Kiriuto's health bar was at 2/3 of full, there were no less than a dozen rats he was kiting around, in the bottom of his screen was two counters, one ticking down the poison effect they were applying with their bite, the other the cooldown on his limited blocking ability. He was in a tight spot, lost in a dungeon he was woefully underleveled and undergeared for, with no prospect of backup or rescue, plus dying here would mean dying in the real world too. Yet, for all of the trouble he was, he couldn't suppress the wide grin on his face. He was loving every painstaking second of it.

Kirito was a serious gamer, and lived for these clutch moments where you risked it all to win big. His heartbeat was so strong and rapid he wouldn't be surprised if it was drawing more rats in. The rats were about the size of a small pony in the real world, with raw red patches of dur worn off, and green foam coming from their jaws. Which was the only thing breaking immersion besides the size, but he figured the visual effect had to have been decided as a way of being kind to the noobs. If he lived, he was sure someone would put out a mod to strip the unrealistic foam away.

He had so far cataloged three of the rats abilities: the damage over time and slowing poison effect, a passive health and damage buff as they swarmed, and the ability to defy gravity and run along walls and the ceiling. Kirito thought they probably could swim as well, but he wasn't eager to test that theory given that the sludge in the sewer pipes was giving off the same green colored wisps as the rat's foam.

As he vaulted a pipe running across the floor and used the wall to turn faster, Kirito threw one of his hunting picks into a much larger and dirtier monster called the "rat triad'. It was a grotesque creature that looked like three of the normal rats sewn together at the hip. It had three foaming heads, three pairs of front claws, and only one pair of hind claws. However, it was slower than the other rats by a large margin. Probably more health than the whole swarm chasing him, but he was slowly whittling it down. Kirito was on his seventeenth lap, and despite missing a few throws, the monster's health bar was almost to the halfway mark.

Which was good, because he was running out of throwing picks and reserves. He had landed in the dungeon and immediately got pulled into combat with a pair of rats that hadn't been too much trouble, and likely made him overconfident. After defeating them and nearly leveling up, Kirito raced down one of the pipes at random. There was an unexpected drop, and the next thing he knew he was lying in a nest surrounded by half a dozen rats. Which is how he got poisoned, since he thought one of the easy combos would take out a rat, but it did not. Kirito turned to the next mob, assuming the first one was dead only to be bit on the arm. When he saw the icon for poison and felt himself slow down, Kirito panicked.

He spammed his few defensive abilities and tried to run, found another nest of rats who joined the first group, at which point they all bulked up and started spraying foam. Kirito had specced for a one-handed sword build, neglecting the shield from the traditional sword and board. While making him faster, since he wasn't lugging a hunk of steel around on his am, it did mean he was left without much to protect himself. He spent his initial points into agility and strength, barely allocating any at all into constitution. The build wasn't a bad one, especially given his training and reflexes, but it did not serve well against a mob of enemies.

The few defenses he did have had ridiculous cooldowns as a way to encourage players to stick to tried and tested methods of dungeoneering. But, as he lapped what he hopes was the boss room again, Kirito's abilities finally finish their cooldowns. He throwns another pick and the boss-rat lets out a screech at the damage, but still can't catch up to Kirito before he is out of it's aggro range. He bides his time until he gets to a large straight pipe, gripping his sword tightly and counting the openings in the walls. When he hits the magic 14th, Kirito whirls around and shouts. He activates one of the basic charges and plows through the horde of rats. His vision is blocked by red pixels and dark fur as he lunges past them, praying that the skill will carry him through the entire swarm and not leave him surrounded. His sword slices across the last rat in the line and Kirito barely has time to catch his breath during the brief skill-stun before he is running again.

His health ticks down another notch as he sends another pick flying at the boss mob, leading the rats on a merry chase the opposite direction from before. He hadn't been sure the skill would work to plow through multiple opponents like that, which was why he needed the have his defensive abilities off cooldown before he could try. It would have sucked if the skill stopped at the first monster it hit, but he would have been able to get away from the mass of rats before they killed him- he thought.

It was moot now, since his ploy worked. By thrusting through the line of rats chasing him, Kirito was able to start damaging the boss much faster, and slowly he started to notice the health bars on the rats chasing him were dropping from green and yellow to yellow and red. A few more switchbacks in this manner, and he killed the first rat in the swarm. The boss dropped to ¼ health, and Kirito plowed through another thrust that impaled a rat on the end of his sword and sent two more shattering.

Careful about more spawning unexpectedly, as well as the strength of their group buff, even as the rats dropped to just a handful chasing him Kirito kept up the long safe attacks. It was only when there was just one rat left that he turned and fought it down rather than running. When the last rat shattered and dropped its spoils, Kirito felt like falling over. Aincrad may have been a virtual world, and his body was stationary in the real world, he still felt exhausted from running for what felt like hours. Careful to listen with his ears even as he opened his menu, Kirito checked the status of his throwing picks. He had bought two packs of 50 from one of the merchants in the town of beginnings, and there were only 14 left in his inventory.

The boss was still alive in that offshoot room, and Kirito wasn't keen to find out if stepping foot inside would spawn more rats. It's how he would design it, but that didn't mean anything. He started to swipe over to the level up screen, but the sound of splashing echoing off the pipes made him rethink that. The last thing he needed was to get ambushed int the middle of equipping new skills. He would just have to make do with his level one stats until he was in a safe area- or at least out of the dungeon.

Kirito took his time to sneak back toward the boss room, alert for any surprises. The room itself was obviously a special place in the sewer, since it was not like the rest. Rather than a pipe like every other space, the room instead looked like a space the rats had chewed out for themselves through the wall. It was dark inside, with broken bricks and mortar littering the ground by the entrance. Kirito would have had to crouch to get through the hole in the wall if he wanted to go in, but he had no plans to walk into its nest. Not until after it was dead, at least. Instead, he stood outside of the hole and searched through the darkness for the creature.

Without the sound of footsteps and the cries of the rat mob chasing him, the rat triad had moved away from where it had been in the room. Finally, he spotted one of the sets of eyes gleaming half behind a pipe. He aimed the pick carefully and threw it, springing back from the hole and waiting. The rat triad let out a loud screech that echoed through the sewers, and Kirito heard answering cries come from both directions of pipes. The triad shambled out from the darkness, and the reason for its shouting became apparent; one of the heads was hanging limp, slumped down and slowing the creature further. Kirito danced around it's initial attack and retaliated with a series of slashes, sending red lines springing through its fur and causing it's health bar to shrink.

He thought it to be stunned as he waiting, and relaxed slightly just as it leapt at him. Kirito cursed himself as he swung his sword up and spun, hoping to dodge the attack. One of the claws rent own his back and Kirito's health bar drained slightly. The rat shrieked again, and Kirito turned back to face it, ready for anything.

Well, almost anything. He was not ready to see that it had anticipated the swing and used Kirito to cut away the dead head and half body on its side. The newly christened 'rat dyad' looked to have regained some health and moved quicker than it had before. It pounced again, which Kirito dodged, only to be caught by its tail whipping into him. He cataloged the new attack and climbed back to his feet, sword in hand. The rat was in the low yellow health wise, and Kirito was confident he could finish it off without too much damage.

It was a tedious fight, if not an exciting one. Kirito could anticipate it's attacks with enough time to parry or dodge, as long as he had seen the attack before. He had to be careful not to use any powerful sword skills, since the skill-stun would be too long and it would have a few seconds to wail on him. Slowly he whittled it down to the red, and when it barely had a sliver of health left it managed to twist so that Kirito cut away the dead side once again, leaving him with 'rat head' left. It also regained some health from the separation and got faster.

Still, Kirito was able to put it down eventually. And his health was still in the yellow. Barely above the red, but yellow all the same. The moment it shattered into polygons, the lights in the tunnels flickered and got brighter. The water stopped looking so dank and green, and the sound of skittering rats faded away. His log updated with the dungeon notes:

Area Boss slain

Error: Location unfounded

Areas cleared: 1/16

The Rat King watches and waits…

Kirito can't decide if he's relieved or disappointed. On one hand, if that was the dungeon boss it was a very weak dungeon. On the other, if it had been he would be out of the sewers by now. And they may have gotten lighter, but they still smelled, and you didn't always want to have clear vision in a sewer. Deciding he was relatively safe for the moment; Kirito opens his inventory and goes to work sorting all of his loot. He has a lot of raw rat meat, and a decent amount of 'rabid slime'. They also dropped a hammer and a spear, which he marked as junk, and some armor.

The armor was mostly trash, the stats not in the right places to help his build, but there was a decent pair of gloves as well as a mask. Equipping the mask immediately made the air more breathable as it blocked much of the smell. Finally, he turned to his skill points.

SAO took a different approach to skill points and leveling than other RPGs. While it did have a set of core skills that you could progress as you leveled, it also allowed you to allocate those points into the actual skills you were using to boost them up faster. Some skills actually had investment quotas, where they would cap out until you sunk enough skill points into them. While there were only three main abilities, agility, strength, and constitution, there were an almost infinite number of other skills you could level. The system running the game, ID Cardinal, was supposed to iterate on the fly as players acted and progressed to build out new skill trees and abilities for them to unlock and specialize in.

It was a rather complex system, and only got worse as you gained levels and ranks in a skill. Eventually, there were combination skills and specialization skills, and augmentation skills- Kirito himself had nearly a hundred skills with some level of rank in them, though he could only have so many 'active' at a time. Active skills provided benefits and abilities to the user, which unactive skills, while still gaining experience, didn't provide any benefit. Kirito wasn't sure how a combination skill would be handled, but he was a long was away from that being a problem.

From his escapades in the sewers so far, he had leveled up twice and was nearly at level four. Kirito thought about dumping his skill points into con, eyeing a passive health regen buff. But, that wasn't his build. Putting points into Con was attractive, but if they were to ever escape this game, they needed to be able to do some damage. Kirito was a veteran of RPGs, and knew that while damage would scale as he leveled, his health would not keep pace with enemy attacks no matter how much he put into the stat. So instead, Kirito put most of his points once again into agility and strength, with a few going into constitution. Not enough to get the health regen, but enough that he wasn't in danger of falling into the red either. As a side benefit, putting points into his con meant he healed from the poison as his body became stronger.

Feeling stronger and faster, Kirito carefully explored the section of the sewers he had cleared. He found a lot of bones and a few chests, but nothing truly special. He managed to replace most of his throwing picks and had a tidy sum of col in his bags by the time he had sound everything. He stood before a large door capping the pipe with a crank wheel in the middle. Kirito spun the wheel and stepped back. The metal cap creaked and groaned, rising up and exposing a new set of dark and smelly tunnels with new rats.

By the time Kirito found the exit, he had leveled up again and his map had recorded nearly half the dungeon. The log said he had cleared four of six areas, but he knew it was bugged. Area five he had searched over and over, but no rats revealed themselves. He knew he shouldn't have expected the game to be perfect from a day one release, but this was the first bug he had found.

It was unnerving, given how he was trapped in the game world. How many bugs in games resulted in a player death? Player deaths they could not afford. Still, as he emerged outside the dungeon, it was good to be alive. The air was bright with sunshine and the smell of forest. Blue skies dotted with clouds, open green meadows and a few patches of trees; the floor was bright and welcoming, a marked contrast to the dark and dirty sewer. Kirito looked behind him to see the city wall, from which he had emerged a rusted and broken gate set by the ground.

Area recompiled

Welcome to Tolbana!