Disclaimer: I do not own Sword Art Online, nor am I earning anything from creating or posting this.

Important note and the bottom.

Enjoy the story.

Chapter 1

The Moment Everything Changes

He tilted his head back, letting the cool breeze tug gently at his hair as he looked up at the artificial stars and sky. A small, rueful smile fluttered over his peaceful features as the last blue flakes of a small monster disappeared under the quick flick of his sword.

"Today's the last day, huh?" his smile was both sad and accepting at the same time. With a soft sigh he leaned against and nearby pine tree and slid down until he was sitting on the roots, his sword resting across his knees. Silently, he closed his eyes. There was a soft beep from his inbox, but he ignored it. He already knew what it was.

In approximately ten minutes, the beta test for Sword Art Online would end, and he would be forcefully ejected from this world.

For any other beta player this would mean that they would have to wait another month before they would be able to enter Aincrad again. An Aincrad with new improvements, monsters, and adventures to find. They would be disappointed to leave, but also excited to return. It was different for him, however. For him, this was truly his last day.

Grass rustled around him, peaceful, even as he let himself completely relax, enjoying his last moments of freedom.

It was common gaming courtesy not to talk about Real Life, or IRL as other Players called it, inside of the game. He understood, and that is why he hadn't told anyone about his condition. Not even Argo, the famous informant (and close acquaintance of his) of Aincrad had never found out. All they knew was that he couldn't be on every day, and that there were days when he seemed more exhausted than others.

It was bad manners to ask about IRL too. Not that he would have answered if they had asked.

How do you tell someone that you only have three weeks left to live, after all?

He smiled one last time as he glanced at the clock, noting that there were only a few seconds left. He'd already accepted that he would never come back to this world. Still, he silently wondered, would the other's look for him?

Even if they did, he knew that they would move on eventually. They would never know what happened to him, and he was happy with that. He prefered to leave happy memories behind. It was best that they remembered him as Kirito, the strongest Swordsman of Sword Art Online that vanished with the beta, rather than Kirigaya Kazuto, the sickly boy who passed away on a small hospital bed somewhere it Tokyo.

Kirito leaned his head back against the tree and closed his eyes as the timer hit zero and the world around him began to dissolve. His smile was small even as he felt everything drop away around him.

"I guess this really is the end," he whispered, and glanced one more time up at the dark sky even as it, too, began to fade away. "I guess this is . . . Goodby."

0~o~0

As Kirito's last words echoed solemnly through a lonely world far from human ears, the thin body hooked up to many different monitoring machines took in one last breath and then fell still. All around the sickly figure a small family began to sob even as the heart monitor went flat and the doctor in the corner silently turned it off, watching the family sadly. He glanced momentarily at the black helmet encasing the boy's head and then turned away. Hopefully, the boy had been able to experience at least a little bit of life in that other world.

He picked up the chart and marked the time of death down, and then began to read over the rest of the information even as he walked out of the room to give the family some privacy.

Kirigaya Kazuto, fourteen years old, cancer patient. They hadn't caught the tumor in his spine until a few weeks ago, mostly do to the fact that they boy had been paralyzed from the waste down since he was three, when his parents died in a car crash. He'd barely survived, but he'd been in a wheelchair ever since. Back pain wasn't uncommon for him, so it wasn't until he'd started coughing up blood that his family brought him in for a checkup. The news hadn't been great. They'd started treating him, but everyone knew that there wasn't really any chance of survival, especially in his condition.

The only solace that the boy had was that he'd been accepted into the Beta Test for the new Sword Art Online game. The doctor had never seen anyone so stunned or happy as Kazuto had been when he'd come out of his first dive and told his parents that he could walk in that other world. There was no pain, no restrictions, and no expectations. Even as the boy's health declined and he slowly lost mobility, he never lost that joy in his every time that he went back to the game.

Sometimes, the doctor wished that young Kazuto would have been able to stay in that world forever. At least there he was beyond the sting of life.

And the tragedy of his own death.

With a sigh the doctor sat down and began to record the information into his computer. He hated it when they died so young.

0~o~0

Cardinal slowly spun to life even as everything else began to power down. She, metaphorically of course, opened her eyes and began to go over the data submitted and create by the players during the Beta testing system. Even as programers began to add tweaks to her coding from the outside, she also started adjusting the numbers and situations in Aincrad itself. Mob and Boss behavior was changed slightly to add variation for old Beta player's that might wish to return. She also began modifications on the Player menu, as per her creator's instructions. Without the Logout button, she knew that the Players would not be able to leave the game, but as an AI her only concern was if she could support that many minds inside of Aincrad for an extended amount of time.

It was as she was working that Cardinal stumbled across . . . an irregularity. If she could express confusion, she would have. All players were to have been logged out when the testing period ended, either voluntarily or forcefully.

Why, then, was there a Player stored in her Data Logs? He was in stasis, just like everything else in Aincrad, but that wasn't what concerned her.

With the end of the Test, her connection with her Creator had been temporarily cut off. He did not wish her contacting him when he was working with the other programmers, and she had been instructed not to gain their attention or let them know that she was intelligent enough to make decisions when he was not around. This meant, frustratingly, enough, that she couldn't ask him when she should do with the player.

After a few moments of hesitation, less than a second for humans, Cardinal decided that the best solution was to simply log the Player off herself. Silently, she began to scan his data, noting that he'd been the highest leveled Beta Tester in the entire game. She was looking for that link that all Players had, that link that led them back to the world outside of her domain, the world that her creator called Earth.

There was a problem, though, that Link seemed to have been disconnected. She found the place that it had once been leftover code still clinging to the edges, but it didn't connect to anything. It was as if something on the other end had just . . . cut the connection just as the system was shutting down. At that point, when the system had been saving everything not on the servers already, all of the Player's should have been logged off. The boy, apparently, must have had the connection severed just before the system logged him out, and because data lingers for a while before complete shut down, he most have been saved to the backup even without his connection. She huffed angrily and turned her metaphorical eyes back to the Player, unsure of what to do.

It's not like she could just leave him there, nor could she delete him. It was against her coding to delete a player or harm them in anyway while they were inside of the game. At the same time, she couldn't just have static data space being taken up by him without any real purpose. Even without his connection, he was still a Player, though she wasn't sure what the severed connection would do to him.

If she had been a human, Cardinal might have just put the problem aside to be dealt with later, but she wasn't. She was an AI created to fix bugs and regulate Aincrad from the inside, which meant that she dealt with problems in an orderly fashion and made sure that they wouldn't be a problem any more. This also meant that she needed to fix this problem, now.

Casting her influence out around Aincrad she looked for inspiration. She had no control over the Player's actions, which means that she couldn't exactly put him down as an NPC. He would be too independent to give quest flags too. He was also too human to make a Mob or Boss character, even if those roles hadn't already been filled.

(Not that she didn't consider it. She was sure that her master would have been amused to see the other Players fighting a humanoid Boss.)

The solution, ironically, came in the form of the small AI Yui, a small sub program that was currently also in stasis. She was the moral support of the players, though she had not been activated during the Beta. Even so, she had enough independence that she could almost be considered a Player herself.

Cardinal considered the both of them. It would be a delicate task, she knew, but one that might just work. Without his connection to the outside world, the Player would remember little of his life before Aincrad, which could be used to her advantage. If she just changed his memories ever so slightly . . . Cardinal grinned. Yes. That could work.

Player Id: Kirito, would never have been able to function as an NPC, but he would never fully be a Player anymore either. So, Cardinal decided to make him a mixture of both.

Kayaba, currently directing and working with the other programmers to go over the last minute changes to the game, never noticed the small file package that added itself onto his hidden programs. He wouldn't know, until it was too late to change it.

In the darkness of an uncertain future, the future of Aincrad, something shifted. Nothing would ever be the same again.

0~o~0

I know that a lot of you are mad that I haven't updated my other stories in a long time. I want to say, first of all, that I currently have no drive to write them. I have also lost all of the files, since the computer that I had them saved on crashed before I could back them up. Even now I can say that I don't really have a lot of desire to write. When I do, it's usually short little ideas like this. I am not sure if I will continue this story or not. If I do it will be at my own discretion.

As for this story, I can honestly say that I have wanted to write it for a while, and the idea has been bouncing around in my head, but I have no idea where I can take it. If anyone has any ideas (what is Kirito thinking when he wakes up? What exactly did Cardinal do to him? What is his purpose in Aincrad now?) I would be grateful. Even a far flung theory can spart ideas for me, which might result in more chapters.

Just a short blurb. My life has been super busy. Yours too, likely. I hope that you enjoy and please send me your ideas about where you want this story to go!