The current season of Sword Art Online: Alicization—War of Underworld just wrapped up with the latest episode “Ray of Light.” This episode offers one of the most contained battles of the season as other episodes had multiple battles happening simultaneously. The battle in this episode is the most dire as the IRL hacker Critter sends 30,000 American players into the Underworld to pare down the number of combatants by attacking both armies.
The Dark Territory and Human Empire armies fight on separate sides of the trench that Asuna previous created. The Integrity Knights and Asuna do their best to fight back against the horde of new players. Across the divide, Iskahn, leader of the Pugilist Guild, gets really pissed watching his comrades get slaughtered. Pissed enough to rip out his right eye to destroy the system seal and jump across the ravine in one explosive leap.
In the meantime, Asuna gets her left arm chopped off by an American player. (Don’t worry she heals her arm back later. A handy skill to have in a pinch.) Iskahn fights his way to the profusely bleeding Asuna to negotiate a temporary truce and have the Pugilist Guild and the Knights join in combat against the army of red armored American players. Asuna uses her god-like powers to build stone bridges across the expanse to united the two factions.
Alice then gets a powerful sleep spell thrown at her by Vecta, who promptly flies off to the World’s End Altar to retrieve her fluctlight in the “real world” (as Asuna keeps telling everyone in the Underworld … more on this later.)
A group breaks off from combat to pursue Vecta, and Critter prepares to send another 20,000 American players into the game to destroy them. And Vassago, back in the “real world,” decides to dive back into the Underworld as PoH, his Aincrad persona—founder of the Laughing Coffin gang of PK’ers.
Meanwhile, the situation turns hopeless for the pursuit group as the new batch of American players enters and surrounds the detachment, until a starburst appears in the sky in the form of an archer who decimates the American players in an explosive barrage of energy bolts. The archer is none other than Sinon, sent in to help our heroes.
The episode ends with Asuna and Sinon reunited, and Vassago/PoH headed to an STL device to dive into the Underworld.
PART 2 RELEASE DATE
The arc ended on a powerful note with much at stake for the Human and Dark Territory armies, as well as the two factions battling for control on the Ocean Turtle. Unfortunately, we have to wait to see how this turns out. The next episode is scheduled to air sometime in April 2020. We’ll keep an eye out for a concrete date and will let our readers know.
THE PROBLEM WITH ASUNA
We love Asuna, but for someone who spent so much time in a deep dive with players and NPCs, as well as having an advanced AI pixie “daughter” Yui, she sure is inconsiderate about telling the fluctlight inhabitants of the Underworld they’re not real. She’s constantly informing them that she’s from the real world and they exist as a virtual construct, which they, surprisingly, are pretty chill about.
Asuna originally tells them the truth to explain she’s not a god. But if I’ve learned anything from Ghostbusters, it’s that when someone asks you if you are a god—you say YES! These poor fluctlights now understand they don’t really exist. Imagine if Morpheus had shoved the red pill down Neo’s throat instead of giving him a choice.
I don’t know, perhaps something was lost in translation in the captions, and in Japanese, Asuna is not so careless. Like I said, we Asuna, so we’ll roll with the poor translation theory.
