Disclaimer: In case you couldn't guess, I am not Reki Kawahara, and therefore do not own the rights to SAO. I just really enjoy it

Prologue: Bloody Origins

The sun shines brightly over the Saitama prefecture of Japan, the warm summer breeze blowing through the hair of children riding their bikes through the streets. They smile and laugh as the sun kisses their cheeks and lights their path. This… is not their story.

They pass one house on the street they are riding through, a house that, to the outside observer, would not be much different from any of the others on this same street. It was quite a nice two-story home with a lot of space, including a dojo in the backyard. With its curtains drawn in such a manner that no light could enter and there seeming to be no lights on within the house, one might assume that there is no one home. This assumption, however, would be incorrect. Within a room on the second floor of this house is a young man known as Kirigaya Kazuto.

Kazuto is, for all intents and purposes, a rather normal looking boy, if slightly effeminate. He is of a slight build and has dark eyes, looking black to those even a foot away from him. Though not as pale as one might expect of someone who spends as little time in the sun as he does, he still has fairly light skin as well as dark hair not falling past the base of his skull. A normal, rather unimpressive individual. Currently, he lays in his bed in the dark, simply staring up at the ceiling. This is something he does at times in an attempt to center himself, maybe try and feel more in touch with himself.

… Unfortunately for him, it only ever really makes him feel very, very bored, and today is no different. Sitting up with a groan, he looked over to the clock on his wall, being able to see it despite the lack of any light in the room, which read 10:30.

Hmm, about three hours until Sugu gets home, thought Kazuto. I still need to have lunch before she gets here, but I suppose I can hop on HoH for a while.

HoH of course referred to Home of Hostilities, a popular fantasy MMORPG where the players chose to either fight on the side of the Coalition, which mostly consisted of the classically human like races such as humans, elves and dwarves, or the Swarm, which generally contained more monstrous races like Orcs, Trolls and Goblins. Kazuto always preferred playing on the Coalition side, but his first account was actually with the Swarm.

Hopping onto the chair at his desk, Kazuto started his computer and logged onto HoH, deciding he would spend some time grinding for levels.

This was how Kazuto spent most of his time in these games, being that he was a solo-player in almost every game he played. It wasn't that he disliked talking or working with people. On the contrary, due to his closed-in lifestyle he almost craved the interactions he would get in his games. But that was the problem, the interactions didn't feel… real, to him.

Whether it was because of the third-person view you got of your character, or the odd mix of people going between speaking normally and role-playing, nothing really felt truly genuine to the young Kirigaya boy in these games.

It was these thoughts, among others, that went through Kazuto's, Kirito in the game, head as he swept through monster after monster, raising his level and doing quite a number on the durability of his sword.

He continued this for quite a while, losing track of time, before deciding to log out to have lunch. It wasn't until he looked over to his clock that the little color in his face drained away and he realized his mistake. It was 1:25 and Sugu would be home any minute.

Rushing downstairs, once again without turning lights on, Kazuto quickly ran to the refrigerator to grab the small pouch-like container holding his meal. He brought it over to the table on a plate with a paper napkin.

While he would normally put his meal in the microwave briefly to make it warm, he chose to forgo this today as he knew his adoptive sister would kill him (figuratively, in this case) if she thought he was skipping his meals. He quickly brings the pouch with meal up to his face and opens his mouth. His already sharper than normal canines grew longer and sharp like knives. Kazuto bites down on the pouch, only allowing these new inhumanly sharp teeth to pierce it. As he does so, he cringes slightly from the cold and small bit of red liquid escapes from the pouch and runs down, dripping on his plate.

He quickly finishes his meal and hurriedly cleans his dish and throws away his napkin and pouch, running up stairs and entering his room just as he hears the front door open and sees the light being turned on. He sighs in relief and plops down on his chair.

Well, he thinks to himself, I suppose I'll hop back on HoH and then browse some forums. Today's shaping up to be pretty dull.

Man, life sure is hard for teenage vampire.

Well… life is kind of a strong word in this case.

Kirigaya Kazuto was never going to have, what some might call, a normal life, even before he discovered he was a vampire.

What do I mean by discovering? Well, it's a rather convoluted story. You see, he was not infected with vampirism as most people are, so much as he inherited it.

When his mother was still pregnant with him, she was attacked by a vampire and infected, being transformed into one. Her husband was not so lucky and was killed in the same attack.

Now, normally one would have no idea what to do, as the existence of monsters and such are, even today, a secret from most of the world. Luckily for Narusaka Aoi, her sister had married into an… interesting family.

Kirigaya Midori had lived quite an average life until she met her someday husband, Kirigaya Minetaka, and was introduced to the world of Monsters. In truth, Minetaka and his father, a man named Ando, were Monster Hunters, two of the few humans who knew of the existence of monsters and chose to stand against them to protect humanity. Though he tried to hide this for as long as he could, Midori eventually learned of it and decided it didn't matter to her. She loved him regardless of what he did. Soon enough after that, they were married.

This worked out well for Midori's sister, as that meant she had access to two of the few people that may be able to help her and save her baby.

Minetaka's father was… less than understanding. He immediately wanted to kill Aoi, the baby be damned. Luckily, he was persuaded against it by his son and daughter-in-law. It was decided that they would help Aoi through her child's birth, unsure of what state the baby would be in (vampire or human), and then try to help her live with her vampiric nature.

You see, vampire biology is… confusing, to say the least. While they are not actually alive, there are recorded instances in which a vampire has had a child with a human. How this is possible, nobody has really determined. It is especially uncertain considering no two vampires have ever had a child. Additionally, while vampires need blood (either human or animal) in order to survive, they can still eat food, though it causes discomfort and nausea to them. This is necessary for female vampires carrying a child, as blood will not sustain it.

The point of this is, there is a precedent set for Aoi's child surviving its mother being transformed into a vampire, even if there wasn't an instance where a mother was transformed while still pregnant.

In the end, both Aoi and her baby, Kazuto, survived. To start off, Kazuto didn't seem to have any signs of vampirism and his mother was surviving well by animal blood, making it so neither Minetaka nor his father felt the need to end her life.

A year after Kazuto's birth, however, another Monster Hunter got wind of Aoi's existence, hunting her down and slaying her without care that she was living off of only animals and not humans. Midori and Minetaka were luckily able to hide Kazuto's existence from the hunter and saved his life. They then took him in and adopted him into to their family, giving their daughter Suguha a big brother.

Throughout most of his childhood, Kazuto continued to show few signs of being a vampire, making his adoptive parents and grandfather believe he was human. Sure, he was more prone to sunburn than others and preferred his meat particularly rare, but he always acted like a normal little boy. It was because of this that Minetaka's father decided to introduce both him and Sugu to the family business.

He started teaching the two children combat in the form of kendo as well as other monster hunting techniques. It was at this time that Kazuto's family found some of the more… peculiar, traits about him. He was stronger, faster and more durable than any boy his age should be, and his reactions were inhumanly fast. Once beginning to display these abilities, Kazuto found he was never really satisfied after he ate his meals, always feeling something… lacking. Not exactly hunger, but something akin to it. This was troublesome for the Kirigayas. They had come to see the boy as though he truly was their son/grandson and didn't want to jump to conclusions about him regardless of his origins.

So, they devised a test. His grandfather would expose him to small amounts of what was generally harmful to a Vampire. That way they could determine his nature with more certainty and also prevent him from actually being killed from over exposure. The test was given on a warm Saturday in the middle of spring, under the ruse of having a day of having a solo training day between Kazuto and his grandfather. Obviously, sunlight effected the boy little more than an average human, so that wasn't going to help in the investigation. Salt lines were always placed in the entryways of the dojo and Kazuto never had trouble entering, nor did he have a problem with entering places without being invited inside, so those were out as well. Garlic didn't actually affect vampires much, so there wasn't a point to testing that.

Thus, there were two primary tools used against vampires left to test. Silver and holy weaponry.

The two started off the day of training by Kazuto's grandfather telling him stories about his time hunting monsters. For one particular story, the eldest of the Kirigayas showed his grandson an old katana, containing traces of silver which, he recounted, he used to slay a werewolf in Hong Kong. He offered for Kazuto to hold it and the eight-year-old, as most would, jumped at the chance. His grandfather tentatively handed him the sword… and nothing happened. It didn't burn him, it only made him stare in awe at the monster slaying sword. His grandfather, when realizing nothing happened, released a breath he hadn't realized he'd been holding.

'Things were working out well,' he thought, 'everything is going to be fine.' And everything was fine… until they tried the holy water.

It was after they had finished the first half of their normal training session, a bit more work than Kazuto was used to since he usually switched with Sugu between rounds of sparring against his grandpa. So at the halfway mark they decided to take a break, his Grandfather offering Kazuto a small flask of water and telling him to use it to cool off. Kazuto thought it was a bit odd but wasn't about to complain. He opened the flask, leaned his head back and poured the water onto his face.

The pain was like nothing he'd ever felt. It was as if someone slashed open every nerve ending on his face, poured lemon juice in them and then set them on fire. From the outside, his grandfather saw as Kazuto started screaming in agony, clawing at his face as steam began to rise from where the water had been poured.

"Kazuto! Kazuto!" Ando yelled as he ran to his adopted grandson. What he saw when he got there was something he wished he had never seen. Besides the red burn where the holy water had hit him, Kazuto's eyes had morphed monstrously with blood red sclera surrounding a golden, animal-like iris. Looking down further, Ando saw what he feared most, his grandson's canines had morphed into long, dagger like fangs designed to pierce through the body and suck blood. He saw all of this in just moment before his grandson, his face a mix of terror, pain and a fury Ando had never seen on Kazuto's face before, lashed out and through him across the dojo into a rack of training weapons.

Kazuto, though still feeling the unimaginable pain, snapped out of the daze he was in and rushed over to his grandfather.

"Grandpa! Are you oka-" Kazuto's worried question was cut off by his grandfather swinging a bokken at him and hitting him across the face. Though this wouldn't normally be much to the very resilient boy, he was still recovering from whatever that water was, and that combined with the shock had made him fall to the ground. "G-grandpa?"

"Back!" Ando yelled at Kazuto, swinging his bokken again as the boy backed away "Get back you beast!"

The bokken finally hit the boy, the holy water having slowed him down and lessened his resistance, and he cried out in pain. "Please grandpa," he cried out tearfully, "I don't want to do this anymore!" The beatdown continued for another minute before something, or rather someone, stopped it.

Kirigaya Suguha knew she shouldn't be trying to spy on her brother and grandfather's private lesson, but she couldn't help her curiosity! They were probably getting to the good stuff already, and she didn't want to get left in the dust! So she had meandered her way over to the dojo just in time to hear her brother yell "I don't want to do this anymore" and then the sound of impacts. She looked inside to see her grandfather beating up her brother! She ran over to stop it as quickly as she could, jumping in front of Kazuto to shield him from their grandfather's sword.

Now, obviously Sugu didn't fully know what was going on. How would she possibly guess that her brother, who was actually her cousin, was a vampire that had accidentally thrown her grandfather across the room just a moment ago. So, she used context clues and came to the conclusion that her brother was quitting their training and her grandpa wasn't so pleased about that, so she promised that she would work twice as hard so that she could train for herself as well as Kazuto.

Ando wasn't sure what to do. He couldn't really confront what was going on with Sugu right there, whatever he did would probably do a great deal of damage to her psyche, either telling her the truth about Kazuto or simply killing him on the spot. It didn't help the matter that his heart broke at the sight of Kazuto, who had seemed so terrifying a moment ago, laying fearfully on the floor with tears streaming down his face. The monstrous changes from before having vanished, save for slightly sharper canines than before. So he simply nodded stiffly and turned to go inside the house, needing to tell Minetaka and Midori the situation.

He tried to ignore the gasp and concerned cries of Sugu saying "Onii-chan what happened to your face?"

It was later that same night that Kazuto was made aware of his origins and he was… shocked to say the least. How was he supposed to react to that? Well, regardless of what he should have done, what he did do was distance himself from most of his family, especially his grandfather. He quit his training as a monster hunter, doubting Ando would even allow a Vampire to train with him. With his primary activity blocked to him now, Kazuto needed something else to pour his passion into. He had always had an affinity for computers, having built one a few months before. He suspects he got it from his mother's side of the family. Regardless, that was where he turned to, burying himself in the world of online gaming.

Additionally, either from the exposure to holy water or simply due to him beginning to go through puberty, Kazuto's body began to change in several less-than-human ways. Actual food stopped being any form of nourishment to him, though it didn't cause him as much discomfort to eat as it did most vampires. Thus, Kazuto began drinking animal blood from animals his father hunted in the short stints he was home for. Kazuto was never allowed to hunt himself due to the fear Midori had over someone finding him like they found her sister. Due to the family deciding they didn't want Sugu to know, and the others not really wanting to see a vampire feed, Kazuto began having his meals alone. He had also started developing an aversion to sunlight. Though he could stay in direct sunlight for about an hour without actually being harmed, it still stung quite a bit.

Despite all of these changes, the one thing that stayed the same was Kazuto's relationship with Sugu. As much as he was angry at his adopted parents for keeping this secret from him and how worried he was of losing control of his monstrous nature, he knew he would never do anything to harm his little sister. He needed something to remain the same from before and he didn't want to lose her. He even planted Salvia flowers at a nearby shrine to give to her for her next birthday, knowing how much he loved their nectar.

Despite that, things were destined to change in the end. Just a month before he turned ten, Kazuto was sitting inside reading a book while Sugu was playing over by the relatively small pond in their backyard. Kazuto heard a splash and looked over, not seeing Sugu anywhere. The little color in his face drained. Sugu didn't know how to swim, they were planning on teaching her in the previous summer but weren't able to due to an outbreak of sirens at the nearby coasts which his adoptive father had to deal with. Knowing what must have happened, Kazuto ran over to the pond and jumped in to get her without hesitation.

Now, this pond was a very special one. The Kirigayas had lived in this household for a long time due almost entirely to this pond. For it had been blessed by priests many years ago and was the source for every Kirigaya hunter's supply of holy water.

Kazuto was well aware of this.

The minute he had pulled himself and his sister out of the pond, the sound of Sugu coughing telling him that she didn't need resuscitation, he stumbled back into the shade of his porch while screaming in agony. The same unbelievable pain he felt that day now spread over every inch of his body. It wouldn't stop. Every second felt like an eternity. Dear god, he just wanted it to end!

"Onii-chan?" He had to stop himself from lashing out like he had against his grandfather when he heard Sugu's voice just a step away from him. He looked at her and saw her expression change from confusion to shock.

"S-Sugu…" his voice broke as he said her name. This was it. It was over. The last remaining thread he had to his old life had just been snapped.

Then Sugu did something entirely unexpected to Kazuto. She hugged him. She just wrapped her arms around him and held him, even as steam continued to rise from his body, enveloping both of them.

"Sugu?"

"It's okay Onii-chan. Thank you," she began whispering in his ear. "Thank you, thank you, thank you…" Sugu continued whispering as she held him and rocked back and forth.

Kazuto didn't know when tears had started falling from his eyes, but he definitely felt them at that moment when he buried his face in the crook of Sugu's neck. That is how they stayed for a long time, no sound escaping them except for Sugu's soothing words and quite sobs from Kazuto. And even as he felt the burning pain engulfing him, he felt an odd warmth spreading in the pit of his stomach and his chest.

It was later that day that Sugu's mother told her the whole truth. That Kazuto wasn't really her brother, that he was actually a vampire (though he still lacked many vampiric traits) and that that day in the dojo had been them testing him to see if he truly had contracted vampirism from his biological mother.

Kazuto thought that this would make Sugu fear him, maybe even hate him, and that he'd lose the last connection he had with his adopted family, but it was the exact opposite. While they were always close before, being probably the best friends either of them had, after this you'd think they were connected at the hip. While they did have to separate whenever Sugu had training or school (Kazuto having been home-schooled for the past year and a half) or when Kazuto had to feed (it was at his insistence, he didn't want her to see that), they were inseparable other than that. Every moment she had to spare, Sugu would either be hanging off of her brother's arm or peeking over his shoulder to watch whatever game he was playing. She didn't want to go anywhere without him.

This is where Kazuto found the problem. The several weeks this had taken place in were the best times he'd had since before the incident, but Sugu didn't seem to want to do anything besides be with him. Before she had fallen into that pond, she had started becoming quite a popular young girl. She had friends she loved to hang out with and she was becoming a well-known fixture in her school's kendo club. But now she barely spoke to any of her friends outside of school and had even taken a leave of absence from her club, never doing anything kendo related except her training. She had also grown distant from their grandfather who was beginning to show signs of physical decline.

Kazuto realized that if this continued, Sugu would completely ostracize herself from society in favor of keeping him company. Given his nature, Kazuto knew he would never be able to do much, if anything, in the outside world with other people without fear of someone discovering his secret. He couldn't condemn Sugu to this life too. So he did what always ended up doing, turned away and left his sister behind. He used a cold personality and a refusal to be with her like he was before to cut the thread that just never seemed to break.

Kazuto stretched and rubbed his eyes after logging off of HoH for the night. He looked over to his clock to see it was about 7:30. Sugu should have eaten by now and would either be in her room or in the dojo training, meaning he should be free to go get his dinner and even warm it up before drinking. He had to make sure he fed regularly as both he and his adoptive family worried that he might go a bit too beastly if he didn't nourish himself. If that happened and he went out of control he knew Sugu or his adoptive father would have to kill him (literally, in this case). He sighed at the fact that it had been over a week since he had a face-to-face conversation with any member of his family, only his mother or sister reminding him to have his meals through his door and him mostly grunting in response. Having pretty much no one to talk to was… less than pleasant.

Almost every single vampire that has been found and hunted down in the last hundred and fifty years has been known to live relatively isolated from the rest of society with the only people they actually interact with being those they would later consume. They would live like this for decades, even centuries. Kazuto recalls this from a lesson he'd had with his grandfather before the incident. If that's the case, and I really am one of those monsters, then why am I so lonely after only two years of not even being entirely alone?

Even though he had worked to isolate himself from his family, Kazuto still inevitably had to interact with them. The conversations usually ended up being cordial but lacked a lot of the warmth there had been before Kazuto discovered what he was. Even without that, he had "befriended" some people over the internet, but it all still lacked the connection to another person that, though he'd never admit it, he craved.

Still, Kazuto had always been stubborn and refused to try and mend the bridges that had been burned. It is for this reason he decided to spend a bit of time on some tech forums to make sure he avoided seeing Sugu. He also wanted to do this because he had been unable to watch the livestream of a tech convention where new things were being unveiled and announced and he wanted to catch up.

It was the post at the top of the forum that immediately caught his eye. It was apparently some new innovative gaming device announced by Argus that would supposedly revolutionize gaming by creating a full VR experience. Kazuto was just starting to read more in depth into what this was all about when Sugu called from outside his door, surprising.

"Onii-Chan? I have to get up really early tomorrow so I'm going to take a shower and go to bed. Make sure you have dinner." Sugu hesitates a moment before adding "And stop playing on the computer without lights on, okay? You'll damage your eyes."

"O-okay, Sugu," Kazuto says, the surprise after being so engrossed in his reading preventing him from putting up his cold façade with his response. "Goodnight."

As he stands up to go have dinner, he thinks to himself Can my eyes even be damaged by things like that? He shakes his head. Oh well, doesn't really matter. I better hurry up and have dinner…

…I wanna read more about this NerveGear thing.

Greetings and salutations. I welcome you all to the wonderful world of this AU I'm writing. And by "wonderful world" I of course mean "pretty poorly written fanfiction". But regardless of the actual quality of the writing, I hope you enjoyed regardless.

The idea for this fic basically just popped into my head one night when I was going to sleep and I thought "that's pretty neat, I should write that down". So I did, in the form of this chapter.

I was also inspired by the fics by SaintInfernalNeos, the patron "Saint" of KiritoxHarem fanfiction. It is nowhere near the skill or magnitude of that dude's stories, but it's what got me to start thinking about this stuff.

When I was writing this I was trying to figure out what I should do with Sugu and the rest of Kazuto's family, then I thought "Hey, why not make them monster hunting badasses?" No fear, I still try to characterize Sugu pretty much the same as in canon for the most part, she'll just also hunt monsters. Sometimes. She is still training. If I do end up continuing this I have many ideas for how I'm going to change other characters to fit the "Supernatural" aspect of this story. I say if because I want to, but I'm really bad at continuing thigns sometimes.

Anyway, I hope you enjoyed this and I'll see you (possibly) next time.