Accel World V23

Sunday Evening July 21 2047,Asagaya residental area in South Asagaya.
Haruyuki and KYH eats the food that Haru brought from the convenience store,the former brings up the KYH's cooking skills in which she is steadily progressing,after the discussion the 2 of them had a duel to decide who gets to eat the last sandwich where Haru and KYH had a brief sword fight with the former losing with his sword being damaged from clashing with KYH's sword limbs,after taking a short break both of them had chat in which KYH asked why Haru chose Lucid Blade instead of upgrading his Aviation abillity for his Level 6 bonus,Haru told KYH that he and Taku promised each other to duel again after both of them reached Level 7 and he intends to fight with his Flight abillity and his new sword,from KYH's evaluation if it's just a free for all where both of them can use all of their arsenal Haru has the advantage but if it's just strictly sword vs sword then Taku has the advantage due to his experience in kendo.

KYH still doesn't have contact with Megumi after NN vs OU Territory War,while she does occasionally go shopping together with Megumi she never actually went to her home,Haru suggests contacting Rose Milady to get information to find Megumi's residence and both of them goes to the Highest Level to talk with Metatron

After reaching the Highest Level they contacted Metatron who has been resting on top of the old Tokyo Tower and her recovery percentage is 78.3%,it's going to take 10 Brain Burst years before she fully recovers(about over 3 days RL time),in the past she once encountered Sun God Inti and attempted to interact with it only to get no reaction at all from it,while Inti normally roams the UNF in most stages it disappears when the UNF transtions into either the Sea or Storm stage which causes Metatron to speculate that it has a dungeon it hides in when it's either Sea or Storm stage.Haru informs her about Megumi and asks her to contact Amaterasu who after arriving in the Highest Level tells them that while Milady isn't available at the moment,she'll pass on their message to them,after leaving the Highest Level,Haru and KYH continues their duel where the latter won and gets the last sandwich.

Haru then thinks about the Seven Dwarves of OU where he thinks that they(minus Ivory Tower) aren't actually bad people despite being on Cosmos's side and he knows they have their own reasons for siding with her and he's open to listen to their side of the story when they want to talk about it,in addition he acknowledges that making Rose Milady quit OU won't that simple as he doesn't know her circumstances.

Haru and KYH decides to hold a Legion meeting where they plan to inform them about what happened in the conference and to plan a rescue operation to rescue the Kings who are stuck in EK with Sun God Inti,in addition Haru wrote a message to his mom that he's staying over in a friend's home to do summer homework to get approval for a sleepover.

The Legion meeting was held in Fuuko's VR Space which is a huge whale that swims in a sky,the attendees are Crow,Lotus,Bell,Rain,Pile,Raker,Current,Maiden,Leopard,Puppeteer,Mitten,Flipper,Scissors,Moose,Porcupine,and Blaze Heart,the meeting was held in a VR space as a precaution in the case where Wolfram Disaster ambushes them(being EK'd doesn't prevent you from doing normal duels and territory wars) and uses Paradigm Breakdown to bring them to the UNF.

The ones who didn't participate in the conference were informed of what happened in the previous volume and they began to discuss on whether they should attempt to do the rescue operation on the Sea or Storm stage,in the middle of the discussion Azure Heir who was late joins the meeting and informs them Graphite Edge's observation report on the enslaved Inti:while it's still stationary due to being controlled it turns out that when the UNF transitioned into the Storm stage,Inti was still burning despite being outside its hideout which suggest that it produces fire by nuclear fusion which means water gets vaporized and then decomposed into hydrogen and oxygen where the former gets turned into fuel and the latter is part of the carbon-nitrogen-oxygen cycle and becomes energy for the sun,so water actually heleps maintain its flames instead of extinguishing it.

The next topic is how The Luminary's thorn crown doesn't melt from the heat,Rain brings up the urban legend of a blacksmith shop who roams the UNF and can upgrade Enhanced Armaments for a large amount of BP and they realized that OU found it and upgraded The Luminary to have heat resistance.Rain then suggests they upgrade the melee Enhanced Armaments in the Legion to get upgraded with heat resistance after finding the blacksmith and discuss with the other 4 Legions what Abillities that are good when it comes to fighting Inti.

They decided that The Infinity will be upgraded with heat resistance and they considered asking Metatron's help but decided not to as she hasn't fully recovered yet,at this point Rin joins the meeting and informs them that Great Wall,Leonidz and Aurora Oval will cooperate with them to save their kings so the current plan of action is to find the blacksmith shop,give the melee weapons for the raid heat resistance up to 5000 degrees and negotiate with other 4 Legions.

After the meeting,Haruyuki takes a bath and thinks about his divorced parents and his father who left them,KYH then enters the bathroom and enters the bathtub with Haru,she asks him to help wash her back(she never took a bath with her parents and she only bathed together with Cosmos when she was 8 years old once before she washes herself on her own after that one time) for the first time in her life,Haru takes off her Neurolinker where he sees a barcode and the serial number on her nape where she tells him those were printed when she was born and that she will disappear as she grows up.

She then reveals to him that the quantum connection technology used in the Neurolinker is named STLT(Soul Translator Technology) and then proceeds to infodump the SAO explanation about the lighttubes in the brain,her parents told her once that the essence of humans is the tube which (understandably) mistook it for the digestive tract at that time until she obtained SSS Order from Graph.

The 1st Gen Neurolinker was released in April 2031 which was sold by RECT with KAMURA implementing STLT on the Neurolinker,but while soul communication aspect of STLT is implemented on the Neurolinker which allows it to communicate with the soul,the soul decoding aspect is still being utilized to duplicate souls by KAMURA.

The kanji for KAMURA which is 神邑 is KYH's mother old surname before she took her husband's surname,her mother was one of KAMURA's entrepeneurs while her father is a KAMURA researcher,KYH then proceeds to explain the cultivation process of the Machine Children which uses in vitro fertilization to create an embryo which is then placed in artificial uteruses,KAMURA installed nerve link devices during the implantation of embryos into the artificial uteruses to experiment soul duplication by overwriting the original Fluctlight with another,the Machine Children's barcodes are a relic of this process.

While the genetics of the Machine Children are still of their biological parents,the Fluctlight overwriting caused a side effect which made it difficult for the Machine Children to acknowledge their parents as their "real" parents thanks to the Fluctlight overwriting,from the POV of KYH's parents she's an experimental product of the overwrite process and KYH doesn't really know how much of her Fluctlight is really hers and how much of it is copied from the template but she thinks that her template is probably a baby because of the limitations of the fetal brain capacity.

KYH's parents who are living in Minato doesn't know that she learned about her origins because she learned this by using SSS Order's admin rights hijacking abillities to access KAMURA's head office where she found out that someone erased most of the information concerning the experiment from 15 years ago and the leftover data can only be used to make an outline that as she grows up she will disappear one day.

KYH thinks that the 20320930 which is her birthdate in reverse next to her barcode is a clue,according to KYH she stayed in her artificial uterus for 13 months before she was born,and she thinks the date has a special meaning and that she will meet her template one day and learn the truth.

After they finished their bath together,KYH and Haruyuki does their homework together since they can't lie to the latter's mother and after finishing their homework by 11:00 PM,they finally go to sleep in the sofa.

Monday morning July 22 2042 07:00 AM
Haru wakes up after receiving a reply E-Mail from Rose Milady telling him to meet her in Shibuya's Sasazuka district,after Haruyuki and KYH eats breakfast and went to Sasazuka using the automated electric taxi(by 2042,cab driver jobs are extinct in Japan thanks to taxis getting autopilot and Social Security Cameras helping the taxi's autopilot with directions to their destination) to go to Sasazuka which is where the territory war between OU and NN took place,after getting there Haru got another e-mail from Milady to go the library and meet her in Box no.4,they did that and meets Milady who has the height of a grade schooler (but still taller than Haru who is 165 cm) despite being in her 3rd year of middle school in Eterna(same private all-girls school Cosmos goes to,so Milady is her junior by 1 school year),Haru,KYH and Milady then exchanged their identity cards in which both of them find out her RL name is Tsubomi Kochika,both parties exchange information concerning Megumi in which Tsubomi tells them that every time a Burst Linker dives into BB they use an exclusive quantum circuit to process their memories while in Brain Burst and after they dive out back to RL the memories are synched to the brain so their Fluctlights doesn't get overloaded with processing memories from Brain Burst and that Oracle is in danger because she's currently not connected to her own circuit and if it goes on for too long she can't go back to the real world.

The three of them goes to Megumi's house on taxi where along the way KYH has a conversation with Tsubomi in which it turns out that the mystery book Megumi remembers even after she lost Brain Burst in Okinawa was an actual belonging she had as Orchid Oracle back then but Tsubomi doesn't know where she even got it or when she obtained it,KYH thinks that the book is something related to her sister and the ARS,after arriving to Megumi's house they learn from her mother that she has been hospitalized ever since yesterday.

The 3 of them went to the hospital Megumi is in now which is the same hospital Avoider is hospitalized in and goes to her room in the 10th floor's east wing,according to her mother she was comatose ever since Saturday afternoon(so she was forced into a coma directly after the Territory War ended and (speculation from here) someone from OU acquainted with Megumi who Megumi's mother knows brought her home when she's still in a coma under the excuse she took a nap) and she only realized something was wrong when she never woke up on Sunday morning and brought her to the hospital,it's been 42 hours in RL time ever since the Territory Battle which is equivalent to 4 years in BB time.

They speculate that Megumi's consciousness is now connected to Wolfram's CIII circuit and that her Duel Avatar should be in the UNF right now so bringing her avatar to a Leave Point will log her out and sever her connection with Wolfram and reconnect her back with her own circuit which could possibly wake her up.As KYH is currently in EK,only Crow and Milady goes to the UNF to save Megumi.

After arriving in the UNF,Milady says there are 2 ways to find Oracle,one is to use the Highest Level to find her which has the problem of having to leave the Highest Level every time she finds a place Oracle is possibly in and the other is to use her Flower Divination special gauge abillity which will tell her where she needs to go for her needs like vehicles,weapons and items from the direction of the petals and as she dived together with Crow while also connecting to the comatose Megumi by cable she believes the cable connection will help the petals guide her.

Rose Milady uses Flower Divination and she and Crow follows the petals which led them to Midtown Tower and found there are Enemies wearing thorn crowns on the roof of the Midtown Tower,Milady then reveals that The Luminary is a 2-piece Enhanced Armament consisting of the crown and the scepter,it's abillity is Divine Light which creates a crown of thorns using the crown piece while the scepter piece is used to control enemies,the scepter can be loaned to others for a while but the true ownership belongs to holder of the crown,White Cosmos.

The Luminary is an important component of Cosmos's plan and as for Sun God Inti,Cosmos and Vise will not remove it until the final stage of the plan.Milady and Amaterasu discussed about the upcoming raid battle with Inti and they ruled out water attack as an option but the former remarks gaining Rudra's assistance may be necessary.

As the roof is guarded by the Beast-class Einhejars from the underground Valhalla dungeon they decided to break in from the 40th floor,KYH mentioned once that Midtown Tower has 54 floors and the ISS Kit was in the 45th floor where Leave points also exists,so both of them decided to go up,on the way up they encountered a Varjag enemy who they couldn't avoid so Rose Milady restrained it with her Ornate Skewering and Crow destroyed using Metatron Wings after they freed it,they went up the stairs again.on the way up to the 45th floor it's revealed Secret Garden is an advanced version of Ornate Skewering using Incarnation but as the use of Incarnation will attract Enemies to them she avoids trying to use it.

After arriving on the lobby of the 45th floor,they found Oracle's Duel Avatar and a drone wearing a thorn crown chained up in pillars with a commander variant of Einhejar guarding them and the Leave point.As the chains are not easy to break,they need to defeat the commander variant Einhejar to free Oracle.

Crow and Milady were struggling as the commander variant has 4 HP bars and they were just doing scratch damage to its HP,Milady pointed out that Einhejars has a soul component inside their armor and that if its pulled out and destroyed the Einhejar will die so she wants Crow to make an opening in its armor so she can pull its soul out.Although Crow thinks there's no way to do it,Milady decides to make a gamble by using Secret Garden and she tells Crow that if the color of the generated Rose isn't red,blue or yellow they have to leave through the Leave point,the color the newly generated rose is yellow so Crow has to make an opening in its armor.

When Crow slashed Glacier Behemoth's horns and Rose Milady's thorns back in the Territory War,he used the technique of concentrating the tip of the sword on a single point but the commander Einhejar's breastplate armor is curved circular breastplate so he thinks there's nothing to pinpoint until the voice who gave him advice when he was fighting Behemoth criticized him for not paying attention to where he should cut.

The voice says that the pinpoint attack sword style is named Omega Stream and he introduces himself as Centaurea Sentry,the 3rd generation Chrome Disaster who died by Blue Knight's hand,he tells him that no matter how smooth a curve is there will be an little intersection with the tangent and that is the point where he should cut and that the number of pinpoints is unlimited,as long he is confident on that pinpoint he should cut it.

The yellow rose that Milady created releases an electric shock that stuns the Einhejar and Crow cut the upper part of the breastplate to create an opening for Milady to rip out and destroy the soul of the Einhejar which kills it,Milady frees Oracle's avatar while Crow frees the drone and rips out the thorn crown it was wearing,they found out it is the Mr.Smith drone who roams the UNF,Ivory Tower imprisoned it after upgrading The Luminary with heat resistance.

Originally Azure Heir's Infinity was the weapon supposed to get upgraded with heat resistance but since he's not here and it's too late for him to get here not to mention Milady realized that 3 Enemies were coming up here because they were attracted to her Incarnation,Crow then decides to upgrade Lucid Blade with heat resistance only to find out his BP isn't enough to pay the upgrade bill but Milady paid it in his place as she knows it is necessary to fight Inti,both of them escaped through the Leave point while Mr.Smith flew away from Midtown Tower.

The volume ends with Megumi waking up from her coma to see Tsubomi,KYH and Haru at her side.