Sword Art Online has been completed...
"What?"
All players will be logged out shortly...
"No!"
Please wait... …. ….
"Keiji! Mika!"
Please wait... …. …
"I cant move!"
"Doctor the patient is going into shock!" The voice was far away.
"Push 100 micrograms Phenylephrine." Said a man.
Something sharp tugged at me, I couldn't move, everything was cold.
"It's not working, the patient's heart is beating too fast."
"He's going into cardiac arrest!"
Mika... What happened to everything! Mika!
"What's he doing!" Shouted the man.
"MIKA!" I screamed at the top of my lungs but I couldn't hear myself.
I could see them both there, I had a chance to stop it. I powered up my sword attack and let it go with all the strength I could muster. There was a loud crash as I felt it connect with something.
Someone cried out in pain.
"Restrain him!"
"His hearts stopped!"
I cant... breath...
"Charging de-fib to two hundred volts. CLEAR!"
I can still see them... Keiji... Mika...
"Charging. CLEAR!"
The light was dull as I came to, the gentle sound of a heart monitor in my left ear falling slightly out of time with the clock on the wall to my right. Six in the morning.
"Where am I!" I gasped, suddenly sitting up.
I felt my brain smack against the front of my skull and I fell back to my pillow instantly. Something hurt like hell on my right arm and I almost puked when I glanced down at a long bandage slowly leaking blood. Pain. Now that was a sensation I hadn't felt in a while.
"Ow." I almost laughed as I said the word. "What the hell is going on?"
My arm began to throb intensely and I remembered that pain probably wasn't a good sensation to wake up to.
"Help!"
The door opened and a nurse came in swiftly.
"Please, try to calm down." She said.
"I'm bleeding." I said.
"You've torn your stitches." She said with a hint of annoyance.
"Still bleeding..." I said.
She raised my arm into the air and called for assistance. It wasn't long before another nurse and a doctor arrived on the scene. The nurses went about fixing my arm, but the doctor just looked at me from behind a pair of thick glasses. His expression looked concerned but there was something else there too, I had seen other's with the same expression before. Fear.
"Do you feel up for walking?" The doctor asked as the nurses finished my stitches.
"My legs are fine." I said.
He nodded to the nurses who left just as swiftly as they appeared, the doctor unhooked my I.V and I managed to haul myself out of the bed. He cautiously helped my put my throbbing arm into a sling before leading me out of the room.
The hospital was quiet. Dead quiet. My legs were objecting to the walk more than I thought they would and had started attacking me with bouts of pins and needles, my left foot decided to give up entirely on the expedition and had gone back to sleep, making me almost cry out as walked on it. Despite this I tried my best to walk normally and catch up, this doctor was curious to me.
"You are in Kanto Cental hospital, Setagaya. You along with thirty one other players of sword art online are currently in care here." He said as we walked down a long corridor.
The rooms we passed we filled with people. People like me in their nerve gears and hooked up to medical apparatus, except they were still sleeping.
"Thirty one, thats a lot for one hospital to take for so long..." I commented.
"Not really, considering we started with nearly a hundred when the crisis started" The doctor replied, he had stopped walking and looked at me with a grim expression. If he was trying to psyche me out he would be sorely disappointed, I knew people had died, some were friends, many were not. It was not a surprise to me.
"Why are they still sleeping?" I asked.
"We are not sure. There have been reports from other hospitals where other players are still unconscious. Please come with me, there are some questions I need to ask you." He said and he carried on down the hall.
We eventually reached a small office, grey light coming in from a large square window onto a desk littered with papers. The place smelt of must and old coffee. Doctor took a seat behind his desk and gestured for me to sit opposite him, so I eased myself down into the chair and gave my tired legs the rest they demanded.
"What do you want to know?" I asked.
"I have been briefed to assess every patient from the sword art online disaster before allowing them to be discharged. Once you leave here you will be admitted to a program for therapy under my monitoring which will aim to bring you back into society, help you re-register for school and basically get your life back." He said. "However, I also have some more personal questions regarding the nature of your awakening."
"Personal how? Did I not wake up in a normal way?"
"No. Of the thousands of players who have woken up, none of them have woke up going into cardiogenic shock. Your body was producing a huge amount of adrenaline at the point of awakening, the effects of leaving the game caused huge stress on your mind and body. It was as if you had been dragged kicking and screaming back into the real world. Even in your unconscious state you were able to lash out and broke an attending physicians jaw, as well as tearing out several of your medical I.V's hence your stitches. You were lucky not to damage yourself more." The doctor paused in his explanation, as if to judge my reaction.
It sounded insane, but I had no memory of this happening. I didn't feel like anything was really wrong with me apart from my arm.
"I broke someone's jaw?" I asked.
"Yes, right before your heart stopped."
"My heart stopped?!" I exclaimed.
"For nearly a minute you were technically dead before we were able to re-start your heart."
"Are you fucking kidding me? I died!?" I shouted.
"We were able to stabilise your heart rhythm, you'll be fine, relax." The doctor said, in a tone of voice that really didn't inspire relaxation.
"Did they just not teach you how to break this kind of news to patients at med school?" I asked.
"I don't understand." He replied.
"I awoke from the game in shock, had a heart attack and was dead for a minute before being brought back to life, and you break it to me like that? Did you not see the possibility of me having another heart attack at that kind of news?" I demanded.
The doctor seemed irritated by my questions, he looked at me harshly from behind his glasses and opened his draw and pulled out a small tape recorder.
"I will begin the assessment." He said.
"Fine. Bring it on." I said, and returning his harsh gaze for ignoring me.
He hit the record button.
"23rd of November 2024, Doctor Kanemoto Eisen completing discharge assessment for sword art online victim patient number 72. Please state your name for the record." He said and gestured for me to respond.
"My name is Raion... wait..." I stuttered, "Ah." My head began hurting slightly, like I needed to sneeze but it was trapped behind my eyes.
"That's not your real name." Dr Eisen said sternly.
"I know, it's my avatar name from the game... I can't remember?" I felt so baffled, how could I forget my real name.
"Give it a moment." Said Eisen.
I wracked my brain for a glimpse of what my name could be. Two years in a game playing under a different name, with people I had grown to love as if they were my own family, it was as if it had erased everything from my life in the real world.
"You are now also the first player, I have witnessed or heard of, to be suffering from amnesia." Dr Eisen stated into the recorder.
"Amnesia, pfft! I've been comatose in a game for two years give me a moment." I snapped, when the truth was I was starting to panic. I couldn't remember where I lived, who my parents were, how I even got into sword art online in the first place. I didn't even remember the day I bought the game!
The pain in my arm was throbbing, and my free hand rubbed furiously across my forehead, like I was trying to squeeze the answer out of my head.
"Anything come back yet, or would you like another moment?" The Dr was starting to get snarky with his remarks and my panic was quickly turning to anger.
Then it flashed across my eyes, a name.
"Yoshida... Yoshida Tetsuya." I said finally and the relief was over whelming. My name slotted neatly into place in my mind and I got more of a sense of who I was. As for everything else... I was still lost for everything else.
Dr Eisen nodded with approval.
"Good, from the beginning then."
"What do you mean?" I asked, a flushed look of confusion on my face.
"In order for me to get a decent psycho-analysis of you, I will need to know about all your experiences in the game. We can take breaks if you need, but please tell me everything you can remember."
It seemed strange that an analysis of my mental state would involve rooting around everything that happened in the last two years. However, those two years were all I really had for memories right now. Perhaps reliving it might jog something, either way it would get me out of this hospital and on to fixing my life.
I looked up at the doctor and my heart almost leapt out of my throat. It was like the office had shifted and changed whilst I wasn't looking. The plain white walls were now grey stone bricks, the light from the window had changed from a faded white dawn to a yellow dusk, and the desk was now made of beautifully carved mahogany and not cheap fibreboard.
"Is something wrong Tetsyua?" Asked Dr Eisen.
I was staring at him wide eyed and I couldn't stop, he was wearing a full set of red plate armour, with a great sword strapped to his back. The unthreatening, but slightly odd doctor now looked like a powerful warrior interrogating me. Everything was like it had been. Like the game. Then with a shake of my head the light changed, my eyes re-adjusted, and everything was as it had been before. Hospital walls, morning, doctor.
"Right," I said, my eyes still wide and unblinking, "From the beginning then."