Demon Swordsman: Remastered (Sword Art Online X Male Reader)

Chapter 2 - Reality

Aincrad was built of a hundred thin floors stacked on top of one another in one mass.

The floors were larger on the bottom and smaller as you went up toward the top, so the entire structure was broadly conical in shape. The first floor was the biggest in the game, at over six miles across. The biggest city on the floor, known as the "main city," was called the Town of Beginnings, and it spread across the southern end in a half-circle over half a mile wide.

Tall castle walls surrounded the town, preventing monsters from ever attacking. The interior of the town was protected by an "Anti-Criminal Code" that ensured no player could lose a single pixel of their HP, the measurement of their true life remaining. Put another way, you were safe if you stayed in the Town of Beginnings and could not die.

After the Fantastic tutorial, I decided to leave with the only other person I consider my friend, Kirito.

There were several reasons why we were leaving. There was no way of knowing if the code would continue functioning forever. We wanted to avoid the infighting and distrust that were sure to develop among players. And the MMO gamer instincts told us to fixate on levelling up.

My escape from reality turned into my new reality, faced with uncertain dangers and obstacles. But strangely, I didn't feel that worried about it, but this is what I wanted; an escape from the harsh reality of the real world. Escape from what happened.

Kirito had invited to bring along a swordsman named Klein to the next town, Horunka, but Klein said he couldn't leave behind his guildmates from a previous game. I honestly didn't care if Klein came with us or stayed in the Town of Beginnings. All that matters is survival.

A sense of survival etched into human DNA from a long distant past.

That's why. That's why Kirito and I ran without looking back to the next town. But to not die between towns, we had to move past the "Relatively safe" areas and into "Slightly dangerous" territory.

Something like this would be impossible if we got the game yesterday, seeing Aincrad for the first time and being the first full-dive game we ever played. We didn't hesitate because this wasn't the first time we played, and we were not ignorant of what lay around us, which would be suicide otherwise. We were Beta Testers. We knew the terrain and monsters of the lower floors of Aincrad.

Our path sounded simple, but it was also dangerous. By leaving the northwest gate of the Town of Beginnings, cutting straight through the open field, through a deep, maze-like forest, we would arrive at a village called Horunka. Though small, it was indeed a safe haven like the big city, with an inn, weapon store, and item shop; it was an excellent base of operations.

We weren't possessed by some heroic desire to defeat a hundred floors of bosses and beat the game by ourselves. We were certain that out of the ten thousand players trapped in the game, at least a thousand were of that ilk. Whether alone or in groups, they would leave town, kill the weaker monsters around them, and begin earning experience points, levelling up, gaining better equipment, and becoming stronger.

It's the sole reason why we were heading to Horunka.

Kirito and I would go from level 1 to level 5 in Horunka. There are no monsters with dangerous effects around us like paralysis or equipment destruction, so even as a duo, we were highly unlikely to meet an accidental death.

The time was six-fifteen in the evening. The fields around us were golden, with the evening sun pouring through the outer aperture of Aincrad, and the forest in the distance was gloomy with dusk. Fortunately, even after night, there were no powerful monsters around Horunka. If we continued hunting until after midnight, we would have good enough stats and gear that we could move on to the next settlement by the time other players filled the village.