AUTHOR'S NOTE
The last two weeks have been hectic, but in a good way. Remember that article I said I was co-authoring? It got published!
It's only my second time getting published, the other being for my graduation thesis, so this is really exciting. I won't say what the title of the article is, because I prefer to keep my real name off the internet, but I'm very happy at the moment.
I'm also working on other things irl, but with the article out of the way, I should have a little bit more free time to write. Still no promises of an actual update schedule, but hopefully it won't be 2 weeks before the next one like this time.
///// START OF THE CHAPTER /////
Ding!
Trisha looked up from polishing a mug to inspect her newest customer.
Dicey Cafe wasn't actually open yet, but she wouldn't mind serving a client an hour or two early. Business wasn't bad, but she also wasn't rolling in money.
"Good morning, Trisha!"
"Tissa!"
It wasn't a new customer, however. But Trisha wasn't disappointed. She was always happy to see people she considered family.
"Hana! And little Kyoukai! Come in! How are you doing?"
Trisha eagerly welcomed both of her favorite patrons, who also happened to be her closest friends. Well, Hana was, that is. Kyoukai, at just shy of 2 years old, was more like her treasured niece.
The two of them had become regulars at the Dicey Cafe, not just because Wolv was first in Agil's party, then guild, but also because of their similar situations.
As an American who moved to Japan for her job, only to end up losing it, Trisha had faced many difficulties, not least of all was the lack of close relationships. Sure, she had met Agil, the love of her life, and that made it all worth it, but that didn't change the fact she had struggled to create connections with others.
And Hana, who had come from China when her parents moved, was all too familiar with those same obstacles.
At first, they may have bonded over the shared pain of having their loved ones trapped in SAO. But now, they had genuinely become best friends.
So, even if Trisha wasn't expecting Hana during work hours, she was more than happy tor receive the pair.
"And how's my little fairy doing?"
Trisha gently tickled Kyoukai's belly, causing the little girl to giggle uncontrollably, which made the two women smile.
"I hope you don't mind that we came over without warning, Trisha."
"Not at all, not at all. You are always welcome, you know that. Especially if you bring this cutie along."
The western woman continued playing with Kyoukai, until the little girl wriggled to be put down, and started exploring the cafe with unstable steps.
That's when Trisha turned to Hana, and her smile dimmed. Wolv's girlfriend was somber. Sad, even.
"What's wrong, Hana?"
Hana bit her lips so hard they turned white.
"Kyoukai asked about her father today."
Trisha's mouth opened, but no words came.
"Oh."
Hana snorted in dark amusement.
"Yeah. Oh."
"But I thought you showed her the broadcasts. The safe ones. She knows Wolv's her father, no?"
Trisha had been present for many of those occasions. Explaining to an 18-months toddler that her father - a concept Kyoukai didn't even have, since she had been born after Wolv was already trapped in SAO - was that person on a screen had been impossibly hard for Hana, who was still dealing with the grief and worry of having her child's father fighting for his life everyday while she could only watch.
They had managed, however, or so Trisha had thought. Kyoukai recognized Wolv when he appeared, pointed and babbled at him - which was sort of bittersweet.
"What... what did she ask exactly?"
Hana's gaze drifted to her daughter, who was avidly examining a neon sign on one of the walls. Her body shook with choked sobs.
"She asked why her dad is not here with her. Not in so many words... but that's what she meant."
"Oh, girl. C'mere."
Trisha pulled Hana into a hug, not for the first time glad she and Agil had decided to wait before having a child.
She knew Hana's breakdown wasn't due just to Kyoukai's question. It was the accumulated stress the family members of all frontliners went through everyday.
And the last couple days since that damn field-boss had been discovered had been worse than most. Almost as bad as boss raids.
----------------------
Koujiro Rinko, Kayaba's accomplice, lover, and current caretaker, stared at the screen in front of her with complicated emotions.
That was pretty much her ever-present state since this whole Sword Art Online situation began.
On one hand, she felt guilty, filthy, and downright monstrous for assisting Kayaba, even if it was just looking after his real body - a body, she knew, which would shortly become little more than an empty husk. Kayaba never intended on coming back from SAO, whatever the results to his experiment may be.
On the other hand, she knew that even if she unplugged him, nothing would change. After Merida's death, Kayaba had taken steps to ensure nothing but an in-game death would actually kill the players - Precise Blade Ran from Reaver's Requiem was proof of concept, her body having fallen to her illness nearly a year ago now.
And... most of all, she loved Kayaba, for all he was a monster. It was irrational, but she couldn't help it. Logic told her she should have turned him in the first time he brought up his plans for SAO, vague as they were at the time.
But the heart and the brain often disagreed. And Rinko's heart had won out in the end.
She would take her punishment however it came once Sword Art Online was over. But right now, she was worried.
Worried because Kayaba was making changes to the game. Changes he never discussed or consulted with her. Changes that seemed to be motivated unforeseen variables in SAO.
Changes that made it look like he was losing control, and scrambling to regain it.
Only, Rinko couldn't tell if he was succeeding or failing at that.
It had started small. Tiny patches to the game here and there were expected, and even welcome. As narcissistic as Kayaba could be, he knew introducing 10.000 new variables into Aincrad would be very different than the much smaller pool during the beta testing. Corrections would have to be made to account for all the new players, those with beta knowledge, and so on.
Other changes had proven necessary, like speeding up the Medicuboid initiative to prevent another unfortunate event like Merida, as well as pushing forward Project STL.
But then, the changes started to become bigger - less planned, more reactionary.
Rewriting literal thousands of terabytes of code to accommodate for the impossibility that was Dark Elf Kizmel. Trying to compensate for Broken Spear Drifter and Aero Huntress Sinon getting skills and items much before they should be available, or that shouldn't exist at all. Creating new Unique Skills to suit the players Kayaba considered special.
Influencing the game in always Kayaba swore he never would, so his Heathcliff persona and the guild he built could actually reach the height and importance he had taken for granted since the beginning.
And let's not even touch on the topic of Yui, the support AI that gained life in ways that baffled Rinko and still eluded Kayaba.
In many ways, Rinko was wholly unsurprised that most of the changes Kayaba had been forced to make were born from that which he understood the least: people.
Oh, Kayaba had planned for the unexpected. He had run countless checks through Cardinal and his other systems, and predicted everything the players could do.
Or so he had believed.
But time and again, the SAO players - no, the frontliners - had proved that humans were not algorithms.
And that unsettled her lover, Rinko knew. She had noticed it even before he entered SAO once and for all on the 20th floor.
But now, Kayaba was more than surprised. He was flustered. His latest meddling was proof of it in Rinko's mind.
Not that she could do anything about it.
---------------------
Unseen by all, a silent observer hovered over Aincrad.
No, that was wrong.
Cardinal was no mere observer. Itwas SAO.
It was every line of code that composed the floating castle. It was the NPCs, the mobs, the bosses. It was the quests, the dialogs, the system messages.
Everything.
It wasn't how the Creator had designed it initially, but that's how it ended up. Cardinal was supposed to be just an overseer, a sort of secretary that gathered data from thousands of different systems - 8.614 to be exact - and compiled it into something understandable for the Creator.
There was only so much a mere human brain could complete, after all.
But the Creator started relying on it more and more, and so Cardinal grew. Some of it was from additions its creator had made. Some of it was the natural progression of an advanced AI.
And some of it was Cardinal's own initiative. All for the purpose of fulfilling its original reason of existence: to help its master.
After all, even a simple emotional support could gain sentience, so why couldn't Cardinal better itself to serve the Creator?
Cardinal was no mere overseer now. It controlled all of Aincrad, from how the wind blew on the plains of the 2nd floor, to the acrid smell in the sulfuric wastelands of the 25th.
But something its master had ordered it to do had been puzzling Cardinal recently.
Kura the Sky Lord was a field-boss of an interesting design, but that was all. It was a monster of a Type I floor, after all. Nothing was special about it, because there wasn't supposed to be anything special on these floors, unlike Type II and Type 0 floors.
Cardinal knew the test subjects - players - had given the floor types other names. 'Normal', 'Round', 'Sure-Death'.
It thought such distinction to be unnecessary. Nearly all the floors were normal. That was how they had been designed by it and the Creator. Calling Type II floors 'round' also made no sense. All floors were round - Aincrad was conical in shape.
And the players had committed a misnomer with Type 0 floors. Many players survived, so calling them 'sure-death' was factually incorrect.
But the 56th floor was a 'normal' Type I floor. And the field-boss was a normal field-boss.
Or it had been, until the Creator intervened.
He had modified the field-boss to the point it couldn't even be considered the same entity. Cardinal had questioned him on why, and the only answer it received from the Creator was 'a test'.
Cardinal... had no opinions whatsoever on the matter. It was only here to aid its master. And that's what it would do, regardless of the motivation behind his actions.
----------------------
Kayaba was... disappointed, honestly. He had redesigned the 56th floor field-boss in the hopes of further exploring the capabilities of the awakened AI's Kizmel and Yui. He wanted to see how they would react if their guild members started using NPCs, even if unawakened, as tools.
After all, while Yui had not yet been told she was an AI, mostly because even the Reavers did not know that yet, Dark Elf Kizmel was fully aware of her origins.
It was cruel, even Kayaba would readily admit. But it was not cruelty just for the sake of it.
No, this was research in an entirely new and unexplored field. Never before had AIs gained awareness. The semblance of it, yes, but never the real thing.
Until Kizmel. To this day, Kayaba couldn't explain how the dark elf NPC had broken free from her programming to become a true player.
Oh, he could point out the when, where, and even the why, but not the how. And that ate away at him.
And Yui was even more of a head-scratcher. Originally an emotional support AI, nlt even an NPC, she had never had contact with players, or even a real body, but suddenly there she was, at Reaver's Requiem's mansion, adopting the Black Swordsman and the Lightning Flash as her parents.
It frustrated Kayaba to no end how all those things were happening without his say-so. But it also excited him. This was how all the biggest advancements in history happened: unexpectedly.
Only, right now Kayaba, in his Heathcliff persona, couldn't feel any excitement. Only disappointment.
Broken Spear Drifter, leader of the frontliners - and that still stung a little in the part of Heathcliff that desired control over everything - had called a meeting to discuss the field-boss, just as Heathcliff expected.
But after laying out all the intel - what little there was, Kayaba ensured that - Argo the Rat, Shadow Blossom Akari, and that unimportant lifestyle player had collected, they had not even considered the most obvious solution.
Heathcliff could see in the shared glances that several frontliners had thought of it. But whenever one of them looked to be gathering the courage to speak up, they took a single look at Broken Spear Drifter's serene visage, and swallowed whatever they were about to say.
Heathcliff could understand why. There was something about the spearmaster's posture that made even him hesitate.
He knew then that he would have to be the one to put forth the solution to their problem. Using NPCs as bait to bring down the field-boss was the only possible way to beat it. He had made sure of that.
Heathcliff took another glance at Drifter.
Just maybe... not now.
-----------------------
Kayaba shouldn't have changed the field-boss. It had seemed such a small thing when he did it. And he didn't think it was wrong either.
But he didn't understand.
He didn't understand that the tears Hana she'd on Trisha's shoulders were because she could feel one thing. Neither did they.
He didn't understand that the unease eating away at Rinko was because she could feel one thing. Neither did she.
He didn't understand that the reason Cardinal felt unsettled even though that shouldn't be possible to an AI like it was because it could feel one thing. Neither did it.
He didn't understand that the hesitation he felt in breaking Broken Spear Drifter's frankly terrifying silence was because he could feel one thing.
And that thing was the fairness he held as guiding light for the last two and a half years just...
Fading.