Ocean turtle raid

Amidst the chaos on the Ocean Turtle, inside the sub-control room, Yuuki Asunaintimidated Lieutenant Colonel Seijirou Kikuoka to ensure that Kirigaya Kazuto (Kirito) recovered safely, engulfing the room in silence at Asuna's tenacity. After Koujiro Rinkoconsoled Asuna, relieving the tension in the room, Lieutenant Nakanishi reported on the several injuries and the damage to the hull.

When Seijirou concluded that sinking the Ocean Turtle was not the intention of the invaders, he prompted Higa Takeru for ideas on their identity. The invaders as they had no markings on their uniforms, thus Takeru could only state that they were not Asian. As the topic changed to their escort ship, the Nagato, Nakanishi reported that their command had judged that the personnel on the Ocean Turtle were taken as hostages, thus the Nagato was ordered to stand ground. Thus, Seijirou deduced that the attackers had contacts within the high-ranking officials that outranked officers from the Self-Defence Forces.

Part 2

Meanwhile, inside the main control room beyond the pressure-resistant barrier doors sealing the Light Cube Cluster, Gabriel Millerhalted a conflict between Vassago Casals and Critter, forcing the team to focus on ideas to reach the cluster. As the team worked on resolving the issue, Gabriel reflected on his plan to steal the light cube of Alice, the first true bottom-up Artificial Intelligence, as well as the Soul Translator technology as commissioned, yet take possession of it for himself while abandoning his team. He would then feign a failure of the operation and secretly construct his own artificial world using the stolen technology. In addition to Alice, Gabriel intended to inhabit the new world with Fluctlights of people such as SAO Survivors, especially the Clearers, due to their exceptional compatibility with virtual worlds.

After a moment of such thoughts, Gabriel enquired on Critter's progress, only to learn that nothing could be done aside from taking a peek into the world. While gazing at a scene of goblins in a scuffle, Vassago proposed entering Underworld to find Alice with the help of the locals. To make the search easier, Critter looked for a usable high-ranking account, yet all the ones in the Human Empire were locked by password. Under Gabriel's proposal, Critter also searched for such accounts in the Dark Territory, thus finding two super accounts: a dark knight and «Emperor Vecta», the former claimed by Vassago and the latter by Gabriel, as both could speak Japanese. At that point, Critter noticed a term called «Final Load Test».

Part 3

Back in the sub-control room, Higa Takeru informed Asuna of Kazuto's dismal condition but immediately proposed stimulating his Fluctlight from within Underworld as a method of treatment. As Asuna volunteered to log into the Underworld, Takeru and Seijirou explained that Underworld was in an unstable state due to an impending invasion of the Human Empire from the Dark Territory, while the capabilities of the human forces were at question due to the damage the Axiom Church had endured. As Alice was likely still with Kirito, while Asuna had the most experience with virtual worlds of them, Takeru agreed that she would be the best person to send into Underworld.

Moments after Seijirou recommended to give Asuna a high-ranking account to improve her combat ability, Rinko expressed concern about the attackers also considering the option of retrieving Alice from inside the virtual world. Although Takeru was convinced that the attackers only had access to hardly-useful lowest-level accounts, he could not dismiss a sense of unease, as if he had forgotten something for a moment. However, this concern of his vanished from his mind when he spotted something that caught his attention on the account list.