Part 5 (1/2)

Then I turned my back on the first friend that I had made in this world and ran forward ceaselessly.

After I had run through the winding alleyways for a few minutes, I looked back again. Of course, there was n.o.body there.

I ignored the odd feeling of my chest being constricted and ran.

I ran desperately to the northwest gate of the Starting City and then past the large plains and the deep forest, then a small village located past all this-then past that to an endless, lonely game of survival.

Chapter 4.

One month into the game, two thousand people were dead.

The hope that outside help would come had been crushed, not even a message had gotten through.

I didn't see it myself, but they said that the panic and the madness that took hold of the players when they realized that they really couldn't get back was unbelievable. There were people crying and others wailing, and some even tried to dig up the ground of the city saying that they were going to destroy this world. Of course, all buildings were nonadestructible objects so this attempt failed without any results to show for it.

They say that it took days for the players to accept the situation and think of what to do after that.

The players were split into four categories.

The first consisted of a little over half the players-they were the ones who still wouldn't accept the conditions that Kayaba Akihiko had put forth and still waited for outside help.

I understood what they were thinking painfully well. Their real bodies would be lying on a bed or sitting in a chair fast asleep. That was reality and this situation was ”fake”. If there was even the smallest discovery, they might be able to get out. Of course, the log out b.u.t.ton was gone but there might be something that the creators of the game might have overlooked....

And outside, the company who ran the game, Argus, would be trying harder than anyone to save the players. If they could just wait, they might be able to open their eyes, have a teary reunion with their family, and then return to school or work and this would all have been just something to talk about....

It wasn't really unreasonable to think like that. I think I was hoping for the same thing deep inside.

Their plan of action was to ”wait”. They didn't take a single step out of the city and used the money they had been allotted at the beginning of the game (the currency was called ”Col” in this world) sparingly, buying only the food they needed to get through the day and finding cheap inns to sleep in, and walked around in groups spending each day without any thought.

Thankfully the ”Starting City” was a city that took up twenty percent of the first floor's surface and was large enough to hold a Tokyo district. So the five thousand players would have sufficient room to live in.

But no help was forthcoming, however long they waited. On some days the sky outside was not a crystal blue but covered with grey clouds. Their money couldn't last forever and they realized that they would have to do something.

The second category consisted of about thirty percent, or three thousand players. It was a group where all the players worked together. The leader of it was the admin of the largest online game info site.

The players who made up this category were split into several groups and shared all of their gains, collected information on the game, and set out to explore the labyrinth area where the stairs were. The leaders of this group set up their base of operations in the ”Black Iron Castle” and sent orders to their various groups.

This huge group didn't have a name for quite a while, but after all the members received a uniform, somebody gave them the somewhat grim name, ”The Army”.

The third category consisted of, at an estimate, a thousand players. It was made up of people who had wasted all their Col but didn't want to make money by fighting monsters.

As a sideanote, there were two basic bodily needs in SAO: one was fatigue and the other was hunger.

I understood why fatigue existed: virtual information and real information were no different to the users' brains. If players became sleepy they could go to an inn and rent a room to sleep in depending on the amount of money they had. If one saved up a lot of Col they could buy a house, but the sum needed wasn't small.

Hunger was a need that many players thought of as strange. Although they didn't really want to imagine what was happening to their bodies in the real world, it was most likely that we were being forceafed nutrients somehow. That meant that the emptiness we felt here had nothing to do with our real bodies.

But if we bought some virtual bread or meat in the game and ate it, the emptiness disappeared and we felt full. There was no way to find out how this strange mechanism worked short of asking a professional in the field of neurology.

So the opposite was true too: the hunger didn't disappear unless we ate something. We most probably wouldn't die if we starved, but the fact that it's a need that's hard to ignore doesn't change. So the players visited the restaurants that the NPCs ran daily and ate some food, at least virtually.

Also, there was no need to excrete waste in the game. As to what was happening in the real world, I didn't even want to think about it.

Well, back to the main point....

The players who had squandered all their money in the beginning, who couldn't sleep or eat, usually joined the huge organization that I mentioned a while ago, ”The Army”. This was because they received at least something to eat if they followed the orders from the top.

But there are always those who can't ever cooperate with others however hard they try. The ones who never wanted to join, or got kicked out for causing trouble, used the slums of the ”Starting City” as their base and started thieving.

Inside the city, or the places mostly referred to as ”Safe Areas”, there was protection implemented by the system and players couldn't hurt each other. But it wasn't like that outside. The stragglers made teams with other stragglers and ambushed other players-which was in many ways much more profitable than hunting monsters-out on the fields or the labyrinth areas.

Even then, they never ”murdered” anybody -well, at least during the first year.

This group got slowly larger until they reached the aforementioned number of a thousand.

The final, fourth category was, simply said, the rest.

There were fifty groups created by people who wanted to clear the game but didn't join the huge organization. They numbered around five hundred. We called these groups ”Guilds” and they had a mobility that ”The Army” lacked. Using that mobility, they steadily grew stronger.

Then there were the very few who chose the merchant and craftsman cla.s.ses. They only numbered about two to three hundred, but they created guilds of their own and started training the skills that they would need to earn the Col they need to get by.

The rest, around one hundred players, were called ”Solo Players”-this was the group I belonged to.

They were the selfish group who had decided that acting alone would be better for strengthening themselves and simply surviving. If they could use the information they had, they could level up quickly. After they had gained the power to fight against monsters and bandits by themselves, there was truthfully no merit in fighting with other players.

An additional feature of SAO was that there was no ”Magic”; in other words, there were no ”long range attacks with a 100% accuracy rate”, so one could fight large groups of monsters alone. If one had the required skills, playing solo was much more effective in getting experience points than party playing.

Of course, there were risks involved. To give an example, if a person was ”Paralyzed” and if he had party members with him, they'd just cure him and that'd be that. But if the person was playing solo, it could lead straight to death. Actually, in the very beginning, solo players had the highest fatality rate amongst all the players.

But if you had the experience and knowledge to win through all this danger, there was a much better compensation for all this risk, and the beta testers (including myself) had both of these things.

With this precious information the solo players leveled up at a fierce pace and a huge gap soon opened between them and the rest of the players. After the game had calmed down a bit, most solo players got out of the first floor and used the cities in the upper levels as their bases.

Inside the Black Iron Castle, where the ”Room of the Resurrected” had been during the beta testing, there now stood a huge metal monument that hadn't existed during beta testing. The names of all ten thousand players were carved on its surface. In addition, a line appeared through the name of a person who died and it gave the time and cause of death next to it.

The first person to get the honor of having his name crossed out appeared three hours into the game.

The cause of death was not losing to a monster. It was suicide.

He believed in the theory that ”according to the structure of the Nerve Gear, if a person is cut off from the system they'll automatically regain consciousness.” He climbed over the iron fence at the north end of the city, at the edge of Aincrad, and flung himself off.

Beneath the floating castle that was Aincard, no ground could be seen however much you strained your eyes. There was only an endless sky with several layers of white clouds. As countless players watched him, the boy got steadily smaller, leaving a long scream and finally disappearing into the clouds.