Board Thread:Questions and Answers/@comment-3250527-20140627033401/@comment-6697950-20140627140019

Where on earth did you see me say "Heathcliff has to manually activate the killswitch"? That's just completely absurd and tedious...

What I said was "He likely disabled the killswitch", as in, prevented it from activating like it normally would, as he specifically stated that he prevented both Asuna and Kirito from dying, despite not operating any windows after Asuna's death, which means that the intervention had to be done before the battle.