SAO Therapist Online
Disclaimer: I don't own anything but what I invent, the original setting of SAO belongs to its creator and
Comments: I would like to thank zero0hero and nanaya88 for inspiring me to start writing in the SAO fandom. Both have excellent stories and I would recommend reading them. Unlike my other story, Dog of Zero, where I love the setting but hate the canon story, I am playing around in a sandbox and with a story that I both absolutely love. My only complaint is that the anime was far too short, and I think it would have been easy for both the SAO and ALFheim arcs to have each been several seasons long in order to give the characters and the setting the justice that it deserves.
Prompt: Nobody effectively used knives as a main weapon in SAO other than Silica in one episode, and she isn't exactly a frontline character to begin with. Understandable, since knives do less damage compared to swords, and you have to get up close to use them, something that most players in SAO would be understandably leery of. Combine that with the necessity to wear light armor and not use a shield on the offhand in order to be a viable knife user, and most players trying to maximize either their attack or armor would end up preferring to stick to swords, maces, shields, or two-handed weapons.
This is the story of player that wasn't a high school kid, wasn't afraid to get in close with a knife, and wasn't going to stick to just making healing potions.
GAME START
I couldn't believe how excited I was to be here, in the starting area of Aincrad. I had watched all of the video that had been released from the beta, read all the press releases, even waited in line over night at the local game store in order to get a copy of Sword Art Online after I failed to manage to get a limited pre-ordered copy.
Watching the hundreds of players that were appearing and wandering around the starting area at the initial city plaza, I was once again so glad that I had managed to get a copy of SAO.
Literally the next generation of VR gaming, SAO was a total immersion VR, with technology allowing for a full range of experiences. Of course from where I was sitting on a bench at the edge of the plaza I couldn't help but laugh at some of the avatars that were just starting out in the game. With a limited size launch on a single set of linked servers, most of the avatars that I was seeing were run by Japanese players like me. Of course, as part of the avatar creation it was possible to look however you wanted, from a more handsome version of yourself to even the opposite gender.
While I had kept the same general appearance, male, thin, and 5 foot 10 with short black hair and brown eyes, as well as admittedly mediocre looks, many of the players had not been as reserved as I in modifying their appearance.
Watching an avatar of a young, thin girl go by, I couldn't help but laugh inside. Unlike with an RPG on a PC, you were directly controlling your avatar's movements, instead of using a keyboard or other controls. And with changing genders and size, came a distinctly different pattern of walking and moving that the player that had just passed me clearly had yet to master.
Of course, I had an unfair advantage, as I was currently finishing my undergraduate in Psychology and Economics, as well as having worked as a peer councilor at the student mental services office.
Normally at the mental services building we would get a regular flow of depressed and stressed out students looking for a quiet place to take nap, while the student councilors sat around and were bored or did homework.
I however, had once had the 'pleasure' of having an arguing couple come in with myself as the only walk-in councilor available, and proceed to demand my help in mediating an argument over what was appropriate clothing to wear to classes and social events that had gotten extremely heated. Suffice to say I had been fairly out of my depth, being as fashion conscious as any other college guy, aka it was fine to wear as long as I wasn't naked and it didn't smell bad. After nearly half an hour of trying to keep the argument civil between the two, I realized that part of the issue was that not only was it a question over what level of formality (regular clothing vs. pajamas for a lecture), but that the conversation going on in front of my was equally about what gender of clothing the 'female' in the couple should wear. With the conclusion of the counseling session deciding that yes, sleeping clothing as well as baring large amounts of skin in public wasn't appropriate, the couple thanked me and left.
I proceeded to sit there and thank my lucky stars and any passing Kami that that hadn't blown up in my face. Toward the end I had realized that I wasn't just dealing with a basic dispute over what clothing would make the boyfriend jealous, but also over whether having the 'female' of the couple dress as a girl was making 'her' unattractive to 'her' boyfriend. Yes, everyone got the basic 'don't judge' lecture on being politically correct as part of the training to become a counselor, but that wasn't really enough to prepare me to try mediate a dispute over cross-dressing and jealousy.
Heck, I didn't even think myself ready to mediate a dispute between a regular male and female couple without a couple more years of psychology classes and getting girlfriend myself, let alone a gay couple that cross dressed.
After that near catastrophe, I had made sure to train myself to check tells like the presence of an Adam's Apple as well as how an individual walked in order to make sure that I never put my proverbial foot in it.
Nearly doing that once was more than enough for me!
This of course was turning up unexpected dividends upon joining the rush to play Sword Art Online.
Of course this wasn't just going to be a game for me. I was looking to graduate in several months from Todai and I needed to help pad my resume if I wanted to get a job beyond working part time as a clerk at the off campus late night convenience store.
To that end I had already gotten the green light from one of my psychology professors for them to help me publish a preliminary set of articles on how behavior diverged from real life in a full immersion game where social norms could be safely ignored while at the same time feeling highly lifelike.
Of course I would need to have the various players agree to fill out the questionnaires and mail them to me, as well as having to first earn enough in-game money to pay for what was likely to end up being a hideously large number of fliers that I would need in order to have spread them around all of the starting areas as well as the high level areas that would likely soon be monopolized by the more advanced players that would likely try to power level to the top of Aincrad.
Either way I was going to need in game money, and lots of it.
Each player started out with a basic sword as well as a modest amount of money that could easily purchase another starter weapon, or alternately, a player could try to save up their money in order to later purchase better gear of another type after leveling for a while, the latter option being the one that I was planning on taking.
After spending several hours running through the basic grinding of the starter mobs in the fields around one of the fields near the northern entrance of the Town of Beginnings, I was just about ready to see if I could switch from my sword to something a bit faster to swing.
While the basic sword skills were certainly powerful against the boars that populated the field, they were a little bit slow for my taste. Not the skills themselves, those felt smooth and incredibly fluid as the system assist took over and guided my body through the motions. The problem was that most of the skills seemed to expect that the user would be standing several meters from the target and then would activate the skill, with it ending afterward with a period where no skills were immediately usable while leaving you standing close to or past the monster, especially the more powerful sword skill that I had managed to figure out how to use. My understanding though, was that most of the other weapon choices would likely have an even larger delay, as they were designed for high power such as using a two-handed sword or a great axe.
Standing around next to an angry mob unable to attack or effectively defend did not sound like a good idea to me, regardless of how much my attacks would benefit.
Knives however, held promise.
I'll admit, I had played my fair share of PC RPG's growing up, and one of the universal constants of such games is that knives were almost always the fastest weapon that you could use.
Add in the fact that you could learn skills to increase your sneaking ability; I was definitely going to be looking into turning myself into a sneaking, knife-wielding badass. Normally this approach got boring after a while in multiplayer games for me, but this time I wasn't just mashing keys in front of a keyboard, but actually would get to experience the thrill of sneaking up on enemies with knife in hand.
Yes, I was here to do research so I could get published in scientific journals, but that didn't mean that I wasn't going to have fun, or even play on my own time to enjoy the game.
Just as I was about to begin the trek back to the starting area to see if I could find an NPC weapon vendor to spend some of the Col that I had managed to collect on a shiny new dagger, the chime and sudden disorientation from a forced teleport occurred and the world disappeared in a haze of light.
I was now in the main plaza where I had spent part of the afternoon people watching, along with what looked to be several thousand other players, if not the whole population of players in SAO.
Watching the sky turn red and the game master that identified himself as Kayaba appear in the sky, I was pretty sure that the hollow feeling in my stomach was a pretty good indicator that whatever was happening was not planned for by the producers of the game.
With his announcement that everyone was trapped for the foreseeable future in the world of Aincrad I couldn't help but feel like only one sentence that could sum up my feeling.
'Crap, we're going to have people dropping like flies.'
Insensitive yes, but aside from shock at the sheer amount of danger that I was now in, that was the only real response I could immediately form.
Watching everyone panicking and yelling and demanding that they be logged out, all I could feel was the numbness that had gripped me ever since my avatar had reverted to my real life appearance. As the mob of players around me began to breakdown into chaos, I knew that what I needed to do right now was to get the heck out of the plaza and into a location out of the way where I could properly freak out and then get down to planning out my next course of action.
Healthy reaction to finding out that I and thousands of others had been thrown into a conflict not unlike that of the feudal era it was not, but looking back afterwards, it was probably one of the best responses that I could have had.
After retreating to a side park several blocks from where Kayaba had just given his announcement, I had sat down and tried to force myself to run through what my options at this point was.
While college had taught me a lot, one of the most important things was that when making big decisions, always do a flow chart or list of what my options were, as well as covering the pros and cons of each option.
1st option, stay safe in the Town of Beginnings and only leave town occasionally in order to safely farm a few low level mobs in order to make enough money to afford basic equipment and food as well as the minimal level of lodgings needed in order to survive in some level of comfort and safety until SAO was either cleared and we were released or someone outside the game managed to figure out how to override Kayaba's programming and safely retrieve all the players.
Definitely the safest option in terms of staying alive, but essentially giving up and putting any real control of my future in the hands of others, which didn't really appeal to me, especially if we were going to be trapped her as long as I suspected we were going to be.
My 2nd option was to slowly level up, keeping only to the commonly explored areas as well as making sure to find out all the potential hazards from other players and information brokers before advancing. Not exactly taking my destiny in my hands, but it would allow me more than sufficient money as well as level advantage in order to keep myself relatively safe as long as I was careful.
Safer, but not particularly more productive than option 1 unless I decided to go the support route and try to specialize in some crafting profession, a path which undoubtedly a stupidly large number of other players would try to take.
My 3rd option though was the one that I both liked the most personally, as well as knew would be the least safe in terms of the monsters that were omnipresent throughout Aincrad. Take a gamble and push myself to the front of the pack of players and put my life on the line by being on the front line of the players pushing further and deeper into monster territory. By mapping out and taking quests before anyone else I would quickly become a sufficiently high enough level to be safe from any player hazard while opening myself up to the dangers of the world that all of us were now living in.
No real option but to take option 3 and risk my life on a gamble to find safety in high stats and equipment. Monsters were going be a threat to my life, but my biggest worry wasn't for them, but from the other players that were present in this game with me.
Like I thought before, people would be dropping like flies, but it wasn't the hundreds of upcoming potential suicides that I was most worried about.
All it would take is a couple of players giving in to the standard MMO behavior of PKing and things could turn ugly really fast.
Facing monsters and raiding dungeons could all be planned out ahead of time, with sufficient safety margins for an individual's level and grouping as necessary to take down dangerous monsters. Player Killers though, were something that couldn't be prepared for or effectively worked around. Even if PKing didn't develop like I was afraid it would, it didn't change the basic fact that people were unpredictable under high stress environments like I had just found myself thrust into. If a group broke up or a player froze mid combat, I would need to be strong and of a sufficiently high level to survive the fallout.
Standing from the bench that I had just spent the last half-hour thinking at, I knew that it was time for me start my gamble.
First step, use some of my Col that I had spent the last several hours collecting in order to get myself a combat dagger as well as some throwing darts. Getting some decent weapons from an NPC was a fairly simple proposition. Trying to get to an NPC at an apothecary to buy some healing potions was another matter entirely though. It seems that while I was planning out what my course of action was going to be, a good chunk of the others in the plaza had responded by going and buying as many healing potions as they could get in some attempt to save themselves from dying. Of course it was a fairly smart thing to do, but it was without a doubt incredibly inconvenient for me!
Of course I still had three basic potions that I had managed to save from drops during my earlier hunting session. That wasn't enough for me to feel really comfortable, but it should be enough for me to not die if I got overrun and had to flee.
Equipped with my new single edged tanto knife at my back, I was ready to go start my opening gamble on saving my life.
Checking my map, I headed out towards the field that I had been previously hunting my way through in order to get some practice in with my knife against an enemy that I already knew the attack patterns of.
Fighting a boar with a knife compared to sword was a very different proposition as I soon found out. With a sword it was a simple to stand several meters back, charge a sword skill, and then let it rip to cut down one of the many boars that still littered the fields, despite the work of several of the other players that clearly had a similar idea to my own. Of course most of them were operating in small groups and equipping heavy armor and large weapons as if that alone would somehow protect them.
Knives, however, were totally different from the sword I had been using before; you had to be standing right next to the boar to trigger an attacking sword skill. When a boar would charge a sword user, it was simple to block the attack or if you had the timing, to sidestep. With a knife I was quick to learn there was no blocking ability. Alternately, after stepping in and landing a 3-slash combo sword skill, there was almost no delay between strikes and it was simplicity itself to immediately launch another combo while the boar was disoriented from the previous set of strikes.
After managing several boars with easy strikes, I began the next part of my plan, namely to go deeper into one of the forests that spotted the open fields around the town of beginnings.
I didn't know which of the small towns around here I should be heading toward, but with my personal map being slowly filled in as I wandered around, I knew that as long as I kept to a fairly straight grid pattern while killing everything that I ran into, I should find a town with open quest lines fairly quickly as well as getting enough XP to hopefully level up appropriately for the monsters I would be facing.
After entering into the forested area, I got a rather unfortunate introduction into why leveling in a group, while slower, was probably much safer as long as I was so similar in level to the monsters of Aincrad.
When in a forest, what do you expect but wolves?
While their initial charge and bite wasn't something that gave me a challenge, as they were generally loud enough prior to attacking me that I could tell when one was approaching through the underbrush using my Listen skill, the fact that the low damage of my dagger made sure that I couldn't kill them in a single rapid flurry of knife blows presented a certain amount of difficulty. Normally not a problem against any other monster, as my increased agility would give me more than enough time to trip them up and launch a second attack after retreating, but I hadn't accounted for the fight not staying a one-on-one affair.
All the raging boars that I had been hunting before certainly hadn't tried to mob me even when I killed one in front of a group of the rest them. And certainly having monsters be aggressive on their own isn't exactly unusual for an RPG.
But having the wolf be able to howl and summon several others? That was not a pleasant surprise, as soon as I had finished off my first wolf with a quick follow up charge and a sword skill that ended with my knife buried in the wolf's spine, I was treated to the sight of three more wolves of the same type stepping out of the bushes and growling at me.
At this point everything became a blur of teeth and claws as they proceeded to charge one after another. I managed to dodge the first and get in a lucky critical hit with my dagger at the second wolf's throat, but the third managed to hit me from the side while I was distracted with my kill and knock me several feet back along with taking a good chunk out of my health bar.
Not quite yellow.
Two more hits though like that and I was likely going to be dead.
I was luckily still on my feet, so I used my newly acquired range to let loose with a throwing dagger that I had drawn from the brace of small knives that I had equipped in a bandolier across my chest. My throwing damage wasn't near enough to kill a wolf, but enough to hit the wolf that had just struck me in the shoulder.
What was important about my throwing skill was that I had unlocked the first level of throwing with daggers and gotten a status effect skill earlier in the day. Instead of almost always landing a hit with a thrown weapon to do damage and draw its attention, Crippling Dagger instead traded accuracy and damage for the ability to have a 50% chance of landing a hit, and if it did hit, doing no damage. But most importantly, it would unleash a status effect on the target, dropping both their movement and attack speed by half for several seconds, allowing me time to kill the other wolf in a one-on-one combat situation.
Charging the first wolf that had attacked me, I got ready to unleash what I was already considering my best and most useful knife based sword skill.
As I got close to the wolf, I could see it getting ready to rear and bite me when I closed in range.
Just as its strike was about to land though, I ground my left foot into the dirt and sidestepped to the right while turning my body so that it stayed facing the wolf. Clearing the wolf's bite attack, and with my dagger in my right held in downward stabbing grip, I felt the sword skill activate just as I passed to the side of the wolf's head, driving my dagger down and right into the wolves neck, severing its spinal cord and triggering a system alert that I had just scored a massive critical hit.
Murderous Strike
Unlike other sword skills that focused on unleashing a chain of powerful attacks, Murderous Strike allowed for a knife user to make a single stabbing attack at a single critical point to deal a truly massive amount of damage. To counter how useful it was however, it could only be used on a single specific point on a particular type of monster, as well as only activating from a point immediately next to the monster in question. Since most monsters would turn to track a single enemy, it was mostly useless for a single player facing against a monster.
Unless you were stupid enough to get in close and stay close to your target so that there wasn't an opportunity for the monster to turn.
With two down and one under a status effect, I turned to the last wolf that I had previously hit with a throwing knife, just to watch as the slowed status from my dagger skill wore off, and it responded by howling to summon more allies.
Swearing to myself, I prepped my dagger and darted in close for a series of slashes that ended its digital life.
Pulling out one of my few remaining healing potions, I used it on myself and got ready for the onslaught.
Break
By the time the sky had finished turning dark, I had managed to make my way almost completely clear of the forest. Along the way, I had managed to level up my Stealth skill sufficiently to be able to sneak up on most of the wolves and other monsters that were in the forest. In between stabbing mobs from stealth and fighting the packs of wolves, I managed to level up all the way to level 2 by the time that I got to the end of the forest.
Upon exiting the forest, with the moonlit wheat fields that spread out in front of me, I could see a town lit up with lanterns in the distance, along with a nearby road that wound its way far to my left that completely bypassed the forest that I had just spent several dangerous hours working my way through.
With the darkness around me however, I had another problem; that of night time monsters.
When night had fallen earlier, the spawn rate and aggressiveness of the monsters had increased, making travel much more difficult than it had been during the day. Now that wasn't much of a problem in the forest, as the cover provided from the trees and bushes were more than enough at that point to sneak up and kill most of the monsters that I would encounter. In the open of the fields that was an entirely different proposition, as I knew that there would likely be more than just the occasional monster that were visibly wandering around the fields.
Of course at some point in the future with a higher stealth skill it would be possible to get through undetected, but at my current level it would be totally impossible to make my way through the fields to the village unbothered by the multitude of monsters that I could just barely make out in the darkness.
Fighting my way slowly through was of course an option, but it was just as likely that I would get mobbed by a large number of aggressive monsters and be unable to retreat safely, especially as at this point I had only a single healing potion in my inventory. I was willing to push forward and put my life at risk in order to secure a safer future, but this was pushing my safety margin far too thin for my liking.
Which left a blitz to the town in the distance as my only option, as once I reached it the Safe Zone that was part of any town or city in Aincrad would kick in, preventing any monsters from attacking players within the town limits.
Equipping my last healing potion in my empty left hand and settling into a crouch I felt the chill indicating I was stealthed roll over. With preparations complete, I began to make my way through the thigh high fields of wheat that lay between me and my goal.
Within a minute however, the roar of an attacking scarecrow monster broke the silence, along with the loss of my attempt at stealth.
Immediately sprinting from the monster that had risen out of the grass to my right, I charged as fast as I could on a straight line towards the inviting warm lights of the town. Swerving several times to avoid monsters and receiving several light wounds for my trouble, I could feel myself become mentally fatigued from the combination of my day long combat catching up to me along with the fading adrenaline of my continued mad dash for the safety of a town.
With a last burst of energy, I managed the last half kilometer into the range of the towns safe zone, upon which I promptly dropped to my butt as I sat there wheezing as several of the NPC townspeople wandered around in their evening routines, completely ignoring the mass of monsters that were being repelled by the gate guard.
Finally, I had completed my goal of reaching an advanced and most importantly, empty part of the map.
Getting up from where I had spent several moments in a haze of exhaustion, I slowly made my way toward the clearly marked inn where it was a simple matter to purchase a basic room for the night. Tomorrow I would go over and organize my inventory of dropped goods and search for quests, but right now having a safe bed was all that I could muster up the energy to be interested in.
That was my first day and my first step that I took in what would become the legend of the knife wielder Nori.
Chapter 1 finished!
Wow, this flowed much faster than I thought it would considering the amount of time that I spent on it.
No idea on what the update schedule will be, but hopefully faster than once per month with similar or longer word length.
