The Night Sky Swordsman (Sword Art Online X OC)

Chapter 68 Synthesis

No one's POV

Zora: There...we...goooo!

For the umpteenth time, Zora hauled himself up, caught his right leg on the corner of the marble, and swung up onto a flat surface at last.

Zora's joints and muscles, taxed well beyond their limit, screamed and throbbed like they were being seared by flames. Large beads of sweat rolled down his forehead and neck, but Zora couldn't even move his hands to wipe them away; he couldn't do anything other than pant. The fatigue was so real and all-encompassing that it was hard to remind himself that this was just the STL's virtual world.

Once the moon had fully risen, Zora and Alice spent the next two hours in another agonizing climb, and now that he was finally up on the ninety-fifth floor of Central Cathedral, Zora didn't even have the energy to look around. He let his limbs lie flat, closed his eyes, and waited for his 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 his 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 Zora and Eugeo were attacked by the goblins in the northern cave.

Alice went unconscious merely to soften the shock of breaking through that eye seal. Zora 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 they got tossed into the cells, but he still responded when Zora spoke to him.

So the reason for the Underworldians' mental fragility and absolute obedience to orders was still a mystery, but at least Zora 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 his head for an hour on the terrace with the minions while Zora waited for Alice to recover, but she never opened her eyes. Zora used sacred arts to stop the bleeding, but he had neither the resources nor the skill to heal her entirely. While he waited, the moon rose and granted some spatial resources, but Zora needed them to generate the ice picks for climbing. The best he could do was rip the hem of his shirt to make an impromptu bandage for her, then continue climbing the tower with the unconscious knight weighing him down.

Zora removed the chain that connected them, tried hauling Alice's slender but unbelievably heavy body over his 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 his side.

Instead, Zora steeled himself, 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 Zora so such relief, he accidentally dropped one of the hooks. All he could do was hope nobody was waiting on the ground far below, unsuspecting.