Chapter 1 – Old Allies


For Koharu, today was a day that only four years ago seemed unimaginable. Her 21st birthday, living a life that she wanted to live; not that that her father wanted her to live, or that Aincrad would've forced her to live either, but her own choices.

It was a funny thing that, despite the trauma and horrors they'd all witnessed in Aincrad – the people they'd lost, the creatures that may as well have crawled out from the depths of hell itself and the unwinnable situations they'd all encountered – none of them had been particularly apprehensive about using Full Dive technology again.

In fact, she'd almost jumped at the chance when an old friend from Aincrad had asked if any of them would be willing to help her out with some work duties involving the game Gun Gale Online, or GGO for short.

Simple tasks such as helping sort through player reports of people using cheats or hacks, and then assisting her in confirming or denying those reports, before handing their findings off to her to deal with the players in question – whether that was banning their accounts, putting penalties on, or in the most egregious of circumstances, contacting the authorities, who would come down on them hard.

No one wanted a rerun of Sword Art Online after all.

Still, it was her birthday, and they were supposed to be having a good time; not reminiscing on those old days…

"To the best girlfriend I could ever have wished for!" Jet held his half-drunk pint into the air.

"To Koharu!" Rain raised her champagne flute into the air around the middle of the table.

"To the birthday girl!" Philia did the same, the glasses clinking as they met.

"Indeed, to many more happy birthdays after this one!" Sanya held her glass into the air, meeting the two flutes and pint glass.

"Cheers!" The glasses were all tapped together to produce a satisfying clink.

"You know you didn't have to arrange all that earlier for me, right?"

The party earlier had been quite something – arranging for almost everyone they'd met during their days in SAO, regardless of where they'd had to come from was no mean feat of organisation, and despite how much she loved Jet, she was certain he'd had some help from Asuna at some point during the planning…

"You think we would ignore your birthday, not least an important one such as your 21st? Preposterous!" Sanya was always quite animated in the way she talked, but she reckoned that she was now starting to approach the point of being cut off from any more drinks…

Still though, it had gotten late, and almost everyone had gone home or logged out, which meant that the quintet of the Concord had moved the party to the nightclub on the Glocken, the main hub of GGO.

The SBC Glocken was a remarkable setting for the game, as it technically meant the game's hub world was a vehicle, rather than a place. A downed Space Battle Cruiser, the Glocken was as large as many cities, and probably a great deal more defended. The massive ship lent its interior to the core elements of GGO almost perfectly – tight corridors, a myriad of corners and dark passages, and above all else, a grimy and worn look that contributed to the aesthetic of GGO.

A post-apocalyptic world, some millennia after a nuclear holocaust that had devastated the Earth, and now, the players of the game were the descendants of the settlers that had returned onboard the crashed spacecraft that were the SBC Glocken and SBC Flugel, fighting amongst themselves for…

Actually, even Zeliska, a developer on the game hadn't been able to give her a straight answer on that front, instead telling her that some things never changed, and that humans would still squabble amongst each other, regardless of the situation.

She had no idea just how right she'd been on that one.

The early days of SAO had been filled with petty squabbles between guilds, and the problems that had caused for everyone else who had to work around the guilds being at each other's throats – a remarkable situation in a death game, she'd thought bitterly to herself on numerous occasions.

"Penny for your thoughts, Ko?" Jet placed an arm around her, having finished his pint.

"Oh, just thinking about stuff. Kinda mad we're still here, right?"

"I mean, if you're tired, we can go to bed. I don't think the girls will mind…" She looked over towards Rain, Philia and Sanya, who were downing a tray of shots off to one side, and looked to be having a fantastic time with it... "Or even notice that we've gone, come to think of it." He grinned.

"I just meant that, well…" She trailed off, but he still realised what she meant. Despite the sometimes-justified hard time they gave Jet for his inability to read the room, as it were, she knew he was a lot more perceptive than he let on, and a lot of that was merely an act.

"Got to admit, if you'd told me I'd be sat in a bar in a spaceship with that girl I met in the beta test, I probably wouldn't have believed you." He joked.

She would admit that she'd fell for him not long after the death game had started, probably less than a week in (though it had taken over a month, and approaching two, before either of them had really acted on their feelings for each other…), but it had been when he'd learned to drop the act a little bit around her that she'd realised how similar they'd both been.

Both were kind of lost in their own lives; Jet, a stranger in a strange land as a Brit living in Japan, whilst she was trying to live a life she wasn't even sure she wanted, that of a professional gymnast, or a musician, depending on what her father had wanted from her at that time.

Both had trouble with their families, and such views often shaped their perspective on people.

Both had found each other in an otherwise hopeless situation, and for that, Koharu couldn't bring herself to ever hate the death game, at least not in the same way as many had become disillusioned after SAO.

"Why wouldn't you?"

"I was too busy trying to be something I wasn't. Too caught up in my own self-loathing. Couldn't see the trees for the forest, as it were."

"The therapy sessions are going well then?" She smiled, knowing that, of all their group, he was the one member that would benefit most from the mandated therapy sessions post-SAO, and had done so.

"They've helped a lot, but it's not the only reason I'm happy, you know?"

"Aww, anyone would think you were trying to butter me up!"

"Nah, that comes when we get home." He joked, though he had a tear in his eyes. Something that seemed to confuse him, as he raised an eyebrow whilst he wiped away the tears…

Wait, why did she feel as if she were about to cry too? There was no way she was that drunk already, was there?

Not only that, but when did the nightclub get smoke machines?

"Get down!" Jet shouted through the tears, and she fell to the floor, with the girls following shortly afterwards.

"What is going on!?"

"I can't breathe!" One dancer tried to shout, before falling to the floor.

"Tear gas!" He shouted.

"Why!" Sanya asked, although with her tone, it sounded more like an order to answer her…

"How should I know?!" Jet retorted. "I'm not the one spraying the bloody stuff!"

"All o' ya bastards. On yer feet, an' no one dies!" The leader of the thugs ordered, as he dragged someone off the floor. "Find it."

"We're not seriously going to listen to them, are we?" Rain asked, although she no doubt knew the answer already.

"Nope." Jet went into his menu, and equipped a pair of swimming goggles, before retrieving his gun from it, whilst she followed quickly, retrieving a pair of biker's goggles and her MP7. "We'll suppress them, buy you some time to gear up!" He spoke as quietly as he could, but still loudly enough to be heard.

This was absolutely not how she planned to spend her birthday, but she'd be damned if she was going to let a bunch of bullying thugs ruin her day and do… whatever it was they were doing!

The music still playing amongst the chaos was some kind of drum and bass track, the bassline pounding through the floor, as the pair commenced their assault on the new attackers. The persistent bangs of their rapid gunfire drowning out the sound of the track but leaving the percussion of it and the gunfire combining in an unholy mess…

The strobe lights of the club made for a difficult situation on both sides – they struggled to see the attackers through the tear gas and the flashing lights on the dance floor and the ceiling, but those same factors made it equally difficult for their attackers to pin them down too, especially as the pair rushed around the impromptu arena, using the furniture as cover, before the return fire destroyed what little cover the plastic chairs and sofas offered, forcing them to rinse and repeat the same strategy, until either the attackers were dead… or they were.

"Any time now!" Jet shouted in frustration. "We're clinging on for dear life out here!"

"You're doing fine." Sanya made to roll her eyes, before a high-powered round obliterated the cover he was hiding behind, scattering plastic and metal screws around and forcing him to shift cover again. "Then again…"

On her side, she was doing a somewhat better job of actually hitting them, her MP7 being the epitome of the strategy "if you put enough bullets in the general vicinity of a target, then chances are you'll hit something…" – she'd already used one full 40-round magazine, and forced her would-be attacker to find some cover, giving her a moment of reprieve…

Until one of them had found a light machine gun and was currently doing an annoyingly good job of destroying any cover they found; regardless of whether they were hiding behind it or not. Deciding that sticking her head out above the table to see what she was shooting was very ill-advised when your opponents could put up to a hundred 7.62mm rounds into your position before you could really do anything.

With that in mind, she settled for poking the MP7 above the table, and blind firing it until she heard it click, telling her she needed to reload. She doubted she'd hit anything much, but it was better than nothing at all…

And fire she did, running the MP7 dry of ammunition with only a single burst, before pulling it back to reload.

Remarkably, she had actually hit something… or someone, based on the groans she heard coming from one of the attackers, and the sudden increase in gunfire vectored in her direction now.

"That one!" The leader of the thugs, a hulking seven-foot-tall behemoth of a man shouted, his arm acting like a heliograph against the strobe lights. "The bitch is behind that one!"

Unfortunately, she'd failed to consider that, by blindly firing, she'd not only told them exactly which cover she was behind, but also removed her own ability to shoot back under the suppressive fire…

"They're like fish in a barrel! Guh-!" Another thug yelled, before he was silenced by a well-placed bullet to the head.

"Finally!" Jet yelled, taking the opportunity to lay down some suppressing fire of his own and take the heat of off her. "Took your time, didn't ya!"

"Says you!" Philia responded between shots from her sniper rifle, the 12.7x55mm fire turning the tides on the attackers and allowing a lull to establish a plan. "We'll keep the pressure on them, cover Koharu!"

"On it!" She could hear 5.56mm shots being fired back into the attackers as they moved around, dodging between the DJ's booth and one of the speakers in a vain attempt to put some more cover in front of them, and desperately trying to avoid the incoming barrage of fire from Rain and Sanya, who'd both begun to tear the attackers a new one – Sanya's PKP Pecheneg proving a very efficient way of removing the unwanted assailants from the battlefield, in the form of a rate of fire of up to 800 7.62mm rounds per minute…

Now with the incoming fire reduced to a manageable level, Jet had managed to work his way from cover to cover, firing short but well-placed bursts as he moved, and found his way over to her.

"Any thoughts?" She asked, reloading her MP7 whilst combined MG, SMG and sniper fire whittled their way through the small force over the other side.

"Turns out there are worse nightclubs than in Bristol!" He joked, before pulling a canister shaped item from his inventory – a flashbang. "I'll stun 'em, we hit 'em!"

"TNKA then?" TNKA was an acronym for what Jet called their usual plan – Take Names, Kick Arse (or Ass, if you were anyone but Jet), and was one of several codes Jet had settled on for communicating their way through a tight spot.

Simply put, it meant "keep fighting till they're all dead.", as Sanya had once decried it "planning to do without a plan" …

"TNKA." Jet agreed, before shouting the acronym to the girls providing the suppressive fire, receiving a thumbs up gesture for it.

With a quick nod back, he threw the flashbang onto the main stage, a blinding flash and what she could only describe as the sound from hell as the explosion hit the speakers, amplifying the noise multiple times and completely disorientating the attackers.

The break in return fire gave them enough to time to mount a counterattack, and the pair leapt from behind cover, pushing their way forward across the dancefloor; the music having since ceased, replaced by garbled static from the destroyed speakers, whilst the strobe lights continued to make both sides lives a pain, as muzzle flash combined with the strobes to make positively ID'ing a target next to impossible, resulting in bursts of gunfire across the place, regardless of how close to hitting a target they actually were…

Around a minute later though, the stage fell silent as the last attacker groaned and fell to the floor, a sea of pop ups telling them that all the attackers were now dead, and that they were safe to come away from cover.

"Well, that could've gone better." Jet admitted, looking over the almost destroyed nightclub. Chairs and sofas were filled with bullet holes, bullets and discarded cartridges, whilst the floor itself was littered with the bodies of the deceased players who were yet to respawn. "Sophie Ellis-Bextor, eat your heart out…" He muttered as he did so.

"Who?" Philia asked, checking over one of the attackers to see who they were.

"Singer, she had a song called Murder on the Dancefloor."

"Delightful." Sanya rolled her eyes as she put her Pecheneg back into her inventory. "It does raise a question though, as they certainly weren't your usual reprobates."

"Yeah, that tear gas isn't something you can buy in any of the stores." Rain said, before picking up the canister. "Though I recognise the marks on these. They're a griefer squad."

"Griefer?" She asked in confusion.

"They go out of their way to annoy people. Had them come across us in the Remnant Wastelands once…" She explained, before grinning. "We won, by the way." Without even looking, Philia and Rain had hi-fived each other.

"Any idea on a name?" Jet asked, interrupting their celebrations on a past victory.

Rain paused to think, racking her brain at the question. "Called themselves the, umm… Madhouse, I think?"

"Hmm, I'll ask Zel and 'Reha about it tomorrow." He yawned, and she followed suit. "Though, I think a nice, comfy bed wouldn't go amiss right about now…"

"Agreed." Rain said, the single word being interrupted by a yawn.

"Yeah, some of us actually have work or school to go to tomorrow…" Philia joked.

"Don't hate me, 'cause you ain't me…" Jet shrugged, although he had a smug grin on his face. "Anyway girls, been fun. Don't do anything I would!"

/-/

The morning after had been better than many "mornings after", especially considering that he had wound up being tear gassed, shot at, and deafened. The house wasn't on fire (again), Alice was oddly quiet (or she was still on charge), and his phone wasn't trying to shake itself off the table with missed calls, messages and notifications that he was extremely late for something…

Remarkably, other than a low humming in his ear from his tinnitus playing up after the blown-out speaker, he was in a decent mood. That was to say that he wasn't hunched over a toilet bowl, spewing the contents of his guts into it, and he didn't have a headache from the copious drinking…

If there was one benefit to full-dive environments like GGO, it was that. You could drink like a sailor, and wake up right as rain the next morning…

Probably a bad turn of phrase right now, as Rain apparently had a stinking migraine, according to the text message she'd sent them.

Still, he had other business to deal with – namely the thugs who'd attacked them. He'd asked Kureha and Zeliska to meet him in the Glocken, around lunchtime if it was convenient for them, and both had agreed to meet him, much to his surprise.

Between Zeliska's job as a programmer, and Kureha's internship, he wouldn't have thought either had much by way of spare time at lunch, but he wasn't going to look that gift horse in the mouth.

He checked his clock besides his bed – 09:59. Plenty of time to get some hunting done before meeting them, he reckoned. Who knew, maybe he might run into someone who knew who the little bastards from last night were?

Chance would be a fine thing, he supposed…

/-/

As it turned out, his hope of running into someone who knew the thugs was misplaced, and before too long, he'd found himself back onboard the Glocken, a few thousand credits richer, and about twenty pounds of ammo lighter.

Midday rolled around - not that it was obvious in the Glocken, the superstructure of the ship rendering the entire world inside the ship in a state of perpetual night-time – and Jet found himself waiting one of the many NPC run bars that littered Deck 1313 of the Glocken.

Jet would admit that he'd always been a bit of a people watcher – a statement he usually had to follow up very quickly with "in the way that I can sit and watch how people go about their lives" to avoid certain assumptions being made – and he found it fascinating how many people could be found in the Glocken, even at lunchtime on a Monday.

The game did have an international demographic, so it wasn't as if the only people online were what his mom might have called "the Jeremy Kyle squad" (and he'd told her off more than once for suggesting that everyone who watched daytime telly was unemployed, unwashed and inbred…), but he had no idea on the number of people who played GGO, and it wasn't like Zaskar published figures…

Or anything for that matter, most knowledge of updates came from forums, and in his case, from the occasionally loose-lipped Zeliska.

Speaking of the devil, he thought as she approached. "I'm surprised you're here this early."

"It's lunchtime, I'm not that bad!"

"I thought you'd be sleeping off last night, really." She admitted, as she took a seat opposite him, earning him some looks from many of the players around him – looks that, should their true potential be realised, would render the weapons in the game useless by comparison.

Zeliska was probably one of the most attractive people he'd ever met – a body that most would consider completely unrealistic, with an outfit that was clearly designed to highlight that, what with all the cut-outs on her dress, purple shoulder length gloves and boots that ran all the way up to her thighs and silver hair down to her shoulders, with orange eyes to boot – so he could see why he was getting funny (read as: murderous) looks from the patrons of the Golden Kalashnikov, though he found it more amusing than anything else.

Especially given she was his boss in this world.

"So, how was the nightclub?" The other person he was to meet arrived and plonked herself down next to him.

Kureha, or Momiji, as he knew her IRL as, was one of the few people he could have called a friend when he'd moved to Japan. His first day at school had been nothing short of hell, but he could be thankful he'd met her and Cody; both of whom spoke a degree of English; Momiji having learned it from Cody, an American… he'd fought himself not to make a joke about the irony that she could speak English better than someone who ostensibly spoke it as a native.

He was an American after all, Jet had thought.

She also had a bizarre sense of fashion, as he'd learned when he'd came across her in the death game that was SAO, her outfit being relatively simple (at least when compared to Zeliska's, or some of the other more… outlandish attire he'd seen on the Glocken.), but in a mix of white and bright pink that was probably intended to match her pink hair in game.

"Cracking little place, if you ignore the tear gas and the firefight." He answered. "Oh, and the tinnitus I got from a flashbang."

"What the hell happened after we went home!?"

"Load of thugs stormed the place with tear gas, and we managed to fight back and kill them."

"Could you stop attracting trouble for just one night?" Zeliska rubbed her fingers together across her brow in mild frustration.

"Hey, not our fault!" He defended them in absentia. "Besides, I think they were looking for something, or someone. Philia told us they were a griefer squad, the Madhouse, I think she mentioned?"

"That was foolish, Jet." Zeliska's usual tone suddenly became more ominous, and he noticed her expression drop slightly. "They'll be looking for you now, you know."

"Eh, let 'em come, we'll do as we always do."

"Zeliska's right, Jet. These guys aren't your usual bunch of thugs. You saw that yourself; tear gas and disregard for anyone that isn't themselves."

"Jeez, this isn't SAO anymore, what's the worst they can do? Kill me and force me to respawn?"

"Look, Jet…" Kureha started to talk, but was swiftly cut off by Zeliska.

"Jet, as your boss and friend, I'm telling you not to go looking for these people. You won't find anything you don't already know, and you'll just attract more trouble to yourself." She turned as if to get up, before turning back to face him once more. "Please, just listen to me once…"

And with that message, Zeliska headed off, leaving a silence between the two old friends, as they finished their drinks of choice.

Kureha was first to break that silence. "You know what she said about them, and more specifically, not going after them?" She asked, a knowing, but disapproving look on her face. "You're not actually going to listen to her, are you?"

He paused for a moment, just long enough to put on a clearly staged ''thinking about it'' face. "Nope."

She sighed at him, before typing something out in her message window. "I think I know someone who can help then..."

"So do I." He responded with a smirk. "I smell a visit to a certain rat coming on..."


{Author's Comments}

Yup, a new story.

This isn't necessarily the future of An Englishman, but it is certainly a future.

I'd had this idea in my head since I'd pretty much started An Englishman, and never really thought of a good time to use it - waiting till I'd finished that story could potentially put me in my 30s by that point, whilst I'd never really had much of an idea on how to approach the idea either.

Wasn't till a discussion on the SAO Fanfiction discord (https: double slash discord dot com / invite / JbcDGfvf - simply enter that into the search bar, and delete the spaces) one evening that I actually had a spark for this, and I feel like it'll work quite nicely into foreshadowing stuff in An Englishman too, especially with some familiar names...

So, a brief thanks to Aperax for reading over this to check it and for the idea of the Madhouse.

Without further ado, here's a trailer for what to expect in this...


"A year ago, I went missing for two months. No one, not even me, knows what happened during those two months." Jet explains. "I keep having these dreams; that I'm somebody else. That I became somebody else. That I gained something I never had before, and lost so much more."

(Images flash by: himself engulfed in an orange and red energy on a cliffside, the energy bursting from his arms and neck. Jet hugging a white haired girl in a suit of purple armour. A pair of lilac haired women attacking him, as he defends himself, before a rapier thrusts into view, and he collapses to the ground, seemingly limp.)

"So what happens next? We're ambushed in a nightclub on Koharu's birthday..."

(Scene changes to a nightclub, engulfed in a gunfight amidst smoke and strobe lights.)

"Then two familiar faces show up, but I don't know why they're familiar. Never met them before, and yet..."

(A light brown haired girl with a long ponytail offers him a massive grin as she picks up a coffee and hands him a note, before the scene cuts to Jet in a suit, and a brown haired boy, slightly younger than him, fighting something very big in GGO...)

"I don't believe in destiny, but if destiny does exist..." He sighs, rubbing a hand across his face. "It feels as if I'm being drawn into something once again. That I've got unfinished business somewhere, and that someone needs me more than ever before."

"A cry for help?" Zeliska asks, confused.

"Maybe. A cry for help from somewhere so far away, yet close enough to reach me..." He glances outside to see a glimmer of gold and blue passing by the coffee shop. "Whatever it is though, I can't just let this one go."

"Still though, that nightclub was only the beginning, Jet, and they aren't going to stop coming for you..."

"He who fights the winds of change will be lost in them, I was told back in Aincrad." Jet explains, looking into his drink and allowing a smirk to come to his face. "Perhaps it's time for the Knight of the Wind to make a comeback..."