NOVEMBER 7TH 2024
You learned to live with it. The coffee was never quite strong enough. The pastries never quite flaky enough. The pasta was always slightly grainy. Player run restaurants with player made food were always better than NPC establishments.
You'd find a favorite and religiously stick with it until one day the chef or the owner or both never came back. It was better to not speculate why. Easier to just move on to greener pastures—sometimes literally. Aincrad was good at evoking that in a person.
Apathy.
I missed my friends. I tried not to think about my friends. They weren't here anymore.
A bell-like alarm tone suddenly sounded causing me to spill my coffee. I wasn't enjoying it anyway. I looked up and froze. The "sky" above me was covered in the same red hexagons from that day. Two years ago yesterday. There was a repeating pattern of WARNING and SYSTEM ANNOUNCEMENT.
I glanced around and noticed other players looking upwards, too. There was something wrong with what I was seeing, but I couldn't understand what exactly it was. I sighed heavily. Whatever it was, it could wait. I needed a new coffee.
I walked over to the counter of the open air cafe I had been hanging out in only to realize that the NPC waitress was gone. In fact, every NPC who worked here was gone. That's when I realized what was wrong with the people around me. Every single NPC had seemingly ceased to exist.
And then—"As of 14:55 on November 7th, Aincrad Standard Time, the game has been cleared," the system proclaimed.
This was a joke, right? Everyone and their auntie knew that the front line was only attacking the 75th floor today.
"All players will now be logged out of the game. Please stop where you are. I repeat…"
The ground started shaking. The other players were cheering. But that's the thing about apathy.
I couldn't find it in myself to care.