November 6th 2022
After a minute or so of running away from the "Town of Beginnings" I turned around and my jaw hit the floor; the "Town" was enormous contrary to its name, then again, it did have to compensate for 10,000 people so that was to be expected I thought after staring at it for a minute.
After tearing my eyes away from the enormous town I continued running until I found a farm type house with a field of crops behind it, I ran inside to see if there was an npc with a quest inside and sure enough I spotted a yellow cursor above a middle aged man which signified he was an npc, I approached him and asked him casually "Do you need help with anything?" which was one of the phrases that activated the npcs dialogue.
He replied in a monotonoustone; "There are some troublesome boars thrashing my crops! Please do away with 5 of them for me" afterwards another blue transparent menu appeared asking me to accept or decline this quest with some details defining what I had to do et cetera. I wasn't too interested in the details, what I was I interested in though was that I had to kill things which meant one thing, my first battle!
I ran outside of the farm house and straight onto the field where the boars were, I remembered to check if I had a weapon equipped; sure enough I felt the weight of a sword on my back, the sword felt too light to be metal as I removed it from its scabbard, "too light for me" I muttered but nevertheless continued my approach towards my target; a blue boar.
As I charged towards it I brandished my sword above my head, I felt the sword gaining energy and shaking with the power of it, I glanced back at my sword, a green glow enveloping the blade, as if it had been dipped in some radioactive waste, I got right in front of the boar and let the energy lose, that is to say; used the sword skill "Vertical" as it cleaved down on the boars face, leaving a red pixelated line down its face.
It felt like my arm had moved on its own when I used the sword skill, no, that IS what happened I thought to myself, I wondered if I timed my arm movements with the skill if it would increases the speed or something, after slicing the boar using vertical a few times,a horizontal clean through its body finished it off.
After it exploded into particles a transparent blue screen once again appeared in front of my vision detailing my rewards; Xp and tiny amount of Col were all I got from it but knew that the reward for the quest would be a nice amount for starting off.
After repeating the process 4 more times on boars that were spread across the field I ran back to the farm house and handed in my first quest, I got a nice amount of Xp and some Col too. I ran around the house looking for other quests but then realized that the man from before was the only one here, fortunately though he had another quest for me.
I once again talked to this npc, got the quest, and ran back outside. It was something to do with collecting some seeds for the crops, apparently there was some worms that dropped them, "worms? What worms?" I asked myself
After accepting the quest I once again ran back outside and scanned the surroundings, looking for these worms that the quest mentioned, sure enough a decent away from the fields some worms were digging around in the dirt, I looked up at the sky trying to see the time, no, it wasn't a sky it was a roof I realized.
I then noticed the time in the bottom left corner of my screen, 3:00 pm it said, so I had been playing for 2 hours already? "Jesus christ" I muttered to myself. I continued my steady pace towards the worms which were lazily crawling and digging around in the dirt, As I had done collection quests before in many other mmo's I realized it might take some time to complete this, maybe an hour if I was unlucky (which I was with drop rates in general).
As I got closes to one of the worms, I drew my sword from it scabbard and instead of wielding it over my head I brandished it by my waist instead which I assumed would be around the position for "Horizontal", I was right as it glowed a harsh red color, once again my arm and sword moved on their own, slashing right to left across the worms midsection.
It seemed these worms had high defense and Hp but no attack whatsoever as it took me a full 10 minutes to kill one of them and it did nothing back to me in return, adding to my annoyance it didnt drop the seed I needed either. Repeating the process a full 20 times I finally got the last seed I needed for finishing this quest.
I ran back to the farm house to hand the quest in and looked at the time afterward; 5:25 pm "God damit it took almost 2 and a half hours!" I shouted in annoyance. I then noticied for the millonth time that there was a transparent blue screen in front me me, this time saying I had leveled up from 2-3"Wow those worms must have given a decent amount of xp if that's the case" I wondered to myself.
I decided to check out if my "One handed sword" skill had increased and if I got any new swords skills for it, I opened my menu and went to skills to find that "One handed sword" had increased to 25 already and I also had unlocked the "Sonic Leap" sword skill which looked like a plain dash to me but I decided to go out side and check it out anyway.
That was when everything went to hell.
I heard a loud bell that seemed to come from the "Town of beginnings" A split second later my senses became over ruled by one thing: Blue, that was all I could think as the landscape around me disappeared which was replaced by a blue glow surrounding me.
When the glow vanished I was somewhere else; "The town of Beginnings"I realized this as I looked around at people being teleported in, the bell at the middle of the square. "A forced teleport?" I wondered, A minute or so later there wasn't any more people being "tped" to this square, the sound of everyone asking whats going on and the like was astonishing.
Then everyone went silent, as 2 red warning signs appeared on the roof of floor 1, one of them saying simply "Warning" in a stretched red hexagon and "System Announcement" also in the hexagon shaped crisscrossing throughout the roof of the floor.
From the middle of this pattern , a crimson liquid slow dripped down, almost like a red maple syrup or something of that nature, it stopped dripping at about 3 quarters of the way down from the roof, and then the liquid started congealing into a shape which meta morphed into a twenty meter tall hooded figure which needless to say- scared the crap out of me.
It floated down so it was right above everyone's heads and then started speaking from its hollow robe, "Players, I welcome you to my world" I didnt understand what he meant by that, maybe he was a staff member of some kind? Or maybe even the creator but as the creator was in Japan with the main SAO server I doubted the latter so It might have been pre-recorded or something like that.
He continued by saying "My name is Kayaba Akihiko. Right now, I am the only one who can control this world."
"Kayaba Akihiko... where had I heard the name before" I wondered to myself, oh wait, he WAS the creator! This must have been pre-recorded though as he had to be in the Japanese server.
"I think that most of you have discovered the fact that the Log Out button has disappeared from the main menu. This is not a bug; it is all part of "Sword Art Online's system" He continued again, my heart started to beat 10 times as fast as it had been a mere minute ago.
"The Log Out button is missing?" I wondered to myself "No way" I said aloud in such a low volume it could have been considered a whisper, I quickly opened my menu and searched through options and other related menu's, I found nothing.
He then said "Until you get to the top of this castle, you cannot log out of your own free will."
The castle he was referencing was obviously "Aincrad"
The next thing this hooded figure spoke could have sent everyone mad "...also, the disruption or dismantling of the Nerve Gear from the outside is strictly forbidden. If these things are attempted..."
Silence was all I could notice about his pause.
"the signal sensors in your Nerve Gear will emit strong electromagnetic pulse, destroying your brain and stopping all of your basic functions."
I was in denial as what he was saying was crazy, it would be mass murder if that was true, I glanced up at my Hp bar the number displayed there was 342 , if that hit 0 then my brain would be destroyed, in other words if I died here I died in real life.
The weight of that suddenly hit me but I swallowed down my fear and accepted it, he went on to explain that 213 players had already died because friends or family had tried to take their Nerve Gear off and that our body's would be safe as the media would be covering it as he spoke.
I thought about Chrissy and wondered if she was 1 of the people who had died already and to tell the truth It deeply saddened me to think of that as I felt tears well up under my eyes but I pushed that thought aside, as I understood that this was now real life, to be honest that thought wasn't that bad as I didn't like my other life that much anyway but realized that I had to get back either way as there was so much that I hadn't done there.
I looked around at the other people near me, all of their faces showed that they still hadn't or couldn't accept it.
"Then I will show you evidence that this is the only reality. In the items section of your inventories is a gift from me. Please confirm this."
I immediately opened my inventory, going to my items and noticed what was there; a mirror and a guide book, I decided to ignore the guide book for now as that didn't seem what he had meant as a gift so I tapped on the Make into Object button for the mirror and grasped it in my hand as it appeared in the air, I looked in it but I saw nothing different; just my avatars face, at first I didn't understand what the point was but then I was surrounded in a white light for a few seconds.
When the white light around me evaporated into the air I was still in the same place, nothing had changed but when I looked into the mirror again, my avatar's face was gone, and replaced with my actual face.
My face.
My real life face.
To be quite fair I actually wasn't that bad looking, I had black hair that went down to jsut above my eyes, quite a good physique, my eyes were bright blue,
I now understood what the point of this mirror was; to prove this was real by making our appearances the same.
I wondered how SAO could get what we actually looked like and everything, but then remembered that to calibrate the Nerve Gear by touching your body here and there so it would know your height and everything else so it wouldn't feel weird in game and since it covered our head it could easly see what we looked like and such things.
"You will all most probably be wondering, "Why." Why am I —the creator of both the Nerve Gear and SAO, Kayaba Akihiko— doing something like this? Is this a sort of terrorist attack? Is he doing this to ransom us?" The hooded figure said again
"These are not the reasons why I am doing this. Not only that, but for me, there is no longer a reason or a purpose in doing this. The reason is because... this situation itself was my purpose in doing this. To create and watch this world is the only reason I have created the Nerve Gear and SAO. And now, everything has been realized"
he then finished by saying "...Now, I have finished the official tutorial for "Sword Art Online". Players- I wish you luck."
It echoed the last sentence as the hollow hood flew into the sky and evaporated into the error messages that dissipated after the hood had gone.
The roof went back to normal and the background music had returned, the game was in its original state apart from the few "rule" changes.
Then after a silent minute.
The crowd of 10,000 player gave their proper reaction.