LN excerpt: Kirito’s rage towards Rath
I stared at the tab for a while. “Observers”—the ones who created, operated, and watched over this world. These people, the staffers at the tech start-up named Rath, had lied to me only once—but it was the biggest lie imaginable.
In June 2026 in the real world, which felt like an eternity ago, I’d participated in a long-term continuous test of their next-generation full-dive machine, The Soul Translator, or STL.
The test period was three days. Through the Fluctlight Acceleration (FLA) feature, the subjective time I spent in the VR world would be 3.3 times as long as real time, or ten days in total. At the end of the test, they had blocked my memories of the event to protect company secrets, or so they’d explained to me. But that was a lie. I hadn’t dived into a test environment; they had sent me into the same Underworld I was in now. And it wasn’t ten days I spent here. I estimated it was over three hundred times that amount…for a span of ten years. Yes, during that three-day test, I experienced an entire second childhood, from infancy to the age of eleven, in a tiny village at the northern end of the world. I spent every day playing in the mud with my best friends, the flaxen-haired boy and the golden-haired girl, and at the end of each day, we trudged home along the riverbanks to the village, side by side.
Two years ago, when I’d just woken up in this place, I saw a vision of that sunset at the bank of the river in the woods.
When fighting against Eugeo, I had a sensation of kids swordfighting.
And just now, at the moment of Eugeo’s death, I saw the scene about the platinum-oak sword.
These things weren’t illusions. They were fragments of the memories that had been deleted, things I had really experienced. I grew up with Eugeo and Alice in the village of Rulid, and I had forgotten all about it until today. Eugeo and Alice, too, couldn’t access their memories of living with me. They both got synthesized by the supreme ruler, but perhaps that memory issue was responsible for both of them recovering their own free will from the process, unlike the other Integrity Knights. It didn’t matter to me anymore why Rath would have inserted an outside element like me into their civilization simulation. But there was one thing I couldn’t forgive. I’d been there eight years ago.
I’d been there when Deusolbert had taken young Alice away.
Eugeo had blamed himself for that for years. He’d never stopped regretting that he couldn’t save her. And half of that regret should’ve been mine to shoulder.
But I’d forgotten the past…and I’d never understood the depth of Eugeo’s suffering until the moment he gave up his life…
“Nn…guh…khf…!” Bizarre sounds escaped from my throat. I clenched my jaw shut as hard as I could, my molars creaking and groaning with the pressure. My stiff left hand rose, the fingers trembling, and pressed the button to call an observer.
A dialogue box in Japanese appeared with a warning sound.
I hit the OKAY button without thinking twice.
The meter twitched, producing a rainbow-gradient bar. Then it shot upward, just as a rustling static noise reached my ears. This was sound from the real world, I sensed. The world on the “other side,” where things were no doubt peaceful and totally unconnected to the madness happening in the Underworld. The real world, where this blood and pain and even death were merely events of interest, at best. A great storm of numerous emotions that I’d been keeping under control came bursting up from inside me, rocking me where I stood. I leaned toward the monitor and, in as loud a voice as I could manage, called the man who had brought me to this place.
If my hand could reach Seijirou Kikuoka or any of the other managers right now, I might actually attempt to strangle them to death. Such was the helpless rage I felt as I slammed my left fist against the marble table and screamed:
LN source: Chapter 13 Part 7, Volume 14 Alicization Uniting
