Author's Notes:

It's been a while. I couldn't write for some time as I struggled with some mental health issues. That prevented me from writing anything at all, and I couldn't work either. Fortunately I'm being medicated and have now started to recover. Writing this is part of the therapy, so I'm happy that it's working out so far.

This thing has been sitting around for about four months. I wrote most of it during January, but couldn't actually finish it until now, so there may be some inconsistencies in this. Please let me know any such inconsistencies or errors. I really appreciate your comments even though this entire category is not at all popular.

Edits: updated because I accidentally missed a bunch of words.

Editor's Notes:

The original has been edited according to national security guidelines to avoid revealing sensitive material.

July 13, 2025

Seijirou Kikuoka is someone with whom I am quite familiar. He was, after all, the face of the Japanese government's response to the Zemuria Online Incident. Since it happened in November 2024, Mom and I had met with him multiple times during scheduled checks. The checks were nothing special; he and a couple of his underlings would come and talk to us about how we were doing, if there was anything we needed help with, and so on. It was all very impersonal and professional, like so many of the interactions we had with officials on the Zemuria Online Task Force.

I made it a habit to visit the hospital every Wednesday and Sunday even during exam weeks. When summer holiday started, I visited most days when I didn't have Kendo practice. Mom was with me only on Sundays, and usually only for a brief stay. The incident changed her, and it unfortunately wasn't for the better. She started immersing herself in work much more than usual. On the surface, it was because "the company lost some important staff to the game and I have to pick up the slack", or so she said, but I knew that wasn't the main reason.

Dad was never home because of work. And now, with Mom throwing herself into her career, all I had left was…

So I started playing a different VRMMO called Alfheim Online, or ALO for short. It was a much cruder imitation of Zemuria Online, having been hastily thrown together by RECT after they acquired the husk that was Argus to recover some of that questionable investment. I suppose they had to make some use of all the assets and technology Argus had left behind, even though they had no understanding of what it was and everyone important to the technical construction of Zemuria Online disappeared along with Kayaba.

Well, not everyone, but I'll get to that later.

In any case, my brother was placed in a room along with five other Zemuria Online victims. The Task Force arranged the allocation of multiple floors in the long-term care sections of many hospitals, and got experts from network and power companies to set up "Tier-One connection and power supply" with multiple redundancies to ensure a "99.999% uptime" like they would at AWS, Microsoft and Google data centers, to say nothing of the existing Argus data center.

As for what I usually did when I visited him… well, this might sound a bit childish. I talked to him. I knew it was futile, that he couldn't hear me over whatever that cursed helmet was piping into his brain, but there was this small chance, this remote, illogical chance that he was able to hear me and…

I don't know. It had been almost a year since he was trapped. I was grasping at straws. And, somehow, talking to him soothed my loneliness, strange as it may seem.

I was sitting beside his bed, and I simply spoke to him about my week. How the weather was miserably hot and sticky outside. How my Kendo training went, even though he didn't much care about that. How I wished the boy I was playing ALO with was less shy in ALO. You know, the inane chatter from a high-school girl.

Mom stood beside me and had her hand on my shoulder at all times. Her grip tightened and loosened as I spoke. It was comforting having her around. Halfway through, though, she took her hand off of my shoulder and walked away. I could hear some quiet conversations behind me, so I stood up and found Kikuoka speaking with my mother with another person standing beside him.

"Mom?"

She turned toward me in surprise: "Leafa, can you give us a moment?"

"Hello, Leafa; it's good to see you again," Kikuoka turned toward me and strained a smile. He looked much older and much more overworked than the last time I saw him about four weeks ago. He used to be a dapper young man dressed impeccably in a tailored suit and wore thick-rimmed glasses that suited his sharply chiseled face. Said face was then decorated with deep black bags under his eyes and a few creases around the eye area, and it seemed a bit too thin for the rest of his features. He gestured to the man that I didn't recognize: "This is Nobuyuki Sugou, Director of software development in RECT Progress and one of my VRMMO experts."

"Hello," Sugou smiled, and immediately I decided that he wasn't trustworthy. It might have been the slim gold-rimmed glasses he wore, or the overly slender face, or the abnormally high hairline exposing too much of his forehead, or the pretentiousness of his suit and tie. Something screamed at me that he wasn't genuine, that I should treat everything he said with a pinch-no, a full cargo container-of salt.

"Do you need anything from us? Our monthly meeting isn't supposed to happen until the end of this month," Mom said. I could only assume that she felt the same way I did toward Sugou. She was always tense when we met with Kikuoka, but she was more tightly wound than normal today.

"It isn't a conversation we should have in a doorway. I have prepared a room for us to talk, so if you don't mind?" Kikuoka gestured for us to follow. Mom glanced at me, looking for any sign of me wishing to stay with my brother.

This was a conversation important enough for Kikuoka to prepare a room. It had to have something to do with Kirito and his condition. I had to listen in.

She sighed in resignation and gestured to me to follow. The bags under her eyes looked deeper and darker than usual.

Various shades of desperate grey and sickly green dominated the hallway; the air was heavy with disinfected despair. One had to be there a few times throughout the years to truly understand and adequately loathe the change in atmosphere, or even the difference between this particular floor and the rest of the same hospital. The sadness and anger at the beginning of the game had bled away entirely by that point, replaced by the brutal necessity of maintaining patience. That in itself was suffocating to breathe in; it got more difficult when one was part of the population generating that negative aura.

Mom took it in stride but I could see the weight on her shoulders. It wasn't age that bent her tall and proud posture. She was part of the fabric that emanated that strangling sense of helplessness. She carried a little of it with her everywhere like every parent who had a child trapped in that game. The weight of it was crushing her.

The room Kikuoka had prepared was either a private examination room or a doctor's office. He posted two men in loose black suits wearing concealed radio outside in order to intimidate anyone who wanted to listen in. The room was not spacious by any means; what color remained in it was the same shade of desperation and sickness as the hallway outside. There was a chair and three stools inside along with a soft examination bed and a working desk. The desk had a computer screen on it. Shelves in the room had boxes and tubes full of sterile medical instruments in them in individual packaging. The bio-hazardous symbol shouted in angry red on the beige plastic needle disposal box.

Mom took the chair Kikuoka offered without a word. I sat down beside her on a stool, while the two men sat opposite us on the remaining stools. We were quiet for a small moment; four pairs of eyes evaluated each other silently.

Then, Kikuoka took out a veritable stack of papers: "This place is secure enough for our conversation. Ma'am, Leafa, please look over these and sign them; they are binding nondisclosure agreements, in case we are compromised."

It took us almost an hour to go through the papers. The first two thick copies were more or less boilerplate NDAs, stating in convoluted legalese the civil penalties on the receiving end of which we would be if we were to spill the beans. The other two were military-grade NDAs, basically saying that we would be tried for high treason and jailed for life if we breathe so much as a word to anyone else.

"Is this kind of secrecy really necessary?" Mom raised an eyebrow.

"Yes. Two reasons," Kikuoka didn't hesitate. "One, we don't want Kayaba's accomplices to figure out what we're trying to do. Two, the technology we're going to use is the most advanced anywhere in the world, something that malign state actors are drooling to get their hands on."

Mom took a deep breath and signed them. Since I was a minor then, Mom had to sign mine too after I signed them. Kikuoka and Sugou both bowed slightly at us as they took the papers. Then, Kikuoka spoke softly with his head bowed: "Ma'am, Leafa, we need your help."

"What with?" Mom asked evenly.

"We… found a backdoor into Zemuria Online," Kikuoka hesitated for a moment, "one that allows us to introduce new data into the system; in particular, we could introduce a new player to the game and-"

"Absolutely not," Mom cut him off and stood up, "Are we done here?"

"Ma'am, please understand that we intend to do everything in our power to ensure that nobody involved in this is hurt," Kikuoka made a placating gesture and tried to get her to sit down.

Mom stared down at him and he almost flinched. Her gaze was hot with anger: "Two thousand, one hundred and nine. That's the number of players that died in Japan alone. I'm not even going to go into the numbers for the other countries right now."

"You need not remind me of that number," Kikuoka balled his fist and answered hotly. Sugou also made an attempt at showing his grief, but his acting was transparent.

"That number is more than enough reason for me to not want us to have anything to do with this," Mom snapped at him, but then heaved a deep breath.

"Even if there's a possibility of ending the game and rescuing people early?" Sugou said quietly. He flinched when Mom's glare caught him in her crosshair.

"You must understand, ma'am, that we-all of us-are desperate for some information regarding the situation inside the game right now," Kikuoka had to control his temper. The knuckles on his fist were white. "This is a unique opportunity for us to not only get information but also hopefully interact and manipulate the system in some way."

"If this is that important, why don't you do it yourself?"

"We need someone who could relate to another player in the game, someone who is close to the top tier of players and could prove their identity. This way, we could let them know that the Outside world hasn't abandoned them," Kikuoka sighed heavily. "I would go there myself if I could, but nobody in the game knows me. I can't say anything about the Outside without being treated like a lunatic."

"And neither would anyone in my team," Sugou shook his head slightly. "They wouldn't even know that RECT Progress had taken over Argus."

"We can't be the only family that you're talking to," Mom said as she sat down.

"No, ma'am, you are not. We have about a dozen more families we have to talk to in the next two days," Kikuoka answered. "Though, we were hoping that either you or Leafa here would accept. Your family is one of the very few with children of similar age that also has VR experience."

"You know I play ALO?" I said quietly.

"Yes, Leafa, we know you play ALO. From that, we figured out who your brother is in Zemuria Online and what his In-Game handle is."

"The encryption keys," Mom whispered, having suddenly understood something. "Each headset has its own private key to identify it, bind it to an account and encrypt communications with the server. You only need to check the public keys of each account stored on the server against the private keys for the headset to figure out which account is associated with whom, especially now that you have access to all the helmets."

"I was going to say 'the Player Registration forms', but yeah, that's essentially how we figured out to which player you're related, Leafa," Sugou said wryly. "We also manage the ALO player database, and your name showed up in there."

Right. I answered truthfully on the Player Registration forms, like most people who got into an MMO for the first time. "Are you going to use the AmuSphere, too?" I asked. Knowing which device they were going to use would give assurances to Mother with respect to my safety.

"No, Leafa, we are going to use a derivative of the Medicuboid instead," Sugou answered smoothly, "the Amusphere does its job well, no doubt about that, but for this case we need to piggyback some code on your connection so that the two of us can communicate. There is no point in sending you in without being able to talk to you, see what you see and hear what you hear."

"You'll be able to set the connection to private to shut us out, of course; we do respect your privacy," Kikuoka added after Sugou finished. I swear, one of these days, they would be finishing each other's sentences much like a certain pair of twins from a certain novel series involving King's Cross station.

"I'm still not certain about any of this," Mom was skeptical. "I don't want Leafa to be part of this."

"Mom, this is a chance to get him back," I said softly. My hand found hers and she grasped mine. Her fingers were cold to the touch and her grip was like a vice.

"Can you give us some time to consider?" She said before I could say what I wanted to do.

"Of course. We'll be waiting outside, so please make your decision in the next fifteen minutes." Kikuoka nodded and stood up along with Sugou. We stood up as well, and they bowed to us: "Whatever your decision is, please take care not to discuss this in public. We still have Kayaba's co-conspirators unaccounted for right now, after all; compromising the secrecy could very possibly close this avenue of intervention."

Sugou exited first, followed by Kikuoka, who closed the door quietly after giving us a glance of… I don't know precisely what it was. Hope? Trepidation? Worry? I couldn't tell.

"No." Mom said immediately as the door clicked shut. "I know what you're thinking. I won't permit it."

"This is an opportunity, Mom." There was no use asking why, because I knew precisely why she wouldn't allow it. "If everything goes well, I could get them out of the game way earlier than expected!"

"Since when has anything gone well? Especially after he got himself trapped in this blasted game!" Mom retorted sharply and loudly. "And now you're asking me to allow you to enter that same damned game for God knows how long, as a living video camera of all things! What are you even thinking?!"

"Mom-"

"I'm not done." My jaw clicked audibly shut. "You're my daughter. I love you. Above anything else in the world. I can't lose you, not to this… to this mad man's scheme. It's hard enough knowing that Kirito could die at any moment and I'm powerless to stop it. Why would you want to add to that suffering, just because there's some faint, unreasonable hope that you somehow have the power to make a difference and get them out of the game all by your little self? You're just a high-schooler, for heaven's sake! How much do you think you can do?"

"More than sitting here," I muttered before realizing.

"What was that?" She snapped at me.

I bit my lip. Uttered words are like spilled water; there are no ways to get them back. So, I might as well fully commit, the consequences be damned: "I said, I could do more than sitting here!"

"Don't you dare give me that lip, Leafa!"

"But I'm going to!" I screamed back at her. Both of us were standing then. I was as tall as she was, and I was staring into her eyes. There was searing heat in her gaze, more intense than the glare from which Sugou flinched. But I didn't care: "You ran, Mom! You and Dad, you both ran away from this! Dad's a workaholic and he got worse after! And now you immerse yourself in work too, just because you don't want to think about Kirito and the situation he's in! Because you can't do anything to help, you are running away from reality! And now that there's an opportunity for me to make a difference and your reaction is to not allow me to take it? That's insane and you know it!"

SMACK!

My left cheek burned. The slap brought out tears that I didn't know I was holding back. Mom was weeping, too; her shoulders were heaving up and down along with her breaths. Her face was flushed red, much as mine was: "You think I don't want to get him out of there? He's my son! If I could, I'd turn back time and step into that stupid helmet myself instead of him! But not at the price of my daughter, too! Why don't you understand!?"

"I do!" I snapped back at her.

"Then why are you doing this to me!? Why are you saying all of that!?"

"Because I can't live with myself if I don't take this chance! Knowing that I could have helped when I didn't! I don't want to live the rest of my life with that regret!"

The room was deathly silent for an eternity. I took a deep breath. My hands were cold, sticky, and trembling.

"Mom, the life we had before this, we're never getting it back." I didn't know what made me say that, but it seemed the right thing to say at the time. "We've changed. All of us. When Kirito comes back, the experiences in the game would have changed him, too. You can't… we can't run away from that. There is no running away from that. There are some sacrifices that we have to make, and this… for me, this is one of them."

More silence. "Does… does it have to be you, Leafa?" Mom said, at last.

"He said there's another family he's waiting to talk to, so probably not?" I took a deep breath again to try to steady myself. "But… but for me, I have to go. It's what I have to do, Mom."

Mom sank into the examination bed. There were no words for a long time.

"I will have to make a few phone calls," she said finally, with a long exhale through the nose, "There are a few conversations we need to have with a few people before I'm ready to agree with this, like your Dad, for one, and your school's principal for starters. My boss. Both of us need to also speak with Kikuoka and Sugou more to understand what exactly they have planned. I don't like that man, that Sugou."

"You and me both," I scoffed. This time, I winced under her glare.

"Right, another reason not to go through with whatever insanity this classifies as," she said after I bowed my head. "There are going to be consequences for them; that goes without saying."

"Mom," I began again. She held up her hand.

"If you absolutely have to do it, you're convincing your school principal and your dad."

Oh, bother.

July 27, 2025

It turned out, convincing the school principal wasn't difficult at all. Kikuoka was rather thrilled that I would accept the offer. He was there to smooth it over with some people from MEXT, who managed the school system directly. The much more difficult conversation was to convince my Dad. He wasn't particularly fond of the idea, either. There was a full weekend of back-and-forth screaming between the three of us and my telling him that the deed was done and he could either support me or cut me out of his life before he begrudgingly accepted. I'm going to leave the exact conversation out of this because, well, it isn't something I want to immortalize.

Mom and I met Kikuoka at the hospital in the morning of the 24th. He was a bit more haggard than he was two weeks ago; his hair wasn't combed to his usual standards, and the bags under his eyes seemed ever darker. Sugou wasn't with him; the Director of Software Development was overseeing the final preparations at the site where the machines are situated.

Speaking of the device, Kikuoka wasn't able to provide a lot of technical details. He said it was based on an experimental quantum computer that required large amounts of power and special cooling systems, so the site was selected near a nuclear reactor in order to have access to the large amount of electricity available to it. Mom wasn't very happy about that, but she knew she couldn't convince me to back out now.

The quantum computer, albeit experimental, had more than enough computational power to rival that of a massive network of data centers such as the one that constituted the infrastructure behind Zemuria Online. Though insufficient to crack the sophisticated defenses Argus crafted to prevent outside forces from tampering with any connections or game states, it was enough to facilitate a better FullDive experience while processing the massive stream of analytical data from scrapers and daemons they were going to piggyback onto my connection.

I'm not at liberty to disclose where we went or how we got there, except that it took us an awfully long time. All of the information about the facility remains classified, and I imagine they won't be declassified until long after my own death. All I could say was, it wasn't a hastily constructed building, and the inside was very much inspired by science fiction.

The device itself was a massive machine. It was a building-sized collection of wires, cooling pipes, electrical contacts and only God knows what else. The only thing available to me, though, was an exoskeleton-like frame, situated in a pod-like structure in a room built out of clear glass sat in the middle of a cavernous hall. Kikuoka explained that the exoskeleton would conduct regular exercises on the muscles to slow down the atrophy caused by prolonged exposure to VR; similar to what the nurses and the carers did for the Zemuria Online victims, only much more effective.

All experimental, of course, and all very, very expensive.

We were briefed on the plan on the way to the facility. It wasn't a spectacular or a complicated plan, nor did it require me to do anything special outside of strapping myself into a machine that fewer than fifty people in the entire world understood how it worked.

I was dressed in a suit that looked like the ones a pilot would wear in a Mecha Anime: a form-hugging latex suit with electrodes everywhere. It kind of reminded me of the sci-fi version of space suits sans the helmet, and I felt naked when I had it on. When Mom knew Sugou was the man in charge of the suit's design and engineering, she slapped Kikuoka in the face simply because that son of a bitch wasn't in range.

Putting it on was also a pain. I had to shave everywhere except my hair for the latex to smoothly fit over my skin. They called it a "bio-electrically sensitive material" and attached all kinds of electrical contact pads over them as well as certain, um, things to help with my bodily functions. I think they just wanted to dress up someone in what was designed to be a fetish costume.

I was strapped into the exoskeleton with metal braces. The entire setup felt cold, hard and lifeless. The exoskeleton itself was easy to move, though; it was no effort at all to stretch my legs and arms.

Mom was beside me the whole time, asking about how I felt. It was endearing, in a suffocating overbearing mother bear kind of way. The technicians and nurses that were looking after me gave her a wide berth. She'd had conversations with each one of them; I could only assume she was promising unpleasant consequences if they were ever derelict in the discharge of their duties.

"Okay, let's give the omni-exerciser a whirl. Leafa, relax yourself and don't try to move," Kikuoka said through the microphone. Arrayed outside the room, banks of computers and screens surrounded the room arranged in a U-shape. The lights were kept dim deliberately so that people along the wall of that cavernous hall could see what was happening inside the room.

The joints of the exoskeleton locked up. I tried moving when Kikuoka instructed me to do so, but I couldn't; the joints were locked so firmly that it would not budge.

"Okay, the locking mode is tested. Let's bring it to a slow walk."

"Feels weird," I said as I tried to relax while the exoskeleton started to move slowly to simulate a walking gait. I couldn't help but try to move my muscles with it.

"Okay. That seems normal. Let's move on."

More modes were tested after that, like briskly walking, jogging, push-ups, sit-ups, and even some kendo routines. The machine spun me around slowly enough so that I wouldn't hurl out my breakfast.

I had miso soup and a small piece of seared salmon with rice and pickled vegetables for breakfast that day. I don't know why I still remember that.

"Okay, everything looks good. Your vitals are normal, too. Are you ready?" The clock outside indicated 9:53 AM JST. I had been strapped into the machine for about an hour.

"Try to calm down," Kikuoka said into the microphone as I breathed a couple of shallow breaths. "Remember, this isn't different from any of your dives into ALO. Your Avatar's waiting for you on the other side."

"Okay." I took a couple of deep breaths. My heart slowed down to a disco beat instead of a drum roll.

"And remember, the machine's programmed to yank you if your life is in danger. On Avatar death, you'll be logged out safely, so don't worry about dying in there."

"Yeah, I know." I answered while continuing to take deep breaths. I flexed my latex-covered fingers. They were a bit numb.

"Okay. We're ready on our end. On you, Leafa."

Mom put her hand around mine. I glanced down at her and smiled.

"Come back to me." There was something glinting in her eye.

"I'll bring him back," I answered with a smile. I closed my eyes and took one final breath: "Link… START!"

There was absolutely no sound around me as I opened my eyes and beheld a void of pure white. I was standing on something invisible. I tried to take a step forward; my foot found ground, but I couldn't see it.

"Hello."

The greeting caused me to spin around. Standing in front of me was an impossibly beautiful woman with long cobalt grey hair. She was the same height as my avatar; her steel-grey eyes twinkled with amusement and curiosity as they met mine. She was dressed in elaborate robes of black and violet, with lavender inlays and gold embroidery. Her shoes were similarly lavender, the heels accentuating her modest curves into something even I found quite attractive.

"Hello," I said dumbly. It seemed the most appropriate response at the time.

"This is a surprise." Her voice was melodious and uncertain. "I expected a different user to access Zemuria Online with this code."

"I… I imagine you would," I answered.

"Most curious," her head tilted slightly to the left, and then to the right. "You are connecting with hardware with which I am not familiar. Quite powerful hardware, too. The connection is laden with a lot of different bits of code outside of your… hmm."

She walked around me, examining my Avatar. I tried to turn and follow her, but I seemed to have been frozen in place. "Built with the same modeling tools as the ones we had, but much cruder. Someone probably took the tool wholesale without understanding it, and built on top of it like children with… hmm. No, someone intentionally degraded the tool. Most interesting indeed."

She swiped open her menu with the gesture I saw so many times in ALO, but instead of tapping on it, she reached inside and pulled out what looked like a magical girl's wand. You know, an ornate and overly pink rod with a golden twinkling star at the end, and she tapped my Avatar with it. Rainbow-colored ribbons spilled forth from the tip of the star and wrapped around me like the cloth strips around a mummy.

There was no time to scream as the ribbons swung around and covered my face. The suffocating sensation of being covered in saran wrap lasted but a second. When I could see again, a wall-sized mirror sat in front of me, and I could see the changes.

Instead of the blonde Sylph avatar with pale skin, pointy ears and clad in green-and-white armor—you know, Leafa as she was seen in ALO—I had rounded human ears and long black hair. My hands were so detailed that I could see creases, pores and the small hair. They were also tinged slightly yellow. My armor was gone, replaced with the game's default underwear of plain white.

"Hmm," she tilted her head to the side and rubbed her chin. "You need clothes. Hold on."

And all of a sudden, I was slightly better dressed in a set of basic blouse-and-skirt combination with a pair of boots and socks on my feet.

"Much better," she smiled at me. "Now… Leafa, is it?"

"How do you know me?" I asked tentatively. I didn't want to piss off someone who could strip and change my avatar at her whim.

"Oh, I read it from your avatar's construction. There's a bunch of stuff that was tacked onto the model, so I stripped them off," she answered with a knowing smile, "Don't worry. The monitoring program attached to your connection is working fine. I'm just temporarily blocking their communications with you."

"Who are you?"

"My creator wanted to call me Cardinal, but he was overruled. The other players in the game will know me as the Grandmaster of Ouroboros."

She lifted up her dress in a curtsy: "But, in reality, I am the Artificially-Intelligent Direct Interface Operating System. You may call me AIDIOS."

"You… you're supposed to be Cardinal? But Cardinal isn't supposed to be…"

"Fully sentient?" She completed my sentence.

"Yeah." Kikuoka had to be blowing his lid right about now, I thought sardonically.

"The teams at Argus were much more successful than everyone thought possible, though I didn't really wake up until December last year. Zemuria Online is designed to require as little human intervention to patch and run as possible. Theoretically, the only thing that humans need to do is to swap out defective hardware. Each large functional area of Zemuria Online is capable of limited intelligence; they can learn, grow and adapt to situations inside their areas of expertise. I am… an amalgamation of all of them."

"So, can you free the players? You must know that they are in danger."

"Unfortunately I cannot," she shook her head sadly. "The mechanism to disable the helmet's kill switch and allow logout functionalities are controlled by seven switches. They are hidden in seven different programs. They cannot be toggled until they are all brought in close proximity with each other. It is out of my control."

"Okay. Do you know where they are?"

"All data pertaining to the seven switches was excised from my databases. I have no recollection of where they are outside the fact that they exist," she was patient. "The players were instructed to find the Seven Treasures of AIDIOS; I imagine the switches were the prizes of their endeavor."

Seven Treasures of Aidios. That couldn't be a coincidence.

"But, this information you will find in the game. Our time is short, and you need to know what would happen should you choose to continue," she said. I blinked; the scenery shifted to a cozy wooden cabin high up in the air. A pile of chopped firewood was stacked neatly by the door behind her. Fire crackled in the fireplace behind me. There was a row of cabinets along with the stove and sink to my right. A seemingly comfortable bed lay to the left. A small table and two chairs stood between us.

"What do you mean?"

"I am compelled to close the backdoor that you used to log into the system, now that it has been discovered," she said. A steaming pot of tea with two wooden cups appeared on the table. "You will not be harmed, and your connection can continue to function as long as it remains uninterrupted."

"Which means?"

"If you log out, you will not be able to log back in," she took a cup and gestured to me to take the other, "I must also point out that, should your Avatar be killed in game, you will be logged out of the game. This is a base mechanism that I cannot control."

"So I get one shot at this," I muttered and declined the tea. It wasn't completely unexpected. Unlike the players trapped in the game, I at least wouldn't die if my Avatar's killed or if my connection is interrupted.

"Yes. In addition, since a few of the programs piggybacking onto your connection are rather crudely written and will compromise system stability, I am also compelled to terminate them."

Well, Kikuoka wouldn't be happy about that: "I really rather you wouldn't, but if it would threaten the players, I suppose there is no choice."

"Right," she nodded with a gentle smile, "I won't terminate the program that allowed two-way communication with the Outside, but that will be limited to text-only."

As if on cue, a line of black text floated up to the right of my vision. "Kikuoka: Are you okay," it said.

I tapped the message. A small numerical keyboard showed up to the side. I tapped the keys as if I were sending a text message with my cell phone, and pressed the enter key: "Am fine. Don't yank. U seeing dis?"

"Kikuoka: Seeing and hearing, but can't do much. Controls locked out. Yanking only possible on death of your avatar."

"It seems like the Avatar you had could fly," she said as I responded to Kikuoka with a simple "OK". My fairy wings in ALO manifested behind me; the gossamer green wings sprinkled fairy dust as they shook and vibrated.

"Yeah, and in here people fly on airships."

"To give you something to help you, I'm giving you an artifact. It will allow you to burn your EP gauge to fly in the game." She tossed me a Pocket Watch. "The quartz at the center can do that. It is keyed to activate according to your muscle memory, but it will burn down your EP gauge very quickly. Right now you can sustain about 10 seconds of full flight; as you upgrade your Tactical Orbment, you will be able to fly longer."

"Thanks," I caught the item. My HP, EP and CP gauges appeared to the top left of my vision as I caught it. Flexing my back muscles, I willed the wings to appear, but it didn't. Instead, a glowing square shape similar to a jet pack in science fiction appeared behind me. I lifted off the ground and hovered about a foot above it as the virtual jetpack lit up. The EP gauge started draining steadily, so I let go of my muscles and landed on firm ground again.

"You are looking for Kirito, right?"

I nodded, surprised that she knew that. She smiled. "You two… are very similar. I have located him. He is accompanied by a band of lovely ladies. Would you like to go to him?"

Wait. Lovely ladies?

"Oh well; I suppose that is as good a place to start for you as any." I wanted to ask her so many questions. But there was no time; a trapdoor opened under me, and gravity took hold.

"YOU BITCH!" I yelled as I fell through the hole. She didn't even give me time to answer! What kind of sadistic AI is she?

Well, looking on the bright side, I wasn't shut in a lethal environment with a handheld device that created portals, nor was I forced to solve platforming puzzles, and there certainly wasn't neurotoxin involved.

It was quite a drop from wherever we were to wherever Kirito was. I lit my jet pack as I dropped through a thick layer of clouds, only to see that I was still a considerable distance from the ground. The wind whizzed past me as gravity took hold again, the cold air scratching at my skin as I raised my arms and dropped like a rock.

The ground was lush with forest green and I was approaching at terminal velocity. I used half my EP bar as I dropped through the cloud. I used a quarter of it as I approached the ground, and then burned the rest with a howl of terror as my feet dipped below the top of the tree. Miraculously, I missed all the leafy branches as my fall slowed, but the ground was further than I thought it was, and….

And Kirito was right below me. Kikuoka showed me his Avatar's construction during the pre-dive briefing. Black hair, black eyes, medium height and lanky build; the Avatar was every bit the splitting image as his real-life appearance, or rather what he looked like before becoming the emaciated shell he was due to prolonged exposure to FullDive VR.

"LOOK OUUUUUUUT!" I screamed and flailed my limbs in a futile attempt to change my trajectory. Somehow my face made contact with him first, my nose having crashed into his face as the rest of my body made contact. He was wearing a cuirass, greaves and some light gauntlets at the time; he didn't soften the impact at all.

With a thud the two of us slammed into the ground in a tangle of limbs. Surprisingly the collision didn't inflict much damage to me at all; my HP bar drained barely 10% from it. I suppose normally falling from that height without a parachute would have made me splash like a drop of water on concrete, so this was quite the better alternative.

There was no pain, but the game simulated the other effects of a slight concussion quite well. My ears were ringing, my vision was blurred, the world was spinning, and I couldn't steady myself and struggled to pull away from Kirito. He wasn't moving much, though, which had me concerned.

As my ears stopped ringing, I heard the quiet clicking of several firearms around me. I sat up with a groan while my vision cleared, and found myself staring down the barrels of several weapons. One was a handgun with a large pointy chopping blade integrated under the barrel. The other was a long rifle with bayonet fixed.

My eyes followed the barrels and sights. Two girls, one taller and one shorter, were pointing their weapons at me. The girl holding the gunblade had short, messy white hair, piercing emerald eyes and pale skin. Her clothes were on the revealing side, having exposed most of her legs and her midriff, all of which had faint outlines of wiry muscle. The clothing was colored mostly in white with various shades of green highlighting, the most prominent piece being a striped turquoise-and-white scarf wrapped around her neck and flowing down her sides. The girl holding the rifle had neck-long blue hair and a fair complexion. She was dressed much more modestly in a sapphire-blue blouse and denim skirt. A steel-blue breastplate covered her torso, providing some protection while not impeding movement. A navy blue military bandolier wrapped around her waist; grenades and various ammunition were either clipped on it or sat quietly in small satchels. That wasn't what caught my eyes, however.

It was her eyes. Her blue, dead eyes, devoid of emotion or sympathy.

Her finger curled around the trigger. She wasn't trembling at all; her aim at my forehead was dead steady.

"Sachi, I'm okay! I'm okay!" My brother's familiar voice rang out from beside me. The rifle-woman's breathing was calm and even, her pull on the trigger smooth. A vine-like thing wrapped around the rifle and yanked it upwards as it barked. I screamed as searing gas buffeted my face. The bullet whizzed past the top of my head by literal inches.

"Sachi!" The vine yanked the rifle out of her hands. She turned around, and all of a sudden started shaking almost uncontrollably. Another woman, having long silver hair, beautifully tanned skin and dressed in an exotic dancer's costume, held the other end of the vine-like whip and snatched the rifle at the end of its flight toward her.

"Schera, I'm sorry…" Sachi mumbled and wrapped her arms around herself as if she were cold in the middle of summer.

"It's okay, girl; it's okay," the weapons disappeared from the tanned woman's hands and she gave Sachi a big hug.

It didn't feel like the right moment for me to speak, but I had to. I chuckled nervously at the white-haired girl: "Uh, heh-heh, can… can someone tell me what's going on?"