In front of the GM Emergency Login System.
"You keep saying it can't be done—so you do it yourself, then." Displeased, Yimi flung the old 'if you're so good, you do it' line right back at her.
"I'm not allowed to touch this. You'd wipe me out for it." Yui's voice had dropped a good deal; she'd almost forgotten that the one before her was the very system built to hunt down exploits—and that right now, she herself was exactly such an exploit.
"I'd never wipe you out."
Yimi looked down at the keyboard and decided the thing was badly designed. Now that she'd turned into a human she had all of ten fingers put together, so how was she supposed to work this many buttons?
Finding it a hassle, she simply called out The World and drove a single punch straight into the keyboard.
At once, every GM account in the game lined up before them as translucent phantoms.
Yui: "..."
So you actually can operate it—just now you were purely messing around, weren't you?
Yimi didn't bother about what Yui thought. Sharp-eyed, she immediately spotted what mattered. "This person—I've seen him before."
She was pointing at Heathcliff's file.
Compared with everyone else, this guy had had the least contact with Yimi, and Asuna had also told her not to disturb the Commander, so whenever Yimi went looking for someone to play with she'd basically never called on him. So he was the bad guy.
"Let's go back and finish him off right now!" Yimi took out a Teleport Crystal and warped back, bringing Yui along.
Yui glanced at the console that could already alter SAO's data to a certain degree, then glanced at Yimi, who was obediently using a Teleport Crystal instead, and didn't think too much of it.
After all, Cardinal itself likewise possessed the power to change SAO, yet against an administrator's authority it was still rather powerless.
Back at the usually quiet Knights of the Blood headquarters, Yimi dragged Yui along and kicked open the door of the Commander's office, giving Daizen-san—who was flipping through documents inside—a good fright.
"Ah, Yimi-chan, and Yui too—this really isn't the place—"
Yimi opened her little mouth, couldn't come up with Heathcliff's name, and raised a paw to ask, "Where's the backstage shit-cooker?"
"The backstage...?"
Daizen-san was tongue-tied for a moment, then corrected her. "That word is 'mastermind'—and besides, 'Commander' just means our leader; you can't go describing him as a 'mastermind,' understand?"
"Where'd he go?"
"At this hour the Commander is leading everyone in clearing the Floor 65 boss. Once we get past this floor there'll be tasty snacks for you again, okay?"
"Mmh."
Yimi shifted into her little-cat shape, sniffed around the office, and walked out.
"If you're going out, take two guild members along to protect you!" Daizen-san reminded her.
Yimi paid him no mind and used another Teleport Crystal to arrive on Floor 65, a floor built around the theme of horror.
"Wait a moment—do you mean to go head to head with the administrator?" Yui tried to hold her back.
"The administrator?"
She'd barely voiced her confusion when Yimi caught another scent 'in the air.'
Normally, when tracking by smell, she fixed her attention on the single most prominent odor and all but ignored the rest, but this one she couldn't ignore.
The last time she'd run off to help Kirito fight, that whole crowd of black-robed men had carried a similar smell; back then she'd only taken it for the smell of the cave dungeon itself.
Yimi broke into a run, heading for the area outside the safe zone.
Kill them all!
"Wait up!" Yui hurried after her.
PoH—real name Vassago Casals, founder of Laughing Coffin.
His origins, too, were tragic. His mother was of Spanish descent, his father a Japanese man. He had come into being as an accident after his parents slept together—no more than a one-night stand.
By rights he should have been aborted, but at his father's insistence he was kept, the reason being that the child born to his father's proper wife had a congenital kidney defect, and his own existence happened to be able to furnish that half-brother with one healthy kidney.
Born to exist for that alone, and looked down on by his mother. He knew that once the donation was done he'd be of no further use to his father, so he used it as a bargaining chip, asking his father to let him emigrate to Japan in exchange for a chance to start over.
Unfortunately, for legal reasons he failed to obtain permanent residency in Japan, and with no other choice he threw in his lot with the underground syndicates. As for his taking part in this game—unlike the other players, he hadn't been trapped in it by accident; he had walked into it of his own will.
His task was to murder, inside SAO, a person who was hard to get close to in reality. There was of course the risk of never coming back, but the reward was astronomical too.
As expected, he completed the task without a hitch—yet afterward the fury in his heart could not be suppressed. Every exchange with one of this game's Japanese players reminded him of that damnable scumbag father. And so his killing did not stop; he went further, whipping up sinners on a grand scale and founding Laughing Coffin in the name of Kayaba Akihiko's ideals.
By all rights, killer players like them would hardly ever show up on the current highest floor—but even orange-cursor players needed to keep strengthening their gear to grow stronger, and craftsmen in the 'village outside the safe zone,' the kind with real skill, were exceedingly few.
"Hm?" Catching Yimi's approach in the corner of his eye, PoH narrowed his eyelids slightly.
He knew this cat. Even though what he'd seen back then had been her human form, all it took was having one of his green-cursor nominal members spend a little money to buy, from an information broker, the entire GeoCrawler record of what had happened.
At the time, quite a few people had witnessed the cat make her move, and Heathcliff hadn't concealed the fact that the cat and Yimi were one and the same.
PoH knew this NPC was strong, so for now he didn't much want to provoke her—but if this thing dared come looking for him he'd definitely strike back, and the amusement to be had from taking it out would, for him, be immense.
Gripping the cleaver-like weapon in his hand, PoH watched as Yimi's health bar gradually surfaced into view.
...
"He won?"
Klein and the other players stared in disbelief at the scene before them.
The full-HP girl had driven the pitch-black blade through Kayaba Akihiko's chest, stripping away his final sliver of health, and from start to finish the whole thing had looked smooth to an unbelievable degree.
Setting aside the sword skills that his outfit made look so gorgeous, Kirito's fighting style was practically that of a rabid dog that had thrown away all defense, brute-forcing the durability of Kayaba Akihiko's shield down to nothing with his twin blades—while every attack he took was fully restored within two seconds.
No—you couldn't call it a rabid dog; an elegant Valkyrie was more like it.
How bitterly ironic. Kayaba Akihiko, famous for a health bar that had never once dipped into the yellow, had failed throughout the entire duel to bring Kirito's health bar down into the yellow.
Kirito lifted his head and met Kayaba Akihiko's eyes.
To the onlookers it looked just like—
Kayaba Akihiko: You cheated?
Kirito: You started it.
Kayaba Akihiko was thoroughly baffled: the lifesteal attribute on Kirito was nowhere in their original design intent.
Kirito withdrew his blades. "You've already lost. Are you planning to weasel out of it?"
Even with his health bar emptied he hadn't shattered the way an ordinary player would; in everyone's eyes it was as if Kayaba Akihiko were using this to sneer at every one of the sacrificed, and it set their teeth on edge.
"No." Kayaba Akihiko opened the menu again, called up a scroll, and tossed it to Kirito.
Kirito did not lower his guard. "With this, clearing the game without a single casualty won't be difficult at all. So what are you scheming?"
"Is that the thing you wanted to ask?" Kayaba Akihiko inquired calmly.
Right—this attitude of his wasn't the air of a superior being that Kirito had sensed before; it was entirely the manner of someone standing outside it all, because he wasn't inside this death game at all. He was the mastermind behind everything.
"Why would you do something so monstrous!" From the back, Klein voiced the question they all shared.
Kayaba Akihiko turned his gaze into the distance. "Why, I wonder. Perhaps even I have forgotten. Before I created this system... no, even earlier than that, back when I was a child, I already longed to build that castle."
"To create a world that surpassed every law of the real world—that was the wish that kept me holding on to life, and I did, in fact, glimpse something that surpassed even the world I had made."
Kayaba Akihiko set his gaze back on Kirito. "Aren't you going to check that strategy guide?"
Kirito didn't respond, but he did open the scroll, and the information inside flowed automatically into his message log.
"According to my original plan, I was meant to greet you all as the final boss on the last few floors."
A setup in very poor taste—the strongest player is the Demon King.
"This world has a system that automatically balances its data, namely Cardinal. But the Rat Stew you people used was never deleted or weakened at all, which has already completely wrecked the balance. Do you know why?"
Hearing Kayaba Akihiko's words, Kirito had an ominous premonition.
Kayaba Akihiko didn't leave him puzzled for long, continuing on. "If an item can't be deleted, Cardinal makes adjustments to the data in other places—much like prices rising. However, because of that one crash, the data of the floors ahead can no longer be altered."
"That's right—every dish and every piece of equipment you developed using that bug-NPC increases the strength of the final boss."
"You've got to be kidding." Someone had already gone weak in the knees from the news.
"What exactly are you trying to say?" Kirito told him to skip the nonsense.
"A year ago, this game suffered a crash. My assessment was that the officials had gathered other relevant programmers to try to hack into the system. It seemed I had underestimated them; this virus attack was something even I could not fully repair."
Kayaba Akihiko paused.
"To fix the problem, I dumped every bug that appeared at the time onto Floor 100, the farthest from the players. And at that time there was an NPC entirely outside my plans—the very one you picked up."
"Perhaps a fallback left behind early by other developers, or perhaps a virus planted directly from outside. In any case, she counts as one of the byproducts of that crash."
Naturally, he had intended to toss her onto Floor 100 and shelve her out of sight, and it was precisely this move that gave rise to a small problem in the program.
As for why he'd turned a blind eye to Yimi's existence and her troublemaking—being unable to deal with her was, in part, one of the reasons.
Kayaba Akihiko watched as Kirito, who had already grasped something, began frantically scrolling the strategy guide down to the very bottom.
"Kirito, the rule I set for this world is that defeating the final boss frees every player—no matter at what point the boss is beaten."
Floor 65, in the village outside the safe zone, PoH's pupils contracted, and he instinctively edged back a little, away from the creature before him.
There, to the left of that now fully revealed health bar, was printed the short line of text that had clipped through her model back when she was in human form—text that, in truth, should never have appeared as a system prompt in this game—
Floor 100 Guardian Boss