User blog:Gsimenas/Volume 12 around the corner

Wow, it's already April. For the past two months, after I've finished reading Vol. 11, I've been thinking "2 more months until the next Volume is released + 1-2 months more until it is fully translated. I don't think I can wait that long...". Well, due to my exams and finding a new hobby of working on this wiki, I actually lost track of time and even the last few weeks it still seemed that the new volume is "at least 1-2 months away"... until I realized that it's actually just a few days away from being released. Though it will still take weeks for the new novel to be fully translated, I'm guessing that Tap will translate the novel bit by bit over the coming month, meaning that we'll have something to look forward to mostly every week, not to mention that we will also get to see some illustrations of the new novel that we can use for speculation until the translation is complete (maybe even use some of them for the wiki, for those illustrations that are not too context dependent)? :D

Which brings me to the topic, what do you think will happen in the next novel? (If you've read the web version (somehow), then don't spoil it for those who haven't, please!) Well, from the preview we can assume that he is defintely going to fight an Integrity Knight (though I wonder who will that be?) and we can also assume that there won't be any major time jumps in the near future, as things are getting intense in Underworld. But do you think that the arc is going to end with this volume, or will there be even more volumes to come (I hope it does, my SAO addiction needs some more fuel :D)? If not, are they going to get Alice back to her senses this volume? And how is Kirito going to stop Quinella when she has the power to mess with peoples' memory, among her many Administrator powers (from re-reading the previous novels, I have a hunch that it will have something to do with the power of imagination, like how Kirito was able to heal his Zephyrias with Sacred Arts without actually using any commands, but that's just me)? (Add any other important questions that I forgot to add here :D) Sure, it will be a lot easier to guess when the illustrations come out, but we can still speculate a bit while we wait :D

Edit: Illustrations are available at Baka now: http://www.baka-tsuki.org/project/index.php?title=Sword_Art_Online:Volume_12_Illustrations