Mostly Dead Means Slightly Alive [YGO/SAO FI ft Nihilo]

Chapter 1

Virtual reality, true 'Full Dive' as it was becoming known. The ability to inject sensations directly into the mind and let a person truly experience a world that exists purely within the digital substrate.

A Holy Grail of entertainment ever since its first conceptualization, rapaciously desired and seemingly impossible to realize all at once. Theories were crafted, dozens of concepts were suggested by available science and technology and hundreds more put to paper by artists of all disciplines. Yet even the most reasonable-seeming remained tantalizingly out of reach, the brain and mind too poorly understood, the technology at hand already so precise and yet still lacking when it came to the precision such dreams might demand.

[ARGUS presents…]

Yet the text before one's eyes, not projected from a screen, simply hanging in space, told a story all on its own. The echo of words…

"Link start!"

…Syllables that came off one's tongue resonating in the mind unshackled, the sense of one's own body bled away into something muted and distant, all but intangible.

[...in partnership with Industrial Illusions Ltd.]

Colours bloomed in the space, aurora borealis writ small, a corona of violet that swiftly faded into blues, then greens, then yellows in turn. Smears of shades swirling through the visible spectrum, overlapping and blending until the black space was swallowed by white, and white in turn gains texture and tangibility. Scents reached invisible nostrils, cool wind brushed a formless and unseen face: damp of rain, tingle of ozone, a chill across barely-there as the blossoming clouds finally parted.

An endless sky, and a vast steel castle suspended in the blue. A final line of text wisped across it, titling the wondrous vision before being pulled away in the wind.

[SWORD ART ONLINE]

Then the clouds rose up again, white swallowing it all, and the distant sense of falling… Falling… Falling…

…Slower…

…and unseen feet touched cool and polished hardwood with no more impact than one might feel descending a step.

Once again colours bled into the white, oil paints poured onto wet canvas this time, swirling and pooling as they resolved into a certain configuration. Velvety reds, rich wooden browns, brass fittings gleaming cheerily in light that has almost the exact texture and feel of oil lamps yet lacks that certain faint flicker. It was a dressing room, at least in approximate appearance, yet for all the 'changing stalls' one could see, this seems centered on a circle in the middle of the floor, a circle in which a wireframe is inscribing itself in the air, the shape of a body starting out as rough outlines and rapidly refining itself as a sign above proudly proclaims what any experienced user would likely have guessed.

'Character Creation'

If the mind currently free of a vessel had lips, they would threaten to lop their head right off, they were so giddy.

Now, time to make an unassuming foundation that'd play nice with the largely nature-driven early floors. It was all forests and mountains and the odd river and lake, with the most exotic things got being plant and bug monsters until you hit the ruined city full of undead. Thus, a weathered and weary ranger, to perfectly slot in with the things from the deep woods that she'd be smacking cards out of and ideally getting one as a mount.

The closed beta test had promised character data would be retained in full release, unlike the earlier Alpha they'd gotten all this info from via forums, so players had point blank told to make their characters with the expectation of carrying them forward into launch proper. Therefore, the very first thing that was added was a milky grey-white eye and deep furrows of clawmarks on the surrounding flesh, giving a little hint as to where things would be headed build and motif wise.

From there, everything else just fell together naturally, a healthy brown-amber eye with but a hint of exhausted darkening around it. Brown hair pulled in a messy ponytail, a petite figure belying whipcord muscle built for handling a bow and trek through countless kilometers of woodland, a nice medley of brown leathers and green-dyed cloth… then came the little details. Adjusting the scars so they'd tug slightly on the cheek and lend themselves to a small, lopsided smile by way of resting face. Some callouses that took handling the practice weapons—bow, dagger, spear, the works—the chargen provided to properly arrange. Very precise touchups to the foot and ankle structure to make padding silently on all terrains come easily and comfortably, on top of enough flexibility to grip down on roots and branches provided something like leather sandals were in play.

It was a fun game of finding yet more and more minutia that could be changed at a literal thought or, failing that due to the sheer finesse needed, gently molding the avatar like clay. It took an entire two hours but by the time the player, now happily christened Helewise Golgari—suitably high fantasy, by their reckoning—, decided she was done it was with a warm fuzzy feeling of contentment.

The window full of sliders lay discarded and forgotten as refinements had quickly grown more and more precise, and by the time it was done felt as though it should be gathering dust if it wasn't for the timeless virtual nature of the space. There was no offer to save the configuration as they finally accepted their digital guise, but then again previews for SAO had made a point of mentioning that capacity for alts—additional characters for a single player—would not be available for this launch, so the lack of even a perfunctory option was not so surprising.


The dressing room faded away, leaving only Helewise, and the point of view was plucked up in a way that should have been nauseating if not for the lack of features around them to confuse the eye and inner ear. Perspective swung smoothly, curving around the body in a broad arc that bent inwards, terminating at the back of the head.

A split second of nothingness.

-step-

-tap-

Sensation underfoot, boot and sock and the irregular pressures of cobblestones muted by both. Sounds of chatter, dozens of voices, then hundreds. Sun on one's shoulders—her shoulders, now—and pure blackness displaying one last message in small and understated letters before giving way to the irregular darkness of one's eyelids.

[Welcome to Aincrad]

Mismatched eyes opened, and the central plaza of the City of Beginnings stretched out before her new body.

It was not as packed as it could have been, surely. The servers had been live for hours and the population had started to disperse accordingly, but still there were hundreds of people to be seen from even their single vantage point. New arrivals gawked as they drifted in and out of nearby streets and alleyways alongside more experienced players, distinct in how the former stared and meandered while the latter moved with some semblance of purpose. Although there was a certain middle ground in people like Helewise, who had done their reading on the Alpha Test. In the distance massive walls rose, and above them the underside of the second floor could only just be seen through drifting wisps of fluffy white clouds.

More than a few players were simply standing and staring at thin air with one finger raised, peering at their menus, no doubt. There was a gently pulsing 'new message' icon in the corner of Helewise' vision, after all, and swiping to open the menu brought it up automatically. Not a tutorial, not quite, but a gentle warning that all Alpha Test accounts had been reset, and while avatars may have been preserved, skills and gear—had they had any previously—were gone and would need to be reacquired. A glance down at the inventory tab showed a number of CoR above it, a slightly more generous amount than previous tests had offered. If she remembered the guides right, it'd be enough for a starting weapon, basic armor, and perhaps a potion or two to get someone going.

Now to gear up.

She planned to eventually go for a more Death Knight sort of setup, but this early on, when she had no mount and gear options were limited? Speed and range would be a hell of a lot more fun.

That meant going for leather armor as the best protection she could get without compromising on speed or stealth. But if she remembered that one forum thread right, the only ranged weapons in SAO were thrown, which… honestly, suited her just fine. Because it meant she'd grab spear skills which would then be gangbusters once she had a mount but for now would suit her just fine for hucking javelins at problems and keeping monsters at a distance.

The overall shape of the City of Beginnings had been mapped, but the details were lacking, possibly for lack of interest on Alpha testers' parts but more likely for lack of will with how massive it was. Four enormous roads ventured out from that central square, the northern and western ones leading to the great gates in the walls that separated the city's safe zone from Aincrad's various dangers in the field. Opposite them, the eastern road made its way towards the cathedral, the main respawn point for players on the first floor while the southern road was quickly shaded by the looming bulk of the Black Iron Palace. Between each of these wide major thoroughfares were dozens of smaller gaps in the buildings, leading to smaller and narrower side streets that criss-crossed the city in a rough grid shape. A few enterprising players darted in and out of them here and there but given how much of the city was set aside for player housing only the lucky or the knowing were likely to find anything amidst the thousands of empty lots.

There'd been a lot that Alpha testers either hadn't figured out or hadn't bothered to share—there were only a thousand of them, after all—, but just going from what was known a faint pattern emerged. The largest streets were populated by design, dozens of vendors making for a truly wide variety of options all in close proximity, maximizing efficiency. Meanwhile, the smaller streets were nearly unpopulated, a scattering of smaller shops that occasionally sold some niche items but mostly held all the same stock, making searching for them largely pointless unless you were particularly dedicated to some very specific bit.

But hidden amongst the smaller streets were the alleyways that wound narrowly through the buildings, barely wide enough for two people to walk abreast and often tucked into the geography in such a way that their entranceways blended in. Far too easy to miss. These places didn't have shops in them, a fact that nearly every post mentioning them seemed to make a point of reinforcing, but the steady stream of careful deflections told a story of its own. Especially for someone so addicted to exploration as Helewise.

There probably really were no shops, but that didn't necessarily mean no vendors, and it definitely didn't mean no nothing at all, because why go to all that trouble to hide these places if you weren't going to put something in them? The Alpha test rules regarding the sharing of in-game screenshots and footage had been impressively firmly enforced, but plenty of unsubtle hints had reached players' ears all the same, and the occasional picture that slipped through the cracks for long enough to become self-perpetuating had been proof enough for most.

That still left finding such places of course, but as long as one was willing to commit to a little searching they'd likely manage sooner or later, and at such a low level…

['Searching' +1]

The effect was slight but noticeable, a faint darkening at the edges of vision, a small stack of wooden crates becoming sharper, the gap between them and the wall beyond coming into perspective for a split second. Short enough to miss with an ill-timed blink or a careless look away, the latter an all-too-real possibility for a player looking about after that sudden skill popup entered their vision.

Helewise for her part simply slipped behind the boxes and into the narrow passage beyond, even if nothing in the world could've kept the smile off her face. That was some smooth integration to the point only the holographic pop-ups made her remember this was a videogame. Especially with how she could feel her scars tug at the lines of her face, whatever Argus intern had slaved over this minutia had her eternal gratitude.

The city closed over her head, shrouding the way in a dusty gloom. Narrow shafts of sunlight illuminated the way, shining on the small heaps of displaced cobbles and patches of moss that had grown up to consume the paving. The cheerful green 'Safe Zone' indicator in the far corner of her peripheral vision remained steady, the trail less outright menacing and more gently eerie as it descended to run alongside some sort of waterway. In any real and lived-in city it would likely be a sewer (or at least reek of piss like one), but thankfully the developers' commitment to detail hadn't extended that far, making for a surprisingly picturesque little scene. Pale stone lightly overgrown, clear water gurgling as it flowed steadily by, its surface a meter or so below the edge of the walkway, cast in warm tones…

"Who goes there…?"

It was in the midst of this moment that the challenge rasped from the shadows beyond, and a figure shuffled into view. Threadbare violet robes hung from bony shoulders and kept the face in shadow but for a faint shifting as the jaw worked quietly, seeming to make some sort of silent assessment before they spoke again, every syllable scraped from their vocal cords with painstaking slowness. "A swordmaster? After all these years? Not pacted, though… A pity…"

'Score!' Helewise cheered inwardly, even as outwardly she just tilted her head quizzically in a way that made her ponytail swish slightly, "What kind of pact are we talking about here?"

"Hmm… You do not know, perhaps there are none left who know now, how long it has been…" Apparently asking after the mention of a 'pact' had been the correct trigger as the NPC shuffled a little closer, their motions scraping hollowly against the stone.

"Denied earth's embrace, we wander. Bereft of life's touch, the eons hollow us, again and again." A chuckle that rattled like bones down a dry well before the cloak shifted, tiny pinpricks of light reflecting within the shadows of the hood. "You are not yet ready, but you could be, in time…"

Perhaps the search skill triggered again, perhaps it was merely a trick of the light, but for a moment, Helewise could see that there was no face beneath that hood. Only an outline of a skull looming from the shadows before fading away as quickly as it had come. "Would you seek to walk the path of we forgotten and decayed?"

She didn't flinch at the photorealistic look, nor at the ominous words. She smiled, "Yes. After all, it clearly has good company and I'm a wannabe cartographer, why not explore it ahead of time and introduce people to it? Some more gently than others."

Helewise had not been expecting to run into something like this, especially this early, but like hell she'd miss out on the opportunity.

"Take this, then," another shift beneath the cloak and a hand emerged. Skinless, fleshless, fingers of white bone holding between them a violet rectangle. A card depicting a humanoid figure, desiccated brown, blooming from a haze of blue-green energy. A little notification popped up in the corner of Helewise' vision.

[Quest Accepted: "Seeker of Beyond" | Play a Zombie-type monster in 25 Duels. 0/25]

The card was one such monster, naturally, a 'Regenerating Mummy'. Another rattling laugh emerged as Helewise took it without fear, and the chattering undead took a step back. The little quest window zipping up into the 'sidequests' tab of Helewise' menu once she dismissed it.

"When you have come to understand our nature, return, and you will be initiated." With its piece apparently spoken, the skeleton finally turned and began to shuffle away with that same scraping gait.
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Alas, it seemed like Helewise had burned through all her luck for chance encounters, some more poking around the backstreets producing nothing and a quick trip back to the thoroughfares yielding her little more than what she was already in the market for. Namely a bog-standard boar spear and a decent set of leathers. She had eyed a quiver of javelins for a long moment, before remembering some complaints online about thrown weapon durability and taking another good look at the price, ultimately deciding that for her first trip she'd be better off just buying a couple health potions.

More cumbersome to use than crystals and their one-word incantation activation, since you had to actually pull the damn things from your belt or inventory, pop the cork and chug. Flipside, hell of a lot cheaper, so for healing in between fights it suited her just fine and would let her make the most out of her time out there. Then she could come back with a tidy pile of CoR and a bunch of animal drops to get some more serious kit going on and try out food in FullDive. Maybe even befriend a crafter or two who wanted the fat, tusks, meat, pelts and so on for their stuff.

Argus had made a pretty good choice with the most basic enemies being boars, absurd amount of materials you could pull out of that, helped kickstart everyone's stuff. Plus learning how to read some basic charge attacks was a good intro to fighting in VR, especially one that simulated the full five senses and would definitely get some people panicked and falling on their asses.

She may even be one of those!

For now, though, she was wading through the sheer volume of players filling the prairies and hills that immediately surrounded the city. The distant pillar up to Aincrad's second floor looming from one direction and the spires of the city's towers opposite it meant that it was hard for one to get truly lost in the rolling green, but the sheer scale was breathtaking even without the fantastical oddities that populated it. There were mobs of course, 'Frenzy Boars' were fairly peaceful despite their names, with a low aggro radius and a tendency to wander about alone rather than in herds, making it difficult for a player to accidentally draw in more than they could handle while they adjusted to VR combat.

Better still, they were as predictable as the online guides had said, lowering their heads in a blatant tell before charging in a straight line, fast but lacking any ability to deviate once they'd committed to their attack, making them easy to evade so long as one wasn't entirely flatfooted. She passed a player who'd apparently put a fair bit of effort into getting a rakish sort of ronin look trying to take a charge head-on only to be bodily tossed about on impact, while an onlooking player with a simpler dark-haired avatar visibly sighed at his antics. The more successful players Helewise saw seemed to favor dodging and striking at the flanks as the boar charged by, often finishing the fight in one or two good blows, but then again, none of the combatants she passed carried spears like hers.

Disappointing, but perhaps that was to be expected from Sword Art Online.

Still, it would be foolish to ignore the clear trend, even if in real life a boar spear like she'd gotten was designed for bracing against the ground and punishing that exact kind of charge. No way to know how well that'd apply here and she'd rather not find it was 'your spear snaps like a twig after a few rounds of this'. Players thinned out the further from the city one got and Helewise soon enough found a reasonably unoccupied stretch of plains surrounding a curious little pond. Water flowing from a distortion in the air to tumble into a picturesque pool that never seemed to fill despite lacking any visible drainage, gleaming crystal clear in the sunlight heedless of its own apparent stagnancy. Some sort of magic fountain teleporting water from the bottom to the top, maybe?

The boars were here too, occasionally grouped up into small herds this far from the city, but with plenty of stragglers still meandering about to be lured into fights. Wandering within ten meters saw them start turning to track her, and from watching the other players she could estimate that closing to six or seven meters would have the boar start pawing the earth, hinting at the charge to come.

Or if one was being exceptionally cautious, she'd seen more than a few enterprising players open their fights by simply throwing a rock to trigger the aggro from a range of their choice on impact, presuming their aim and arm were up to the task of course.

She just walked right up to one, those little tweaks she'd done to her feet making sure staying on the balls of her feet was perfectly comfortable as she approached, spear held just like her stance; low, loose and ready. At some invisible threshold, the boar stopped pawing at the ground and committed to the charge with a stomp and a porcine squeal, leaving her to twirl out of the way with a laughing exclamation of, "Toro!"

Then she stabbed the fucker.

She'd aimed for the neck, but her timing had been a bit off and so instead she opened a wide gash of red wireframes down its side… then promptly watched its footing go to shit and send it crashing into the pond. After that it was honestly kinda sad, watching it scream as it tried and failed to get any grip on the smooth waterside stones, so she just stuck her spear through its eye. While it looked like just more wireframes and red light, someone had put real work on the feedback of attacks, she'd felt the slight resistance as she punctured the eyesocket to skewer the brains and finally scraped against the inside of the skull before the whole thing exploded into a shower of polygons.

From there it was just finding and stabbing more of the porkchops-in-waiting.

The drops from the three boars were unfortunately lackluster as Helewise took stock in the aftermath, quietly taking heart in at least not yet having had to pop any of her potions. Two 'tattered boarhides', three 'cracked tusks' and a fourth 'chipped tusk', as well as a small collection of 'frenzy hoof's and miscellaneous 'boar meat's that might well have included bits of sinew and gristle in them, at least going by their little image in Helewise' inventory.

[The most an amateur skinner can likely hope for.] The little hint in the description of the hides was a small consolation at least, giving direction for a player looking to improve their drops, though Helewise would need to give up one of her starting skills if she wanted to do that right now. Both [Searching] and [Polearms] had leveled up a few times from her exploration and handful of fights. Not enough for any major unlocks yet, but enough that the spear already felt a bit lighter in her hands and the occasional distant figures seemed that tiny bit sharper.

If she recalled the guides right, you needed a Key Item to swap out your skills without resetting your levels on them. Unfortunately, they had clearly changed things from the Alpha, since the elf NPC who handed them out had been nowhere to be seen. Something to ask around about later, she'd hate to reset her progress just because she missed something as basic as 'just go to the pillar dungeon, dumbass, NPC at the entrance gives them out'. It had to be something tied to Main Story Quest, given how basic a function it was.

Decision made, she just started eyeing the next boar to bottom bother. Thankfully, there was no real risk of dodging a charge attack into the aggro range of a herd, so it was just a matter of not ending up like that first boar and trip because she didn't pay attention to the terrain.

Which was of course when she got startled by something else she had stopped paying attention to as a voice hollered over the hills.

"Hey! Uh… Spear girl!" "Not like that, idiot." A pair of players were approaching as the afternoon light started to shift towards evening, a muscular blonde man who looked like he'd run into the character creator's limitations while trying to build some sort of bare-chested barbarian archetype and come out looking like Chinese bootleg Conan and a young man with chestnut hair who looked like he'd tweaked every single slider on the character creator once and said 'good enough' to the result. Not entirely generic, but rather distinctly nondescript.

It made for something of a funny image then, that the muscled blonde was rubbing his side where his friend had elbowed him. "Is it just me or does the lack of pain make it feel super weird t'get hit?" "Not right now Joey, Ho there! Miss Ranger!" The friend in question waved Helewise' way, smiling. "How goes your hunt?"

Oh, huh, RPers? She supposed there would be more of them around, and she technically was one given she loved the idea of having what was basically a FullDive DnD campaign given all the freedom Cardinal provided in regards to dynamic dialogue and quests. Sure, the Alpha testers had grumbled about it being a bit chatbotty sometimes, but that'd been the Alpha like half a year ago and it'd just been meant to test how well NerveGear headsets performed compared to the bike-sized Medicuboids when it came to shaking hands with the human brain. Helewise had yet to run into any issue like that, everything felt so lifelike you'd forget it was a videogame if it wasn't for the semi-frequent system pop-ups.

Either way, she was more than happy to match the energy thrown her way, "Hah! Damn mediocre, I'll tell ya! Meat should be okay enough once minced or turned into jerky, and the rest… well, apprentice craftsmen need something cheap to practice on, is the best I can say. So at least I won't be sitting on a bunch'a junk at the end of the day."

"Well, perhaps we could help you out a little? If you have any need of it of course." They were speaking English, which was a certain strangeness in itself given this was the Japanese server. Not that there weren't going to be expats and foreign residents playing (hell, she was one), but they'd opened with English and hadn't been surprised when she'd answered with the same. "I'm Tri-uh… Zeero, and this is Jonah," the brunette's eyes slid over to his friend again, who was squinting at Helewise oddly. Or rather, squinting at a point just above her head, eyes slowly going between it and her face.

If the cursors above these two's own heads could have twinkled innocently, they might well have taken that moment to do so.

"Uhh… 'Zeero' I think…" The blonde pronounced his friend's screen name with the care of someone who might well be entirely unused to the concept of a pseudonym.

"What? I grabbed crafting remember?" "Yeah but…" 'Jonah's eyes slowly swung back up to Helewise' cursor again and then back down to her face, his cheeks reddening as the emotional emulation system responded to his embarrassment with an exaggerated awkward flush. 'At least Cardinal didn't go for the comically large sweatdrop.' "I don't think she's gonna give you a quest for it…"

"Why wouldn't she?"

"Well doesn't the green thingie mean she's a player?"

'…Oh, there's the sweatdrop.' The production of SAO's emotional reading engines was entirely cartoonish, thankfully, though seeing it pop up behind Zeero's realistic 3d visage was still quite odd as his eyes now swung up above Helewise' head, then back down, staring at her with a faintly horrified expression before turning beet red too. "Oh."

"Pffft. I thought you two were just newbie RPers!" Helewise snorted, struggling mightily to keep it to just that since these two were mortified enough as-is without someone outright laughing at them. She hoped the friend requests she shot out with a quick few swipes of her hand—kudos to whoever had made the interface, it was hideously intuitive—would take the bite off of it. With a party to watch her back she could start tackling boar herds just fine.

Jonah jumped in surprise at the friend request, then burst out laughing when Zeero looked about ready to bolt at the sheer indignity of it all before he tapped it and a little checkmark appeared on Helewise' screen. "Relax Tris-uh, Zeero."

"Relax?! Uuuugh…" His eyes rolled in a full circle before he finally deigned to accept the request as well. "Fu-uh… Frick," he shifted away from the curse halfway through it, "First impression completely blown."

"I mean I don't think that's anything bad if she's inviting us to be friends, hey-uh," Jonah's attention shifted back towards Helewise suddenly, the fact that he had an immediate source of knowledge to hand dawning on him. "What's 'Arpee-er' mean anyways?"

"Roleplayer, it means roleplayer," Zeero groaned behind him before Helewise could answer.

Jonah's expression turned to confusion again. "Wait, ain't that a sex thing?"

Helewise's willpower was outright herculean, the way she managed to keep her voice steady despite the witch-like cackle that was doing its damnedest to burst out of her ribcage, "Nah, that's E-RP, like how you got h-doujins as a pretty important distinction when you swing by Comiket."

"You've gone to Comiket? Lucky… Though musta been pretty expensive flying all the way out t' Japan." Jonah outright grinned, the expression looking oddly at home on his avatar's face.

Were these two using VPNs or something to get in the Japan server? But then why would they assume… ah, hell, nothing to do but to ask, "I actually live there nowadays, landed a pretty alright gig as an english teacher, but uh. If you are in America or Europe, how come you don't have five million ping from trying to connect to the Japan server?"

She was pretty sure it was automatically assigned by region, too. Maybe some friends overseas they wanted to hang out with in FullDive? It would be a pretty nice way to feel like you were actually spending time with someone even if there was an ocean or two in the way.

"No, it's been smooth." "What do you mean 'Japan server' we're on the American server aren't we?" Zeero and Jonah inquired in stereo, voices overlapping. They looked at each other, blinked, and both opened their mouths again before flinching back, expressions turning thoughtful.

"No, it doesn't make sense. Like you said," Zeero motioned to Helewise, shifting back and forth restlessly as though unsure who he should be speaking to. "The ping would be crazy if we were connecting to Japan wouldn't it?"

Jonah had opened his menu in the meantime and seemed to be scrolling through it, his accent growing thicker with nerves, "I'm sure I clicked 'America' at the start, didn't I? The whole Nerd Gear setup thingy."

"NerveGear," Zeero corrected absentmindedly, swiping the air to pull his own menu open, "maybe that's why we couldn't find Yugi earlier?"

"Aw man… There's gotta be an option to fix it though right?"

"We might need to remake our characters, I don't think they've got transfers yet. We'll just, uh…"

Zeero went still, his hand hovering uncertainly over the menu. "Hey-ah… Where's the 'Log Out' button?"

"What're you talking about it's right–..." Jonah's rebuttal died in his throat, giving way to a murmured 'the hell?'

One that Helewise echoed when she opened her menu and found the same. "...That makes no sense, I took a quick break to drink water while I was making my avatar and it let me log out just fine. Lemme send a ti—"

A bell tolled, the sound consuming her attempt to speak as it surrounded them. What should have had a source instead seemed to come from all around, bombarding them with noise.

At least it stopped when darkness bloomed around them, small mercy though it may have been.

What that too was swept away, they emerged to a familiar sight, the central plaza that had been their first sight in this world, seemingly packed to bursting as flashes of light heralded incoming teleportations in the dozens, hundreds, even thousands.

"...cket." Helewise trailed off, slowly lowering her finger.

Already the place seemed full to bursting, a moment's hesitation to take stock proving insufficient to the task as more people kept teleporting in. More than should have been on any one server, surely.

The whole population of Sword Art Online, brought together in a single place, the orange-streaked sky slowly giving way to colors that started as the ruddy shades of afternoon sunlight and ended on a monotone of baleful bloody red.
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