Right Back At It Again- Chapter 2



      It all started in November of 2021, just a few days after I turned 15.  I was driving my very first car with my little brother in the backseat back from an ice cream shop in New York and we were stuck at an intersection, waiting for the light to change.  All of a sudden, I heard the screeching of tires spinning and then the world turned black.
    When I lifted my head off of the steering wheel, the smell of chemicals, oil, and smoke filled my throat.  Slowly turning back, I saw my little brother looking out of the now-busted in window.  As if in slow motion, he turned to me, showing me the right side of his face.  Blood was pouring out the side of his head, where flaps of skin were peeled back to show the torn muscle and slight hint of his skull.  I remember screaming and hitting the broken driver's side door until my knuckles were raw and red before passing out into peaceful oblivion.
    My brother survived that day, but my mind never seemed to.  Panic attacks came at seemingly random and sleep was delicacy I would rarely taste.  I was diagnosed with PTSD and directed to several therapists.  After the accident, I grew more and more distant from my family; I always felt cut off from my parents and my brothers.  I guess this feeling is what drove me to MMORPGs and why I began to become obsessed with them.  They offered a world in which I could start over, become whoever I wanted to be.  I soon became increasing good with them, to the point where I could participate in professional MMO's.
    After accumulating enough money on the professional MMO, APB, I declared myself an emancipated minor and moved to Japan to be closer to the MMO industry.  In a new world, away from anyone who knew about my past, I thought I would feel better and more at ease.  However, due to my limited knowledge of Japanese and my name's similarity to the word, "nancy", I found that I had to deal with new problems.  I would frequently get into fights both at and outside of school; almost everyday I seemed to acquire a new injury.
    Eventually, I found some friends in some of the other foreign kids and developed a regular MMO group that I could depend on.  I felt happier than I had ever felt in my entire life when my hands were at the keyboard and my mind was in another world.  Eventually, two of my friends, Devon and Garrith, moved in with me at my house and we would run through MMORPGs faster than most players. 
    It's no surprise that when SAO went public, I rushed off to buy some NerveGears and three copies of the game.  I begged Garrith and Devon to try the game with me after I got calls from Josh, Katie, and Matt from our usual MMO group telling me that they were going to be going online as soon as the countdown ended.  Relenting after I told them that I had ordered some food that they could only eat if they played with me, we all put our NerveGears on at the same time and started the game.
     I immediately fell in love Aincrad; I spent the first hour perusing the markets of the beginning town before settling on buying a thin blade with my beginning amount of money.  After that, I set off to find my friends among the thousands of other players in this new virtual world.  We all agreed to use the names we usually used in other MMOs, so that it would be easier to find each other.  After half an hour, we grouped up and set up a party together.  Fighting together, we were about to reach level 2 when that fateful bell rang and we were transported the main plaza.
    After the game master's horrifying revelation, I almost lost my mind; once again, I was stuck in a world that I couldn't escape.  Desperately, I started to search for my friends among the crowds of other players that were now panicking.  In a short while, we were able to get everyone back together and were about to hit the fields outside the town to farm the fields and level up so we start to search for the boss when I saw a familiar face in the crowd of other players.  Crouched over and clutching his chest was my grandfather. 

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January 26th, 2023 

    After talking to the old man, I discovered that he was, in fact, not my grandfather; he was just an old janitor who had been trying out the NerveGear his granddaughter had given him and just so happened to look like my late grandfather.  Against my better judgment, I decided to protect him and invited him to the party.  From then on, Selwyn became a member of our group and eventually our guild.

      From day one, I spent all of my time in combat and managing my guild, Darkness Falls, of which I was the leader.  I was in the assault team that killed the first boss and I worked part time on the frontlines, which were at floor 24.  At this time, I was proficient with throwing weapons and quite a few levels higher than the rest of my guild, including Selwyn.  Gerg, Garrith's SAO in-game name,  had set up a blacksmithing shop on floor 13 and I bought a headquarters for our guild on the same floor.
      As most of the guild was out gathering resources for Gerg or farming on the higher levels with  our two newest recruits, Jesse and Auser, I decided to take a trip with Selwyn outside of town.
       It's a beautiful day out, I thought to myself as I looked at the slight dusting of snow that the outdoors had received overnight.  The reason why we picked floor 13 to be the floor on which our base of operations would be located on was because it seemed to mimic the seasons in real time, making it feel that much more like real life.  Just then, Selwyn shivered and pulled his fur coat closer around himself.
      "I honestly don't understand how you're not cold, kid," he muttered, glancing at me.  "You got some kind of heat crystal or something you're hiding from me?"
     I chuckled, amused by my companion's never-failing bluntness.  "No, I'm just used to this kind of weather old man.  I'm from New York, remember?"
    Selwyn grunted and nodded, fixing his gaze forwards.  "I've gotten better at fighting," he remarked, a layer of excitement hidden under a nonchalant tone.
    Resisting the urge to look at his level, I asked, "So you've gone up some levels?"
    "Several," the elderly man confirmed, looking towards the white topped trees of the forest in the distance.  "I was wondering: would you accompany me to the dungeon today?"

     I mulled over the idea in my mind for a few moments before answering.  "Sure," I said, smiling at my best friend.  "You've been training a lot lately and I don't see why we won't be able to take it together."
     Selwyn turned to me and smiled, showing perfectly white teeth, a lie compared to what he told me his teeth looked like in real life.  "I'll beat you to the forest, kid," he said, starting off in a sprint toward the dungeon entrance.
      "Not on your life, old man," I retorted, chasing after him at full speed.  With the wind whipping through my hair, I thought about how impossible this situation would be in real life.  For one, Selwyn had an arthritic back and could never come close to keeping up with me, a former cross country runner.  If Sword Art Online had been anything other than the death game it had become, I thought to myself, it would have been a beautiful way for the disabled to move again.
      Noticing that Selwyn had stopped, I slowed down and jogged over to him.  "What's up, old man?  Out of breath already?" I jokingly asked, patting him on the back.
     "Not on your life, kid."  He panted, throwing my own retort back at me.  "It looks like the forest has stopped our little foot race."
     Huge trees now dominated our vision and pine needles covered the ground, as if they had fallen off of the trees earlier in the year.  Wondering for a few minutes why a Japanese game would include trees not native to the country in the game, I marked it down as creative diversity.
     "Well, it's not gonna come any closer to us,"  my friend remarked, obviously eager to get a taste of his first dungeon.
      "Yup," I said, nodding in agreement.  "Let's get this thing started."  Moving forward, I thought I saw some movement in the upper branches of the trees and some snow fall to the ground. Looking again closely, I couldn't find anything and shook my head.  Probably just a NPC squirrel or something.
      "What's taking you so long, kid?"  Selwyn called out to me, quite a ways deeper into the dungeon than when I last saw him.  "Scared?"
      "As if!" I shouted back, adding some pseudo-90's teenage angst to my voice.  I started to run deeper into the forest, happy to spend some time with one of my best friends. 
       In real life, I tended to avoid most people because I never felt like I belonged.  No one I knew had ever experienced the kind of life experiences that I had or had to deal with something like PTSD that could take over your life.  However, the elderly always seemed to hold a special part in my heart; their experience, their wisdom was something nobody could rival.  They always seemed to know when to say the right thing at the right time to the right person.   I guess the closer to death you get, the more valuable life becomes to you.  It becomes something you treasure and nurture and not something you spend.
      My thoughts were suddenly interrupted by a load of cold, wet snow falling on my head.  As I stood there with an annoyed expression, Selwyn started to laugh at me.  His eyes drifted upwards to
see what caused the snow the snow to fall and he stopped laughing.
     Confused, I glanced upwards to see a group of about 5 enemy NPCs perched in the branches above, staring at us.  I gritted my teeth and pulled out one of my throwing picks and launched it at the nearest one.  As one, the group fell to the group and my pick soared over the head of the one I was aiming for.
      The NPC in the front of the group, which was now shaped like a V, garbled something and the rest of the group started head towards Selwyn.  I wondered briefly if I could pull up anything in the databank that was my memory seeing these enemies before when I completed the dungeon with the assault team.  However, try as I might, I could not seem to remember anything about humanoid enemies being found on this floor.
     Selwyn deflected the first attack from the mob in front and managed to evade an attack from the second enemy.  I took three of my throwing picks and launched them at the group of enemies that had now almost surrounded my best friend.
    "Selwyn!"  I shouted, taking a poison dipped dagger out of my belt and readying it.  "Just block and evade; I'll take the aggro off of you!"
     The old man nodded and rolled out of the way of an enemy's sword's reach.  Just then I let go of my throwing dagger and watched it race towards the lead mob's back and sink into the cloaked figure.  It let out a pained cry and shuddered for a few moments before continuing to attack Selwyn.
      With wide eyes, I watched as one of the enemies landed a hit on my best friend and a red gash appeared on his shoulder.  That dagger should have drawn at least three mobs towards me, if not four.  Slowly, the realization came to me and I gasped in horror.
      "Selwyn!  They aren't NPCs!"  I shouted, drawing my sword from my side and rushing to my best friend's aid.  "They're players!"  I flinched as another sword managed to find it's way to Selwyn's side.
     He nodded to show that he understood and swung at the player who hit him and hit another in the face by accident.  I kicked the outermost member of the crowd in the side of the stomach and knocked him to the ground.  Switching my attention to another player, I heard the grunt of the other player as he started to get up.  Slashing the guy across the chest, I pulled one of my daggers out and threw it at the guy who was trying to get up.
     The weapon hit him in the eyes and I saw that he had received the <<Vision Impaired>> status. With grim satisfaction, I turned my attention back to the other player I had been fighting when I heard a familiar scream.
     Selwyn was on his knees, shaking and looking at his shoulder as if he was hemorrhaging.  A red player was standing above him with his sword in both hands, laughing.  I quickly pulled out a hatchet from my belt and threw it at the player.  However, before my weapon found its target, the PKer plunged his blade into my best friend's back. 
     For a few seconds, the closest thing I had to my grandfather shimmered with a white glow before bursting into an array of shining shards, almost as if the fragile man I knew was made out of glass and the single thrust of a sword has shattered him.  With a thud, my hatchet lodged itself into the face of Selwyn's killer and, he too, was wiped from existence.
     I don't really remember much about what happened after that; really, that was the last memory I had before I woke up in the same forest with about four dead player's armor and items.  I recall getting up off of the ground and going over to where a blue tinted sword was laying and picking it up.  Looking at it's description, I could see that it was called "Ice-Stained Blade" and had previously belonged to a player called JirBlue.
     In the coming months, that sword and I would continue systematically hunt down and kill every PKer we could find.  No longer did I spend anytime on the front lines; instead, every second was spent patrolling outside of towns, waiting for my targets to walk outside of the town.  I began to believe that this whole situation, this whole game was just a test.  No one actually died and all I was doing was ridding the system of the faulty and destructive variables.
     That was until I woke up that day in the hospital and realized the terrible truth.  I had killed 287 people.