Just as Kayaba Akihiko had said, every problem he couldn't handle had been dumped into the Ruby Palace—a very common optimization method in game development, doing rough-and-ready processing in a place players would never see.
Originally he'd prepared to change tactics and simply seal away this flaw, the Ruby Palace, then leap out himself once the Floor 99 boss had been defeated—which would achieve the same final-boss effect just as well. What he hadn't expected was that Cardinal would flatly rule that he had designated that virus-spawned NPC as the Ruby Palace's guardian boss.
His greatest wish had been to create a world like this, one that transcended the rules of reality, and to do so as the leader of all players; dramatically becoming the final boss had been no more than an incidental notion.
As things stood now, even that incidental notion hadn't been dashed—it had merely been realized in another form.
"Kayaba Akihiko!"
By now PoH had already run through Kayaba Akihiko's entire family with filthy words in two languages. A Labyrinth guardian boss came, by design, with the trait of never leaving its boss room—and now the man had actually let the single most powerful boss in the whole game run wild across the entire map!
"Yimi..."
Yui, who had likewise seen that string of characters, wanted to say something, but PoH was not about to wait for this little girl to finish before thinking about running.
The instant he drew out a Teleport Crystal, that hand of his was severed—and he thus got to fully experience how it felt for those people who, even inside a game, still suffered pain.
Yimi licked her paw again.
Where this world's adaptive capacity was concerned, the returns her cat form reaped over her human form were greater by no small margin.
Cardinal really had done a fine job crafting her skills and special effects.
To have incited so many people to awaken the darkness in their hearts and become killer players, PoH certainly did have nerve; enduring the lifelike pain of a severed arm, he didn't thrash back and forth the way those people in the prison had.
He could no longer run—so then he wouldn't run!
PoH's expression turned grim as he drew the 'Mate Chopper' he had painstakingly forged and charged. He knew that against the strongest in this game he had no margin to withstand even a single blow, but going by the intelligence this cat had shown before, her AI was practically the equal of a genuinely sentient being.
Any sentient creature, faced with an attack it could react to, would instinctively make a blocking motion no matter how strong or weak that attack was—and his one and only chance here was...
PoH turned his gaze toward Yui, whose face had filled with panic ever since Yimi's health bar appeared.
But it was too slow.
He didn't even need to discover for himself that an attack on Yui would only bring up the [Immortal Object] label—because, thanks to his own shift of aim, Yimi, who had been off to his left, suddenly leapt to a spot directly in front of him, and in that instant PoH tasted the very feeling of defeat that Kirito and Kayaba Akihiko had known in their first duel.
No human could possibly react to speed like this. That Kayaba Akihiko really was wicked—from the very beginning he'd never once intended to let the players break free of this world!
His cleaver did land a clean hit on the little cat, but that health bar of hers, fragile as it looked, didn't so much as tremble.
In this one instant, already knowing his own ending, he grew instead extraordinarily calm—and so he noticed the white light that had been shrunk down infinitely for the sake of optimization, and the place its far end illuminated, which by its very style was plainly nowhere in SAO.
Within that white light, a certain someone he loathed abruptly underwent a strange change: beneath that person's terrified expression, a cut line matching PoH's cleaver appeared at the area of his kidney.
"Hahaha!"
Seeing this, PoH couldn't hold back his laughter, laughing especially freely and contentedly—likely the only time in this whole life of his.
What final boss—Kayaba Akihiko probably would never have imagined it either; this was plainly the real world's...
Rumble——
The cat paw fell, and in the game's exquisitely detailed way it kicked up a great cloud of dust that shrouded the entire range of the village outside the safe zone—yet it didn't destroy so much as half a brick.
The man who had done so much evil was thus wiped from existence, and the affair of Laughing Coffin was, at this moment, at last brought to a full stop.
"Yimi." Yui reached out a hand toward her.
"The smell's gone." Yimi gave her neck one last scratch with a hind leg and shifted back into human form.
The Heathcliff account had been logged out, and all that remained was Kayaba Akihiko, observing everything from a god's-eye view.
Yui gazed at that gradually vanishing health bar, opened her mouth, then swallowed back what she'd meant to say.
Yui chose to selectively ignore what she'd just seen, and could only put on a forced, cheerful face. "Then shall we head back? Or go and find Papa and Mama?"
"..."
No need.
The strategy guide Kayaba Akihiko had handed over was extremely detailed, nearly amounting to handing part of the administrator privileges to Kirito as well. It marked every object set on each floor, including the locations of the boss rooms and the relevant data.
Programmatically, there was no finding Yimi—but the position of the 'Ruby Palace Guardian Boss' was marked plain as day. Even as she kept moving about, Cardinal counted it as a proper, built-in mechanism and kept the marker's coordinates updated in real time.
"Papa?" Yui called out a greeting to the person who'd come, her voice without its usual liveliness.
Because she'd noticed too that Kirito was in a very bad mood; though the boy tried to hide it in the shadow of his bangs, how could a girl of her small height fail to see it?
"You're back! We found it—that Commander is the backstage shit-cooker!" Yimi lifted a paw in greeting to Kirito.
"Mm. I already know." Kirito nodded.
According to what was recorded in the strategy guide, the final boss came in two forms: the humanoid form had a skill resembling 'Infinite Spear,' one of the ten Unique Skills, and the artifact in its hand could even deliver wide-area strikes and break through the system.
"What's the matter?" Yimi, who had likewise noticed Kirito's foul mood, trotted up in front of him.
The cat form possessed a skill set like that of a standard boss: it could unleash high-power long-range slashes and even hard-lock a person in place for five seconds, during which it dealt enormous frame-by-frame damage—fail to dodge in time and death was certain.
And the cat form moved at a speed the naked eye couldn't perceive; through the Knights of the Blood's ceaseless development of effect-granting delicacies, her attack values had already climbed to a point that was all but impossible to withstand.
"Did somebody bully you?"
But for the sake of balance, there was one single thing Cardinal had never adjusted: her lowly defense and her small-fry-tier health bar.
"It's nothing..." Kirito pulled Yimi's head in against him and held her close.
Even with such low health and defense, her movement speed alone all but guaranteed that even if the Clearers packed every corner of the whole hall and struck at empty air, they might never truly land a hit on her.
"Hmm?"
"Papa!" Yui sensed something was off—because when Kirito had appeared, his sword had been drawn.
This game couldn't hide tears; that discomfiting streak of wetness slid down Kirito's fine features from his chin and dripped onto Yimi's cat ear, making it twitch twice.
All the Clearers' selfless, life-risking efforts were for a single goal: to return to reality and reunite with their families. Not only the hundred-strong Clearers—the several thousand others still trapped in this game shared the very same hope; everyone was wishing for it...
A decision had to be made here, it had to be...
Kirito gripped Elucidator, the pitch-black one-handed sword, in his hand and lifted it.
"Why are you crying?" Yimi tipped her little face up and reached out to wipe his tears.
"..."
The blade tipped downward and, with the game's physics, sank into the ground.
But he couldn't do it—he utterly couldn't; how could he ever bring himself to strike?!
"Sorry... I'm sorry..." Kirito used his now-freed hand to cradle the back of the little cat's head as well, his legs slowly giving out beneath him.
Had he been considering swinging his sword at this child? Swinging his sword at the child he regarded as his own daughter?
As far back as that first-floor boss room, when he'd turned his back on all the players, he had already steeled himself to clear this killing game no matter how much infamy it brought.
Yet now, facing his one and only chance, he had made such a weak decision; every bit of resolve he'd handed down before had, in this moment, been utterly shattered.
He had all but failed everyone.
"Asuna, let's find somewhere and live in seclusion..."
"...All right."