“Ngh…arrg…hyaa!”
The strained cries were paired with desperate sword swipes, the blade swishing through nothingness.
The blue boar charged its attacker the next instant, nimbly evading his slashes despite its massive bulk. As I watched the beast’s flat snout throw him skyward to roll across the field, I couldn’t help laughing aloud.
“Ha-ha-ha…not like that. The important part is your very first motion, Klein.”
“Yeow…Hairy bastard.”
As the boar’s attacker—my party member, Klein—rose to his feet swearing, he shot back a pitiful reply in my direction.
“Easy for you to say, Kirito…He can really move!”
I’d only met this man just a few hours earlier, his reddish hair flared back by the bandanna tied to his forehead, his lean figure clad in simple leather armor. If we’d introduced ourselves with our real names, it would have been hard not to use polite honorifics. But these were character names we’d chosen specifically for this virtual world: He was Klein; I was Kirito. Attaching -san to each other here would’ve just been weird.
Noting that Klein’s legs were unsteady and his spill had probably dizzied him, I leaned down to the grass at my feet, scooped up a rock, and held it above my shoulder. The system recognized this motion as the initiation of a sword skill, and the stone began glowing a faint green.
The rest happened nearly automatically. My left hand flashed, and the rock traced a bright arc through the air, striking the blue boar between its eyes as it prepared to charge again. The swine uttered a squeal of rage and turned to me.
“Of course it moves; it’s not a training dummy. But as long as you initiate the motion and get the sword skill off properly, the system will ensure that it hits the target.”
“Motion…motion…”
Klein muttered the word like a spell, waving the cutlass in his right hand.
The beast, properly known as a Frenzied Boar, was only a level-1 mob, but with all the missed strikes and painful counterattacks, Klein’s HP bar was nearly half gone. Dying wasn’t a big deal, since he’d simply revive at the nearby starting town, but we’d have to trek all the way back here to the hunting grounds again. This fight could only last one more round.
I tilted my head in hesitation as I deflected the boar’s charge with my sword.
“How do I explain this…? You don’t just hold it up, swing it, and cut the enemy like one, two, three. You have to pause just enough in your first motion to feel the skill cue up, then kapow! You blast it into him…”
“Kapow, huh?”
Klein held his curved sword at mid-level as his handsome features crumbled into a pathetic grimace beneath the tasteless bandanna.
He took one deep breath in and out, lowered his waist, then lifted the sword as though to cradle it on his right shoulder. This time, the system recognized the required motion and his arched blade glinted orange.
“Raah!”
He roared and, in a much smoother motion than before, bounded forward with his left foot. A satisfying shgeen! sound effect rang out as his blade carved a path the color of fire. Reaver, a single-handed scimitar skill, caught the charging boar squarely on the head, wiping out its remaining HP.
The enormous bulk shattered like glass with a pitiable squeal, and purple experience numbers floated before our eyes.
“Hell yeah!”
Klein struck a victory pose, turning to me with a huge smile, his hand held high. I returned the high five and cracked a smile of my own.
“Congrats on your first kill. Just remember, that boar was basically the wimpiest little slime in any other game.”
“Are you serious? I was convinced he was a mid-level boss.”
“Not a chance.”
I returned my sword to the sheath on my back, my smile fading to a wry grin.
Behind the friendly teasing, I understood Klein’s euphoria. With my extra two months of experience and leveling, I’d been singlehandedly responsible for all of our battles so far, making this the first time Klein had truly tasted the pleasure of dispatching a foe with his own sword.
As if to practice his lesson, Klein repeated the same skill several times, hooting and cackling, while I turned to survey our surroundings.
The field around us was brilliantly illuminated by sunlight just beginning to take on a tinge of red. Far to the north lay the silhouette of a forest, while a lake sparkled to the south, and the walls of a town could be faintly glimpsed to the east. To the west was nothing but endless sky and golden clouds.
We were standing in a field to the west of the Town of Beginnings, the starting area at the south edge of the very first floor of Aincrad. Countless other players were no doubt fighting monsters of their own in our vicinity, but the scale of this space was so vast that none were within eyeshot.
Finally satisfied, Klein returned the cutlass to the scabbard on his waist and approached, scanning the horizon with me.
“Man…no matter how many times I see this, I just can’t bring myself to believe that it’s all inside a game.”
“Just because we’re ‘inside’ it doesn’t mean the game world has absorbed our souls or whatever. All our brains are doing is bypassing our eyes and ears, taking in the information directly through the NerveGear.” I spoke through pursed lips like a pouting child, my shoulders hunched.
“Yeah, well, you’re already used to it. This is my first full dive into the game! It’s unbelievable. What a time to be alive!!”
“You act like it’s such a big deal.”
I laughed it off but secretly agreed.
NerveGear.
The name of the hardware that runs Sword Art Online, this VRMMORPG—a Virtual Reality Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game. But this machine is fundamentally different from the home TV gaming consoles of the past.
Unlike previous hardware featuring two points of man-machine interface on a flat monitor and a handheld controller, the NerveGear has just a single interface: a streamlined piece of headgear that entirely covers the head and face.
Countless transmitters embedded within the unit generate a multilayer electric field that connects directly to the user’s brain. Information is sent not to the eyes and ears but to the visual and auditory centers of the brain itself. And not just vision and hearing. Touch, taste, smell—the NerveGear is capable of accessing all the senses.
With the headgear on and the chin-arm locked in place, a simple “link start” spoken command instantly causes all external noise to fade out and plunges your vision into darkness. Pass through a floating rainbow ring materializing out of the emptiness, and you’re in a different world composed entirely of digital data.
In other words, this machine, released to the public in May of 2022, finally succeeded in creating a perfect virtual reality. The major electronics manufacturer that developed the NerveGear coined the term “full dive” to describe the act of connecting to the VR world.
It was an all-encompassing isolation from reality, more than worthy of the term.
After all, the machine didn’t just provide virtual stimuli to all five senses; it also intercepted and collected the brain’s commands to the body.
This was a vital function in providing full control within the virtual world. In other words, if your mental commands to your real body were allowed to pass, you might run within the virtual world during a full dive, but your real body would quickly slam into the wall of your room.
It was only because the NerveGear intercepted the signals from the spine to the body and converted them to digital information that Klein and I could race around the virtual battlefield, swinging our swords with abandon.
You leap into the game.
The sheer impact of this experience profoundly enchanted many gamers, myself included. Once you tasted a full dive, there was no going back to the world of touch pens and movement sensors.