Author's Note: Here's the final chapter. I hope everybody enjoys it.
Disclaimer: I do not own Sword Art Online (or the works of H.P. Lovecraft).
Chapter 20: Wounded Hearts
The hole in the sky opened up to reveal a starscape filled with odd green mist-like clouds. In the center of the opening was an immense and horrid-looking mass of pulsating dark-grey flesh. The thing had fanged mouths all over what was considered its body, each of them opening and closing as if trying to take in air. Also all over the creature's body in places just as random as its mouths were several glowing yellow eyes that lacked pupils. Several small writing tentacles grow all over the abomination like trees. The creature was perhaps the most vile-looking entity that Kirito and the others had ever witnessed in any game. Klein had put his hand over his mouth to keep from vomiting when he saw the monstrosity.
"Is that… is that thing Azathoth?" Lisbeth asked.
"I think that's a pretty safe bet." Kirito answered. "We beat Nyarlathotep too late."
Suddenly Sinon took off into the air flew as high as she could to get close to the opening in the sky. The bluenette then fired off a quick succession of arrows at Azathoth. Each of the arrows flew into the opening, but Sinon couldn't tell if they had hit the creature or if they even did damage if they did.
"I don't know how we're supposed to beat this thing!" Sinon called down to the others. "I can't fly any further up, and I don't think my arrows are even reaching Azathoth!"
"Maybe we could use some sort of attack spell." Siune suggested.
"I don't know. The range of any spell we could use would probably be as limited as Sinon's arrows." Asuna pointed out. "Besides, the best one of us with spells like that is Leafa, and she's not here right now."
"So what? It's game over?" Klein asked.
"Daddy! I'm not detecting any HP gauges attached to Azathoth!" Yui informed him. "I'm not even sure he's really a boss!"
"Then that could mean… the thing we're seeing is somehow the Azathoth virus itself!" Kirito realized.
"The what?" Klein asked with a raised eyebrow. "Kirito, do you know something about what that blob in the sky is?"
"Fairy warriors." Odin spoke. "I thank you for your assistance in fighting the Crawling Chaos, but your role in this battle is finished. It is up to me to slay the ruler of these gods of madness. This battle is far beyond what you're capable of."
With that, Odin raises his spear and aimed the head of it at the hole in the sky. Azathoth fired down a massive beam of green energy from the largest mouth on his body. Sinon quickly flew out of the beam's path as it continued towards the ground. The head of Odin's spear lit with a brilliant white light and created a barrier of gold energy around him and the players still on the ground. When Azathoth's attack ended, Odin fired a beam of white like towards the opening.
The beam hit Azathoth, causing the blind idiot god to give off horrid cries of pain so wretched that they forced Kirito and the others to cover their ears. Odin fired another beam from his spear, striking Azathoth again and causing a massive crack of white light to form on his body. Odin then threw his spear up towards the opening. The spear sailed through the hole in the sky and struck the crack on Azathoth's body. Azathoth exploded with a blast of green flames and smoldering flesh upon being hit. Soon after, the opening began to close and Odin's spear reappeared in his hand with a flash of gold light. The kind of the Norse gods banged the end of his spear on the ground, causing the area to become enveloped in flash of white light.
When the light finally faded, Kirito and the others found that they were back on top of the mound with Odin. The sky above was the normal star-filled sky of ALO.
"I thank you again for your assistance, fairy warriors." Odin told them. "This world would have fallen into endless madness and decay were it not for your help. As my role here is now finished, I take my leave and with you luck with your noble exploits."
Odin banged his spear on the ground again and washed the area out with another blinding flash of light. When the light faded again, the king of the Norse gods was gone.
"Well… it looks like we were able to save ALO after all." Asuna observed.
"I guess so." Kirito replied. "Of course it was Odin who really took down the Azathoth Virus."
"You guys obviously know something about this that the rest of us don't." Lisbeth interrupted. "Care to let us in?"
"Yeah, sorry. Asuna and I did a some digging after we first met Donis to see if ALO had been hacked to copy my character data, and it turns out that some hacker infected the game with a virus." Kirito explained. "Its purpose was to cause ALO to generate things from the stories written by H.P. Lovecraft. So the dungeons under the mound, Leng, even Nyarlathotep and everything else connected to Lovecraft were all caused by the Azathoth Virus."
"You're kidding!" Sinon exclaimed. "So… none of all that were legitimate additions to the game?"
"Not one." Asuna confirmed. "In fact, the people running ALO had been planning to reset the whole game if they couldn't eliminate the virus. But since it looks like we were able to get rid of it, the reset shouldn't happen now."
"Then I guess it's a real good thing we ran into Odin." Klein remarked. "It's because of him that virus thing is dead."
"It's kind of strange that we had to go on a quest to help him do it though." Siune pointed out. "It really seemed like all of this was part of the actual game."
"Actually, it's just a theory I have, but I think that Odin might have been the personification of some security program that Cardinal created to eliminate the virus." Yui suggested. "Perhaps he could've been the embodiment of Cardinal itself. Whatever he was, it looks like his purpose was to eliminate the virus as well as anomalous NPCs like Nyarlathotep."
"But then why go through the quest?" Klein asked.
"It could be that Odin couldn't override the narrative that the Azathoth Virus had put in place." Yui theorized. "So perhaps Cardinal created a quest to have players go through that narrative and allow Odin to accomplish his tasks."
"However it happened, I'm glad it's all over now." Lisbeth declared. "I hope they throw that hacker in jail for fifty years."
"I'll say." Sinon agreed. "What the bastard did… really screwed with a lot of people."
"I hope Leafa will be okay after all of this." Siune interjected. "She seemed to be the one who was hurt the most."
"We better just call it a day." Kirito decided. "I'm probably going to have to have a long talk with Sugu after all log out."
A week went by after the battles with Nyarlathotep and Azathoth. ALO did not have to be reset, but nothing about the Azathoth Virus or the incidents connected to it had been made public. It seemed that the company behind the game wanted to keep everything covered up to avoid negative scrutiny. As for the Order of Yig, the guild had quickly dissolved with the loss of Donis. Kikuoka and a few other agents from the government had discreetly contacted the former members of the guild in the real world to inform them of Donis's true identity as Nyarlathotep and directed them to seek counseling if they thought they needed it.
That afternoon, Kikuoka had asked Kazuto and Asuna to come meet him after school at the same upscale café where they first learned of the Azathoth Virus. The couple found the government official waiting for them at the same table as before.
"Glad you two could make it." Kikuoka told Asuna and Kazuto as they sat down. "The reason I called you here was to give you an update about what's been happening since the Azathoth Virus was deleted."
"Has the virus come back?" Asuna asked.
"No, but there has been an interesting little development." Kikuoka answered. "It seems that some of the things that the virus added to the game have proven to be so popular among some of the players, the admins at ALO decided to keep most of them in. In fact they're planning on releasing more Lovecraft-themed updates to the game next month."
"Some of the things that the virus added like those dungeons under the mound are actually pretty good." Kazuto admitted. "I've even thought about exploring them a little more closely myself."
"In the end, I guess that hacker who caused all of this sort of got what he wanted." Asuna realized. "He wanted a VRMMO with elements from Lovecraft's stories in them, and now he's got one."
"On that note, I had a little chat with our hacker, Mr. Chiba about that NPC you told me about, Nyarlathotep." Kikouka revealed. "I of course didn't give him any names, but when he learned about some of the things Nyarlathoptep did he seemed horrified. Chiba claimed that he never wanted anything like that to happen in the game. And as hard as it might be for you two to believe, the programmers I've been consulting with on this case think he was telling the truth about that."
"You're saying that Nyarlathotep was an accident?" Kazuto asked sounding a little outraged.
"The Azathoth Virus was programmed to make the version of Cardinal running ALO to gradually add Lovecraftian elements to the game, with the eventual outcome of replacing almost everything already existing in the game with them." Kikuoka explained. "The original Norse mythology elements would've been completely overwritten the Cthulhu Mythos. Chiba even admitted that his goal was to bring ALO into a totally new age. Unfortunately he couldn't make the virus very specific on how to do that, so the corrupted Cardinal System acted on its own to create a narrative to help bring those changes about. The system ended up drawing heavily from the literature connected to the Nyarlathotep character to create an NPC to fulfill that purpose. And because Nyarlathotep needed to fool certain players to achieve his directive, he needed a large amount of intelligence, enough to fool them into thinking he was another player."
"He certainly did a good job with that." Asuna darkly admitted. "Too good, in fact."
"If you don't mind me asking, how are Ms. Suguha and the others that Nyarlathotep interacted with doing?" Kikuoka asked.
"Rika and Shino seem to be doing fine." Kazuto answered. "As for Sugu… she seems to be doing better, but I can't really tell for sure. She hasn't logged back into ALO since we fought Nyarlathotep though, which is pretty understandable."
"She'll be fine." Asuna assured him as she put her hand on his. "She just needs some time."
"If it's any consolation, Chiba will be doing some time for infecting ALO with his virus." Kikuoka revealed. "Because of Nyarlathotep and the potential psychological harm an A.I. like that could've caused, a judge reviewed the case and decided to give Chiba ten years behind bars."
"He should get twenty." Kazuto declared.
"Maybe, but keep in mind that some of what resulted from the virus was an accident." Kikuoka pointed out. "Some of the laws regarding VRMMOs are still being written, so punishments for crimes like this are being issued on a case by case basis. If you ask me, I think that Chiba's punishment is more than appropriate."
"Maybe…" Kazuto replied. "I just hope that Sugu and the others can get over what happened because of all this."
Shino entered the Dicey Café, an establishment that had become a regular meeting place in the real world for the survivors of SAO and their friends. She came to the café to have a bite with Asuna and Rika and perhaps go see a movie afterward. Shino spotted Rika sitting at a table towards the back of the bar by the jukebox. The spectacled girl went over to the table and exchanged greetings with Rika as she sat across from her.
"I haven't seen you in the game since the whole Nyarlathoptep thing." Rika told her.
"Yeah. I decided to take a little break after what happened." Shino explained. "So… I have to ask, are things cool between you and me? You know… since we both ended up sleeping with Donis… or I guess I should call him Nyarlathotep."
"We're cool." Rika assured her. "In the end we were both duped, and by a guy who wasn't even real to begin with."
"Donis was the prefect guy." Shino admitted. "Too perfect to be real. He had Kirito's looks and a whole lot of charm."
"I've thought about it a lot since it happened, and I guess what drew me to Donis in the end was that he was so much like Kirito." Rika admitted. "I guess we just both wanted a guy that we couldn't have."
"Kirito really is one of a kind." Shino pointed out. "We were just kidding ourselves thinking we had found a guy who was like him but better."
Suddenly a smirk appeared on Rika's face. "Say. I wonder how much Kirito's avatar is like his body in the real world?"
"What do you mean?" Shino asked with a raised eyebrow.
"I just thought of a good way to mess with Asuna when she gets here." Rika explained. "Just follow my lead."
At that moment, Asuna finally arrived and went over to their table. "Hey guys! So, you thought about what movie you might want to go see?"
"Before that Asuna, Shino and I have something we'd like to discuss with you." Rika said with a mischievous grin. "We were wondering if you could help us compare notes."
It had been two weeks for Suguha since the incident with Nyarlathotep, and it had been a very rough two weeks indeed. She had barely left her room except to go to school or to kendo practice. The kendo training had at least helped Suguha take her mind off of Donis somewhat, but she was still in a dark place. The rest of the time when she wasn't at school or at practice, Suguha had stayed in her room listening to sad music. In reality, Suguha thought that she had been doing some of the things girls her age typically did when they suffered a bad breakup.
Suguha had been getting better though after the incident. The process was slow, but she had been coming to terms with the fact that Donis hadn't even been real. The man she fallen in love with had been nothing more than a fantasy. Donis had been her fantasy of being together with Kazuto and being something more to him than a sister come to life. Suguha had realized that she had been a fool to think that her relationship with Donis could've been anything more than that.
It was still fairly early in the evening as Suguha suddenly heard a knock on the door. She went over to answer it and saw that it was Kazuto.
"Hey Sugu." Kazuto spoke. "How're you doing?"
"…Fine, I guess." Suguha answered. "What do you want?"
"Well… I was just about to log into to ALO to meet with Asuna and the others." Kazuto answered. "There's this one quest we've been planning to go on for the past week, and I thought you'd might like to come. Liz finished a new sword for you to use, since your old ones got broken when… well, you know. You interested?"
"…I'll think about it." Suguha answered.
"We'll be waiting at Liz's shop for the next twenty minutes." Kazuto told her. "I hope I'll see you there."
Suguha closed her door and looked at the amusphere lying on her nightstand. She hadn't put the thing back on since Nyarlathotep had defeated her. The dark-haired girl had to admit that a flight around ALO sounded pretty good at the moment.
After thinking it over for a couple of minutes, Suguha got onto her bed and put the amusphere on. "Link start!"
FIN
Afterward: I hope the final battle with Azathoth wasn't too anticlimactic for anyone reading. During the planning stages I couldn't help but think that a being like Azathoth could only be defeated by by a mythological figure like Odin. Anyway, this finally concludes another story of mine. I'll admit that this story probably isn't one of my better creations. I probably butchered the characters of Leafa, Lisbeth and Sinon to an extent. If that truly is the case, I apologize. Still, I had fun working on this story, and I hope that everyone else had fun reading it. I don't know when I'll be doing another SAO story at the moment, but I'll try and make the next one that I do better than this one.
Please review and let me know what you think.