Chapter Text
Thomas Hilary grinned as he opened the box that sat on his desk and pulled out its contents. A new Nerve Gear Virtual reality helmet, and a copy of the game for it, Sword Art Online.
It was a miracle he had it really. He had put his name into a Japanese online raffle, and had won. A one in a million chance, and he had won the grand prize. He hadn’t even been aiming for it, but had been aiming for the Hot spring trip as it would have given him an excuse to travel to Japan. Yet instead now he was going to play the most hyped game around on Day one of its release.
Through a VPN no less.
As soon as he had won he had done his research. SAO was a game only being released in japan, with an international release planned for a year after the initial Japanese release. The raffle company didn’t seem to care and shipped it anyway, but after his research he figured a VPN would probably let it work for him, and since the game ha a basic translation program built into it he would just need to spend a bit of time fiddling with the games settings.
Thomas looked over at his clock and smiled. It was almost time for the game to start. It was getting pretty late for him due to time zones, but he didn’t care, so he quickly got about setting up the game, and the Nerve gear. By the time it was all set up it was almost 11, meaning the game had been launched for about half an hour he figured.
With a final smirk he laid down on his bed, slipped the helmet on, and gave its command to start and found himself falling through a open space of lights and colors for a moment before the game initialized, finding himself standing in front of the games menu’s.
“Alright, lets start get this ready. Settings.”
For a second nothing occurred, before the settings screen came up, prompting him for his preferred language, and from there he began looking over the settings as best he could. The game took a few seconds on each setting to change its script from Japanese to English but he managed to get through all of the settings at a decent speed considering how much he was changing.
Though the setting did make it clear that only written words would be automatically translated, which was fine by him. He’d still be able to do quests and use the map, and as he was planning on solo playing he wouldn’t need to talk to others much probably.
With the setting done with he finally moved into entering the game, starting with making his character, which prompted the age old question of MMORPG’s.
Male, or female?
Since it was a VR game he didn’t need to worry about how nice of an ass he was going to be staring at, and playing as a busty blonde bombshell Valkyrie like he tended to in MMO’s was very tempting. However, he did not know if the game would augment his voice or not. That was one thing his research did not turn up.
So after a moment of thought he picked male and then was prompted for a character name. He thought for a second and typed it in before being given a whole slew of options for how to make his character look. Luckily he knew what he was aiming for.
A Reasonably tall man, long brown hair, bright green eyes, a sharp yet honest face, a sculpted and athletic body that was not overly muscular like a bodybuilder, but more like a martial artists. The amount of details and focus he could give his character was impressive, and he went all out. With that out of the way he checked of a number of boxes of options, confirmed his work, and then gained the feeling of floating before his vision turned white.
Blinking a second later he found himself standing in the middle of a great plaza of cut stones, surrounded on all side by buildings pulled out of a fantasy. He was in. He was now part of SAO.
“Damn, these graphics are no joke,” he muttered as he looked around. “Everything looks so real,” He paused and noticed a fountain nearby and walked over to it, looking at his reflection in the water. He was exactly as he had designed his character, looking like an occidental man with green eyes and long hair. His outfit was a simple pair of pants and a shirt with shoes, and a mere chest plate strapped over his body, while on his belt was a simple straight sword. A shortsword essentially. “I’ll need to replace this thing first.”
The game may have been called Sword Art, but you could use basically near any historical melee weapon if his research was right. There was no magic or ranged weapons really, but anything could be worked around if you got inventive enough. Whatever weapon you chose would give you skill levels in its type of weapon the longer you used it, so if he wanted to get good with his weapon of choice, he needed to choose it.
Glancing around, and noticing that everybody else seemed to have the same starting gear, he spotted a Merchant and walked over just as a pair of girls walked away, one of them sporting a spear in hand.
“Ah @^&^%$^&^%^&(^$” The NPC merchant spoke. He understood nothing of what he said, but that point was moot when a window appeared in front of him, asking if he wanted to shop. Clicking ‘yes’ he found a large list of various equipment’s available for sale, and after making the list smaller by just showing weapons, he began looking through it. Daggers, longswords, spears, shields, the options were wide but also seemingly limited to simple weapons. This was the first starting location in the game, so it wasn’t unexpected but- . . .
“Aha!” He exclaimed as he found his weapon of choice, finding that it was the least costly of all the weapons, and clicked buy. He then moved to sell his sword, but decided against it and waved goodbye to the shopkeeper as he headed off.
Just because they were NPC’s didn’t mean he shouldn’t forget common courtesy, even to a program.
“Oh, I should equip it and look over my stats,” He suddenly said as he stopped, spied a bench, and walked over to it and sat down before bringing up his stats.
Name : Paracelsus
Gender : Male
AGI :10
STR :10
VIT : 10
Paracelsus nodded and closed his stats at the realization he had no way to modify them just yet. He’d need to get levels first. And as such he opened his inventory and scrolled through it. Basic short sword, basic chest plate, 2 potions, and his newly acquired Cypress Staff were the only things in his inventory.
Cypress Staff – a Shaft of Cypress hewn from a modest bough into a staff good for a casual hike. Arguably the worst thing to use as a weapon, barely better than bare hands. Often used as a base to create early polearms and other proper weapons.
Paracelsus chuckled at the description as he equipped the Staff. By the logic of it not being made of metal or being a proper hardwood, sure it could be counted as weak, but anyone who knew anything about oriental Martial arts or Historical European martial arts with a Quarterstaff knew that a well made Quarterstaff was a terrifying weapon in the right hands. One he intended to use to its fullest no matter what.
Yes. He intended to play a VRMMO based solely around swords, with a quarterstaff.
“Granted grenades or poisons would supplement that nicely, but it’ll probably be a while until I can start fiddling with potions and that sort of thing.”
With a smile Paracelsus stood up from his seat, summoned the staff into his hand, and began striding down the road. It was time to get to fighting!
Xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
All weapon types in Sword Art had the games namesake available for them, Sword Arts. They were abilities that different types of weapons could use that had various effects, damage multipliers and the like applied to them, but could not be used all the time. Using a sword art was relatively simple, by making a preplanned motion, or calling out the arts name, it would activate and guide the player through the art. some send the player lancing forward like a dart, others would make the player do a plain attack, or a very powerful strike and the like. All of them made the weapon in hand glow a color according to either the weapon type or the art type, Paracelsus was not sure, making it easy to tell when one was using an Art.
The Quarterstaff, or perhaps staves in general, did not seem to have them.
And he had checked.
Using the staff was not hard for him as he had IRL experience with them, so he managed to, quiet successfully, kill a number of boars with his staff. But he had no options for sword arts with it. He checked by equipping the sword and, as excepted, he was given a single art he could use with the sword. An art that disappeared as soon as he equipped the staff again.
“I figured this could be a potential problem since staves were not an option on that wiki, but I kind of figured they would be counted under polearms,” He grumbled aloud in slight annoyance as he looked around at the epic landscapes of Aincrad, the field below him full of a mix of Boars, and noobs like himself who were fighting them. After a second of watching the field, and even seeing the sway of the grasses from the light breeze he could feel, he smirked. “Oh well, I’ll just have to try harder!”
With his decision made Paracelsus began running down the hill he was atop and dropped into a controlled slide right toward a boar. It turned toward him as he slid down toward it, but was blindsided as he swung his staff and smacked the boar right across the face. It reeled, and as it did Paracelsus gripped his boots to the ground and got to his feet, approaching the boar with his staff in both hands before delivering a number of quick swings into the boars side and head. Weak points seemed to be a thing that worked in SAO, and each time he hit the boars face, specifically its snout or eyes, it reeled and seemed unable to act.
It took about forty seconds for him to kill the boar without taking a single hit.
He stood up and looked around and spotted another player just engaging a boar themselves. They used a simple sword and seemed a bit uncertain of how to go about it, getting hit a couple times, but at the same moments they also hit the boar and managed to kill it.
In twenty two seconds.
“I’ve got my work cut out for me it seems,” Paracelsus said as he looked at the orange sky, signaling that night would soon arrive for Aincrad. And as SAO used a real world clock and times, it also meant it was nearing night in Japan. “Ha, time to log out I guess,” He said as he opened his menu and looked it over. “Huh, did they move where the logout button was? According to that wiki it should be right here.”
He looked again, finding nothing, and then began looking over the rest of his menu’s, an act that took a while as he had to wait for each menu to auto translate itself according to his settings each time. No matter where he looked he could not find the log out button though.
Just as he was about to loo for the third time, a glow and glimmer surrounded him and he found himself transported into a massive arena of yellow-brown stone. And could see that other players were being teleported there as well.
A lot of them. More than hundreds, and more than thousands even.
It was a lot of people. Possibly all of them!
They all look confused, Paracelsus included, and after a few moments, when no more people seemed to be getting teleported a great being in a cloak of red formed at one end of the arena before them and began speaking.
And of course it was in Japanese and had no text box, so Paracelsus understood none of it.
He did understand expressions though, and as he looked around they were all the same. Fear, horror, shock, anger. Whatever the red robed thing was saying was bad to hear, and became more clear as video panels, a true multitude of them, appeared to its sides. They showed new stations showing people being taken our of houses on gurney’s, people crying in fear and sadness.
As the thing seemed to finish Paracelsus saw evet other player accessing their menu, so figuring it was a quest he did the same and found an item he did nor recognize his inventory.
The mirror of reality.
“The hell?” Paracelsus mumbled as he looked at it, and decided to see what it did to other people before he would use it himself.
Flashes surrounded him seconds later. “What was that all . . . . . oh,” Paracelsus said as he looked around and found that many of the players around him now looked different, less like game characters, and more like real people, like Japanese people.
The great robed figure then said something else, before, with a surprisingly virtual effect, he disappeared, leaving everyone in the arena in silence for a second.
Before hundreds of people began screaming, crying out, or seemingly losing their minds.
And in the middle of it all, still with his perfect looking and obviously Occidental Avatar, Paracelsus could only look around in confusion.
“What the fuck is going on?”