The Santana 2000 tore down the highway.
The model had been out of production since 2004 and had long since become a collector's piece, but Satoru had a weakness for old things. The first car he had ever driven had been a Santana, and once he was legally able to drive again, he had searched used-car lots until he found this one.
Its left-hand drive made it look hopelessly out of place on Japanese roads.
Satoru loved it anyway.
Now the old veteran was giving him everything it had on the long road to Sapporo. His right foot ached from holding down the accelerator. He had been driving for nearly eight hours, stopping only for fuel and the restroom.
Even by train, Tokyo to Sapporo was a journey of nearly ten hours. Flying was the sensible choice. Most people who wanted to tour Hokkaido by car flew in, rented one near the airport, and started from there. Driving the entire way, ferry crossing included, was something only a person with no fear of inconvenience would attempt.
But airports and stations meant cameras, ticket records, and crowds. Yuuki had escaped with nothing but the clothes on her back, and Satoru had been certain Kikuoka would send people after them.
So he had chosen the car.
Hours later, it was becoming obvious that no one was following.
It was already one in the morning. Satoru had watched the last of the daylight fade as he drove, and the strain was finally catching up with him. On a trip this long, two drivers should have taken turns. The girl in the passenger seat, however, was in no condition to touch the wheel.
Satoru trusted his driving, but he was not stupid enough to trust an exhausted body. Around ten o'clock, he had activated his Fluctlight to sharpen his focus and keep one careless lapse from causing an accident. To his accelerated perception, even the Santana at full speed crawled along like a bumper car.
Using his Fluctlight to overcome fatigue would only leave him more exhausted afterward.
The contradiction did not matter.
The backlash would come once he shut it down, and he had accepted that price.
The longer he kept it active, the worse that price would be. This was the first time he had maintained it for three straight hours. His face had gone pale, sweat soaked his clothes, and only his eyes remained unnaturally bright.
He was beginning to regret his decision.
Regret was rare for Satoru, but unease had settled deep in his chest. It was not because he had chosen the slower route, nor because he feared what this strain might do to him.
Yuuki was running out of time.
The seat belt seemed to be the only thing holding her upright in the passenger seat. Without it, her limp body might have folded in on itself. She looked as though she were asleep, but she was not resting. Her unfocused eyes were still open by sheer force of will.
Gold drifted through those gentle irises.
Her Fluctlight was burning too.
Unlike Satoru's, it could neither be controlled nor extinguished.
He had not noticed until they were already hundreds of kilometers from Tokyo. Yuuki's voice had grown softer, and the excitement she had shown after escaping had slowly faded. He had assumed she was tired. It was only when he asked what she needed at a rest stop that he truly saw the light devouring her life.
No one understood what it meant better than he did.
The Fluctlight was powerful, but that power had always been a double-edged sword. Once awakened, it continued to mature until the eyes turned brilliant gold. That was the final stage at which it could still be restrained. Beyond that point, it stopped obeying and began consuming the life that fed it.
Satoru had crossed that boundary himself. He had become drunk on the false freedom it gave him. Even when his accelerated mind could calculate exactly how long he had left to live, he had still been able to laugh and play his contemptuous game with Death Gun.
If not for the strange turn of events that followed, he would already be dead. He could control the Fluctlight now, and his eyes had settled into a pale blue-gold unlike the brilliant color from before.
But he did not understand how he had crossed that threshold.
He had no way to help Yuuki do the same.
All he could do was keep talking. He knew that a person burning through their Fluctlight should remain perfectly lucid.
He told her everything, including the truth about Makoto Kaizuka. He softened nothing and hid nothing.
Yuuki still did not answer.
His heart sank.
If even that clarity had begun to leave her, then she was already near the end.
How long had she possessed this power? Perhaps it had been burning for as long as she had been trapped there.
His own Fluctlight had awakened when he met Makoto. Yuuki's might have awakened around the same time. Satoru had eventually learned to control his, but she might never have had that chance. Two years in Aincrad, then almost two more after GGO. She could have endured this for four years, every day, every hour, every second.
It had been a long time since Satoru had felt so completely helpless.
Kikuoka had probably sent no one after them because he already knew. Yuuki had so little time left that retrieving her was no longer worth the effort.
Every time that thought surfaced, regret twisted harder inside Satoru.
If he had risked the airport or the train instead of trying to outsmart everyone, she might already have reached her destination.
The makeshift hero team he and Shinkawa had formed was stalled here, and Satoru had no idea what had happened to the other man.
Had Kikuoka punished him for ruining the experiment?
"Damn it..."
Yuuki stirred.
She looked exactly as she had in the virtual world, but none of the Absolute Sword's bright energy remained. She was smaller and more fragile now, her skin so pale that even a touch seemed capable of hurting her. She looked like a doll assembled from a thousand delicate pieces, ready to fall apart if even one came loose.
She turned toward Satoru. His own face was deathly white, and each breath came harder than the last.
"Five hours," she whispered. "That's all I have left."
Satoru's brow tightened.
She had calculated the time of her own death. That was another cruelty of the Fluctlight: its processing power could give a person the answer to almost anything, even when that answer should never have been known.
"We're almost there," Satoru said. "Trust me. Hold on. Five hours is enough."
"It's okay."
Yuuki was calmer than he was. A weak smile touched her still-childlike face.
"I've been ready for this for a long time."
She looked through the windshield at the dark road ahead.
"I used to wonder what dying would be like. Maybe I'd fall asleep one night and never wake up. Maybe I'd simply collapse. No more thoughts, no more dreams, only darkness that never ended. Every bond, every promise, everything that tied me to the world would become a farewell. Whenever I imagined a goodbye that complete, I was terrified."
Her voice grew softer, but she continued.
"Then everyone else left before I did. In the end, I was the only one still here. The promises and memories I treasured stopped feeling like things I had to cling to. There was no one left for them to reach. Now, if I close my eyes, I can finally rest. I won't have to force myself to smile anymore. I suppose I won't even be sad after that."
Yuuki smiled faintly.
"Getting to see the real world again was already more than enough. And I got to speak with you. I never thought that would happen. I've known about you for a long time, Satoru. About you and Makoto."
"Don't you hate me?" he asked.
"I don't know how."
There was no accusation in her voice.
"I don't know how to hate someone, and I don't know what revenge is supposed to look like. I don't even know whether the two of you truly hated each other. You said you considered him a friend."
"I still killed him."
"Then why are you pushing yourself this far to finish what he was supposed to do?"
"Karma, I suppose."
Satoru gave a bitter smile.
"Strictly speaking, I owe him my life. At the end, he chose not to strike the fatal blow."
He remembered Makoto standing with his back to him after Satoru's defeat. Just before his own HP reached zero, Makoto had reduced the Forgotten War Statue to a sliver of health and left Satoru a path forward.
"Maybe that's the price of winning another life. You inherit the other person's mistakes along with it. The living keep carrying the weight until they finally collapse. Then someone else defeats them, takes it up, and the cycle moves on."
Satoru had wondered many times why Makoto had spared him. Why give him a way out with the last moments of his own life?
If their positions had been reversed, Satoru would have chosen mutual destruction without hesitation.
Makoto had calmly chosen otherwise.
Maybe he had known that surviving would not be mercy. Even now, it felt as though that terrifying man's ghost were still lecturing him.
Satoru reached for the Santana's single-disc CD player. It was filled with old songs he had collected over the years. At one in the morning, theirs was the only car on the highway. Darkness streamed past on both sides while the headlights revealed the same strip of road, flat and seemingly endless.
The engine hummed steadily. Yuuki's breathing was just as even, without so much as a tremor of struggle.
Nothing around them was urgent.
Nothing looked wrong.
The peace of it was almost unbearable.
But Satoru was racing against time. A promise left by the dead could not be allowed to die a second time.
He needed something to break the silence.
The old speakers came to life with soft drums and piano, dreamlike and sad. It sounded like the end of a Western fairy tale: a little girl, surrounded by elves and animals, wandering in her sleep to the edge of a magical land. There, she climbed into a boat made from a giant leaf and drifted into the mist.
A clear female voice began to sing, quiet and young, as though she were telling the last lines of that story.
The song was "Afterglow," the ending theme from an old fantasy series called Century Sonny. Satoru remembered almost nothing about the show beyond stationery coming to life and setting off on an adventure. The ending song, however, had never left him.
The lyrics painted moonlight over the sea, shooting stars carrying dreams into the wind, translucent wings rising toward the sky, and the colors of dawn blooming at the edge of memory.
They spoke of hope, yet the melody carried the ache of a farewell.
It was an ending theme, after all.
Satoru tightened his grip on the steering wheel.
Yuuki listened in silence.
"It's beautiful."
For the first time, Satoru did not answer her. He only pressed the accelerator as far as it would go, jaw clenched as though determination alone could make the car move faster.
The real world had limits he could not break. In a virtual world, he could move with impossible speed. Here, he had an aging engine, an empty highway, and the distance still ahead of him.
The Santana 2000 was no fairy-tale carriage. No miracle would carry them beyond its top speed, no matter how hard he pushed it. Satoru stopped comparing their arrival time with the five hours Yuuki had left. If he calculated the answer and found it impossible, he was afraid some part of him might surrender.
The song began again, and Yuuki glanced toward the CD player.
"Why do you keep playing the same one?"
Satoru's pale blue-gold eyes never left the road.
"Because if the ending theme isn't over, neither is the story."