Sword Art Online Light Novel Volume 12

The twelfth volume in the Sword Art Online Light novel series and the fourth installment of the Alicization arc.

Chapter 7 (The Two Supervisors, 5th Month of Human World Calendar 380)
Kirito recollects his life since he entered high school, and how he has been forced to leave his education three times already (one time because of the SAO incident, another time due to being stuck in Underworld and now again because of breaking the Taboo Index). He then resumes his talk with Cardinal  who continues the story of Quinella after she had found the list of system commands in Underworld.

She explains that when Quinella attempted to steal the system authority level from the Cardinal System using a complex system command, Quinella accidentally burned the primary instruction of the Cardinal System (to preserve regularity of the world) onto her Fluctlight as a non-changeable principle due to her low knowledge of the complex syntax of supervisor level commands. Because of this, Quinella inherited the Cardinal's duty of regulating the world, but pushed it to even greater extents - to regulate the residents as well.

It was Quinella who divided the human world into four empires and created different obstacles, such as the Gigas Cedar, to restrict the movement of the residents and thus be able to regulate them. Then Cardinal proceeds to explain the origin of Quinella's worry and how she created the Synthesis Ritual to exceed the limit of her memory, which is estimated to be about 150 years. The Synthesis Ritual allowed Quinella to manipulate the Fluctlight of a chosen person and thus she used this ritual to create a backup of her memories in another person's Fluctlight. At the time, a ten-year-old daughter of a furniture's shop owner had become a nun at the Axiom Church due to her above average System Control Authority. Due to her young age and thus, a large free memory capacity, the girl was invited to the top floor of the Cathedral, where Quinella attempted gaining control of the girl's Fluctlight and using it to store a back-up of Quinella's memories. The Synthesis Ritual was successful and Quinella's compressed memories were successfully copied onto the girl's Fluctlight. However, as Quinella and the girl regained consciousness at the same time after the ritual, they realized that they were exactly equal existences and began to break down due to the shock caused by this realization. The nun's Fluctlight was the first to break down and, at that moment, the Cardinal System's sub-program, which was copied onto the nun's Fluctlight along with Quinella's memories, managed to assume control of the young girl and the two Fluctlights stopped breaking down. Cardinal immediately attacked Quinella to gain the upper hand and, at first, she was winning because of taking the initiative. However, Quinella then realized a weakness that Cardinal had and made her room a place where no Sacred Arts could be used, generating a weapon afterwards. Although both generated weapons to fight, but Quinella had the advantage due to being used to her body, while Cardinal had yet to adapt from controlling a grownup's body to that of a young girl, so Cardinal had to escape. She took refugee in the Great Library Room, which Quinella had created to store her memories and had made hard to access from the outside, and destroyed its only connection to the Central Cathedral and thus preventing Quinella from being able to enter the Library.

She waited in the Library and released familiars to look around the Human World for people capable of helping her, but whenever she found someone, Quinella always reached the person first and captured him or her to turn into another Integrity Knight. During the over 200 years without any success, Cardinal began to grow impatient, until she heard rumors that the Gigas Cedar was cut down by two youngsters. She immediately sent Charlotte, her most trusted familiar that was stationed in the northern region, to find the two youngsters and investigate how they were able cut down the Cedar. Having deduced that Kirito was in fact a real human after a year's worth of observation, meaning that Kirito would be immune to Quinella's Fluctlight altering commands and would be able to face Quinella head on, Cardinal set up the maximum amount of backdoors in the Cathedral, to await for the time when Kirito would enter the Cathedral as either the winner of the Four Empires Unity Tournament, or as a criminal who broke the Taboo Index. As Kirito ended up breaking the Taboo Index, Cardinal guided the two youngsters via Charlotte to one of the backdoors in the Cathedral's garden, after they had escaped their prison.

Chapter 8 (Central Cathedral, 5th Month of Human World Calendar 380)
When he was inside the central cathedral, Kirito dosed off. Eugeo having a second thought of bringing up the cardinal problems to him, eventually failed. Volumen 12