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Story: [Disgaea Online]
Summary: Kayaba had a very different vision for his grand creation. Also, he was less obsessed with transforming his dream into a new kind of reality and a lot more set on just... being a dick. By the time the players get free, their view of reality is a little bit... wonky.
Crossover: (Sword Art Online) / (Disgaea)
Genre: Humor
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It was weird, how consistent the lighting was.
Just... a constant light, with a barely perceivable humming. Instead of the flickering of braziers and uneven light of nearby lava. It was a bit like Jotunheim, except without the blood-freezing cold, and less of that... ever-present kind of light. With Jotunheim it was more as if there had been light once, and the light was still trapped within it, turning the whole area into a bright winter's day, regardless of what time it was.
Electrical lighting was weird.
The sound of traffic wasn't so bad. Of course there was always going to be some kind of distant noise, whether it be a crackling firestorm that didn't move any closer or people fighting all the way through the night. Not that there was a way to tell night from day in the Netherworld.
So even if the car-horns and emergency sirens, and whatever else, did sound very different from what Kirito had grown used to, it wasn't something that was all that hard to ignore.
More difficult was the boredom, honestly. Stuck in the hospital like this, there was even a limit to the amount of physical therapy he could do in a day without hurting his body more. Instead he had to lay in bed, staring at the ceiling or propping himself up to stare out through the window, either way the view was about equally entertaining.
In the beginning, Kirito hadn't minded it too much. It was a nice sort of break from the constant stress-levels that'd been the final few areas of the Netherworld being cleared, from trying to figure out what the hell Heathcliff's deal was.
In hindsight, it should've been so obvious. A brilliant leader who deceived them all into throwing their weight behind him and his claim as Overlord, it was a perfect kind of story, depending on how Kayaba would've wanted it to play out there at the end.
Kirito hadn't figured that out before Heathcliff had knelt in defeat though. Up until that point, he'd just figured that maybe they shouldn't actually trust the man who might actually be a sociopath. A sociopath placed in a position of power? Why should he let them go back to their own world afterwards? Wouldn't it be so much more pleasing to his ego if they could all remain in the Netherworld and serve him as their unquestionable Overlord?
Asuna hadn't been quite as certain about Heathcliff's personality as Kirito had been, but she had become somewhat disillusioned by what kind of people were allowed to join up with the Knights of the Blood. One rotten egg here or there trying to start a fight and being assholes? That was one thing, Asuna hadn't hesitated in her duties as the Vice Commander to smack them a good one for causing trouble for the rest of them. But several dozens of rotten eggs? Where the assholes were recruiting even more people like themselves, with Heathcliff never seeming to listen to her worries about where their guild was going?
Asuna had broken it off with the Knights of the Blood several months ago, with good reason.
But Heathcliff had still been one of the biggest factions among the Clearers, and if he won the final battle he would become Overlord. Kirito knew there were plenty of other assholes who wanted that title for their own obsessive reasons, but there was a difference between an asshole who everyone knew was an asshole, and a well-respected one.
So Kirito had gone into that final battle, despite being part of the solo-guild, with the full intent of giving Heathcliff enough of a beat-down that someone else could claim the title of Overlord in the aftermath.
Except... thanks to Klein and his guild showing up to help, they'd ended up not just exhausting Heathcliff enough that someone else could swoop in and claim the title instead, but actually to the point of defeating him on their own. And when they'd turned around to brace themselves for the other guilds trying to charge at them, those guilds had all managed to wipe each other out.
The few scattered members of the solo-guild were basically the only people left standing. So their guild-leader should be the one who became Overlord, by default.
Except, of course, they didn't actually have a guild-leader, because they were the solo-guild and they'd only created that because everyone needed a guild to classify as a Clearer.
Theoretically, as the solo-guild member with the highest level, Kirito would've been the one chosen as the new Overlord, except he'd managed to figure that out quickly enough to ruthlessly throw himself to the floor in defeat before Asuna. Because there was a big difference between a former member of a proud guild, and a constant member of the wishy-washy solo-guild, one of the more prominent members of that group of asocial weirdos who tried to act 'neutral' in what was basically a giant PvP-event.
Kirito didn't doubt that if becoming an Overlord had ended up requiring some degree of democracy more than just punching everyone else into submission, Kirito would've ended up losing almost instantaneously. The same could not be said for Asuna.
She was well respected, even if people might've ended up a bit peeved at her for abandoning her guild in order to become the Overlord on her own.
And then the whole shebang had played out the way it had.
Heathcliff revealing himself in his defeat, the path to the Archangel opening, Yui interfering against the NPC that'd been programmed to judge them as unworthy for claiming the title of Overlord through battle, and then... the game ending.
Kirito had woken up in a hospital bed, in a body barely able to move, when his previous one could've survived a head-on collision with a speeding train without even a scratch.
So, for a bit there, it'd been nice to just... lay down for a while, and try to wrap his head around everything that'd happened. But there was a limit to how much thinking Kirito was willing to do in an average day, and boredom was very much a constant enemy.
It was hard to be entertained by blank walls and a soft breeze through a distant tree, when you'd become used to dodging magically summoned meteors lobbed at your head. When your own magic pulsed with the beat of your racing heart, and the world warped around the edge of your sword.
Say what you would about Kayaba trapping them all in that place, but it'd been one hell of a game to experience.
Not that Kirito wasn't aware how very close they'd come to falling for one of Kayaba's back-up plans of screwing them over in victory. In fact, they would've been forced to fight the Archangel if Yui hadn't interfered when she had, and Kirito honestly wasn't sure how ludicrously overpowered the Final Boss of the game would've been, so that could easily have ended with the whole lot of them waking up as Prinnies.
Kirito had been a Prinny twice over at this point, and it was still one of the absolute worst experiences ever. It was just something about losing both of his thumbs at once that kind of ruined your day rather thoroughly, even if it did give you a good opportunity to consider Reincarnating into a different class.
The ability to Reincarnate into a giant dragon or not, being forced to spend at least a month of grinding as an explosive penguin with peg-legs, just because your partied wiped against something?
Dick move, Kayaba, dick move.
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"How's our new Overlord doing, anyway?" Klein asked, sounding like he was grinning.
"Pretty sure her mom heard someone call her that, so now she's grounded." Kirito wasn't entirely sure if that was the full story, but it was the only parts Asuna had been willing to share, so he wasn't going to say anything more.
"Ouch." Klein huffed a laugh. "Dunno how she can be grounded and hospitalized at the same time, but it doesn't sound fun."
"Speaking of fun, has Argo made any progress with lighting people on fire with her mind, yet?" Kirito felt his lips stretch in a tired grin at the memory of hearing about that particular plan of hers.
"Not that I know of." A bit of Klein's humor drained away into something weary. "Heard someone nearly stabbed a doctor while yelling about 'doodz trying to steal stuff', though."
Ah, yes. Prinnies were... prime target for PK-ers, what with being in new and awkward bodies that still had all of their cash, even if their human-gear would end up safely stashed away. Not that cash was really important... unless you were buying gear, or needed to be Reincarnated. Honestly, it was more just assholes picking on people who were down on their luck, than a functioning business-model.
So, if a player who spent a lot of time as a Prinny for whatever reason, was startled? They could get violent. Especially so if they were in a body that they weren't happy with, such as a Prinny's weakened state, or their real body atrophied by the NerveGear coma.
It was a bit disturbing to hear the speaking-tic outside of the game, but it wasn't like he hadn't heard it being done by pretty much everyone at one point or another. Kirito had done it himself for a couple of days after his first stint as a Prinny. His second stint he'd kept his mouth determinedly shut for long enough that it hadn't affected his speech-pattern when he finally Reincarnated again, but that'd been because he knew Argo personally and she was absolutely the kind of person who'd hold that kind of slip-up over his head for the rest of eternity.
"That's going to go down well." Kirito sighed. "At least none of Argo's stupid spells actually require activation-phrases."
"You sure you wanna call the fire-mage stupid?" Klein made an uncomfortable noise. "Even if she's not listening, it doesn't mean she won't hear about it somehow."
Kirito made a vague noise of protest. "She lit me on fire way too many times for me to be nice about it." Kirito had been a Prinny a few of those times. A poor and explosive Prinny. Kirito was pretty damn sure it hadn't been on accident, no matter what Argo claimed.
Also, Argo was already fully aware of Kirito's opinion on her magical ability, so it wasn't like he was going to end up in trouble over it. Even if Argo managed to somehow achieve omniscience through sheer stubbornness, and used it to listen in on people she knew. Though, honestly, Kirito wouldn't entirely put that kind of thing past her.
The statement about activation-phrases was still solid though. If Argo had been chanting weird phrases at people, instead of just glaring at them and willing them to ignite, there would probably be a lot more calls to politicians and stuff to deal with their craziness. Not that anyone had ever really used activation-phrases for their magic attacks. Shouting that kind of stuff was all well and good in a manga or something, but real battles were kind of a lot more fast-paced than that.
No point in beginning to speak an activation-phrase or something, only to have someone punch you in the throat. Magic was slow enough to activate as it was.
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Kayaba shook his head, still not entirely sure if he was proud or offended by the demands of this tiny part of his grand creation.
It was a small AI that was supposed to help people to not have mental breakdowns over people coming at them with a sword. Considering Kayaba's plans, he hadn't really been able to keep her around. She had enough admin control that she would be able to forcefully log out someone who was having enough emotional issues, which was... not good.
At the time, he hadn't been entirely sure if her forced log-out would trigger the NerveGear's anti-tampering protocols, or if it'd avoid it. Either way, it wasn't exactly a good idea for the game as Kayaba had envisioned it.
MHCP001, or Yui as her programming insisted on her being called, had therefore been shut down on launch. Kayaba hadn't really considered that she'd been hard-coded enough into the game that she didn't shut down completely, and that he'd accidentally maybe invented some new form of personalized torture for this AI that he'd created.
The panic-attacks of the players might've gotten less frequent over time, but emotional distress had very much still been prevalent all across the Netherworld all the way up until the very end. So, for the AI to be denied the ability to help, despite her programming demanding that she help, had likely been a rather harrowing experience.
She didn't really seem to hold a lot of grudges about it though. She understood why he'd done it, even if she disagreed, and seeing as everyone had been safely logged out, she'd decided to let bygones be bygones. Or she was trying to be the better person.
She was an angel, after all. Their inherent programming was a bit different from the demons that Kayaba had ended up spending so much time overseeing the AIs of.
Back to the issue of whether he was proud or offended by the small AI, Kayaba could admit that it was probably more proud than offended. A bit stunned by her daring towards her own creator, but not truly angry about it.
For all that he'd planned to betray the players three times over – both with him trapping them in the game and him setting himself up as their Overlord, as well as the tiny little backup-plan for if another Overlord was chosen – he'd never considered himself a sore loser. If he lost, he lost. And he'd definitely been defeated.
Honestly, he was more worried about that boy's social life than anything. Normal people didn't spend what must've been over a hundred hours a week, just constantly grinding for levels. Kayaba wished his former Vice Commander well, if she was really trying to get into that boy's pants, she was probably going to need every bit of luck she could manage.
No, he knew how to lose gracefully. The reason for his torn feelings in regards to Yui, was the fact that she'd twisted his own rules against him.
Someone had been trying to capture the players that had been logged out, probably by whatever company had ended up in charge of the physical servers. And Yui wanted him to stop them. Kayaba hadn't really seen the point. He'd given them all an open path to freedom, if someone else screwed them over, that was up to them to deal with.
However, there was a small problem with that idea. Kayaba hadn't given them the order to go away and be free. The Overlord had ordered everyone to be logged out. And the Overlord was the indisputable leader of all demons. And Kayaba in his avatar of Heathcliff, was in fact a demon.
Therefore, he had to help everyone to properly log out of the game. That was Yui's logical reasoning, and Kayaba was absolutely going to leave some kind of message to Kirito at this point. As the AI's adopted father, Kirito should really keep his daughter from running around blackmailing sociopaths into communal service.
Still, as the one who was defeated, despite all of the advantages that he really should've had – he'd been secretly boosting his EXP-rate for months at this point, how the hell was Kirito still higher level than he was? – Kayaba had agreed.
He'd even decided to be a particularly helpful Samaritan and plaster Sugou's attempt all over a whole bunch of media-places. All to better serve his indisputable Overlord, whose parents were apparently in business with the man, and whom a few security-cameras showed had been visiting the newly-crowned Overlord's bedside to drool over her unmoving form.
Never let it be said that Kayaba was a sore loser. Or that he wasn't a viciously ruthless bastard.
No, the reason he felt so much pride in regards to Yui's apparent personality, was that she'd been the one who'd convinced him to take that extra step and check the hospital's cameras. Apparently she was quite determined to set both of her parents up with each other, even if one of them had the social life of a crazy person in a basement, and Sugou had been in the way.
That kind of ruthlessness made Kayaba more than a little proud.
Especially considering how she was still wearing that angel-avatar of hers, which would mean that she'd be fighting against the constant 'forgiveness is everything'-subroutine that was inherent in that class.
Ah, but if only she'd been a devil instead, what kind of horrors could she then not have wrecked upon the unsuspecting populace of the world?
At least up until her mother grounded her, as she would've been a demon and therefore forced to obey the Overlord's every order. So, perhaps she had good reason to remain in that particular form. Kayaba, himself trapped in a digital form after the death of his true body, could appreciate that kind of foresight.
She was like the evil little granddaughter he'd never wanted.
XXX
Suguha didn't really know what her brother had been through in that horrible game of his.
What she did know was that his thought-process had been a bit... corrupted, from the long habit of weird things happening around him. Suguha knew this because it was something that the doctors had told her parents, and herself, to be wary of.
Mostly though, Kazuto was just constantly bored. Which was weird, because her brother usually loved slacking off or shutting himself inside of a room. The idea that him being inside of a room on his own was boring to him said some promising things about his future social-life. Maybe. Probably not though, it wasn't like the hospital had his beloved gaming-computer in it, or even decent internet. He'd be lost to the world the moment they were given the go-ahead to take him back home, Suguha was resigned to that.
No, weirder than that was that Kazuto had found friends. Friends whom he talked to without using some kind of computer-chat. This gave Suguha some hope about her brother's social-life, but she wouldn't put it past Kazuto to make friends with people who were just as reclusive as himself, so that might be a false kind of hope.
There was some talk about a girl though, and if Kazuto had somehow managed to find a girlfriend before Suguha found a boyfriend she'd probably never live with the shame. He spent nearly his every waking moment locked inside of a room, and Suguha did sports and made friends with people. And-... And, if there was any justice in the world, and Kazuto did somehow manage to find a girlfriend before Suguha found a boyfriend, then Suguha really hoped that she'd at least be ugly.
They would've met inside of a video-game after all, so that'd make sense, right? Even if Suguha felt a little bit petty about wishing for that kind of thing. It'd just be too humiliating for words to find out that her recluse of a brother had scored some kind of photo-model girlfriend, when Suguha herself hadn't even dated at all.
Sure, he was older than her, so she'd still have a couple of years before her parents started making weirdly speculative noises about it, but if Kazuto beat her in acquiring-speed, then Suguha wanted to at least beat him in quality. She was supposed to be the social one of the two of them, after all.
However, ignoring that particular can of worms, Suguha didn't really understand her brother and his friends. Like, the way he'd joked about 'prinnies' being in charge of cooking the hospital-food. Apparently, they were some kind of servant who didn't have thumbs? So Kazuto had thought that it was funny to compare the blandness of hospital-food with that kind of potential for inability.
It was... in hindsight, maybe a little bit funny? By the time Kazuto had explained the whole joke, it was more sad than funny, but Suguha had been missing the reference, so it might've been funny to some of the other people in the game.
There was also how he often ended up calling those other people on the phone, talking about lots of different things that Suguha might've been able to piece together if only she'd been able to hear both sides of the conversation.
Like, what was Jotunheim, and what did it have to do with winter? And what did the cold weather have to do with 'Argo' trying to be helpful? And why would Kazuto have had a speech-impediment at any point, let alone one bad enough that someone could blackmail him over it? And why was he blaming 'Asuna' – and wasn't that his girlfriend? – for it?
She'd missed out on a large portion of her big brother's life, and it was a bit depressing to find. Sure, they hadn't exactly been all that close before, but they'd still been sort of peripherally aware of everything. Okay, about most things, anyway. The big stuff, at least. They'd had the option to learn more about it anyway, if they'd just talked.
Actually meeting Kazuto's friends kind of dashed a lot of her assumptions about them though.
Asuna was gorgeous – so unfair, Kazuto was probably hogging all of the dating-luck in the family, the selfish hermit. Klein turned out to be way older than him and looked like a bum. Agil was married and owned a bar. Argo was a girl – and was always glaring at everyone as if she was trying to light them on fire with her mind or something. Sachi was also a girl and seemed to have a crush on Kazuto – that he seemed completely oblivious to, and Suguha wondered if there was a story there. Silica was an adorable girl closer to Suguha's age than Kazuto's and not at all a giant fire-breathing dragon – and also seemed to have a crush on Kazuto, what the fuck, since when had her brother become popular with girls? And Lisbeth was proven to be a girl as well – despite Kirito's comments about how she was a Prinny too often to know for sure, which explained nothing at all.
All in all, meeting Kazuto's friends was an experience.
It didn't help matters when Kazuto explained that Argo was in fact trying to light people on fire with her mind, because she'd been some kind of fire-mage character, and was firmly in denial about magic being nothing but a gameplay-mechanic. Or that it was apparently really weird to see Silica's actual face, instead of the many many sharp teeth, because her character had been a literal freaking dragon? Kazuto had apparently tried being a few other things too, since he'd have to reincarnate anyway – and what the hell was that supposed to mean?
Sachi belonged to a small guild who'd more imprinted on Kazuto than the other way around, seeing as they'd been the ones to track him down after the game completed. Sachi seemed to very much be the driving force behind this decision on their part, despite looking about as harmless as someone capable of being scared of their own shadow could manage to be. Apparently she'd spent so much time being literally made of fire, that having a shadow was weird to her now? Either way, Kazuto considered her a distant, if friendly, acquaintance or something.
Klein had some weird tic about ending all of his sentences with 'degozaru', which Suguha would've never believed to be a real thing if she hadn't met him herself. Agil was pretty normal, except for the fact that he was a giant black man who looked like he'd literally turned into a skeleton or something. Sure, everyone had a degree of gauntness in their faces because of the coma and stuff, but Agil really took it to the next level. He looked basically halfway-dead, and it made Suguha more than a little bit nervous, because nobody else seemed to be worried about it.
Lisbeth was apparently part of another tiny guild who were actually all pretty bad at fighting, and kept getting in over their heads, which meant that they ended up as Prinnies a lot of the time. Not that anyone really explained how that worked to Suguha, but it explained maybe a little bit about Kazuto not really noticing that she was a girl most of the time. Prinnies were supposed to look like peg-legged penguins, and penguins weren't really super-obvious about genders.
Asuna though. Asuna looked delicate where everyone else looked malnourished, and she wore it with that gentle kind of fierceness that Suguha was just instantly jealous. Her brother had literally landed himself with some kind of rich-girl photo-model, the asshole. How was Suguha supposed to outdo him now? She was doomed to failure, and dammit but that was just so unfair.
Also, Asuna and Kazuto were definitely dating, though Suguha wasn't entirely sure what they were talking about when they talked about 'their daughter Yui', because you weren't supposed to be able to have kids in a video-game, right? Suguha wasn't even sixteen yet, she was way too young to be an aunt!
In the end, Argo was the one to reassure her about that. Mainly because she said something about the two of them being weirdos who adopted an angel.
Suguha wasn't entirely sure how angels showed up in the conversation, but adoption she understood, and it was a great relief. That probably meant that Yui already had parents of her own, so Suguha wouldn't have to worry about becoming an aunt early on. Phew. Dodged a bullet there.
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A/n: Yes, I started writing this because I finally got around to picking up Disgaea. Not really my type of game, but it was kind of fun, and the world is hilarious enough that I obviously had to play around with it for a little bit.