Alice and I were slowed down for less than five seconds.
We shared a glance, then I took the lead down the narrow hallway. Thankfully, the red smoke I inhaled wasn’t toxic—if it had been, something would’ve happened to Chudelkin, given that his clothes were filled with the stuff—and the coughing indeed soon wore off.
The hidden passage was built for Chudelkin’s size, and I had to duck down to avoid hitting my head on the ceiling. The occasional scraping noise I heard from behind had to be Alice’s shoulder guards hitting the walls. The sheath of the Blue Rose Sword on my right waist was also banging against the wall as I shuffled along uncomfortably.
Eventually there was an ascending staircase ahead, so I stopped and made sure there wasn’t an ambush before charging upward. Chudelkin’s footsteps were long gone, darkness and cold air the only things coming down the passage ahead.
The staircase was much longer than I had anticipated and seemed to cover a good three floors’ worth of height. I’d estimated that the chamber filled with what Chudelkin called the automated senators covered the space from the ninety-sixth to ninety-eighth floors, so this path was probably leading us up to the ninety-ninth.
The battle with the Axiom Church that had begun in the basement—two years before, when Eugeo and I left Rulid—would be over in two floors. My partner wasn’t at my side, but if Bercouli’s words were accurate, I would see him again in Administrator’s bedchamber. Then I’d give him the Blue Rose Sword, and the three of us would defeat Chudelkin, then the pontifex herself. And then…
I shook my head, focusing on a faint light up above. I could think about what to do afterward when we got there. This was the final battle: Concentration was everything, and the present was more important than the future and the past.
From up ahead, I heard the distant screech of the prime senator.
“System Caaaaall! Generaaaate…”
That would be an element-based sacred art. My hackles rose, but there was no stopping now. The light ahead grew closer and closer.
“The stairs are ending up ahead!” I warned Alice.
“Watch out for a surprise arts attack!” she replied.
“Got it!”
I held my black sword out front as I ran. Given the measure of control a caster had over the possession of a generated element, magic in this world was well suited to ambush attacks. You could form a flame element, keep it on standby, then discharge it when the enemy came into sight, almost like a firearm.
On the other hand, the power of the magic was dependent upon the number of elements being expended. If it was just one little orb, the attack power would be the same, whether cast by a student in their first year at school or a master with a lifetime of experience. Discipline allowed one to increase the number of elements at once, but each one required a finger to maintain it, so the upper limit of simultaneous elements was ten. My black sword had the capability to absorb energy, so I could defend against even a tenfold heat or frost element attack.
If Chudelkin was going to attempt a surprise attack, it would be safer to plunge through the exit of the stairway, rather than lean out carefully. I sped up through the last leg and leaped high in the air on the final step.
But there was no storm of fireballs or deluge of icicles. I did a full three-sixty turn in midair to survey the room, but I did not see Chudelkin or anyone else. I landed on the marble floor on one knee and listened carefully. The only sound was Alice running toward me.
She appeared through the exit of the staircase as I got to my feet, then she took her own turn examining the place. “I thought I heard him chanting, but there’s no one here…Perhaps Chudelkin gave up on laying a trap and fled to the hundredth floor above…,” she murmured, glancing up at the ceiling.
“But that’s Administrator’s room, right?” I asked. “Is the prime senator allowed to just burst in there?”
“I doubt it…Where are the stairs up anyway?”
Once again, I looked around the round room that composed the ninety-ninth floor. It was quite large, probably a hundred feet across. The floor, ceiling, and curved walls were the same familiar white marble, but there was nothing in the way of decoration or ornamentation. At most, there was a series of large lamps fixed to the walls, but only four were lit, leaving the interior dim. Everything in the room was pure white, so it would probably be blinding in here if all the lamps were on at once.
The staircase we’d taken opened directly into the floor near the wall. There was a marble hatch above, and I was certain that if lowered, it would fit seamlessly into the floor.
Perhaps there was a similar hidden drop-down door in the ceiling somewhere. I looked around for a pull cord or handle, but saw nothing. Perhaps a good sword skill might punch a hole in the ceiling…
“This room,” Alice suddenly murmured. I turned and saw that the knight’s left eye was open wider than usual.
“What about it?”
“I’ve…been in here before. This is where I woke up…on the day I became an apprentice Integrity Knight…”
“W-wait…are you sure about that?!”
“Yes…All the lamps were on at the time…and the room was extremely bright and shining…The pontifex herself stood in the center, and she commanded, Wake up, child of God…”
Alice realized that a note of reverence had crept into her voice, and she scowled. “The pontifex removed all my memories up to that point, gave me a false past and a knight’s duty, then left me with Uncle…with Commander Bercouli. Then a part of the floor, similar to the elevating disc in the middle part of the cathedral, took Uncle and me down to the ninety-fifth floor. I have never been back here since.”
“The floor…sank?” I repeated, stomping on the marble with my boots. The only sensation I felt was thick, unmoving stone. It would be hard to find a hidden elevator in a room this size, and we didn’t need to go down.
“Do you remember how Administrator went back to her chamber then, Alice?” I asked.
She lifted a finger to her lips and thought. “I think…that the moment the disc sank into the floor…she looked up…and another small disc descended from above…”
“That’s it!” I shouted, staring greedily at the white ceiling. It wasn’t a pull-down hatch but an elevator hidden above us. Even still, I couldn’t spot anything like a switch. There wasn’t an operator like on the elevator between the fiftieth and eightieth floors, so there had to be some mechanism to work it automatically. But what was it…?
“Oh…perhaps it was what the prime senator was chanting…,” I wondered aloud. Alice latched onto it.
“So it wasn’t an ambush but an art to make the disc move…? Kirito, what did you hear Chudelkin say after ‘Generate’? Do you remember?”
I really, really didn’t want to tell her I wasn’t listening, so I frantically replayed the moment from a few minutes before in my head. His needle-pitched voice had cried, Generate, and then…
“L…Lu…something…,” I said, struggling to remember. Alice’s glare was even colder than usual.
“That should be enough. The only element that starts with lu would be a light element.”
My face lit up, and I nodded to show that I did understand after all, but Alice was already turning and putting away her sword. She thrust her open hands toward the ceiling.
“System Call! Generate Luminous Element!”
To my amazement, she created a full ten light elements, the theoretical maximum. She then sprayed the floating white orbs outward without further modification. They landed at various points on the ceiling and burst without a sound. One flashed brighter than before—and then a circle of light a few feet across appeared where it had landed. It wasn’t in the center of the room, but close to the wall.
Alice lowered her arms, and I walked up to her side, watching cautiously. The circle of light faded quickly but did not disappear, and before long, the ceiling within its perimeter slid smoothly down toward us.
The stone platform was at least eighteen inches thick and looked tremendously heavy, yet it floated as if it were nothing. The light element had merely been a switch, and something else was powering the movement, but I couldn’t begin to guess what it was. It was on the level of some of the “miracles” I saw Cardinal perform in the Great Library—in fact, that must be exactly what it was. The source of this elevator’s movement was doubtless some tiny piece of Administrator’s boundless power.
The elevator landed on the floor with the slightest of vibrations. The top was not bare marble but was covered in bright-red carpet that glowed faintly in the light coming down from the circular hole in the ceiling.
The way to the top floor of Central Cathedral was open.
When Alice and I rode that elevating disc to the hundredth floor, the last and biggest battle of all would begin.
The original plan was that I’d use my secret-weapon dagger on Administrator while she slept and let Cardinal handle the rest. But with Chudelkin hiding from us on the floor above, she would likely be awake already—and more importantly, I’d already used my dagger to save Fanatio, the vice commander of the Integrity Knights.
Fortunately—if you could call it that—Alice the knight had agreed to return to being the original Alice already. That meant Eugeo didn’t need to use his dagger on her. When we got up there, I’d have to rescue him from his frozen state, I suspected, and find a way to use his dagger before Administrator started taking me seriously. I couldn’t imagine another way for us to win.
Alice was reaching a final moment of determination as well. We stared at each other and nodded in unison.
“…Let’s go.”
“Here goes nothing.”
And thus the elite disciple Kirito and Integrity Knight Alice Synthesis Thirty started walking toward the elevating disc that awaited just ahead.
One, two, three steps—and the pale light coming from the hole in the ceiling, probably moonlight, abruptly shaded over.
I stopped and stared into the hole, where I caught sight of a number of bright glimmers of light.
It was, in fact, moonlight—reflecting off a beautifully designed suit of armor. Whoever it was leaped down through the hole, a good twenty feet above, long cape trailing behind.