...towards the next great adventure

Suxamethonium chloride is perhaps one of the cruellest substances known to man. To say that it is simply a poison does not do it justice. Amongst the various technical terms and medical jargon that describes its effects the one that most people would understand is cardiac arrest. It is colourless and odourless when in an aqueous solution and only a small amount is needed to kill. And killed it has. It has been used as a paralysing agent for lethal injections and has also been used for murder, some of which are not so recent. The latter was because a small enough dose to kill is also hard to detect unless a trained toxicologist is looking specifically for it.

However, that is not what makes it cruel. No, the reason suxamethonium chloride is particularly cruel is simply because the victim will be acutely aware of what is happening to them. They won't lose consciousness nor will they be numbed to the experience of having their heart stop and subsequent failure of the rest of their body. Regardless of whether they feel pain or not during the whole process, the victim will also be unable to communicate as well. The psychological damage of knowing and feeling one's body ceasing to function and the hopelessness of being able to do exactly nothing about it must be beyond description.

He had known about it, read up on it even. Searching for the term succinylcholine on the internet wasn't hard. Feeling it being injected in to him was not that much harder. It had entered his shoulder. The reason it had was because he had lunged straight in to the attack. He was trying to protect something. It was a person, someone dear to him, and he recalled her face, but not her name. Those brown hair and eyes were so soft and warm but full of worry. She must have known, seeing him as he felt himself being lifted away as his consciousness started to leave. In the end, he remembered himself being calm about it all.

Which was why this was a strange sensation. The room he was in was exactly like the one was back in April, white and devoid of anything else. It contained only him. His clothing was certainly not the clothing that he was in when he died. It was black, the garments that he knew and recognised from his time in another world. It was from two-three years ago, the event that had indelibly stained him, a persona that had become a part of his soul. The one known as the Black Swordsman Kirito was now standing here. There were only two possible explanations to this. One, he was really dead and this was the afterlife and two, linking back to his memory of April, he was in the STL, or at least his soul was and neither were especially encouraging.

Kirito wanted to sigh, if only for the sake of doing something, but he became acutely aware of something else. It was a circle depicting ever moving turquoise twirls. He walked around it. There was nothing behind it. He was aware of the concept of a portal, an opening that led to destination but this one showed no sign of where it led to, only that it did. A third explanation popped in to his head. This was purgatory, a sort of waiting room while he was sorted by the powers that be, and the portal was his judgement. Not wishing to be trapped in an endless white expanse forever, he moved his hard towards it. As soon as Kirito touched some invisible but arbitrary barrier that was its boundary, he was sucked in immediately and felt himself falling.

= Elsewhere =

"What do you mean he's not here?"

"I can understand your confusion Asuna-kun but please, allow me to explain."

"Yes Kikuoka-san, please, do explain why you kidnapped Kirito-kun and why he is currently not here."

"We were trying to reconstruct his memories using the STL as he had incurred some brain damage from cardiac arrest."

"It was also going so well too."

"You may not believe me but as we were loading up the software and preparing to insert Kirito-kun in to the Underworld he stepped in to an event horizon."

"An event horizon?"

"He stepped in to a miniature black hole that somehow appeared in the software."

"But if he was hooked up to the STL shouldn't his physical body still be here?"

"That's the thing Koujiro-sensei, it also took with it his body. So for all we know, he could be perfectly fine, the problem lies in that we do not know where he went."