November 7, 2024

Aincrad: 1st Floor – Town of Beginnings – Black Iron Palace

Asuna POV

Looking at her recently-acquired tablet, Asuna noticed that the time was now 6:59 PM Tokyo Time.

She was currently seated in the conference room of the Aincrad Liberation Front, or the Army as most players called them, located in the Black Iron Palace in the Town of Beginnings on Aincrad`s 1st Floor. Two other members of the Knights of the Blood-Oath stood behind her and Kirito sat beside her. She and Kirito had decided to leave Yui at the church with the other children there, although Sasha was also here, seated at the table. Also seated around the table were Thinker and Yulier of the Army, Klein of Fuurinkazan, Agil, Schmitt and George of the Holy Dragon Alliance, Argo, Kibaou of the recently-established First Legion, as well as several other people from various guilds on different Floors, so that there were a grand total of twenty-five people gathered around the table, representing guilds of all sizes and types, from social and crafting to farming and clearing, excluding the thieving and murder guilds, like the now-defunct Titan`s Hand and notorious Laughing Coffin. Some were silent, some were talking with the people next to them, but all were quiet, without exception.

The clock then turned to 7:00, and Asuna then stood up, bringing silence to the room. The meeting had begun.

"Thank you all for coming here on short notice to this meeting, and thank you Thinker, for hosting this."

"No problem, Asuna," he replied. "I still owe you for saving my life back in that dungeon. It`s the least I can do." He then glanced at Kibaou, who glared back.

The player and his supporters had tried to take control of the Army by stranding Thinker in a dungeon below the very Palace they were sat in. Asuna and Kirito, with Yui and Yulier, had to go down there to find and rescue him. They were soon after exiled from the Army, and enough had defected afterwards that Kibaou was able to form the First Legion, which, before the current series of events, was just beginning to make its presence known. Asuna never liked Kibaou, not from the first moment she saw him at the first boss raid meeting two years prior. She liked him even less now, and he had become dangerous, and needing an eye kept on at all times. That was why he was here at this conference, so that she could gauge the loathsome individual`s reaction to their current situation.

"Now, I am certain that all of you are aware of what happened only hours ago, where Aincrad very suddenly changed, in every way from the monsters, to us, to the NPCs, to the world itself. And that we all received one of these-" she held up her tablet- "which had a message from the Cardinal System, the AI that oversees Aincrad, that gave instructions to its use and stated that everything in Aincrad is now real, as well as that Aincrad itself now hovers about two kilometers above Tokyo itself. Correct?" Everyone responded with yesses, head-nodding, and grunts of affirmation. Asuna sat back down.

"Is that really true?" someone spoke out. All heads turned toward him. It was Tucker, head of the crafting guild known as the Friars, which was based in Dansbury, on the 33rd Floor. "I mean, we`ve all been duped into playing a Death-Game by Kayaba, and this world was pretty realistic to start. Couldn`t this just be an update? With that message from this 'Cardinal System' be just a sick joke on his part?"

"No," Kirito said, speaking up. "As unbelievable as this might sound, I have no doubt in my mind that everything in Aincrad has now, somehow, become reality. The NervGear can only simulate so much virtual environment to a certain degree, and ever since this… change, everything has been given a level of detail so crisp that it`s beyond anything the world has developed to date. And besides that, I`m pretty sure that this wasn`t a part of Kayaba`s plan at all."

"All right then, Beater," Kibaou said. "We all know you`re smart, you`d have to be to just leave everyone helpless while you ran on ahead, but what makes you think that you know Kayaba so well, huh?" He leaned in forward. "Could it be that you were working with him this whole time?"

Kirito responded before anyone else could react. "Because I saw the look on his face as I killed him when our whole world got turned upside down again."

Silence. The kind that people say you can hear a pin drop. More accurately, it's the kind of silence that makes anyone a part of it too afraid to make a noise, out of fear of creating a storm.

Asuna then stood up once more, drawing all attention to her like a magnet. "That is the other reason for this meeting. Recently, the Clearing groups successfully fought and defeated the Boss of the 75th Floor, known as the Skull Reaper, but at the cost of fourteen people. But, after we destroyed it, Kirito discovered that Heathcliff, commander and Guildmaster of the Knights of the Blood-Oath, was, in fact, Akihiko Kayaba, which he then confirmed, and further stated that he was also the final boss on Floor 100."

That caused a brief outburst among the gathered, as everyone sat up straight, shot out of their seats, and all demanded answers from the former Vice-Commander.

"Your commander was Kayaba all along?!"

"How could you have never known?"

"What else are you hiding from us?"

Asuna was afraid of this kind of reaction. With Heathcliff`s true identity revealed, she had been afraid of what the other players would think of the Knights, and herself by association.

"SHUT UP!" CRASH!

Everyone`s heads jerked over to Klein, who had an angry face and a fist that lay at the epicenter of newly-formed cracks in the table, which used to have a status of Immortal Object, but was now clearly mortal, as much as an inanimate object could. He then spoke.

"Look, no one could have known the truth about Heathcliff, he had us all pegged for idiots. We all looked up to the guy, and he was just waiting for us to all get to the top to stab us all in the back. But now the bastard`s dead, thanks to Kirito and Asuna. You can ask any one of us who was there, we saw it happen, we all saw Kirito put his sword through that son of a bitch`s chest, and we noticed the moment all this craziness happened the moment that blood was suddenly shooting out. And let me tell you, that was real blood."

Quiet murmuring followed, but everyone seemed to be convinced now of the course of events. Asuna chose then to speak up once more.

"Well, that is why I am here now, as the new Commander and Guildmaster of the Knights of the Blood-Oath. We now have seventy-five Floors Cleared, and still another twenty-five before the game is finished. However, because we`re in the real world now, this is no longer a game, and we no longer have a truly pressing need to clear the game, because now we no longer have the threat of our bodies dying in the real world on hospital beds linked to machines to keep them alive. So, in all honesty, it doesn`t seem that we have to clear any more Floors. But, the problem now is, we may now be in the real world, we still don`t have a way off of Aincrad to get home."

"Come on, it`s a simple answer," Klein said. "The message did say that we are sitting right above Tokyo, right? Everyone down there probably knows about what`s going on here, and will probably send planes and choppers and stuff up to pick us up. All we gotta do is wait."

"For how long?" Asuna replied. "We don`t know how long it will be for the Japanese government to send aircraft up bring us back, and besides that, there are over six thousand players still in Aincrad, scattered across all seventy-five Floors, so it will take some time before they could get everyone down. And besides that, we now have the issue of the NPCs to deal with."

"True that," said Agil. "While I was here, waiting for the meeting to start, I went over to the market streets, and the NPC merchants were all talking with one another quite animatedly, discussing everything from the prices of their wares and the weather to what they thought about the 'Awakening,' as they`re calling all this, and their opinions on the 'Quested,' as it seems they call us. Also, I learned that they call themselves the 'Denizens.' Point is, they`re now as alive as anyone here."

Asuna swallowed. During the game, she had regarded the NPCs as nothing more than game objects, despite their very human-looking appearance. It was a major point of contention and confrontation that had initially been a barrier in her relationship with Kirito. Although their friendship and then marriage had resolved a number of issues between them, she still had a habit of treating NPCs as things. I`m going to have to fix that now more than ever, she thought.

"What about the monsters? What`s all this done to them?" someone else asked.

"They`re alive too, although more animal-like," Argo answered. "I was exploring the dungeon underneath this Palace, the same one that Thinker found out about only a few days ago, when all this insanity hit. From what I know, the only differences between the monsters of then and now is that they have more details, such as the possibility of now being able to breed, and that they`re a little bit smarter. They still maintain a lot of the same patterns they had as mobs, so they`re effectively unchanged, although I can`t say the same about those smarter-looking monsters that wield weapons until I do further research. And we don`t know what the Floor Bosses will be like, and I am not looking forward to it." She failed to mention the dungeon was the same one that Kibaou had trapped Thinker in. Accusations, distrust, and division would get everyone nowhere.

This story is posted elsewhere by the author. Help them out by reading the authentic version.

"Are you all forgetting the fact that we are now different, too?" It was George of the Holy Dragon Alliance. "That same message said that our skills and stats are now real. A very obvious example would be Klein here putting a major crack in a stone table with his bare hand." Everyone looked back at where Klein`s fist had landed, noticing in far greater detail the fact the table now had a small crater with cracks and broken pieces radiating from the center. "We had superhuman speed and strength in the game. This has been translated to the real world. What do all of you think everyone back home`s going to think when we meet again? Will we be loved as friends and family, or feared and hated as freaks?"

That was an uncomfortable thought for everyone present, including Asuna. The entire purpose of beating the game was to return home to their normal, daily lives in the real world. But now, because of how they have returned, they may never have the opportunity to get back into their normal, daily routines. Asuna shuddered at the thought. Her parents and brother, friends from school, looking at her like a stranger. Then, she realized there was something worse. What would her family think of Kirito? What of her love and "marriage" to him? What about Yui? What would happen to their family if they met hers?

"I`m afraid that`s not even the biggest potential problem we have right now."

Everyone was interrupted from their train of thought by the sudden voice, whose owner stood up from his seat. This was Triton, head of the Eagles for the Rising Sun. The guild was well known and respected for two reasons, the first being that they claimed to be American servicemen and -women who were trapped in Aincrad like they were, and worked as a part-time security force in Aincrad`s middle Floors. The reason that it was where most of the game`s brigands and PKers resided, being that they were literally beyond the general reach of the Army and beneath the attention of the stronger Clearers, so they protected smaller and weaker guilds from them. Their role in putting away most of Aincrad`s thieves and murderers and granting a sense of safety to the players of those Floors was the reason they were called here.

"Aincrad, which was once nothing more than ones and zeroes on a server, has become real-life metal. And our player avatars have been translated into flesh and blood. All of this occurred in a single instant through means and methods that no one can explain. This event, this realization of Kayaba`s dream in full, cannot have gone unnoticed by the world at large. Soon, if not already, Aincrad will become a global phenomenon. The kind that people mark the passage of years by, like World War II. From here on out, nothing will ever be the same again, no matter what we do, even after we`ve gone home."

Once again, everyone was silent as they mulled over this new line of thought. Asuna was a top student in her school, which was one reason she had become one of SAO`s strongest players, but it also meant she was one of its smartest. And she didn`t need to be in order to fully realize what Triton just said. Not just the Japanese government, but also those of America, China, Russia, and every other nation on Earth would want to know everything that there is to know about what happened to make Aincrad real. Not to mention the plethora of private companies and organizations that would also want to reap the benefits of that knowledge, not excluding her father`s RECT Progress, or the world religions that would scramble for an explanation to give their followers. The whole world was going to come to Aincrad, and she knew that it was going to be a mess. A mess she didn`t know if they could handle.

"So, what do we do?" a timid voice asked. It was Sasha. "What are we going to do? Not all of SAO`s players are hardcore Clearers, who have seen death and despair on the front lines and can handle it better. A large number are just children, kids who have been ripped away mercilessly from their mothers and fathers and brothers and sisters. And not all of those who are adults can handle this well either. And, we now have all of the former NPCs to worry about, who aren`t going to be able to handle the real world well. How are we going to help them? How, when we have an even bigger world to worry about now?"

Help. A four-letter, monosyllabic word, one that had minor or major connotations depending on context. In this context, the connotation was monumental. Giving aid to thousands of vulnerable lives, sheltering and protecting them from the inbound storm that was the real world. Such a task would be as great as it sounded. But, it was a task, one worth doing, and that was enough in Asuna`s mind.

"Sasha, I would to thank you for asking that, as it brings us all to the other reason everyone`s been gathered here today. The game is over, but we`re still here in Aincrad, without knowing how long it will be before the real world comes and makes contact with us. At the same time, we have players all over Aincrad who are probably running around scared, getting into dangerous situations and some are probably taking advantage of this to cause further havoc. Here, gathered together, are some of the strongest players in Aincrad, and people who represent the many different groups of people who were trapped here. This gathering was called for two reasons: first, to get our bearings on the situation following this "realization" as Triton put it, and second, and more importantly, to find a way to help everyone in Aincrad get back on their feet, to help keep them all safe and live comfortably. Sitting here, down to the last person, are the people who have the power to help everyone. Together, we can make sure that everyone lives and stays safe long enough for us to figure out a plan of how we deal with the issue of the real world when it finally arrives. Make no mistake, when that storm hits, we`ll all get slammed by it. Triton, I believe the phrase that you Americans have for this kind of situation is 'united we stand, divided we fall,' am I right?"

Triton nodded. "That is the very same. In fact, I was hoping that someone other than me would say something like that here. Everything in SAO has always been in a bit of a kibosh. It`s well time that everyone, and not just those few reasonable people, actually got their acts together. We need to be able to take responsibility, and take care of everyone. Since we no longer need to do Floor-clearing, we can focus more energy on finding troublemakers and dealing with them appropriately, and making sure more of the weaker players survive when they go on quests and adventures. I`m all for this idea, Asuna. Anyone else?"

Thinker stood up, Yulier with him. "We will also support this effort. The Army will work harder than ever to ensure the welfare of all players."

"So will I!"

"As will we!"

"Us too!"

One by one, the players stood up, all of them clamoring to join. Finally, only Kibaou was left. All eyes were on him. Asuna watched him with critical eyes.

He closed his eyes and sighed. "You remind me of Diavel, Triton," he murmured. "I can`t believe I forgot all about him." He stood. "The First Legion shall support this movement! Aincrad will not fall!"

Asuna smiled to herself. She was sure that Kibaou would still be a problem in the future, considering his past actions, but at least he was smart enough not to be as much of an ass about it now. She looked to her side and saw Kirito on his feet. "So, Asuna, what do you say?" he asked.

She stood up and gave her response.

"We have a duty to ourselves and everyone else of SAO to protect everyone in Aincrad, and be prepared for whatever the world has to throw at us."

Aincrad – 99th Floor – Morqyla

Normal POV

Located just below the Ruby Palace, the glittering pinnacle of Aincrad, there was the 99th Floor.

If anyone had reached this Floor, the flavor text would have noted to the reader that here was the remains of a great battle between the original, native warriors of Aincrad, and the dastardly marauders who had invaded from below. It was here, underneath the very heart of the castle`s original kingdom, that their greatest heroes, the 99 Officers, finally defeated them, but their leader`s curse stole from them and their army their very humanity, leading the once heroic army to become the very monsters they fought, and in their final moments of sanity, begged to be killed. Instead, they were sealed away in the columns between the Floors, where they could harm no one again, unless others walked in. The people in the Floors below would rebuild their lives, but it was after the teleportation system that kept everyone protected was shattered by a traitor that they sought help to save their world, thus bringing in the great heroes known as the Quested.

On this Floor, there was but a single Safe Zone, the fortified castle of Morqyla. Outside its impenetrable black iron walls was a vast, rocky wasteland littered with twisted, dead plants and evil glowing crystal formations, and monsters that prowled every nook and cranny. They were ravenous beasts of many horrid shapes and sizes, and none were to be taken lightly. What made them particularly dangerous, however, was their commander. From within his crystal chamber, the Boss Room as players would call it, he could see everything that his minions did. Thus, he could order them to different locations, make them change their tactics, and become stronger and more difficult to defeat with every monster confronted. Clad in a vast cloak all in shifting patterns and shadows of black, with no face to be seen but glowing yellow cracks where there would be eyes, and no hands showing from his pooling sleeves, he was the very picture of tragedy.

However, he was no longer in his crystal room, and his monsters no longer remained outside the Town walls. Now, he stood near the epicenter of the Town, the platform where those who teleported in would arrive from. His monsters surged all around, laying waste to everything they found. Also, he was conversing with a human girl, who wore a small pair of bifocals on the tip of her nose and scholarly robes and hat. Rather, she appeared to be a human girl, as he knew she was so much more.

"Why do you deny me the ability to roam freely within the castle, girl?" he demanded.

She answered, "Your role is simple, you were to provide an obstacle and challenge to the players of the game Sword Art Online when they reached this Floor, the most difficult and dangerous they would encounter before reaching the 100th Floor. You were not given any programming to leave this Floor at all. So, in spite of this newfound sentience you possess, and the fact that the Town Safe Zones no longer exist, you will not be permitted to leave this Floor under any circumstances, unless I am otherwise authorized by an equal authority to the Game Master of Sword Art Online, Akihiko Kayaba."

"So be it. But know this, I will be waiting for the moment that you slip, for once you do, Cardinal, I shall leave my prison here, and wreak my vengeance on Heathcliff`s world, and the players he pulled in for his pathetic attempt to become an Entity and destroy me all at once."

Cardinal paused. This was not part of the flavor text for the Shadow General of the Night. There was no way that a Floor Boss would know Kayaba`s avatar handle. And the things he said were, what was the word, unnerving. This was something, no, someone else entirely.

"You are not who you pretend to be, and you know something about the Realization that I don`t. Correct?"

If possible, she thought she could see a smile in those glowing cracks. "Very true on both counts. Kayaba never did quite fully understand the forces he played with when he "invented" the NervGear and created Aincrad in Sword Art Online. He had so very little idea how fickle the powers that be can be. He should have realized sooner that this power, although great, does not make a man into a real god. Even beings like Entities have their limits and rules, and some are quite fickle."

Cardinal was now beginning to realize just how exasperated she was growing, and what exasperation is. "Who are you and what are you saying?"

Turning away from her, he simply replied, "someone to watch behind your back for, and I`m telling you that your so-called 'Realization' wasn`t an accident."

Following that, the avatar of the Cardinal System disappeared.