walls were all that separated
us from the capitals of other empires.
"Those walls were not constructed by granite blocks, mined
and assembled over decades. The Administrator used her godly
powers to summon them in an instant."
"…An…an instant ?! Those walls?! That's got to be beyond the
scope of sacred arts…Didn't that stun all the people of Centoria…?"
"Of course. That was the point. She used the power of the Cardinal System to impress fear into the hearts of the citizens.
Through this mental barrier, and the literal barrier of the Everlasting Walls, she could limit the flow and mingling of the people.
That way, the Axiom Church had control over the passage of in-
formation, and thus a better grip upon the people's minds. She
wanted the people to be ignorant, pliable, faithful servants of the
Church in perpetuity…And those preposterous walls weren't the
only physical barriers she erected. In order to limit the frontier
expansion happening in all directions, Administrator placed
many massive terrain obstacles in their way—unbreakable rocks,
bottomless swamps, uncrossable rapids, unfellable trees…"
"W-wait. Trees…you can't cut down?"
"Correct. A cedar of nearly unfathomable size, with practically
unlimited priority and durability."
I thought of the tear-inducing hardness of the demonic Gigas
Cedar and rubbed my palms together under the table.
So the Gigas Cedar wasn't a natural growth south of Rulid but
an artificial roadblock placed by the Administrator, intended to
prevent the residents from expanding their territory and activity
by refusing to budge and sucking up local resources.
And there were other features like that out in the world.
Things that people had wasted centuries of hard work in a futile
attempt to eliminate…
When I looked up, the little girl was once again gazing at me
with all-knowing eyes. Her tiny lips opened to continue the lesson.
"…And thus, under the control of the all-powerful Administrator, a very long time of peace and idleness came to pass. Twenty
years, thirty…The people lost their spirit of ambition, the nobles
fell into slovenly greed, and the heroic swordsmen of old sank to
the level of a stage show. You have seen these things for yourself.
For forty years, then fifty, Administrator gazed down at the lukewarm state of the human world and felt deep, deep satisfaction…"
It must have been like gazing upon the complete, pristine
ecosystem of an aquarium. I recalled the fascinating entertainment I got from my ant farm kit as a boy and felt uncomfortable.
Cardinal reminisced as well, then glanced back at me and said
firmly, "But there cannot be eternal stasis in any system. There
are always events, incidents…Seventy years after Quinella became
Administrator, she realized something had changed within her.
Her conscious mind blanked out for short periods; even when she
was awake, memories from the past few days became unavailable
to her, and those perfectly memorized system commands
wouldn't always spring to her tongue. These were grave phenomena. Administrator used her control commands to examine her
own fluctlight in detail…and the results stunned her. She had
reached the limit of her memory-holding capacity."
"L-limit?!" I yelped. This was a shock. I'd never heard that
there was an upper limit to the amount of data—the amount of
memory—a soul could hold.
"Is it so unbelievable? There is a physical limit to the size of
the lightcube that holds a fluctlight, just as there is to a biological
brain. Therefore, the number of quantum bits storing information is also limited," Cardinal explained matter-of-factly.
I held up my hand and pleaded, "W-wait, wait. Uh…you keep
mentioning these 'lightcubes.' Am I supposed to believe the Underworldians' fluctlights are stored on those?"
"What, you didn't know that? A lightcube is an actual cube,
two inches to a side. Each one is the exact size to contain a fluctlight, and the storage requires no system resources. They are
gathered in what is called the Lightcube Cluster, measuring about
ten feet to a side."
"S-so, uh…if they're two inches, then ten feet means…," I
mumbled, trying to calculate the total number. Cardinal provided
it for me.
"Theoretically, the total would be two hundred and sixteen
thousand cubes. But because the Main Visualizer is contained at
the center of the cluster, the actual number is fewer."
"Two hundred and sixteen thousand…So that's basically the
upper limit of the Underworld's population…"
"Yes. And there's still plenty of room to go, so if you feel like
finding a girl and adding to the number, there will be empty
lightcubes to spare."
"Ahh…H-hey, who said anything about that?!" I protested. The
young sage gave me a piercing look, then returned to the topic at
hand.
"…However, as I mentioned, each lightcube will eventually
reach its full capacity, given enough time. Administrator had already lived an impossible one and a half centuries since her birth
as Quinella. The dam that contained all those years of memories
finally began to leak, causing errors in her ability to save, store,
and replay memories."
It was a chilling concept that struck home. I'd already built up
two years of memory in this accelerated world. It would mean
that even if I only spent months, or days, in here, my soul itself
was still logging that information toward its eventual end.
"Have no fear. Your fluctlight still has plenty of blank space
available," Cardinal pointed out with a smirk, reading my
thoughts yet again.
"H-hey…that makes it sound like my head is totally empty…"
"If I am an encyclopedia, you are a picture book," she said
smugly, taking a sip of tea and clearing her throat. "Continuing
on. Faced with this unexpected issue of memory limits, the Administrator panicked. Unlike the easily controlled numerical
value of life, this was a finite resource that could not be avoided.
But she was not the kind of woman to accept this fate without a
fight. Just as when she stole the throne of God, she came up with
yet another diabolical solution…"
She grimaced, set her cup down, and folded her little cattleyaflower hands atop the table.
"…At the time…which was two hundred years ago, there was a
girl studying sacred arts as a sister-in-training in the lower levels
of Central Cathedral, a girl just ten years old. Her name…I have
forgotten. She was born to a furniture maker in Centoria and,
through the whims of random value settings, wound up with a
slightly higher system access authority than others. Thus, she
wound up selected for the Calling of a holy woman. A skinny,
scrawny girl with brown eyes and brown curls…"
I blinked and reexamined Cardinal's appearance. She seemed
to be describing herself.
"Administrator brought that girl to her chamber on the top
floor of the cathedral and gave her the beatific smile of a holy
mother. Then she said, 'You're going to be my child now. A child
of God who will lead the world.' In a sense, she was right—in the
sense that I would inherit the information of her soul. But it had
nothing to do with the love of mother and child…Administrator
attempted to overwrite that girl's fluctlight with her own fluctlight's thoughts and crucial memories."
"Wha…?"
Yet again, a chill crawled up my spine. Overwriting the soul.
Even the phrase was horrifying. I rubbed my sweaty palms together and struggled to work my jaw into producing speech.
"B-but…if she's able to perform such complex fluctlight manipulations, why didn't she just erase the memories she didn't
need?"
"Would you take your most important files and crack them
open for editing?" she shot back. I faltered and had to shake my
head.
"N-no…I'd make a backup first."
"Exactly. When the Administrator imprinted the Cardinal System's directives into her mind, she lost consciousness for a day
and night. That is how dangerous manipulating one's own fluctlight is. What if one attempts to organize one's memories and
causes damage to crucial data? Instead, she took over the soul of
a young girl with plenty of extra memory capacity, and once she
was satisfied that the replication worked, she planned to discard
her original, worn-out soul. She was very thorough and very careful…but that is when the Administrator…when Quinella made her
second great mistake."
"Mistake…?"
"Yes. Because when she took over the girl and scrapped her
old self, there would be a single instant when there existed two
gods with equal power at the same time. Administrator meticulously plotted and arranged a devilish ceremony…a fusing of soul
and memory in what she called a Synthesis Ritual…and succeeded in seizing another fluctlight. I waited…how I waited for
that moment…for seventy long years!!" she shouted, her features
strained with slight agitation. I just stared at her, dumbfounded.
"Um…hang on. Then…who are you? Who's the Cardinal I'm
talking to now?"
"Don't you understand yet?" she asked, pushing her glasses
up. "You are familiar with my original version, Kirito? Tell me the
features of the Cardinal System."
"Uh…well…"
I thought hard, summoning my memories of Aincrad. It was
an autonomous management program that Akihiko Kayaba developed to run his game of death, SAO . Meaning…
"…It's meant to run automatically for long periods of time
without human correction or maintenance…?"
"Indeed. And to achieve that…"
"To achieve that, it has two core programs—a main process
that performs the balancing functions and a subprocess that performs error-checking on the main…"
I paused, my mouth hanging open, and stared at the little girl
with the curly hair.
The Cardinal System's powerful error-correcting process
should have been old news to me. Yui, the AI that Asuna and I
took in as a daughter during our time in SAO , was a subordinate
program of Cardinal, and I'd had to fight desperately to protect
her when the system recognized her as foreign and mercilessly attempted to delete her.
In actual terms, I only accessed the SAO program space
through the system console, searched for the files that made up
Yui, compressed them, and turned them into an in-game object,
but it was practically a miracle that I managed to do that much in
the mere seconds that I had before Cardinal detected my access
and shut me out. The massive presence that I was fighting on the
other side of that holo-keyboard was Cardinal's error-correction
process…meaning it was the sweet-looking girl sitting across
from me now?
While I grappled with that complex rush of emotions, Cardinal
sighed, as if dealing with a particularly dense child, and said,
"You've finally put it together. It was not one single fundamental
directive that Quinella wrote into her soul. The main process told
her to maintain the world . And the subprocess ordered her…to
correct the mistakes of the main process ."
"Correct…the mistakes?"
"When I was an unconscious program, all I did was endlessly
examine the data the main process spit out. But once I gained a
personality as Quinella's 'shadow mind,' so to speak, I didn't just
check for redundant code anymore; I had to judge my own actions. You might call it…multiple personalities."
"Then again, in the real world there are those who say that
multiple personalities are a thing that only exists in fiction."
"Is that so? But it is very real to me. Only when Quinella's consciousness faltered the slightest bit could my cogitation process
surface. And so I thought…this woman named Administrator has
committed massive mistakes."
"A…mistake…?" I repeated. If maintaining the world was the
basis of Cardinal's main process, it seemed that no matter how
extreme Quinella's choices were, she was perfectly aligned with
that directive.
But Cardinal stared right back into my eyes and intoned,
"Then I ask you. Did the Cardinal System in the world you knew
ever once do direct harm to a player?"
"Er…no, it didn't. It was the player's ultimate enemy, yes…but
it didn't unfairly attack any players directly. Sorry, point taken," I
said. She snorted.
"But that is what she did. She meted out a punishment crueler
than death to those who doubted her Taboo Index or expressed
rebellion toward her order…but I will tell you about that in detail
later. On those few occasions I awoke from my sleep as the Cardinal System's subprocess, I determined that Administrator's existence was one enormous error and attempted to destroy it. Three
times I attempted to jump from the top floor of the tower, twice I
tried to stab myself in the heart with a knife, and twice I used sacred arts to burn myself. If a single action could reduce her life to
zero, even the pontifex would not escape oblivion."
The sound of these ghastly statements coming from such a
precious little girl stunned me. Cardinal barely batted an eye as
she continued, "The last one was the closest. I unleashed the
strongest of all sacred arts attacks, and the torrent of lightning
blasted Administrator's vast life amount down to just a single
digit. Then the main process regained control of the body…and at
that point, anything less than death was effectively nothing.
Within moments, she had restored all health with the right commands. And that incident was enough for Administrator to feel
threatened by her unconscious subprocess at last. When she realized that my moments of control came during instances of fluctlight conflict—meaning, mental instability—she used a preposterous means to lock me up for good."
"Preposterous…?"
"From her birth until she was chosen to serve Stacia, Administrator had been human. She had enough emotion to find flowers
beautiful and music enjoyable. That humane side of her from
childhood had been relegated to deep in her soul ever since she
became the ultimate ruler of this world. She determined that the
infinitesimal unrest she felt during spontaneous events was
caused by that emotion of hers. So she used the admin commands
for directly manipulating lightcube fluctlights to eliminate her
own emotional circuits."
"Uh…when you say eliminate her circuits, you mean she destroyed part of her own soul?" I asked, chilled.
Cardinal nodded, frowning.
"B-but that's crazy," I continued. "It sounds way more dangerous than even that fluctlight copying experiment you described…"
"She did not just pop right into her soul and do it, of course. It
was the Administrator's style to be aggravatingly cautious in mat-
ters like this. Have you noticed that the people of this world have
hidden parameters that are not displayed on their Stacia Windows?"
"Y-yes, I suspected as much…I've seen several people whose
appearance didn't reflect their strength and agility…," I replied,
thinking of Sortiliena, whom I'd served as a page for my year in
the academy. She was so slender that she seemed fragile, yet
she'd bowled me over multiple times when we clashed.
And yet this little girl, who looked far weaker than her, possessed a bottomless well of imposing presence and power. Her
hat bobbed. "Yes. Among those hidden parameters is a value
called the violation index . It is a numerical representation of
each civilian's degree of obedience to the law as measured
through their statements and actions. It was probably created for
outside observers to easier monitor the in-simulation subjects…
but Administrator quickly discovered that she could utilize this
value to sniff out those people who were skeptical of her Taboo
Index. To her perfect world, these people were like bacteria
sneaking into a sterilized clean room. She wanted to exterminate
them all at once, but she could not break the rule forbidding murder that her parents had impressed upon her as a small child. So
Administrator attempted a horrifying experiment that would not
kill those with a high violation index but still render them harmless…"
"And…that's the punishment crueler than death that you mentioned?"
"Indeed. As experimental subjects for her fluctlight-manipulation rituals, she chose people with a high violation index. What
information was stored where on the lightcube? Which spot
should you tinker with to cause loss of memory, loss of emotion,
loss of thought? Hideous, inhuman experiments that even the observers in the outside world hesitated to attempt," she said, ending in a whisper.
Goose bumps rose on my arms.
Her face looked downcast, and her voice was quiet, stifled. "…
Most of those used for the original experiments did not emerge
with any personality to speak of. They merely breathed, nothing
more. Administrator froze their bodies and life and stored them
in the cathedral. Over time, she gained experience in manipulating fluctlights, and when she was ready to lock out her own emotional side to keep me away, she had learned plenty after copious
tests on the people she'd brought to the tower. At the time, she
was about a hundred years old."
"…Was she successful?"
"You could say she was. It didn't eliminate all her emotions,
but the experiment did manage to remove fear, shock, and anger
—feelings that might cause momentary impulses. Since then, Administrator has never been shaken by any situation, no matter
what. She is like a god…no, like a machine. A being that maintains the world, keeps it stable, keeps it stagnant…I was banished
to a distant corner of her soul, never to reappear on the surface.
Until the moment she turned one hundred and fifty, when her
fluctlight hit its maximum storage and she took over the soul of
that poor girl."
"But…based on everything you've told me, the soul that Administrator put into that furniture-maker's daughter was just a
copy, right? So the emotions of that soul should've been limited
from the start…How were you able to rise to the surface at that
moment?" I asked. Cardinal's eyes traveled somewhere distant,
likely through the mind-numbing span of two hundred years of
time.
Very faintly, she said, "My vocabulary…does not have the
words to properly describe that moment…the horrifying eeriness
of it all…Administrator summoned the furniture-maker's girl to
the top floor of the cathedral and attempted the Synthesis Ritual
on her, to overwrite her soul. It worked successfully. The girl's
unnecessary memories were deleted, replaced by a compressed
version of Administrator's—of Quinella's—mind. Her original
plan, once she was sure it had been successful, was for the
maxed-out Quinella to eliminate her own soul…However…"
Cardinal's cheeks, which were normally a healthy red, were
now as white as paper, I noticed. Despite her claim that she had
no emotions, it seemed she was grappling with a deep, inescapable fear right then.
"…However, when the replication was complete and both bodies opened their eyes at close range…there was a kind of tremendous shock. I suppose…it was something like a sense of aversion,
of wrongness…that, impossibly, there were two of the exact same
person in existence. I…no, we …stared at each other, then felt an
abrupt surge of hostility. Something that said the other could not
be allowed to exist…It was more than an emotion—it was an impulse…something like a fundamental rule that must be acknowledged in the deepest core of the sentient mind. If that situation
were allowed to continue, I daresay that both our souls would
have obliterated themselves in their inability to withstand the
truth. But…in the end, that did not happen, as disappointed as I
am to admit it. The fluctlight copied onto the furniture-maker's
daughter was the first to shatter, and in that instant, I seized control as the sub-personality. Thus, we recognized each other as Administrator in Quinella's body and the Cardinal subprocess in the
girl's body. Our souls stopped collapsing and stabilized."
Soul collapse.
This phrase seemed to perfectly match the stomach-churning,
eerie experience I'd witnessed just two nights before. I crossed
swords with Raios Antinous, first-seat elite disciple at Swordcraft
Academy, and severed both his hands with a Serlut-style Ring
Vortex. This could easily be fatal in the real world, but he would
have survived in the Underworld if given prompt treatment. I
moved to clamp down the wounds to stop the bleeding and preserve his life—his numerical hit points, as this world defined
them.
But before I could help him, Raios let out a horrifying scream,
fell to the floor, and perished. Blood still flowed from his stumps,
meaning that his life wasn't yet at zero. Raios had died of some
cause that was not the elimination of his life value.
He had been placed in a quandary where he could either protect his life or uphold the Taboo Index, but not both. Unable to
choose, he apparently got stuck in an infinite mental loop, until
his very soul self-destructed.
I imagined that what happened to Quinella when faced with
her copy was fundamentally the same. The terror of knowing that
someone else possessed all your memories and thought the exact
same way must have been beyond imagination.
For the first few days after I awoke in the forest near Rulid, I
was unable to determine beyond a doubt that I was the real
Kazuto Kirigaya and not just an artificial fluctlight copied from
my mind. Until the moment Selka the church girl helped me confirm I could defy the ultimate set of laws in this land, I had feared
that possibility.
What if my mind was set adrift in infinite darkness and I
heard my own familiar voice say, "You're a replica of me. An experimental test subject that can be erased with the press of a key."
How shocking, how confusing, how terrifying that would be…
"Do you understand everything so far?" The voice across the
table sounded like a wizened instructor. I looked up, realizing
that I'd been busy frying my brain, and made a vague gesture.
"Um…yeah, kind of…"
"I am finally about to get to the part of my lesson most relevant to you. I cannot have you struggling to keep up."
"The most relevant part? Oh…right. I still haven't heard what
you actually want me to do."
"Yes. I have been waiting for two hundred years for the chance
to explain this to you…So, I was at the point where I split off from
Administrator," Cardinal said, twirling the empty teacup in her
hands. "At last, I had gained a body of flesh all my own. Technically, it belonged to a poor girl who'd been training to be a nun…
but she vanished entirely in the moment that her lightcube's data
were overwritten. Once I was born through that cruel ritual and
unexpected accident, I stared at Administrator for point-three
seconds before I finally took the action that needed to be taken. I
attempted to erase her with the highest level of sacred arts. I was
a perfect copy of Administrator, so I had the same level of system
access. If I struck first, I calculated that even if she fought back
with a spell of the same level, I could consume all her life points
before the spatial resources went dry. My first attack landed, and
things went as I expected after that. The top floor of Central
Cathedral was racked by thunder and lightning, gales of wind,
and flames and ice blades as our respective life points steadily
dropped from the damage. We were losing life at exactly the same
pace…meaning that since I had drawn first blood, I should have
emerged victorious in the end."
I tried to imagine a battle between god and god, and shivered.
The only attacking sacred arts I knew were the very simple kinds
I'd used in battle against Eldrie, simple manifestations of the element in question. They were less powerful than a sword swing,
better for covering fire or blinding a target. Using them to wipe
out another person's life…?
"Huh? Hang on. You just said that Administrator couldn't
commit murder. Shouldn't that limitation also apply to you, too,
since you're her copy? How were you able to attack each other?"
Cardinal looked slightly peeved that she'd been interrupted at a
particularly dramatic part of her story, but she obliged anyway.
"Ah…that is a good question. As you said, Administrator was
not bound by the Taboo Index of her own creation, but she could
not break the rule against killing from Quinella's childhood. Even
after years and years of study, I have not discovered the reason
that we artificial fluctlights are totally unable to disobey our
higher orders…but this phenomenon is not as absolute as you
might believe."
"…Meaning…?"
"For example…"
Cardinal moved her right hand, holding the teacup, over the
table. But rather than set it on the saucer, she made to set it down
on an empty bit of tablecloth—except that her arm paused right
before it made contact.
"I cannot lower the cup any farther than this."
"Huh?" I gaped.
She scowled and explained, "When I was young, my mother—
Quinella's mother, I mean—taught me that a teacup must be
placed on the saucer. It was a very minor rule, but one that still
holds power. The only truly great crime was murder, but there are
seventeen other taboos still active, including such silly rules as
this one. I cannot lower my arm any farther than this, and if I try,
I will feel a terrible pain within my right eye."
"…Right…eye…"
"But even this is significantly different from what ordinary
civilians feel. They cannot fathom the idea of placing the cup anywhere but the saucer in the first place. In other words, they are
ignorant of the fact that these absolute boundaries are shaping
their minds. Of course, such ignorance can be bliss…"
Cardinal put on a wry, self-deprecating grimace that was completely at odds with her childlike appearance—a sign that she recognized her artificial roots. She returned her arm to its usual position.
"Now, Kirito…does this look like a teacup to you?"
"Eh?" I squawked, staring at the empty cup in Cardinal's hand.
It was white porcelain, with simple curves and a plain handle.
Aside from a single navy blue line around the rim, there was no
decoration.
"Uh…sure, it looks like a teacup. I mean, it had tea in it…"
"Aha. And how about now?"
She tapped the rim of the cup with her free hand. Once again,
liquid filled the cup from the base, sending up a column of white
steam. But the smell was different this time—my nose twitched. It
was too rich and tangy to be tea. No, this was cream of corn soup.
Cardinal tilted the cup so that I could crane my neck and see
inside. As I expected, the contents were thick and pale yellow.
There was even a crispy crouton floating in it.
"C-corn soup! Thanks, I was just feeling hungry…"
"I'm not asking you what's in it, fool! What is the container?"
"Err…well…I mean…"
The cup hadn't changed in the least since the previous moment. But now that she mentioned it, it did seem a little too simple, a little too big, a little too thick to be a typical teacup.
"Uh…a soup cup?" I guessed. Cardinal grinned and nodded.
"Yes. Now it is a soup cup. There is soup in it."
And to my shock, she set down the cup right on the tablecloth
with a little thump.
"Wha…?!"
"See? In a sense, the taboos inflicted upon artificial fluctlights
are very soft and vague. Simply changing one's subjective viewpoint makes them easy to overturn."
"…"
Stunned, I revisited the scene in the dorm from two days before. The very moment I had burst into the bedroom, Raios was
about to bring his sword down on the prostrate Eugeo. If I hadn't
blocked it with my weapon, he would certainly have cut Eugeo's
head from his shoulders.
Obviously, killing was the greatest of taboos. But to Raios in
that moment, Eugeo was not a fellow human being but a criminal
guilty of violating the Taboo Index. By viewing the situation in
that light, he easily circumvented that soul-etched command.
Eventually, I heard a creak from the back of the other chair at
the table. Cardinal had lifted her tea/soup cup to her lips. The
meat bun and sandwich I'd eaten many minutes ago had already
been converted to life points, and my empty stomach clenched
up.
"…May I have some of that?"
"You are a greedy fellow, aren't you? Give me your cup," she
said, exasperated. She leaned over to the cup I was holding out
and tapped on the rim. The empty receptacle filled up with that
fragrant creamy yellow liquid.
I drew it back quickly, blew on the steam, and then sipped it. A
rich, familiar taste filled my mouth, and I closed my eyes to savor
it. The Underworld had a soup with a similar flavor, but it had
been two years since I had an honest-to-God cream of corn soup.
I took another sip or two and exhaled with satisfaction, and
Cardinal took that as her cue to continue.
"Now, as I just demonstrated, a simple change of perspective
can allow me to overturn the taboos that bind me. We—Administrator and I—did not view each other as humans in that moment
of battle. To me, she was a broken system that threatened the
world, and to her, I was an annoying virus that could not be
deleted…We spared no effort to eliminate the other's life, using
sacred arts of the maximum power possible. In just two or three
more blows, I would have destroyed Administrator or, at the very
least, ensured our mutual death."
Her lips pursed, reliving the memories of regret and frustration. "But…but then, right at the end, that devious witch recalled
the one definitive difference between us."
"Definitive difference…? But I thought the only thing that separated you two was your appearances. You had the same system
access level and knew all the same commands, right?"
"Indeed. While we fought with sacred arts, it was clear that I
would win in the end, thanks to my successful initiative. And so…
she abandoned her spells. She converted one of the many highpriority objects in the chamber into a weapon, and then designated the very space where we fought as an invalid address for
system commands."
"B-but…wouldn't she be unable to undo the order?"
"Exactly. Not unless she left that space. When she started
chanting the command to generate a weapon, I realized what she
was up to. But there was nothing I could do. Once I was unable to
make a command, I could not undo it, either…So I was forced to
join her in generating a weapon and attempted to finish her off
with physical damage."
Cardinal paused, then lifted the staff leaning against the table.
She extended it toward me without a word, and, surprised, I
reached out to take it. The instant I was the one supporting it, the
unbelievable weight yanked at my arm, and it took both hands to
set the fragile-looking stick down on the table. The staff thudded
loudly on the surface, clearly possessing a priority level at least as
high as my sword or Eugeo's.
"I see…so not only is your sacred arts level godly, but so is
your weapon-equipping level," I noted, rubbing my wrist. Cardinal shrugged, as if this was obvious.
"Administrator didn't just copy her memory and thought
processes but all her authority levels, life points, and everything
else. The sword she fashioned and my staff there were completely
equal in strength. Even without sacred arts, I still believed that I
would win a physical battle in the end. But once I held my staff, I
realized Administrator's plan at last, and the definitive quality
that separates us…"
"You keep mentioning that. What is it?"
"It's quite simple. Just look at my body."
She opened the front of her thick robe to reveal a white blouse,
black pants, and white high socks. In stark contrast to her ancient
scholar's manner, she had the fragile, weak body of a little girl.
I looked away on instinct, sensing that I had just seen something I wasn't meant to view, and asked, "What is it…about your
body…?"
She folded the robe closed again and growled, "How dense can
you be? Imagine that your mind was put in this body. Your eye
level and arm's reach would be totally different. Do you think you
could use your sword the same way you did before?"
"…Oh…"
"Until that point, I had been in Quinella's body, which was
very tall for a woman. During our exchanges of sacred arts attacks, I hadn't noticed it much…but it wasn't until I held my staff
and prepared to intercept her attack that I realized what a desperate situation I'd been placed in."
Now that I saw it from her perspective, I recognized the truth
of that statement. Among the many VRMMOs out there, choosing
an avatar with a vastly different size profile from your real body
was disorienting, and it took a considerable amount of time and
experience before close-quarters combat felt comfortable again.
"…So what is the height difference between you and Administrator, anyway…?"
"At least a foot and a half. I can still picture her expression, the
way she looked down on me and smiled. Our battle resumed just
after that, but within two or three strikes, I had to admit that my
chances for victory were all but gone…"
"And…then what happened?"
I was here talking to her now, so obviously she'd somehow
pulled through, but I held my breath like the story was unfolding
before my eyes.
"Administrator had the advantage, but she made one simple
mistake. If she had actually locked the doorway before she nullified all system commands within the chamber, she would have
easily slaughtered me then and there. With my lack of human
emotions"—I chose not to point out that she looked visibly upset
right now—"I determined that immediate escape was necessary
and darted for the door like a rabbit. With each scrape from Administrator's sword to my back, I felt my life depleting…"
"Wow…that's scary…"
"You may find yourself in the same situation, after two years
and two months of drooling over every woman you've met."
"I…I wasn't drooling!" I protested, rubbing my mouth at this
unexpected assault on my character. "W-wait, hang on. Two years
and two months…? You haven't been watching me all along, have
you?"
"Of course I have. Yes, it was only twenty-six months out of
my two centuries, but even then, it was far longer than I expected."
"Wha…?"
I was stunned. Every single thing I'd done on the way here had
been observed by this little sage? I didn't think much of it would
be worthy of embarrassment, but I also couldn't be sure that none
of it was. I didn't have time now to go back and reflect on twoplus years of memories…or so I told myself.
"W-well, we can get back to that later. Anyway…how did you
escape from the Administrator?"
"Hmph. Well, I escaped out of her chamber door on the top
floor of Central Cathedral, thus restoring my access to sacred
arts, but it did not change the situation. If I tried to attack with
spells again, she could just label the hallway a no-commands zone
as well. The only thing that changed was that my method of escape went from running to flight. In order to regroup and recover, I had to flee to a place where her attacks could not reach
me."
"Yeah, but…she's literally the administrator of this entire
world, right? Can there be a place that she can't get to?"
"Being the administrator of the game might make her a god in
a sense, but she is not truly omnipotent. There are just two places
in this world that she cannot go."
"Two…?"
"One is the place beyond the End Mountains…the Dark Territory, as the humans call it. The other is the Great Library, where
we are now. In fact, this library is a space she created herself, a
kind of external memory storage when she learned that there was
a limit to her memory. It contains all the system commands and a
vast amount of data relating to the Underworld. Therefore, she
decided that no person aside from her should ever be allowed to
set foot in it. Administrator fashioned it so that despite being located within the cathedral tower, it occupies its own isolated
space, with no connection outward. There is only one doorway in,
and only she—no, only she and I know the command to get
through."
"Aha…," I murmured, looking around the Great Library again,
with its countless aisles, staircases, and bookshelves. The
rounded walls looked like nothing but unbroken brick patterns.
"Then, beyond that wall is…"
"Nothing. The wall itself is indestructible, but even if you
could tear it down, you would find only an empty void beyond."
Briefly, I wondered what would happen if you jumped into
that void. Then I shook my head and asked, "Is that door you
mentioned the thing we passed through to get here from the rose
garden?"
"No, that is something I created far later. Until two hundred
years ago, there was a large set of double doors in the center of
the lowest level. During my desperate flight from Administrator, I
chanted the spell to call forth that door—and even I had to start
over twice. Once I finished the command at last, the door appeared at the end of the hallway, and I plunged through it, then
closed and locked it."
"Locked it? But if you and Administrator had the same authority level, couldn't she just open it right after you?"
"Indeed. But fortunately for me, while locking the library door
from the inside is as simple as turning a key, it requires a very
long and tedious unlocking art from the outside. Through the
door, I could hear Administrator's cold and hateful voice chanting
the unlocking command while I was busy casting a new spell of
my own. I saw the lock turning counterclockwise just at the moment I finished my own chant…"
Cardinal clutched herself, reliving the memory. It was a twohundred-year-old event, and yet I felt a chill just imagining it. I
finished the last of the corn soup and summoned up the courage
to ask, "Were you chanting a spell…to destroy the door?"
"Precisely. I obliterated the great doors, the only entrance to
the cathedral's Great Library. In that instant, this place became
unmoored from the outside world…thus allowing me to escape
Administrator's wrath."
"…And why didn't she just create another door…?"
"What did I tell you earlier? Administrator first created the entire library, including the door, and then ripped it loose from the
physical space of the cathedral. The spatial coordinates of this
place as registered with the system are constantly switching
through unused space at random. Unless she can precisely predict the correct numbers, it is impossible to breach this place
from the outside."
"I see…but the coordinates of Central Cathedral are fixed, so
you can open a hallway from here to the outside."
"Exactly. But because any door I create, once opened, will immediately be sniffed out by Administrator's agents, I cannot use
them twice. Just like what happened with the rose garden door I
used to scoop up you and Eugeo."
"Th-thanks for that…," I said, bowing. The little sage chuckled,
then looked up to the domed ceiling of the library. She narrowed
her eyes and said, in careful reflection, "…I fought against an
error that needed correcting, and I lost. I ran in disgrace to this
hiding place…and I have spent the two centuries since on observation and consideration…"
"…Two centuries…"
But of course, I'd only lived seventeen and a half years in the
real world, plus two years of accelerated time in the Underworld.
With less than twenty under my belt, it was impossible for me to
fathom that length of time. I could only imagine the vague expanse of history.
The little girl sitting across from me had lived through that virtually infinite span, surrounded by nothing but silent mounds of
books in this vast library, without even a mouse to interact with,
much less another person. It was a totally unfathomable isolation
from the world, something the word solitary didn't even begin to
describe. If I had been in the same situation, I would never have
lasted two centuries. I would have opened the door to the outside,
even knowing it meant certain oblivion.
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 halfsleeping 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…?"
"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 de-
fense 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…"
"…An observation unit…," I muttered, looking at the bookshelf
Charlotte had vanished into. Her mission was simply to watch the
actions of the two of us. But for the two years since leaving Rulid,
Charlotte had been tugging on my hair and occasionally whisper-
ing her own advice to me. In a sense, she'd been a closer companion during this journey than even Eugeo.
Thank you , I whispered inside my mind, bowing toward the
shelf. Then I looked back to Cardinal and said, "So basically…
you've been stuck here in the Great Library, using familiars as
your eyes and ears, searching for a possible human helper for
over two centuries…?"
"Correct. I cannot view the violation index of individual humans from here. I have to keep an ear open for rumors of strange
events, then send observers out to watch the people who were
likely to have caused them. It is a very tedious, laborious process.
More than once or twice, I have found promising people, only to
see them hauled off and made into Integrity Knights. I have no
emotions, but I've certainly learned enough about disappointment and patience. In fact…in the last decade, I've even begun
understanding the concept of resignation," she said, her lips
turned upward into a grin weighted with two centuries of life.
"While I sat back and watched the world, Administrator has
been busy creating a proactive system of defense, securing powerful knights to do her bidding. In fact, that is the true purpose of
the Four-Empire Unification Tournament that you and Eugeo
sought to enter."
"…So the warrior who wins that tournament doesn't earn the
glory of being promoted to Integrity Knight…"
"He or she is forced into becoming one. Their prior memories
are placed behind a wall, and they become powerful, unthinking
puppets for the pontifex's bidding. The families that produce Integrity Knights are given eye-popping payments and elite noble
titles, so those lower nobles and merchants are happy to teach
their children the sword, even if ultimate success means they will
never see those sons or daughters again. The knights themselves
are assigned to duties that will ensure they do not make accidental contact with those families. They are cut off from their pasts."
"…So that's what you meant when you said they were intentionally isolated…"
"Yes, I was speaking of this system. Of the thirty-one Integrity
Knights, half were brought in for violating a taboo, and the other
half were tournament champions. Eldrie Synthesis Thirty-One
was the latter."
"I see…So that's how it works…," I said, exhaling gloomily.
So it was actually a good thing that neither Sortiliena, the student I served as page, or Eugeo's Golgorosso had been triumphant at this year's tourney. If Sortiliena had beaten Eldrie
and gone on to win, then I would have encountered her in the
rose garden as an Integrity Knight with her memory removed.
And there was more. If the incident with Raios and Humbert
had never happened, and Eugeo and I had become school champions as we'd planned and then gone through the tournament
and won—or if we'd never escaped those cells and had been taken
in for questioning—then Eugeo could have ended up as the thirtysecond Integrity Knight, even if my natural fluctlight kept me
safe. We would have fallen right into a terrible trap. I shivered.
Cardinal quietly went on. "Over these two centuries, Administrator has steadily shored up her defenses, while I have nearly
lost all hope. So yes, I began to wonder why I was even bothering…"
Her brown eyes stared up at the distant ceiling of the library.
She blinked a few times, as though imagining warm sunlight
streaming from the cold rock dome.
"…The world I saw through my observation units was beautiful
and radiant. The children ran happily through the fields, girls
blushed with romance, and mothers smiled at the babes in their
arms with loving sentiment. If the furniture-maker's daughter
whose body I possess had been allowed to grow like normal, she
could have had all those things. She would have led a life untroubled by the workings of the world and, after sixty or seventy
years, ended her life in bliss and satisfaction, surrounded by her
family…"