After surviving the SAO death game, Kirito spends his downtime in ALfheim Online with Asuna and Alice, until the Seed Nexus's separate VRMMORPGs get forcibly merged into a single new game, Unital Ring, and everyone's stats reset to zero. The manga adapts the fifth arc of the light novels, following directly from the Alicization storyline as Kirito and his friends work out the rules of a game none of them chose to play.