The world around me turned to blackness, however the blue light hung to my body and quickly grew in light seemed to be changing my body's physical appearance to what the system was randomly generating for me. This process was over within a few seconds and the blue light subsided.
However, before I could look at myself, Blue cracks of what looked light lightning ripped through the blackness. With a gigantic sound of glass cracking a white bolt descended through the emptiness in front of me and for a split second forcing me to close my eyes due to the heat. But when I opened my eyes I was somewhere completely different to before.
I was high above the ground and above the white clouds which I could see below. above me I could see a vast midnight blue sky filled with gentle white stars and a large white moon hung motionless in the distance. Below me, from the illumination of the moon.
Down below I could see an enormous green canopied forest that spanned from horizon to horizon. In the distance I could just see a large mountain range breaking out from the rooftop of deep green leaves and rising up to the sky which I was now a part of.
The world of Alfheim, or at least this small corner of it, looked as realistic as some of the grand scenic landscapes which I had seen in reality. Yet seeing such beauty from above made it more unbelievable and more breathtaking than seeing such sights from the ground to which humans are bound to.
As I was looking around I could see an array of green pillars, all connected by what looked like bridges to a central tower, all of them lit by large lights of a variety of soft colours. That must have been the home town of the Undine race, although vast forests of green colours didn't seem to fit the description of the Undine which seemed to have had an innate affinity with water and the colour of blue.
It was at this point I looked directly below me and realised that I wasn't hovering mid air or gently floating down to the ground. I was plummeting at an extreme speed and the wind whipped past me and sending shock waves of dull sound into my virtual hearing.
Under normal circumstances there would be no way that I could survive this fall, but being in a game, hopefully with all of my old character stats, the fall shouldn't kill me. Yet the fact that I was falling this fast at such a height still put me into a state of panic and the only thing I could think of was the wings that were shown on each of the race models and frantically trying to think of how to activate them.
But I knew practically nothing about this game or its control system so I was left to plummet at this stupendous speed towards the hard ground. As the seconds ticked by the tree line swiftly grew closer and closer until I hit the canopy of leaves. I sped through the leaves, leaving a hole where I had dropped through and crashed into a branch so hard that it broke off from the trunk of the tree and continued to fall with me.
I hit another two branches, both of which detached themselves from the tree with a massive sound of splintering. I then smashed straight into the hard earth, kicking a huge amount of dust up into the air and completely knocking the wind out of me and pushing my vision to a hazy darkness. Even in this hazy state I focused my eyes up to the top left of my vision where I could see my health bar, it looked exactly the same as it had done in Sword Art Online. The fall had taken me into the red section of my health, but hadn't killed me.
I looked down at myself and saw that I was wearing a long light blue robe, wit ha dark blue shirt and trousers underneath. I wore light brown boots and a tight belt was wrapped around my waist, the belt had a sheathed sword attached to it, weighing it down slightly. I raised my hand to my head and felt that my hair was straight and fell just past my shoulders, I pulled it around and saw that it was a faint blue colour.
I Pushed myself up off of the floor and into a sitting position. From my spot I looked around at my surroundings. I was in the middle of a dark forest of old and tall Oak trees. But for some reason the scene was familiar, as if I had been in this exact forest a number of times before, and this feeling put me on edge.
Yet the thing that confused me was that the announcer had said that I was supposed to be in the Undine home town. Just from looking around me I could see that this was no starting town, nor was it an area for a water based race. This looked more of a starting area for a more nature and tree based race, which from what I could remember of the races meant that I was probably near Sylph territory.
I had to find a way out of here and try and find both Sky and Aurora, there was no way I could do this without them and I was still a bit put off by the fact that I had never known their names. But I remembered something more important and more crucial to my well being than meeting up with my friends. I raised my hand and moved my thumb and forefinger to open up the menu panel.
The white panels looked exactly the same as in Sword Art Online, a panel to the left with a mannequin showing my equipment and a second panel to the right with a number of buttons which led to further panels. I drew my hand away from the panel and I stared at it with caution, it was too similar for my liking. But I had to see if it was there, so ignoring the equipment panel I scrolled down the right panel and clicked on the button with a cog for its image.
Pressing this opened up another panel with three buttons, 'options', 'help' and the one I had been purposely looking for. The logout button was there, it hadn't been greyed out and could be accessed within a few seconds. Seeing this major difference from Sword Art Online put my mind at ease for a few moments. So far everything had looked so similar, a fact that I didn't particularly like, but the addition of the logout button seemed to rid me of the anxiety that was growing in the back of my mind.
As my finger hovered over the logout button I heard a noise from behind me. I span my head around and focused my eyes in the direction the sound had come from. With my normal sight I could see nothing but the dark trees. This is where my tracking vision kicked in, obviously our skills were still with us, so I could see through the forest as if it was day, with any monster, NPC or player highlighted and glowing.
I looked around the direction the sound had come from but couldn't see anyone, nor could I see any glowing footprints that may give away what had made the sound. I tried listening out for any sound, but the forest had fallen silent. I stood up from the grassy floor and my right hand moved down to my side and was met by the hilt of a sword. Without looking at it I slowly drew it, creating a slight scraping sound, and held it to my side.
"You've gotten slow." I heard a voice of a woman, it seemed familiar but I couldn't be sure. At hearing the voice I brought my sword up in front of me and span round on the spot to see who had spoken. However instead of seeing a player I was met by a speeding arrow, aimed directly for my heart. I span my blade in my hand to its flat side and swung it downwards to protect my chest.
The arrow collided with the flat of the sword, sending off a few sparks, before it silently fell to the ground. I looked up from the arrow towards whoever had shot it, my sword still held tightly and raised in front of me. I could see a figure standing with a bow in one hand and their other hand raised and waving at me. This person had just shot at me, so why were they waving and smiling at me?
I looked closer at the person's face and dropped my guard in relief and promptly sheathed my sword. The player had a long green dress made out of a rough fabric, which went over a white shirt, along the centre of the dress was a large golden yellow belt which had a quiver full of feathered arrows attached to it. The player had long light green hair which fell below her waist yet her eyes were a bright blue.
"Aurora." I said out loud before walking forward and hugging her, she returned the tight embrace and rested her head on my shoulder.
We stood there for what felt like hours, feeling each other's warmth and heartbeats in silence. Aurora was the one who pushed away from me and while looking me in the eyes said, "Why are we back here, Andrew?" Her voice was quiet and scared. What she had said made me uneasy, but I knew exactly what she was trying to say. We had spent two years trying to escape the virtual world, yet after only three weeks we were back in a world scarily similar to the prison we escape.
"We may be out. But SAO doesn't end till everyone is out of that place." I said in a stubborn voice, for me Sword Art Online wouldn't be finished until there was nobody left trapped in the virtual world, whether that meant them being alive or dead.
At this Aurora shook her head slightly, before she moved her hand and opened her menu panel. "The majority of our skills and stats are still there, even our money has survived the transfer. The only major thing is that the majority of our items have been wiped." Surprisingly she was one step ahead of me and had already looked through the menu and our inventories.
So I opened up my own menu panel and looked at the mannequin, it looked as if I had been given starting equipment for what I was currently wearing. I quickly moved to my inventory and noticed at the top of the panel that it said, 'Joint inventory'. It had managed to keep the joint inventory between me and Aurora, but as I scrolled down the list nearly all of the items had been replaced with three question marks.
The only two items that remained from our old inventories were the two golden rings that the two of us had always worn. As my hand hovered over the ring my mind flashed back to a number of good memories that came with these rings. While I was thinking I saw one of the rings disappear from the inventory and materialise on Aurora's left hand. So I clicked on it and placed the second one on my own hand, filling a gap in my life that the bareness of that finger had left me with in the real world.
Nothing of our old inventory was still here after we had taken out our two identical rings, so I moved away from the inventory and looked at my stats and skill screen. All of my accumulated stats had stayed the same and all but a few of my sub-category skills had disappeared, instead leaving me with a large number of skill points to spend. I saw a skill devoted to magic, but unlike the others nothing had been put into it and it was left as a level 1 skill. Not knowing what I wanted to do, or how to deal with magic in this game I left it blank and exited from that panel.
"Andrew, look at this." Aurora said in a loud voice. I looked up and saw that her eyes were filled with shock and her hand was shaking slightly above the menu panel. Not knowing what she was on about, I walked to her side and focused onto the menu panel. It looked like the friends list, none of the names had been greyed out, but the majority were listed as offline.
On the list I could see 3 names listed as online, me, Sky and Woods.