Sword Art Online - Volume 28 - Chapter Aft

AFTERWORD

Thank you for your boundless patience in the long, long wait before Sword Art Online 28: Unital Ring VII.

It’s been one year and eight months since the last new volume, which I believe sets a new record for the longest wait for a new SAO book… Records are meant to be broken, but this is one I really didn’t want to break! I’ll make a mental oath to get the next one in promptly!

(This next part will contain spoilers for this book.)

Here’s a little bit about the story. This one was mainly about the events in the Underworld. During his appearance in the last volume, Emperor Agumar really gave off the aura of a weekly villain who ends up saying, “But you won’t get the best of me next time!” at the end of the episode, but he turned out to be tougher than he looked! I think he’s going to continue to play the villainous role in the next book, too.

Also, in this volume we have two characters who achieved an unprecedented feat of joining the story after being introduced in a different medium.

The first is Integrity Knight Eydis Synthesis Ten, who was a game-original heroine from the mobile games Alicization Blading, or Unleash Blading. In the previous volume, I wrote that the “tenth Integrity Knight” was frozen in Central Cathedral, so I knew I would eventually be introducing Synthesis Ten. I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to invent a totally new knight or to reverse-import Eydis Synthesis Ten from Blading, but I figured more than a few readers probably had some attachment to the name Eydis Synthesis Ten, so I put her into the story here. However, a number of details are different from the game, which I’ll go over later.

The second character was Mito (Misumi Tozawa), who appeared in the animated feature films, Sword Art Online Progressive: Aria of a Starless Night and Scherzo of Deep Night. She’s had quite a complicated creation process, actually. In interviews and other places, I’ve said I created her on request to fill the position of Asuna’s real-life friend for the purposes of the movies. But the truth is that she didn’t simply come out of nowhere.

The story “The Safe Haven Incident” from Volume 8 contains a mention of a brilliant tailor by the name of Ashley. Even back in SAO’s days as a web novel on my website, I always envisioned her as someone who was friends with Asuna in real life, and who helped support Asuna in the difficult period after her partnership with Kirito ended. I wanted to write more about Asuna and Ashley for forever, but wasn’t able to make it work. When they asked for a new character for the Progressive movie, however, Ashley was the first image that popped into my head. So I created Ashley’s story from scratch and added more details until I was left with Mito.

I kept that connection quiet because I wanted the reveal that Mito was Ashley to come from the story itself, not from some interview or online post. However—and I touched on this a bit in the story reading at the tenth-anniversary “Fulldive” event—the two movies weren’t going to get this far into the story, and I wasn’t confident putting her into the Unital Ring arc would feel like a natural and unforced story development, so I didn’t think I was going to get the chance for a while. But as I was writing Volume 28, I suddenly had a burst of intuition that the moment might be right, and so I got the chance to reunite her with Asuna.

All that said, however, it’s difficult to make the background of the Mito from the Progressive films match the story here. So, like Eydis, there are some differences between the character in the movie and in this book. In short, here are the distinctions.

[Eydis]

- Frozen 300 years ago (100 years before the Alicization arc) and has no knowledge of anything after that, particularly the Otherworld War. Has never met Alice before.

[Mito]

- Didn’t encounter Asuna at the start of SAO, and naturally did not abandon her in the Nepenthes Forest.

- Didn’t take part in the battle against the first- and fifth-floor bosses.

The stuff that happens in the Nepenthes Forest is a core element of Mito the movie character, so it didn’t feel right to completely ignore that, but it’s such a heavy thing that hangs over her head that I didn’t want Mito in the books to suffer from the same kind of guilt, so I removed that burden from her. On the other hand, it’s not like she didn’t suffer any painful events in Aincrad, so Mito is actually technically the second Ashley, and inherited the name Ashley from the original owner. I think that story will find its way into the main books at some point. It’s not important, but just for the record, Mito hasn’t played any VRMMOs since being freed from SAO, and passed off the Ashley name to a third person.

I expected this to be a short afterword, but I’ve gone on for quite a bit. The main point is that I hope you will cheer for the Eydis and Mito that appear in the novels as you’ve already done in the games and movies.

This is also the first book to feature a part from Eolyne’s perspective. It’s given him the chance to speak a little bit about the backbone of his mysterious story. And the intruder Kikuoka was so worried about has finally appeared (again?), so I’ll let your imagination fill in the blanks of how the two worlds might continue to intertwine in the future.

I thought I had plenty of extra time on the schedule this time around, but as usual I went right down to the wire, so I must apologize to my editors Miki and Adachi, my illustrator abec, and all the people who help make this book a reality. And to you readers, thank you for following along, and I hope to see you in the next one!

Reki Kawahara—April 2024