This is a Sword Art Online Fanfiction Only.

Life wasn't easy for me, for starters my family flat out was not present for most of my life, I don't know the specifics but according to my Aunt, who I been thinking she was actually my mom till a few years ago, my mother and my father were involved either in an automobile accident, or she died during my birth and my father flat out abandoned me or committed suicide due to a deep depression.

Like I said my life was not easy at all, to make matters worse my mother eventually divorced from her backstabbing drunken bastard that was my Uncle, and according to her I have the single most unladylike hobbies she has ever seen.

Let's face it, in my senior year of high school, she flat out asked me if I like girls more than I liked guys. I happen to know many women enjoy the same hobbies I do, I am an expert on computer programming, and electronics, I built my own PC from stuff people put out on the curb.

The second thing and what I am most known about it, my practice of Kendo, I was the national Kendo champion for the last five years, I even was given the rather embarrassing nickname of the Warrior Princess of Kendo by some of the idiots in the tournament.

I swear that every single time an idiot thinks I would be easy prey by first flirting with me before the start of the match, ended up in a stretcher and being carried to the nearest emergency room after the match was done.

In the dojo, everyone knew that trying to use my gender, or stereotypes that I was weak because I was not male was a taboo subject for me, and if the idiot did try to do those then he would get the beating of a lifetime from me.

That is why I love Virtual MMO RPG games, there you can be free of gender stereotypes, I often picked a male avatar, and when I got the Beta version for the most detailed, and impressive game ever made, I log in it almost every free moment I had, the game is called Sword Art Online.

You might be wondering what about my family? Well like I said my Aunt got a much-needed divorce, and I live with her and my cousin, her name is Suguha. At first, we got along much like your normal siblings. We criticize each other ruthlessly about everything, we make fun of each other, and sometimes we even ended up beating each other with wooden swords.

You know the usual relationship that most of my teachers consider it a miracle that we don't have a steady day for family therapy. Thank goodness I was able to win myself a copy of the post-beta release, if I had to hear one more time how I am fated to remain single for the rest of my life, simply because I am good at Kendo I would need to tell my Aunt to hide anything with a sharp edge, for Suguha's own good.

As soon as I placed my nerve gear on my face and I logged into the game, I felt a sudden happiness well up inside me, I kid you not, I was happy to the point of almost breaking into tears.

The place looked wonderful, just like I remembered during the Beta. I could contain the excitement no longer and began running down the streets to the exit to one of the many fields that surround the city of beginnings.

As I ran I began greeting all the NPC that I knew and it was always weird that they always behaved differently with me, I mean most players go to the NPC Shops and get the same tired and repetitive scripted replies. Not me though, I shared jokes with a weapon store owner and we were laughing so hard that we ended up having trouble breathing.

I knew an Armor Merchant so well, that I know the names and nicknames of his kids, his wife makes delicious blueberry pies and is the owner of a local restaurant I used to frequent. I would know that some of the Potion and Crystal Vendors have experimented a little too much with some things I like to call recreational potions.

Let's just say that if you take a potion and you start seeing pink frogs flying through the air, and the moon starts whistling row your boat, that you are experimenting with some weird combination of potion ingredients, and you should really sit down before you hurt yourself.

Just as I made it to one of the fields this guy that looked to be either like a homeless mugger or a bandit came running after me. Under normal circumstances, I would take my sword and beat him up till he was unconscious or dead. I sure didn't want to be mugged the first few minutes I was back in the only place I really called home.

"Look, I know what it looks like, but since I saw you running through the plaza, I got the feeling that you know your way around this game, and I was hoping that you could, I don't know, show me the ropes, teach me the basics, pretty please!"

That is when I realized two important things, first I met a guy that had no clue how things work around here, and second, they actually removed the tutorial level from the entire character creation portion of the game.

"Come on, follow me." We began walking towards a field and there were a ton of warthogs, these things are the lowest of the low in this game, I kid you not, these things are the equivalent of slime monsters in some other RPG games.

"The combat in this game is fairly simple to understand, as long as you do the initial motion for an attack it will always, and I mean always hit." He was looking at me with a blank look on his face, boy this is going to take a little more explanation it seems.

I picked up a small pebble and began to do the motion for the basic attack, "Just hold your weapon pretend you are going to attack and as you pull back the weapon will begin to glow, when the weapon feels like it is ready to explode you let go and you should do the attack."

I did let go and the small pebble came flying out my hand and smacked as warthog on the right side of his ass. Sufficient to say the warthog was not too happy about being hit with a rock on his rear end. He turned around and charged at me, I did my best to keep him busy as the guy I was teaching tried to do the things I told me.

When I saw that he was ready, I turned kicked the warthog hard enough to send him his way, and sure enough, the other guy sliced that warthog in half. I guess he didn't know much about this game since he was jumping up and down like he won the lottery. His happiness was short lived however when he looked at what he got in cash and how much EXP points he gained.

"Hey, what gives? Why am I getting so little money and low Exp?" I honestly don't know whether I should feel relief at hearing this person say this or worry that this person jumped into a game without actually reading anything about it online.

"What exactly do you think you just killed? These things are no better than the slime monsters in other RPG games, let's face it, they are the lowest of the low so of course, you aren't going to kill one and jump from level one to ninety-nine with a single kill. Which brings me to another point, did you read the game manual at all?"

The guy began to laugh and scratch the back of his own head, I guess from that I can safely say the answer to that is no. "Come on, we can kill a few more dozen just to make sure you know the mechanics. Why exactly am I doing this?"

He flat out looked at me with a smile and said it was because I was a very nice, kind and helpful person.

This was definitely something I never expected anyone to say about me, for crying out loud, the Beta was pretty much my stress relief, I was a member of the single most brutal player hunter guild during the Beta, still don't understand the name and it seems I will never be able to take off the guild tattoo.

Here I am helping a person, when during the Beta I would have used this kind of player as bait, just play with him for far enough till a much higher than his level tried to beat him up for EXP and loot, and I could kill the bully for the fun of it, I guess that is why they called the guild Laughing Coffin.

I think only three people knew the truth about my gender, first was the leader of the guild a bruiser went under the name of PoH, for a guy that big it was a major surprise he liked to use as his main weapon a hatchet.

The other two were brothers, one was called Johnny, and the other was called Xaxa. I lost count how many times Xaxa sent me requests to eat a meal together until I told him I was actually not interested in dating.

You would expect this to pretty much end our friendship but in reality, it actually made us very good friends and without the social tension of thinking of it as a date, we actually enjoyed many chats and funny moments in our friendship.

Johnny loved to pick on him though and pretty much told him that it was no surprise that someone with my kill count would actually stick people in the friend zone. To which I argued that it was not my fault that the Beta had so many bullies, to begin with.

I guess at the end of the day it is still sort of Karma, here I am helping learn to fight against monsters that you need to kill about a hundred of them to buy a drink at the local restaurant.

In this game you have a limited number of skill slots, that means that even if you wanted to master everything you really couldn't. I could probably save a bundle if I actually picked up the cooking skill, but let's face it, according to Suguha you didn't want to eat anything I cooked unless of course, you were suicidal.

Now you see why the Beta was my stress relief, don't you? My basic skills are blacksmith skills, single longsword style, combat proficiency for those helpful passive skills, and hunting which for some odd reason includes a fishing skill. I still don't know if they wanted to spare the effort to separating those two skills or the developers were being nice and allowed us to have both with one skill slot.

In the last thirty minutes I lost count how many times I had to save the idiot from his own mistakes, some might say it was me trying to make up for my murky and dark past during beta, but there simply is just something about this guy that makes me want to help him for some reason, pity I suppose, but it took him half an hour for him to learn the basics.

"I have to say and MMORPG without any magic, I haven't seen something like that before. This place is breathtaking beautiful too, I mean look at that sky, the sunset alone is something you can't tell if this is real or fake."

I took my sword and looked at it, "This is one of the reasons I love this castle so much, this is a world were a single blade can take you anywhere, the only limit is your own effort, I honestly feel more at home here than I ever did back in the real world."

That is when I heard the growl of someone's stomach and I looked at the guy who I just finish teaching the basics. "It might seem real but the only real thing right now is that I am hungry. You can even eat on this place, but too bad it does nothing to curve the hunger of our IRL bodies."

"I called and I am getting a pizza and a six-pack of root beer, it should be here by 8:30." I looked at my heads up display and looked at where the clock is. It was 8:20. I guess I can see someone that is going to be eating cold pizza. Hope the guy has a microwave, but then again he does seem like the person that lives on his own, so he really must have one.

"Well you better log out, you only have ten minutes." I turned around to look at my inventory when I heard the guy scream and really start to freak the hell out.

"Hey, look at your options do you see a log out button?" I didn't even call my menu before I turned around and looked at him and began shaking my head, "It should be right beneath the call GM function. Let me have a look."

I did the motion to call my menu again and sure enough, there was the GM call function, but the log out button was missing. That is when he started doing some weird hand and arm motions.

"Isn't there an emergency reset motion, something we can do to turn off the game, take off our nerve gear or something?" I told him that he really should have read his game owner's manual. I told him that in order to prevent injuries the nerve gear prevents our body to react to any of our movement signals from our brain, it pretty much uses the brain of the player to make us feel and make the experience more real to us.

"Aside from having someone pull the nerve gear off us, we are pretty much stuck till the company running the servers does a mass shut down, or till our nerve gear runs of power, and that will take a long while. Over fifty percent of the weight of the nerve gear is the battery."

He seems to relax as I told him that, or maybe he realized that it was pointless to keep trying to find an in-game reset or emergency exit motion. "But to have a bug of this caliber on their first day of launch, the technical support staff must be feeling they been sent to hell. Something like this could end up killing the entire Genre of games and even cause their companies to go belly up."

Just as we finished saying that we heard the bell that was on the Plaza ring, and next thing I knew I saw a light.

We found ourselves on the Plaza, there was only one way that this could have happened. "A forceful transport? I can't believe this is happening."

I touched the guy on the shoulder and pointed at the sky. The sky was turning red at some places and beginning to drop blood like liquid from the sky.

The blood began to pool together until it formed a faceless cloaked figure, it sort of reminded me on the GM.

"Now that you are all here I would like to get a few things out of the way. I am Akihiko Kayaba and I am the maker of this world. Many of you are wondering where is the missing log out option in your menu."

He almost seems like that he was waiting for everyone to shut up when everyone finally realized that they needed to be quiet before he would continue.

"This is not a bug, there was never meant to be a logout option in the final release of the game. Now what I have to tell you next will shock some of you, but there is no way of resurrecting a player who has died either."

"Now you are wondering why would I make this game this way, the answer is simple, I wanted to create a world of my very own, the world that was free of the corruption and the world that was truly fair."

"Now the next thing is this, much like in the real world, if you lose all your health points here, you will die. The nerve gear will send a signal destroying your brain if that happens."

The guy began to freak out, and so did many of the people around me. "That is impossible, there is no way something like the nerve gear can destroy our brains! This is insane!"

I began to remember the specs of the nerve gear and realized he was telling the truth. "Actually he is telling the truth, there is an appliance that works on the same principals as the nerve gear, it's your common microwave oven."

He looked at me and couldn't believe what I said, that is when Kayaba decided to continue.

"You might think of this insane, but it is not. I have sent many warning that disconnecting the nerve gear or trying to tamper with it would cause the players to die, my warning was not taken seriously and as a result, a thousand players that started to be here have died."

Images of news reporters and newspapers saying pretty much how the people died began to appear all around us. There was no mistake this was real.

"All, however, is not bad news, your bodies have been moved to medical facilities and all your physical needs and care shall be met and provided for by my company."

"You only need to concentrate and finish this game, for once the last surviving players reach and beat the last boss, they will automatically be log out of this place."

"To make all of you more comfortable with your time here I have placed a small gift in your inventory. Please look for it and use it now."

I looked and found that in my inventory the only item was something called a mirror. I took it out and the second that I looked at the mirror I saw my real face, in a flash of blinding light, I became dazed.

I looked at my body and realized that my body and quite probably my face changed to my real appearance. People always teased me that I looked a lot like that Wonder Woman in that old television show.

My shoulder length black hair, my figure, and everything was just as I remembered. The guy who I been playing with didn't actually look that different.

He was just staring at me, or should I say he was staring at my chest. "You mean to tell me the person who was teaching me to fight was a girl and a total babe at that. Tell me do you have a boyfriend?"

"My name is Klein I am twenty-three and single. I am currently looking for a girlfriend."

I looked at him and began shaking my head, "Look, Klein, you may call me Kirito, and I think we have more important things to worry about that dating."

Just as I said that I looked at the large faceless GM figure that was floating in the sky, almost like on cue, it began to melt, "This concludes the tutorial of Sword Art Online, and for the last time Welcome to my world."