The Night Sky Swordsman (Sword Art Online X OC)

Chapter 89 The Hero's Awakening

No one's POV

Vassago Casals was born to a Hispanic mother and a Japanese American father in the Tenderloin, a lower-class neighborhood in San Francisco.

In America, baby names that seemed likely to limit the opportunities of the child, who didn't have a choice in the matter, were often rejected at the stage of the birth certificate. That was the only reason his mother had named him Vassago instead of Devil or Satan. Vassago, the prince of hell, was a name with only minor recognition, so the city clerk accepted the name, none the wiser.

There was only one reason a mother would give her child the name of a demon, and that was because she never wanted him—because she hated him.

He didn't know how his parents had met, nor did he want to, but as far as he understood, it was a monetary relationship. The pregnancy wasn't planned, and his mother wanted to abort him, but his father forced her to go through with it. That didn't mean that he loved the son who was born; he checked in every now and then on the child's health but never even brought so much as a gift. About the only thing he ever gave Vassago was the ability to speak Japanese.

It was only when Vassago was around fifteen years old that he finally understood why his father had forced his mother to give birth and then had made only the bare minimum of child support payments.

That was when he was told that there was a child with congenital kidney failure on his father's side of the family—and they wanted him to be a donor. He had no choice in the matter. But Vassago gave his own condition: He wanted to live in his father's country, Japan. Once he had donated a kidney, his father would have no use for him, so the status of his financial support would be in limbo. If he had to stay in the slums and deal drugs to survive, he knew where that story would end—so he preferred to start over in a new country entirely.

His father accepted, and in exchange for his left kidney, Vassago received a passport and airfare. He left for Japan without saying good-bye to his mother. When he arrived, fate was even crueler than he could have realized.

By Japanese law, international adoption involved complicated paperwork and stringent requirements, and even if the adoption process was successful, children above the age of six were not automatically given the right to stay in the country. Vassago had no choice but to live outside of the law from the moment he arrived.

So he wound up in the care of a Korean crime syndicate. Because he could speak English, Spanish, and Japanese, they provided Vassago with a fake ID and trained him to be a hit man.

Vassago completed nine successful jobs in the five years before he turned twenty. The tenth job was something he could never have imagined.

His job was to reach and kill a target that could never be found in the real world—the target was in a virtual world instead.

When it was first described to him, he didn't know what it meant. Only when he was given an explanation of the SAO Incident, which had arisen just a few days earlier, did it make sense to him. The target was a victim of the Incident, stuck at home under strict security, never to emerge. If they waited for the deadly game to kill him, there was no telling when that would happen or if he might survive and escape eventually. But if they could get into the same game and kill his character, the NerveGear would kill him in real life.

That still left three major problems to solve.

For one, Vassago the hit man would not be able to leave the game until it was beaten. If he died in the game, he was dead for real. And Vassago himself could not attack the target. If anyone got their hands on a game log of who attacked whom, they could potentially trace back the assassination attempt.