Satoru and Souji walked side by side down a wide, bright corridor.
The pure white sunlight was almost blinding. Along the corridor, white jade pillars seemed to flow with a watery glow. In that spotless field of vision, the only thing with any deep color was the shocking crimson carpet beneath their feet.
The exposure was far too high. Satoru had to narrow his eyes to keep his vision from being affected. Half of his body on the right side was bathed in the blazing sunlight outside the windows, and both his and Souji's Salamander-red hair shone with a fierce brightness.
Things were much quieter here.
The noisy discussions of merchants and the overlapping chatter of passersby had faded into the distance. Only the long, graceful sound of a flute echoed softly through this palace-like building.
Bright colors under a brilliant sun. It was the kind of unreal scene that could only exist in virtual space.
Even if the sun was fake, the simulated warmth on his body felt real enough to make him drowsy after running around for an entire night.
He raised both arms, stretched, and yawned.
"We left at eight last night. It is ten in the morning now," Souji said, sounding tired as well. For their part, they had made two trips just to pick him up. "If you had unlocked the map, you could have used teleportation."
"It would be a little much for a level 1 account to teleport freely around the world map. Besides, flying is this game's biggest selling point. Having players experience flying as travel is important too," Satoru said. "Still, after this one night, I have opened up quite a bit of the map. It will be easier from now on."
"Forget that. Experience or not, for us..."
"Efficiency is what matters?" Satoru finished for him.
Souji laughed along with him.
"Exactly."
"I saw quite a few people. What, has the studio shifted its focus over here?"
As he spoke, Satoru walked over to the corridor window and leaned against it.
Souji rolled his wrists and leaned against the wall beside him. He looked as though he wanted to rest too.
"VRMMOs. You only have to play once to understand. This really is a revolution for the gaming world," Souji said.
As he spoke, he opened a window and fiddled with something. Then, unbelievably, he took out a pack of cigarettes.
"This stuff is good. Tastes great. You cannot find it in real life."
Satoru accepted one with a look that said, you know what you are doing. The two lit them one after the other.
"Whoa. That flavor is intense."
Satoru bared his teeth a little.
"Honestly, when SAO came out, we all felt we had to try it no matter what. We are not industry people, but we have played enough games to tell that games on consoles and similar hardware had hit a bottleneck."
Souji spoke calmly.
"Game visuals on a single monitor have basically hit their ceiling. This isn't the pixel era anymore, where turning things into 3D was already revolutionary. At this point, there's not much left to push forward visually. Same goes for gameplay. After all these years, what gimmicks and settings haven't we already seen?"
He continued,
"I don't think games themselves are running out of ideas. The next leap was always going to come from hardware."
"Back before PCs became common, gaming meant arcades and those brick-sized handhelds. Then computers showed up. 3D graphics, CGI, all those gorgeous visuals. And with them came a whole new generation of waifus too."
"Wasn't your wife from FF7…"
Satoru trailed off.
"That's my second wife."
"..."
Satoru looked at him with a complicated expression.
"Anyway, VRMMOs. Back then, all of us thought they'd be the next revolution in gaming. Then we actually played them and realized they really were. Once you've fought using your own body and seen a fantasy world with your own eyes, sitting in front of a keyboard just doesn't cut it anymore."
Souji folded his arms and glanced at him.
"At the time, we were thinking about getting into SAO too, just to test the waters. But we couldn't secure enough spots in the first batch. Then we found out you got in, so we figured we'd wait and hear how it went from you. Who the hell knew it'd turn into two whole years?"
"ALO came out after that, but with SAO happening first, not many people were willing to touch it at the start. In the end, it took a few brave idiots diving in before the playerbase slowly picked up. Though honestly? I still think those first few were company plants."
Souji sighed.
"People who entered virtual worlds around the same time, yet one side ended up fighting for their lives while the other just treated it like entertainment."
Satoru scratched his head.
"Talk about bad luck."
"At least you made it out," Souji said. "A few of the people here still remembered you."
"Our old studio was never exactly a tightly structured company. Aside from the boss, everyone else was basically a part-timer."
Satoru smiled.
"That is true. But when the Guild Leader heard you had contacted us, he suspended quite a few activities. He has been waiting here since the day before yesterday."
Souji patted his shoulder.
"We all met playing games back then, then joined the same studio. We are all getting older now, but we can still play together. Honestly, I am pretty happy about that."
"Although I hate to admit it, all my waifus are fake."
Damn, so you were self-aware after all.
Souji gazed up at the corridor ceiling at a forty-five-degree angle and sighed wistfully.
"Come on, come on."
Satoru flicked his cigarette away along with him.
...
The Salamanders were currently the most powerful race.
Their strengths lay in weapons and combat, and the players who chose that race were not exactly calm sightseeing types. They were fighters, especially when the people leading them were a bunch who were used to brawling and treated dragging others into PvP like eating and drinking.
What only a few people knew, however, was this:
The Salamander upper ranks were basically all from the same studio.
The way power levelers played was efficient and practical. For them, this was their actual job. Looking at a certain power leveler was enough to understand. Even if his coworkers were not quite as unhinged as he was, they were not far off.
Souji pushed open the door and led Satoru inside.
"Yo, boys. Comrade Sword Saint is back."
He raised his voice and strolled in at an easy pace.
"My kin, have you finally fought your way back from that abyssal land?"
A deep, magnetic tremor came from the man seated in the room.
He had long crimson hair, and his character model was somewhat slender. There was a fragile, noble, almost traditional elven beauty to him.
He gazed at Satoru, his face filled with sorrow.
"Knowing you wandered the sea of death, yet being unable to contact you, truly pained my heart."
"But you are indeed a mighty warrior. Neither light nor shadow could sever your iron will."
"Fuck..."
The others in the room lowered their heads into their hands and muttered.
"Has his condition gotten worse...?" Satoru asked hesitantly.
"He is addicted to cosplay. If we met in real life and brought up what he acts like in-game, he would be so embarrassed he would want to crawl into a hole."
"Excellent warriors gathered under Montifa's banner, you all possess souls like fire. Yet why are your words so lacking in beauty? We are elves. Elves who belong to flame. The boldness that ranges across the battlefield is ours, but so too are the songs of victory after battle, the wine, the swords, and the drums that stir our hearts. That is the essence of an elf."
"Fuck, can you talk normally?"
The Salamander player sitting not far from him slammed the table.
"My kin..."
"Fuck!"
The remaining people all curled their lips, their expressions twisted with secondhand embarrassment.
Although they were all meeting through in-game avatars now, Satoru could probably identify who was who from their voices and speaking habits alone.
The man sitting properly in the center, with delicate features and dressed like an elven prince, was without question the head of their old studio.
His name was poetic enough: Sakuya Miara. But the person himself had none of that style. He was an ordinary young man who loved immersing himself in his own world.
Sometimes he would lament the helplessness of life. Sometimes, over voice chat, he would use that magnetic voice of his to describe going shopping that day and being shyly told by a high school girl waiting behind him that he looked like a young Marlon Brando.
When playing battlegrounds, he liked putting on battle music. Every time they finished off a high-level boss, he would always deliver a deliberately mournful eulogy.
"Before, it was fine. We could not see him. Now we get both the visual and audio experience. Fuck me, I cannot take it!"
The Salamander beside him looked as if he was about to break.
"My excellent kin, Grannis Darkhammer," Montifa said calmly. "Why can you not sit down?"
"Do not say my nickname in that damn effeminate voice! I cannot stand it!"
"But Grannis Darkhammer, that is your name."
"My name is Ichirou Narita!"
"Even so, Grannis Darkhammer, that sacred name was chosen by all of us when you first became one of our kin."
Montifa's expression turned solemn, and his voice became dignified.
"Yurnero is the name of the Blademaster. Shadow Song is the name of the Demon Hunter. Grannis Darkhammer is the name of the Paladin. If you reject it like this, how will you answer the oath we all swore in those days?"
"Aaaah, fuck! Stop saying it! Do you seriously not feel embarrassed at all?"
The man called Grannis Darkhammer was already clutching his head and trembling.
Satoru looked at the two of them with an extremely complicated expression.
"Those two... combined, they have to be forty-two or forty-three, right?"
"We are all closing in on twenty-five, so yes, about that."
Souji nodded in agreement.
"What a disaster... Thank goodness your nickname and mine are not that pretentious."
Especially this boss. When he said the Salamander's name, he gave "Grannis" a low, rising cadence, then dropped a heavy stress onto "Darkhammer," as if the name carried the weight and weathered dignity of some great historical figure.
The worst part was that, for all his faults, the guy really did have a good voice.
So it became:
"Grannis Darkhammer..."
Montifa shook his head.
"Do you intend to abandon that sacred name?"
"Have you forgotten the days when you and I defeated our enemies and recited laments together? If so, let us do it once more. Surely we can reclaim the hot-blooded passion of those days."
He cleared his throat.
"The abyss bears suffering, iron armor forges the merciless. Pain engraves hatred into bone, wrathful eyes break the prison..."
"I will break your damn hammer!"
Grannis Darkhammer, bearer of the sacred name of Paladin, had already drawn the greatsword at his waist. He kicked the lord to the floor, straddled him, and began stabbing wildly downward with the greatsword.
"You, you are actually stabbing me!"
"One sword is not satisfying enough!"
Grannis Darkhammer drew another gleaming greatsword.