Maybe it was all a dream?

Asuna POV

The darkness receded from her field of vision and what she saw had her feeling like she just woke up from a bad dream.

She was back.

Back to where it all started.

Back to the town of beginnings on the plaza where her life changed.

She was back there for the first time since that day. She had left and never looked back. Leveling up, grinding, and working herself until she fainted, all in order to get out of this hellish game.

Could this all have been a dream? Those 2 years of suffering and fighting?

A small part of her desperately hoped she hadn't spent 2 years inside the game. But her logical part of the brain knew this could never be true no matter how much she wished it to be so.

A simple look on her body assured her that was the case as her equipment was way too high level for a beginner.

She suppressed the shock and logic took over. She wasn't the rich girl she was before. She had survived on the frontlines of this deathtrap for a whole year now. She had been in more stressful and dangerous situations before. This couldn't even compare to being surrounded by high level monsters and not having a teleportation crystal. She shivered at the memory.

She started paying closer attention to her surroundings. People were here just like last time but that was where the similarities ended. The place was the same and the faces were familiar but that's it.

Nothing else was similar. There were fewer people, as many had died in that 1 year, and the ones that had remained weren't the same. These ones looked nothing like the crying, terrified, complaining and cowardice mob that was present last time. Since then they had seen close ones die. They had probably come close to death themselves more than once. Experiences like those can change a person.

After the initial confusion they had nothing that even resembled fear. No if anything looked furious. Furious and determined.

She then shuddered. Where was Kirito? He was holding her before they passed out. She suddenly paled.

Could he be…

No, no way it was Kirito. He wouldn't die on her.

Yeah but people all around suddenly started… shattering what if

She maniacally looked around trying to find his trademark black coat. It was nowhere.

Then she started noticing that everyone looked bigger than her. Then she looked down and two of her worries went away at the same time. One was that she had gotten shorter. It was just that she was kneeling down.

The second was where Kirito was. He was lying on her lap pillow.

'Oh there he is.' She said relieved. She then thought about it again. 'Wait… What?' She exclaimed. It wasn't like this was the first time he used her lap pillow but seriously they were in the middle of the crowd of all the players of Aincrad. This was super embarrassing.

But the relief canceled a bit of the embarrassment while she slightly slapped him on the cheek.

'Kirito I have food for you.' She whispered in his ear. That was enough to make him jump up head-butting Asuna in the process

'Where? Eh… Ah Asuna? What is it? Where are we? More importantly are you okay? Why is your nose bleeding?' Kirito stood up looking around scanning the environment. Trying to understand what happened then suddenly he stood still and very slowly turned to Asuna like he had seen a ghost.

'Wait' He said under his breath 'Bleeding?'

Then it hit her. There was no blood in SAO. She whipped her nose and examined the red liquid disbelievingly. Why? How?

'Kirito what is going on?' She asked for the second time in 20 minutes. And then blood started coming out of the ground.

A/N: Hello people. Greghero here. This story can go into waaaaaaay too many different directions but I will only write one of them and I want to be certain which one is going to be the best. For this reason and the fact that I have great inspiration and love for 2 other stories of mine (The day the world was painted red [SAO fanfic]) and (War changes people [Artemis Fowl fanfic]) I will probably not update this for a while. I would appreciate your support though on the rest of my fanfics. That's a subtle way of begging you to check my other SAO fanfic (The revenge of the king of darkness) because I believe that if you liked this one you are going to fall in love with the other one. It is about Kirito taking revenge on Black Coffin for killing his sister (His sister came with him on day 1) and using the guild they had created for this reason. It is an all out war between the front lines and the LC. I also put in some small tweaks like different races and NPCs that are sentient but no magic. AND I gave it a feel of reality (*wink,wink*trust me I don't want to spoil it for you but it is a twist I enjoyed greatly writing). It has pretty mature themes though (gore, politics, programming, biology, romance, ethics, ideology, Kayaba's god complex, Kirito's hero complex and more psychology [I feel like MatPat sometimes. Debating psychology and all kinds of science through videogames and all]). So please give it a chance. Thank you very much for your understanding and as always glad to entertain you!