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"Hey, hey, woah, Kazuto, try to calm down…"

Kirito was nearly deaf to Sugu's words.

She couldn't understand what he had gone through post ALS. She hadn't been there when he had been all alone trekking through the desert with some of their friends being captured and being unsure if Asuna, his partner and the one who he shared everything with, was dead.

She hadn't seen the blood, heard Shino's howl and the explosion of her rifle barrel exploding, the pain in Asuna's voice and the gurgling as one of them nearly bled out before he could breach the door with Rika.

Sugu hadn't experienced any of those moments but Kirito had, and they haunted him the moment he shut his eyes.

Who cared if it had happened months ago now? It had still happened and he would never forget them for as long as he lived.

Those memories and seeing the blood all over the side of his partner's head while she was barely conscious, having expended all of her energy trying to hide the depth of the injury from the rest of their friends; were why he had freaked out. Freaked out when Asuna started coughing, coughing up speckles of blood.

He could see the white walls of the hospital, but his brain was back in that year long trek through hell in a desperate attempt to get everyone home.

It was running through the various possibilities, the probabilities and the painful notion that he and everyone else didn't have the equipment to fight whatever she had.

They had barely managed to keep Argo from bleeding out and kept Asuna stable from the spinal injury, via the blessing of medical bay they had found but those injuries, especially Argo's, had drained all of their resources. Saving Shino from drowning in her own blood every hour for the first day had taken every last bit they had and a week later when Rika had all but crash landed it had been gone. They had managed to save her thanks to Silica's supernatural healing powers, but they had only been able to "repair" Rika's permanently broken leg via Rika's own powers. Namely the girl melting metal and carving a corkscrew around the middle of her leg from the inside.

So they didn't have the resources for Asuna getting sick.

Hell, Shino couldn't use her shooting hand and had to relearn how to shoot with her other hand and eye since the burns from the explosion rendered her hand malfunctional; Rika's face was white all the time and she couldn't forge, really run, or fight anymore besides learning how to snipe from Shino; and Caylee was still partially mute and cognitively inhibited due to the damage Kyaba had done to her brain as the only survivor of the GM massacre inside ALS.

But that meant…

What would they do? Asuna was irreplaceable and they, no, he needed her.

"Ma'am, you can't-"

"Honestly I don't care what you say I can or can't do," a woman snapped in agitation and clear irritation. With just a hint of the same kind of desperation that Kirito was overwhelmed with.

"Klein, call Argo and ask her what her ETA is."

There was a bunch of noise like someone was pushing their way through a group of people before Kirito felt a hand firmly grasp his upper arm. One forever scarred with little scars of forging without proper equipment but also metal bending and snapping under their fist back then, out in that hell where their world had been turned upside down for the second time.

He shakily looked up to meet the concerned and rather tight with worry expression of Rika Shinozaki, his partner's best friend since childhood. But more importantly, one of the elites in ALS and the sole smith that had kept them all alive during the hell of the post game.

Someone who understood the agony going on in his head of a world that only those who had lived those moments could see and understand.

"L-Liz," he stumbled over the shortened nickname of her gamertag and stumbled a bit physically as well as she moved toward a row of chairs dragging him firmly by the arm as she moved. "She… what if…" his voice cracked and he blundered through the true worry, "we don't h-have the resources!"

Another hand stabilized his back when he stumbled and Kirito blurrily swung his head the other way to see the glasses wearing form of Asuna's other best friend Shino. The girl's makeup conflicted with Kirito's memories just like Liz's, wait, he meant Rika. "It's alright Kirito, take a breath," Sinon, no, Shino, told him before Rika strong armed him into sitting down in one of the hard seats.

The brunette with her hair currently up in a bright pink curly ponytail, another oddity, placed a hand on the floor and carefully lowered herself down to it so she could kneet down in front of Kirito.

He watched her grab his hands with hers, which was when he noticed that his were shaking. But his attention was rapidly diverted to Shino, since he could hear her wheezing as she took a seat beside him, another side effect of having a rifle explode very close to her face, which was unscarred purely because of Liz's powers back then. "Sinon, you're w-wheezing," he stumbled, trying to get a grip when it felt like he was drowning under the over stimulation of so many sounds and lights while so many of his friends were hurt. "Are you okay?"

Asuna, Sinon, Argo, everyone was in a bad way-

"Kirito look at me," Rika forced his attention back to her while Sinon waved his concern off. Kirito obediently turned his slightly fuzzy gaze on Liz, listening to the insistent request of one of his close friends. "Look closely," Rika directed calmly, way more calmly than Kirito was feeling right now with how hard he was shaking. "Take a few deep breaths and think about what you see."

Part of him dimly recognized what Liz was doing, that she was pulling the same stunt she frequently pulled on others when they were stuck, trapped back in the hell that was their lives for a full year.

Still, he obediently looked at the brunette. Taking in the girl's freckled face and the scarred split in her eyebrow from a knife glancing off of her face in one of many moments where she was acting as the group's unstoppable one person army. The way there weren't any healing marks in her hands as everything was healed over leaving just white scars against her tanned skin. Her eyes weren't the mutation pink and were instead a milky warm brown.

She wasn't in the always extremely dusty and dirty clothes that she forged in, the pink and black tank and simple trousers, rather she was wearing normal world clothes. A half-sleeve denim jacket shrugged on over some kind of pink colored dress with the jacket currently buttoned up with a few buttons and she was… wearing jewlery? Pink hued dangling earrings and a silver necklace alongside, oh.

The silver, gold, and titanium dog-tags that she wore around her neck made the ones resting under Kirito's shirt almost burn, reminding him of the promise they all wore now that it was all over.

It… was over?

His gaze switched to Shino, looking at the sniper too, just to make sure he wasn't seeing things.

The nick above and below Shino's eye was healed over, a gentle scar of her scope shattering against her face, and her face was clean of dirt and gunpowder. Amongst the other dust particles she usually had in smears over her cheek from Rika touching her face without being able to wash her hands off from her forging and gun repairs. Her eyes were a reserved light silver rather than a firm teal, and like Rika she had makeup dusting her face but at a lighter almost unnoticable to his eye.

The sniper wasn't in her front-lines uniform either, as just like Rika she wore normal world clothes. Namely a white and silver striped short sleeve top with one off shoulder sleeve, black denim capris with the hem held in place by bullet brass pins and a sheer hoodie like jacket over her top. The jewelry, her teal stud earrings still felt almost wrong.

As if sensing his scrutinization, Shino shifted her gaze from somewhere down the hall and pulled her own dogtags under her shirt. The sight of the set of three dogtags, one silver, one gold, and one brass was the confirmation Kirito needed and suddenly everything was clear.

They were in a hospital in the normal world. Asuna's treatment didn't rely on the few resources that he and his friends had, rather she had the entire normal world's medical system at her disposal.

"Go ahead Rika," another voice spoke up and Kirito looked up to see the tired looking form of Caylee as she presented her RATH secret service ID to the guards and Silica went rushing past. Their resident medical expert after the hell of last year rushing in to get a look and make sure Asuna would be okay.

The only one they were missing, the last one he needed to know that they were okay, was Argo. Who wasn't here yet.