It's been a long time since I've done one of these, huh? Well time to get back into it, I guess, and what better way to get into it than with an updated blog based around my first ever blog! That's right, we're delving back into Kazuto Kirigaya, otherwise known as Kirito once more!
Also, obligatory spoiler warning: There will be stuff from Alicization & War of the Underworld used here!
BACKSTORY
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| Kirito, as he appears in SAO |
Kazuto Narusaka seemed set to have a pretty normal childhood with his loving parents... until his parents died in a car crash when he was just one year old. Kazuto luckily survived, and ended up being adopted by his aunt, Midori Kirigaya, and raised alongside his cousin Suguha as one of their own. Despite this, Kazuto was a pretty smart kid and, at the age of 10, managed to go through erased records in the national registry and discovered that he was adopted. Distraught by this, Kazuto turned to gaming as a means of escapism and started unintentionally pushing his cousin/adoptive sister away.
Amongst one of these games was a new and upcoming VRMMO using experimental NerveGear technology called Sword Art Online, of which he was one of the lucky 1,000 Beta Testers, going by the handle Kirito (A portmanteau of his first and last names: Kazuto Kirigaya).
Kirito's life would forever be changed, however, at 13:00 on November 6, 2022- the moment Sword Art Online started its official service. Unfortunately, what should have just been a fun time turned out to be something sinister, as its creator, Akihiko Kayaba, would reveal a deadly truth about the game: Players were not allowed to log out of Sword Art Online until the game was cleared, and if a player died in-game, the NerveGear would fry the user's brain, killing them in the real world. Thus, SAO became a fight for survival. Kirito would be one of the Front Line's top players for much of SAO, gaining the extra skill, Dual-Wielding, becoming one of the strongest players in the game, falling in love with another of the strongest players, Asuna Yuuki, and eventually clearing the Death Game by exposing Heathcliff, the strongest player, as Kayaba, then defeating him in a duel.
However, 300 players, including Asuna, had not woken up, leaving Kirito distraught, and he remained this way until he was shown a picture of what appeared to be Asuna stuck in a hidden location in another VRMMO, ALFheim Online. Steeling his resolve, Kirito dove in, rescued Asuna, exposed the corrupt Sugou Nobuyuki's plot to create mind control tech and distributed the World Seed, an environment made to create new VRMMO games, while also reconnecting with Suguha along the way.
A year after that, Kirito would be contacted by an official going by the name of Kikuoka Seijirou, who wanted him to work on another case of people seemingly being killed by VRMMOs: This time, revolving around a mysterious user named Death Gun, who ravaged the VRMMO shooter Gun Gale Online. Once again, Kirito dove into the fray and, with the help of top GGO player Asada Shino AKA Sinon, managed to solve the Death Gun mystery and bring the perpetrators to justice... nearly.
Turns out, one of them escaped, and attacked Kirito and Asuna while they were on a date. While Kirito succeeded in apprehending the assailant, he was injected with a lethal drug and, while he managed to survive, he was left with severe brain damage and put into a coma, and thus was forced to be put into an experimental full dive machine known as the Soul Translator (Which he was testing, prior) so they could heal him. In turn, Kirito was left stranded in the VR Environment Underworld and, alongside an old friend, Eugeo, sought to bring back Eugeo's lost friend Alice, uncover the mysteries of the Axiom Church and contact the real world. He succeeded, though at the cost of Eugeo's life, which combined with a power surge caused by an attack on the facility he was kept in, left him into a coma. At the end of the War of the Underworld, Kirito woke up and proceeded to single-handedly save Underworld from those who raided it, before ruling it for 200 years alongside Asuna, where he became known as Star King.
PERSONALITY
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| Kirito, in his second ALO Avatar |
Kirito's not really good with words. He's not afraid to speak his mind, and tends to be blunt, and also has a bit of a trollish streak to him- he's fond of teasing others. Kirito also occasionally falls into bouts of overconfidence. While he's usually calm and collected, Kirito can sometimes fall into battle frenzy and fight with such ferocity that sometimes he has trouble remembering the details of said battle. Though originally a loner, Kirito is a kind person who won't abandon those in need. Kirito's most prominent personality trait, however, is his guilt complex: whenever things go wrong, Kirito has a very nasty habit of blaming himself- the most prominent examples of this being the Death of the Moonlit Black Cats in the Aincrad Arc and Eugeo's death in the first half of Alicization. When he's not wallowing in guilt, though, Kirito has an extremely strong resolve.
ABILITIES
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| Kirito, as he appears in GGO |
Kirito's got plenty of abilities up his sleeves, though they tend to vary between games, though he does have a few skills that were developed without assistance from the system, which are known as Outside System Skills. Among these are Hypersense (Allows Kirito to sense people through killing intent), Arms Blast (Allows an opponent to pinpoint a weapon's weak point and strike it to destroy said weapon), Spell Blast (Allows Kirito to cut through magic spells), Bullet Deflect (Exactly as it says on the tin- lets him deflect bullets like a Jedi) and Skill Connect (Lets Kirito chain One-handed Sword Skills together by wielding a sword in both hands).
Another example of a skill that carries across games, but isn't quite an Outside System Skill, is Incarnation. To put it simply, Incarnation, as described in Underworld, is a secret technique that allows the user to alter the state of the world through imagination and will. While it is mostly used in Alicization, Kirito has tapped into something similar a few times even prior to that- most notably when he delayed his own death in Sword Art Online, and when he cut through Death Gun using a recreation of a Dual Blades technique in Gun Gale Online. Incarnation can also be used to power up others- in Alicization, the combined Incarnation from all the residents of Underworld, plus some of Kirito's closest friends, was able to elevate Kirito to basically a godly level of power (by Underworld's standards, anyway), which is a state commonly referred to as Star King, named after the title he gained during his 200-year rule over Underworld. The common thread here tends to be that whenever he draws upon such power, his eyes glow yellow. He's also done some other stuff with it too, such as creating force fields, like during his final fight against Gabriel in War of the Underworld.
Kirito has also had some practice in Sacred Arts, another Underworld Specialty, which uses Sacred Power created by the sun and earth to manipulate the elements. There are eight known elements, those being Aqueous (Water), Aerial (Wind), Cryogenic (Ice), Luminous (Light and Healing), Metallic (Metals), Thermal (Fire), Umbral (Darkness) and Crystalline (Glass), of which Kirito has been known to use Cryogenic, Luminous, Thermal and Crystalline. For example, using Crystalline to create a mirror to reflect beams of light, or Luminous to heal wounds.
Lastly comes Kirito's bread and butter, Sword Skills. In the Underworld, Kirito's unique brand of Swordfighting was named 'Aincrad Style' (named after the floating castle in which the titular game was based), which focuses on multi-hitting one-handed Sword Skills, plus some martial arts on the side. Kirito, during his time at the North Centoria Imperial Swordsmanship Academy, also picked up on some tenets of Serlut Style, taught by his teacher, Sortiliena Serlut. Said style focuses on using unorthodox weapons and disrupting the opponent's stance. There are many, MANY different types of Sword Skills, and even amongst skill trees there are many sword skills to go off of, but Kirito, due to being the player with the fastest reaction speed in Sword Art Online, possesses a unique set of Sword Skills to only him: Dual Blades. This lets him Dual Wield swords to further bolster his offensive power. On top of this, the second sword also lets Kirito parry blows more effectively, with the main tradeoff being that his attacks are more committal due to the higher number of hits. His signature technique using Dual Blades is Starburst Stream. This sixteen-hit combo one-shot the Gleam Eyes, staggered Heathcliff's perfect defense, forcing him to use the System Over-Assist, and took out Gabriel Miller, who had overwhelmed basically everybody else, including Asuna and Sinon, who held the powers of Stacia and Solus, the Underworld goddesses of Creation and The Sun, respectively.
EQUIPMENT
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| Kirito, as he appears in the movie, Ordinal Scale |
Kirito's equipment tends to vary depending on what game he's in, but I'll just go over his best weapons, those being from Alicization. His main sword is the Night Sky Sword. Forged from the branch of a centuries-old demonic tree known as the Gigas Cedar, this blade, despite being made of wood, is considered a Divine Object outranking even some of the most notable weapons in Underworld.
In Underworld, Divine Objects' full powers can be unleashed through what's known as an Armament Full Control Art, which draws upon the weapon's memories to unleash some form of special move related to said memories, which comes in two stages: Enhancing and Releasing- done through the codewords "Enhance Armament" and "Release Recollection" respectively. The Enhance Armament of the Night Sky Sword has it fire a beam of darkness from the blade, which consumes light. The Release Recollection is purely a buffing technique- the blade absorbs light from all around and converts it into energy that Kirito can use to heal wounds or increase his own power dramatically. These both come from the Gigas Cedar's memories, where it did much of the same thing.
Kirito's secondary sword is that of the late Eugeo: the Blue Rose Sword. While it was originally broken in the fight against Quinella (This is what caused Eugeo's death), it would later be repaired to its former glory when Kirito came back to save Underworld. This Divine Object, made from an eternal block of ice, can freeze all nearby targets solid with its Armament Full Control Art. The Enhance Armament and Release Recollection are similar in that they freeze targets solid then cause life-sapping blue roses to bloom on the frozen targets, though the life draining and freezing effects are quicker in the Release Recollection variant. At the end of War of the Underworld, the sword also shows the ability to create tendrils of ice that shoot out from the sword, locking into targets to freeze them solid directly.
FEATS
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| Kirito's Alicization Avatar |
Strength/Destructive Power
One-shot the Gleam Eyes with Starburst Stream in Aincrad.
In Mother's Rosario, successfully pulls off a two-versus-thirty pincer attack alongside Klein.
In Alicization, his clash with Alice Synthesis Thirty blew a hole in the Axiom Church Central Cathedral, which the two were then sucked out of.
At the end of War of the Underworld, fought and defeated the Abyssal Horror, and shook the entirety of Underworld while he was at it. In the original light novel, this scene had Kirito describe it as 'like the Milky Way', and the feat itself has been calculated to be Solar-System Level.
Speed
In Phantom Bullet, slices through a sniper round from Sinon (This comes to about Mach 2, given the real life guns that Sinon's PGM Hecate Ultima Ratio II are based on).
In Mother's Rosario, causes a sonic boom while rushing to help Yuuki and Asuna.
In Alicization, manages to dodge Fanatio Synthesis Two's lasers. Fanatio's sword is explicitly forged from a superweapon meant to reflect and focus the sun's rays, and the light the sword gives off is explicitly linked to Solus (That is to say, the Sun). On top of this, it scorches instead of explodes and is reflected by mirrors/glass, so this is most likely real light. Even lowballing this puts Kirito at relativistic speeds.
Like with power, taking out the Abyssal Horror. The Abyssal Horror is faster than a Mechadragon, which could travel between solar systems in minutes and is capable of interstellar travel.
Durability
Again with the Abyssal Horror: He withstood being at the epicenter of the clash with the AH, which means he has durability equal to his power.
