Prologue
To start the story off, my name is Kyou Izagawa. I'm one of the lucky players that purchased a copy of Sword Art Online: Under World Edition. I've just recently made my character. The game is supposedly utilizing the next-gen technology called the STL, or the Soul Translator. What it does is read the very base of your consciousness called the fluctlight. It takes a copy of it and places it into the game. To tell the truth, I don't understand all the mechanics of it, but it seemed really fun. Recently, they've been trying to gain rights for the AI fluctlights that have been extracted from the game. The game isn't actually all that new. There have been rumors going around the net saying that people have participated in the game. I dismissed them at first, but once the name "Kirito" came up from one of them, I did some research. Apparently, a couple of years back, there had been one special AI named Alice that was extracted. She was what they call a bottom-up AI. Normally, there are two types of AI. There's the generic top-down AI that's the basic NPC in games, but then there's the bottom-up AI. These AI are the closest things to being human. Naturally, there will be people who see all AI as human. I guess this is true. Anyways, after she surfaced on the net, there were people who made reports of seeing her in this one game. They described her perfectly and they spoke of what went on in game, how they came to participate in it, and how they died. The name Kirito eventually came up after sifting through the hear-say. They had apparently been tasked with eliminating him from the game, but he was so incredibly "broken" that they were reduced to nothing. It's also not the first time I've heard this name. I have an older brother who spent his time playing VRMMORPGs. He had played GGO for a while when he encountered a player named Kirito in the BOB. Apparently, Kirito could dodge bullets with minimal effort while using a sword to eliminate players. When I first heard that, I was skeptical, but I realized that there was one possible way for a person to be so skilled. I realized that this player named Kirito was most likely a survivor of the SAO incident. I eventually found this person on the net who went by the name of Lance. He was an avid researcher of these rumors. He and I quickly became friends through our mutual curiosity.
Then, all of a sudden one day, the both of us received a strange email from an anonymous source. We told each other about it and decided to open it. The contents were scarce, but they pertained to an invitation for a game. Lance and I thought this was our lucky break. We accepted it without even knowing what game it was for. In retrospect, we should've been more skeptical.