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Because of her paralyzing fear of death, the girl spent the night talking with the protagonist. They poured their hearts out to one another under the moonlight.
"It's going to be okay. You are definitely going to survive this."
Kirito said those words to the terrified, helpless girl, and in his heart, he made a firm resolve for the first time. He would protect these friends he had met in the game. The Moonlit Black Cats would be safe under his watch. It was a decision that perfectly fit the image of a hero.
The girl responded with a gentle, trusting smile.
However, during a routine group excursion to clear a dungeon, the party members accidentally stumbled into a hidden room. In some versions of this story, there was never a detailed explanation as to why the Black Cats triggered that specific trap.
But in this version, Haruto wrote it with meticulous detail. The hidden door was a high-level trap designed to trigger only when an elite player entered the zone. Based on the Black Cats' average level of 20, the mechanism should have remained dormant. But it snapped shut today for one reason.
The presence of Kirito.
A group of level 20 players had been dragged into a slaughterhouse meant for an endgame warrior. The outcome was predictable and gruesome.
Yuta watched the prose describe the Moonlit Black Cats being picked off one by one by an endless sea of monsters. His heart grew cold. This was nothing like the "overpowered hero carries the newbies" story he had imagined.
Why was this chapter so incredibly painful?
Haruto had spent more than a thousand words painting a warm picture of their daily lives, how they met, how they bonded, and how they became a family. Then, in an instant, he pulled the trigger.
The first teammate was struck down, letting out a harrowing scream.
The second was pierced through the heart. The third, consumed by a futile rage, tried to charge through the blockade only to be defeated instantly.
Kirito was cutting down monsters with every stroke. But even as the strongest swordsman, he couldn't defeat hundreds of enemies fast enough to stop the inevitable. He could only watch as his friends were extinguished.
Finally, only Sachi remained.
The girl who admired him, the girl who had shared her soul with him under the stars, the girl he had sworn to protect... she looked at Kirito one last time before the killing blow landed. She left him with a final, bittersweet smile, and then her avatar shattered into a rain of digital shards.
Yuta sat frozen in a daze. So that poster... the girl smiling with tears in her eyes... was that her final moment?
"Shiori Takahashi... are you even human?" Yuta muttered, his blood boiling with frustration.
Sachi's body vanishing into light meant that in the real world, the program in her NerveGear had activated, sending a high-voltage microwave pulse through her skull and physically destroying her brain.
"How could he do this?" Yuta's eyes were rimmed with red. He was a reader who could tolerate most tropes, but he couldn't stand seeing such a lovable girl discarded like this. You just don't kill the favorite character like that. It's an unwritten law of the genre.
'What is wrong with you, Shiori-sensei? Are you actually sick?'
Yuta scanned the subsequent pages, desperately hoping for a plot twist or a miracle. But he was disappointed.
There was nothing.
Instead, the chapter focused on Kirito's combat prowess. He truly was the strongest swordsman in Aincrad; he managed to cut through hundreds of elite monsters that his entire guild couldn't even scratch, carving a path out of the trap through sheer violence. But it was a hollow victory. He saved himself, but he failed to save his friends.
Because he had hidden his level to join them, he had inadvertently triggered the very trap that killed them. From that day forward, Kirito's heart became a cold, suffocating prison of guilt.
Eventually, he heard a rumor about a rare item that could resurrect a fallen player. To get it, he had to defeat a formidable boss.
"Nicholas the Renegade."
Kirito staked his life on the line.
In a frenzied battle where he exhausted every resource and his health bar dwindled to a single pixel, he achieved a desperate victory.
But the resurrection item... was useless. It couldn't bring Sachi back. The requirement for use was that it had to be applied within ten seconds of a character's death.
Yuta felt a sharp, physical ache in his chest. For the first time, he realized just how terrifyingly "real" the world of SAO was. Readers often treat protagonists like they have invincibility, assuming nothing they do has permanent consequences. But Chapter Three taught the audience a brutal lesson.
Kirito was not a god. A single error in judgment could lead to the permanent death of someone he cherished. And that death was absolute. Even after spending months fighting to the brink of death to find a "miracle," it didn't matter. Sachi had been gone for half a year.
In the game, and in reality. How could a digital item fix a brain that had been physically damaged months ago?
Taking it a step further... did Kirito not realize this? Why would he risk his life for an item to revive someone who had been dead for months?
In that moment, Yuta finally understood Kirito's mental state. He just wanted to try. What if it worked? What if the creator of the game was lying about people dying in the real world? What if their consciousness was just trapped in a digital void? He needed to know. He needed that sliver of hope to keep breathing.
The reality was cruel.
The ten-second limit shattered Kirito's last remaining delusion.
So far in this chapter, the story of Sachi had "stabbed" Yuta three times. Once when she died, once when the resurrection item failed, and finally when Sachi's pre-recorded voice message was played. Sachi had left a message for Kirito before the raid, scheduled to be sent months after her death if she didn't make it.
Sachi's gentleness, her feelings for Kirito, her acceptance of life and death, and her perspective on their time together were all distilled into one final sentence.
"Kirito, meeting you and being with you... it was truly wonderful. Thank you. And goodbye."
Yuta burst into tears.
Three stabs in a single chapter. You really are something else, Shiori-sensei.
He reflexively scanned the QR code on the magazine to cast his vote for Sword Art Online, then immediately opened his browser and navigated to the Kiyozawa Library official forums.
It was only midday, yet the comment sections for Shiori Takahashi and the publisher were already a war zone of grief and anger. A truly great writer can use a few thousand words to create a character that haunts the reader forever. In this one chapter, Haruto had successfully broken the hearts of every reader.
"Holy crap... when Chapter Three started, I was thinking, 'Who is this Sachi girl? Get her out of here so Asuna can come back.' Now that I've finished the chapter, all I want to say is: Shiori-sensei, how could you be so cruel? How could you do that to her?"
"Is this the difference between a side character and a heroine? Asuna is strong and cool, so she gets to live, while a 'normal' girl like Sachi is just fodder for the plot?"
"Did Kirito actually love her? Or was it just guilt?"
"The book doesn't say. It never explicitly defines his feelings. It was probably a mix of both, which makes it even more painful."
"The description of the fight was breathtaking. I actually held my breath while reading it. But for the reward to be useless... that's just the author being a sadist. He loves to see us suffer."
"It's the world's fault!"
"No, it's Shiori Takahashi's fault! He's the one who wrote her death!"
"I won't even mention his previous works. The heroine of Anohana was already dead, so her disappearing at the end was expected. River from To the Moon was already gone too. But Sachi? Was her death necessary? I'd rather he never created her than end her story like this. She didn't even get the chance to tell the protagonist she loved him."
"Honestly, I'm never trusting this author again. I thought he had changed, that he was writing a light-hearted adventure. I was a fool."
"Look at it this way. Shiori-sensei had to kill her off immediately just to make sure Asuna's position as the main heroine wasn't threatened."
"For me, the hardest part was empathizing with Kirito. He triggered the trap because his level was too high. He survived because he was strong, but he effectively killed his friends. That kind of guilt would drive anyone into a deep depression. It's devastating."
"I thought this novel was just about showcasing a cool game. I figured the deaths were just numbers on a screen, people I didn't know. But with Sachi, I finally felt the weight of the 'Death Game'."
"Please tell me it's not going to be like this every week. One chapter, one heartbreak?"
"Probably not. This chapter was clearly designed to forge Kirito's character and establish the stakes of SAO. The future... should be about clearing the game, right? Probably?"
"You sound so unsure that it makes me even more nervous."
"Don't blame me! After Chapter Three, I'm terrified Shiori-sensei is going to kill off a cute girl every single volume."
"Wait... Asuna isn't going to die too, is she?"
"Unlikely. The character posters for Asuna are much more elaborate and detailed than Sachi's. If he was going to toss her away, he wouldn't have put this much effort into her design."
Following the serialization of Chapter Three, the reader reviews were overwhelmingly negative, not toward the quality of the writing, but toward the "sadistic" author. The characters were perfect; the creator who controlled their fates was the one who was guilty. Haruto's social media was flooded with messages condemning his "waifu-slaying" tendencies. However, the readers' actual behavior told a different story. They were utterly obsessed with Sword Art Online.
When the rankings for the issue were finalized,
1. Crimson Abyss: 2,456,132 votes.
2. Sword Art Online: 2,019,856 votes.
3. Labyrinth of Another World: 1,212,312 votes.
4. You and Me: 690,000 votes.
The growth of SAO was directly affecting the audience of the long-standing veterans.
The drop for other titles was a natural side effect of Haruto's rise. But it was the raw number of votes for SAO that sent a shockwave through the industry.
Two million votes? By the third chapter?
This kind of popularity growth was unprecedented in the history of light novels. Usually, even a breakout hit takes months of world-building and narrative peaks to secure a stable fanbase before it can challenge the pillars of a flagship magazine.
Yet here was Sword Art Online, only three chapters in, commanding over two million votes.
Even taking into account the massive promotional budget of Kiyozawa Library and the crossover support from To the Moon and Initial D fans, this growth was abnormal. You couldn't just explain it away as riding old fame. Every top-tier author has a built-in audience when they start a new series, but almost none of them see results like this.
The only conclusion the industry could reach was that the work itself was a perfect match for the current tastes of the public.