S.A.O Project Alicization - OC/Male Reader Insert

Project Alicization ----- Chapter Fifteen

Body temperature is such a strange thing, Asuna Yuuki thought.

Beneath the navy sky, its clouds curling with orange after the end of the rain, they walked along hand in hand. Kazuto Kirigaya had been lost in thought for the last several minutes, looking down in silence at the brick tiles on the pedestrian path.

Asuna lived in Setagaya and Kazuto had to get back to Kawagoe, so they normally took their separate trains at Shinjuku Station, but for whatever reason, Kazuto had said he would escort her closer to home this time. It was almost an entire hour extra for him to get home from Shibuya, but she sensed something different in his look this time, so she accepted the offer. Not to mention for some reason Shi decided to walk with them too, keeping his distance to not third-week obviously.

After they got off at her stop, Miyanosaka Station on the Setagaya Line, Kazuto and Asuna naturally wound up holding hands.

There was something about the experience she found reminiscent. It was a memory that was as painful and frightening as it was sweet, so she normally didn't allow it to surface, but every once in a while she felt it when she was holding his hand.

It wasn't a memory of the real world. It happened in Grandzam, the city of iron towers on the fifty-fifth floor of old Aincrad.

At the time, Asuna was the vice commander of the Knights of the Blood guild and had a greatsword-wielding personal guard named Kuradeel at her side at all times. Kuradeel held a fanatical obsession toward her, and when Kirito (Kazuto) prompted her to consider quitting the guild, he tried to use a paralyzing poison to kill her friend.

With two fellow guildmates dead and Kirito nearly gone as well, Asuna drew her rapier with rage. She tore away at Kuradeel's HP bar, but at the point where one more hit would have finished him, she hesitated. Kuradeel used that moment of weakness to strike back, and he was stopped only when Shi took major fall damage jumping of a cliff to block it.

The pair returned to the KoB headquarters on the fifty-fifth floor, announced their departure from the guild, then walked through Grandzam without a destination, hand in hand, ignoring Shi's teasing about being right about the guild.

She'd played it cool at the time, but underneath, her heart was swirling with disappointment in herself for hesitating, and guilt for having forced that burden onto Kirito. Just as she was feeling that she didn't have the right to be considered a member of the elite front line or to walk at Kirito's side, she heard his voice telling her that he would do whatever it took to get her back to her old world.

In that instant, a powerful drive overtook her. The next time, she would protect him. Not just that time, but every time. In any world.

She still vividly remembered how the hand that had been so cold the entire time she held it suddenly erupted with warmth like a furnace. Even now, after the flying fortress fell and she escaped from the land of fairies, the memory of that skin temperature came back to her when she held his hand.

Body temperature truly was a strange thing. It was merely the by-product of the expenditure of energy to keep the body running, but the sharing of that heat through touch also seemed to impart some kind of information. As evidence of that, Asuna knew that Kazuto was silent because he was hesitant to tell her something important.

Kazuto had just said the human soul was photons trapped in the microtubules of brain cells. Could that light exist not just in the brain but throughout all the cells in the body? A quantum field made from fluctuating motes of light in the shape of a human being, connected through their palms...Perhaps that was what she was truly feeling when she felt his body temperature.

Asuna closed her eyes and said a silent reassurance.

It will be all right, Kirito. I will always be watching your back. We're the greatest forward and backup in the world.