Sword Art Online - Volume 1 - Aincrad Page 4

  That wasn’t all. The actual build and the horizontal length of the players had become larger too. There was no way that the NERvGear would have been able to know all this.

  The person who answered this question was Cline.

  “Ah…wait. I bought the NERvGear just yesterday so I remember, but there was a part of the set-up… what was it called, calibration? Well anyway, during that bit it touched your body here and there, maybe it was that…?”

  “Ah, right……that’s what it was…”

  Calibration was where the NERvGear measured «how much you had to move your hand to reach your body». This was done to reproduce the sense of feel accurately within the game. So to say, it was almost as if the NERvGear had data about our exact figures saved inside itself.

  It was possible, making all the avatars of the players an almost perfect polygon replica of themselves. The purpose of this was also almost too clear now.

  “…reality,” I muttered. “He said that this was reality. That this polygon avatar…and our HP was our real body and our real life. In order to make us believe this he’s produced a perfect copy of us…”

  “But…but y’know Kirito.”

  Cline scratched his head roughly and the eyes beneath his bandanna shone as he shouted.

  “Why? Why the hell’s he doing something like this…?”

  I didn’t answer that and pointed upwards past our heads.

  “Wait a moment. Most probably he’ll answer that in a bit anyway.”

  Kayaba didn’t let me down. A few seconds later a voice, sounding almost solemn, sounded from the blood red sky.

  ‘You will all most probably be wondering ‘why.’ Why am I—the creator of both the NERvGear and SAO, Kayaba Akihiko—doing something like this? Is this a sort of terrorist attack? Is he doing this to ransom us?’

  It was then that Kayaba’s voice, which had been emotionless up to now, seemed to show some signs of emotion. Suddenly the word «empathy» passed through my mind, even though there was no way that would be true.

  ‘None of these is the reason I am doing this. Not only that, but now for me, there is no longer a reason or a purpose in doing this. The reason is because…this situation itself was my purpose in doing this. To create and watch this world is the only reason I have created the NERvGear and SAO. And now, everything has been realized.’

  Then after a short break, Kayaba’s voice, now emotionless again, sounded.

  ‘…now I have finished the official tutorial for «Sword Art Online». Players—I wish you luck.’

  This last sentence trailed off with a faint echo.

  The huge robe rose soundlessly, and started sinking, hood first, into the system message that covered the sky, as if melting.

  Its shoulders, then its chest, then its two arms and legs merged into in the red surface, and then a final red stain spread briefly. Right afterward the system message that had covered the sky disappeared as suddenly as it appeared.

  The sound of the wind blowing above the plaza and the BGM that the NPC orchestra was playing came softly to our ears.

  The game had returned to its normal state, apart from the fact that a couple of rules had been changed.

  Then—at last.

  The crowd of ten thousand players gave a proper reaction.

  In other words, countless voices started to resound loudly through the plaza.

  “It’s a joke right…? The hell is this? It’s a joke right!?”

  “Stop kidding around! Let me out! Let me out of here!”

  “No! You can’t! I’ve got to meet someone soon!”

  “I don’t like this! I’m gonna go home! I want to go home!!!!!!”

  Yells. Clamors. Shouts. Curses. Begging. And screaming.

  The people that had changed from game players to prisoners in a matter of minutes crouched clutching their heads, waved their arms about, grasped each other or started to swear loudly.

  In the midst of all this noise, strangely my mind became cool again.

  This, is reality.

  What Kayaba Akihiko had declared was all true. If this was the case, this was all to be expected. It’d be strange not to. This genius was one side of Kayaba that made him alluringly attractive.

  Now I can’t return to reality for a while—perhaps a few months or maybe more than that. During this time I can’t see my mother or sister, nor talk to them. It was possible that I would never get the chance. If I died here—

  I died in reality.

  The NERvGear, that was once a game machine, is a lock to this prison and a tool of death that will fry my brain.

  I breathed slowly in, then out, and opened my mouth.

  “Cline, come over here for a sec.”

  I grabbed the warrior’s arm, who seemed to be much older than me in real life, and made my way through the raving crowd.

  We made it out of it quite quickly, maybe because we were near the edge. We entered one of the many streets that led out of the plaza in a radial pattern and I jumped into the shadow behind an unmoving carriage.

  “…Cline,” I called his name again.

  He still had a somewhat blank expression on his face. I continued talking, trying my best to sound serious.

  “Listen to me. I’m going to get out of this city and head over to the next village. Come with me.”

  Cline opened his eyes wide under the bandanna. I kept talking in a low voice, forcing the words out.

  “If what he said was true, in order to survive in this world we have to strengthen ourselves. You know that MMORPGs are a battle for resources between the players. Only the people who can acquire the most money and experience can get stronger. …the people who’ve realized this are going to hunt all the monsters around the «Starting city». You’ll have to wait forever for the monsters to regenerate. Going to the next village right now would be better. I know the way and all the dangerous spots, so I can get there, even if I’m only level one.”

  Considering that it was me, that was quite a lot of words that I had just said, but despite that he stayed silent.

  Then a few seconds later his face scrunched up.

  “But…but y’know. I said before that I stood in line for ages with my friends to buy this game. They would have logged in and most likely they’d be in the plaza even now. I can’t…go without them.

  “…”

  I let out a sigh and bit my lip.

  I could understand all too well what Cline was trying to tell me through his nervous gaze.

  He—was bright and was easy to get along with, and he most probably took care of other people pretty well. He was most definitely hoping that I’d take all his friends with him.

  But I just couldn’t nod.

  If it was just Cline, I could get to the next village while protecting us from aggressive monsters. But if there was even two more—no, even one more person coming along it would be dangerous.

  If somebody died along the way, they’d die as Kayaba had announced.

  The responsibility would undoubtedly fall on me, who suggested to set out from the safe «Starting City» and failed to protect my comrade.

  To bear such a heavy burden, I could never do that. It was just simply impossible.

  Cline seemed to have read all these worries that had flashed through my mind. A smile appeared on his slightly bearded cheek and he shook his head.

  “No…I can’t keep relying on you. I was a guild master in the game I used to play. It’ll be fine. I’ll just make do with the techniques that you’ve taught me till now. And…there’s still a chance that this was just a bad joke and that we’ll all be logged off. So don’t worry about us and go to the village.”

  “…”

  With my mouth closed, I was wracked by an indecision that I’d never felt before in my life.

  Then I chose the words that would gnaw at me for two years.

  “…OK.”

  I nodded, stepped back, and said with my dry throat.

  “Well, let’s part here. If
anything comes up send me a message. …well, see you later, Cline.”

  Cline called me as I turned my eyes downwards and turned to leave.

  “Kirito!”

  “…”

  I sent him a questioning glance but he didn’t say anything, his cheek only shook a little.

  I waved once and turned northwest—the direction of the village that I’d use as my next base.

  When I had taken about five steps, a voice called out from behind me again.

  “Hey, Kirito! You look pretty good in real life! You’re quite my style!”

  I smiled bitterly and shouted over my shoulder.

  “Your look suits you ten times better too!”

  Then I turned my back on the first friend that I had made in this world and ran straight forward ceaselessly.

  After I had run through the winding alleyways for a few minutes, I looked back again. Of course, there was nobody there.

  I ignored the odd feeling of my chest being restricted and ran.

  I ran desperately to the northwest gate of the Starting City and then past the large plains and the deep forest, then a small village located past all this—then past that to an endless, lonely game of survival.

  Chapter 4

  One month into the game, two thousand people were dead.

  The hope that outside help would come had been crushed; not even a message had gotten through.

  I didn’t see it myself, but they said that the panic and the madness that took hold of the players when they realized that they really couldn’t get back was unbelievable. There were people crying and others wailing, some even tried to dig up the ground of the city saying that they were going to destroy this world. Of course, all buildings were non-destructible objects, so this attempt failed without any results to show for it.

  They say that it took days for the players to accept the situation and think of what to do afterward.

  The players were split into four big groups.

  The first consisted of a little over half of the players; they were the ones who still wouldn’t accept the conditions that Kayaba Akihiko had put forth and still waited for outside help.

  I understood what they were thinking painfully well. Their real bodies would be lying on a bed or sitting on a chair fast asleep. That was reality and this situation was the «fake», if there was even the smallest discovery they might be able to get out—of course, the log out button was gone but there might be something that the creators of the game might have overlooked—.

  And outside, the company who ran the game, Agas, would be trying harder than anyone to save the players—if they could just wait they might be able to open their eyes, have a teary reunion with their family and then return to school or work and this would all have been just something to talk about—.

  It wasn’t really unreasonable to think like this. I think I was hoping for the same thing deep inside.

  Their plan of action was to «wait». They didn’t take even a single step out of the city and used the money they had been allotted at the beginning of the game—the currency was called «Coll» in this world—sparingly, buying only the food they needed to get through the day and finding cheap inns to sleep in, and walked around in groups spending each day without any thought.

  Thankfully the «Starting City» was a city that took up twenty percent of the first floors surface and was large enough to fit a Tokyo district. So the five thousand players would have had sufficient room to live in.

  But no help was forthcoming however long they waited. On some days the sky outside was not a crystal blue but covered with grey clouds. Their money couldn’t last forever and they realized that they would have to do something.

  The second group consisted of about thirty percent, or three thousand players. It was a group where all the players in it worked together. The leader of it was the admin of the largest online game info site.

  The players who had gathered under this group were split into several groups and shared all of their gains and collected information on the game and set out to explore the labyrinth area where the stairs were. The leaders of this group set the «Black Iron Castle» up as their base of operations and sent orders to their various groups.

  This huge group didn’t have a name for quite a while, but after all the members received a uniform, somebody gave them the, somewhat grim, name «The Army».

  The third group was made of, at an estimate, a thousand players. It consisted of people who had wasted all their Coll but didn’t want to make money by fighting monsters.

  As a side-note there were two basic bodily needs that existed in SAO. One was fatigue and the other was hunger.

  I understood why fatigue existed. Virtual information and real information were no different to the users’ brains. If players became sleepy they could go to an inn and rent a room to sleep in depending on the amount of money they had in their pockets. If one hoarded a large amount of Coll they could buy a house, but the amount of money needed wasn’t small.

  Hunger was a need that many players thought of as strange. Although they didn’t really want to imagine what was happening to their bodies in the real world, it was most probable that we were being force fed nutrients somehow. That meant that the emptiness we felt here had nothing to do with our real bodies.

  But if we bought some virtual bread or meat in the game and ate it, the emptiness disappeared and we felt full. There was no way to find out how this strange mechanism worked, short of asking a professional in the field of neurology.

  So the opposite was true too, the hunger didn’t disappear unless we ate something. We most probably wouldn’t die if we starved, but the fact that it’s a need that’s hard to ignore doesn’t change. So the players visited the restaurants that the NPCs ran daily and ate some food there, at least data-wise.

  Also there was no need to excrete waste in the game. As to what was happening in the real world, I didn’t even want to think about it.

  Well back to the main point—

  The players who had squandered all their money in the beginning, who couldn’t sleep or eat, usually joined the huge organization that I mentioned a while ago, «The Army». This was because they received at least something to eat if they followed the orders from the top.

  But there are always those who can never cooperate with others however hard they try. The ones who never wanted to join, or got kicked out for causing trouble set the slums of the «Starting City» as their base and started thieving.

  Inside the city, or the places mostly referred to as «Safe Areas» were protected by the system and players couldn’t hurt each other. But it wasn’t like that outside. The stragglers made teams with other stragglers and ambushed other players—which was in many ways much more profitable than hunting monsters—out on the fields or the labyrinth areas.

  Even then, they never «murdered» anybody—well at least during the first year.

  This group got slowly larger until they reached the aforementioned number of a thousand.

  The final, fourth group was, simply said, the rest.

  There were fifty organizations made by the people who wanted to clear the game but didn’t join the huge organization. Their number was about five hundred. We called these groups «Guilds» and they had a mobility that «The Army» lacked; and using that, they steadily grew stronger.

  Then there were the very few who chose the merchant and craftsman classes. They numbered only about two, three hundred but they created guilds of their own and started training the skills that they would need to earn the Coll they need and get by.

  The rest, around one hundred players were called «Solo Players»—this was the group I belonged in.

  They were the selfish group who had decided that acting alone would be better for strengthening themselves and simply surviving. If one could use the information they had, they could level up quickly. After they had gained the power to fight against monsters and bandits by themselves, there was truthfully no merit in fighting with other
players.

  An additional feature of SAO was that there was no «Magic», in other words there were no «long range attacks with a 100% accuracy rate» so one could fight large groups of monsters alone. If one had the required skills, playing solo was much more effective experience point-wise than party playing.

  Of course there were risks involved. To give an example if a person was «Paralyzed» if he had party members with him they’d just cure him and that’d be that, but if the person was playing solo it could lead straight to death. Actually, in the very beginning, solo players had the highest fatality rate amongst all the players.

  But if you had the experience and knowledge to win through all this danger there was a much better compensation for all this risk, and the beta testers, including myself, had both of these things.

  With this precious information the solo players leveled up at a fierce pace and soon a huge gap appeared between them and the rest of the players. After the game had calmed down a bit most solo players got out of the first floor and used the cities in the upper levels as their bases.

  Inside the Black Iron Castle, where the «Room of the Resurrected» had been during the beta testing, there now stood a huge metal monument that hadn’t even existed during beta testing. The names of all ten thousand players were carved on its surface. In addition, a line appeared on the name of the people who were dead and it gave the time and reason of death next to it.

  The first person to get the honor of having his name crossed out appeared three hours into the game.

  The reason of death was not losing to a monster. It was suicide.

  He believed in the theory that “according to the structure of the NERvGear, if a person is cut off from the system they’ll automatically regain consciousness.” He climbed over the iron fence at the north end of the city, or the edge of Aincrad, and flung himself off.

  Beneath the floating castle that was Aincard no sort of ground could be seen, however much you squinted. There was only an endless sky with several layers of white clouds. As countless players watched him; the boy got steadily smaller, leaving a long scream and finally disappearing into the clouds.