CHAPTER 2

Six months passed since the first floor was cleared. As time in SAO progresses and advances, so do the players. As of now, the current floor that has yet to be cleared is Floor 42.

The front lines – the group consisting of powerful players and guilds teaming up together to clear the floors – are still planning how to make their attacks, what other strategies can be used, and so on so forth.

Jyun is a member of the front lines, although she never participates in any of their meetings and only assists them when it comes to defeating the floor bosses. Hence, she just retreats back to her house in the 29th floor. It took a lot of Cor for her to buy a house because, for the past 38 floors, she had to lodge in inns all the time until she finally got to save up enough Cor to get herself a good house.

She walked down the long, crowded road that would lead to her house. On the way there, a scream stops her from walking. She, along with all the people surrounding her, turns around to where the scream was coming from.

"Help! Someone help!" a woman screamed in panic. In front of her is man in his thirties, looking very pale and weak. The people gave some space and backed off the scene by a few feet, and when Jyun moved to the front to see what the fuss was about, she had to stop a gasp from coming out from her throat.

"What's wrong?" One of the townspeople asked.

"He's dying! Someone help!" the woman wailed with fear etched all over her face like a permanent mask. She doesn't have a healing crystal, and no one bothered to step forward to help her heal the man.

In SAO, dying means a person's HP is down to his/her very last bar, and the people were baffled. They were in a safe zone and no one's HP can go down in a safe zone with the exception of duels. So how can he be drained of HP? There was no such thing as life-reducing poison in SAO compared to other games.

Jyun was also confused to how could the man be dying, but she was not primarily focused on that. What surprised her more was that she knew the man.

Jyun may not have any trust at all in most of the players, but she knew that this man was different. He is a kind man who, instead of fighting any monsters, just serves as a cook in a restaurant that he set up in the 36th floor. He was the one who taught her how to cook, and thanks to him her cooking skills went from horrible to decent. Therefore she owed him, and she now had the chance to repay it.

She walks forward and no one even notices her until she made herself known to the crowd by saying, "Stand back. I'll heal him."

She took out a healing crystal and with only one word, the crystal shatters and fully restores the man's HP. Jyun was grateful that the man was alright now, but she was also very annoyed as to why didn't anyone do anything to help him even though they also have healing crystals with them.

Healing crystals are not expensive but not cheap either, yet anyone could get enough Cor to buy 10 of them if they defeat some monsters in the lower-level dungeons. The fact that they didn't do anything meant that they don't care at all and this was exactly why Jyun puts up her guard towards almost everybody. Only very few out of the eight thousand were the people she's sure she could trust without any doubt whatsoever.

One was the man she just healed, and the second was Kirito. She hadn't talked to him since that incident in the first floor, but she does get a few glimpses of him in some of the boss floors that they cleared. Other than that, they haven't talked at all. Whenever she is reminded of him, she feels like she does belong.

She was always an outcast, and she admits it to herself often without feeling any pain. She thought that no one would feel the same thing she does, but the fact that someone else has been in a situation similar to hers made her feel a bit enlightened about herself. And she didn't even ask him to tell anything about his life. He just said it to her so openly, that she doesn't feel that alienated as she always feels.

Setting that aside for now, she helped the man up to his feet and silently departed the area, bringing him to her house.


"Um... I really have to repay you for saving me." Touma insisted, all the while eating the bread soup that Jyun cooked up for him once he was awake from his sleep. The raven head shook her head.

"No. You already did, when you helped me develop my cooking skills." She quickly replied with a kind tone, a tone that she rarely uses nowadays. "It sure helped me a lot, even if it doesn't seem that much to you." She claimed. She was already in her casual outfit consisting of a dark blue short-sleeved shirt with black pants reaching to her ankles and silver flat sandals.

"Well, I'm just surprised that you would still remember that. But I really can't help but owe a debt to you for saving me."

"That reminds me... were you attacked in the town?"

"Eh? What makes you ask that?"

"When I saw you with your HP drained to the last bar, you were in the town, not out. And you don't own any weapons, so it's unlikely that it was from a duel. And no one can kill someone in a safe zone." Jyun stated, her tone turning back to serious as she sat at the edge of the bed. Touma readjusted himself into a more comfortable position as he twiddled his thumbs tougher, trying to think of what happened when he got attacked.

"My memory of it was hazy, but if I remember right, it was in the forest right outside the town. Is that already outside the safe zone?"

Jyun nodded her head. "So you were attacked outside the town, and then dragged back inside to cause a scene. And even though they know you're already drained, no one even bothered to help you." Her voice started to turn sharp with anger, and she made a heavy sigh to collect her thoughts. "Touma-san, do you know what your attacker looked like?"

Touma thought for a while, doing his best to recall clearly the features he could pick up about the man that attacked him. He remembered blazing, unruly red orange hair and bloodthirsty eyes of the same color, along with a very large and heavy sword, it looked like something that not a normal human could wield alone.

Since that was all he could recall, he told all what he knows, word by word, to Jyun and she immediately stood up from the bed. She put back on her battle attire, her Shadow Cape hanging over her back and her Fienna boots replacing the simple sandals.

"I'll go find him." She said and she wasn't going to listen to any of his statements of her to do otherwise. She immediately left the house to go to the part in the town where the players teleport to another floor. Touma couldn't say anything because it happened so quickly, and he knew that Jyun might grow worried if she comes back and sees him gone. He just stayed on his bed and waited.


Jyun heard of him. She didn't know exactly who the man was, but she heard of what he does from the gossips of the other players. A man who attacks people until they're down to the very last HP bar, then bringing them to town for the men to watch and stay there in shock and fear and confusion as the person dies. But no one actually knew what happened to those thirty-four players who died from the same attacks, because they left them there to suffer and shatter like glass, watching their fragments dissipating into the air.

Now... she knew the real reason why and she won't allow that to happen any further. She wasn't sure exactly if she chose the right floor to teleport in, but her gut was strongly telling her that Floor 35 was where that man is right now - the HP Drainer, or some others call him... the Bloodsucker.

To be continued...