The headset was cold against my skin. Not uncomfortable, no, just enough to remind me that all of this was about to become real.
I let my hand hover in the air for a few seconds. One last hesitation. Then I pressed the button.
Everything went black.
"Link Start."
The startup screen lit up in a burst of bright light. The scanners kicked in immediately: heart rate, brain waves, everything looked normal.
Then the familiar menus appeared: language, interface, sensory calibration. I'd already seen all of it during the beta. It was like stepping back into an old room left exactly the way I'd left it.
I selected "Start Game."
The space around me warped. My body dissolved into particles of light.
Then nothing.
When my vision came back, I was standing in the middle of a paved plaza, in a village suspended in the sky. Aincrad.
The stones gleamed softly under the artificial sun. Players ran around in every direction, excited, awestruck. The buildings, straight out of a fantasy dream, looked too perfect to be real. Even the air smelled like something somewhere between fresh grass and a scent I couldn't quite place.
Out of habit, I looked down at my hands. They felt real enough.
"Blax!"
I turned around. Kirito was walking up, a big grin on his face.
"You logged in right on time. I thought you were gonna miss the launch."
"Never in a million years."
We slapped hands, like always. The energy in the plaza was electric, the kind you get in a gacha pull when you finally land the character you've been waiting weeks for. Groups were already forming. Shouts, laughter, raw joy. Pure euphoria.
And yet…
I looked up at the sky. Not a single cloud. Not a breath of wind. Even the leaves on the trees stayed frozen in place.
But it didn't really worry me. I figured it was just some quirk of the game engine. A minor detail.
I let out a quiet sigh. This wasn't the time to let a strange dream get to me.
After a quick shopping run at the market potions, healing herbs Kirito suggested we go hunting.
"Come on. There's a field not far from here. The boars are easy, perfect for early XP. Time for some good old-fashioned farming."
I laughed, following him.
"Farming's the life."
We left town along a narrow path lined with tall grass and colorful flowers, motionless as if the wind itself had been paused. Honestly, Kayaba was a genius when it came to detail. But sometimes it was almost too well made.
When we got to the field, a few players were already stirring things up. One of them got sent flying by a level 1 boar. His friends started teabagging him, laughing the whole time. Even I cracked up.
Kirito, meanwhile, was completely in his element. He engaged the fight smoothly, his beta-tester reflexes still razor sharp. I followed his lead. My movements weren't quite natural yet this wasn't my weapon of choice but I managed well enough.
"Hit them right after their charge. You can knock them off balance," Kirito said, cutting through the air.
"I know," I answered, finishing off a boar with a clean hit.
A small chime told me I'd gained XP.
The fights kept coming, faster and smoother each time. Kirito was smiling. He was in his world.
"We make a good team," he said after taking down a group of three.
"Maybe, but this isn't the weapon I'm best with."
He nodded.
"I know. But you won't get your scythe before the tenth floor."
"I know…" I answered with a sigh. "I just have to be patient."
We kept grinding, relentlessly. Honestly, we'd both clearly played way too many grind-heavy games in our lives.
Two hours later, we headed back to the market. The sun hadn't moved an inch.
A shopkeeper walked past us. An NPC. Her gaze met mine.
And right then, my heart stopped.
Her eyes weren't normal. Not poorly modeled the opposite. Too perfect. No blinking, no emotion, just two glassy, gleaming spheres. And she was staring at me. Only me. Her smile was barely there.
Then, in the blink of an eye, she went back to being an ordinary, smiling shopkeeper, as if nothing had happened.
I took a step back.
Kirito shot me a look.
"You good?"
"Yeah. Just... the realism gets to me sometimes."
He shrugged.
"Can't blame you. SAO's perfect enough to drive you crazy."
We went back to killing monsters. The combat system was smooth. The animations, gorgeous. My old reflexes were coming back. Even missing my scythe, I loved the feel of the game.
Another two hours went by. Then we headed back to the central plaza.
That's when everything changed.
The virtual clock struck 5:00 p.m. A bell tolled across all of Aincrad.
And in an instant, every player was teleported to the center of the plaza.
Shouts rose up from everywhere, mixed with confused murmurs. Some yelled that they'd been mid-fight seconds earlier. Others got angry, already looking for someone to blame, a bug, anything to hold onto.
Then the sky turned blood red.
A massive figure appeared in the air. A cape billowed around him, as if disconnected from the wind entirely.
Kayaba Akihiko. Or rather, his avatar.
His voice echoed directly inside our minds:
"Welcome to Sword Art Online."
Kirito went pale. So did I. But not for the same reasons.
My gaze had locked onto a figure standing atop the clock tower. The same woman from my dream the night before. Motionless. Watching only me.
Kayaba went on. He announced that logging out was impossible, that any attempt to remove the headset would result in death. He showed footage, blurry images of people already dead in Japan. The panic ratcheted up another notch.
But he wasn't done.
"And that's not all," he said. "Sword Art Online was never designed to be a simple game. It's a filter. A test. Let me help you understand."
Massive numbers appeared in the sky: 00.
"From this point forward, every time two floors are cleared by anyone in this world, this number will increase by one. It doesn't matter where you are, or which floor you're fighting on only your character level counts. Anyone whose level is equal to or below this number... will die."
The silence that followed was absolute. No one moved, no one spoke, as if the whole world were holding its breath.
"You can leave this world in two ways," Kayaba continued. "Reach the hundredth floor. Or find what you don't see."
The players understood. To survive, they'd need to level up, no matter where they stood on Aincrad. But anyone who fell behind would eventually be caught by the threshold.
"Some of you are already dead. Your level was too low the moment I activated real death. For you, it's over."
Before our eyes, players began to liquefy, like paint melting away on the spot. Screams broke out, sharp and uncontrolled. This time, the horror was real.
Then Kayaba vanished.
I looked up. The woman was gone from the tower.
Around me, the whole plaza dissolved into panic players screaming, others collapsing to their knees, others already sprinting toward the streets, chasing an exit that didn't exist.
Kirito, meanwhile, put a hand on my shoulder.
"We need to move. Find somewhere safe. Think," he said seriously.
I nodded. But my mind was somewhere else.
What I'd seen wasn't a bug. I was sure of it. That woman...
I knew her. I didn't know from where. Some buried feeling, like a memory from another world.
And a single word echoed in my head. The only one she'd said in my dream.
"Anomaly."
What if...
What if what I'd seen had been real?