Chapter 9: Crossing Field
Late afternoon, Complexity head staff establishment, one week before Hideki meets Kazuto
When Fuzen huffed in a stately manner through his small cigar, it did not produce the usual strong burst of cocaine-infused smoke. The thing was running low on juice, contributing to the rather irritating lack of kick left in it, but for once the man was not irked by such a trivial thing. After all, he had better things to worry about.
Namely, plotting.
Exhaling slowly out of his mouth, he pulled the cigar from between his teeth and arched his neck to watch the smoke curl its way up to the ceiling before dispelling at its peak. He watched the wreaths of smoke twist in the air until they were completely out of sight, and only then did he stub the cigar and lower his head once more. Leaving the cigar on the ashtray, standing straight up on the smashed-in end of the stalk, Fuzen spin deliberately in his high-backed chair and linked his fingers, glaring hard at the shaded window opposite him.
Reaching into his breast pocket, he eased out the nanotech phone resting in the space there, keying open the device once he'd done so. The nano-cell was something still in development by his teams and was far from people ready to be marketed, but being the president of Complexity had its perks, and exclusive tech specs were one of them. Swiping and tapping his way through the phone's files, he brought up a particular file on a human profile, eyes absently scanning over the person's dimensions and bodily specifics for what felt like the millionth time.
Grunting, Fuzen continued glaring at the photo that was attached to the profile, the gears in his head turning like well-oiled clockwork. Changing his plans was something the businessman despised doing, as any tweaks made to carefully laid-out plots were often last minute and virtually ineffective. And now, during the process of one of his most critical schemes yet, this had to come into the picture and turn everything on its side. Literally, everything. Not a single detail of the original plan remained after what Fuzen had seen on that human profile, a fact that irritated him to no end. He had grown up in the slums and learned to fight for himself in order to survive, taking everything from everyone he could and never making a single error in his plots. Once he had established himself in his local area, he had gone on to tackle the vast world of economics, business, enterprise, and the inevitable behind-the-scenes trickery that came with it. Over the course of fifty one years since he had left his mother's womb, Fuzen had gone from a dirt-poor runt on the streets to the omnipotent head of Japan's largest company in innovative technologies. All through precise planning and not a single mistake along the way.
"Damn child," He muttered gruffly, turning around to grind the butt off the cigar deeper into the surface of the ashtray. "Damn the child and her parents."
Despite the immense prosperity Complexity enjoyed due to its status as the unopposed champion of the future (technology wise), the company was not operating at tis peak performance at the current time. About half a year prior, Fuzen had been preoccupied with fighting off the law in a consuming debate which had eaten away at his ability to work. The debate itself had been about his two-year absence from the world. Fuzen had come under fire from complaints about atrocities committed by himself and others within the death game of that accursed scientist, and only through skillful bribery and the pulling of the right strings had he managed to escape a prison sentence. Now he walked as a free man, but he could feel the eyes of the people on him at all times.
And now, during a time of crisis where his company had taken a minor nose-dive, his assets had begun to slip, and several underground friends had severed their connections to him due to his prolonged absence, the head of Complexity was forced to deal with this...scum, a mosquito that refused to be swatted properly and only came back to risk its well-being once again.
Realizing that his breathing was becoming a bit more erratic, Fuzen muttered to himself and reached into his desk to produce a second cigar. Lighting the new one, he jammed it between his teeth and leaned back, momentarily ignoring the massive piles of work waiting for him and trying to think, think, come up with a way...
Knock knock.
The anger and irritation rose inside of Fuzen's chest like a wildfire at having his train of thought derailed, but forced himself to suppress the rising emotion. Clearing his throat loudly to cleanse his mind, the executive called out, "Enter."
The doorknob across the room turned, and the door it was married to was pushed open by the incoming visitor. Raising his eyes, Fuzen saw Hideki making his way into the office.
"Ah, Hideki," The executive greeted briefly, turning to face the man in his chair and setting down the cigar. "How good to see you. Come, have a seat."
"Thank you," The respectable young man said politely, taking the chair he was offered. Fuzen popped the cigar back between his teeth and blew a small smoke ring, satisfied at its strength, while he waited for his subordinate to speak his mind.
Hideki did not express himself immediately, instead dining to gaze upon the heavily framed portraits lining the wall to his right, oil paintings of all the presidents of Complexity before his boss. Fuzen followed the boy's gaze and narrowed his eyes slightly. It was true that he was quite fond of the young man, but sometimes he took too long to prepare for his monologues.
Then, at long last, he spoke. "You see, sir..." Hideki began.
Fuzen blinked at him once to prompt an elaboration.
"...there is something I wish to ask of you."
Now that caught his interest. Stubbing his second cigar despite having smoked it for only a few minutes, the executive leaned forward in his desk and clasped his meaty hands together and gave Hideki his entire undivided attention.
"And what," He asked slowly, "Might that be?"
The younger man squirmed in his seat for a moment before raising his head and saying, "I wish to take on an apprentice, of sorts."
Hideki Yuuki was the son of a very good friend of Fuzen's, Shouzou Yuuki. Well, more technically speaking, he and Shouzou were half-brothers. They were uterine siblings, meaning they shared a mother but had differing fathers. The issues their mother had had to deal with regarding divorces and commitment had, however, let the half-brothers to regard themselves more as very close friends in order to avoid any sort of affiliation with said "family issues." Fuzen was also rather fond of Shouzou, although this favor was tested by his younger brother's inability to think coldly and calculate without factoring human compassion into the equation. But family was family, at least until they ceased to benefit you.
The Complexity executive had not, however, maintained any sort of feasible connection with the other side of his family aside from the occasional phone call. The reasoning behind this was rather simple: he could not allow them to interfere in his affairs. In business the element of surprise is always key, and having more people obligated to stay close to him was no bueno. Not to mention that he had never been overly fond of his little half-brother's wife or the children, for that matter. Even now his relationship with Shouzou was strained by lack of contact and general detachment, something Fuzen hoped to prolong.
Blinking, he sat back in his chair and hmmed. "An apprentice? Care to elaborate?"
Taking a deep breath, Hideki said, "Sir, I have been looking to expand on my career's opportunities for quite some time now, something that may or may not have escaped your attention. Despite my love for traveling and the various types of business I have encountered, I wish to establish myself in one particular area and be able to frequent that place. To me, that place is home. If I were to be able to take up a position in this very building, I could be pivotal to many ongoing projects still stuck on the drawing board. The apprentice is someone I wish to nurture for the future, someone I can pass on my knowledge to. I am by no means an old man with a life's worth of experience to relate, but I feel that I have much to give."
Hideki's relation to the boss's half-brother had certainly been part of the reason for his rapid acceleration through the ranks, but Fuzen had always known that the young man was a hard working soul who had earned every bit of his success. Now, he did not particularly agree with the honesty the youngster seemed to exhibit much like his father, and Hideki still received a measure of dissent from his peers due to his rapid promotions. At one point in Hideki's career, Fuzen had promised him any request, anything he could give, in order to thank him for his tireless efforts. It was true that the Complexity executive was at his core a liar, schemer, and traitor by habit, but he still believed in rewarding people (when he felt like it). A warped philosophy perhaps, but it wasn't like anyone was brave enough to say it aloud.
Fuzen turned halfway in his seat and took his own time to gaze upon the portraits hanging ominously from the wall, one long procession of presidents leading the nation of Japan through the next step into the future. Like a never ending continuum.
"Do you have anybody in mind?" He asked absently.
Hideki nodded; that boy always had an answer for everything. "Yes," He affirmed.
"His name is Kirigaya Kazuto."
The name thundered in Fuzen's ears at a thousand decibels.
Despite employing his "poker face" skills, the executive could not keep his countenance from contorting once before he pinned it under his control. Still refusing to face Hideki, he stared at the paintings for a moment longer in order to regain his composure. Then he forced a smile and turning back to his visitor.
"Kazuto-san, you say?" Fuzen asked stiffly, drumming his fingers across the mahogany of his desk.
"Can you tell me more about him?"
Hideki seemed confused that his superior would take any sort of interest in his potential student, but he obliged his boss. "He's quite close to our family actually, or so I can infer, as I have returned home only recently. He is in a budding relationship with my little sister," he added with a smile. "I have yet to meet him, to confess, but I've heard enough of his technological prowess to at least consider him for the position. He constructed his first computer when he was ten and won a science fair with it, and he was smart enough to get out of that death-game crisis a while back alive and well."
"Seems like a fine young man," The executive murmured softly, lost in thought for a moment. Then he rose from his chair, saying, "Well in that case, Hideki, consider your request granted. I'll have an office set up for you a few floors under and leave you to move in as you see fit. You will be free of any business trips for quite some time, but they are not over. Soon we will require your services once again."
"Thank you, sir."
Once Hideki had left, he linked his cell to his laptop screen and pulled up the full specs for the profile he'd been studying earlier. Reaching out, Fuzen traced his index finger under the curve of the subject's chin in the photo provided, wondering if he would discover some sort of resemblance to the parents but found none, unsurprisingly.
Smirking, Fuzen closed the profile. Looking at it any longer wouldn't change anything. In any case, the girl would serve her purpose and then be disposed of.
Forever.
It happened on a Saturday.
Kazuto was sitting at home continuing his work on the computer program that would allow him to see his in-game daughter again once the nine month waiting period was over and he could use VR once more. When Kazuto had initially awoke from Aincrad, he had been worried that the game would be obliterated entirely and Yui's existence likewise erased. Instead, the floating castle was brought into the world of ALfheim, where it now made its constant journey across the skies of the land of faeries. Thanks to this, the SAO servers were intact and safe for the time being, albeit with very few active users. None, actually, if you considered the fact that none of the survivors were medically cleared to utilized full-dive technology, but Kazuto knew for sure that there were players out there who had chosen to ignore that ruling. Not to mention that scores of inspectors occasionally made their way through the many floors, scouring the land for any lasting trace of Kayaba Akihiko; despite his death, there were fears that through some sort of clever twist, the intelligence the scientist had grafted onto the Global Net would come back to haunt them. So the SAO servers were certainly not abandoned, simply underfilled.
Now, merely completing the writing of the program was no guarantee of being able to maintain contact with Yui again. Any software was useless without the tools to run it, tools Kazuto simply did not own and had no chance of being able to afford. No, it would require the resources of some sort of gargantuan coalition of money to set up the tech and hardware that had to pair along with his software. A place with the equipment to supply his ambition.
Somewhere like Complexity.
Kazuto had performed some research on the company he'd been offered a position in in his spare time, although he did not find much information he was not already privy to. He had, however, gleaned the identity of the company's head: President Fuzen, surname unknown. Although the absence of a last name available on the net would have seemed odd to others, Kazuto was well aware that it was a safety measure; he had heard legends of the days long past when celebrities and business juggernauts had dared to walk around in public knowing that their faces and surnames were out there to be known. Perhaps such behavior would have been acceptable half a century ago, but in today's world the various ways one could undermine another simply by being in possession of a full name was too dangerous to risk.
Now of course, there was also the decision to make on whether or not to accept Hideki's offer. An internship at Complexity could very well be (career speaking) the best thing to ever happen to him, as long as he made his way around smartly. Although Kazuto couldn't say for sure, he hoped fervently to be able to join the software sector of the company. A place where he could bring his abounding innovations to life, somewhere he could associate with people who actually understood his talk.
A means to bringing Yui back.
Rubbing tiredly at his eyes, Kazuto resumed threading the encryption codes for the software, fighting sleep to stay up and make progress. Dimly, he recalled that the results from his college entrance exams were supposed to be coming any day now. Was it today? Yesterday? Next week? Hell, he had no idea. Yawning, he tried to push the thought out of his mind.
Then the phone rang.
The sound made him sit straight up in lightning fast fashion in his chair, shocked to hear the loud ringing so late into the night. Cursing, he realized that he should have lowered the volume on his cell, seeing as it was well past midnight. Then the thought struck him; who the hell had the need to contact him at one thirty five in the morning, anyways?
Without even checking the caller ID, he let out a short grumble before answering the phone and grunting, "Hello?" In a hoarse voice.
"KAZUTO!" Screamed a voice from the other end, so loudly that it thundered into his eardrums with the force of a stampede of elephants and caused the boy to flinch badly for the second time. Switching the phone to his other side and rubbing the offended ear, Kazuto halved the volume and hissed, "What? It's one in the morning!"
"Check your email!" Asuna's voice just said back, ignoring everything else in favor of keeping the volume of her voice at its high levels.
Sighing in exasperation, Kazuto set down the phone for a moment in order to pull up a web browser. A few clicks and a typed in password later, he was staring at his undisturbed inbox.
"I've checked," Kazuto said testily into the phone. "Was something special supposed to happen?"
Asuna groaned from the other end, and Kazuto thought he heard other voices in the background. Was the whole family up to bother him?
"Refresh it, silly," His girlfriend said back. "And hurry!"
Shaking his head, Kazuto hit the refresh symbol and waited for the deed to be done. Once it had, his eyes scanned down the list of received, unopened mail until their landed on a particular message. His lips went dry for just a moment and he was forced to lick them, trying to untwist his tongue to form comprehensible words. Reaching out, Kazuto opened the email and rapidly fired through its contents, his heartbeat exponentially increasing with every sentence he consumed.
"Have you read it yet?" Asuna asked impatiently from the other end of the line.
For once, Kazuto didn't feel like rebuking the girl for her persistence.
"I..." He began, still struggling to understand the situation with his sleep-deprived mind.
"I've been accepted to Tokyo University."
He heard Asuna squeal in delight on the other end but barely registered it, still staring slack jawed at the email sitting in front of him. Surely, he had held some considerable hope of being admitted to the most prestigious university in Japan, but to see the vision become a reality...
"I've been accepted too!" Asuna shouted. "We're going to go to university together!"
"Seems so," Kazuto replied slowly.
Then a slow smile spread across his face.
Leaning towards the phone, he said teasingly, "Looks like you'll have to put up with me for four more years, eh?"
Asuna just laughed joyously at the prod, saying back, "I wouldn't have it any other way, Kazuto.
"There's no one else I'd rather end up with."
His heart swelled at those words, clich'e as they may be. So his worry about the future had been for naught after all. He would have four years, four years left with Asuna. Four years to build something everlasting. Allowing himself a soft, grateful laugh, he reached out and caressed the computer screen before him and the code displayed on it.
What do you think of that, Yui? He thought.
Mama and Papa are going to be together forever.
The next day, the news began to slowly trickle in and spread among the various households. Kazuto and Asuna had been accepted to Tokyo. Rika had been admitted to the highest institution involving perfection of the arts and crafts. Keiko was left largely unmentioned under the wake of all these sudden acceptances; a fact that she despised, seeing as it would separate her from her precious friends, but at the same time the freshman felt a small flame of pride for her senpais. The only one to entirely miss the news was Klein, who was still traveling the world on his business trip and wouldn't return until they had all been attending college for quite some time. Egil sent his congratulations, along with Yulier and Thinker, who Kazuto hadn't heard from in months.
By the time all of the news had settled down to a more manageable level, it was the first of May and the roots of spring had already begun to dig into the hearts and souls of the people. And when dawn spread its fingertips of rose into the sky on the first of May, Kazuto opened his eyes to realize that the time had simply whipped by without his notice. It seemed like only yesterday that he'd been learning to walk again, and only a couple hours since Asuna had been released from the hospital. In four months they would be able to use VR again. He had a job of sorts at Complexity (Kazuto had decided to take up Hideki's offer, surprising the man at the quickness of the boy's response). Rika was going to another college, and he and Asuna would leave behind Suguha, Keiko, and Egil, not to mention their respective families.
It also turned out the Hitomi was a student at Tokyo University, resulting in a rather dubious remark about "two years of fun." The nurse was a sophomore going on junior, meaning she would be around to "guide the younglings" for a couple of years. Kazuto honestly did not know what to think about that.
Kazuto knew that many of the things he had learned to take for granted were going to disappear. He had not, however, expected one of them to take their leave as quickly as it did. He was helping Suguha cut vegetables in the kitchen one night (which pretty much embodied the extent of his cooking abilities) when his phone buzzed on the counter. Setting down the knife he'd been wielding, Kazuto left his sister to her work to go answer it. He'd expected to hear Asuna once he picked up, but today it wasn't.
"Hey," Said Rika's voice softly.
"Hey," Kazuto greeted back, in an equally delicate fashion. "What's up?"
"Ah, well..." A slight pause.
"Can you meet me right now?"
Kazuto raised his eyebrows and checked the clock, noting that it was nine o'clock at night. Turning back to the phone, he said, "Well, it's pretty late...is it something urgent?"
"Yes. I need to see you now."
A frown. Then a smile. "Okay," He consented. "Where?"
"Local park. Center bench. Ten minutes."
The local park was shrouded in shadows when Kazuto arrived there, wrapped up tightly in a thick jacket to combat the sharp biting cold that frost his breath whenever he exhaled. The only source of illumination was from a single lamp that hovered over the central bench in the park, like a small island stranded in a sea of black. He could see Rika's slight figure sitting on the bench, waiting patiently, and briefly wondered how she'd known which lamp post would be on. Had she been planning this?
Taking his steps forward, Kazuto stepped into the pool of light and sat next to her on the bench, although he maintained a respectable distance. The night air was so frigid that their breaths billowed from their mouths. Rika was staring into the wall of darkness in front of her, not yet acknowledging Kazuto's presence, and the boy took a moment to observe her. Her hair had grown out a bit over the past few months, and now the tips reached to kiss her shoulders. It made the former blacksmith look older than Kazuto considered her to be, and in a sudden rush he realized that Rika actually was as old as her appearance suggested. He shouldn't think of her as the fifteen year old Lisbeth he'd met in Aincrad; no, now she was a fully grown woman.
"It's cold tonight," Rika said softly at last, startling Kazuto out of his brief reverie. Taking a moment to compose himself, he tried to follow the girl's soft pink gaze but found nothing. Shaking his head, the boy replied,
"Yeah. Strange, since it's spring now."
Rika adjusted her seat and moved closer to the center, sitting so that their shoulders just barely brushed together. Kazuto took note of this development but didn't think much of it. Looking into the night through half-lidded eyes, the girl continued to speak.
"It almost looks like there's nothing out there," She said quietly. "As if there's nothing to look for. What do you think?"
Kazuto spared a cursory glance at the darkness and said simply, "Well if you run over there I'm sure you'll trip over something."
Rika laughed at that and leaned into him, using his shoulder as a support. "You would say that. Straightforward and practical. You were never one for anything superfluous, were you?"
"Not really."
The partial redhead nodded in agreement and let her cheek plop onto the top of his shoulder and rest there, the tips of her hair reaching up to tickle Kazuto's ear. "I've always liked that about you," She said absently. "You brought sense to a chaotic world..."
"Where's that coming from?" Kazuto asked with a small chuckle, trying to ignore the fact that Rika's entire left side was pressed against him. And she was warm.
Rika smiled and closed her eyes. "When I first met you, I thought you looked too plain and simple to be of any interest or use," She explained. "But how wrong was I? In the end, your simplicity and straightforwardness was what saved us all. You did things no one else could just by doing them, and you peeled apart peoples' shells and got inside like no one else could.
"You were easy to be around, after a little while," The former blacksmith continued. "Yet equally impossible to understand."
"I wasn't that complicated," Kazuto replied. "I just didn't let people know, was all. I was quite unsociable."
Rika shook her head in disagreement and turned to bury her nose into his jacket, making Kazuto tense up in surprise. Rika was a very dear friend to him, but this was...
"No," She whispered. "You made people feel safe. Even when they couldn't understand you, they felt secure. I felt secure. That night we spent in the dragon's den..."
Kazuto stared down at her in bewilderment as she leaned back and rubbed at her face, laughing nervously. "I fell pretty hard for you, you know. Silly, now that I look back on it. Like a sword, you can build one, but can't improve upon one that has already been handled by another..."
"Rika," Kazuto said seriously, "What's gotten into-"
"I didn't know what to think really, when I saw you and Asuna together for the first time," Rika said abruptly, smiling at him with smudged eyes. "I felt happy for her, but still...this ugly, bad feeling. Some sort of hunger. For a warmth I'd been able to taste but not consume. A warmth you gave me." Then she laughed again, and hiccuped. "How cruel of you, Kazu-kun," Rika choked out before having to reach up and wipe at her eyes again. "How could you leave me to crave for such a long time?"
By this point, Kazuto was at a total loss. "I-I didn't..."
"That's right, maybe you didn't," Rika whispered, leaning in to emphasize her words. "That's why I wanted to see you here, Kazu-kun, because I wanted you to know...at least to know, this heat I've been carrying around for so long, before I leave..."
"R-Rika, don't-" Kazuto stuttered as the girl's face drew closer and closer, and more specifically, her lips. This was completely uncalled for, he hadn't even seen it coming, what was going on? When had Rika gotten like this?
Finally, Rika's lips were a millimeter from his, and he was prepared to push her away when she choked out,
"Please..."
Their lips met, then, although Rika contributed most of the movement, while Kazuto simply scrunched his eyes shut and tried to ride out the hideous feelings of betrayal that threatened to take over. After feeling their wet, slippery lips press together for a moment longer, the blacksmith pulled back and smiled faintly at Kazuto, who just watched, slaw jawed.
Leaning in, Rika whispered, "Take care of Asuna for me, okay?" Before taking off into the darkness.
Kazuto watched her go, and only when her back had disappeared into the night did he collapse into the arms of the bench, staring sightlessly at the stars above. He could still feel Rika's lips slipping between his, and more specifically, the message behind them. That she was sorry, but her needs had to fulfilled just this once.
And as he continued to stare at the sky above him, Kazuto sighed tiredly. Well, perhaps it hadn't been totally uncalled for. He had been well aware that there were other females who harbored some sort of interest in him from the very beginning, but had failed to ensure that nothing like this would occur. A lack of management on his part.
Then a thought occurred to him.
I'll never be able to look her in the eye again.
With that established, Kazuto was about to get up and off to bench to leave when he saw her.
Keiko was standing behind the bench, arms crossed in her usual stubborn manner, watching him with a critical eye. The girl's usual pigtails were let down today so that her chocolate brown hair cascaded down her back, and for one of the first times he saw that she wasn't wearing her school uniform.
"Um...I-" Kazuto stuttered, wondering how much she had scene.
"Don't worry, I won't tell," Keiko said in a low monotone, and initially he sighed in relief. Then his ears caught onto the girl's tone and he asked, "What's the matter?"
Keiko just closed her eyes and sighed, dipping her head like he was a child who couldn't figure out first-level math.
"Just let this be a lesson to you," She said at last. Then she turned to leave.
"Sometimes you just have to cut people off, and forget."
Then she was gone too, and Kazuto was left to contemplate,
But what if I can't?
Please no flames for the minor KazutoxRika, I felt it was necessary to close her role as a character in this story. Since she's going to a different university, future appearances will be strictly limited or even nonexistent. So I just wanted to resolve one of her greatest issues, her unrequited love for Kazuto, in a way that would not threaten or ruin his relationship with Asuna.
But in any case, please review if you have anything to say!