"Well, it's the first day so these sort of bugs could occur. Around about now, the GMs should be crying by now from the number of messages flooding in," Klein said calmly.

"Is it all right for you to stand around like that? You said that you ordered some pizza, didn't you?" I asked teasingly.

"Ah, that's right!"

I smiled as I watched him jump around, his eyes wide.

I threw away a couple of items I didn't need from the inventory, which had turned red from having too many items, and then walked over to Klein.

"Argh! My anchovy pizza and ginger ale...!"

"Why don't you call a GM? They might cut you off from their side."

"I tried, but there's no response. It's already 5:25! Hey, Kirito! Isn't there some other way to log out?"

After listening to what Klein, who was waving both arms, said...

My face became rigid. I felt a groundless fear send a chill down my back.

"Let's see... to log out..." I said while thinking.

To get out of this virtual reality and back to my room, I have to: open the main menu, press the 'Log Out' b.u.t.ton, and press 'Yes' on the window that popped up on the right. It was pretty simple. But... at the same time, apart from that procedure, I wasn't aware of any other way of logging off.

I looked up at Klein's face, situated quite a bit higher than my own, and shook my head.

"No... there's none. If you want to log yourself off, you have to use the menu. Apart from that, there's no other way."

"That's impossible... there's got to be something!"

Klein suddenly started shouting as if he was denying my statement.

"Return! Log out! Escape!"

But of course nothing happened. There were no voice commands in SAO of that description.

After Klein shouted this and that and even jumped around, I spoke to him.

"Klein, it's useless. Even the manual doesn't have anything on emergency access terminations."

"But... this is just stupid! Even if it's a bug, I can't even go back to my room and my body when I want to!" Klein shouted with a bewildered expression on his face.

I totally agreed with him.

This was impossible. It was complete nonsense. But it was indisputably the truth.

"Hey... what is this? It's just really weird. Right now, we can't get out of this game!"

Klein gave a desperate laugh then quickly started talking again.

"Wait, we can just turn the power off. Or just pull the "Gear" off."

As I watched Klein move his hands as if he was trying to take off some invisible hat, I felt the anxiety returning.

"That's impossible, both of them. Right now, we can't move our bodies... our real bodies. The "Nerve Gear" intercepts all the signals that our brain is sending here," I tapped the back of my head, "and reroutes them to move our avatars here."

Klein slowly closed his mouth and put his hands down.

We both stood speechless for a while, each lost in thought.

To reach the FullDive state, the Nerve Gear intercepts the signals that our brain sends down our spines and translates them so that we can control our avatars in this world. So however wildly we swing our arm about here, the arm of my real body (lying on my bed right now) wouldn't move an inch, ensuring that I wouldn't hit my head against the corner of my table or anything.

But because of this function, we can't cancel the FullDive of our own free will right now.

"... so unless the bug is fixed or somebody in the real world takes the Gear off, we have to wait it out?" Klein mumbled, still a little dazed.

I silently signaled my agreement.

"But I live by myself. You?"

I hesitated slightly but told him the truth.

"... I live with my mom and my younger sister, a family of three. I think that I'll be forced out of Dive if I don't come down for dinner..."

"What? H-How old is your sister?"

Klein suddenly looked at me, his eyes sparkling. I pushed his head away.

"You're pretty calm right now, aren't you? She's in a sports club and hates games, so she's got nothing in common with people like us... but more than that," I spread my right arm in an attempt to change the subject. "Don't you think it's weird?"

"Well sure. Since it's a bug."

"No, I mean it's not just a bug, it's a "can't log out" bug. It's a big enough problem to bother the operation of the game itself. Like your pizza in the real world is getting colder every second, it's an actual economical loss, isn't it?"

"... a cold pizza... that's as meaningless as hard natto!"

I ignored these meaningless comments and kept talking.

"If it's like this, the operators should take the server down and log everyone out, whatever the cause. But... it's been 15 minutes since we first noticed this and there hasn't even been a system message, let alone taking the server down. It's just too weird."

"Hmm, now that I think of it, you're right."

Klein started rubbing his chin with a serious expression on his face. In the area beneath the bandana, which covered a little bit of his sharp nose, intelligence sparkled in his eyes.

I started listening to Klein, feeling a little strange about talking with someone whom I'd never meet if I erased my account.

"... the company which created SAO, "Argus", is a company that's famous for being considerate of its users, isn't it? That's why everyone was fighting to get their hands on a copy even though it's the first online game. It's sorta meaningless if they screw up like this on their first day."

"I agree. And SAO is the first VRMMORPG. If something goes wrong now, they might pa.s.s regulations for the whole genre."

Klein and I looked at each other's virtual faces and sighed.

Aincrad's seasons were based on reality, so it was early fall here as well.

I looked up, sucking in the virtual air; taking a deep, cold breath.

100 meters away, I could just about see the light purple bottom of the 2nd floor. As I followed the uneven surface, I saw the huge tower-the "labyrinth" that was the path to the upper floor-and saw that it was connected to the outer entrance.

It was just past 5:30 and the small strip of sky that could be seen was red with the light of the sunset. Despite the situation I was in, seeing the endless plains painted gold with the light of the evening sun, I found myself speechless in front of the beauty of this virtual world.

Right after that...

The world changed forever.

Chapter 3.

Ding, ding... A chiming noise like a bell-or perhaps a warning chime-sounded loudly, making Klein and me jump in surprise.

"Ah..."

"What's this!?"

We shouted at the same time and stared at each other, our eyes wide.

Both Klein and I were immersed in a clear blue pillar of light. Past the blue veil, the plains in my vision blurred steadily.

I'd experienced this a few times during beta testing. It was a "Teleport" initiated by an item. I didn't have the prerequisite item nor did I shout the proper command. Did the operators initiate a forced teleport? If so, why didn't they even inform us?

As my thoughts raced, the light around me pulsed stronger and darkness overtook me.

As the blue light faded, my surroundings became clear again. However, this wasn't the sunset-lit plain anymore.

A large road paved with stone. Medieval streets surrounded by street-lamps and the huge palace radiating a dark light a fair distance away up ahead.

This was the starting point, the central plaza of the "Starting City".

I looked at Klein who had his mouth wide open next to me. Then at the bustling crowd of people that surrounded the two of us.

Looking at the bunch of stunningly beautiful people with a variety of equipment and different hair colors, they were no doubt other players like me. There were about a few thousand-ten thousand people here. It was likely that everyone who was logged on right now had been forcefully transported to the central plaza.

For a few seconds, everyone just looked around without speaking.

Then a few mumbles and mutters could be heard here and there; it started to get louder.

"What's happening?"

"Can we log out now?"

"Can't they take care of it quickly?"

Comments like these could be heard from time to time.

As the players started to get more annoyed, shouts like "Is this a joke?" and "Get the h.e.l.l out here, GMs!" could be heard.

Then suddenly...

Somebody raised his voice above all these comments and shouted.

"Ah... look up!"

Klein and I almost automatically turned our eyes upward. There, a strange sight greeted us.

The bottom of the second floor, one hundred meters above us, was checkered in red.

When I looked closely, I could see that the pattern was made up of two phrases crisscrossing each other: the words [ Warning ] and [ System Announcement ] written in red.

I was surprised for a moment but then thought, "Oh, the operator is going to begin informing us now," and the tension in my shoulders eased a bit.

The chatter died down in the plaza and you could feel everyone waiting to hear what was going to be said.

However, what happened next wasn't what I had expected.

From the middle of the pattern, a liquid that looked like blood started oozing down slowly. It came down at a rate that almost emphasized how viscous it was, but it didn't fall all the way down; instead, it started congealing into a shape.

What appeared was a twenty-meter tall figure with a hooded robe draped around it.

No, that wasn't exactly right. From where we were looking, we could easily see into the hood-there was no face. It was absolutely empty. We could clearly see the inner cloth and the green embroidery inside of the hood. It was the same inside the robe, all we could see inside the edges were shadows.

I'd seen that robe before. It was the same clothing that the Argus employees who worked as GMs during the beta test had always worn. But back then, the male GMs had a face like an old sorcerer with a long beard and the females had an avatar of a bespectacled girl. They might have used the robe because they lacked time to prepare a proper avatar, but the empty s.p.a.ce inside the hood gave me an unexplainable feeling of anxiety.

The countless players around me must have felt the same.

"Is that a GM?"

"Why doesn't it have a face?"

There were a lot of whispers like these.

Then the right sleeve of the huge robe moved as if to silence them.

A pure white glove appeared from the folds of the long sleeve. But this sleeve, like the rest of the robe, didn't cover any sort of body.