"Good luck players, Try not to die. Even though you most certainly will."
Johnny was already turning away from the scene. Kayaba was probably going to disappear in some sort of dramatic manner and then the crowd would be thrown into chaos. How boringly predictable. Life needs action, needs adventure! And Johnny knew just how to bring about that adventure.
He tapped through the list of skills. Players began with three skill points and hundreds of skills to choose from. Of course, to better accommodate new players, skills could be filtered into different categories. Johnny did so, filtering by PvP. Sure, Kayaba had said that this was a death game, and it wasn't like Johnny thought he was lying; though many others no doubt would. But that made it all the better. Putting your life on the line, the slightest mistake being the difference between life and death, each player fighting for the right to survive—that was what Johnny was seeking.
Skills were found and chosen. ⸢Dagger Proficiency⸥, ⸢Sneak⸥, ⸢Poison Proficiency⸥... At the last one, Johnny paused. His finger hovered over the button. In another world, perhaps he would take it in a heartbeat. But for some reason, he paused. Another skill had caught his eye. ⸢Corrosion⸥ it read. Intrigued, Johnny pressed it.
⸢Corrosion⸥
"What is a warrior without his blade? Dead. What is a guardian without his shield? Useless. Corrode the tools of your foe and leave him bereft of weapon and armour."
Lvl. 1: +10% durability damage to armour, +20% durability damage to weapons.
Lvl. 2: Locked.
Interesting skill, but Johnny still was more in favour of poison. Maybe he'd pick this one up later? He scanned through the page one last time and a line at the bottom caught his eye.
"Bypasses the ethics code."
Oh yes. Oh Hell yes. Poison? Useless in the face of this! This was the holy grail of the gamers everywhere, even more so in a game with graphics as realistic as Sword Art Online! With this… with this, he could bypass the damn ethics code and accomplish the ultimate goal of all men by stripping his foes (Read: Girls), and leaving them naked and humiliated. Johnny placed his last point into ⸢Corrosion⸥ without a second thought.
In his defence—while this line of thinking was somewhat creepy—Johnny was a barely fourteen years old gamer, only recently in the throes of puberty. Girls had become of interest to him, and as long as he was stuck in this game he decided he might as well make the most of it. And besides, at least he was just being a pervert not a mass-murdering psychopath who got his kicks off from crippling players, injecting them with poison, and staring into their eyes as they died, terror written on every line of their sobbing faces.
Johnny considered his next action. He would have liked to see if corrosion worked on NPCs, but there weren't any humanoid enemies until the second floor. So he'd just have to test it out on players. That said, for all that he was a fairly experienced gamer and sure that he'd be able to beat any newbs, SAO was still an MMORPG. Numbers played a fairly big part. Beyond that, most of the players who would be outside the city would probably be fellow veterans, and if he was underlevelled he wouldn't stand a chance against them. So, grinding it was. He wasn't a beta tester, but he had read the online forums and knew where to go. Not the best spots probably, but the good ones.
Dagger in hand, Johnny dashed out of the city and into the slowly darkening evening. Determination pushed him onwards. He would become the ultimate enemy of women; he would gaze upon their naked flesh and teary eyes as they trembled before his might!