I lay in the soft bed looking absent-mindedly at the white panel ceiling listening to the steady high pitched beeping of the cardiac monitor sitting next to me. I still had wires patched onto different places around my body, some reading my heart rate, some reading my blood pressure and others doing a job that I couldn't even try to comprehend from the brief run down given to me by the white cloaked doctors.
I lay there and my mind slowly began to go over events, trying to make sense of them and trying to reassure myself of the truth behind them. It had been a week since Sword Art Online had been cleared and the grand floating of Aincrad destroyed after over two long years of fighting and dying. Three of my friends had died in there.
Andrew, Adrinn, and Oliver, Torinn, had died fighting against the player killing guild who called themselves The Laughing Coffins, both going down trying to protect others, trying to give others a chance to live that bit longer at the cost of their own lives. The two of them had been killed by players, murderers who if they still lived were likely to never see justice for the horrific crimes they had committed in that world.
And then Steven, Woods, he had been there, fighting alongside me up until the very last boss battle against the terrifying power of the Skull Reaper. He had run out of healing items and didn't take the time from the battle to scrape some more either from his inventory or those around him.
In the end I watched him get obliterated by the merciless scythes of the 75th boss, sword broken and health non-existent. His body had disappeared along with all of his items in a flash of light and a flurry of particles, as he stood protecting Sky who was knocked to the ground with no way of getting up.
All of us had seen him die, all of us saw his HP bar hit zero and all of us were forced to watch his body dissipate and vanish from existence. Yet down the hospital hallway in a small, private room, Steven was lying in a bed, like I am, with his heart still beating and his body still breathing oxygen. For some unknown reason he had survived dying in the world of swords, yet he still wasn't truly alive in this world. Even though he was still alive his Nerve Gear is still active upon his head, keeping him from the real world and threatening to kill him whenever it pleased.
However even though I had forever lost two of my friends and was at the point of losing a third, there was a gleam of happiness that came from the end of that virtual world. Both Sky and Aurora had survived it along with me and were now somewhere in this same hospital being treated back to good health. I had yet to speak to them much due to the constant flurry of hurried and put out doctors trying to keep the 34 English survivors alive, well and most of all away from the glaring eyes and ears of the media crews and journalists that had seemingly begun laying siege upon the hospital which we were being housed within.
When I had woke from the virtual world my body was numb and weak, stopping me from moving very far or even holding anything with a strong grip. But thanks to the magic of 21st century medicine and huge amounts of food and drink, I was regaining my strength and I could walk quite far if I had something to support myself with.
I was nowhere near the sort of physical fitness of when I entered the game or even of when I was in the game, but as with all of the survivors we were taking the slow walk to both physical and mental recovery, even though it seemed impossible to heal all of the scars left by such an ordeal.
The door to the small room opened with a heavy woosh, breaking the monotonous sound of the room. I raised my head to look at who had walked into the room, expecting to see one of the many doctors that had come and go to help with different aspects of my body. But instead I was met with a short, but plump, man in a black suit standing by the side of my bed. He had an organised mess of shortish brown hair, distinct hazel eyes, a rough red face and his hands dug deep within his pockets.
"Am I right in thinking that you are Andrew Thoron?"
I looked at the man for a few seconds wondering who he could be or why he was here, but no explanation was forthcoming and there was little I could do other than answer his question.
"Yer, I'm Andrew. But who are you and why are you in a private hospital room?" I got straight down to what I was thinking, yet I was still more interested in resting and getting back to my routine of contemplating the past two years than what he had to say. However I pushed myself closer to a sitting position so that I was in arms reach of the alarm cord dangling by my bed and so that I didn't look as vulnerable.
The man gave a short humoured laugh before replying, "You can call me Mr Newton. I am here to collect you for a meeting about the end of Sword Art Online and some more information that you may want to be privy to." He seemed satisfied with his short explanation, however I looked at him with an inquiring stare, wanting to know exactly what he was on about and weary of him being a journalist.
"I presume you want to know more before you leave this room." He said with a sigh. He had hit what I was thinking right on the head with a swift and scary precision and I was starting to truly worry that he was a high end interviewer or something. He then pulled a chair over from next to the door and sat down.
"Huh, I suppose I should explain myself further then. I am the leader of the legal group that monitored all of the British Players and was the one who led the campaign to keep you in the care of the NHS instead of being placed private care where your parents and relatives would have had to pay out ridiculous amounts of money to keep you alive." This was the first I had heard of this kind of organisation, but I was put slightly at ease as it seemed that he wasn't one of the journalists I had feared, but I still kept my guard.
"In extension, I am also in charge of maintaining and overseeing the tech and server groups that have been monitoring your Nerve Gears. So in summary I've been keeping you and the rest of the British players alive." He continued in a calm yet restrained and slow voice.
It took my brain a few seconds to process the depth of what the man had said but when it came down to it all of the players in this hospital owed their lives to this man. I presumed that he also had made efforts to keep us sheltered in this hospital, away from the media and legal interrogators, which considering that it was a London hospital must have been an extremely hard task to pull off.
However two years in SAO had taught me to be cautious of anybody and of things that they said sounding too good to be true, even though this was the real world and in a secure environments 'old habits die hard'. "That still doesn't explain why you want me for some meeting or tell me what the meeting is about."
"Good God, I've been told that you lot are stubborn and cautious of everyone that you don't know, but I never believed that it would be this tricky." He remarked with a alight chuckle to himself. At this I smiled slightly, happy that we had gained such a reputation for being awkward with what we could consider to be outsiders.
"Well if you want it all on the table before we even leave the room I may as well tell you what's going on. As you may know one of the players, Steven Keywood, who went under the username of Woods has yet to disconnect from the virtual world and is still in a state of unconsciousness. As of a few hours ago, when I last checked the reports that have been sent to us, there is an additional 299 players in the same state as Mr Keywood, making up 300 people."
"To put this in perspective 10,000 people went into that game and 6,147 of those players are still alive, 300 of them still trapped for some reason. We have some vague ideas as to why this may be possible, but nothing concrete. As for your part in this, we have been told by two young ladies, who will also be attending this gathering, that you knew Mr Keywood before the game and throughout the game." He said this once again with a contented smile but his face showed a firm finality to what he was saying.
The number 6,147 quickly stuck to my mind and for a few seconds that was all I could think about. 3,853 people had died in the floating castle of Aincrad, the majority of them innocent and unsuspecting children and teenagers who had been taken from their families, friends and lives by a game which ended up killing them. And even though so many people had died, sacrificing their lives to try and complete that pointless game, 300 people were still presumably trapped within the virtual world.
However my mind also latched onto the fact that he had said about two girls, who were also going to be present, that had said that I had known Steven for such a long time. After going through the very small list of people this could be I was left with a certainty that it was Sky and Aurora. I looked at the man, still not 100% convinced on his story but seeing little way out from this situation and the chance of seeing both Aurora and Sky and the possibility of being told why Steven was still alive outweighed my doubts and cautious state.
"All right then, where are we going for this 'meeting'?" I asked slowly, keeping direct eye contact and making it clear in my tone that I still didn't trust him, however genuine he seemed. It just all too good, even for the real world things like this were normally bound to books of fiction written to tell a story and to entertain, never are they a real representation of what the reality of life is though.
I swung my legs out from the side of my bed and with effort pushed myself onto my two unbalanced feet, pressing up against the wall and taking deep breaths. I then moved my hand over the cardiac monitor, turned it off by ripping a wire from the back and them moved on to ripping the patches attached to me off.
The man sent a concerned look at me and was about to say something before I swiftly cut him off, "I don't need help, just show me where we're going." He looked slightly offended by the sharpness in my voice but closed his mouth, turned and walked over to the door.
Before SAO I would have been accepting of help from others, if it was offered, but now after being able to rely on myself and a small number of trusted people for so long I hated people pitying me and trying to help me do things that they believe I can't. So now when people try to offer me help I shoot their offer down without hesitation or care for their insulted and worried looks.
The man opened the heavy fire door with a slight woosh sound and walked out into the large hallway containing the majority of the British SAO survivors. I slowly walked across the room, making sure that my legs weren't going to give way under me and I gripped the smooth metal handle of the door and pulled it open with all of my strength. I left the room and leant up against the wall once again to catch my breath slightly before continuing.
The suited man, was standing outside my room looking down to a chained gold pocket watch. He looked up at me, closed his watch with a slight snap and signalled for me to go ahead of him down the hallway. I dragged my feet forward and he took up a slow pace behind me.
The journey down the hallway took much longer than it should have due to my physical condition forcing me to stop every so often, slowing my already slowed pace. By the time we had reached the end of the hallway Mr Newton, as he called himself, looked slightly bored and impatiently kept getting his watch out, as if to see every second which had passed since he last looked.
On the right hand wall was a door much like the one to my room, but with a large "Private" sign attached to it and the small rectangular window in the centre of the door had been blacked out, stopping people from looking in or out. Mr Newton looked up once again from his watch and with a slight murmur of "Acceptable." motioned me to go into the room.
The room itself was exactly the same in structure and layout to my own room and all of the other rooms which I had seen so far, however the contents were very much different. A number of glowing and beeping machines all set in a semi circle around a large occupied bed, each with a variety of coloured and sized wires leading to the person lying still within the bed.
The person had a grey plastic head gear on, dark visor included, meaning that I couldn't see who it was from this distance, but I knew this had to be the room in which they had been keeping Steven and therefore the person hooked to all of these machines had to be him. Around the bed and the machines were three people.
One was standing just back from the bed holding their left hand at their side, they had extremely long smooth and straight brown hair which fell around her slight and seemingly frail figure, this person was wearing a white shirt and white trousers, a patient, Aurora. Another was an older man who had dull blonde hair which in competition with the visible gel was flat upon the man's head, he looked rather tall, however he was currently sitting down so I couldn't gauge how tall exactly, he wore jeans a black shirt and a brown leather jacket, this was someone I had yet to meet.
The other person, like Aurora wore patients clothing and had hair flowing down her back. But unlike Aurora it was a bright blonde blonde colour and seemed to stick out slightly in different places. She was kneeling by the bed and her head was lying on Steven's unmoving side. From a glance I could tell that it had to be Sky and I would have been surprised if this was the first time she had been at his side like this.
Aurora turned around as she heard the door opening and looked at me for a few seconds. Her blue eyes had lost a lot of their shine and were red and the skin around them was visibly raw, she was pale and she looked as if she had lost a lot of strength and weight. But as she saw me her eyes brightened slightly and the saddened smile turned to a feeble smile. On impulse I moved forward and embraced her gently, knowing that she was still in much physical pain.
She eventually returned the embrace and with relief placed her head on my shoulder and leaned her light weight into me. The man sitting in the chair to the side of the room lifted his head in slight surprise, seemingly not paying attention to the door, and got up with a sharp clap from his hands. Sky however stayed were she was, possibly asleep or not wanting to move from the state of peace she had somehow found.
"I presume you are Andrew Thoron?" The man asked eagerly, not even attempting to keep with the calm and somewhat muted feel to the room.
I raised my head and looked at the man for a few seconds, he had blacks surrounding his eyes and his skin was visibly starved of light. "Yes, that's me." Was all I could muster while the tender feeling of being so near to Aurora spread through my body.
"Good, good. Excellent. Shall we get this over with then, as I can see that I'm not really wanted in this room considering the reason we are all here. So I can either give you a long exposition of sympathy and pity or we could get tot the point of us being here and try to do something about our sleeping friend here." He said this with such conviction and indifference that even Sky moved her head around to look at the man, even if it was a brief second of contempt.
The man saw Sky's look and the slight glares that me and Aurora had sent in his way. "I presume we take the latter option then?" He said hitting the nail on the head. "Well then for a start I'm Daniel Hackett, and I've been the one who has been watching over the servers that Sword Art Online ran on, specifically looking at the connections from your nerve gears to the servers hosted in Japan, currently by RCT inc. with their new game." This introduction meant little to me, but from this quick description I presumed that he was working with Mr Newton, instantly making me harbour a slight distrust for what he did or said.
"Now as we can all expect when the game ended each of the players disconnected from the server one after the other practically. However we observed that when a person dies in the game they are disconnected from the server approximately 5 seconds before the NerveGear can fry the player's brain." He spoke slowly so that we could try and follow what he was saying, but there was little hesitation or pausing almost as if it had been practised or at least thought over thoroughly. This made what he said sound fake and without much care for us three.
"But we did see one exception to this." As he said this he moved his head in the direction of Steven, so that we were clear on who he was on about.
"Around 10 or so minutes before the game ended, I don't have the exact times with me but its around there, his NerveGear disconnected from the main server host for a good 10 seconds before reconnecting to a server under the name of RCT inc. for seemingly no reason. We presume this server change caught him just before he was going to die in Sword Art Online and so kept him alive during that final fight. But as he was now logged into what looked like a different server he didn't disconnect from Sword Art Online like the rest of you did." At the mention of the final fight my mind flicked back to images of it that were present in my dreams, I also felt Aurora tense her body slightly.
After Sword Art Online finally came to close the main server structure keeping it running was supposed to have been taken down, or at least not used this early by RCT. Yet when we tried to directly trace Steven's nerve gear connection back to the server we get given the name 'Alfheim Online', but we can still see that its near enough the same server structure as used in Sword Art Online, just reinforced by other server shards which had to be used before Sword Art Online had closed down." The man spoke with a maniacal smile and a glint in his eye, he obviously relished in explaining things which he had found to others. But he was met with looks of confusion, causing him to lose some of the shine in his eyes and his smile wavered somewhat.
"Right, yer its a bit complicated and long winded. But we have made some sense of it and have made steps to save your friend. Ok, in short what I'm trying to say is that Steven, along with the majority of his player data was transferred onto Alfheim and it is likely that he is now somewhere in that world. Under this conclusion me and two of my colleagues have gone into Alfheim to try and find evidence of our theory. Buuut as its still at its heart an MMORPG, we are restricted massively by our levels, money, gear and just general skill and teamwork it seems. Now however pathetic our efforts were we managed to acquire some bits of interesting information. Around the time that SAO went down people felt the world shake slightly and bright lights were seen to fall from the sky around the world, the people that went to investigate the lights however were slaughtered without even seeing what they were being attacked by. Hopefully this is where you come in." He ended his long speech by taking a few deep breaths and looking expectantly at us.
"You want us to go in to that game?" Came the quiet question from Aurora, with a tone of worry and doubt. At this the man simply nodded with a smile.
"And why do you think we can be of any help?" Sky said still with a darkness behind her voice.
"We believe that the servers are the same as SAO's and so we can presume that the player data went with it, meaning that you are likely to retain all of your levels, money and possibly items." He said directly to Sky in a calm manner, not in any way put off by her manner.
"So as we have our levels and such from SAO you think that we are better suited to finding out about this 'information' that you speak of, on the off chance that its related to Steven?" I gave a quick summary while looking at the man's bubbly expression with one of darkness and doubt.
"So, will you do it or not?" He said with a finality to it.
