Accel World: American Branch

Rise of the Ten Kings

Chapter One: A New Game

A/N:

My first Accel World story, huh… it's totally infested with nothing but OCs, it's an alternate universe, and its main character is the biggest self-insert I've ever seen from anybody on FFnet, but oh, well.

The premise is that a year after the accelerated world makes its debut in Japan, the developer decides to do a branch version of the program overseas in America. Over in the US, which is a more progressive country in many ways, children have been wearing Neuro-Linkers since birth for a few more years than they have in Japan, making for an older crop of characters than the first Burst Linkers were when they got the program.

The main character is a fifteen-year-old when he gets the program, and he's incredibly smart and fast to react mentally, but hates school. I won't say much more about him, since you'll see exactly what he's like once the story starts.

Well, I'll let you read now.

It started with a single message.

At the time, I had been full diving into one of my favorite VRMMOs. I was grinding for materials to upgrade my main weapon when I suddenly got a message on my Neuro-Linker that somehow cut through the barrier of virtual reality.

I thought it must have been my mom, telling me to come back to reality and call it a night. After all, it was after one in the morning, and she always got pissed if she caught me full diving past twelve. She had never figured out a way to message me and have me receive it in-game, but I wouldn't put it past her to figure out how. She became scarily resourceful when pushed hard enough.

So, I logged out of my VRMMO and woke up to find… my empty, dark bedroom. Mom wasn't in my room, waiting for me with an angry look. I didn't hear any noise throughout the house, although that didn't mean much.

The message icon was still blinking in the corner of my vision. I tapped on it with my left index finger, and a rather interesting message popped up. Too out there to be from mom, but too elaborate to be a prank from any of my friends. The sender was untraceable, too, it seemed, and none of my buds were smart enough to pull off a feat so elaborate.

"Welcome to the Accelerated World!

You have been chosen from the 391,000,000 people in the United States of America to take part in this momentous step for humanity! You and 10,000 others in your nation will never be the same!

Once the program in this message finishes installing successfully, your life will change forever!"

That was about the gist of it. As soon as I finished this excitable message full of exclamation points, I growled to myself, put the message aside, and looked at my Neuro-Linker's background processes. One in particular stood out:

BB_2040_Installer: Active

Before I could do anything about this weird installation process, a loading bar appeared in front of me, blocking me out of stopping the installer momentarily. Then, with almost zero delay, the loading bar filled all the way up. I felt an insane rush of wind flow past me as my whole field of vision blew up with a few flaming words.

Brain Burst

Then, more words scrolled through my field of vision, this time in a Times New Roman Font, rather than a literally flaming font.

Installation Success! Welcome to the Accelerated World!

"What the hell is this?" I asked myself aloud. "Some kind of virus? Well, it doesn't matter. I'll get rid of it in the morning."

That's how it all started. Little did I know, it wouldn't end anytime soon. This program would be with me for the rest of my life, solidifying my position above the crowd. Above the rest of humanity.

The next morning, I completely forgot about that strange virus that had rooted itself into my Neuro-Linker. I found myself far too preoccupied with the strange dream I had after finally falling asleep.

"The hell was that about…?" I mumbled to myself as I fumbled with the covers to get up.

I needed to be up before Mom came in and started nagging, otherwise she would be so annoying that I'd ignore her and try to pretend I was asleep. Then I would miss school, and I was already three days away from being considered truant. They had been lenient with me so far, mostly 'cause they had no idea how to deal with someone so smart, yet still so apathetic about education. But if I ended up truant, I would have to deal with a whole new host of unforgiving asses.

I don't feel like dealing with the district attorney, so I'll avoid pissing off the school people for a little while.

In the next few minutes, I had gotten up and out of bed with my Neuro-Linker around my neck once more, changed into a black t-shirt and dark blue cargo jeans, and gotten my white socks, black shoes and fingerless leather gloves on. The gloves were gym gloves, but I never really worked out, simply because I had a ridiculously fast metabolism as is. I could eat all I wanted, and I would never gain weight from it. The reason I wore the gym gloves was because I just liked the feeling of compression they gave my normally-slightly-shaky hands, for whatever reason.

I sauntered into the bathroom with minutes to spare before Mom came looking for me. I looked into the mirror, finding a teenager that could easily pass for someone a few years older if he would just cut his hair. But I liked my long, strawberry-blond locks too much to cut them just yet. The bangs came down past my mouth if I brushed them forward, but I trained my hair to stay back, so they never became an issue. The back of my blond, wavy hair could stretch down to my shoulder blades if I tugged it straight.

The main reason I had the potential to pass for someone older than fifteen was because of the wiry, reddish-blond beard that consumed most of my lower face. I shaved it fairly regularly, but if I let it grow, it would get curly. So I kept it to stubble, which kept it straight.

As always, the irises of my eyes were gray with a hint of a strange red color in a ring around each pupil. I was hypersensitive to light, for which I wore prescription sunglasses most of the time, but a secondary reason for the tinted glasses was because I didn't want others to see that demonic red ring around my pupils. Speaking of glasses…

"Found ya," I chirped in my deep, smooth voice, grasping for a set of thin, dark gray frames on the bathroom's shelving unit where most of my hygiene stuff was kept. I had placed my glasses there before my nightly shower, then left them there for when I entered the bathroom the next day.

Despite the Neuro-Linker's built-in vision correction being spot on, I refused to use it most of the time. My prescription sunglasses, tinted just dark enough to shield me from light and shield the true color of my eyes from other people, also corrected my rather poor eyesight. Perfect eyesight is 20/20, but my eyes were a minimum of twenty times worse.

I refused to use the device's vision correction for a simple reason: I wanted to see the world all by myself. I wanted to observe everyone and everything I encountered with my own eyes, rather than see polygonal recreations that come from a high-definition digital camera.

I put my glasses on, sliding them up my nose to their designated spot. The dark gray lenses were a mix between curved and rectangular, thin enough across that if I looked directly down or up, I wouldn't be looking through them at all. But I liked it that way; the bigger lenses typically used as fashion statements weighed down my nose and face too much, so they were tiring to wear for long periods of time.

Suddenly, my world darkened considerably, returning to the comfortable shade of darkness I was used to. The light of day hurt my eyes considerably, so anything more than the dimly-lit bedroom and hallway I had previously walked through would seriously pain me without these.

Glasses had mostly become a fashion device around the time I was born, what with the camera on the Neuro-Linkers being able to recreate almost completely realistic images and the connection to the user's senses being able to input those same images into their field of vision. Most of the time, I got a lot of compliments from passersby about my 'nice shades', but those people didn't even understand half of my reasons for wearing them. Even so, I would politely thank them or say, 'I know, right?' and move on like nothing happened.

But a world of such superficial politeness… it made me sick. Those pieces of trash thinking they had the right to comment on something they didn't know the first thing about almost made me nauseous with disgust.

Enough about that. Why focus on trash when I could focus on getting my own shit together?

I grabbed my hairbrush from the shelving unit to the right of the large bathroom mirror, where I had gotten my glasses from, and started brushing away the tangles of last night's dreams. I could barely fathom how merely tossing and turning in my sleep could get my hair so messed up, but it certainly did.

I definitely felt more than a few hairs snap by the time my long, wavy, strawberry-blond locks were in a presentable shape. I had to wet the brush in the sink so they'd stay that way, but now my hair was brushed back, out of my eyes.

I grabbed another of my items from the bathroom shelves. This time, I got my hat. It was an old-fashioned baseball cap that fit rather loosely around my head, yet still held snug enough to not fall off if I bent over fairly far. Its color remained a dark black, and it had the white kanji logo of a kendo club I had once been a part of. Now, I more or less just used the hat when my others were in the wash, to ensure that no stray hairs would fall into my face.

They were nice people, I mentally rationalized as I began reminiscing about when I had been a member of their club. But practicing outdoors even in the middle of winter… damn, their style didn't fit me at all. I can't handle the cold in the slightest…

I shook my head solemnly, deciding to just finish getting ready and head for school. The bus would likely be at its stop by my house in about ten minutes, so I needed to hurry up a bit in order to have time for a light snack before I left.

Mom had been surprisingly happy with me that morning. I got up and ready without her prompting me, which lifted her mood considerably. She even transferred some extra money onto my school meal account via the Global Net, telling me I could use it to buy something nice to eat for breakfast once I got to school. As soon as I connected my Neuro-Linker to the world-wide Wi-Fi specifically for the neck devices, the money arrived in my account with a satisfying old-fashioned cash register sound effect that I had installed a while ago for the hell of it.

After grabbing a cookie dough-flavored Pop Tart packet from the snack cabinet, I left the house in relatively light spirits, having packed my school backpack the night before. I began walking up to the bus stop at the top of my rather quiet street, soaking in the light breeze and comfortable warmth of a spring morning. I heard the ping of a message incoming, but decided to wait on reading it until I got on the bus.

There were a lot of trees in my neighborhood, so even if I looked up, the branches multiple tens of feet above me would shield me from the rising sun's rays. The morning seemed brighter than usual, more optimistic. But I knew it was just a figment of my imagination. And if it wasn't, then something was bound to happen to screw it up sooner or later.

And I was right. The moment I reached the bus stop, the world went dark in an instant. Then, a few seconds later, when my sight returned, everything around me had changed all at once. Suddenly, the green, lively trees had all around turned into stone obelisks, and the sidewalk beneath my feet became a cobblestone path. The grassy earth turned to infertile white sand, and the houses on my block turned into abandoned-looking huts.

"What the hell happened here…? Did I somehow log onto one of my VRMMOs?" I briefly wondered, before realizing that my voice sounded different. It had a metallic tint to it, as if I were speaking through a metal helmet.

I also noticed that in my left hand, where a package of Pop Tarts once resided, I could feel something with much more weight. I looked down while bringing my hand up, and I found a golden-bronze arming sword gripped firmly in my fingers. It almost looked yellow, and the thirty-three-inch symmetrical blade looked sharp enough to kill someone. I saw a cross decorating the end of the hilt where a pommel would normally be, and a crown-like design looked to be engraved into the middle of the guard.

I don't have a sword like this in any of my VRMMOs… what's going on?

I noticed two bar-like shapes in the top of my field of vision, both of which looked filled to the maximum. In between them, a few numbers resided. They read, 16:00, like a timer, but they didn't start counting down.

"So this is a Duel Field, is it?" an unfamiliar voice chimed out about ten yards in front of me. "Kind of a weird one… maybe a desert ghost town?"

Duel Field?

I looked over at this new arrival, finding a fellow clad in silver plate armor holding a large, round, silver shield with blade-like edges. His armor gave off a distinctly masculine appearance, as well as the impression of being near-impenetrable. He had a silver helmet that covered his entire head, more like an eggshell than an actual helmet.

No matter how I looked at this situation, where every image around me looked slightly polygonal at the edges, it seemed like I got dragged into a fighting game. A virtual reality fighting game, no less. This really didn't seem like a normal fighter, though. If it were, I would have to download and install it, not to mention launch it myself – wait, hold on a minute. Something weird did install recently, only last night in fact.

That BB_2040 installer program that appeared after I received a strange message from an anonymous sender. So if that were this fighter game, then it would make a bit more sense. But still, how did I just suddenly get sucked into it…? I'd never heard about games that required zero input from the Neuro-Linker's owner to launch.

"Hey, you there!" I decided to try my luck with the armored guy across from me before giving up on getting my answers. "What's going on here? Why did I just get sucked into this VR setting?"

"Didn't you read that message two minutes ago?" he answered my question with one of his own.

I remembered receiving a message on my way to the bus stop, though I hadn't read it yet. But how did he know about it? Well, he probably received one himself, and it likely explained this situation, since he asked me about it in this context. "No, actually, not yet. Mind explaining what's going on here for me, since you obviously know more about what's going on than me right now?"

I hated admitting that someone else knew more than me, but I figured I had to in order to get him to tell me what he knew. So I sucked up my pride and said something I'd probably not say again for several months, if not years.

"Well, remember that program that installed last night?" he began his explanation my confirming my suspicions – so that program was behind it. "It's apparently something that can accelerate our consciousness by one-thousand times, and in order to keep doing it, we have to duel each other and accumulate the currency for it. That's it in a nutshell."

"You're kidding, right?" I called what seemed like total BS immediately. "That makes zero sense. How could a freaking fighter game accelerate my consciousness by that much? If it were by a multiplier of six… maybe even ten times, I'd buy it. But… a thousand? No way in hell."

"You don't have to believe it if you don't want to, but that's what's going on right now," he replied, cocking his shield arm back until the entire round metal piece was behind him. "And now, I'm gonna beat you."

It was at that precise moment that I realized what the piece of metal on his arm really was. Rather than a shield, which would defend against melee attacks, the bladed edges and flat surface made it… a giant throwing weapon. I quickly looked up to the two bars at the top of my vision, looking below each of them for any letters that would add up to names. What I found under the right bar suddenly confirmed my suspicions.

Silver Slinger

To sling was to throw, which fit his weapon perfectly. It made a lot more sense now, but also put me in a lot worse of a situation – he could use ranged attacks with that thing, whereas I only had a close-ranged one-handed sword, which probably wouldn't be able to block throwing weapons that large at all.

I just stood there, frozen due to indecision. Should I close in on him? That throwing weapon would probably be able to be used effectively as a close-ranged weapon or shield, too, so wouldn't it make more sense to try to dodge it and then attack my defenseless enemy?

A second later, the decision was almost made for me. My silver-armored opponent began unwinding his tightly-coiled body, preparing to launch his giant bladed shield at me.

Almost on instinct, I found myself shouting at him. "Stop it!" I screeched, my voice cracking at being raised so high. Of course, I realized quickly that he probably wouldn't listen to me, based on his words to me so far, but…

Wait a second. Why did he freeze? Just seconds before, he had been coiling his body to throw his weapon at me, but as soon as I shouted 'stop it' at him, his whole body froze mid-throw, as if unable to move. He seemed to be struggling against his own body, to no avail.

What just happened? I wondered to myself as I looked on in captivation at my frozen opponent.

I decided to look up at the other HP bar, just to confirm or deny a sneaking suspicion I had. The words below it rang loud and clear in my consciousness.

Yellow Ruler

So I made him stop…? It was the only conclusion I could come to. Based on the 'ruler' in my apparent name, I must have had some kind of control ability. Not mind control, but rather bodily control. I quickly decided to test my theory.

"Punch yourself!" I shouted at him. His own free hand curled into a tight fist and slammed itself into his side, and I saw his HP bar deplete by a good percentage.

Looking slightly to the side of his HP bar, I noticed for the first time that the timer started counting down, likely because one of us made motions to attack. Almost forty seconds had already passed.

At the same moment his fist made contact with his side, a second bar right below my name filled up slightly. This one was less than half the length of the first bar, and much, much thinner, so I didn't notice it until it started to fill up. From what I guessed, it was probably a finisher bar for using special attacks – but I had no idea what mine were, so this wouldn't be a duel where I could use them.

"Cut yourself with that weapon!" I shouted, fully intent on using the hell out of my overpowered ability. However, this time, he merely stood in place, and a system message blared across my window of vision for a moment.

Command too complex

"I see… so it can only handle simple commands," I interpreted the message in a low whisper. "Well, whatever. Punch yourself again!"

When the world changed back into the one I was familiar with, it looked like only fractions of a second had passed. The sun stayed in the same low-overhead position of morning, and the breeze felt exactly as I remembered it being before the start of that duel.

I won it, by the way. The guy couldn't do much of anything except punch himself repeatedly as I controlled his body over and over again using my apparent power. Eventually, after about three minutes of that, his HP ran out all the way, and I was declared the victor. I didn't have to move an inch from my starting spot in the end, and I apparently gained ten of these things called 'Burst Points', bringing up my total to one-hundred-ten.

As soon as I thought back to the duel, I remembered what my opponent kindly explained to me before I made him defeat himself. He mentioned that he learned all this from that message, so I figured I should go read the same message unabridged for myself.

I opened my message window in my Neuro-Linker, tapping the top unread one from and unknown and untraceable sender, who I assumed was the same one from last night. I began to read, smirking wider and wider at what I found.

The message basically said I had been given a power to surpass normal humans with its so-called 'acceleration' technology. It also explained how to use it, and the requirements for using it. It finished that paragraph with a short explanation of how the technology itself worked, along with a brief brush-up on duel terminology.

It moved on to say that only about a thousand people out of the projected ten-thousand were given the messages I had received. The first one-thousand of us, all living in the New York City area, had the ability to recruit as many people as we wanted in order to close the gap between one- and ten-thousand.

Finally, it said that if I wanted to discover the reason for this technology's existence directly from the game's creator, all I needed to do was reach level ten. If I did, then I would be able to meet the game's creator themself and learn the reason behind this game, Brain Burst.

Once I finished reading, I felt a new drive. A drive to do something that I hadn't felt towards anything in a long time. I would do it. I would reach level ten and find the meaning behind this game and the revolutionary technology that drove it forward.

"This is gonna make things way more interesting."

With those words mumbled under my breath, I continued my walk to the bus stop.

A/N:

I thought about making the chapter a bit longer, but decided to stop here. Besides, the story itself will likely take place over more than twenty chapters, anyway, should I stick with this that long.

I would ask for a review, but the Accel World archive is kinda dead, from what I see. I just wanted to write this for fun, since I've been reading Accel World and thinking about this fic for a long time.

Well, I'll leave for now. I need to work on something else… probably Last Stand. I never thought I'd get so absorbed in writing a zombie apocalypse fic.

See you when I see you!