A colossal arena more than a hundred kilometers across was now collapsing with a thunderous roar.
And before it fell apart, something like this had happened: a hideous, savage-looking green-skinned monster suddenly tore apart the nearby seats, flooring, and other structures, then burrowed straight inside.
At first glance, it looked like the kind of helpless, furious outburst of a predator forced to watch its prey escape. As if, unable to do anything else, it vented its rage on the massive arena itself, ripping it apart and bringing it crashing down.
The speed of the collapse was astonishing. It was almost as if demolition charges had already been planted throughout the giant arena, and with a single command, the key supports had all blown at once, sending the whole thing crashing down.
And then a bizarre sight appeared.
The collapsing arena suddenly resembled a caving beehive, with the swarm inside bursting outward all at once.
Flying machines of every size rose into the air.
And almost none of them looked alike.
No matter how one looked at them, they did not seem factory-made or modular in design. They looked hand-built by individuals, which was why every single craft had an absurdly different shape.
Some resembled twenty-first-century motorcycles. Others looked more like tractors.
In short, many of them had shapes that looked completely incompatible with aerodynamics. There was no way they should have been able to fly, and yet they flew anyway.
Some of them even sounded like shrieking garbage heaps being dragged across metal, their frames shaking so violently they looked ready to fall apart at any moment, yet somehow they never did.
The most ridiculous part was that some of them even broke the sound barrier in an instant.
And these flying machines, large and small, appeared to have actually been part of the giant arena's structure itself, which was absurd in its own right.
Not every green-skin had a craft of its own, though. Some of the vehicles were crammed full of them, so overloaded that it was hard to imagine how they stayed airborne.
But they all had a single shared objective: to pursue the nearly transparent intruder.
And so they pulled out all kinds of weapons.
Some looked like crude homemade muskets. There was no visible energy module, and the barrels even looked as if they were made of wood, yet they fired lasers.
Elsewhere, a multi-barreled autocannon mounted on one of the craft was roaring away, its ammunition belt being consumed at high speed. But if one looked closely, one might notice that the rounds stuffed into the belt seemed to be made of wood.
In short, the sheer madness of the scene made Asuna, who was watching the livestream in real time, feel as if she were seeing an illusion.
It reminded her of an old cartoon she had watched, one that had remained popular from the last century all the way to the present: Tom and Jerry. The way those green-skinned monsters attacked made them feel like characters from a gag cartoon going to war with each other.
After Kain pierced through the sky, what came into view was even stranger. It was not outer space, but something that looked like movement through the underground.
But then, almost immediately, he veered into a space made entirely of steel.
A closer look at that bizarre steel labyrinth, pieced together from structures of every conceivable shape, made it seem eerily like a graveyard of starships.
Yes, a starship graveyard.
It looked as if countless broken, ramshackle ships had been scavenged, rebuilt, and then welded together in chaotic layers to form a gigantic hive-like battleship.
And the craft Kain was piloting was currently under attack from a dense storm of incoming fire.
Those attackers showed absolutely no restraint. They did not seem remotely concerned about damaging the massive patchwork hive-ship they had built, nor did they appear to care in the slightest about friendly fire.
So what exactly were these green-skinned creatures?
To be honest, the moment Asuna first saw them, her mind immediately jumped to the monsters from a game that had been hugely popular more than ten years ago.
That game was Warcraft.
These green-skinned monsters looked a lot like the orcs from it.
In fact, SAO itself had similar orc-type monsters.
The biggest difference, however, was that the orcs in this livestream could fly fighter craft and use firearms and other modern weapons.
Wait, there were even small warships now.
Several small warships had appeared directly ahead of Kain, trying to intercept him.
And beyond those small warships, she could already see the stars, which meant Kain was about to fly out of that chaotic place.
In the blink of an eye, he really did burst free of it. The speed was simply too fast.
And with the wider field of view, Asuna could only stare in a daze as she finally saw what he had emerged from.
It was like boarding a rocket from Earth and then, once outside the atmosphere, realizing the thing you had just left behind was an entire planet.
What Kain had just flown out of was also a gigantic sphere.
No matter how one looked at it, it seemed to be a planetary fortress created by directly transforming an entire world.
And around that fortress, there was a fleet. One ugly-looking ship after another, each one another impossible construction assembled from mismatched parts.
Which meant every battleship had a unique appearance.
And those warships, together with the planet-sized war machine itself, were hurling such dense firepower at Kain that it was as if not even a strand of hair could slip through the barrage.
One "moon" that happened to lie along Kain's flight path was caught in the crossfire and ravaged. In an instant, half of it was vaporized by the bombardment.
As for why she identified it as a moon, it was because there was an even larger celestial body nearby, a planet that looked somewhat like Mars, and that "moon" was clearly its satellite.
That planet, too, was undergoing a near-apocalyptic cataclysm, as if heaven and earth themselves were being torn apart.
Because the green-skins' gigantic metal sphere had swept past it, the gravitational pull it generated seemed so immense that the planet's crust was being ripped to pieces.
Fragments of shattered crust were being flung out under that titanic pull, creating a scene so overwhelming that it defied words.
And now that Kain had flown farther away, the fortress planet, covered in metal from pole to pole, looked even more like a moon orbiting that Mars-like world, except this moon was glowing on its own.
And that battle moon did not seem to have merely passed close by. It looked like it was actively doing something to that planet.
There seemed to be a glowing whip, like a luminous tentacle, thrust deep into the planet itself, as though it were draining away the world's energy source.
Then, all at once, a glowing orcish face appeared on the surface of the battle moon, as if it were turning toward the retreating Kain and roaring at him in fury.
And then an ominous light began gathering at the mouth of that face.
The image looked like something out of a science fiction film: a giant machine opening its jaws, preparing to fire some catastrophic particle cannon.
In the next instant, accompanied by a flash of dark red light, the entire field of view was swallowed by crimson radiance.
At the same time, the livestream feed itself began to distort.
It looked like an old television from the last century struck by interference, the image dissolving into static.
(End of Chapter)
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