Sword Art Online: Butterfly Blades

by The One True Nobody

It began with a game of death, and a delinquent tomboy's hatred of the man who had trapped her there. It was just bad luck that Akihiko Kayaba had made an enemy of the beta test's eccentric PvP legend, "Midnight Butterfly," on the very day he put his plans in motion; no one ever looked at a tough-girl punk and thought they were smart enough to go toe to toe with a mad genius...

2. 1-1: Midnight Butterfly

Revision Note: At any point in time, with or without out notice, small mistakes, typos, and other minor changes may be made to any chapter of this story as I become aware of them. I will only post additional notes such as this one when an important update or rewrite is posted.

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- WORLD ONE: AINCRAD | STAGE ONE: PATHS TO POWER -

~ V ~

"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away."

— I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon
by Philip K. Dick

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- Chapter One -
"Midnight Butterfly"

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A teenage boy sat alone, staring disconsolately at the bulky NerveGear helmet that sat up there, mocking him from the second-highest floor of his wall-rack bookshelf. This article of furniture was otherwise occupied by various textbooks, novels, manga, and programming manuals that he owned. Kazuto Kirigaya had felt like the luckiest teenager in all of Tokyo when he had scored one of a scant one-thousand closed-beta tester opportunities for the world's first-ever Virtual Reality MMORPG. And it had surpassed all of his wildest dreams during the testing phase.

Now, it was November 6th, 2022... the game's official launch was here.

And his doctor's professional opinion was that he should wait at least another half-week before going into Full Dive. Which meant that Kazuto had to wait three extra days before he could play Sword Art Online.

Because the real world just sucked like that.

Never mind that he didn't even believe that the doctor had any idea what he was talking about, never mind the little niggle where everything he knew about the way Full Dive worked meant that a minor head injury shouldn't have made a difference—and he definitely knew more about the NerveGear than that doctor did, just going by how the guy had spoken. None of that mattered: his doctor had said it, his mother had accepted it. Kazuto had been left with no recourse but to promise not to use his NerveGear until that precautionary window of time had passed, and once the promise was made, it would have felt wrong to break it.

He sighed, glaring balefully at the virtual-reality device, which looked back at him through its transparent visor-display emotionlessly, as a thing without a face tends to. At least he'd still been able to cash in his exclusive first rights to buy the game, dodging the inevitable launch-day hellstorm that had already consumed retailers everywhere. No need for a beta tester to go out shopping; if any of them decided to buy the game, an online-order copy direct from Argus was delivered a full week ahead of release. But at present it was a bit difficult to look on the bright side of life.

"Eh, three days won't make a difference," he told the helmet, loudly enough that he was sure to also make his empty bedroom aware of how little he cared, of how not depressed he definitely was. "I'll just have to really work to make up for the leveling disadvantage next week. I'll still make the first boss raid, easy."

Getting his hands on an Anneal Blade within a reasonable amount of time was probably not a thing that would happen, though. Meh.

Obsessed as he was with experiencing SAO in its finished state, though, he figured he would at least use these three days for something. And so, building upon the foundations of online nerds before him, he had scoured the Internet for information on a pursuit that he had mostly ignored until then.

During the beta test, which had been held over the summer, one of the testers had anonymously leaked the beta-test program onto the Internet. It had been quite the milestone for online game-hacking circles, as no one had successfully circumvented NerveGear DRM and ripped a game before, and the beta had been designed to automatically uninstall itself on the day after the conclusion of the closed beta.

Of course, in the weeks after that exploit had been discovered and... exploited, the NerveGear had received a firmware update that locked it down even tighter than it had been locked down before. And the ripped beta version itself had so far defied anyone's attempts to data-mine it. Between the proprietary file formats used by the NerveGear's operating system, and the legendary programming expertise of the game's lead designer, even the basic questions of which data files correspnded to which aspects of the game had remained an inscrutable puzzle. No one could even tell the character models from the music files. The data structure was that alien to conventional programmers.

At this point, even figuring out how much of the game's assets had to be stored locally and how many of them were kept exclusively on the SAO servers was impossible. The dev team had been really tight-lipped about what made their game engine tick, probably so as not to give their eventual competition any tips that might speed along another publisher's efforts at producing a VRMMO. Kazuto got that logic well enough. Argus always had been kind of a shrewd company.

If he couldn't play the game, though, then Kazuto had decided her might as well spend the next few days trying his hand at turning the underlying data into something comprehensible. To people like him, anyway. Even if it did only amount to beating his face against a brick wall.

But he'd been at it for about an hour and a half now, and his patience was wearing thin already. Maybe it hadn't been such a bright idea... no, scratch that. It had definitely been a lame idea. If better-educated nerds than him hadn't cracked it yet, he wasn't going to be the one to manage it.

The Ethernet cable and USB charger were both plugged into his PC. On his main, front-and-center monitor, a command line window lay open. Lines and lines of failed, rejected commands filled it from top to bottom, and Kazuto was stumped. He sat there, staring irritably at it. It felt like the even the little blinking cursor at the end of the command line was mocking him now, too.

As soon as that thought crossed his mind, he decided he needed a break. After a heavy sigh and another disconsolate look—this time out his window—Kazuto dragged the command line window over to his side-monitor and opened his browser on the main. The browser's tab bar was stuffed with so many open pages that none of their names could be seen, as it always was. But he had long since memorized which was which. He clicked over to the MMO Stream channel that he always kept tabbed and put his headphones over his ears, thinking to skim through a magazine while the stream played as white noise in the background. It was his go-to way to pass the time when he was in one of those moods where he just didn't feel enthusiastic about anything.

"—thought it was just a crazy rumor, I knew it couldn't be true!" spoke the peppy female voice of the channel's host Harumi. Kazuto went rummaging in his drawer for a magazine. "No one's ever been able to capture footage direct from NerveGear before, but this guy says he's found a way!"

Kazuto blinked, and, as he'd half-spun his chair away from the desk, he kicked off the floor to face his monitor again. He was watching the stream now with rapt attention. The latest issue of Dengeki NerveGear hung limp and forgotten in his hand.

Had he heard that right? Someone had figured out how to capture footage from a Full Dive? No way.

"Not only does he say he's found a way, he's announced a day-one, launch-hour livestream of Sword Art Online!" the host went on excitedly. "So those of us who didn't manage to get a copy in the first wave can live vicarious through him! Isn't that right... Gadget Genkai!"

The stream, which had until then been a behind-the-counter view of the host with her microphone, slid to the side into a split-screen view. In the new window that now dominated the left of the display, a familiar face became visible. The audience in the chat must have recognized it instantly, because chat-message speed went into immediate overdrive. Kazuto clicked the fullscreen button on the player, wiping that distraction from the screen and leaning in, spellbound by the possibilities.

Gadget Genkai (which of course was not his real name) was a well-known Internet personality, and one of those who worked professionally at video creation. His face was as recognizable to computer enthusiasts as an idol's was to her fanbase. With stylish silver-framed glasses, spiky red-dyed hair, and a sharp-chinned face that was half-Japanese, half-something-else, he was the sort of striking person that one never had a chance to confuse with someone else.

He'd first gained notoriety about half a year ago with an epic feature-length documentary about the possibilities of augmented reality gaming and how the budding technology of the NerveGear could be adapted and expanded to provide more options for gaming and software beyond just Full Dive, ending with an unveiling of a very limited but tantalizing proof-of-concept rig of his own invention. Since a video demonstration could only do so much, he'd recruited a number of random volunteers from his fanbase to join him for a meet-and-greet in Tokyo and invited them to try out his device on-camera during the production of the documentary. They would then describe what they saw and experienced while it was in use. The testimony and social media buzz had been considerable, if not exactly explosive.

A professional hardware developer, he'd made a solid living doing computer and gadget reviews before that. But the AR device pitch and documentary had hit at just the right time, because that had been during the window of anticipation for the Sword Art Online beta. The growing excitement for the possibilities of the NerveGear had made for fertile ground in which to plant seeds of speculation for the future beyond virtual reality.

Kazuto knew that if anyone understood the ins and outs of NerveGear technology well enough to figure out a way to record or stream from it, it would be Gadget Genkai.

"Now, now," Genkai laughed, scratching the back of his head. "I will indeed be hosting a stream! But it won't be me you'll be living through if you didn't manage to snatch up a copy for yourself, haha!"

"Oh?" said the hostess. "But you did manage to get in on the closed beta over the summer, didn't you? I would have thought you'd be playing on launch day!"

"Well, I'd like to," Genkai admitted sheepishly. "But the software I'm using for the livestream requires someone to work mission control at a desk outside of the game, you understand. I haven't figured out a way to operate it from in-game just yet, and I'm still fine-tuning it, so I wouldn't want to trust it to someone else and then leave them up the creek without a paddle if a glitch happens. But I absolutely have to host a stream on launch day. My hope is that, if this stream is successful, Argus will toss a brand deal my way and I can work officially with them to kick-start the SAO livestream community for real!"

"Ooh, I can hardly wait for that day. Imagine all of the epic journeys and adventures and events the players would share... ugh! Now you're making me wish even harder that I'd managed to get a copy for myself, Genkai! I wasn't able to get to the store in time because of work..."

"That's too bad, Harumi-san," Genkai said sincerely. "But I hope you'll enjoy watching the stream, anyway! I've recruited another beta tester who's agreed to travel all the way here from Osaka to work with me, and her boyfriend will be joining us too. Since you'll be hosting this broadcast with me, I hope you enjoy your front-row seat!"

"Oh, you know I will! But hey, did you say the beta tester who'll be running the stream is female? I know who I'll be adding to my friend list when I get my hands on a copy, then!"

"Heh, well, she also earned herself a rep as a PvP contender during the beta test. She was a bit of a legend, actually, so we're certainly in for some intense battles. She's even agreed to do a little demonstration for you all to show off how PvP in a virtual world works. Needless to say, it's very different from what you all may know from existing MMORPGs... I think you'll be impressed."

A PvP legend from the beta test... Kazuto leaned back in his chair and thought back. There had been several well-known PvP specialists who'd made it their mission, instead of joining the push forward to clear floors, to squeeze every last bit of potential they could out of the game's combat system and general movement capabilities. And the one that came to mind when he thought of "legends" was an eccentric player who he'd never had a chance to test his skills against. Apparently, this mysterious masked figure had never spoken, had always been masked and cloaked but only armed in lightweight leather, and had bucked the system by utilizing a weapon loadout that most players had considered a handicap.

This player had only ever logged on in the dead of night during the final week of testing. According to a certain player who'd made a living as an info broker, this person had gone toe to toe with the best of the best in the game and had defeated all opponents through a combination of evasive moves, ordinary sword slashes without any system assist to guide them... and very liberal use of the game's Acrobatics skill. Which had intrigued Kazuto by itself: by that point in the beta, Acrobatics had allowed the players who'd been leveling it up to do some pretty crazy things.

Kazuto, or "Kirito" as he'd been known in-game, had been excited to seek out this player on the last night of testing, but unfortunately, they had never logged on that night. He'd had to settle for just hoping to run into that player in the retail game.

Among beta testers, this unknown, masked PvP specialist had been known as the Midnight Butterfly, for the custom purple butterfly pattern visible on the shirt underneath his cloak and his tendency to show up only during the late hours of the night. But due to this player's athletic ability, Kazuto had never considered that the player behind that male avatar might be a girl. Girl or boy, though, whoever it was must have practiced a lot over the course of the beta test to swoop in like that at the end, fighting with such an effective improvised style.

As the host and Genkai discussed some further specifics about his experimental streaming program (apparently, the launch-day SAO stream was also going to be the software's first real stress test), Kazuto decided to abandon his fruitless attempts to data-mine the SAO beta version. He was feeling pretty good, all of a sudden; even if he couldn't play, he now had something to look forward to after all. And if the player the stream would be recorded from was indeed that most unusual of players, he'd also be able to get a look at her playstyle before he challenged her in-game himself.

Yeah, Kazuto decided as he closed the command-line window and unplugged his NerveGear from the PC. He could definitely work with this. Now he was looking on the bright side of life. He grinned for the first time that day as the stream window cut to a shot of a group of those lucky enough to snag a copy of SAO when it had hit store shelves the previous Monday...

~ V ~

Ryotaro Tsuboi was stoked. He was also hungry and a bit cold even with his jacket on. And he was definitely going to drop off to sleep as soon as he got back to his apartment. But he was also stoked, and it hadn't worn off yet in all the long hours he'd been camped out here with his friends. After all, how could he let himself grumble and complain about a little thing like how cold it got at three in the morning, October 31st... or about how it stayed that cold until well after sunrise... when he and the members of his future guild had managed to snag such a prime spot in line outside the largest and most well-stocked gaming and electronics superstore in all of Tokyo?!

Arranging this so far in advance had so been worth the discomfort.

Ryotaro, along with those five of his buddies that formed his usual gaming group, were only thirty spaces back in line. This put them just behind the few people who had camped out really early because they had an absurd excess of free time on their hands. Which pretty much guaranteed that all six of them were going to be walking away with shiny, first-wave hard copies of Sword Art Online.

Ryotaro stretched his back for the thirtieth time or so in the last three hours, and reclined against the hefty backpack he'd stuffed a whole night's worth of snacks into. The pack itself was propped up against a now-half-empty portable cooler for the canned drinks that went with the snacks. He watched and listened with an eager, relaxed grin as his friends chatted with each other, and with the group that sat ahead of them. But for now, he was sleepy, and figured that if he wanted to be lucid enough to log in when the servers went live at 1 PM next Sunday, he'd better get in a power-nap before the store opened in an hour so. It wouldn't any good if he completely wrecked his sleep cycles just in time to be totally zonked-out when the server went live.

The others wouldn't be logging in until some hours after launch, around 4 PM or so on November 6th, since they all had work that day. They didn't work long enough hours that they wouldn't be able to log in, but Ryotaro would be going it alone for a while before his buddies had a chance to dive in and join him.

No sweat, though. His plan was simple and it cut right to the quick, just the like the cool and dashing samurai he hoped to play as in-game: he would nap now, to top off his energy levels; snag a copy the moment they got inside; send his friends off at the station with a hearty see-ya-on-the-other-side and high fives all around. Then he spend the next week boiling over with hype, go to sleep on the 5th after binging pre-release dev interviews and trailers. He'd set his alarm at max-volume for exactly 11:00 PM, two hours before game start.

He would chow down on a quick, microwaved breakfast sandwich, put in an online pizza-delivery order for 5:30 PM, and then he would dive. He would use the before-launch prep window that the devs had provided to customize his avatar, and then at 1 PM on the dot, the dashing samurai warrior... Name Not Yet Decided-san, would materialize into the game's starting city and take Aincrad by storm! Or at least wander around a bit, getting some kind of feel for the game.

And then he would briefly disappear from that world whilst Ryotaro logged out to enjoy a quick few slices of teriyaki mayo pizza with ginger ale. By then his friends would have logged in, so they would all meet dead-center of the starting city and get rolling for real.

Yep. A solid plan of attack. Learn a bit about how the game worked, then meet up with his friends and show them the ropes. Go on adventures, slay some monsters, level up, maybe go spelunking in a dungeon if they got daring. Find out wherever the heck the guild function in this game was, and start one up. Business as usual in concept, maybe, but with NerveGear and the unparalleled immersion of Full Dive, it would be so, so much more hype than "business as usual."

Ryotaro looked to the group his friends were chatting with, who were starting to drift off into their own little huddle as conversation wound down. He looked back behind them, where the next few people were all straight-up snoozing in sleeping bags now, to be awakened by mobile phone alarm in half an hour or so.

He took a deep breath, adjusted his position for comfort, closed his eyes...

"Ah... 'scuse me, hey. Sorry t' bother ya."

Ryotaro opened his eyes and blinked. Someone from outside the line had approached him. A teenager, by the look of him, with short-cropped red hair and one of the darker shades he'd seen among the golden-toned Japanese skin-color range. He looked distinctly like a street-punk troublemaker, not that Ryotaro would hold that against the kid; people often said Ryotaro had a thuggish face, and he'd learned to laugh it off and take it in stride. Besides, the boy looked genuinely apologetic for taking his time.

At a guess, Ryotaro would probably have put this teenager down at eighteen or nineteen years of age, around about the college years. Probably he wasn't in college though, if he was out here at this hour. His jacket was worn and well-used, and the logo t-shirt visible underneath was faded, the graphic image well on its way to being chipped into oblivion by way of repeated washing. His jeans were faded and torn in several places, including the left knee. It did not look like a "pre-ripped" style.

"Yeah? 'Sup?" Ryotaro said casually, giving the guy a smile. He'd judged by the look of the kid and the stiffness of his bearing that he probably wasn't super-comfortable being formal, so Ryotaro figured it was better to keep it friendly.

"Ah... right, here goes," the teenager said. He spoke in a low voice, looking back and forth. His dialect was classic Osaka-ben; Ryotaro hadn't heard anyone speak like that in quite a while outside of online voice chats, but he'd heard enough of it there to recognize it immediately. The boy took a breath and went on: "My name's Kenshin Nakadachi. I'd like t' ask you a favor... you're in line for SAO, right?"

Ryotaro's easy smile fell a little. "I'm not lettin' you cut in line, if that's what you're asking."

"No! I mean, kinda, but I don't actually need a copy! I mean... ah, shit, look, let me just get my phone out so he can explain face-to-face..."

Perplexed by Nakadachi's stammering attempt at explanation, Ryotaro sat up and rolled his neck a little. Kenshin dug out a a smartphone and what looked like a wireless headset. By this point, Ryotaro's friends had noticed what was going on and were watching dubiously. Ryotaro accepted the phone and headset when Kenshin held them out.

"Here," said the dark-skinned boy. "But don't yell out or anything, okay?"

Ryotaro frowned at the boy. "Oh... kaaaaay," he said, and put the wireless headset on as he looked at the screen. It was a video-chat program. Not the exact one that Ryotaro kept on his own phone, but similar, one of its competitors probably.

And then a face appeared and Ryotaro froze up. Hardly anyone interested in NerveGear would have had to ask who those silver-framed glasses, spiked red-dyed hair, and half-foreign facial features belonged to.

"Hey, there!" spoke the voice on the other end. "Sorry to bother you so early in the morning! You're waiting in line to buy Sword Art Online, aren't you?"

"G-Gadget Genkai-san!" Ryotaro almost choked out in a loud whisper. His friends reacted all at once, each responding somewhere along the spectrum between a twitch and a full-on jump, but beyond that no one was watching. They huddled around his shoulders behind the cooler and backpack to gawk at his phone.

Genkai smiled sheepishly and scratched the back of his head.

"Guess I don't need to introduce myself, then. May I ask what your name is? You can give me a screen name if you like."

"N-nah, that's alright, I'm a grown-ass adult. The name's Ryotaro Tsuboi. Good to meetcha!" He put on a grin to banish his nerves, and it mostly worked.

The audio was coming in through the headset, so his friends couldn't hear. One of them comically tried to put an ear up to Ryotaro's left earpiece as if they were trying to eavesdrop through a bedroom door or something. Snorting, Ryotaro reached over and lightly shoved his friend away by the nose with his open palm. His friend scowled in mock-anger at him and flipped him off. Ryotaro rolled his eyes and returned the gesture. Watching the interaction through the phone's camera, Genkai stifled a chuckle at the interplay. Kenshin, who had backed off and stuffed his hands into his jacket pockets, was quietly laughing.

"Didn't think I'd be having a video chat with a bona fide e-celeb," Ryotaro said after this distraction was (literally) out of his hair. "What's the occasion, Genkai-san?"

"Well, we haven't announced it yet... but I'm doing a collaboration with MMO Stream that's going live with the game next week," Genkai said. "We're looking to do some B-roll for the lead-in to the stream, you know, show some of the hype surrounding retail release. And one of the things we'd like to do is have our volunteer cameraman follow along with one or more of the players, get a short up-close-and-personal view and interview with someone about why they're hyped, what they hope to get out of SAO... and so on. Sound like something you could get down with, Tsuboi-san?"

"Sure you don't want someone a little more photogenic?" Ryotaro quipped. "But yeah, I'm game! Gettin' to show my handsome mug on a nationally-famous livestream channel? How could I refuse?"

"Glad to hear it. And you're planning to log in at 1 PM sharp at launch, are you?"

Ryotaro nodded in answer.

"That's perfect. I have another idea I'd like to run by you, then."

"Yeah? Okay, shoot."

"Maybe you'd like to join Kenshin here and his girlfriend for the stream," Genkai suggested with a grin. "We'd be helping each other out. They could use a fresh newbie like you to help with the PvE tutorial bit before they demo the PvP dueling system for the audience. And of course, you'd get a hands-on lesson for how to fight and how to plan your character build, complete with exclusive beta-tester tips and tricks. Sound good?"

"Oh, hells yeah!" Ryotaro said, so excited that he almost yelled out and had to force himself to keep his voice down. "That's perfect! I was actually hoping I might be able to pester a beta tester to show me the ropes at some point that day anyway."

"Great! Then you can meet our two former beta testers at the east exit of the Teleport Plaza as soon as you log in," Genkai said, satisfied. "They'll be easy enough to find... Kenshin's girlfriend sticks out like her life depends on being loud and proud. You'll know her when you see her."

"Hmmmm," Ryotaro said teasingly, looking over the phone at Kenshin. "He says your girlfriend sticks out and I'll know her when I see her. She a hottie, then? Go, you."

Kenshin laughed again, rubbing the back of his neck. "Well... something like that," he said. "You'll see what I mean when you meet her. My Kyo is... well, she's one-of-a-kind."

"Alright, with that decided," Genkai said into Ryotaro's ears, "I'll get back to the business of getting things organized for next week. I may have figured out how to record from this big old hunk of actualized science fiction, but... it's not an easy set-up job, I'll just say that."

"Right, then. Lookin' forward to working with ya!" Ryotaro said. Genkai waved and the chat program went black, so Ryotaro took off the headset and handed both that and the phone back to Kenshin.

"Alright," Kenshin said, slipping both items back into his jacket pockets. "Glad to be workin' with ya, too. Gotta say, when I graduated high school, I didn't expect t' get involved with any online content producers, but life's been strange since the beta."

Ryotaro's friends gathered around as Ryotaro himself stood up, dusting off the seat of his jeans. One of his friends leaned in and said, "You got a chance to play the beta? Man, I'm so jealous. That's some uber good luck!"

Kenshin gave the guy a crooked smile. "Well, it wasn't me who got the beta slot. I just took turns with my girlfriend, sharing the same avatar. I'll be using the beta account when we log in, though. Kyo wants to play a female avatar; she says the one we put together for the beta felt weird to move around as, until she got used to it."

"Huh," Ryotaro said. "I didn't know they'd let beta testers share accounts like that."

"Well, a few testers were allowed to, as long as they made sure the person they were sharing with also signed the NDA," Kenshin said, scratching the side of his nose. "Argus did want to test how smoothly it would work if two or more players logged in t' play through the same NerveGear and the same account. That was just the excuse we used t' do it, though. Kyo's parents disagree with the concept of fun, so she had to dive from my place at the time. The beta happened before she could get an apartment of her own, see. So she was only able to log in at night most days, and she had to sneak out t' my place to do it. She didn't actually get t' use most o' the beta time she had, so I logged in more regularly than her."

"Ah, jeez, that's rough," another of Ryotaro's friends said. "Imagine being lucky enough to get a slot in the beta, and not being able to play it because your mom wouldn't let you have a NerveGear in the first place. Old-timers and the sticks up their butts, man, I tell ya."

"That was pretty much the situation," Kenshin said, shrugging. "But it ain't the first time she's used my place t' sneak in some gamin' hours. She's a bit of a rebel."

"Sounds like you got a wild one on your hands," Ryotaro said, wiggling his eyebrows suggestively. "She got any friends you could introduce me to?"

One of his friends (he didn't catch who) elbowed him in the side. Rather than being offended on behalf of his girlfriend, though, Kenshin just snickered. "Kyo'd probably get along with you," he said. "Anyway, let's do this thing. I have a camera in here..." He indicated a belt-pack that had been hidden until this point, since it was strapped on just under his jacket around back. "...But we should go over what I'm gonna film and when. Someone else from MMO Stream is also gonna be out here gettin' footage of all the people who come out with their copies, group shots and stuff, so ya might wanna get in on that afterward. And..."

The hours between then and the store opening passed in an amicable blur of planning, conversation, and Ryotaro's group getting to know Kenshin Nakadachi. They were going to be playing Sword Art Online with this guy in a week, after all. There was no sense doing that as strangers!

~ V ~

"...Ugh," groaned Kyo Morinaga under her breath. "I can't stand Elza Kanzaki."

So of course that was all that this stupid idiot's playlist had on it, apparently! The obscure offerings of an independent up-and-comer! What luck! A truly epic way to start off the day before Sword Art Online's first hours of service kicked off.

Kyo couldn't bring herself to speak up about it, though. So as she worked to assemble the cheap queen-sized bed that they needed for the day's job, she sent a silently baleful glance at the head of spiky red hair that was swaying away in time to the music. Benjiro Miura, otherwise known to the online world as Gadget Genkai, was hard at work configuring the NerveGear recording program he'd spent the last half-year developing into something functional. Most people imagined that he was really intense when he worked, and indeed the man portrayed himself that way on camera for effect...

...but he was really just a huge dork. When he was working for real, he did so with pop or classical music playing in the background. Which was fine, Kyo thought, different strokes for different folks. She just wished she didn't have to listen to it while he did! Or she wished he'd at least pick a different goddamn artist's stuff to fill up his playlists with.

"Almost done here," she announced at last. She stood up, brushed nonexistent dust from her hands, and took a few steps back admire her handiwork. Now she just needed to drag the mattress through the door and that would be that.

The reason she hadn't spoken up about the annoying music was mainly because of this bed. Kyo hated futons, so she'd nagged and nagged until Benjiro had relented and let her set her own bed up in here; she'd disassembled it and carted it over herself with her car. They were planning more sessions after this, so it made sense to have a good setup for them. Even if the NerveGear blocked all sensation while she was in the game, Kyo was going to spend a heck of a long time laying down while she was in there, and she wanted to do that on the thing she was used to doing that on.

Besides, it wasn't even that the music was bad. It was infuriatingly good, actually. Kyo's dislike of it was for another reason entirely, and she didn't want Benjiro to ask about it if she brought it up. So she held her peace and focused on her work.

Looking back over his shoulder, Benjiro surveyed the bedframe that Kyo had assembled and did that thing where he pushed his glasses up his nose with two fingers, grinning. Kyo rolled her eyes at the anime-like gesture, and his grin widened; she knew he did it because it exasperated her.

"Guess it fits just fine," he observed. "You were right about that. I'll miss having the extra room to tinker, but I guess we'll be doing SAO content for a while. Makes sense to have something like this set up."

Kyo shrugged. "It does if you're really serious about pushin' this VR capture-device idea," she said. "All that testin' you'll needta do with every new version o' the program, all the tinkerin'... and the early-bird stranglehold on SAO streamin' content... you ruthless bastard."

Benjiro smirked, and got up from his chair. "That just leaves the mattress. Kenshin's on his way back now with snacks and drinks, so I soldier through the launch-day endurance round with our good friends at MMO Stream."

"Good," Kyo said, strolling over to the bedroom door of Gadget Genkai's two-room apartment. "That means I get a few hours alone with my smokin' hot dakimakura boy before we spend the rest o' the day Goomba-stompin' kobolds and shit. Just what the doctor ordered, heheh."

"Yeah, yeah... just spend those few hours somewhere other than here," the tinkerer said dryly, following her out to help. "When you two get all googly-eyed and flirty, it makes me want to hurl."

"You just needta get yourself a lady-friend o' your own t' keep ya warm at night, friend. You'd understand if ya did!"

~ V ~

"...in just fifteen minutes when MMO Stream hosts a special collaborative livestream with Gadget Genkai and a mysterious young lady from Osaka who was an SAO beta test PvP wunderkind! I can hardly wait!"

The words came out of her phone's speakers tinny and yet they filled the small, private dressing room, and the petite girl who sat there grinded her teeth. Not for the first time that day, Elza Kanzaki's eyes darted from the phone propped on a plastic stand upon the vanity in front of her, to the open locker in the corner next to where she sat.

The locker in which the NerveGear rig sat on the top shelf, tempting her. Tempting her. So tempting...

Twenty minutes. Twenty minutes and she could put that bulky headset on and be lost to the world... if she wanted to sacrifice her entire career in exchange for a few hours of fun in a fantasy world. Why had she brought it with her? Easy answer, really. She hadn't been able to bear leaving it behind. The venue did have good Wi-Fi in the staff areas, so she could go into Full Dive from here if she really wanted. The possibility existed and had cast a grating pall of nagging temptation over the whole event for her. She hadn't been able to stop herself from packing the thing in her bag just before walking out the door.

But she couldn't. Today was too important; she couldn't get out of it, not if she wanted to seize this chance while it was there for seizing. It was not an exaggeration to say that her future as a singer and songwriter hinged on today's event.

But it pissed her off. It pissed her off so much, and to rub salt in the wound, she was technically competing with that Midnight Butterfly bitch from the beta test... again! In a way, they were both going to be performing on a stage for an audience at the same time. Maybe her in-game rival was even looking to turn that into her career.

Elza pushed her chair back onto its rear legs, gripping the table corner with one careless hand to keep it standing. Rocking it back and forth, she delighted in the heart-pumping sensation of being just about to unbalance and topple over onto her back. "Who'd've thought 'he' was actually a chick?" she asked the empty dressing room. "And here she is, all set to become MMO Stream's de facto VRMMO idol. Man, life just isn't fair sometimes."

She let her head loll backward and around so she could stare at her NerveGear again. What she wouldn't give for a rematch against that night-owl PvP hellion! Their bout at the end of the beta had been, by far, the most fun that "Pitohui" had experienced during the entirety of her time with the game. And Pitohui had logged a lot of hours by the end.

Pitohui, however, had not been a PvP duelist like the Midnight Butterfly had been. She had been a different kind of player-versus-player specialist... specifically, she'd been what was known as an "orange player." She had been a Player Killer who had attacked and killed other players within the game, operating outside the sportsmanlike confines of the dueling system.

Such players were marked with an orange cursor and barred from entering towns by the NPC guards who protected them. The system had recognized her as a "criminal" within the world of Aincrad, and this had turned her time in the SAO beta into a thrilling game of survival and predation. She had sought out the most obscure hiding places within dungeons and outdoor environments to camp out in or lay ambushes for other players, catching them unawares whenever she could and taking them head-on with whichever weapon in her collection she was most in the mood to experiment with that day.

And she had been damn good at it.

On the second-to-last day of the beta, she had decided to end her last marathon Full Dive session by taking on the most exciting mark she'd caught wind of yet. A mysterious masked midnight duelist who fought without the aid of system assist! Elza had heard of this player three days prior, and had practically been drooling with anticipation at the prospect of trying her hand against such a target. She'd formed a party with two other PKers who saw the same appeal in that challenge, and they'd finally managed to catch the Butterfly alone on the tenth floor in a field dungeon...

It had been everything that Elza could have hoped for! The Butterfly had neatly dodged their ambush, had taken out one of Pitohui's companions with a flurry of deadly-precise critical hits and a Sword Skill before switching to a less orthodox, PvP-specific loadout during the resulting lull. Then the Butterfly had managed to hold the remaining two PKers off just long enough to lure them both into a nearby group of monsters.

Pitohui had kicked her remaining party member to the floor to divert the monsters' aggro, so that she could pursue the Butterfly deeper into the dungeon. And there they had fought. And it had been glorious.

Until the field dungeon's big, bad boss monster had lumbered in and blindsided them both, sending them both packing in an explosion of polygonal shards... allllllll the way back to the Town of Beginnings on floor one. It had been Pitohui's first and only death during the beta, and it had reset her cursor to green. She's screamed and raged for all she was worth, and the Butterfly, who had respawned only a meter or two to her left, had turned to her and stared.

Pitohui had asked her irritably, "What are you looking at?"

And the Butterfly had blandly stated, "Who knew such a sweet li'l indie singer could be such a cold-hearted bitch? You're psycho, y'know that?"

And without waiting for a response, he (or she, as Elza knew now was the correct pronoun) had opened the menu with a swipe of one hand and logged out on the spot. Pitohui had been left to stand there, gawking at the place where the Midnight Butterfly had vanished, gawking like a damn fool and wondering just how her opponent had managed to identify her as Elza Kanzaki.

Her avatar hadn't resembled her real self at all; in fact, it had been so much taller than her that it had taken days to get used to moving and fighting as Pitohui and had taken nearly as long to get used to being Elza again after the beta had ended. She hadn't behaved at all like Elza Kanzaki's public persona while in-game, either. The only similarity she could think of was that her in-game voice had remained the same as in the real world, but no one else had recognized her by her voice... had they?

Not many of her fans had heard her speaking normally, rather than singing. She wasn't at a stage in her career where she frequently did meet-and-greets or similar events. So Elza had wondered if the Butterfly could have been someone close to her, but she was sure that couldn't be the case now. She didn't personally know anyone from Osaka, and most of the women she knew weren't interested in gaming to begin with.

The question burned at her, alongside her yearning to settle the score. And now the Midnight Butterfly would be re-entering the world of swords, performing for the masses there even as Elza was stuck out here in the world of doldrums and worn-down salarymen, performing for those who had no interest in such things.

"Agggggghhhhh," she moaned. "What a drag."

"Kanzaki-san!" someone called from outside. "Your first bit starts in ten!"

She sighed, and rocked back and forth a little bit more on her tilted chair. Of course she'd even miss the start of the livestream, too. Couldn't even watch a bit of that just to get some tiny bit of a fix before getting to work.

Fuck my life, she thought.

This day-long music festival was looking to be quite the ordeal. Well, she thought, at least she'd get a breather for an hour or so in the middle of things to check in on the stream for a bit... that was the closest she'd get to scratching her Sword Art Online itch for another three or four days, when she flew back home and finally had a bit of time off, probably...

A frustrated growl escaped her as the chair fell back to a proper standing position. Elza Kanzaki looked in the mirror and put on a bright, idol-appropriate smile. Then, she stood, shut the locker, and left the dressing room.

~ V ~

He stood there, hunched forward, claws out, fangs bared, ready to spring forward—he was twitching involuntarily, flecks of drool dripping down to the floor from his open maw. Above, a red moon cast its light over the castle ruins that served as an arena. Beneath that moon sat the succubus, hovering about half a yard off the floor. She lightly flapped her bat-like wings from time to time to maintain her coquettish midair sitting position, legs crossed, upper body leaned slightly back. The pose emphasized both her unnaturally perfect curves and the bountiful cleavage revealed by the provocative costume she wore: something between lingerie and a leotard. Beauty like hers was unreal; so were the catlike slits in her yellow eyes. It was the kind of thing that could only have been "designed." At this point, it was a toss-up whether the designer had been a kind of horny man or just a very daring woman. Neither of them had bothered to look that up yet.

The two of them squared off like this and stared each other down again for a long while, growling werewolf and smirking sex demon. Then, the wolf snarled and pounced.

Laughing, the succubus flapped her wings once and sprang into an airborne backflip, whipping her right leg out in a vicious vertical kick that nearly caught the wolf in the chin with a shining stiletto heel that more than just "resembled" the blade such footwear was named for.

Nearly; but near was not enough. The wolf knew her tricks and drew up short, then tried to swipe at her exposed spine with one of its inhumanly long arms. The succubus had already beat its wings once more as she'd kicked though, ready for this sort of countermove. This launched it only a few feet farther away while she was upside-down, but that was enough to escape the range of the wolf's claws.

The revolution of her aerial acrobatics completed itself. When she was hovering again, now in a graceful standing position with one shapely leg angled in front of the other, she brought two fingers to her lips. She blew the wolf a kiss... which took the form of a flaming, purple heart-shaped projectile, spinning through the air toward its target.

Growling, the wolf leapt aside and bounded several paces in that direction—the projectile attack's trajectory curved to follow, but could not home in sharply enough to strike home. There was no question of tanking the damage or risking a narrow evade to counterattack. As the wolf couldn't afford to take more damage at this point any more than the succubus could afford it. He was not as adept at agile movement in Full Dive as his opponent was, either, so against this opponent he needed to play it safe a lot of the time.

Not that he hadn't put up a good fight; he at least had a good grasp on this character's moveset. Their health bars, displayed along the top edge of both players' fields of vision, were both down to less than ten percent and they had both won two rounds apiece. The rules they had set at the start had been best three-out-of-five: whoever managed a solid hit now would win the match.

The succubus winked tauntingly, but said nothing, as RCT Progress had not included a voice-chat feature in this game. The only chances to talk were in the lobby, and only when two NerveGear systems were connected on a local network as theirs were. The extent of the vocalizations the game allowed at any given time during a match were determined by the character one chose to play as, but no matter which were in play, the sounds they could make were almost useless in their extreme limitation.

For the werewolf Grath, that meant snaps and snarls and grunts. For the succubus, Lilim Moonsway, it was limited to sexy moans and teasing giggles. She was extremely unpopular with female NerveGear users, for this and several other reasons... such as the way the game emulated the feeling of wearing such a revealing costume, and how female players were allowed by the game's programming to experience a less "censored" version of that feeling.

It took a certain amount of fortitude on the player's part, and more than a little shamelessness besides, to play Lilim as one's main. One who knew this specific player would have said that Lilim's entire game-feel fit Kyo Morinaga's mental approach to life, living, and everything else to a skin-tight "T." They probably would have said it with a certain amount of long-suffering exasperation, at that.

This game was called Nightwalkers and had been marketed as a "spiritual successor" to a long-ignored franchise developed a long time ago by a company that was not RCT Progress. It only had eight playable characters to choose from, one of which had been added as downloadable content less than a week before on November 1st. While it was a blast to play in bursts, Nightwalkers had been devised more as a tech demo than a serious, full-featured game, and would not be augmented with additional modes or a single-player story campaign until the middle of 2023 at the earliest.

Several such titles had been released by multiple companies, each experimenting with the possibilities of this newly-invented technology in a different way. In the case of this particular title, the lead developer's ambition was to show that, with skillful programming, NerveGear users could control game characters with bodies and body parts that their real-life brains weren't used to operating. Like a body with wings, for instance.

RCT had teased many interesting ideas with this concept after Nightwalkers had been met with moderate levels of interest and critical praise. One such tease was the hypothetical mention, in a developer interview, of a VRMMO to compete with Argus's Sword Art Online. But this notion of controlling virtual body parts that the human player didn't have was one of the more uncertain ideas that had come about during the NerveGear's first year on the market, since it seemed fewer players had the aptitude to master it than didn't.

Many players found it too difficult to play as anyone but the two characters with mostly-unaltered body shapes, such as the werewolf or the mummy. The most difficult character on the roster to control, but also the one that had dominated online multiplayer once a few hardcore NerveGear users had mastered its moves and combos, was Cosmic Question: an amorphous body-horror mass of pulsating organs from which eighteen tentacle-blade appendages flailed out at random points on its body. That one was a little too advanced for either of the players currently facing each other in this particular local match, though Kyo's lack of interest in playing as a "Lovecraftian hentai abomination" had contributed somewhat to her failure to get a handle on it.

Unlike fighting games played on a regular game system or arcade cabinet, performing moves here wasn't just a matter of quick reactions and practicing input combos until one could do them without thinking. It pretty much called for a complete rewiring of the player's brain. Nightwalkers was therefore one of the NerveGear's most niche early titles, with only around twenty-five-thousand or so copies sold in Japan to date. Not a terrible number, since there weren't many NerveGear units in circulation yet, but far from amazing.

The succubus was considered "intermediate" in terms of control difficulty, because while it did have a human form for the most part... it also had wings, and in order to use them the way this player had, it was necessary for the player to pretend that they had bones and muscles in their back that didn't exist in real life. Once mastered, the player could access limited but useful flight capabilities that transformed this otherwise basic female humanoid character into a swift, dangerous mid-to-close-range fighter that was almost tied with Cosmic Question at the top of this game's very short competitive tier list.

Kyo was very good at using Lilim Moonsway's flight mechanics. The only things that kept her from being unstoppable were the game's oppressively low flight-time and flight-altitude limits.

Giggling, she flapped her wings and rose into the air, not quite out of reach of the werewolf's terrifyingly swift, slashing leaps. Kyo hoped to bait Kenshin into trying one of those leaps so she could swoop underneath and get him in the belly with a combo, but they had played together so often since this game had come out that he knew better than to fall for such a ploy. His growling stopped and he turned his head a bit to the side, eying her with a look that gave the impression that his wolf's maw was grinning at her. It was a look that might have been saying, I know what you're up to. Or maybe just, Dinner!

The stand-off lasted several seconds... and then, Kyo flapped her wings, jolting forward—

At the same moment, the wolf dashed along the ground, hoping to slip beneath her and get her from behind. But she was ready for that, too—

—and then they both stopped short, Kyo the Succubus doing an awkward midair turning drift and Kenshin the Werewolf skidding to a dead stop and grunting in a way that might have been a swear if the wolf's mouth could do language at all. Both of them were seeing the same notice at the top-right corner of their vision: a blinking red text-box alerting them that the NerveGear's built-in alarm clock had gone off.

Well, it's time, Kyo thought. Guess we're gonna be settling this one in Aincrad.

The succubus grinned down at the werewolf, shrugged her shoulders, and let herself freefall to the floor, landing daintily on her feet with the one-two clack of high heels on stone. The wolf huffed, and after a few seconds looking at each other, they moved at the same time... both of them ducking into identical, formal Japanese bows of apology as if begging each other for mercy.

This was what the system read as a forfeit, so long as a player held the pose for more than three seconds. And if both players did the pose at the same time, the system would tally the match on both players' accounts as "no-contest," so that it didn't affect their running tally of wins, losses, and draws.

Once she was out of Full Dive and could see the timer on the NerveGear's visor-screen, Kyo tugged the NerveGear off and then swung her legs straight up vertically above her hips, feet parallel to the ceiling. From this position, she snapped her body in a whipping motion, leaping into a Spider-Man crouch on the mattress. "Oof!" she heard from the bed's other occupant, who sat up ungracefully and gave her a playful scowl. "Watch it, my hand was over there!"

"Now what would your hand've been doin' in the general vicinity o' my lower reaches? Hmmmm, Ken-kun?" Kyo teased, but in a low voice so that the room's third occupant wouldn't hear.

She turned eyes full of taunting heat on her boyfriend, who smirked in answer to the challenge. It was a game they had been playing with each other whenever they went into Full Dive in the same room; Kyo had been the instigator, of course, because even rough-and-tumble Kenshin Nakadachi was too much a gentleman to pull this sort of stunt without a lady's permission. But ever since their third co-op, same-room dive, whoever went into Full Dive after the other would find an interesting part of the other's body to rest a hand or finger on while they uttered the words Link Start. The objective would be to make the other blush when they woke up. So far, Kyo was in the lead... but, only by two points. Women had more embarrassing places to touch! ...It was the sort of game that could only be played between a couple with their intimate level of trust, and again, Kyo was pretty shameless by nature.

She had to admit that Kenshin had been quite daring to do this while someone else was in the room, though. Honestly, it kinda got her going a little. He'd pay for that one when they got some time alone after the stream...

"Well, that does it for the pre-stream recording test," Benjiro announced from the desk behind Kyo and her right. "I'll archive that one for you two later, so you can look over the fight. Might not see as much as you'd like, since it's all from Kyo's point of view. But, might as well, I guess."

Kyo looked over her shoulder, then turned around and sat cross-legged at the corner of the bed. Shaking the mop of dyed-green hair out from the frankly uncomfortable bunches it always got clumped into when she put on the NerveGear headset, Kyo wished (and not for the first time) that she could jump forward a half-decade or so in time, to whatever year it would be when Argus inevitably developed some kind of "NerveGear S" slim model... one that resembled the old VR goggle headsets, instead of a fucking X-Wing pilot helmet.

She couldn't even imagine trying to use this thing if she'd been, like, a black woman with an afro, or a dude who liked to spike his hair out with gel, or something. Come to think of it, how had Benjiro used it? Did he really make his daily hairstyling choices based on whether or not he planned to use his NerveGear that day?

"You got the whole match, then?" she heard Kenshin ask. The shifting weight on the mattress told her that he'd settled down at the foot of the bed just behind her.

"Yep... all twenty minutes of it," Gadget Genkai said, exasperated. "It was thrilling stuff, or at least it was when stuff was happening. The rest of the time... were you two playing mind games with each other, or was all the growling and giggling some kind of nonverbal pillow talk?"

"Yes," Kyo and Kenshin both said at the same time.

Benjiro heaved a sigh and sent them a annoyed look as Kenshin draped his arms smugly over Kyo shoulders and she, just as smugly, leaned into him. Since they were planning an extended dive, they were both wearing layabout clothes, the kind that one wore whilst lounging around the house after waking up at 2 PM and having leftover pizza for breakfast. Which in Kyo's case meant she was in in shorts and a flimsy tank-top that exposed both her feminine midriff and the unusual amount of muscle tone that texturized her otherwise diminutive and girlish figure.

"Guys," Benjiro said. "Can you at least refrain from frisking each other until after we're done and I can, y'know... leave you two alone?"

"We'll think about it," Kyo said unconvincingly. Kenshin just grinned and made a show of planting a kiss somewhere in Kyo's mop of green-dyed hair.

~ V ~

After closing his eyes and praying to the gods for a patience buff, Benjiro shook his head and pushed his chair back from the computer desk. The motion rattled several bits of loose hardware that he kept out as decorative fluff for when the camera was pointed in that general direction. "Right, should've known better than to ask at all..." he said. "We're on in fifteen for the pre-stream. Our bit is audio-only, and should only go for about ten minutes. Then we'll have a half-hour break before the servers go live. You already got your avatars sorted out, right?"

"Yep," Kenshin said. "I'll be taking the beta avatar we shared, Garett Stone, and Kyo will be—"

"—playin' as myself!" Kyo finished brightly, grinning.

Benjiro spun his chair around, staring blankly at Kyo. "What."

"Playin' as myself!" Kyo said again. "Y'can save and share avatar customizations usin' those long passcodes, right?"

"Oh. Yeah, I remember. And the NerveGear lets you save those to an OS notepad app," Benjiro said slowly. "What's that got to do with it, though?"

"Wellllll," Kyo said, leaning over and smirking up at her boyfriend. "The code's only so long 'cause it has variables for every little stinkin' thing. Face, hair, eye color, body type variables, muscle tone on different parts o' the body, a girl's 'measurements,' and on, and on. Some o' the variables ain't even covered by the avatar assets the game provides. Just about the only thing the code doesn't have in it is the size of a dude's junk, actually! ...Which makes the whole 'measurements' thing feel a little lopsided, in my opinion, but what can ya do."

Kenshin rolled his eyes. "This is Japan, Kyo," he said. "Of course that isn't in there. They'd never be able to sell."

"Phooey t' you and your logic," Kyo said. "Anyway, thing is, the avatar-creation code also works for that VR shoppin' mall that came out for the system before the beta went up. Remember?"

"Oh yeah," Benjiro said, finally catching on. He hadn't even thought to see if those codes were compatible.

Some bright-eyed retail giant from America had seen dollar signs when the NerveGear dev kits had gone out. They had hired a Japanese software developer to produce a virtual reality shopping application for them. This was one of several free apps for the system catering chiefly to casual and especially female consumers, by letting users Full Dive to access some sort of service from home that they would normally have to go out for. There was a virtual movie theater app that emulated all the comfort and clarity of watching a film at a physical theater (although the devs hadn't implemented theater food yet). There a virtual classroom in which friends could meet online to study together and through which professional home tutors could give home-schooled children lessons remotely (although its functionality was still pretty limited).

And then there was the virtual reality shopping mall.

So far it only did clothing, jewelry, game shops, and the like. New products and new categories were frustratingly slow to be added if their in-app models needed to have any sort of detail. But the shopping mall's most useful function was that it utilized the high-tech scanning array inside the NerveGear headset to replicate the user's face, and recreated their general body type by using data from the rig's first-boot calibration process... combined with anatomical sliders so that the user could custom-specify things that the rig couldn't accurately determine on its own. This allowed for something that online shopping enthusiasts hadn't been able to do before: trying out clothes and shoes before ordering them. It had gotten quite popular with NerveGear users since its release on the Argus e-shop.

The mall app also provided, under its account settings, a long passcode that could be used to conveniently recreate the same avatar in other apps that used these functions. Most people tended to ignore this, since any other apps that did the same thing would probably just recreate a mostly-accurate version of the user without input. It hadn't occurred to Benjiro that the passcode system for the mall app was the same as the one SAO used, but then, he'd had no interest in a Full Dive shopping app for trying-and-buying clothes and only knew about it because he'd done a video feature a while back in which he gave brief, speculative evaluations of the NerveGear's early offerings and what might be expected of the system in the future.

He wouldn't have guessed the absurdly boyish Kyo Morinaga'd had much interest in such an app either. But then again, she had a Machiavellian tendency to devise bizarre and roundabout solutions to problems. And the app itself was free, you'd only spend money if you ordered something. Maybe she'd just thought to try it out in a fit of whimsy.

Or maybe she had some other twisted reason for using it that he didn't want to even ask about. With her, it impossible to guess.

Benjiro had known Kyo as an acquaintance since middle school, though they'd lived in different cities. Kyo's uncle had been Benjiro's next-door neighbor for a time, and whenever little Kyo had been dragged there for a family visit (little-girl pigtails wibbling and wobbling with every sulking step she took), the girl had found time to drift away from the adults to pester Benjiro about the games and computer stuff he'd liked even back then, stuff that her mother and father evidently believed that little girls were not allowed to show interest in.

It hadn't been until years later when she'd seen one of his videos online that Kyo had gotten in touch and they'd really become friends, though. By then they were both in their final lap around the metaphorical high school track. Kyo had already been dating Kenshin Nakadachi for almost half a year.

Their present degree of collaboration would not have come about, however, had Kyo and Benjiro not both been lucky enough to be selected for the Sword Art Online beta testing phase at the same time. The odds had been astronomical, and when Kyo had gotten her slot, she'd assumed Benjiro hadn't gotten one and had bragged about it to him in an instant message.

When they'd realized that they could meet up in-game, they'd made plans. That had been when Kyo had finally introduced Kenshin to him. Since her boyfriend was the one who would spend the most time logged in (due to the aforementioned mommy-and-daddy issues), Kenshin was the one that Benjiro had mostly partied with during the beta. He'd had to settle for hearing about most of Kyo's Aincrad adventures secondhand via IM chat, since she had always logged in so late at night. But she'd told him some interesting things about the game's movement, acrobatics, and combat functions that he and Kenshin hadn't managed to figure out on their own.

Kyo was that kind of thinks-outside-the-box, experimental type of player. It was really a pity that she hadn't been able to log that many hours during the beta, because if she had, she'd undoubtedly have uncovered and reported more glitches and exploits than any other player. Benjiro thought so, anyway.

"Wait." Benjiro leaned back, folding his arms as a potential problem occurred to him. "Won't that block the broadcaster's view? You know... the hair? Your left eye?"

Kyo grinned and brushed a finger through the unruly curtain of fir-tree-green that fell over the left side of her face.

"Nahhhh. I checked before the beta ended, and if your hairstyle covers an eye, the game just treats it as invisible t' your own NerveGear. Only other players see it."

"Ah, okay. That's fine, then. Go nuts."

~ V ~

"Hey, Kazuto! Um, sorry to bug you, but... can I come in?"

He looked up from his magazine, just barely catching his sister's voice over the "white noise" music playlist he'd been killing the last fifteen minutes with. He probably wouldn't have heard her at all, except he'd intentionally kept the volume lowered so that he could also hear MMO Stream in the background. He wasn't really interested in the host's spiel—Harumi was a bit overly tryhard at sounding "cute" and it really wasn't his thing, even if a lot of guys liked it. Gadget Genkai's pre-stream feature on the retail launch had ended a bit ago. So Kazuto had tuned out again, and was waiting for Genkai to return with the first-ever Full Dive livestream to grace the 'net with its awesomeness.

As a result, he actually heard it when Suguha Kirigaya knocked at his door and asked to enter. He winced, and thought about ignoring her...

...but then he sighed. He had some time to kill anyway. "I'll be right over," he said. He left his headphones on his desk, hit "pause" on the audio player, and went to open the door.

Suguha stood there, rocking back and forth on bare feet, dressed in a stay-home pair of shorts and a t-shirt. He was a little surprised; he didn't keep close track of his family's schedules, but he did at least pay enough attention to know when they might be home and when to expect they'd go off somewhere. Wasn't today practice day? Suguha was into sports and took kendo lessons. And she was good at it; she'd even made it to nationals for her age group. So why was she here, and why was she absolutely not dressed to leave the house?

His first thought had been that she'd just come to let him know she was leaving, as she usually did when it was just the two of them in the house, and hadn't gotten ready to go yet. Apparently not, though, because she stopped rocking on her feet, clasped her hands behind her shorts, and said, "Um, I called sensei and told him I wasn't feeling well," she said. "So I'm staying in today. Are you... are you busy?"

And she looked up to him apologetically. Oh. So that was what this was about.

"Sugu..." Kazuto mumbled awkwardly. "I told you it was my fault, didn't I...?"

Suguha bit her lip, and Kazuto stood there. Silence dragged on for a bit, neither of them moving and neither knowing what to say.

It had been his fault. He'd been goofing off, and he'd paid for it. But even worse than not being able to play Sword Art Online on launch day, he seemed to have made Suguha feel really guilty about his injury. And there didn't seem to be any talking her out of it. She didn't deserve it, and he felt like a knife was being twisted in his side whenever something reminded him about it.

He stepped aside wordlessly, realizing that just standing there would probably make it worse, and she walked into his room. Her eyes glided around the place as if it were a landscape as alien to her as Aincrad would have been. Eventually her eyes landed on the NerveGear. "So that's..." she murmured, "...the, um, the thing you use to play that VR game, right?"

"Uh-huh," he said, nodding. "Well, I'm not going to be using it. If you're staying home, you wanna give it a try? I'm just going to be watching a stream of the game, so you're free to take it for a spin if you want."

He asked jokingly, not really expecting her to be interested. Her eyes lit up and for a moment he thought she might surprise him by taking him up on his offer. But she grinned, and shook her head.

"Maybe another day," she say. "I am a little curious. I'd feel bad if I got to play it before you do, though. Um, how's your head...?"

"It's fine," Kazuto said. He reached up and brushed a finger beneath his bangs, where thin stitches could still be felt. The cut was mostly healed and the stitches would naturally dissolve soon. "To be honest, the doctor doesn't know what he's talking about. A little head injury like this wouldn't be affected by a dive. But, mom says I can't play, so I can't play. It's only for a few days, so..."

"You say that, but I can tell you're still frustrated," Suguha said meekly. She turned to face her brother. "Um, to tell you the truth... since you can't play, I thought maybe I could keep you company today."

For the first time in a while, Kazuto was struck by how unlike him she was... in appearance as well as personality. Sometimes it was so plain to see that she wasn't really born to the same parents as him, and this had ended up being one of those times.

"You don't need to do that..." Kazuto said, looking away. "Besides, I'm just going to be doing, you know, nerd stuff. Watching some computer geeks play SAO and talk about the NerveGear. It'd bore you tears, honestly."

"Oh, I don't know about that," Suguha said, a tentative smile surfacing. "This did all start with you trying to do your VR sword moves in real life, didn't it? And then you asked for a spar. I was really surprised. I'm a little curious about it if it could get you of all people to try your hand with a shinai again."

"Haha... well..." Kazuto mumbled, scratching the back of his head. "I never did explain that, did I? I'm not really sure if you'd, uh, if you'd get it..."

"Try me," Suguha said, putting her hands on her ample hips. Kazuto would have been a stuttering mess if he'd been talking to any other girl with Suguha's figure; as it was, the only feeling her looks ever inspired in him was profound relief that he had an excuse not to be the Overprotective Big Brother when she started showing interest in boys. He could already tell that in a few years, that would be like going solo against a war fleet of wyverns with a plastic bat joke weapon instead of a sword.

"Ah, well, there's a dueling system in the game," he said, deciding to humor her. "You know... player-versus-player swordfights and stuff."

"Swordfights in virtual reality..." Suguha mused, walking over to the corner of his bed and sitting down on it. "Wait, what's that got to do with you wanting to swing around a practice sword? Don't you control your character with some kind of game-pad or something?"

"What? Oh, not even," Kazuto laughed, a bit stiffly. He shut his door and went over to his desk chair. A glance at his computer's taskbar clock told him there was a bit of time before the server went live and the stream started.

"Then what?"

Kazuto reached up and picked up the NerveGear, slipping it on over his head but not switching it on.

"When you boot up the NerveGear and say 'Link Start,' you go into what's called a Full Dive," he said. "When that happens, the device... how do I put this... it basically hijacks your nervous system and your five senses. It, uh... it intercepts all the signals to and from your brain except for the ones needed to keep your body functioning. So instead of seeing what your eyes see, you 'see' what the game sends through your optic nerves. And instead of feeling or hearing what your skin or ears would, you feel or hear what the game makes you feel or hear. Same for taste and touch. You can eat eat virtual food, and do all kinds of other things. It's... a bit like the NerveGear beams a really vivid dream into your head. In SAO's case, it would be a dream of fantasy adventure."

His voice picked up energy and enthusiasm as he worked his way through the explanation; socially awkward though Kazuto was, it had always been easy to get talking when it was about the stuff he was really into, and he was really into the amazing things that NerveGear tech was capable of.

"Wow..." Suguha said. Her eyes widened. "Can I have a look?"

With a lopsided grin, Kazuto took the headset off and passed it over to Suguha, who leaned forward to take it and turned it over to look into the underside.

"So..." she said slowly, "if it hijacks all the signals from your brain, do you control your character like it's your own body?"

"Yep."

"Oh!" Suguha burst out, eyes glittering. "So it's not just some videogame swordfight, it's an actual swordfight!"

"Well, yes and no," Kazuto replied, bemused. Suguha was turning the headset over and looking at it from all angles. "You move your body to fight, but it's not the same as being a swordsman or athlete in the real world. If it was, not many people would have fun playing it. You'd have to be good at it in real life, and how many people do you know who can use a battle axe?"

"Oh? I guess that makes sense," Suguha said, peeking over the dome of the NerveGear. "But how do you swordfight with your body if it's not the same as the real world?"

"Well, you definitely have an advantage if you're used to doing certain things in reality," Kazuto said earnestly. "But the system is designed with a lot of moves that let anybody be an effective player if they just know when and where to activate them, and what to do when you aren't using them. Those special moves are called Sword Skills."

"Sword Skills..."

"There's a Katana skill you can unlock in the game, for example. Now, someone who does kendo like you could fight like you do in the real world, and that would be really useful. But on top of that, whether you have that real-world skill or not, your movement speed, strength, and what kind of stunts you can pull off in the game all depend on your avatar's in-game stats... numbers, like strength and agility. Then, there are the Sword Skills, which use a system assist to guide your body."

Kazuto lifted his hands and mimed taking a high-guard stance with a sword.

"You move your body in a specific way for each move, and your weapon glows and sends you a bit of physical feedback to let you know system assist is about to take over. Then the system moves your body for you and pretty much guarantees you'll always hit your target, unless it's another player who know how to dodge or counter the skill you used. Anybody can use the Sword Skills, the other in-game abilities, and their stats to be effective at fighting the game's monsters and doing quests and stuff. But players who can combine that with genuine athletic skill, or who practice enough in-game to develop some, will always have an advantage against other players."

"I get it now..." Suguha said, sounding awed. She set the NerveGear on her knee. "That's why you wanted to practice all of a sudden."

"Well, not... entirely," Kazuto said sheepishly, rubbing the back of his head. "I mean, that's part of it. But I really just... got hyped for the game and went temporarily insane, I guess? I wanted to feel what it was like to fight with a sword again. Which wouldn't have been enough on its own for me to ask, but I'm also looking forward to going toe to toe with a certain someone from the beta test, if I can track that player down in the retail game."

"...I'm really sorry I screwed that up for you," Suguha groaned, flopping backward onto the bed with the headgear still propped on her knee. "Now I feel even worse about it. Hearing you talk about it like that, Sword Art Online sounds amazing."

"Really? You're actually interested?" Kazuto said. "And stop feeling bad about it. I keep telling you, it was my own stupid fault!"

It had also been a complete accident. They had been sparring, and Suguha had taken an opening to whack Kazuto a good one in the head for being awful at swordplay. How the heck were either of them supposed to know that one particular head protector in the family dojo's supply closet had been on the verge of breaking? She'd whacked it hard enough to crack it, and Kazuto had been taken so far off-guard by it that he'd slipped, dropped his own practice sword, and somehow fallen face-first on top of it. Not only had he bumped his head, he'd managed to cut his forehead open badly on the crack that had opened inside of his own helmet. He'd gotten up, wobbling and trying to tell Suguha how good she was at swords through the fog.

And then the blood had dripped into his eyes and he frozen up.

Suguha had panicked and shrieked for help. Fortunately, it turned out that head wounds like that one were just the sort of thing that bled profusely even if they weren't all that deep or serious. The fact that he'd been so dizzy and disoriented for a bit there had been because of the impact, not the bleeding.

"I still feel bad," Suguha insisted again. She angled her head up to look at him. "But, hey, did you say you were going to be watching a livestream of the game?"

"Yeah. A famous Internet guy's hosting it in... oh, darn, it's almost time!"

For he had glanced at the clock on his PC and realized with a start that it was five minutes to 1 PM. Suguha immediately sat up, without even using her arms; she was just that physically fit.

"Hey, mind if I watch it with you? I'd like to see this amazing VR swordfighting game for myself," she said, smiling hopefully. It was the last thing Kazuto had expected out of this conversation, so he hesitated before answering.

"Oh... sure, I don't mind."

"Great! I'll go get a folding chair from the kitchen."

And Suguha bounded out of the room, leaving Kazuto to stare at the door and wonder when the planet had started spinning vertically instead of horizontally and doing backwards long jumps up the final boss staircase of the solar system. Suguha... showing interest in a videogame? Between that and a hitherto unheard-of NerveGear recording program making a surprise last-second debut, it seemed to be a day for the impossible to become possible.

Grinning wryly, Kazuto turned back to his PC to pull the headphone plug out and turn his external speakers up, so that Sugu could hear the stream when she got back.

~ V ~

The time had come. She and Kenshin had joined Gadget Genkai on MMO Stream to briefly introduce themselves and talk about their time with SAO's beta test over the summer. Kyo had given an embellished version of her own history with it, since being honest would have meant airing out some personal shit on-stream and that would have just been a major buzzkill for everyone involved.

That done, they'd taken a short break. Then, all too soon and yet not soon enough for this particular, impatient girl, 1:00 PM ticked closer.

"Alright. Almost go time. You two ready?" Benjiro said, staring at the main monitor where his recording program dominated the screen. It looked no different from any ordinary open-broadcast-software program for screen capture and console recording, but Kyo knew from experience that its underlying functionality was pretty unique.

A bundle of wires and cables ran from one side of her NerveGear (technically it was Benjiro's NerveGear) all the way to the rear of the high-end PC tower beside the desk, where it plugged into a custom-designed internal component that was, essentially, just a highly specialized video capture device with its own dedicated graphics processor. An external solid state drive had been plugged in and lay blinking atop the tower, ready to receive any archive recordings they made while streaming; it was he fastest, most cutting-edge drive on the market, because it had to be in order to keep up with the process of converting VR audiovisual data into a two-dimensional video file for monitor playback, and then sending that footage into the broadcast program for streaming.

A whole stack of similar drives stood on a shelf within arm's reach of Benjiro's chair, ready to be swapped in as others filled up. Because of the process of conversion, recording the footage as video archive files during a livestream was not an optional convenience as it would be with conventional games, but a mandatory step in the process. Benjiro still needed to work on a version of the program that could convert and stream footage without this middle step; until he did, getting together the hardware necessary to stream NerveGear titles would be prohibitively expensive.

The man himself had brought out a professional-looking microphone on a complicated-looking, adjustable, arm-like stand that was clamped to the desk and arranged so that the mic hung right about where it needed to be for him to talk at it. The plan was to keep on recording and streaming all the way to Floor 100 of Aincrad over the next however-long-it-took, so they would need a lot of space and nothing but the best equipment to work with if they were to see this project to its conclusion.

"Alright! We are ready t' make gaming history!" Kenshin said, giving a thumbs-up to the back of Benjiro's head.

Kyo nodded, a similarly pointless thing to do when someone wasn't looking at you, and took a breath. "Only now am I startin' t' get stage-jitters. Go figure."

"Because you're getting all twisted up planning what you're going to do," Benjiro said. "You'll get over it once you're in the thick. You two should stop thinking and start diving."

"Kyeh-heh... you're prolly right," Kyo said. She laid down as bouncily as she could permit herself to, given the number of wires trailing out of the side of her head at the moment. "Once I've got a weapon in hand again, I'll barely even remember you're spyin' on us through my left eyeball, Ben... you creepy creeper, you."

"Hey, you volunteered! You exhibitionist!"

"Not sure whether to be turned on or to punch this guy in the face," Kenshin murmured from next to her on the bed. Kyo snickered, and turned her head to look at him through the NerveGear's visor.

"See ya on the other side," she said, with a wink and poke to his abdomen. Then she whispered huskily: "You know the rules. Your turn, sexy."

Kenshin's smile transitioned into a smirk, and he said, "See you there." Then, whispering in turn: "Don't touch anythin' I wouldn't touch."

"Doesn't 'xactly narrow it down, does it?" she responded under her breath with a laugh.

"Will you two horny rabbits quit giving each other bedroom eyes and just dive already? You have thirty seconds!"

"Roger that, boss!" they both said. Then Kenshin turned his head to face the ceiling, closed his eyes, and said, "Link Start."

His body relaxed in that way that signified all conscious mental commands to move his muscles had ceased. Beyond that and three little lights on the far side of his headset, which Kyo couldn't see from her present angle, there was no outward sign that his mind had left the real world and was on its way to Aincrad.

Drawing in a slow, silent breath, Kyo turned her head to face the ceiling as well. With about fifteen seconds remaining, she had to decide what part of her boy-toy she was going to almost-grope to best make him blush after the game. She lifted her left hand, running through a few possibilities in her mind...

...then, she breathed, "Ah, fuck it. I'm nervous right now. So I'll be a dumbshit romantic, just this once..."

So she snaked the fingers of her left hand between those of his right. Kyo took a moment to savor the warmth of her boyfriend's hand intertwined with her own, and then she squeezed it and echoed the NerveGear's universal Full Dive activation command.

"Link Start!"

~ V ~

He'd gone and taken too long to customize his avatar, dang it all! Now he was sitting there staring the character name selection and grinding his teeth. All the cool classic samurai-movie names he'd had in mind had been claimed already.

Ryotaro put his invisible, virtual tongue between his invisible virtual teeth; his (thankfully visible) virtual arm and hand hovered over the projected touch interface, having held down "backspace" long enough to clear the text field again. He looked up at the handsome, red-haired male he'd constructed to play as. It was approximately the same height and build as he was in real life; one thing he'd figured out from online research was that playing as a character whose height was drastically different from the player's in the real world sometimes caused players additional difficulty at judging distance and size.

But he hadn't known about the time-consuming calibration process when he'd started the NerveGear up for the first time. If he had, he'd have set his alarm half an hour earlier to make sure he had time! Apparently the calibration was used so that the system had an accurate idea of the player's true body type so it could compensate when the virtual body they needed to control in a game was different from the one in the real world.

A glance up at the corner of his peripheral vision told Ryotaro that he had about a minute and a half to decide on a name or he'd be late out the gate. That would have been a pain even if he hadn't agreed to meet someone for a launch-day livestream, since he'd planned to scope out the opening town for any players who seemed to already know where they should go to get the ball rolling on hunting and leveling. At least now there was a little less pressure, since Kenshin Nakadachi and his girlfriend would probably wait a few minutes for him. If he hadn't had that to look forward to, it would have been a disaster. The beta testers would probably just beam into the game and sprint off immediately to call dibs on some amazing early-game quest or dungeon.

Still, he didn't want to keep them waiting...

"Come on, come on, brain! Think!" he muttered. Then: "Ah, shit, of course. How could I forget?"

The NerveGear could only detect a user's brainwaves to a limited extent. According to the articles the Ryotaro had read online, the technology needed to create a software interface that responded to a player's "thoughts" as a control method was still a long way off—if it was possible at all. Even what little input there was that the system could pick up in this way wasn't completely reliable. For example, the system had the capability to determine the player's real-life biological sex via brainwave scan, and it mostly worked... except for the times when it didn't. The technology for intercepting body motion commands and nerve signals for the five senses was far more accurate and reliable than any of its brainwave-related components.

As a result, the NerveGear utilized a system for its user interface that was functionally similar to the games made for older stereoscopic VR accessories: motion control. The difference was that, instead of waving a motion controller of some sort around, one only needed to move their body in a pre-determined way to trigger a function. And if a game utilized a visible menu, it could be interacted with like a holographic touch display, complete with tactile feedback, as if it were a physical object within the game's world. Thus the name-entry keypad, while it appeared holographic, felt like a physical keyboard when a player's fingers pressed down on the keys.

Ryotaro swiped his right arm down as if miming a very ineffectual karate chop, and a list of NerveGear system menu items appeared. Among them were the settings menu, a limited SMS text-messaging app, music and video players that could load anything the player decided to store in their NerveGear's internal drive, and a built-in Internet browser. Most of this wouldn't be enabled within Sword Art Online itself until Argus put out a patch update to implement it. But since the avatar creation "screen" (more of a "room," really) was something that used the NerveGear's base-level operating system to function, all of those system-level apps were still available while the player worked on their avatars. If a player wished to, they could sit here for hours just dicking around with the different character-design options and jamming out to music. Some players probably had done that, and the way Ryotaro heard it, the multiplayer lobbies for a few other launch-year titles worked the same way.

Grinning, he tapped the icon for the NerveGear's web browser, and quickly pulled up a bookmark he'd had saved ever since he'd picked up the system a month before. He'd wanted to save his first Full Dive experience for SAO's launch day. But he had set up the system ahead of time with a few visor-display apps in preparation, including a link to a promising MMORPG name generator webpage. He figured it'd give him more names that fit his tastes than the ones that SAO's random-name button had come up with so far.

Opening that page in a tab, he pressed a finger to the top and performed a by-hand, mid-air drag-and-drop. It was a surreal operation to perform three-dimensionally with one's index finger rather than with a mouse or a touch-screen; Ryotaro couldn't help but chuckle at the novelty of it. He positioned the window just above the name-entry field display. Then he tapped the "Male" and "Human" options that the generator page gave him, and began rhythmically tapping the Generate Random Name button at the bottom of the browser window.

It cycled through a few sets of seven names. Ryotaro skimmed through them absently, thinking he maybe felt like something beginning with a "K" sound, like Kurosawa or maybe even something that sounded foreign... Maybe a "KR" sound... or would that actually be a "KL" sound? He always got those two mixed up, since they sounded so alike...

...Perfect. We have a winner!

Grinning and hoping this one wasn't taken like the last bunch of names he'd tried, he quickly typed out five letters in the name-entry field and hit "Confirm."

The name "Klein," as it happened, hadn't been claimed yet. He rectified that immediately. So it was that a handsome, red-haired samurai was born into Aincrad on that day with that name, and Ryotaro thought it was a pretty slick name for a dashing warrior hero, if he did say so himself.

~ V ~

"Wow," Suguha said in awe, and then bit a piece off the low-fat potato chip she'd been holding in her hand. "I knew games had gotten pretty realistic, but I imagine seeing all of that with my eyes instead of on a computer screen, and it must be so amazing."

"It really is," Kazuto said earnestly. He leaned back in his chair and tugged his own bag of chips open. "There are things about the visuals that aren't quite real enough if you look at them closely. The graphics aren't much more advanced than you'd get on a high-end PC, really. And the system can only do so well at emulating certain things you might touch, taste, or smell, and sometimes that can take you out of it. Like, if you're swimming, the water feels off, just a little bit 'wrong.' But other than that and the NPCs being kind of robotic, it really does feel like a 'world.'"

"NPCs?" Suguha asked.

"It stands for 'non-player characters.' Like, you know, shopkeepers and stuff."

"Oh. You gaming nerds sure use a lot of abbreviations for things."

"Haha, yeah. It's a bit like having our own secret language sometimes. Normies keep out!"

"Pff. That wasn't a compliment, you goof!"

After sharing a laugh with Kazuto, Suguha popped the other half of the chip into her mouth and considered the possibilities. She couldn't help feeling another pang of guilt for delaying her brother's re-entry into that "world."

She had brought in not just a folded chair tucked under one arm as she'd said she was going to, but on a whim she'd grabbed some snacks and a couple of canned drinks from the fridge (which stood unopened for the moment on Kazuto's mousepad) and stuffed them in a spare convenience-store bag so that she could bring in everything they might need in one trip, as she might have done during her rare but always-memorable sleepover nights with one of the girls she knew from school. While Suguha was interested in this game in a way she hadn't expected to be twenty minutes before, her primary reason for being here was still to make it up to her brother by making his day just a little bit better.

So the snacks and drinks had seemed like a fitting olive branch. If he was going to be stuck here just watching the game that he really wanted to be playing instead, the least Suguha figured she could do was save him a couple of snack runs while he did that. That was what she told herself, but in reality, she had to admit that part of the reason for this "courtesy" was that as long as the snacks and drinks lasted, she had an excuse to stay there with him for for a little longer. They'd barely spent a few minutes together now, and even that was an unusually long time for them...

Suguha couldn't help but feel a guilty sort of excitement at the realization that she might have momentarily, and completely by accident, managed to break the ice with her increasingly distant big brother. It wasn't as if they disliked each other, but... well, it had been years now since they had really done any kind of sibling bonding, not to put too fine a point on it.

On the screen, after a lead-in by a female hostess (Suguha hadn't caught her name), the male voice that apparently belonged to one Gadget Genkai had declared that they were "going live" and the stream window had crossfaded into a zooming tunnel of colors. Then, five circles with English words had appeared on screen and lined themselves quickly along the right side of what Suguha understood to be player's field of vision. Kazuto had explained without prompting that this strange event was the NerveGear's pre-game Full Dive boot test: it confirmed the connection with the player's five senses one after the other, sight, smell, hearing, taste, and touch, to make sure that the player could dive properly. In rare cases, he'd said, certain players would experience irregularities in one sense or another for reasons that no one entirely understood. She supposed that was only to be expected. It sounded like a complicated machine, and everyone's brain was a little different, right?

Now she was staring through someone else's vision at a large, apparently circular city square in a fantasy world. It looked like one of those game or anime cities that was too "almost-medieval" to exist in a world with modern technology, but wasn't nearly medieval enough to be a real historical setting. It was picturesque, though, if a little basic. Suguha had seen similar imagery in movies she'd watched with friends.

Then again, it is just the beginning of the game, Suguha thought. She had one or two gamer classmates at school, like Nagata, and knew enough about role-playing games to guess that there must be more eye-catching and imaginative places that the player could find as they explored the world. Those Dragon Quest games and their ilk were supposed to take hours and hours and hours if you stuck with them all the way to their endings.

That said...

"If it's supposed to feel like a 'world,' though... isn't the music that's playing a little—?"

"Good afternoooooooon, Aincrad! Your soon-to-be PvP mistress is back and ready t' dominate! Kneel before the Midnight Butterfly, squealing pigs! Kyahahahahaahahahaha...!"

The voice interrupted Suguha and she jumped in her seat. The player had assumed what Suguha thought looked (from the first-person perspective afforded by the stream) like some kind of boxing stance. The so-called "Midnight Butterfly" threw two quick, precise jabs and a vicious uppercut at the air as she spoke, in jarring contrast to the words she spoke... as if she were some kind of BDSM-themed prize fighter or something. Suguha blinked.

"Huh. Well, she sounds... unique," Suguha commented. She giggled. "If someone made a commotion like that in the real world, everyone would just turn the Stare of Shame on them all at once and hold it there until that person melted into a puddle on the sidewalk. And then they'd stare some more because how dare you leave a puddle on the sidewalk!"

Kazuto laughed nervously, glancing uncertainly at her. "I-I didn't know she'd be like that, I swear! Actually, in the beta, she used a male avatar. I didn't find out she was a 'she' until today."

"Oh, so you've played with this person?"

A long-suffering sigh sounded through the PC's speakers, followed by Gadget Genkai dryly saying, "You wanna try and maybe not attract all the players on the server to photobomb the stream, Kyo?"

"Ehhhh, relax. Look: most of 'em ain't even here yet."

It seemed to be true. Even as Kyo spoke, Suguha saw more flashes of light were popping up hither and thither within Kyo's field of view, and she assumed they must be the other players all logging in one after another. She didn't know much about computers outside of how to use a web browser and her e-mail, but she had picked up a thing or two from conversations with her mother—Midori Kirigaya was the editor of a tech magazine, after all. If all of this were happening on a server, their arrivals in the virtual world must have been staggered somehow.

All the better not to blow up the server room, my dear, heeheehee! Suguha thought randomly, munching on another chip.

Not that there was much time to observe this, as the player looked around quickly, said, "That way, yeah? Yeah," and sprinted off toward one of the large, walled plaza's exits. Suguha guessed from the orientation of the two open gateways that she'd caught a glimpse of that the circular square probably had four exits, corresponding to the four cardinal directions.

As the player looked around, though, Sugu caught sight of a large bell-tower monument or something in the center of the square and thought that maybe she'd underestimated the starting city's visual appeal. Again, she wondered how it would feel to be standing in such an environment personally, seeing it with her own eyes, reaching out to lay her hand on the exterior surface of that bell tower...

A sentiment that the female MMO Stream host immediately seconded: "Oooh, it's so beautiful... I wish I was there myself!"

It was spoken with that typical way of playing up the excitement of something that Suguha recognized from television hosts. She wondered if the host had worked in television before, but she could also tell that there was genuine enthusiasm beneath the act.

"So, Genkai-san!" the host went on. "Now that we're here, why don't you tell us a little about how this streaming software works?"

Kazuto leaned in, evidently curious. But before thinking better of distracting him, Suguha blurted out the rest of the thought she'd left unfinished before Kyo had cut across her.

"If it's supposed to feel like a world, isn't the random music that's playing a little too, I don't know... 'game-like?'"

For there was indeed music playing in the game. It was soft, instrumental with some kind of string-instrument as its main focus (she didn't know enough about music to identify which instrument), and it sure did sound like the music that she would have attached to a medieval city in a movie or something. It sounded nice! But still, she thought it was weird.

"Well, apologies in advance," Gadget Genkai was saying. "It's not perfect yet, and some of the sound channels may be a little off. But basically, my custom rig duplicates and splits off video and audio signals before they reach they reach the player's brain. It works the same way that an HDMI splitter device does, in principle, but the way that NerveGear output is formatted isn't designed to be displayed on a monitor, so it's useless in its base form. To convert and transmit data that quickly, it requires a cutting-edge PC and top-of-the-line USB cables, and also some kick-ass custom capture hardware of my own design..."

"Oh, the music?" Kazuto said suddenly, as if his brain registered her question on a delay.

He seemed to be so engrossed in what he was hearing. Suguha bit her lip, realizing her mistake, but he went on, seeming not to mind the diversion at all.

"Out in the fields or in a dungeon, it's all ambient sound instead of music. And not just for atmosphere. You need to be able to listen closely while you explore to hear when monsters or other players are nearby, or you might get blindsided. There are other things to listen for, too. But in towns, which are safe zones, there's a lot of music that plays. To maintain a sense of immersion, they have NPC street musicians playing the music instead of just having it play out of nowhere like in other games... let me see if... ah, right there. See, by that window?"

Kyo was approaching the plaza's gate, beyond which stretched a wide market street lined with shop stalls and crowded with people who were probably characters in the game instead of players. Suguha could indeed see a musician playing some kind of instrument, but Kyo didn't focus on them at for the moment, so it was only a brief glimpse.

Gadget Genkai went on: "—of course, the video'd look weird on a monitor if I duplicated all the video data, and I haven't figured out how to put both eyes' visual data together into a 3D video format yet. So this works just like capturing conventional stereoscopic VR games. We're only seeing the visual data from Kyo's left eye right now."

"Yep!" Kyo affirmed, turning to look at a shop's display window and scowling at her faint reflection in it. "Gross, a skirt. I haven't worn one o' these since middle school. It looks so weird. And my hair's totally the wrong color... I need t' snag me a green hair dye item, like... yesterday. Just my luck, since the only way t' find hair dye on floor one's either a rare drop or a quest reward..."

The MMO Stream host giggled. "I think you look cute! But I guess your character definitely lifts, huh? You have too many muscles, Kyo-chan."

"I made this avatar look like the real me from the real world, and I don't do 'cute,'" Kyo responded obstinately, tugging at her jet-black bangs and pouting in an exaggerated way (this was, ironically, very kawaii indeed). "I guess our first order o' business is gonna be clothes shoppin', huh. It's gonna take me a few days t' remedy the hair-color problem even if I do it the fast way."

Suguha wondered why Kyo thought regular black hair was the wrong color for her. It looked pretty nice.

Genkai sighed again. "Shouldn't you be more worried about, I don't know... buying a sword? This is Sword Art Online, Kyo, not 'Osaka Tomboy Simulator 2022.'"

But before Kyo could shoot back with a witty retort, a girl's voice spoke up:

"E-excuse me... but did you say 'clothes shopping?'"

The stream's field of view turned to look at another player, who also had a female avatar. It seemed to be a pretty ordinary-looking girl, from what Suguha could tell. Cute and yet unremarkable, in a white-and-pink variation on the same starting gear that had been visible on Kyo's reflection.

Suguha heard Kazuto say, "Huh, I think that's the default..." though she didn't quite know what he meant.

"Uh, yeah," Kyo said. "I know where the best shop for that is. Wanna come with?"

The "default" girl player smiled hopefully, and nodded. "Um, yeah!" she said. "Thank you very much!"

Kyo gave the other player a thumbs-up. The MMO Stream host squealed.

"Oooh, and right out the gate we've made an unplanned friend!" she cheered. "I've heard that shopping in SAO is a lot like shopping in real life, too, just with more swords!"

"...Yeah, it is," Genkai responded exasperatedly. "Alright, then. I guess we were going to go over how shops work before we head out to decimate the local wild boar population, so we can work with this. I told you be more careful about who you let tag along while we're broadcasting, Kyo."

"I like it! As a long-time MMO fan, I say it's refreshing to see people just approach each other and talk like this!" said MMO Stream lady. "Really old-school... in any modern PC game, you'd just be running around ignoring each other until you needed help with a dungeon. Even if you join a random guild right away, probably you wouldn't actually play with them until way later. Laaaaaaaame."

Kazuto chuckled. "She's right, you know." Suguha looked back at him, puzzled, so he clarified: "A lot of newer MMORPGs are really streamlined, but they're also designed so that new players have an easy time getting through the main quests on their own. If you had to look for other players to do stuff with, it would take longer to catch up to all the players who've already reached the current 'endgame' level, so there aren't many places where you need to do that until later on. When you do, there's usually a system in place that automatically matches you with random players... you get matched up, blitz through the dungeon as fast as you can... not much time for social stuff along the way. It doesn't bother me too much, but I know some players who aren't as into it."

"That sounds like a waste," she remarked.

"Yeah, well, a lot of modern games aim for mass appeal, and that means not much takes all that long to do. If it takes a lot of time or a lot of effort it's a barrier to entry. I prefer the older games. They're a lot more inconvenient, but more immersive and if you're smart, you can be a lot more tactically flexible sometimes. Akihiko Kayaba wanted to design a game that had the feel of the old style of MMORPG. He also drew inspiration from some older single-player games, like Wizardry, the kind of stuff that's so old it's growing mushrooms. A lot of it is really slow and ponderous, but they have the kind of feeling that he wanted to evoke in SAO."

"What feeling is that?" Suguha asked, reaching for the can of fruit juice on the mousepad. (The soda next to it was for Kazuto.)

"Well, the quote he's most famous for is something like, 'This might be a game, but it's not something you play.'" Kazuto turned to look at Suguha, raising a hand and gesturing vaguely with it while he thought of how to explain the developer's mindset. Apparently he wasn't as interested in listening to the stream now that the subject of the recording software had passed.

There was a pause while Kazuto took a few seconds to consider how best to explain what this quote meant. In the background, Kyo had seemingly engaged the "default girl" in small talk, so Genkai had lowered the game audio to tell the host more about their plans for the day's play session.

"The idea was..." he began slowly, "...that if they were to just emulate what people like about modern MMORPGs played on a computer screen, it would be a waste of Full Dive's potential. Like, if you're just running around doing generic repeatable quests and waiting for the system to teleport you into a dungeon you've already done six times before, it wouldn't feel like it was taking advantage of the immersion that NerveGear is capable of. In those games, you also tend to repeat the same sequence of moves without much variation, because it's the efficient way to play the type of character you picked and if you deviate from that, you're dragging down the party. Akihiko Kayaba—he's the one who designed the system and he's also lead designer for SAO—said he'd leave those more streamlined games to other companies. He also just doesn't like those kinds of games. At all. So, yeah."

"I think I get it," Suguha mused. "What's the use of this sci-fi miracle helmet if you use it to just play the same kinds of games you play on a regular game console, right?"

"Exactly," Kazuto said, sounding surprised and pleased that Suguha agreed with the sentiment. But before he could say anything else, a voice called out:

"Jeez, I'll sure feel like an ass if I get this wrong, but are you the chick who's doing the MMO Stream collab? Garett Stone's girlfriend, that is?"

The voice that came through the lowered game volume was male and casual, but with a slight nervous edge of apology that suggested he was on the edge of backpedaling into Japanese formality at the first sign of rebuke. Kyo's field of view turned again, and Genkai apologized to the MMO Stream host before the game audio volume returned to normal again. The stranger's avatar was definitely customized, unlike "default girl's." It was tall and handsome, with long red hair. Suguha smiled, figuring that it made sense for the guys who play the game to make themselves all look movie-star-gorgeous. She wondered what this player looked like in reality. Probably not halfway as dashing, that was for sure!

"That's me!" Kyo said gamely, offering a hand to the guy without hesitation. "You're the one who's agreed to tag along for the livestream, then? Good. You can help Garett-kun pretend he's carryin' our shopping bags, heheh."

"Shopping bags? What would..." Pause. Then, with sudden excitement: "He DID ask you to introduce me to a friend!"

Both Kazuto and Suguha were left to stare in speechless exasperation as the movie-star-handsome warrior turned sharply toward "default girl," standing up straight and putting on a serious face.

"Hello!" he said intensely, and ducked into a perfect forty-five-degree-angle bow. "I'm Klein! I'm twenty-two, single, and looking for a girlfriend! It's good to meet you!"

"U-um... huh?!"

Default girl's response was echoed almost in stereo by Suguha. Kazuto scratched his chin. "W-well," he said with a shaky laugh, "female players are a bit rare. There are some guys who'll hit on anyone with a female avatar, hoping to get lucky. It just kind of annoys the few who actually are girls, and it's more likely that they end up hitting on a dude anyway."

Suguha's eyes narrowed. "Oh. Fun," she remarked blandly. Then she huffed: "Boys."

Kazuto chuckled and shook his head. "Hey, we aren't all like that."

"Are you?"

"Of course not!"

"Good. I'd have to take back my apologies if you were," Suguha jabbed, grinning.

"Take them back anyway! I keep telling you it was my own dumb fault!"

This is fun, Suguha thought, turning her attention back to the stream. We haven't bantered like this since forever... I guess he doesn't hate me after all.

Little did she know, her brother was thinking more or less the same kind of thing in that very same moment.

~ V ~

They'd agreed to meet on a particular street off the Teleport Plaza in the Town of Beginnings, but also to stagger their arrivals there a bit to give Benjiro and the stream host Harumi a chance to get some introductory chatter out of the way. It was an easy meet-up to arrange, since both he and his girlfriend had played the beta version and were pretty familiar with the town. That said, even the beta testers couldn't claim to have the entire layout memorized. Aincrad was designed to feel like a world, after all. That meant that, unlike towns in other games that were a bit unnaturally compact for the sake of convenience, even if they were supposed to be considered "large" within the setting...

...well, SAO was on another level.

The light faded from Kenshin's view and he saw through the eyes of his beta avatar, Garrett Stone, for the first time in months. He tried to recall the specifics of Aincrad's bottommost "floor."

To make a game feel like a truly continuous world, one would have to design something truly sprawling. That came with a logistical drawback for a videogame, in that most people who might want to play them didn't have time to go on a literal week-long trip to get somewhere in-game. The key to good world-design in such a game was to make it sprawling enough that it evoked the sense of going on a long journey while not actually taking up too much of the player's time: balance was key.

To that end, Sword Art Online was designed in such a way that enabled it to sort of have its cake and eat it at the same time. It was set in a gigantic, floating "steel castle" called Aincrad. This ludicrously huge structure, suspended high in the sky, was comprised of one hundred circular "slices" of open world to explore. No doubt there were lore reasons behind the game world taking this form, though in all ten or so floors that had been explored during the beta, those reasons hadn't been revealed... Kenshin suspected they had been left out on purpose, to keep the game's campaign story quests unspoiled prior to release...

...but the functional result was that the game world was divided into relatively digestible chunks. These, in turn, were connected to each other by a series of magical teleportation devices situated in the main towns of each floor. Each floor had a "main dungeon," which took the form of a large cylindrical pillar through which players could ascend and eventually reach the next floor.

Reach the end of the dungeon, defeat the raid boss guarding it, and the first group to do so had the honor of journeying to the next floor before anyone else and activating the teleport gate in the first town of that floor. Once that was done, during the beta at least, all players gained access to that floor whether they had participated in the battle or not. Kenshin suspected that this had been because the devs had wanted more players to ascend to higher floors and test out more stuff before the end of the beta cycle, though. In the retail release, the prevailing expectation was that all players would need to participate in a successful run at each boss to gain access to each subsequent floor.

But the "slices" of open world were only "relatively" digestible even as it was. The first floor on its own was the largest, owing to the somewhat conical shape of Aincrad, but it weighed in at six miles across and thirty square miles in total.

Within that space were a few towns, big and small, as well as caves and ruins to explore. Some of those had more than one "floor" or they twisted around in on themselves, looping deeper underground; this added still more to the total land area available to players at the start of the game. It wasn't as large on its own as some open-world console games, not nearly, so it was functionally playable for most people. But the teleport system was the only quick-travel function in the game.

If players wanted to quick-travel outside of the main city teleport gates, they would have to use expensive limited-use items to do it. Akihiko Kayaba had, quite blatantly, wanted players to physically travel around his world to get wherever they were going. There always was the option of renting a horse in town to carry you to whereever it was you wanted to go, but this was a bit too expensive for the rate at which money could be earned on the first floor.

It was ambitious as hell. Take the Town of Beginnings as a mild example. The semicircular walled city at the first floor's southern edge was half a mile across on its own, and every single building there was interactable. Shops, inns, NPC residences (some of which doubled as secret, luxury inns with features like extra item storage), guardhouses, restaurants, residences that players could buy for themselves (although it was highly unlikely that any player would be able to afford these for quite a long time), and on and on and on. Looking closely, it was clear that there was an element of limited procedural generation in the creation of buildings and overworld elements. But even considering that, the detail that had gone into the world was astounding.

But even considering that, when I multiply the first floor's thirty square miles by a hundred, Aincrad is still just thirty thousand square miles, isn't it? Less than that, since the floors gradually get smaller as you go further up. It sounds large, but it's... what? Not even a fifth of Japan's land area, was it? I forget.

There had been a few larger games than that for sure, even a few of them being single-player, although some of them were quite old and had achieved the effect with completely random world generation.

What made Aincrad feel truly "huge," though, wasn't just the size. It was the sensation of experiencing that world with all five senses, controlling an avatar body as if it was one's real, physical self. What made it feel "huge" was the sheer amount of stuff packed into every corner of the world, whether that "stuff" was useful in the videogame aspect of fighting hoards of monsters and clearing quests, or not. A player could log in every day and just enjoy exploring the game as a social space without ever touching the combat, and it would work. Aincrad could be both a game world for those who wanted to live an adventure, and it could also just be a virtual-reality tourist space. It did both of these things equally well.

Kenshin reflected on this as he strolled up the road, taking a roundabout route to the agreed-upon meeting place.

He hadn't been interested in MMORPGs before, had always been more of an action-game and fighting-game kind of guy. Kyo had shared much the same tastes, even if she played other genres more often than he did. When Kyo had gotten her hands on the Sword Art Online beta version and had shared it with him, though, the experience had turned him into a true believer. Neither he nor she had even joined any of the boss raids, but they had both squeezed a truckload of fun out of Aincrad by the time the beta phase had ended. The only thing left undone for them at this point was to experience this amazing virtual world hand-in-hand with each other, rather than rotating out behind the guise of the same avatar. And oh, the adventures they would have...

"...twenty-four, single, and looking for a girlfriend! It's good to meet you!"

"And, it starts," Kenshin said mournfully, looking up at the heavens in regret. Or at least, he looked toward the heavens. The solid ceiling between him and Aincrad's second floor kind of obstructed his view.

Then, a familiar cackle met his ears and he grinned.

"Kyahahahaha, lookit you, Klein! Channelin' all that Big Shonen Sidekick Energy. Y'wanna maybe dial it back? You'll scare off my first in-game friend before I've had a chance t' friend her!"

Kenshin stepped out from the alley he'd been cutting through, coming into view of his girlfriend, whose avatar really did look like her real-world self without the hair dye. Two others stood near her. One of them was a red-haired man, still bent into a bow, and the other was what looked like the default female player character, auto-adjusted to whatever height its player was in real life.

The girl, who seemed nervous and put off by Klein's awkward come-on, looked around suddenly and said, "Wait, what's this about a livestream?! Eek! Am I being filmed?!"

"Oh, oops," Kyo said, scratching her head. "Um, yeah. Everythin' that I hear and everythin' that I see through my left eye is bein' broadcast online right now. So, er... smile, you're on candid camera?"

There was a long pause during which Kenshin wondered if he should intervene to prevent disaster. Kyo, apparently enjoying the situation, spoke to her unseen audience.

"Aaaaaaand now would be a good time t' explain how SAO's emotional expression engine works, Genkai-san! Explain t' the audience why our friend here looks like an anime gal who just got walked in on in the shower."

"Ack!" yelped default girl.

"Oh, you're right, she does," Klein observed, most unwisely. "That face is adorable. I've never seen a girl blush like that in real life."

Default girl had been red as a stoplight, but she snapped pretty quickly around to glare at Klein with the most vicious and terrifying look of anger a face could produce. Kenshin grinned. That, too, was the game's emotional expression system at work. It spooked Klein so well that he stumbled back a step and put his hands up in a warding gesture.

"Sorry, sorry! I was kidding! Kidding!" he blurted, and the expression engine was working on his face now, too.

As Genkai was no doubt explaining to the audience at that moment: some aspects of Full Dive weren't quite perfect. A player's brain would try to trigger in the real-life body attached to it, as it did in the real world, but if the game avatar had no such reactions to trigger, nothing would happen. To compensate for these limitations, Sword Art Online utilized a system whereby a player's expression and emotion data were translated somewhat loosely into one of a number of facial expressions, depending on what was deemed appropriate. Some of it was determined by the limited brainwave patterns that the rig was capable of picking up, as well, for the purposes of triggering involuntary forms of expression such as crying or laughing. The game even had emotional responses that were meant to signify that a player was genuinely unwell, such as rapid breathing or breaking out in a cold sweat, which were meant to let the player know that they should consider logging out of the game.

But the involuntary responses, not being tied directly to the signals the brain sent to the body to control muscle movement, were more artificial and exaggerated than their real-world equivalents would have been. The result was that it was amusingly difficult to hide what one was really feeling in this world. Among beta testers, a common sentiment was that people were more honest in Aincrad than they were in real life, because the system made it harder to lie about one's feelings with a straight face. Only the players with unusual mental discipline had consistently pulled it off, as far as Kenshin knew.

He hovered there for a minute or so, waiting for default girl to simmer down from the game's "enraged" face to its merely "annoyed" one. When it looked like Kyo was going to continue being derelict in her duty to keep things civil on-stream, Kenshin decided it was time to make his entrance.

~ V ~

The girl with the default avatar took a deep breath, figuring it would be silly to shout at someone in-game and not wanting to do something so embarrassing while some kind of camera was recording the whole thing. Then, as she was about to turn to apologize to the other female player for intruding on her broadcast, a voice called out:

"Looks like the fun started without me, huh?"

She looked past Klein, where a well-built and grizzly-looking male avatar in dark-gray starter gear was strolling casually their way with his thumbs hooked in his belt. He spoke in the same Osaka-ben dialect as the girl who was livestreaming, so she assumed they must know each other in real life and had agreed to meet in the game. Possibly for the livestream. Which was still broadcasting her! Oh God!

"We're just gettin' to know each other, Garett, that's all! Our collaborator showed up, that'd be Klein here, but I also wanna show this girl where she can get some cute clothes! Also, pants. I needta buy pants. I won't feel comfortable in my virtual skin until I do."

"Yeaaaaaah... seeing you in a skirt is just... strange," said Garett, looking the Osaka girl up and down. "It'd be one thing if you were in an avatar that didn't have your real-face attached to it... or your body type. Especially that."

"Wow, this is what the real you looks like?" the new player asked, distracted from her own discomfort by this surprising revelation. It hadn't even occurred to her to make her own avatar like that, but it probably wouldn't have been very smart if she had. As that thought occurred, she asked randomly, "Aren't you afraid of people recognizing you outside the game?"

"If anyone tries anythin', I'll just kick their ass. No big deal."

The new player stared, frazzled by that answer. The Osaka girl's eyes went flat and she rolled her eyes, saying without prompting, "Genkai-san, most o' MMO Stream's audience is older anyway. Chill."

Apparently someone on the other end of this... livestream had taken umbrage with Kyo's brusque reply. The new player giggled.

"Okay, then," she said. Without really thinking about it, she bowed formally to the Osaka girl. "Well, I'm... Asuna, Asuna Yuuki. It's good to meet two of you!"

"...Man, that hurts," she heard Klein grouse without heat.

"I'm Kyo, and that's Garett Stone," the Osaka girl said, gesturing to the latest arrival to indicate that the second name belonged to him. "He's my boyfriend, and we're workin' together for the stream."

Asuna looked Garett over speculatively, thinking he seemed a bit too old for a girl of Kyo's age. Then she remembered that the player behind that avatar wasn't necessarily the same age as the character they were playing, and giggled at her own mistake.

"It must be nice to be able to play a game like this with your boyfriend," she said. Then the penny dropped and she remembered she was being recorded. "Oh. Um. H-how many people do you suppose are... watching this stream... at the moment?"

It was Klein, damn him, who answered. "Well, MMO Stream is only the most popular MMO channel on the 'net, and since SAO had a limited print run at launch... I'd say thousands, at least! Probably anyone who wanted to play but couldn't, and a bunch of people who're on the fence besides."

Anyone who had wanted to play but couldn't, Asuna thought dully. Like an older brother who was currently connected to in-flight Wi-Fi as he crossed the ocean on an inconveniently-timed business trip, perhaps.

Uncharacteristically, Asuna thought: I am so busted.

"Left eye, right?" she asked Kyo in a resigned voice, turning to face her.

Kyo blinked. "...Yes?" she answered, in the form of a question.

Asuna took a breath, then another, and then looked directly into Kyo's left eye with a look of contrite determination. She clapped her hands together in a gesture of apology and bowed.

"I am so sorry for using your NerveGear without asking, Big Brother. I was curious. But I'm going to keep playing for a while. I'll put it right back where it was when I'm done and never touch it again, I promise! Now, I'm going to go... try on some cute clothes! I hope you have a good trip!"

Kyo, Garett, and Klein stared at the girl in silence for several seconds. Then Kyo said, "You don't look like yourself, so why are ya apologizin'? You could just go on like normal, and your brother'd be none the wiser... hell, he prolly doesn't know it's his sister he's watchin' right now."

Huh? Asuna straightened up and said, "But... I just gave my name."

~ V ~

Suguha almost spat her juice all over the monitor. Half-choking, she covered her mouth with a hand and forced herself to swallow. "Oh jeez," she said, between coughs a moment later. "Even I know better than that."

Kazuto's palm met his face, and the field-of-view in the stream window became slightly obscured as Kyo mimicked the gesture. Much hilarity and mocking had exploded in the live-chat sidebar. He felt a little bad for this Asuna girl, but at least she couldn't see the text chat from inside the game.

"Oops," Harumi the Host said regretfully. "I'll do our new friend a favor and just... sliiiiither back a li'l bit on the timeline and boop that unfortunate slip out! There we go. Too bad we don't do broadcast delays on this channel. Remember, ladies and gentlemen... ladies especially! Don't give your real-world info out to strangers online! Bad things can happen. Um. Heheheh. It was kinda funny, though. What a way to start things off, am I right?"

Gadget Genkai's only answer was a dry, "Kill me now."

"Okay," said Kyo patiently from within the game. "Y'know what, newbie? Since you've dug yourself inta that hole about as deep as y'can go, why don'tcha just run with it and stick with us for a while? We're doin' a little how-to-play-SAO pow-wow after we hit the shops. So I'll teach ya the ways o' the world, everythin' from shopping t' the menus and equipment, to combat. Sound good?"

The girl called Asuna bowed humbly. "I would appreciate it," she said. "Thanks..."

"Okay then. So, what's your 'character' name?"

"...That would also be 'Asuna.' Is that bad?"

"Eh, not if you don't tell anyone else it actually is your name," Klein put in. "If it really bugs you, you can probably get in touch with the Game Master later and see about getting it changed. Most games do let you do that. Might have to pay for it, first time might be free... doesn't hurt to ask."

Asuna turned to look at the guy who'd introduced herself by hitting on her, stared at him suspiciously, and then relaxed. "I'll keep that in mind," she said. "...Thank you, Klein-san."

"Heh. Happy to help."

~ V ~

After that, Kyo and Garett led the way to a clothing shop, where Kyo vanished into a dressing room to change into the male version of the starting gear. There was nothing stopping a female character from wearing clothing designed for the males (or the reverse), but each gender began only with the basic beginner outfit for their gender and a set of lightweight leather armor that covered the upper torso and nothing else. For girl characters, the default outfit featured a skirt and bare legs. A popular starting outfit, probably, for most female players and probably for the guys who wanted to play as girls, too. Kyo fell into neither category, and couldn't ditch the costume fast enough.

So Kyo switched to pants and sold off her original starting armor. Klein asked the robotic but polite male NPC tailor for a red bandana, and found that they did, in fact, have those in stock. After indulging Asuna's desire to try out some outfits in the changing room (and taking the opportunity to give the livestream audience a tutorial on how clothing and equipment worked in SAO), the group headed a few streets and alley west to a shop that Garett knew from the beta was the best NPC shop in the Town of Beginnings. Here they could pick up starter-level weaponry on the cheap, so that is what they did.

At this point Kyo winked and said she had to go do something that would come up later in the stream, and disappeared down a narrow alley next to the weapon shop. When asked where she was going by Asuna, all she told the girl was, "Spoilers!"

Klein went for a curved blade, a plain-looking scimitar, and after completing the transaction waved it around enthusiastically and erratically to get a feel for it. Garett bought a light spear, along with whatever mysterious unknown weapon Kyo had wanted. Asuna picked out a thin and long one-handed sword called a rapier, which she said looked "elegant," though Garett had warned her that it take some time before she unlocked the first Sword Skill in that weapon class.

Kyo bought her own weapon when she returned about four minutes later. When asked what she'd bought, she grinned coyly and didn't answer. She had even closed her left eye when operating the shop menu, so that her purchase would be kept secret from the livestream's audience until the time was right. This she had decided on with the others before the stream. The moment she met Garett's eye with knowing anticipation on the way out had been an unscripted act on their part though, and might have clued some viewers in as to when she intended to reveal the weapon that she'd chosen.

At last, Kyo sent out the party invites. Along the top-left of her field of vision, and consequently the top-left of the livestream footage, there were now smaller three green health meters below her own. From top to bottom, they were labelled Garett Stone, Asuna, and Klein. On the way to the town's north exit, Kyo improvised the planned tutorial on how SAO's player menu and stat screens worked by explaining it all to Asuna.

While she went through it all, Asuna listened raptly, repeated instructions to commit them to memory, and nodded in all the right places. Kyo caught sight of another player following behind them toward the end of the lesson, but resolutely kept her eyes focused on what she was doing so as not to call attention to this person on-stream. She knew exactly who was tailing them, and she wanted it to be a surprise for the audience.

Once the four of them were outside the city, they all took a moment to admire the rolling plains that stretched out before them, tranquil and open grasslands divided only by a smooth dirt road trailing away into the distance. The sky was clear and blue and visible in every direction except "up" (because Aincrad always had a ceiling, of course). In the distance, low cliffs and rocky hills could be seen, with shallow valleys visible between them; in another direction, a forest was visible. Even as the party looked on, birds took off from the trees, flocking eastward in a shapeless airborne cluster.

"Wow..." Asuna breathed. "This is amazing... I can even feel the wind on my face... I can smell the grass, too! It, well, it maybe looks a bit, um, not quite real? But it's so close to real! This is amazing. To be able to just put on a helmet and experience the outdoors like this whenever you want... no matter where you live, even in the middle of the city..."

"Some o' the virtual games in development would blow your mind, if that's what gets ya goin'," Garett remarked. "Fishin' simulators... wilderness survival simulators, huntin' simulators... I've even heard of a NerveGear game in development that's supposed t' just let ya hike and mountain-climb in VR, without there being any really 'game-like' goals or objectives in it. Y'won't benefit from the exercise side of things, but just bein' able to experience that sorta thing from the comfort o' home, I think it'd be worth it."

"Yeah," Klein said heartily. "It was real touch-and-go with the NerveGear for a while, since not many companies were willing to take the dive and make games for it before anyone else. But the hype surrounding SAO's beta was a shot in the arm for the system, no mistake. Now everyone in the industry wants in, it's wild."

Kyo hung back, the better to keep the other three players on-camera. It was a very photogenic moment to capture, three adventurers on a hill gazing out upon distant adventure that stretched out in all directions before them. No doubt the editors at MMO Stream would snip this bit and use it as part of some promotion or whatever. Might as well give them that trailer shot, she figured.

After counting down from twenty and letting Asuna's hair wave dramatically in the breeze for a few seconds more, Kyo strode forward. "Alright, ladies," she declared. "It's SAO Boot Camp time! We'll start with the weakest enemy in the game, the Frenzy Boar!"

Kyo dashed out over hill between Garett and Asuna, stopping only when she could see a herd of the things milling around downhill from their position. She reached out and pointed. They were brown, tusked, and their snorts carried faintly on the wind that blew toward the party, along with a bit of their odor. While they weren't very intimidating, they were hefty-looking enough that anyone with a basic sense of self-preservation wouldn't want to be in front of them if they charged forward.

"This MMO is old-school! So even the weakest enemy in the game can mess ya up if ya don't know what you're doin'!" Kyo said, in an energetic drill-sergeant impression. "Lucky for you, maggots, I very much do know what I'm doin'! And before we're through, so will you! For security reasons, tho', imma hafta ask y'all to burn any notes ya take durin' today's lesson. Can't have 'em fall inta enemy hands, after all."

"Woo! Let's rock!" Klein cheered, stepping up next to Kyo and drawing his scimitar.

"I think I'm ready. But... those are enemies?" Asuna said. "Why would we hurt those? They look like harmless animals to me..."

"Ah, to be young and innocent t' the ways of videogames..." Garett sighed theatrically. "I'll cover this part of the lesson, Professor."

"Please do!" Kyo invited, bowing and sweeping an arm. "My classroom is your classroom."

"Right! So, Asuna, you remember the status screen, right? The experience-point bar and the skill list?"

"Yes, I know," Asuna said, a bit defensively. "You fight enemies and gain points to level up and get stronger. But shouldn't we kill something more... evil? Like a, like a goblin, or something?"

"In time, rookie," Kyo said slyly.

"Right, but there's more to it than experience points," Garett said. "Did you know there are skills other than fighting in this game, Asuna?"

"Hm? Like what?"

"Oh, stuff like... leatherworking... tailoring... blacksmithing... things like that. Profession skills that require you to go out and collect materials to make things with, in other words."

"Ah, crafting and gathering," Klein said wistfully. "So many hours of my life that I'll never get back. And my patience never lasts long enough for me to get anything out of it, either. But damn if it isn't addictive."

Asuna looked from Garett to Klein, and then said, "Oh, I get it... you can use other parts of the pig to make useful things. So while we fight these boars, we'll also be collecting things that we can use or sell later. Can other players buy the stuff we get from fights?"

"You catch on pretty quick for bein' so new," Kyo said, grinning. "Yeah. Although not every boar we kill will drop somethin', and right now our party item distribution's set to 'random,' so it's a toss-up which o' the four of us gets the drops when a monster bites the dust. That's not super important right now, tho'. Right now, we're just gonna get some practice in. Since this is the first-ever Full Dive MMO, the gameplay's really different from what most people're used to."

"I've been meaning to ask about that," Klein said. "I've read the pre-release articles and some of the general info that the beta testers were allowed to share, but I'm not sure I really understand how it works. I don't see any hotbar or anything anywhere... so how do I use that Reaver attack I've got in my skill list?"

"I'll let Ken-kun... sorry, Garett Stone over here—" (Kyo pointed casually to the avatar controlled by her boyfriend.) "—demonstrate it for ya, and for all our viewers online! I gotta hang back and play camera-girl, after all."

She winked (with her right eye) at her boyfriend, who gave her a little salute. And so it was him who descended the hillside first, with Kyo gesturing the other two to follow at a safe distance. As they'd done for most of the down-time so far, Gadget Genkai and Harumi had probably taken a few moments to banter, but to avoid distracting Kyo during gameplay, Genkai had actually started muting the audio-input function on the streaming software so that Kyo couldn't hear what was being said. As discussed ahead of the broadcast, Genkai would make sure the commentary paused whenever it seemed like Kyo was about to do or say something important. The two of them were professionals, so Kyo was pretty much just leaving them to it.

When Garett neared the first of the Frenzy Boars, he bent low, picked up a rock, and held it over his shoulder. The rock took on a luminous blue glow, and Asuna gasped.

"Pre-motion, or 'preparation motion,' though... knowin' as much English as I do, they coulda just said that 'pre-motion' stands for 'pre-motion' and it woulda made about the same amount o' sense," Kyo remarked. "It's a little like motion controls for older gamin' consoles, only a heck of a lot more reliable. You take a certain stance, like Garett's doin' right now, and you'll both see and feel the game's system assist take over. It's a little like an automatic move in any other game, although not entirely..."

Garett, who'd been listening to her explanation, took her brief pause as his cue to let 'er rip. He snapped his arm forward, and the rock shot out of his hand into the nearest Frenzy Boar. It impacted the boar's flank, leaving an angry, glowing red spot where it hit.

"When ya inflict damage t' either an in-game enemy like a monster, or to another player, a temporary wound opens on their character model," Kyo said, pointing to it. "Y'can keep track of where you've hit that way. Since this is a teen-rated game, there ain't no blood or gore or anythin'. All injuries, even the ones where a body part flies off, just glow red like that. In addition, you'll only feel a kinda weird discomfort when ya take damage yourself. Enough t' let ya know you're hurtin', but not enough t' actually... hurt. The devs had t' get a bit creative t' avoid turnin' this game into a big ol' traumatic stress simulator, hehe."

Even as Kyo offered this rambling explanation, the Frenzy Boar turned and charged down Garett, who smirked, held his ground... and skipped aside, jabbing his spear into the Frenzy Boar's other flank, the weapon sinking deep into the monster's virtual flesh. Instead of blood, more glowing red encircled the spear. Garett set his feet firmly against the ground and pivoted, keeping the spear pressed deep in the monster's body and twisting his wrists.

"That said!" Kyo said brightly, "you can attack without those system-assisted sword skills, too! Like so. Combine that with knowledge o' what weapons function best against what sorta targets, and you can do some interestin' things. Behold!"

Garett roared theatrically and dragged the boar into a veering turn, for it had tried to continue its run. It squealed and stumbled, and as it lost footing, Garett made his move, pushing forward into it and driving it with his spear onto its side where it flailed uselessly to struggle against him.

"A spear is an excellent huntin' weapon!" Kyo said, pumping her fist. "So spear-users have an advantage against boars and other game animals and game-animal-like mobs! So it's really easy t' pin 'em or force 'em into a Tumble state! Tumble's a brief status ailment that stuns ya if ya fall in a bad way, by the by. Now... sweet cheeks, finish your fuckin' dinner, will ya? Quit playin' with your food!"

Garett yanked his spear out, stabbed it down twice more as the pig struggled, and then leapt back. "Take all the fun outta life, why don'tcha!" he laughed. He assumed another stance and his spear began to glow blue.

It almost looked like the boar would manage to flail its way back to his feet, but then a flash blasted forward from the tip of Garett's spear and struck viciously at the boar's exposed underbelly. Or at least, to the naked eye it looked a little like a flash erupted out of the spear; in truth the spear, glowing with the telltale light of a low-level Sword Skill, had thrust forward and retracted with a rapid front-back motion that far exceeded anything the players present could have done with a spear in the real world.

Up until this point, the Frenzy Boar's name and health bar had been displayed as a curved, holographic interface element above its model. And while prior attacks certainly had inflicted damage, the strike to the underbelly wiped out the remaining sixty percent of the Frenzy Boar's HP in a single stroke. It went from green to yellow to red in the span of a moment, and then...

...the boar exploded, just blew up, but not with fire and blood and guts. It simply shattered with a digitized sound to match the effect, bursting into a spray of glittering, polygons of bluish light.

In front of each party member, identical windows opened in thin air, each visible only to them. The windows all displayed the same values. Kyo focused on hers, the better to show it for the benefit of her real-world audience.

"Two more things back t' back," she said. "When you're in a party, experience and 'col' are divided equally between party members, rather than anyone gettin' the full amount. Fun fact, the developers are idiots; the 'L' in col should be an 'R.' Anyway: there's four of us, so we each got a paltry six XP and seven or eight col, give or take. If there's any roundin' up t' do on the division, that gets sorted out randomly."

Then she turned to grin at her boyfriend, who straightened up and gave her a stage-bow.

"Second: what Garett did just there was strike a critical point on the monster's body! If ya can get in hits like that, they do a buncha damage. The right weapon and skill at the right time strikin' the right spot can absolutely dominate in most situations. You'll wanna take that into account with party-based strategies. A spear Sword Skill to a Tumbled boar's belly is the best way t' handle that particular class o' mob, although, haha... knockin' a boar down the way Garett did there isn't as easy as he made it look."

"That's the skill of a beta tester, I guess!" Klein said, grinning and giving Garett a thumbs-up. "Good going, man! I kinda wanna try it myself now."

"Before that," Garett said, "with that boar dead we've got enough distance from the others not to aggro them. So, I want you both to practice using your weapon for a bit. Get a feel for normal attacks, and Klein, you should also get usedta the feel o' the system assist..."

Asuna couldn't activate a Rapier-class Sword Skill at her current level: the One-Handed Sword proficiency had to reach a certain point before Rapier unlocked, although the Rapier could be wielded without it and would still gain points toward that end. So she practiced basic slashing and stabbing motions while Garett coached Klein on the pre-motion required to activate the Reaver skill and had him fire it off a couple of times. Kyo angled herself to catch all of this in the stream window. When Klein activated the skill on his third attempt, rocketing forward with his curved scimitar all aglow, Kyo clapped and whistled to applaud the accomplishment.

After this, the two beta testers stood back and let Klein and Asuna take down the remaining boars without help. Klein did a good job at inflicting damage with his Reaver skill, but what surprised Kyo and Garett the most (as well as Gadget Genkai, Harumi, and pretty much everyone in the text chat) was how nimble and skillful Asuna turned out to be.

Klein took on one boar, taking his time to get a feel for its movement and attack patterns before punishing it with Reaver. Asuna, on the other hand, had sprinted ahead with her Rapier drawn back, and proceeded to unleash a running thrust into the boar's snout when it turned to face her, before it could ready itself to throw its weight behind a charge at all. Then she drew back her sword and skipped to the side, evading a frantic, bucking tackle. Two more stabs whipped out into the animal's back and side before she drew away, walking backward and raising the blade back to a ready stance. The boar pawed at the ground...

...charged...

...missed her again, as she skipped to the side and swiped at its flank.

It turned and faced her once more, pawing the ground with its front hoof restlessly.

Klein, shattering his own target with another Reaver, turned and gawked at her. "Yeesh, she's good," he said. "I thought she'd have a harder time than that if she's usin' a weapon without Sword Skills."

A mischievous, almost evil chuckle escaped Kyo, and Garett grinned knowingly. "Y'know," said Kyo, "dependin' on the player, not havin' any Sword Skills you can use might just be a feature, not a bug."

~ V ~

"She's not wrong," Kazuto stated seriously in response to that thought.

The stream window had widened as the player Kyo had drawn back to keep both rookie players in-frame, and while Kazuto had been happy to see Klein get the hang of the basic mechanics... the complete newcomer's swiftness at acclimating to virtual swordplay was a sight to behold.

"Wow," Suguha said next to him. She sipped her soda. "I wonder if the reason she fights like that is maybe because she isn't thinking about it like a videogame."

"Maybe," Kazuto said, glancing sidelong at his sister. "I told you that athletic skill could be an advantage. The main reason for that is what happens after a Sword Skill goes off."

"What do you mean? What happens after?"

"Well," Kazuto said. "I told you the system pretty much moves your body for you. There are tricks you can do to increase the effectiveness of your skills, like moving your body into the system assist to make the skill a little faster and punchier. But after the skill completes, there's always going to be a pause... a follow-through, as if you just swung something heavy like a bat and have to wait for the momentum to play out before you can reset yourself. The 'animation lock' of the Sword Skill leaves you vulnerable if you miss, or if you hit your target but there's another enemy trying to attack you at the same time."

"I get it. That's why athletic skill is an advantage," Suguha said, watching Asuna dance around the Frenzy Boar. The default-girl-avatar's face was screwed up cutely with intense concentration as she continued to dodge and counter the mob's simple attack pattern. "If your opponent is using Sword Skills without thinking, you can punish the openings they leave in their guard. Is that only a player-versus-player thing?"

"Nah," Kazuto said. "From floor three onward, mobs start using Sword Skills themselves. And even before that, the bosses use them, too. Learning to recognize, respond to, and punish Sword Skills is a vital part of playing SAO well. There are no 'rotations' in this game, except for stuff like pot rotations or raid-group party rotations."

"Uh... 'rotations?'"

"Oh, uh... gamer term. Ask me again later, if you really want to know."

"Okay. Oooh, she got it!"

For the rapier-wielding amateur had, without taking even a pixel of damage to her own HP, scored a final jab right in the Frenzy Boar's left eye. Apparently this was a critical hit, because its HP dropped sharply to nothing and it shattered into polygonal pieces.

"Woo!" Suguha cheered, punching the air. "You go, girl!"

Kazuto grinned wryly and took advantage of the lull to take a gulp of soda. I have a feeling that, once Asuna learns a Rapier Sword Skill or two and learns to work them into her fighting style effectively, he thought, she's going to absolutely destroy this game. If she keeps playing, anyway.

Although from the sound of the girl's confession, it didn't seem like Asuna would be playing SAO for very long at all. Pity, that. It would be a shame if natural talent like that went unfulfilled.

~ V ~

The party continued to hunt, moving on to a cluster of trees to the east-northeast of town. This, Kyo had told them, was a good level-one hunting ground for parties in particular. Frenzy Boars were easy enough to fight and grind experience and col from if you were playing solo. But in a party, the gains were pitiful. Dire Wolves yielded much better results, and there were more of them per respawn.

Asuna had been surprised to learn that it would be quite some time before they or any other player could hunt boars in the same place again. According to Garett Stone, monsters and NPCs would always respawn if a player killed them, but they would stay dead for a set period of time before that happened. During that time, anything that any player might do with that enemy or character—any player—was completely off the table. Any quests an NPC might have been related to would be locked out or unable to progress, and an area might potentially become barren of monsters to fight for points (although it also would also become safer to travel through for a while).

She had asked how so many players could play the game at once if that were the case, and Kyo had calmly responded: "That's why the openin' day retail release was limited t' ten thousand copies, see?"

And Asuna caught on to the idea in part, even before Klein nodded and voiced that understanding in full.

The first floor of Aincrad was six miles across, which was a lot of space for the one-thousand beta testers, but even ten thousand players logging in at different times of day to hunt the same territory on different respawn cycles would tax the limited low-level resources around the Town of Beginnings to an uncomfortable degree. So the launch copies had been limited. In a few weeks or a month, more copies would go out. But by then the first wave of players would have leveled up and largely moved on to other areas, maybe even to the second "floor" of Aincrad. Space would open up, allowing new players to fill the void and make use of those early-game quests and hunting grounds.

"It wouldn't be necessary t' do it that way for most other games," Kyo had added with a dry laugh, "but with the NerveGear bein' the hot new thing and SAO promisin' t' deliver an experience we usedta think would never be possible, the game would fill up way too fast. And the game's underlyin' tech is so advanced, between the Cardinal System and the sheer amount o' data-per-player it needs t' process, it'd be too much t' have more'n one server runnin' it per geographic region. So the staggered release was a necessary evil. Lemme see, what were the numbers..."

As they slipped between trees. Kyo lowered her voice, repeating numbers that she said were being fed to her by a "Genkai-san" who was running the livestream outside the game. Asuna learned that there had been around two hundred thousand NerveGear units sold as of summer 2022. At that time, the Sword Art Online closed beta test had been held. Apparently, only one thousand people had been selected for it, but around a hundred thousand, approximately half of all NerveGear owners, had registered for a chance at participating.

"If a hundred thousand, or even fifty thousand players all started the game together on launch day, the thirty square miles that make up Floor One woulda become a madhouse! Actually managin' t' kill a boar'd be like winnin' the flippin' lottery!" Kyo laughed. "Oh, hey, we found 'em."

An unnecessary announcement, since they and all the stream's audience could see the wolf that had leapt out, red eyes and snapping jaws aimed at Klein. They also heard him scream the girliest scream Asuna had ever heard out of a man as he swiped out in panic at the creature. He somehow managed to swing his scimitar right across the wolf's open mouth. Its leaping momentum jerked with the impact, sending it flailing past Klein to flop across the grass like a furry, toothy, yelping ragdoll.

"Oooh, nice, that's a Tumble! You show promise, maggot!" Kyo crowed. Growls and howls erupted around them. Kyo stepped back and turned to snatch at a branch in the tree behind her, climbing up and perching her virtual bottom well out of reach of the ensuing combat.

Asuna looked up at her, and Kyo waved merrily.

"I'll just sit up here where I can catch all the action on camera, yeah?" Kyo called. "Wouldn't wanna disappoint our adorin' fans!"

"And she still gets experience points for it!" Garett scoffed, moving up and positioning his spear so that, with a slight adjustment, he could launch his glowing Sword Skill. "You two, be ready to move. If you die, you'll go all the way back to the Town of Beginnings, and it'll be a pain to meet back up again. So don't die, got it?"

"Got it," Klein said, readying the Reaver skill.

Asuna tensed in anticipation. When she had snuck into her brother's room and tried on the NerveGear, she'd only meant to explore the very beginning of the game and see what virtual reality felt like. But this feeling, as she raised her thin starter rapier and then sidestepped the first pouncing predator to make a snap at her front-most leg? This feeling was something else. This feeling was addicting.

She felt graceful, powerful. Like a feminine force of nature. She had never felt anything like this in her entire life. She almost didn't want to stop feeling this way. And that was something she hadn't been able to say about much of anything she'd ever experienced before. She decided as one of the wolves emerged from the brush and bore down on her, that she was going to buy herself a NerveGear and a copy of Sword Art Online as soon as she could; she wanted to experience this world again, and explore its farthest reaches, and see how far this feeling could take her...

~ V ~

By the time Elza Kanzaki had finished her first part on stage and found time to take a break, it was nearly three o' clock. She snapped the dressing room door shut and locked the latch behind her. It wasn't a soundproofed room, so the dull hum of the crowd outside was muffled, not muted.

It wasn't a huge venue, but it was a bigger one than she typically performed at. What made this concert so potentially life-changing wasn't so much the size of it, but the relative prestige of featuring there. This wasn't an event that catered to the flashfire whims of the teen idol audience, but to those with real musical taste, from enthusiasts to critics to the sort of people who owned and played their own instruments at home or composed amateur music using programs on their computers. If a performer could make it here, and if they performed well here, their name would be remembered... at least for a while. And if one performed well in their career after making it here, it was a sign that they had the sort of staying power that music fans could see as dependable. It meant consistent talent, and consistently enjoyable music.

And that recognition could mean a lot of things, all of which added up to a consistently successful musical career.

Elza had kept her face calm and pretty while singing. She was good at that. It was a little like letting some kind of alter-ego pilot her body for a while, one with a far more even temperament than she had. But she'd also sung more songs without a break than she was used to, and her mental endurance was more than a little frayed. At this point she was ready to flop face-first onto the sofa at home and just sleep belly-down on it, without even taking a bath first.

But now that she was away from the crowd, and had nearly an hour of peace and quiet to herself... she couldn't really have peace, because there was nothing to stop her from thinking about what she'd had to give up to sing here today.

The second half of the day would be a little less taxing, since it involved a scheduled rotation of performers rather than a series of mini-concerts. Elza would have to be at the ready backstage the entire time, though, so this was her last chance to decompress before the final rush.

And she couldn't even decompress. What a laugh.

"...To hell with it," she grunted. An ungirly and obscene verbalization that likely would have one-hit-killed the entire budding Elza Kanzaki fanbase if anyone were there to hear her say it and see her face when she said it.

Not even bothering to pretend she could put SAO out of her mind, Elza made a beeline for her locker and pulled out her mobile phone and the stand that went with it. Propping it on the counter and plugging it back in to the charger, she sat, crossed her legs obstinately, and hit all the buttons that would unlock the device and bring her back to the MMO Stream app she'd been watching earlier.

Buffering, buffering... buffering...

Aaaaaaaand...

SMASH!

Elza blinked and leaned forward, for the first thing she'd seen was a Dire Wolf leaping at another player. The wolf's model shattered into glowing blue shards as the red-haired man it had leapt at executed a Sword Skill in the same moment. Reaver, she recognized, a low-level charging attack in the One-Handed Curved Swords category. The scimitar-wielding player pumped his fist, turned around, and yelled energetically, "Yeah, YEAH! You wanna eat something, eat THAT!"

The view, perplexingly, was a view from above. As Elza watched, a female player (or at least, a female avatar) jabbed a second wolf with her blade twice rapidly while it lay vulnerable on the ground. Elza recognized the weapon as a rapier and wondered if it was even possible to unlock the Rapier weapon proficiency in just a few hours of play. She could have sworn you'd have to get some distance into the basic One-Handed Sword proficiency first...

I guess she really just wants to use "pretty" weapon, huh, Elza thought. It was hard to be dismissive, though. It was plain to see that the girl had talent.

While those two players tangled with wolves, a muscular and grizzly-looking male avatar leaned against a tree in the background. This one held his spear like a walking stick and observed the melee with casual interest. Elza figured he must be a more experienced player, letting two newbies get a bit of (literal and numerical) experience at the game. Which would mean the Midnight Butterfly was...

The female player scored a precise stab through the downed wolf's eye, and it burst into polygons like the other had.

"And that's a wrap, people!" came a loud female voice from the vicinity of the camera itself. There was a bit of incomprehensible camera motion and the field of view dropped to ground level. From the sound of it, the streamer had been up in a tree and had just jumped down.

Right. Of course. The Midnight Butterfly had been an Acrobatics fiend. During their fight in the beta, scoring hits on that player had been a real pain in the ass. By the end of the beta it was possible for a player who'd dedicated enough time into leveling Acrobatics to pull off things like running along walls for a limited distance, to say nothing of the platforming that could be done when the terrain got complicated. And when Acrobatics were used in combat, one could pull off outright unrealistic attack and evade combinations of the sort that begged someone to play them back with dramatic, Matrix-esque slow motion effects. Aincrad was a virtual world, after all. It wasn't obligated to obey the laws of physics.

"We done hunting mobs, then?" asked the muscular man, who from his appearance and the list of names at the corner of the stream's display, Elza guessed was Garett Stone.

"I could go for a while longer, but, I guess the stream would get boring if we just hung around grinding all day!" the redhead with the bandanna said. Probably Klein, that one.

"I'm fine with doing something else," said the girl, who looked like she was using the default avatar. The point-of-view streamer's name was Kyo and there was only one female name on the roster (even "Kyo" was at best a unisex name). So by process of elimination, the other girl had to be Asuna. She sounded exhilarated and content as she sheathed her rapier.

"Well, it's good y'all feel that way, 'cause it's time t' show off a real fun side o' this game," Kyo said, the camera turning slowly to regard the spearman, who grinned in challenge.

Elza leaned forward, eyes glittering. Had she tuned in to the stream just in time? Finally, had something gone right for her today?! She could hardly believe it...!

"Ooh, are we going on a quest? Exploring a dungeon?" Klein asked, bringing up a fist and grinning. "I say bring it on! I can't wait to see what that's like in Full Dive...!"

Asuna looked at him strangely. "A dungeon? Why would we want to explore a dungeon? That sounds depressing."

Kyo burst out laughing at that, which was annoying because her eyes closed for a few seconds while she did it. Then Kyo shook her head, which was annoying because it shook the camera when she did it. She said patiently, "A 'dungeon' is like, a labyrinth or a cave system or a castle, or some other big challengin' area full o' monsters, traps, and stuff for a group o' players t' explore and fight in. And no, we ain't goin' into a dungeon just yet, but did ya see that big stone pillar in the distance while we were outside?"

"Oh, right. I was wondering about that," Asuna said. "It looks so big... wait, are you saying we can go inside it?!"

Elza grinned. The floor dungeon was always, from the outside anyway, a stone pillar connecting the floor it was on to the ceiling above. The Floor One dungeon was three hundred yards across and one hundred yards tall—it looked a bit squat as a result—with twenty floors' worth of pure, expansive, maze-like exploration. There were some basic traps and secrets and treasure chests, of course, but it was nothing special compared to the dungeons on later floors. It was really only a challenge insofar as mapping the place was a time-consuming task, although players could share map data in-game, making this more of a cooperative endeavor than it might have been in other MMOs. The monsters started to hit pretty hard deeper in, so players had to stay on their toes to reach the boss room, but this wasn't much of an issue for a full party.

All of the dungeons were full of good places to mount a PK ambush, though. Elza's eyes nearly misted over as she remember all the good times she'd had ruining other players' afternoons by ganking them eleven floors into a dungeon expedition, forcing them to make the time-consuming journey all the way back from Black Iron Palace in the Town of Beginnings...

...and occasionally being ganked when she tried to gank someone, but, those were the breaks. Nothing was ever worth doing if it was easy.

"So if we're not going into a dungeon, what's next on the agenda?" Klein asked. Kyo looked back at him. Elza got the impression she was smirking.

"Follow me," Kyo said.

Elza licked her lips. You'd better not disappoint me, "Butterfly," she thought. I'll make you pay for it in-game if you do.

~ V ~

It was the moment that she'd been waiting for ever since she logged in. Kyo had almost needed to restrain herself from trying to rush through the shop and battle tutorials to get to the good part faster; Asuna's presence there had been something of a boon in this regard, since it had given Kyo some added incentive to be thorough with her explanations. Benjiro had warned her when they were planning the stream that because the game was in VR, it was too different from a regular MMO to assume that players would just "get" the obvious stuff. They had to show the stuff that was the same alongside the stuff that was different, so that viewers had a good idea of where the game diverged from tradition and where the systems and design mentality stayed true to it.

Now, though, it was time. And Kyo knew just where to go.

Among the beta's PvP-focused players, it had remained a popular dueling spot right up until the end. Its close proximity to the Town of Beginnings and the teleport gate made it one of the more convenient locations for the passtime, especially since the only monsters between there and the town were low-level and didn't actively pursue players. Unfortunately, SAO didn't do that thing where aggressive mobs would ignore you if you'd out-leveled them enough, so travel could be a real nuisance sometimes even if the monsters in a given area didn't pose a real threat.

About a quarter-mile or so north and east of the gate was a moderately tall cliff, atop which was a small plateau. Kyo lead the party around the back of it; Genkai and Harumi chattered through a filler tangent on the way, informing the audience that while it was possible to run almost non-stop in game, most players during the beta had ended up walking more than running because it just felt weird to run all the time in VR, and the simulated feeling of breathlessness often tricked players into feeling like they couldn't run any longer than they could in reality. At last the party came to a steep, grassy ledge that, after making a two-foot jump, marked the bottom of a narrow, grassy incline that ran along the cliff face all the way to the top.

This sizable, vaguely oval-shaped vista above was wide, flat, and looked out on the surrounding grasslands as if it owned the place. It was also encircled by wooden torches that perpetually burned with blue flames: something that players would quickly learn to recognize as the sign of a safe area.

"This one's just here t' teach players that safe areas exist outside o' towns, really," Kyo said absently as she climbed up off the sloping ledge, stretched her arms, and brushed virtual dirt off the front of her pants. "Although I hear a big group o' beta testers got some players with the Cookin' Skill together and had 'emselves a little outdoor boar barbecue on the last day o' testing. They brought out a big ol' barrel o' wine too, a quest reward from a higher floor, t' toast the retail game's success."

"Wine? Barbecue?" Asuna asked, stepping up next to Kyo. "You can eat and drink in this game?" Then: "...You can't... get drunk in this game, can you?"

"Yes, you can; and no you can't, in that order," Kyo said, grinning. She walked to the center of the safe zone, hands on her hips. "The booze in the game's all just there for effect, although it does have accurate taste. I've tried it, it ain't bad."

Asuna was looking at her with narrowed eyes. "...Are you underage?"

"...Oops. You got me, officer," Kyo said. She heard a distinct slapping sound that wasn't connected to anything she could see in the game; that was probably Gadget Genkai performing a precision facepalm. But Kyo decided to have mercy on him, and on Harumi, by adding: "I asked some older beta testers if it was accurate, I just meant that I'd tried the stuff in-game. Ain't no law against drinkin' virtual alcohol that doesn't get ya drunk, yeah?"

Asuna's eyes narrowed a little bit more. "I guess."

"Not much point in drinking it, either," Klein laughed, coming up onto the ledge beside Asuna. "But before you ask, no, I am not underage. Now, what've we come out to a safe area for?"

Behind Klein, Garett Stone stepped onto the plateau. He brought up his spear, stepped past the other two, and leveled it at Kyo. She smirked, hooking her thumbs in the belt of her pants.

"Heheh... I'm glad you asked, Big Sidekick Energy!" she said.

Klein sighed, and rubbed the back of his head. "Dammit, I'm gonna be stuck with that nickname for a while, aren't I."

"You know it!" And Kyo swiped the air, tabbing through her menu with swift and precise motions that made it obvious to all in attendance that she'd had a lot of practice working the thing. Tapping one item, she equipped the same curved scimitar that Klein was using. It materialized in a sheath on her belt. Then, she tapped another item right below the first one, and instead of choosing "Equip," she picked "Materialize."

The sword appeared in its sheath, hovering for a moment in midair in front of her. She reached out with her left hand and caught the sword by the grip. She held it there, grinning at Klein.

"Huh?" Klein asked. "Why'd you buy two of 'em?"

"Kyeheh... this is my own special fightin' style!" Kyo said, and she whipped the sword to the left, launching the sheath off into the grass. Asuna watched curiously, Garett rolled his eyes... and Kyo used her right hand to tap the button that closed the menu before drawing the other sword with it.

She stood there with one scimitar in each hand for a full thirty seconds, smirking at her boyfriend, before the penny finally dropped and Klein burst out:

"Holy shit, you can dual wield in this game?!"

~ V ~

"Ha... not quite," Kazuto chuckled. "But I guess that rumor about her was true after all."

"Two swords? That's a bit showboaty," Suguha said dubiously. Realizing she still had an empty chip-bag in her hand, she crumpled it up and bent low to stuff it in her brother's small-size trash bucket.

"Well, a lot of games do have two-weapon styles in them," Kazuto said, glancing at his sister. "It doesn't really matter that it's not realistic to fight that way. It's a cool power fantasy, and when you get down to it, games are usually about giving you that to some degree or another. The thing is, even though a lot of games have dual-wielding in them, Sword Art Online doesn't have a character skill for it."

"Huh? Really?" Suguha asked. She looked back at the monitor. "Then why's she doing it?"

"Well... there isn't a skill as far as anyone knows from the beta," Kazuto clarified. "The style of dual-wielding that she's using isn't one, anyway. It's kind of an 'outside the system' skill that certain players can use if they practice at it."

He gestured as if opening the menu in-game, with the same swiping motion Suguha had seen used a few times on the stream.

"You remember she went into her inventory just now, right? She 'equipped' the first sword, which put it on her belt and made it the primary weapon for the hand she registered as dominant when she made her character. But she didn't 'equip' the second sword."

"I saw that. She picked, um, what was it? 'Materialize,' I think?"

"Right. That just takes an item out of storage and makes it appear in the game in front of you. From there, you can examine it, use it if it's a consumable item, store it somewhere on your avatar's person if your outfit has pockets for it, break it, leave it on the floor, 'appraise' it if you have the skill for that... do whatever. The thing is, even if you don't 'equip' the weapon through the menu, it's still considered 'equipped' by the system if you're holding it in your hand. The game's programmed that way because it's sometimes possible to get your hands on another player's weapon, and it wouldn't make sense if you couldn't use it to attack with."

"If Kyo-san had picked 'equip,' it would just switch out the one sword on her belt," Suguha summarized. "But if she picks 'materialize,' she can 'equip' the sword to her other hand just by holding it."

Kazuto nodded. "Yep. And so even though there's no skill proficiency for it, she can use two weapons at once. Any player can. The problem is that when you do, you can't use any of the Sword Skills with either one. The game won't recognize the pre-motions for them until you drop or put away one or the other. That said... if you have weapon proficiency levels for the weapons you're holding, regular attacks will still do normal damage. It wouldn't be as powerful as the Sword Skills. But it also means there's no chance of being caught in a post-motion delay."

Suguha blinked, and grinned, looking back at the screen.

"And if you practiced enough, you could get good at it!" Suguha said. "And it might not be so good against monsters, because you can't use Sword Skills, but against another player you could use your 'real' skills to get an advantage if they rely too much on Sword Skills."

"Yeah. That's the reputation she earned in the beta: a player who logs in only late at night, challenging other players to honorable duels while dual-wielding scimitars," Kazuto said. "The 'Midnight Butterfly.' They thought she was a guy back then, though."

"They said they shared an account, she and her boyfriend. How'd they stop people from thinking they were the same player?"

"Well, she was always masked and dressed different when she challenged people. Or so I heard. I never had a chance to take her on. Garett Stone, I actually did party with once or twice. He was a medium-armor spear-user. Oh, this should be good—they're starting."

Suguha turned back to the screen, holding up two clenched fists and bouncing in her chair.

"Go, go, go, Kyo! You can do it!" And she punched up toward the ceiling.

Kazuto looked at her, exasperated. "You're just cheering for her because she's a girl, aren't you?"

"Of course! That's only natural! Take him down, Kyo-san!"

~ V ~

Kyo and Garett had moved to opposite ends of the safe area, where (Kyo explained to the others) damage was normally impossible. Klein and Asuna had taken seats on the grass near the edge, safely away from the clash that was about to commence.

"Impossible, that is... unless two players agree to a duel!" Garett had added dramatically. Klein instantly got pumped, though Asuna had needed to ask what 'Pee-Vee-Pee' meant when he voiced the term.

So while Klein gave her a quick crash course on the concept of player-versus-player combat in MMORPGs, Kyo and her boyfriend took their positions. Kyo grinned, winked with her right eye, and shrugged to show the weapons she held in her hands.

"As my hands're otherwise occupied... care t' do the honors, sexy?"

"With pleasure..." Garett said with a smirk. He switched his spear to his off-hand and called up his menu with the other. "Loser has t' do whatever the winner asks after we log out. How's that for a bet?"

"Pff. You already know you're gonna lose, you masochist," Kyo snickered.

"Whooooooaaaaa, this is verging on too much information!" giggled Harumi. "But oooh, this is so exciting! The first PvP match of the stream! Would you mind giving us a rundown on the dueling system, Kyo?"

"Will do, voice from another world!" Kyo said brightly. "Ken-kun... Garett Stone is gonna send me a duel invite. Like... so."

A window had popped up, prompting Kyo with a message: Garett Stone has challenged you to a duel. She clicked the Accept button with a finger extended from the hilt of her right-hand weapon, and another window popped up.

"Once the challenge is issued, the player the challenge was made to is the one who decides the ruleset you're workin' with. There's three options, as y'can see: 'Full Finish,' 'Half Finish,' and 'First Strike.' The other two are the nonlethal options, if ya don't wanna risk a player bein' sent back t' the Town o' Beginnings with a chunk o' their EXP shaved off. Those modes end when one player gets the other's HP bar down to halfway, or when one player gets in a single solid hit in First Strike. Not a scratch or a glancin' blow; a solid hit, either a direct hit with a normal attack or a good smack with a Sword Skill. Although that mode also ends at half-HP, if two players end up only scorin' little bug-bite cuts on each other the whole way through."

She moved her hand to the Full Finish option.

"Those're the friendly options, o' course, but they also mean that duels end quicker," Kyo said with a grin. "When I dueled in the beta, it was always Full Finish. No matter what mode ya pick, though, duels have a time limit. If time's up, the player with a more-than-five-point health advantage wins. If two players're within five HP of each other, that's a draw. Now..."

Kyo hit the Full Finish button, and extended the still-pointed index finger of her right hand toward the sky, wagging the finger (and the sword) teasingly back and forth.

"...once the duel's accepted and the rules finalized, y'get sixty seconds. See, the timer?"

For a timer display had indeed appeared in the air above the two of them. It was counting down from sixty, with a rolling, circular set of lines surrounding the numbers for effect. Above it, a long and narrow window bearing the message Garett Stone vs. Kyo had appeared, above which were large English letters spelling the word "Duel." Kyo looked sidelong at Klein and Asuna, winked with her right eye again, and turned toward her boyfriend's avatar. She ducked into a low stance, left sword in a guard position in front, right sword held slightly behind and to the side.

"Here's a free tip for y'all out there in Realityland, now," Kyo said. "The sixty-second lead-in's a time for mind games! Players'll try t' get a read on what Sword Skill the other's plannin' to open with based on their stance, which means they'll also try t' trick their opponents by looking like they're about t' start with one Sword Skill when they really wanna start with another. Of course... y'can't get that kinda read on me, 'cause I don't use Sword Skills when I'm fightin' other players. Or do I? Kyeheheh..."

"Yep, that's our Kyo. Only you would call a handicap an advantage," Gadget Genkai sighed exasperatedly. "We'll mute the feed for you so you can focus on the duel, but as for all of you in the audience, I'm going to explain this little duel-wielding trick Kyo uses and why trying it's a waste of time for anyone who isn't as crazy as she is."

"Love you too, Genkai-san," Kyo snarked.

Garett, who was holding his spear horizontally in front of him, made a pained grunting noise and mimed grabbing an invisible dagger in his chest. "Oh... I see how it is," he said mournfully. "You want a clean break. But the laws of this kingdom forbid divorce, and so you've decided to consign your husbando to the next life. Woe is me. My heart breaks and bleeds at the indignity of this betrayal, my love...!"

Ten seconds.

Nine.

Eight.

"Yeah, sorry. I just can't keep up with such a ravenous beast of a man..." Kyo sighed dramatically, not shifting from her stance. "I never get a wink o' sleep anymore! I'm goin' crazy! This has t' end, even if... even if...!"

Three.

Two.

(Asuna's face, visible in the corner of Kyo's eye, had gone very red indeed.)

One.

The START! message dominated the space between them for an instant. Then the duel countdown display disappeared, its various elements scattering to the winds as if to clear the way for the two warriors who charged each other down in the next breath.

~ V ~

Elza was literally on the edge of her seat. It wouldn't have taken much movement at all to send her toppling ingloriously to the dressing room floor. This is it, she thought. This is what I live for.

She could have done without the formalized, one-versus-one duel. Elza understood the need to demonstrate the system to the audience, but PvP had always been more fun to her when it was spontaneous, unexpected... when it felt as close to a life-or-death struggle as it could get. Even so, this rush. This adrenaline high. She wasn't even the one fighting, she was watching it on a dinky little mobile phone screen, and still it felt as if she were there. The first-person perspective of the livestream certainly helped.

Kyo and the spearman rushed each other. Kyo abruptly veered right; to the side on which Garett's horizontally-oriented spear stance wasn't angling its blade. As Elza expected, Garett stopped, planted his feet, and swung the blunt end of his polearm out to parry the scimitar that Kyo whipped out at him; he turned out to be pretty skilled with the weapon, though, at least enough to pivot and swing the spear around in a fast, fan-blade-like spinning-block motion, creating a wide area in front of him that Kyo's blades couldn't pass through without being batted aside.

Kyo's next move caught Elza off-guard, though. As the spear's tip neared the floor, Kyo kicked out with her left foot, hooking the pole with the ankle of her leather boot and halting its motion. Her HP decreased a bit on impact; but before Garett could react in any way more substantial than a widening of the eyes, she planted that foot back on the ground and stabbed forward with both scimitars, one on each side of the now-motionless vertical spear at gut-level, where the starting armor offered no protection.

Both weapons sank into her boyfriend's virtual body, but she didn't stop there. She pushed forward, leaning in for all she was worth... and, caught off-guard as he was, Garett fell backward to the grass without much resistance. She was on top of him, blades impaled through his avatar's belly—if a weapon was impaled through an avatar, it inflicted continuous damage until removed, Elza recalled—and then Kyo, who had turned her push into a jump, planted both boots on Garett's torso right below where the swords had pierced him.

"Agh!" she heard Garett yell out.

"Wow! What a play!" the MMO Stream host blurted out, sounding awestruck and delighted. "You just can't pull these kinds of moves in other MMORPGs! This is like watching someone play the Lord of the Rings trilogy! Will we be surfing down stairs on a shield next, firing arrows into the hoard?!"

"Sadly, ranged weapons in SAO are kind of a rare thing," Gadget Genkai commented. "I don't think the bow and arrow are even an option, although I did find a chakram while I was playing. No goshdarn idea how to unlock the skill for it! Something for players to discover while they explore, I guess."

"The chat is going wild, too! ...U-um..."

"Something up, Harumi-san?"

"Oh, no, just a few weird messages in chat. Let's leave those to the mods, shall we? Ha. Some people have a really morbid sense of humor."

Elza didn't look at the chat to see what the MMO Stream host (who was apparently Harumi) had seen there. That would have meant taking the livestream out of fullscreen, and that just wasn't something that she wanted to do right now. This was too exciting. Elza couldn't wait to log in and get into a tussle like this again...! There was no greater thrill...

...Well, maybe there could be, but SAO was the closest she would ever get to it...

Argh! Why did the game have to launch TODAY of all days?! she raged.

~ V ~

"Whoa. Vicious..." Suguha said. She was leaning so close to the monitor that Kazuto had needed to roll his own chair over to the left to get a full view of the stream.

"Yeah, no kidding," Kazuto said. "I'd heard the rumors, but that move was something else. It's not easy to think on your feet when the action starts, not even in VR. Once the adrenaline's pumping..."

"...You fall back on practiced moves," Suguha said, nodding. "I know. Kendo is the same way. In that game, you'd have to practice a lot at using the right Sword Skills at the right time, I bet. She must have poured hours into practicing her two-sword moves to be able to do something like that without planning."

"Or maybe she guessed that was what her boyfriend would do," Kazuto put in. "Since he uses a spear and knows she's good at fighting without Sword Skills... that sixty-second timer is for planning your opening play, after all."

"You're probably right. Still, that was... ah! He shook her off!"

For the struggling Garett had managed to push his polearm up into Kyo's chest and face between her outstretched arms. And she had let go of her swords as he shoved her away.

"Huh! Smart!" Kazuto laughed.

"Smart?" Suguha echoed. "She's defenseless!"

"Maybe, but..."

Kyo managed to catch herself in a kneeling position without entering Tumble status. Garett Stone staggered to his feet, and stared into the stream's field of view for several seconds before his eyes widened: he glanced at the corner of his vision, probably at his HP bar, then looked down at the two swords still embedded in his flesh. That was another few seconds that his HP continued to drop at the same rate it had been doing while Kyo was on top of him. They could see it in the stream's party display; it was now almost down to the halfway mark.

"Dammit, Kyo!" Garett growled, reaching down to tug one of the scimitars from his chest by the hilt, and—

—Kyo rushed him without a weapon, the stream window flying straight at him. Garett swore again, and awkwardly moved his spear to swing at her, but she ducked it, skidding low along the ground, probably on her knees—with her left hand, she grabbed the polearm and pushed it up and over herself—stood as quickly as she could probably manage, and grabbed the sword still embedded in Garett's body with her right—his HP was still dropping, if only at half the speed it had been before—half of it was gone now, signified by a change from green to yellow in the health display—if it had been half-finish or first-strike, that would have been that—

"Oh," Kazuto gasped. "Sword Skills are disabled when you have a weapon 'equipped' in both hands, Sugu, remember?"

Suguha leaned in even closer, if that were possible. "This girl's devious," she said. "I might have to play SAO sometime. I kinda wanna fight her..."

In the next moment, Kyo ripped the second sword out of her boyfriend's virtual body. It left the stream's view, but Kazuto recognized the motion. She was holding the weapon over her shoulder...

~ V ~

"Holy shit," Klein said weakly. "Is this what SAO's combat is like? It doesn't even look like a videogame anymore... except for the glowing parts, I guess."

The places where the two curved blades had impaled Garett, or Kenshin Nakadachi as Klein knew him, were a blazing, angry orange-red rather than the crimson of blood. But it communicated the injury just as effectively. Klein gulped, trying to imagine what it must feel like to have two virtual swords jammed through your middle like that. He'd taken a few hits, and knew that SAO didn't do "pain" like the real world did. But it did produce an oddly pain-but-not-pain kind of sensation that was kind of scary in its own way. He had no idea what impalement would feel like under this system, and he kind of didn't want to find out.

Always was more of a PvE man, anyway, he thought, sparing half a glance to see how Asuna was reacting. She was kneeling on the grass, leaning slightly forward with a wide-eyed look of mingled interest, horror, and delight, as if she were one of those chicks who got really, morbidly into watching a good horror movie.

Then the motion of the duel inevitably drew his eyes back to the action.

Kyo ripped the second sword out of her boyfriend ruthlessly. The expression on her face was almost evil, a toothy and predatory grin complete with flashing eyes. Klein recognized the pre-motion she initiated, transitioning the sword's removal from Garett's gut smoothly into the Sword Skill that Klein had been practicing ever since they'd left the Town of Beginnings. Of course he recognized it, how could he not? After today it would be burned into his brain until the day he died. He'd go senile and forget the name of his future firstborn son before he forgot that move.

"Reaver from point-blank range," he muttered. "Jesus."

He thought she'd rip through his torso again, but as the scimitar lit up with that blue glow, she angled herself a bit to the side. Kenshin tried to swipe at her with her own sword, but they were in close quarters... he didn't have the room to counterattack with a slash, and the angle was too awkward for a fast stab.

Kyo tore past him on that side, carried by the system assist that determined the speed and distance of the charge-type attack. When she came to a stop behind her opponent, she had reopened some distance between them...

...and Kenshin's left hand had gone flying through the air in a spray of red light, severed a few inches below the wrist. It flopped to the floor and shattering like the boars and wolves that the party had been killing not long before.

Asuna gasped and clapped her hands to her mouth. Klein thought maybe she'd been genuinely scared or grossed out, maybe spooked out of playing SAO entirely, she was a young girl after all...! But then she jumped up to her feet, cupped her hands to her mouth, and cheered, "Woooooooooooo! Go, Kyo...! You're almost there! Just one more!"

Klein, who had gotten to one knee to comfort the poor thing, stumbled and fell sideways to the grass. "Oh," he mumbled into a mouthful of virtual grass. "She's a psycho like the other one... maybe her being so good at slashing things was a warning sign."

But Asuna was right: one more good hit would end the match. Klein could see it in the corner of his vision. Not only was there a debuff marker and a red splotch indicating a decreased health maximum, but Garett Stone's HP gauge had decreased to less than ten percent. That Sword Skill had taken out almost half of Kenshin's life on its own, putting him squarely in the red.

Klein heaved a sigh, got to his feet, and gave Kenshin's back a consoling smile. "Better luck next time, my dude," he murmured.

~ V ~

"Yes, yes, hahahahaha!" Elza Kanzaki cackled. She had picked up the mobile phone and was holding it up to her face, grinning almost madly, tingling with excitement. "That's the Midnight Butterfly that I remember! Try to cut off at least one more part of him before you put him out of his misery...!"

Harumi the MMO Stream host was cheering. Unseen by both of them, the text chat was mostly dominated by a similar sentiment or messages gushing about how amazing virtual reality combat looked. In-between those messages, however, some others occasionally popped up. They were very different messages, but if anyone looked at the chat in those moments, it would have been difficult to see them, let alone read what they said.

The text chat was scrolling by way too fast. Elsewhere in Japan, in a residential neighborhood in Kawagoe, the two Kirigaya siblings didn't even glance at it. Their eyes were also glued to the action...

~ V ~

Kyo half-expected Kenshin to try for a counterattack during the post-motion for her Reaver attack. She wasn't able to move in that short moment except to turn her head and look; she watched with satisfaction as his hand landed in the grass and shattered. Her second scimitar lay where it landed, too far away to be worth going for right at the moment.

Not to disappoint, she saw him spin around, wildly swinging the business end of his spear in her direction. It grazed her bottom. She felt the tip trace a straight horizontal line through her pants and across her virtual cheeks. As if the not-quite-pain sensation tickled, she burst out giggling.

Post-motion released her, and she skidded to a stop, putting her free hand on her butt and a wicked grin on her face.

"Oh my. Bad touch," she chided. "Viewers, I realize ya didn't see that, but Garett-san here just poked his spear somewhere a proper man should never do without consent! You rogue. You scoundrel. What've ya t' say for yourself, pervert?! You'd better take responsibility!"

A glance at her HP bar told her that between the damage she'd accepted to interrupt Kenshin's improvised spinning spear-guard and the damage she'd taken just now, she'd only lost a cumulative sliver of health. Kenshin barely had more than that sliver's worth left. She could tell that Kenshin had practiced at fighting without using Sword Skills before the beta had ended. But he hadn't put in nearly as much time doing it as she had. He didn't have a kitten's chance in a mountain blizzard of surviving the next twenty seconds.

Kenshin grinned like the rogue he was and, awkwardly angling his spear with one arm to continue fighting, he said cheekily, "It didn't trigger the Anti-Harassment Code, did it? Oh well."

"Then I guess I'm sendin' ya t' Black Iron Palace the ol' fashioned way, smartass! Haaaa!"

She turned her body full-on toward him. With only one arm, Kenshin couldn't initiate a pre-motion for his spear, nor could he effectively maneuver it in defense. He made a valiant effort, swinging the weapon one-armed in the direction she swerved, then trying to intercept her when she quickly changed direction. She had considered, for about one-tenth of a picosecond, letting him get one good hit in to save his pride. Then she'd decided, in the next one-tenth of a picosecond, that his pride could go fuck itself and the horse it had ridden in on.

Kyo batted his spear away with her scimitar, with as much force as her Level 1 avatar could muster. Its momentum halted before it could truly gather any, the blade went wide. Then, Kyo went for the kill shot, a critical hit: a horizontal slash across her boyfriend's exposed throat.

"Urk!"

He dropped his spear. Kyo let the scimitar drop from her own hand to the grass and theatrically looped her arm around his back so she could sweep him through a dance-move-like twirl while his HP gauge rolled down to zero. The one displayed above his head beneath his cursor vanished with a beep, but the one in her party list didn't. There was a roughly ten-second window after a player's HP hit zero, in which their avatar would remain active. The player would lose motion during this time and the NerveGear would emulate a severe sense of physical weakness.

It had led to some truly dramatic roleplaying moments during the beta, for those players who were into that sort of thing.

Kyo lowered her boyfriend to the floor, sighing mournfully and fake-crying, "O-oh, my love! I'm sorry... but... I just couldn't take it any l-longer...! Or somethin'...!"

"H-ha..." Kenshin rasped, his ability to speak having been debuffed by the cut to his throat. It was still an angry red. The game's engine had turned his avatar pale, and beads of virtual sweat were breaking out across his forehead. "Guess that went about as well as expected... Kyo, even if I don't have what it takes yet, I'm glad we got a chance to fight like thi—"

Mid-sentence, the player avatar shattered into a million tiny shards of light. Kyo mimed wiping a nonexistent tear from her eye, and stood up. She gave an exaggerated sniff... closed her eyes, tilted her head up at the sky... whispered, "You will be remembered...!"

...and then, like a human incarnation of tonal whiplash, Kyo spun around and grinned at the audience that was watching from within the game.

"Game, set, match!" she crowed. "The Midnight Butterfly earns her first notch in the retail game! Am I awesome, or am I awesome?!"

Two cheering voices and three sets of applause filled the air to accompany the WINNER! notice that had spawned upon Garett Stone's death. Two cheering voices, from Klein and Asuna; and a third pair of hands clapping away, because as Kyo had suspected since they'd left town... the four of them had been followed. As if she had sprung out of the ground, the familiar hooded avatar of Argo the Rat stood just a half-pace behind Asuna and Klein, applause timed so that neither could hear her over their own clapping.

No doubt the sneaky little sneak-demon had been using them to grind up her Hiding skill ever since the party had left town. That had been how Kenshin had met Argo to begin with. Kyo went to collect her dropped swords, chuckling to herself and wondering if Argo had been thinking of that when she had decided to repeat history.

Well, either way... I got to strut my stuff, won our bet, and I've got some interesting ideas for how to cash it in, Kyo thought. Today is a good day.

It was the last time that she would think such a thought for quite a long while.

---

Author's Note:

So this chapter ended up clocking in at around 36,000 words. That's a bit crazy by my standards. Normally, I call it a day at around 10,000 to 15,000 words for a chapter, and will even cut a chapter short if I reach that word-count vicinity and haven't gotten close to my original planned end-note yet.

This chapter was an exception, because I had a very clear idea of where I wanted it to end and I just did not want to change that plan. And yet, so much else had to be written first. While this is the Sword Art Online fanfic category, there's a lot of exposition that I feel has to happen regarding game mechanics and worldbuilding. The anime is more well-known than the light novels, after all, but a lot of worldbuilding and narrative exposition doesn't make it into the episodes adapted from the novels.

Aside from that, though, my approach to fanfiction usually is to write as if the story I'm telling is a stand-alone work of fiction, even if I know academically that the audience can be assumed to know or remember a lot of the source material I'm building off of. Doing this helps me establish the "rules" the story and characters have to abide by, and that in turns helps me construct a more internally-consistent end product. SAO just so happens to ironically be a series where doing that actually does establish literal "rules" within the game's universe, so this chapter ended up doing a lot of that.

I've spent way too much time writing and proofreading this chapter, so I'm going to leave the whole "extended thoughts on what I want to do with this fanfic" but for another time. For now, I hope you've enjoyed this opening chapter as much as I enjoyed writing it. I'll see you all again, whenever I find the time to write Chapter Two! It might be a bit of a while before I get to that, since I just started a new job and am getting into the swing of things with that. But I wanted to get Chapter One done so that Butterfly Blades didn't end up sitting there in my story list as just a short prologue and nothing else, heheh.

— Lewis Medeiros,
November 6th, 2020 at 4:01 AM

P.S. Holy shit, I just realized what I did there. That's amazing.

P.P.S. Pitohui doesn't have a character filter either. WHY.