Sword Art Online – Progressive - Volume 1 - Chapter 1.02

2 
THE MOMENT SHE HIT THE FLOOR, THE ONLY thought that passed through her brain was the mundane question “I wonder what happens when you pass out in a virtual world?” 
Falling unconscious was a momentary shutdown of the brain, caused by the stoppage of blood flow. Blood might stop flowing for a variety of reasons—heart or blood vessel malfunctions, anemia, low blood pressure, hyperventilation—but under a VR full dive, the physical body was already utterly stationary in a bed or reclining chair. On top of that, everyone stuck in this particular game of death had presumably been transferred to a nearby medical facility, where they’d be undergoing regular monitoring and the administering of necessary drugs and fluids. It was hard to imagine someone passing out from purely physical reasons. 
These thoughts ran through her fading consciousness and eventually coalesced into a simple statement: I just don’t care anymore. 
Nothing mattered. She was going to die here. If she passed out in the middle of a labyrinth guarded by deadly monsters, there was no way she’d emerge safely. There was another player nearby, but he wouldn’t risk his own life just to save a stranger. 
Besides, how would he save her? The weight that a player could carry in this virtual world was strictly controlled by the game system. Deep in a dangerous dungeon like this, any player would be heavily laden with potions and emergency supplies, not to mention all of the loot they’d procured along the way. It was impossible to imagine anyone carrying another human being on top of all that. 
Then she realized something. 
For fleeting thoughts escaping her brain just before she fell unconscious, they were certainly lasting quite a while. Plus, it was only hard stone beneath her body, so why did she feel something so soft and gentle pressing against her back? She felt warm, somehow. There was even a light breeze tickling her cheek. 
With a start, her eyes snapped open. 
She wasn’t in a dank dungeon surrounded by clammy stone walls. It was a clearing in the midst of a forest, surrounded by ancient trees engraved with golden moss and thorny bushes bearing small flowers. She’d passed out—no, been sleeping—on a bed of grass as soft as carpet in the middle of the round clearing, measuring roughly eight yards across. 
But … how? She’d lost consciousness deep in that dungeon, so how could she have traveled all the way to this outdoor area? 
The answer was ninety degrees to her right. 
There was a gray shadow huddled at the foot of an especially large tree at the edge of the open space. He cradled a large sword with both hands and had his head resting on the scabbard. His face was hidden beneath longish black bangs, but based on the equipment and profile, it had to be the player who’d been talking to her moments before she passed out. 
He must have found some way to carry her out of the dungeon and to this forest. She scanned the line of trees, until on her left she finally spotted a massive tower stretching upward to the roof, a few hundred feet away—the labyrinth of the first floor of Aincrad. 
She turned back to her right. Perhaps sensing her movement, the man’s shoulders twitched beneath the gray leather coat, and his head rose slightly. Even in the midst of the midday forest sun, his eyes were as black as a starless night. 
The instant she crossed gazes with those pitch-black eyes, a tiny firework went off deep in the back of her mind. 
“You shouldn’t … have bothered,” growled Asuna Yuuki past gritted teeth. 
From the moment she’d been trapped in this world, Asuna had asked herself the same questions hundreds of times, if not thousands. 
Why did she decide to play with that brand-new gaming console, when it wasn’t even hers? Why did she put the helmet on her head, sink into the high-backed mesh chair, and utter the start-up command? 
Asuna hadn’t bought the NerveGear, VR interface-of-dreams-turned-cursed-tool-of-death, or the game card for Sword Art Online, vast prison of souls—that had been her much-older brother, Kouichirou. But even he’d never been one for video games, much less MMORPGs. As the son of the representative director of RCT, one of the biggest electronics manufacturers in the country, he underwent every kind of education necessary to be their father’s successor, and everything that didn’t fall under that duty was eliminated from his life. Why he became interested in NerveGear—why he chose SAO—was still a mystery to her. 
But ironically, Kouichirou never got a chance to play the first video game he’d ever bought. On the very day that SAO launched, he was sent on a business trip overseas. At the dinner table the night before, he’d tried to laugh off the frustration, but she could sense that he really was disappointed. 
Asuna’s life hadn’t been quite as strict as Kouichirou’s, but she too had little experience with games aside from free downloads on her phone, even up to her current age in ninth grade. She was aware of the presence of online games, but the entrance exams for high school were fast approaching, and she had no reason or motive to seek them out—supposedly. 
So even she had no explanation why, on the afternoon of November 6, 2022, she’d slipped into her brother’s vacant room, put the already prepared NerveGear on her head, and spoken the “link start” command. 

The only thing she could say was that everything had changed that day. Everything had ended. 
Asuna locked herself inside an inn room in the Town of Beginnings, waiting for the ordeal to be over, but when not a single message had made its way through from the real world in two weeks, she gave up hoping for rescue from the outside. And with over a thousand players already dead and the first dungeon of the game still unbeaten, she understood that defeating the game from the inside was equally impossible. 
The only choice left was in how to die. 
She had the option of waiting for months, possibly years, within the safety of the city. But no one could guarantee that the rule that monsters couldn’t invade towns would never be broken. 
Asuna preferred to leave the city rather than curl up into a ball in the dark, living in fear of the future. She’d use all of her instincts to fight, learn, and grow. If she ultimately ran out of steam and perished, at least she didn’t spend her remaining days regretting the decisions of the past and mourning her lost future. 
Run, thrust, and vanish. Like a meteor burning up through the atmosphere. 
Such was Asuna’s mindset as she left the inn and headed out into the wilderness, totally ignorant of a single MMORPG term. She picked out a weapon, learned a single skill, and found her way deep into the labyrinth that no one else had successfully conquered. 
Finally, at four in the morning on Friday, December 2, the accumulation of so many battles caused her to black out with exhaustion, and her quest should have ended. The name ASUNA carved into the Monument of Life beneath Blackiron Palace would be struck through, and everything would come to a close. 
It would have. It should have. 
“You shouldn’t have,” Asuna repeated. The slumping, black-haired swordsman dropped his eyes dark as night down to the ground. He seemed to be slightly older than she, but the surprising naiveté of his gesture surprised her. 
A few seconds later, her original suspicion returned as a cynical smile crossed his lips. “I didn’t save you,” he said quietly. It was the voice of a boy, but something in it disguised his actual age. 
“… Why didn’t you leave me back there, then?” 
“I only wanted to save your map data. If you spent four days at the front line, you must have mapped out a good chunk of unexplored land. It would be a waste to let that disappear.” 
She sucked in a breath at the logic and efficiency of his explanation. She was expecting the same answer that most people she’d met had given her, some claptrap about the importance of life, or the need for everyone to band together. She’d been prepared to cut through all of that nonsense—verbally, of course—but the practicality of his answer left her speechless. 
“… Fine. Take it,” she muttered, opening her window. She’d finally gotten used to the menu system, tabbing over to access her map info and copying it to a scroll of parchment. Another button command materialized the scroll as an in-game object, and she tossed it at the man’s feet. “Now you’ve got what you wanted. So long.” 
She put a hand in the grass to get to her feet, but her legs wouldn’t stay steady. The clock in her window showed that she’d been out almost a full seven hours, but her exhaustion hadn’t entirely worn off yet. She still had three more rapiers, though. She’d told herself before she left that she’d stay inside the tower until the last one’s durability level was below halfway. 
There were still a few suspicions lurking in the back of her mind. How had the swordsman in the gray coat managed to bring her out of the dungeon to this forest clearing? And why did he take her all the way outside, rather than just to the nearby safe zone within the tower? 
They weren’t worth turning back to ask him about, however. So Asuna turned to her left, in the direction of the black, looming labyrinth, and started to march off. 
“Hang on, fencer.” 
“…” 
She ignored him and kept walking, but what he said next made her stop in her tracks. 
“You’re doing all of this for the purpose of beating the game, right? Not just to die in a dungeon. So why don’t you come to the meeting?” 
“…Meeting?” she wondered aloud. The swordsman’s explanation reached her ears on the gentle forest breeze. 
“There’s going to be a meeting tonight at the town of Tolbana near the tower. They’re going to plan out how to beat the boss of the first-floor labyrinth.”