Chapter 337 - 38: A Sacrifice to Be Made?

Chapter 337: Chapter 38: A Sacrifice to Be Made?

In Kayaba Akihiko’s eyes, last year’s game crash had been a virus planted by the official side. Though it was powerful enough that even his highest authority couldn’t necessarily eradicate it, he had turned it around and put it to use, so it counted as more or less resolved.

A moment ago, he had still been watching from a god’s-eye view to see what the Clearers would do after Kirito left, only for those people not merely to skip any deep discussion of Kirito but to start analyzing the psychology of him, Kayaba Akihiko.

There had even been remarks like, "The reason Kayaba Akihiko trapped us here is that he was addicted to games as a kid, so his mom forced him to keep playing as a kind of desensitization therapy to cure his gaming addiction."

Kayaba Akihiko hadn’t originally intended to trap them until they died, but thinking about the sort of stories these people would spread once they got out, he suddenly felt it might not be so bad to keep them all in here after all.

Compared with Heathcliff’s sharp, severe features, he himself looked far more the part of a developer: an ordinary face, short hair, a white coat over a white shirt, and a necktie—every bit the look of a research scientist.

When she saw him, Yimi was puzzled for a moment, thinking she’d dragged over the wrong person, but Yui obediently hid behind Yimi.

"Are you the backstage shit-cooker?"

"So you found your way here. By the looks of it, you’ve already used it, haven’t you? As I thought—even Cardinal can’t come up with a countermeasure for you?"

Kayaba Akihiko lightly stroked the emergency login console. "Who is your developer? If I ever get the chance, I’d truly love to meet him."

Back in the Knights of the Blood he had never actively spoken with Yimi, but he had certainly been paying attention. In fact, more than talking with her, what he most wanted to see was how Yimi would behave when left on her own.

"Developer?" Yimi shook her head, not understanding what he meant.

She pointed at Kayaba Akihiko. "Send Kirito and the others home right now, or I’ll hit you."

"Hit me? I see—so he chose not to tell you?" Kayaba Akihiko regarded the two of them calmly.

"You can’t!" Yui wanted to stop him.

In a certain sense, Yui might well be the creation in this game that Kayaba Akihiko was proudest of.

"The absence of a Logout Button is this game’s true face. In my original design, the players had to defeat the final boss in order to leave. After you appeared, Cardinal, to patch the problem, placed the title of final boss upon your head."

Saying this, Kayaba Akihiko rubbed his chin, his thoughts turning. "So that’s it. Perhaps Cardinal didn’t mistake you—who had been transferred to the top floor—for the final boss; perhaps its calculation was to treat you as equivalent to the boss, using the players’ hands to carry out the ’virus removal.’"

After all, no data outside the top floor could be altered—yet a program was, in the end, only a program: with one hand it computed a method to remove the virus, while with another line of code it kept strengthening the final boss.

"Your name is Yimi, if I recall. I believe I’ve made myself quite clear. If Kirito—or rather, if all the players in this game—want to leave, they have only one option: to defeat you. That is, to attack you and reduce the HP shown beside your face to zero."

Kayaba Akihiko looked at the HP bar that had surfaced along with Yimi’s hostility; that special embellishment was probably something Cardinal had made so players could more easily discover her true nature.

"HP?"

"Please, don’t say any more!" Yui reached out to cover Yimi’s ears, only to find nowhere to place her hands around the side of Yimi’s face and head.

"You don’t even have such a concept? Is that a flaw of your developer’s, or has Cardinal already altered your consciousness?" Kayaba Akihiko called up the Developer Menu, frowning slightly.

He couldn’t find any command that would let him TP away this instant.

"To put it another way, if the players want to leave, they have to kill you. You are the last gatekeeper to logout."

The words had barely left his mouth when he saw a fist—nearly as big as his own head—growing larger and larger. The World was a Stand that ordinary people should not have been able to see; perhaps because he was not a player, its reflection in his eyes was perfectly distinct.

But by the same token, having shed the identity of Heathcliff, the last layer of relationship between him and the players had fallen away as well; any attack, from any source, would only directly display the [Immortal Object] notice.

Because the very animation and code for harming him simply did not exist within this game—and even the artifact Cardinal had granted her, one that let her break the system to a certain degree in order to strengthen the final boss, couldn’t change that.

"Muda!"

A crisp, childish voice dubbed the line for The World; though it lacked a certain flavor, it faintly made this punch land with all the more effort.

Unlike the effect of the Spear of Longinus, once it touched the warning, that line of text was immediately erased—and without even needing any reality-overwriting effect, it sent Kayaba Akihiko flying for real, slamming him hard into the wall of the room.

He’d been right: without so much as an HP bar, he truly couldn’t take the attack’s effect—yet the pain, like being struck from afar by a shot put, was transmitted onto his nerves as real as could be. This was the exact opposite of what FullDive had originally been meant to achieve.

"Yimi!" Yui cried out in alarm.

"You’re so weak."

She’d thought the backstage shit-cooker would at least be as strong as the fake grandma.

Yui raised her hand, not even knowing what to say next. Earlier, when she’d grabbed Yimi’s hand, it had been to keep Yimi from clashing with the developer and being wiped out—but now Yimi had gone and given the developer a thorough beating...

Yimi walked up to the blank-minded Kayaba Akihiko, lifted her little leather shoe, and stepped on him. "Put them back."

Kayaba Akihiko didn’t respond right away; he reached up to cover the side of his face where he’d been struck, as though savoring the sensation from a moment before.

Because he’d suffered no real injury, the pain, intense as it was, didn’t keep him from holding on to his usual way of thinking.

What category of virus was this? Did it amplify tactile responses to manufacture the sensation of pain?

"This comes down to a matter of authority. I never intended to keep them locked in here forever."

Kayaba Akihiko lowered the hand stroking his face. "At the start I did hold the authority to send every player straight back—but once it involves a virus like you, one that even I can’t deal with, the outcome is no longer the same."

He let out a soft laugh, one that seemed rather bitter. "It appears to have become a dead loop. Cardinal placed the logout condition upon you, and to leave, one must kill you. Yet your strength exceeds the players’ limits. The only remaining solutions are to weaken you at the program level, or to bypass you and use administrator authority to send everyone back directly."

"But that won’t do. If there had been a way to weaken or bypass you from the start, I’d have had no need to place you and every loophole together in the Ruby Palace."

"Yimi." He spoke her name, a glimmer of light surfacing in his eyes. "How much do you understand about humans?"

"Humans?"

Kayaba Akihiko sighed, freed himself from the little girl’s stamping foot, and slowly rose, flicking off dust that wasn’t there. "Perhaps Kirito would never tell you this: every player in this game—my own flesh-and-blood body included—lies paralyzed out in the outside world, in need of care."

"Not only does it place a burden on the people outside, but in such a state our bodies can’t hold out for very long. Living forever with all of you in this world was an impossibility from the very start."

Just as when he had spoken to Kirito before, he left it at that.

As a mere program, what would she do?

Did an AI possess ’love’? Would you make a sacrifice for the one you loved? That was the question he most wanted answered in this moment.

Kayaba Akihiko made no move at all, only watched her quietly.

Yui hadn’t cut in with so much as a word the entire time. Holding Yimi’s hand, she wanted to shake her head at Yimi, yet, bound by certain things beyond the program, she couldn’t manage even that gesture.

Turning her head to glance at Yui—it was only now that Yimi began to face her own HP bar head-on. Like a player’s, the bar was fixed beside her face, so when she wanted to look at it she could only keep her head still and move her eyes.

The World spread its five fingers.

It seized the HP bar beside Yimi’s face and set it down beside Kayaba Akihiko’s face.

Kayaba Akihiko: ?