“There…we…goooo!”
For the umpteenth time, I hauled myself up, caught my right leg on the corner of the marble, and swung up onto a flat surface at last.
My joints and muscles, taxed well beyond their limit, screamed and throbbed like they were being seared by flames. Large beads of sweat rolled down my forehead and neck, but I couldn’t even move my hands to wipe them away; I couldn’t do anything other than pant. The fatigue was so real and all-encompassing that it was hard to remind myself that this was just the STL’s virtual world.
Once the moon had fully risen, we spent the next two hours in another agonizing climb, and now that I was finally up on the ninety-fifth floor of Central Cathedral, I didn’t even have the energy to look around. I let my limbs lie flat, closed my eyes, and waited for my life value to return.
There were nearly fifteen floors between the terrace with all the stone minions and here. It wouldn’t have been that bad if not for the golden knight fixed to my back by her slender chain, necessitating all that time and stamina.
Alice Synthesis Thirty had impressively overcome the Seal of the Right Eye, that mysterious system that kept all Underworldians in check, but the cost had been severe. It had exploded her jasper-like right eye without a trace, and the shock and pain had knocked her unconscious.
The Underworldians’ souls were stored in lightcubes, an artificial memory medium. Perhaps because of that, they had a tendency to be more susceptible to psychological shock. When they were faced with immense sadness, fear, or anger, they went into a kind of temporary shutdown to protect their fluctlights from some kind of fatal error—but in a world without the concept of crime, it was quite rare for such extreme emotions to manifest. It had happened to Alice’s sister, Selka, two years ago, too, when we were attacked by the goblins in the northern cave.
Alice went unconscious merely to soften the shock of breaking through that eye seal. I expected she would awaken eventually; if there had been some fatal-error damage to her fluctlight, she would have died on the spot, as Raios Antinous had.
In that sense, it was remarkable that Eugeo, who had suffered the same phenomenon as Alice, stayed awake and finished his swing when it happened. He’d been fully spent after we got tossed into the cells, but he still responded when I spoke to him.
So the reason for the Underworldians’ mental fragility and absolute obedience to orders was still a mystery, but at least I knew it was possible for them to overcome it; Eugeo and Alice proved that. Yes, they were technically artificial intelligences, but the power contained in their souls was no different from that of people in the real world…
These thoughts and more went through my head for an hour on the terrace with the minions while I waited for Alice to recover, but she never opened her eyes. I used sacred arts to stop the bleeding, but I had neither the resources nor the skill to heal her entirely. While I waited, the moon rose and granted some spatial resources, but I needed them to generate the ice picks for climbing. The best I could do was rip the hem of my shirt to make an impromptu bandage for her, then continue climbing the tower with the unconscious knight weighing me down.
I removed the chain that connected us, tried hauling Alice’s slender but unbelievably heavy body over my back, and seriously considered removing the golden armor and Osmanthus Blade that made up most of that weight. However, it would have been stupid to leave those tools of hers behind now that she had made up her mind to fight on our side.
Instead, I steeled myself, hooked the chain to the knight’s body, and began climbing up toward the top of Central Cathedral in the distant night sky. After two hours of miserable effort, the sight of a new terrace brought me such relief, I accidentally dropped one of the hooks. All I could do was hope nobody was waiting on the ground far below, unsuspecting.
At any rate, once I had made it the ninety yards straight up that vertical wall to the ninety-fifth floor, I figured I had earned the right to lie down on flat ground for a little while. I wasn’t planning to move for another three minutes at least.
Just when I hoped to enjoy the feeling of every muscle in my body relaxing, I was interrupted by a quiet groaning from atop my back.
“Mm…muhhh…,” the knight said, her breath tickling my neck. “Where…? What…did I…?”
She tried to get up, but the chain quickly went taut, and the weight returned to my back.
“These chains…Kirito…Did you carry me…up here…?”
That’s right—you owe me some gratitude, I thought.
“Oh no, you’re all sweaty! You’ll stain my uniform! Get away from me!” she shouted, whacking the back of my head. My forehead smacked the hard marble floor.