[Full Translation] If You Were Here

Today marks the premiere of the Alicization anime's second half, War of Underworld. To celebrate, I laboured hard the past weeks to get the alternate Alicization timeline story "If You Were Here" all translated and spruced up for release... as a fluffy contrast to the War of Underworld's more gruesome route to make it all that much more painful in the end, mwhahahaha. To be honest, I had to double check at times to confirm I didn't somehow wound up in the gameverse with this story. If you love Eugeo and want more of his interactions (especially sick burns) with Kirito, this is the story just for you! And it'll probably make you hate Raios and Humbert even more when you realise how differently things would have gone if those two were out of the picture earlier.

For those out of the loop, the author of SAO, Kawahara Reki, began a series called "32/33" with his doujin Material Editions to explore the idea of what would have happened to the story if Eugeo and Kirito never broke the Taboo Index. But due to lacking time to write another side story to promote the Blu-Ray/DVD sales of Alicization... as well as his lack of time to participate in COMITIA doujin meetups where he releases his MEs, he decided to kill two birds with one stone by taking the incomplete 32/33 series and making it into a BD/DVD bonus story (retitling the story to "If You Were Here"), with some extra original content that wasn't present in the MEs to bring the story to an end.

Notice: This story is only recommended to those who have watched Alicization episodes 1-24, or have read volumes 9-14 of the light novel, since it does make quite a few references to the canon version of the timeline. Disclaimer: the story may or may not cause diabetes. Read at your own risk.

To make things easier (seeing as ME28 and ME29 content was already published separately and each had a varying amount of parts), I compiled the entire translation of the story into a single webpage straight away, instead of making separate posts for each part (I also added in some bookmarks to help you find where you left off, you can thank me later).

Click here to read the story.

Now, I did give this story a once-over before publishing it, but I'm only one man and could have easily missed some blatant fuckups, so if anyone notices anything wrong, be sure to inform me. Feel free to drop any other suggestions or impressions in the comments below as well.

Credits

Raws: Takazuki, Celest
Translation: Gsimenas