The sunset seemed to set the whole sky on fire.
Incredibly, Satoru was standing level with the sun beyond the clouds. He was not flying or floating. There was simply an unseen floor beneath his feet, like the glass observation decks in high towers, hundreds of meters above the ground.
Right now, he must have been even higher. Thousands of meters? Ten thousand?
And yet, he felt no fear at all.
The blood-red sky, dyed by the evening glow, stretched far, far into the distance. Its crimson light seemed capable of reaching the end of the world. Only a faint wind stirred the tips of his hair. Satoru propped himself half upright and looked down at an angle, at the floating castle slowly breaking apart as it fell.
So this was what that city looked like from the far side of the sky?
...Heh.
He smiled tiredly.
"Suzuki-kun."
The voice behind him, rising from nothing, made him pause for a moment, but it did not frighten him.
Satoru stood quietly and turned around. He saw the face he had once seen on a magazine cover in a late-night convenience store two years ago.
Kayaba Akihiko. Not Heathcliff.
In a researcher's white coat, he looked subtly different from the man in blood-red armor. The only thing unchanged, perhaps, was that still, rippleless gaze. Yet under the sunset, even his thin face seemed less rigid, and the light softened his eyes by a fraction.
"A magnificent view, isn't it?" Kayaba walked to his side and looked out with him at the vanishing floating castle.
"If you made a view like this, does that mean you always thought the game might be cleared?"
"If it were never cleared, of course there would be no need to show it. But if someone did succeed, it would be a shame not to have a grand curtain call. So this scenery was designed at the same time as the castle itself." Kayaba smiled faintly.
"Right now, the SAO mainframe on the fifth basement level of ARGUS headquarters is using all available memory to erase the archives completely. In another ten minutes or so, this world will be gone."
"A true ending, then...?"
Satoru clenched his hand and let out a long sigh.
"Yes. The hero who chose to sacrifice one person in order to defeat the Demon King. That is the ending you chose."
Kayaba said it, then shook his head.
"But if you had truly sat on the throne of the Ninety-Ninth Floor, what waited at the end would have been finality... This ending, at least, leads to another beginning."
"Things have always changed people... but all of you changed some things as well. Wouldn't you agree, Suzuki-kun?"
"All surviving players, 6,147 in total, have logged out and returned to the real world."
"The people who died."
"Truly died," Kayaba finished for him.
"How real of you. Even though this world was built on your original fantasy."
"Indeed..." He seemed to smile wryly. "I had almost forgotten that feeling. When I learned that the FullDive system had been developed, I lived for one purpose: to create this city, this world that surpassed every framework and law of reality."
"Though... at the very last moment, I witnessed something that surpassed the laws I created. Double transcendence, of all things. It is not exactly funny."
The wind began to strengthen.
"People dream of all kinds of things from childhood onward. I can no longer remember exactly how old I was when this floating castle first took hold of me. No matter how much time passed, that imagined world remained vividly carved into my mind. The older I became, the clearer the image grew. The name Sheeta was another one of my obsessions, I suppose."
"Perhaps... somewhere, the Castle in the Sky truly does exist."
"After all, Sheeta, so deeply bound by fate, eventually met her Pazu in you."
"..."
"Let us talk about something else, Suzuki." Kayaba spoke softly. "In the final moments of our battle, you went too far beyond. The soul may seem boundless, but humans are flawed creatures by nature."
"Do not rely on that too much. Every time you use it, you may be consuming the life of your soul, and your brain may not be able to endure it either. After all, we live through these physical bodies... Yes. If there truly were a way to live freely, even without the body, I would very much like to try it."
"To vanish in that realm between man and god would probably feel like a phoenix burning itself to death. And after that... humans do not rise from the ashes."
"Who would use something like that again?" Satoru shook his head. "Like you said, it is only useful inside a FullDive environment."
"Haha, true enough."
Kayaba laughed freely.
"Congratulations on clearing the game, Mr. Sword Saint."
"..."
"Lastly, I left you time." Kayaba paused. "I am sorry to say that I ultimately lost control of the girl I wrote. By the time I noticed, her data was already gone. Not deleted... moved somewhere, perhaps. But that is what makes it so incomprehensible. No one should have been able to move it."
"Or perhaps... she stepped ahead of us humans and became a butterfly, free at last."
"All I can do is give you this present moment."
"In any case, the future is still something you must seize."
"Any further questions, any answers you crave, will have to come from you."
"Do not find that troublesome. This is what comes with the choice you made... At the very end, I wish you luck, Suzuki-kun. May the road ahead of you be less cruel."
Kayaba cast one last look at the collapsing summit of Aincrad, the massive blood-red palace crowned with magnificent spires. The wind grew stronger. When Satoru blinked, Kayaba was gone, as if carried away by it.
"He was more talkative than he looked, wasn't he?"
Satoru looked to his left and said it with a smile.
"Yeah."
The voice, gentle as water, carried a smile as well.
The blonde girl stood there quietly. Her soft hair was bathed in the faint red of the sunset, and perhaps because of that light, her cheeks seemed flushed. She held a small smile and gazed at him peacefully.
"You held on until the very end... Nero."
"Because of your underhanded little scheme." Satoru walked slowly toward her and looked at her. He could see, clearly, that she was turning transparent. He reached out, and realized his own hand was fading too. He stopped thinking about it and simply wrapped that no-longer-real hand around her.
"It really was... a little underhanded."
Sheeta's smile widened, though her eyes grew wetter and wetter, and she wrapped her arms around Satoru's slender back.
"I'm sorry..."
"So finally... it's just the two of us?" Satoru's voice dropped, choked by the lump in his throat.
"It was like that before, too. Nero was always a bit of a loner."
"Hahahaha. That's true..."
"But this is different from before… Now, I don't even have time to sink into the grief."
Satoru held her a little tighter.
He, the girl, and this world.
All of them were slowly turning transparent.
"Nero…"
"I don't know whether this will be the last time I ever get to speak to you in this life… So there's something I have to ask. Something I vaguely realized after learning the truth, but never asked because I was too much of a coward."
"Wh… what?"
"Do you love me?"
Satoru leaned closer to her.
"…"
"Just as Kayaba imagined, you were originally a mental-care program meant to watch over every player in Aincrad. In other words… you found me because that was your duty. Later, I forced my own selfishness onto it and decided, all on my own, that you were someone I had to protect. I searched for a warmth I had never known in you."
"You found me because I had killed someone. Because you were worried about me. The truth is, I've always felt inferior. I was never truly strong… I've always been like that."
"And still, I clung to that tenderness."
"On one side was an insecure man pretending he was certain. On the other was a program whose purpose had been written in advance."
"In the end… the feelings between you and me became a little blurred."
"Just like this world. It began from nothing, became fiction, and then declared itself reality."
"If I'm allowed to ask this… I want to hear you say it seriously, just once."
"The reason you love me."
"Let's just say… even now, I still don't have enough confidence."
Sheeta laughed softly.
"As I thought, Nero is cutest when he acts like a child."
She felt his warmth.
"Even if I first searched for you because it was my duty, that duty was also the only heart I had. I didn't know where those feelings came from, but I followed them all the way here. And along the way, new feelings kept piling up."
"If I have any regret… it's that, until today, you never told me you loved me. Just as you said, Nero, you lack far too much confidence."
"I loved you so much… and yet I never managed to make that love reach your heart."
Transparent tears slid down her unreal face.
"If only I had told you more. So much more. If only I had shown you more of what I felt. If only I had learned sooner, much sooner, how to smile like this… and how to cry like this."
"…Sheeta."
"Nero, do you love me?"
"Of course. Of course. Of course."
Satoru shed tears, but he laughed louder than ever. High beneath that fading crimson sky, the sound was jarring and unbearably sad.
"Hahahahaha! That's enough. That's more than enough. Now I have a reason to spend the rest of my life searching."
"Maybe Kayaba can't see it."
"But I can still see… the direction you're heading."
"These eyes can see it."
Both their tears turned into sparkling fragments and vanished into the wind.
"The Fluctlight Domain is the place both you and I will reach."
"If you are a god, then I will follow you."
"If I become a god, then I will fall and become human."
"Fate binds us… from that distant shore."
"And someday…"
"We will embrace in the real world… or perhaps we will embrace within a virtual Fluctlight."
...
I was never strong enough to overturn the systems already in place.
I wanted to rewrite every encounter and bury my guilt.
In truth, there was no road left ahead.
Day after day, my subconscious drove me to reap what I had sown.
The two poles of the world, white and black, fought until the very end.
I created and destroyed, and in the end, lost my freedom.
I have endured enough punishment, surrounded by ruin.
Only the reasons within me remain.
—That version of Suzuki Satoru ends today.