AN: Welcome to my SAO fanfic! Hope you enjoy!

This is a an inspiration of a short abandoned story that I had for SAO

Disclaimer: I don't own Sword Art Online or Warhammer Fantasy Battle/Age of Sigmar

It was a beautiful Sunday in Japan. Autumn was in full swing, the effects of the changing season on the nearby trees was evident, their leaves swirling around a young black-haired boy who found himself rushing through the city as fast as humanly possible. He was in such a hurry due to the fact his aunt had asked him to pick up some food for dinner that night. His sister would be cooking, and sure enough that meant salads and maybe something cooked on the side, if he was lucky.

Normally he would be glad to go, but today was the worst day. He had something very important to get to at 1:00pm and he could not be late. This was why he found himself attempting to get back to his room at breakneck speeds, even though he had repeatedly warned his family for weeks beforehand to not bother him today. Luckily for him, the district from the markets to train station was very open and less developed than the urban jungle that was nearby Tokyo.

However, 'less developed' was only relative and the boy still was surrounded by massive skyscrapers, businessmen, tourists and a multitude of others as he attempted, and failed, to maneuver around them quickly without running into them. A few shouted at him as he collided with them and then continued on again, but he paid them no attention.

He managed to catch the train as the last of the passengers were boarding and the door was shutting, but he managed to squeeze onto the train before it departed. Being used to the confines of his room, and not used to such extended running, the boy dropped the groceries onto the ground and collapsed onto the closest seat. He was panting and his legs were shaking in a combination of exhaustion and anticipation. A few older men raised their eyebrows at his behavior, but otherwise said nothing else. A few girls were giggling at him, although he couldn't be sure if they were laughing at him or his actions.

Kazuto Kirigaya was by no means a bad looking boy, but most would not describe him as having boyish looks either. His face was androgynous if one was to be polite, positively feminine if one was more honest or teasing him. His hairstyle didn't help him with this look either, it was long, long enough o threaten to cover his eyes if let to rest. However, this wasn't currently a problem as during his sprint to the train station the wind had swept it aside and it had been kept there by now dry sweat, allowing him a clear view of the train's participants.

Out of all of the ordinary people on the train there were three groups who were of importance to Kazuto. The first were the old men who were still looking at him as if they were expecting him to apologies to them for ruining their day for his admittedly loud and disruptive performance. This was something Kazuto had no intent to do and so he ignored them.

The second group was the group of girls who were still giggling at him. Although the laughter seemed to be infectious, they seemed to have stopped laughing at him and were simply unable to stop laughing at all. Kazuto was glad they didn't say anything to him, as he was not the best at social interactions and making friends. One of the old men shot them a harsh glare and purposely coughed, and they quickly stifled their laughter. However, it was the third group of people who interested Kazuto. They all held a sealed plastic box as if someone was going to steal it from them. Rightfully so, what was written on the box told even the oldest man, reclusive hermit or youngest child what pains they had gone through to get that box.

The copy of Sword Art Online each gamer clutched in their arms had only been released that very morning. The company had allowed their marketing campaign to get a tad out of control. Even though it meant amazing sales for the company it got in trouble from law enforcement across multiple prefectures as people had been in line for more than a month in extreme cases. In addition, the online versions of the game sold out within a few seconds due to the huge popular demand. There were rumors that the game had only 500,000 copies that were available across the globe.

Despite this, the amount of complaints and negative backlash against the shortage of games had practically zero effect on the company's pre-order sales for the 2nd wave of releases. They released a press statement about purposely artificially constraining the supply to prevent server and CPU overloads. The former was undoubtedly true, far too many games in the last decade had fallen to launch day server-side failures.

Sword Art Online, commonly known as SAO to people who had tired of saying the name constantly, represented the next generation of gaming technology. The Nerve Gear system gives a fully immersive virtual reality system with the ability to move in a 3-D environment and experience all five senses.

At least that was the marketing. However, the experience of actually full-diving was beyond description. The best that one could describe it was that they were alive in the video game.

Kazuto knew this first hand, he had miraculously been able to get into the beta of SAO. During the month-long beta, the game had been the only thing that Kazuto had been able to think about. At school, it was all he was able to think about; he even dreamt about the game. He was obsessed with SAO and it broke his heart when the beta ended.

When the beta ended all of the players had been teleported where a game master had offered them if they could beat them they could continue to play. Obviously, this was designed to be impossible and it was probably the game masters' way to release their stress during the development cycle.

The game masters had beaten them to death with objects that shouldn't have been in the game's code at all. Kazuto had the experience of being killed by having the GM taking his health bar, and proceeded to beat him to death with it. Others had reported being shot by guns, dismembered, and thrown off skyscrapers. One had even reported being attacked by catapults, only to run outside of their range and then finding trebuchets waiting to crush him. Another had found himself face to face with the guns of the famous Shōwa period Yamoto-class battleships. Apparently, the sound had been so loud the company sent him personalized merchandise as an apology.

Kazuto was snapped out of his rambling thoughts about the game when the train announced that his stop was next. He gathered up his groceries, hopped on his bike he had left outside the station and raced home.

Stumbling into his house, he was greeted by his cousin, Suguha.

"Onii-chan, welcome back! That didn't take you very long. How come you don't move that quickly all the time?" she asked him.

Kazuto only gave a grunt to acknowledge his cousin and glanced at the clock on the wall to see how long he had taken. It read 12:56. "I'm going to be late!" he thought. He threw down the groceries on the counter, grabbed some snacks, and ran to his room. He barely heard his cousin scream at him that he had broken two of the eggs and to slow down. He couldn't have cared less as he entered and locked the door to his room. He turned on his computer, anxiously waiting for it to power on.

If he was in the state of mind to think straight, he would have realized that his strenous relationship with his cousin had slipped significantly in the past month. Ever since he had hacked into the national database and found that he had been adopted, he had distanced himself from his family. However, his cousin had never been told the reason for the increasing distance between herself and Kazuto, and the past month of near isolation had only made things worse.

Even though he had a state of the art computer with one of the fastest CPUs on the market and a SSD, each second it took to turn on felt like an eternity. Finally, he had grabbed his Nerve Gear, kept perfectly clean over its weeks of inactivity. He placed it on his head and watched the news while waiting for the last few seconds to pass until 1:00 pm. A local news station was on.

"In other news the construction of the Kanto earthquake monument has begun today." Kazuto began to sweat as he waited for the last news story to finish. "This morning, an incident occurred between construction workers and citizens waiting for the new game Sword Art Online. The ARGUS company has yet to admit responsibility for the incidents but has issued apologies that its buyers have caused. However, the ground-breaking ceremony took place at noon today as scheduled."

As Kazuto shook in his bed from the excitement the thought crossed him that the ground underneath him might break if he couldn't sit still. The news concluded, "The monument is expected to be complete by late summer next year in time for the 100-year anniversary of the earthquake. Well that all we have to day for the twelve-o-clo-" The news reporter was cut short as the clock had finally struck one and Kazuto shut of the TV. Lying down he spoke the two words that he had said in his dreams for over a month now. "Link Start!" He was greeted by the familiar streaks of color and the systems check and then an artificial female voice…

Welcome to W̕͟͢͠à̶r̷̡͟͝͞ha̶̵͡͠ḿ̶̧̕͠ Sword Art Online!

Far away in a server room, Kayaba Akihiko was monitoring the launch of his game. However, everything was going horribly wrong. He had lost control of the process of the game. The cardinal system that the game was built upon had gone spiraling out of control. He was quickly running diagnostics, but the server was corrupting the files of every device it had come across. Fighting visual glitches in the file system of all places, he struggled to fix the issue.

Despite his brilliance with computer technology, he was not very into gaming, preferring to make instead of consume, only playing occasionally. Dozens of games sat installed, and being corrupted, on his personal computer, which had not been played in ages. As a result, he failed to recognize the significance the red, green, blue and purple patterns that occasionally flickered across his screen.

Hope you enjoyed! Please follow, and favorite if you enjoyed. Reviews are extremely appreciated as well. Until next time!