章節 5: 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 non–destructible 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 button 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 «Cor» 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 20% 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 30%, 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 Palace» 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 Cor but
didn't want to make money by fighting monsters.
As a side–note, 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 Cor 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 force–fed 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 classes. 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 Cor 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 Palace, where the «Chamber of
Resurrection»2 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
NerveGear, 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 Aincrad, 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.
The short line was crossed mercilessly over the boy's name two
minutes later. The cause of death was «Falling in midair». I didn't
even want to imagine what he went through during those two
minutes. There was no way of knowing if he had returned to the
real world or, as Kayaba had said, he had his brain fried. But most
people believed that if there was such a simple way of escaping
the game, the people outside would have already pulled the plugs
and saved us.
But there were still some who gave in to this easy way of dealing
with things. Most people, including me, found it hard to take the
«Death» in SAO as reality.
That had still not changed. The phenomenon of the HP bar
reaching zero and the polygons that made up our bodies being
destroyed was too much like the «Game Over» that we were all
too familiar with. It was probable that the only way to understand
the real meaning of death in SAO would be to experience it
yourself. This shaky truth would have been the reason that the
decrease in players slowed.
On the other hand, a lot of the players who were part of «The
Army», especially the ones who had first belonged to the first
group, started losing their lives while trying to clear the game and
fighting monsters.
Fights in SAO needed a bit of getting used to. It was less like trying
to force yourself to move but «entrusting» your movements to the
system.
For example, even for a simple uppercut with a one–handed
sword, if the player learned the «One–handed Sword skill» and
then equipped «Uppercut» from the list, they would only need to
assume the starting motion; then the system would almost
automatically move their body for them. But if someone without
the skill tried to copy the movements, it would be too slow and
weak to use in actual combat. It was like inputting commands in a
fighting game.
The people who didn't adjust to this just swung their swords
around and even lost to boars and wolves they would have been
able to beat if they used the single strike skills they had by default.
Even then, if they just gave up and ran away after losing some of
their HP, they wouldn't have died but...
Unlike the attacks of 2D monsters that we see through a monitor
screen, the battles in SAO were so real that you'd feel afraid. It was
as if a real monster was baring its teeth at you and giving chase
with the intention of killing you.
Even during the beta testing there were some people who
panicked in the middle of a fight, but now death awaited you if you
lost. The panic–stricken players forgot about using their skills and
even running away, their HP disappeared and they were expelled
from this world forever.
Suicide, losing to monsters. The number of crossed–out names
multiplied at a terrifying pace.
When these reached two thousand, one month into the game, a
cloud of despair hung over the surviving players.
If the number of deaths kept increasing at this pace, all ten
thousand would be dead in less than half a year. Clearing the
hundredth floor seemed like a mere dream.
But... humans adapt.
A little over a month later, the first labyrinth was cleared and the
number of deaths started to slow quickly. People started
spreading information in order to survive and most people started
to perceive that monsters weren't all that scary if you gained
enough experience points and leveled up properly.
It might be possible to clear the game and return to the real world.
The number of players that started thinking like that increased
slowly but steadily.
The top floor was still far away, but the players started moving
with this vague hope... and the world started turning again.
Now, two years later and with twenty six floors left, the number of
survivors is around six thousand.
This is the current situation in Aincrad.
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