Satoru had always considered himself an unassuming man. He had no desire to stand beneath a spotlight, but neither would he crawl into some filthy corner and hide. Even so, the first technique he chose against Yuuki had been the exact same one she used.
It was pride, plain and simple.
Pride he had not even realized was there.
He was the man who brought Aincrad to an end, the player who had forged Infinite Sword into the strongest Unique Skill. Holy Sword, with its flawless balance of offense and defense. Life-Farewell Halberd, built to break armies. Assassination, honed for bloodshed.
All of them had fallen before his blade.
Aincrad had produced plenty of legendary fighters: the Black Swordsman, the Flash, the brilliant Sword Princess. Yet none had been able to withstand the full edge of Yurnero's Severing Blade.
That was the end point he had reached.
The meaning hidden inside the name.
Sword Saint.
Few people had ever called him that. He had kept his distance from the clearing group, hunted alone in the labyrinths, and never carried a famous title of his own. In truth, only one person had ever praised his skill so highly.
Kayaba.
Recognition from the creator of the world was probably the highest achievement any player could receive.
The moment Satoru held a sword, thought became unnecessary. The weapon awakened the memories in his body and drew the motion out of him: fingers, palm, forearm, shoulder, waist, legs. Once he raised the blade into its opening stance, his entire body lowered into position on instinct.
The Sword Skill followed as naturally as water.
His form matched the system's prescribed motion almost perfectly. At the instant of activation, he drove off the ground hard enough to add even more force, pushing the strike beyond the output the system should have allowed.
It was not the power of his Fluctlight.
It was technique forged through two years of virtual combat where every mistake could mean death.
His perfected Sonic Leap slammed into Yuuki's attack. Her purple-black sword locked against his own, the two blades biting into each other.
Satoru immediately understood how she had won sixty-seven consecutive duels.
There was real weight behind her sword. It was not arrogance to say that a lesser opponent would have lost on the first exchange. He had used Sonic Leap more than a thousand times. If Yuuki's execution had been even slightly incomplete, the system would have given his strike priority, and his blade would already be buried in her chest.
She was no ordinary player.
The thought passed in an instant. As the force behind their clashing weapons ran out, both blades recoiled.
Surprise touched Yuuki's youthful face, but her body was already moving. Her obsidian sword came down diagonally toward Satoru's shoulder.
He shifted aside at the last possible moment, choosing the narrowest and most dangerous evasion. The black blade skimmed across his chest without landing cleanly.
That risk gave him exactly what he wanted. He did not need to recover his stance. His sword snapped back at her in the same motion, turning defense into a lightning-fast counterattack.
Yuuki yanked her sword back with startling strength and caught his blade across its middle. Steel scraped along steel with a shrill cry, scattering orange sparks between them.
Satoru's expression did not change. He let his sword grind downward against hers, tossed the hilt from his right hand to his left, and reversed the blade as it fell. With the weapon held backward, he drove the pommel toward the armor over Yuuki's chest.
The position was awkward but carefully protected. The flat of his blade covered the underside of his left arm, keeping Yuuki's horizontal sword from cutting into it. At the same time, he forced her weapon downward and opened the center of her guard.
His arm slid along the black sword, and the pommel struck Yuuki's breastplate with a hard metallic crack.
It was not a Sword Skill. It barely qualified as conventional swordsmanship.
His body had simply found the answer on its own.
Satoru had fought too many people who relied on the same system-assisted techniques he did. Against such opponents, an ugly basic attack in the middle of a familiar pattern could be more dangerous than any named Skill.
The impact would stagger Yuuki for at least a second. Most people responded to a blow by retreating or swinging their weapon on reflex, and either response would be too slow.
His left hand was already inside her guard. All he had to do was turn the reversed blade and slash across her neck. A clean hit there would deal massive weak-point damage and might end the duel immediately.
At worst, her black sword would take his left arm in exchange.
An arm for her head was an excellent trade.
Efficient, cold, and utterly without mercy. Less than ten seconds into the duel, the habits of the death game had already bared their teeth.
Yuuki's avatar was small and beautiful, and the exposed skin of her neck looked almost real. None of that mattered. Once someone became his opponent, a pretty girl and an enormous boar boss were separated only by their models and numbers.
Satoru never stopped to wonder whether fighting that way might leave someone shaken. He did not seem to realize that his instinct to corner an opponent and finish them at any cost had become a little unhealthy.
Several spectators shivered and touched their own necks without knowing why.
At point-blank range, Satoru's reversed sword swept through a clean horizontal arc.
A few red particles sprayed into the air.
Too shallow.
Yuuki had reacted the instant the pommel struck her armor. She did not try to counter or even raise her sword. She simply threw herself backward and escaped his reach. The blade barely grazed her neck, dealing only a sliver of damage.
It was the smartest choice she could have made. Any unnecessary movement would have cost her a large portion of her HP.
Yuuki landed several steps away and touched her neck, relief still visible on her face.
"You really are trying to kill me! Is that how the clearing group's officers fight?"
Full Loss Mode meant exactly what it sounded like. The duel would not stop at first strike or half HP. It continued until one side lost all their health. In ALO, that still meant suffering a death penalty, and a powerful enough weak-point hit could force that outcome in a single blow.
A decapitation strike was more than capable of doing it.
Faced with Yuuki's accusation, Satoru only raised an eyebrow.
Was that not obvious?
In a PvP fight, of course you attacked to kill.
Yes.
Satoru's instincts were definitely a little unhealthy.
The crowd had been stunned by the merciless strike. They looked from the expressionless man in red to the small, adorable girl and immediately chose a side.
"Exactly! That's no way to treat a girl!"
"The death penalty is awful, you know!"
"Farming-guild people really don't know how to enjoy a game! Showing no mercy to a cute girl like that? Stay single forever!"
They seemed to have forgotten that the same cute girl had beaten all of them into the ground and had been terrorizing challengers for sixty-seven straight matches.
Satoru pressed his lips together.
This felt strangely familiar.
Had he not once fought another beautiful swordswoman while an angry crowd shouted abuse at him from the sidelines?
The memory amused him. He gave Yuuki another look, compared the two girls in his mind, and allowed himself a small, satisfied smile.
Sheeta was still cuter.
To everyone watching, however, that childish little smile looked like the smug contempt of an arrogant guild officer.
"Come on, Absolute Sword! Cut him down!"
"We'll distract him for you!"
Yuuki let out a long breath. The bright, easy confidence she had worn until then faded into concentration.
She looked again at the man in the uniform of a guild she disliked. When she met Satoru's faintly amused gaze, irritation rose in her for reasons she could not quite explain.
There was something rude about the way he was looking at her.
She could no longer deny his strength. The man standing seven or eight paces away was the first player she had met who truly satisfied the standard she had set for herself.
Unfortunately, he also appeared to belong to one of those insufferable farming guilds.
The disadvantage in their first exchange, piled on top of her existing resentment, left her genuinely angry. Her refined features did not carry anger very well. No matter how hard she tried, she still looked more sulky than threatening.
Yuuki shouted and charged.
There was no Sword Skill light around her weapon this time. She came at him with pure swordsmanship, yet the pressure behind the attack was even greater.
Her obsidian blade left its own black trail through the air.
Satoru shifted his sword back into his dominant right hand. A heartbeat later, they collided at close range.
Yuuki's sword became a sequence of ink-dark afterimages. The rapid clash of metal alternated between clean ringing notes and harsh, heavy impacts, while sparks burst around them in quick succession.
Her speed rose all at once.
By the time Satoru recognized the change, the blade coming toward him had become a storm of black.
Yuuki attacked as though her weapon weighed nothing, cutting again and again from every angle, accelerating with each strike.
Her ordinary swordplay was stronger than her Sword Skills?
The answer was right in front of him. Powerful system-guided techniques restricted her. Only when she abandoned those patterns and moved freely could her true ability emerge.
She stole the rhythm of the duel in an instant.
At that speed, Satoru had no room to activate a Sword Skill. He could only parry, counter, and move with the relentless flow of her attacks.
Once he adjusted to the pace, his surprise finally settled.
FullDive combat tested the compatibility between a player and their avatar. The greater the compatibility, the faster the player could receive information from the game and return commands to it.
Nezha, the blacksmith they had met in the early days of Aincrad, had struggled so badly with that connection that he could not even judge distance properly. Makoto Kaizuka was the opposite. If an avatar was a player's projection inside the game, Makoto moved as though he were physically alive within Aincrad.
Yuuki was another genius of FullDive compatibility.
Her reflexes might even surpass Kirito's. A player would need extraordinary response speed to receive Dual Blades, and without using his Fluctlight, Satoru could never have matched that Unique Skill at full speed.
Years of synchronization between Satoru and Yurnero allowed him to keep pace with Yuuki, but only barely. More than anything, he was relying on battle instinct and accumulated experience.
If he waited until he saw an attack before reacting, he would already be too late.
Their blades swept past each other's bodies, slowly cutting away at both HP bars. Clean hits remained rare.
Yuuki drove herself forward with a sharp battle cry. Her black sword battered at Satoru's guard while she relentlessly targeted weak points, especially his neck. Apparently, she had taken his earlier attempt personally.
Cuts flickered through the air faster than the eye could comfortably follow. Her unassisted sword dance became an endless, irregular barrage.
"She's incredible!" someone shouted. "Go, Yuuki!"
The crowd could feel the intensity of the exchange, but most of them had already endured the humiliation of losing to Yuuki. What they really wanted to see was the hated farming-guild officer suffer.
Satoru frowned and focused entirely on the attacks.
Yuuki's offense and reflexes were terrifying, but there was a reason she had not overwhelmed him. Experience was part of it. The other part was that she was too direct.
Her blade never used a feint to break the rhythm and force a wrong response.
Could swordsmanship this brilliant also be her weakness?
His weapon was inferior to hers, and maintaining this pace only kept him under pressure. He needed to take control again, even if doing so cost him HP.
Satoru knocked her blade aside, then turned his back on her without hesitation.
Yuuki struck at once. Several cuts opened across his unguarded back, tearing a chunk from his HP bar.
He used his own body as a shield long enough to take the opening stance of a Sword Skill.
Reaver.
The thrust was aimed away from Yuuki. He meant to use its acceleration to launch himself out of her range.
A purple glow ignited behind him.
Yuuki had read his intention. Rather than settle for the damage already dealt, she activated a Sword Skill to punish his escape as severely as possible.
Excellent judgment.
It also gave him an opening.
Satoru broke the flawless starting stance of Reaver. The orange light around his blade scattered and vanished as he spun back toward her.
He had memorized the position of Yuuki's sword and every detail of her posture.
An Original Sword Skill.
He had never seen that stance or attack path. It could only be an OSS. Without knowing how the technique moved, his plan to counter one Sword Skill with another was useless.
His sword came forward anyway.
There was no system light around the blade, but the motion was too clean and deliberate to be mistaken for an ordinary swing. Drawing solely on memory, Satoru reproduced Azure-Rising Abyss from Infinite Sword's Severing Blade sequence.
It was effectively an Original Sword Skill performed in the middle of a duel.
Because he had never registered the technique with the system, it received none of the usual assistance or damage. For all its precision, it remained an ordinary attack shaped by exceptional technique.
Five thrusts came at him like streaks of lightning.
Satoru barely stopped three. The other two struck home and drove his HP into the yellow.
But the Skill did not end after five.
The purple light around Yuuki's sword had not faded. If anything, it was only beginning to burn brighter as she raised the weapon over her left shoulder.
Another five hits at that power would leave him with almost nothing.
There was no room to evade.
A rueful smile crossed Satoru's face. Then his expression hardened, and for the first time in the duel, a low growl escaped him.
Strength, experience, instinct, memory.
He drew on all of it and cut through the air.
There was no time to activate another Sword Skill. His only option was to build one from ordinary attacks again.
Stardust Trail.
Ten cuts at blinding speed.
Given enough time, he could probably register the techniques carved into his bones through the OSS system. At present, he had no choice but to recreate one by force.
His sword hummed under the strain. Satoru poured every ounce of strength and Agility available to the avatar into restoring the speed of the old technique.
It was not the weapon he once carried, but he would make the Skill live again anyway.
The plain steel of his blade crossed the blazing violet of Yuuki's. Neither weapon turned aside to defend its wielder. Satoru's sword tore into her black armor while the obsidian blade pierced his own.
The next five strikes passed in an instant.
Damage light covered Satoru's body. Yuuki's armor showed only shallow scoring and a single point of lost durability.
When the exchange ended, Satoru's HP had fallen into the red.
Yuuki's was in the yellow.
Her OSS had now reached ten hits. Even in Aincrad, a ten-hit Sword Skill belonged among the highest levels. Under the player-created OSS system, it should have been close to the human limit. The best Skill Tome on the market only contained eight hits.
Yuuki should have entered a recovery delay.
Satoru still had five cuts of Stardust Trail left.
He was moments from losing, yet that fact did not concern him much. Without awakening his Fluctlight, even he struggled to reproduce all ten hits of Stardust Trail.
Yuuki was a genius, but surely she could not go beyond...
The blue-violet light around her sword was still burning.
Her OSS was not over.
The possibility of defeat sent a cold thrill through Satoru. Every instinct he possessed as a swordsman surged to the surface.
Five hits remained in Stardust Trail, the most he could barely complete. If Yuuki's OSS could surpass the ordinary human limit of fifteen, then he wanted to see it.
They roared at almost the same moment. Both understood that the duel had reached its final exchange.
Their blades moved.
For an instant, the pale fragments of starlight that once accompanied Stardust Trail seemed to gather around Satoru's unaided sword. Across from him, the violet radiance around Yuuki's weapon burned like flame.
Neither defended.
They struck each other head-on.
Yuuki achieved impossible speed by following the OSS.
Satoru achieved it by forcing everything his body knew into motion.
One.
Two.
Three.
Three exchanges raised Yuuki's OSS to thirteen hits.
Four.
Satoru felt the hard boundary of his body's speed. He could not swing any faster. He gathered every scrap of focus and determination into one final cut.
Reproducing a ten-hit Skill by hand would have been an extraordinary achievement anywhere else.
Here, it meant nothing.
His final strike went for Yuuki's unarmored neck. It was the only vulnerable target he had left.
Five.
Yuuki twisted aside, eyes wide with the effort. Satoru's blade missed. The moment the last cut passed her, all the strength drained from his arm.
As he had expected, ten hits were the limit of an ordinary person.
Six.
Yuuki's sixteenth strike came straight for the center of his torso. Pale damage marks already crossed Satoru's battered armor, and her final thrust aimed precisely at the intersection of that X.
It was a finishing blow.
"This really is..."
Regret and admiration pulled a quiet breath from him.
He could reproduce only ten hits without the system's aid.
Yuuki had already registered a sixteen-hit Skill.
That was nothing short of a miracle.
Its power and speed defied reason. More than either of those, it was beautiful.
He did not want to lose, but he would not regret losing to a technique like this.
Satoru looked into Yuuki's clear, resolute eyes and prepared to accept defeat without turning away.
Gold filled her irises, and the sight struck through him.
His pupils widened.
Confidence and victory shone in Yuuki's gaze, but neither mattered. What held him was the rich golden light spreading through her eyes.
The final thrust was beautiful. So were her flying hair, her tense expression, and the fierce concentration on her face.
The gold swallowed all of it.
"That is..."
Satoru's voice shook.
Something erupted without sound, a roar held inside perfect silence.
His Fluctlight awakened.
Yuuki felt the change like an explosion beside her ear. Her heart jumped with it.
For only an instant, she saw his stern gaze. Gold threaded through its deep black, softened by the surrounding blue until it neither burned nor blinded.
Satoru's sword had stopped beside her neck, spent after she evaded the final cut. Then it came alive, the exhausted blade filling with fresh force and intent. After the briefest pause, it tore through the confused overlap of light and shadow.
Yuuki's sixteenth strike hit nothing.
The force of it burst outward and flattened the surrounding grass in a wide radial pattern, but the blade had missed.
"Huh...?"
Yuuki stared in confusion.
SAMURO WINS!
The system answered her confusion with an impartial verdict.
The winner was Samuro.
That only deepened her confusion.
She finally noticed that her HP had already fallen past the defeat threshold. A second later, she turned and found Satoru standing on her other side without understanding how he had gotten there.
He slowly returned his sword to its scabbard.
Feeling her gaze, Satoru looked back. His eyes had returned to their quiet black.
"Yuuki... are you...?"
Satoru lowered his gaze.
"I need to talk to you."