ALfheim Online: Hard Mode

Prologue

A/N:

At what point does one realize that he writes too many unfinished stories? For me, the answer is both never and right from the very beginning. Try to wrap your head around that. Just try it.

Anyway, this is kind of just a little something to let people know that I'm still alive. It's short, around sixteen-hundred words of actual story, but it's some of the highest quality work I've written in my life, in my personal opinion.

This story is set where ALO is the death game (with different prerequisites for escaping), Sword Skills exist, and Kirito is a girl. That's pretty much all you need to know.

This might never be continued. That's something I thought I'd say up front. It intrigued me, to say the least, when I saw how few SAO stories there were with a female Kirito in them. I thought I'd give it a spin, but I'm not sure if I'll be able to make her actually seem like a girl – gender-switching a character doesn't just change their gender, especially in the case of teenagers like Kirito. They wind up with different hormones, which elicit different reactions and develop different personality traits as the characters mature. I'm not sure how well I'm going to capture that.

So, as for any potential romance… I'm not sure. Kirito is the only character I plan to gender-bend (no exceptions, and no one will change my mind), so unless I decide to write some yuri, pairing her with Asuna is out of the question. I'm not exactly opposed to the idea – if you check my favorite stories list, you'll find that the vast majority of them are not of the heterosexual variety. At the same time, though I like reading well-written yuri (more so than het, most of the time), I'm not sure about how well I'd fare writing it myself.

I guess I should let you read, so I'll shut up for now.

A dull, eighty-centimeter gray sword closed in on my left collar bone, before being effortlessly batted away by a longer, glimmering black one. The resulting clang reverberated through the cave in a series of deafening echoes for several seconds before the sounds started to fade.

Only to be replaced by more of the same.

Flurries of quick blows sent shower upon shower of sparks in all directions with each time I blocked a strike from my opponent. Undeterred by my effortless blocks and evasions, the player before me continued to strike without end.

By the look in his dark eyes, he believed that the reason I never made a counter-attack must have been because I couldn't – that the limit of my speed only allowed for me to block and dodge, and my reactions were too slow to return any blows.

But that's to be expected.

For most of the fight so far, I had been measuring his power and speed, all the while waiting for something. This battler wearing lightweight, silver plate armor and wielding a generic shortsword failed outright to impress me so far.

I spared a single fraction of a second following a particularly strong parry to look up at the top-left corner of my vision. Three bars stacked on top of each other; one green, one blue, and one red.

The green bar, my "HP bar", was a visual representation of my life force. It showed no damage whatsoever – early on in the fight, I let him hit me a few times, but the hundred points or two out of over fifteen-thousand lost were quickly restored by my passive skill, «Battle Healing». After those disappointingly weak hits, I began blocking every strike with such impeccable timing that I took no damage.

The blue bar below it represented my "Mana" – the energy that allowed for the use of the most powerful attacks in this world, among other useful skills and abilities. My Mana gauge had not lost a single point since the beginning of the fight, due to my refrain from using any.

The red bar on the bottom, with a maximum size of half the two above it, filled up at a slow pace with each block or attack I performed. It showed about ninety-five percent and rising.

When it filled to maximum, that's when I would strike. And when I did, the fight would be over before he knew it. His body, mind and soul would disappear from this world and the other for all time, and he would never again see the world outside of this cruel prison we were all trapped in.

He would never return to the family he had outside of this world. They would be denied their reunion when this game of death finally ended, all because of a selfish player's wish to free herself – my wish to escape from this prison. And return to the world of reality, where no one awaited me, anyway.

I had no reason to return, no one to welcome me home – but that didn't matter. All that mattered was my own survival, and if others with more reason to go back had to die by my hands for me to stay alive until the end, then so be it.

Another strike cut through the air towards my abdomen at an alarming speed – much faster than the highest speed he had reached before. His blade glowed a vibrant sky blue, a signal that he had activated one of the powerful attacks using his Mana. A «Sword Skill».

I instantly recognized it as a mid-tier skill with four hits, the STR-based «Horizontal Square». It was one of the most damaging skills for the one-handed sword build, should a player focus on their Strength stat primarily.

But it didn't matter – it was too late in the game for him to execute a skill. The red bar at the top of my vision had finally filled up to full a mere moment before, and that spelled his doom.

"Ha!"

With a shout and a powerful stamp of my feet, I jumped into the air and out of the way of his first strike before he could even blink. Both my left and right swords were lifted behind my shoulders, where they began to glow a brilliant gold in their intersected position.

The red bar began flashing white as the golden shine engulfed my blades of white and black. Then, when the shimmer reached its peak and my swords began to simultaneously move, the bar depleted fully in an instant.

However, despite the activation of what was obviously a «Sword Skill», my Mana bar remained untouched.

This was the power of the red bar. It represented my «Burst Power», which accumulated slowly over time from striking and blocking strikes. When it reached full, it allowed me to activate a pre-selected «Sword Skill» at no cost of Mana, with the added bonus of a high chance to stun my opponent on each hit.

My golden skill unleashed itself on my vulnerable opponent's wide open chest with zero delay, the opening double-strike leaving a red X on his body. My blades followed with another simultaneous strike, this time cleaving outwards through his midsection.

The first four hits of my skill had interrupted his «Horizontal Square» by stunning him, leaving him wide open for the remainder of my onslaught with no way to fight back. I could already see the fear blooming across his scruffy face as he realized that this was it for him – my façade of weakness' disappearance had shown him the true difference in our powers, and it was staggering. In the opening moments of my skill, he knew…

He was going to die.

I always felt a certain degree of pity upon seeing that face on my opponents in their final moments of living. If only things didn't turn out like this, I always thought, then I would never have tried to kill them. If only this game, this VRMMO, hadn't trapped us and made itself into our prison. If only the penalty for defeat wasn't death, your avatar's erasure from the virtual world, and your soul's disappearance from the realm of the living.

If only the sole way to escape and return to real life wasn't to kill any others who didn't share your race.

But alas, this is how it turned out. I couldn't just do nothing, nor could I let myself be killed to spare those who had more reason to live than I. My bravery prevented me from sitting and doing nothing, and my cowardice prevented me from letting other players who deserved better win over me and return to real life as I sunk into the abyss of death.

And so, as my glimmering swords continued their assault on this poor player's body, lowering his HP greatly with each consecutive strike, I looked into the player's frantic gaze and mouthed one phrase.

"I'm sorry."

I knew a simple apology could never truly atone for my sins against the players I killed. But even still, at the very least, I wanted them to know before they died. I wanted them to know that I wished it would've been different. That I didn't have to kill them.

That I truly regretted my actions, even as I committed them.

The final hit of my seven-hit combo, the «Original Sword Skill» I dubbed «Seven Sins» upon its creation at my hands, led my left sword to stab through my opponent's silver chest plate, right to his left of the center. Where his heart would have lied, should we have been in reality.

His HP had depleted fully on the fifth hit, in truth. His body only lingered because my combo had not yet finished then, but now that it was complete, I saw his avatar begin to shimmer with a rainbow of almost-white colors.

As I dropped to the ground once more, the golden glow fading from my blades as they lowered to my sides, I repeated my earlier phrase.

"I'm sorry."

I'm sure he heard it just before he exploded into jagged fragments of a whitish rainbow. That knowledge made me feel somewhat better. Even if I had no way of knowing if he really forgave me – his facial features had been distorted as his avatar unraveled by the time I said it. But, at the very least, I knew he heard it from his slight movement immediately after I finished. He knew of my regret, and that alone brought a small amount of calm to me.

And just like that, it was all over. Our battle had lasted no longer than a minute and a half – that's how long it took me to destroy the hopes and the very life of someone of his caliber. But even if I had only known him for what seemed like a few fleeting moments of the almost-two-years I had spent in this virtual hell, I'm sure I would never forget his face right before he died.

Just like all the hundreds of others, his terrified face would be forever burned into my memory. He would invade my dreams with them, terrorize me for the rest of my life with them.

But, in the end, he was only a drop in the bucket. He was only another grain of sand added to the sandy beach of my trauma in «ALfheim Online».

A/N:

This is quite possibly the first sword fight I've written in ages that I'm actually satisfied with. Concerning the parts that weren't mechanics exposition, I think I did very well in comparison with things like the BS I wrote in the now-deleted Summer Camp.

This is, more than anything, just a means of telling people that I'm not dead. Depending on the response from readers, I might try my hand at continuing this. As for my other, already-published works, I don't think most of them will ever see a new chapter. In fact, I can count the number of ones I think are worth continuing on one hand with at least one finger left over. As for which ones they are, I won't say just yet.

So, what's in the future of the author known as Insert New Name Here? I don't really know, but I'm sure that, now that the winter is gone and my seasonal depression (the real, medical diagnosis kind, not the pretend BS that most people talk about) is lessening, I'm pretty sure I'll be more active in the coming months.

I guess I'll let everyone go for now. Hopefully you enjoyed this little pilot prologue, and I'd love your thoughts on it. Note that I mean your thoughts on the prologue, not on my habit of starting new stories instead of continuing my old pieces of sh*t. and comments regarding updates to other stories or expressing discontent with my putting up another new one will be blatantly ignored. You have been warned.

Well, I'll see you when I see you!