Haruno Yukinoshita's POV
The study was silent save for the faint rustle of expensive paper.
"Excellent work, Haruno. Finally, we are looking at something beyond those half-baked scripts. This… has a pulse. It has teeth. Who created it?" My mother's voice was sharp with intrigue, her fingers gripping the bound pages so tightly the paper threatened to crease.
"Would you believe he's Yukino's age? Quite the delightful irony, don't you think, Mother? That my brilliant little sister's peer could produce what our entire contracted stable of writers cannot." I chuckled, layering the statement with my usual ironic jest.
Mother fell silent for a long moment, her gaze piercing through the air before she let out a controlled sigh. "This world truly does not lack for geniuses. There is the former child prodigy, Kousei Arima. Professionals hailed him as the second coming of Beethoven—that is how obscenely high their expectations for his talent soared. Then there is the so-called 'God's Tongue,' Erica Nakiri."
Her tone then dropped, sinking so low it was a vibration meant only for my ears. "And that girl… what was her name again? Ah, yes. Kazuki Kazami. Her mind was deemed too brilliant, too valuable for the state to leave unclaimed. They incorporated her consciousness directly into their strategic artificial intelligence project… 'Thanatos'."
A cold, visceral understanding, far beyond a simple gulp, locked my throat. This wasn't just about art or business.
Mother was talking about a tier of existence where people ceased to be people and became institutional property.
"Is that true, Mother? I never realized we had so many monsters hiding in plain sight."
She offered a dry, humorless chuckle. "At least we have one now within our grasp. Do not lose him, Haruno. Get close to him while he is still least famous and at his weakest. It will make him… pliable. Easier to control in the future."
"You and Yukino do not possess that kind of raw, brilliant mind. We are living in the era of technology now, not real estate. Sooner or later, the families like ours will be replaced by new, digital-age elites before we can even properly sink our roots. That is unacceptable."
I saw the flaw in her logic, or what I thought was a flaw. "But he's a writer, Mother. A storyteller. If we are pivoting to technology, shouldn't we be hunting engineers? Coders?"
Her eyes darkened, a sign of her impatience with my perceived short-sightedness. "Have you become so out of touch with the current trends, Haruno? Do you not see how explosively the entertainment industry is booming? America has its Hollywood monopoly. China has its legions of cheap creators, willing to undercut the global market. But us? We have anime. We have idol culture. Our soft power is spreading globally, and the industry is refining itself. I will not allow our family to fall behind the wave we should be riding."
"I understand, Mother," I assured her, the dutiful daughter. "I will make certain he remains in our boat."
"No." The word was a knife, clean and final. "I want him inside our family. You or Yukino. I do not care which. Make your choice. And do not forget to invest in him—heavily. Make our favors to him so substantial, so integral to his rise, that the very thought of abandoning us becomes an impossibility."
Her instruction was stern, devoid of maternal softness. This was pure boardroom strategy applied to a human being.
"Yes, Mother," I replied, my voice perfectly neutral.
And that was how it always went. Politics, and fucking politics again. The endless game of acquisition and leverage, where even genius was just another asset to be secured.
Still, a part of me uncoiled in relief. At the very least, for now, I would not have to worry about Mother forbidding me from seeing him again. The permission was implicit in the mandate.
Inwardly, I chuckled.
Outwardly, I maintained the expected facade—a slight, resigned downturn of my lips, a subtle wearying of the eyes, the picture of a daughter reluctantly accepting a heavy duty.
The perfect mask, hiding the fierce, contrary joy that now beat in rhythm with my heart.
The game was vile, but for the first time, the piece I was ordered to move was one I desperately wanted to touch.
...
Kayaba Akihiko's POV
"I used to rule the world."
"Seas would rise when I gave the word."
"Now in the morning I sleep alone."
"Sweep the streets I used to own."
The melody reached me just as my fiancée began listening to a song I didn't recognize, yet one that felt unnervingly familiar.
I knew the source of that voice.
Hearing it now, coming from my fiancée's speaker, froze me completely.
My fingers, which had been flying across the keyboard in a rhythm of pure code—refining, optimizing, perfecting the world of Sword Art Online—stilled.
The lines of logic and command faded from my focus.
I turned my full attention toward the sound, my face tightening with confusion.
Was I hallucinating?
Had I pushed myself too far, to the point of hearing that voice again?
That voice. The one that had single-handedly unraveled my original design. The voice that, through a series of leaked movie scripts, had exposed a detailed with chilling accuracy, my plan to trap ten thousand players inside a death game.
The result was not intrigue, but panic.
It drew the sharp, paranoid eyes of every major shareholder and investor.
Suddenly, they were terrified that the fiction was a blueprint. They flooded my project with "assistants"—glorified spies—to monitor every line of code, to ensure I wouldn't attempt the "funny business" outlined in those scripts.
Capitalists and politicians are so easily frightened.
So, I reluctantly shelved that particular vision.
But abandoning one plan only meant devising another.
I needed a new way to make them back off, to stop them from trying to lay their grubby hands on my creation, from changing the very soul of my game simply because they found its realism "too intense" for their fragile sensibilities.
The government, too, began sniffing around, wanting shares, wanting voting rights, wanting to turn my world into a regulated product.
I made Sword Art Online. Not them. I am the architect. I alone understand what this world should be. They are laymen. Cowardly politicians. What right do they have to demand a share of my vision?
I knew with cold certainty that once they grasped the game's full potential, their reach would only extend further, their interference growing more suffocating. That was unacceptable.
I hate them. I hate the politicians and the capitalists who believe they can buy an artist's soul, who trample vision beneath the boots of profit and "marketability."
They care only for margins and benefits, willfully ignoring the creators who pour their passion into the work, and the players who yearn to truly live inside it.
They are the reason beautiful things become sanitized, safe, and dead. They are the wall between a dream and its realization.
And I hate them for it with every fiber of my being.
And now, that voice was singing a lament for a fallen king.
It echoed in my own living room, a ghost from a future I'd been forced to discard, a bitter reminder of the world I'd wanted to build and the streets I would never own.
Now, they came to me demanding guardrails.
They wanted the organ systems for sex completely removed, to prevent any NSFW content from ever occurring within the game.
They demanded I strip away anything they deemed "inappropriate," sanitizing the very reality I had labored to build.
They were turning a world meant to be lived—in all its raw, unfiltered potential—into something sterile, safe, and utterly disgusting.
That wasn't the only demand. I saw the pattern clearly.
This was just the beginning.
I feared, with a cold, sinking certainty, that their further intervention would systematically dismantle everything I had worked for.
Every nuanced mechanic, every fragile ecosystem of consequence and sensation, would be filed down into bland, inoffensive plastic.
It was the very reason I had conceived of trapping the players in the first place.
If not for that damned voice exposing the script and putting them all on high alert, I would have already executed my plan.
With players trapped inside a true, unbreakable reality, the game would achieve its greatest freedom.
Politicians and capitalists would be too traumatized, too terrified of creating a second Kayaba Akihiko, to ever dare interfere so deeply again.
It would grant creators across the industry a new, sacred space to share their visions without the suffocating intervention of "safe" corporations.
It might destroy public trust. It might limit the player base to a niche forever. But so what?
I, Akihiko Kayaba, would rather have a handful of players who truly appreciate the art of my creation—who play it with the gusto and immersion it deserves—than a mass of millions who trample over my vision because they feel "uncomfortable" or "unsafe."
Their insecurity is not my concern. They were never my intended audience.
I hold no love for people who care only for their own delicate sensibilities, who refuse to take the time to truly appreciate a creation, to lose themselves in it and live within it fully.
This is my world. I built its mountains, coded its laws, and breathed digital life into its skies. And I will never, ever let anyone step over it again.
Not the players. Not the governments. Not even Argus itself.
Never.
...
Note: In case you forgot who Kazuki Kazami is, she's from Grisaia, an anime with incest hentai themes. You can Google it for details or images for better visualization. I can't share images here because every time I do, I get shadowbanned for posting explicit picture. So, I've given up on sharing images on this site and now limit all such picture to my cover book.
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