"Thomas-kun, how's your arm treating you?"

  I turned around to see Oyogu staring at me with innate curiosity. Her black hair, yellow eyes, and tanned skin combined together to make a look that nearly no one else at the school could accomplish.

  Oyogu was another foreigner like myself. Unlike me, she was raised in Japan since nearly the very beginning of her life. Inside of SAO, we were good friends, and I eventually learned that she was the daughter of a Russian mob boss. Her father fled with Oyogu in tow to Japan due to having a contact with the Yakuza that got him out of his sticky situation at the time. But that turned sour when her father never made it with her. But, the Yakuza member decided to turn her into a member

  This is all to say that Oyogu was a foster child raised by a loving family.

  "Oh, it's fine. Still a little bit of numbness occasionally but I'm okay." I looked down at my left arm that was still in its sling and clenched my hand.

  On Sunday this week, I was forcefully injected with a drug intended to paralyze patients by numbing their muscles and nerve ends. This was because of a man named Kyouji Shinkawa, who had attempted to take my life with said drug. If I remember correctly, it was called succinylcholine, based on the vial I managed to catch a glimpse at.

  "Are you sure?" Oyogu stammered, still staring at me like a curious cat. "I can always help you if you need something, I have explicit permission to, y'know!"

  "I'm fine, really! Gimme a break here, I'm still breathing, at least." I gave her a nervous chuckle before putting my hand on her shoulder. "I'll tell you if I need anything, alright?"

  She crisply nodded in the affirmative.

  “All rise, bow, be seated.”

  Footsteps and movements sounded in unison as they headed my commands. This was my day as class representative. To my surprise, it was oddly fulfilling.

  For some reason, I suddenly felt that I had purpose in that classroom. Even though it was a simple job–commanding the start of the session of class, cleaning after school, and ensuring the behavior of multiple students. It was… fun, which was shocking, even coming from me.

  “Trenor-kun, You really don’t need to clean so late…”

  My head turned from the floor to the front of the classroom, where the English teacher was standing. He was in front of the lectern, and I was near the back of the room, broom in hand. I stuttered before replying.

  “Er.. Robin-sensei, it’s only thirty minutes past dismissal. I can still catch a train if I finish my work by four-thirty."

  “Hmm… Alright, you take care, then.” He smiled, and swiftly left the room with a bag slung over his shoulder. I sighed and continued cleaning.

  To call this purposeful would be putting it lightly. Doing this gave me a goal, something to work towards, even. The only thing really hindering me was the fact that my arm was still a little numb from the injection during the fight. Sometimes the scene sprang back in my head. Sometimes my fingers would go cold. Sometimes I freeze still. Sometimes…

  "Thomas?"

  My head instantly snapped back towards the door. The person that I saw was the last person I'd expect to step foot in here at this hour. Kikuoka. He was fitted in a slightly ragged suit, and had an apprentice on each side of him.

  I quickly let go of the broom to hold it in just my right hand, and bowed deeply.

  "That's unnecessary, Thomas…" Kikuoka said blankly. I looked up in confusion.

  "Why?" I asked, furrowing my right eyebrow. Kikuoka scrunched his face a bit, as if considering if he should even continue speaking.

  "There's something very important we need to show you."

  I asked him what was so important.

  "It's… It's about your family."

  I felt my eyes widen and set the broom aside, and asked Kikuoka if he was serious, almost probing him for more info.

  My family had been lost to me for unknown reasons for the past three years. I had lost them in what I assumed was a house fire, created by an unknown cause. A part of me wanted to say that extremist parties burned the house down in a demonstration of domestic power of sorts, but another part of me wanted to say something much, much darker. Either way, the fact that Kikuoka and his team managed to come up with anything seemed like a miracle,

  "Are you serious? What-what about them?" I stammered, just barely able to climb over my own words.

  "It's better if we show you, in private."

  Before I knew it, I was in a car, silently sitting in the back seat. Kikuoka was trying to lighten the mood with some humor, but I didn’t really pay attention. I was too buried in my own thoughts to consider him as outside interference. In fact, I couldn’t even hear him, thanks to the headphones I had in. I was playing a rock album that I decided to download onto my phone, mainly because it was good, but also because I had to learn it for a show in February.

  Outside the window, I saw crowds of people tearing down walls that were plastered in screens. For the ones they couldn’t get too because they were so high off the ground, there were glass, metal bottles and cans thrown at them. Someone even brought a long pole with a metal tip to break the screens.

  It was chaos, but the government hadn’t done anything to regulate the placement of the displays. It had even gone to the point that cameras were being installed into the displays to monitor the observation rate of advertisements. A brief analysis had shown that most of the ads the people immediately looked towards and pointed out were advertisements that were erotic, grotesque, or even downright stupid.

  “Well, wherever you look, corruption will always find its way there…” I sighed, resting my head on the dimly tinted window.

  “Hm? Hey, what'd ya mean? I’m not corruptive!” Kikuoka argued jokingly. I decided to fire back.

  “You’re not corruptive, you’re just unable to be taken seriously. That’s especially true whenever I or Kazuto are nearby to listen to your useless babbling.”

  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Kikuoka frown a little bit, being practically unamused from my statement, or rather sick burn.

  “You do have one good quality, at least.”

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  “And that is..?”

  “You’re really fuckin’ persistant. That’s God’s honest truth.”

  Kikuoka simply chuckled in the front passenger seat, but I felt a smirk poke at the edges of his mouth.

  “We’re here,” one of the men in suits said, stepping aside from a metal door.

  “Thank you.” Kikuoka simply said and gave a crisp salute, which I had never seen him do before…

  “Just inside, Thomas. We’ll have all the answers.”

  I was hoping they would.

  I had been taken to… actually, I didn’t know exactly where I was. I knew I was below ground-level, due to the elevator that took me down so far, but I also didn’t know where I literally was, because before I arrived, they asked me to put on a blindfold and turn off my phone. When I asked why, an agent said, “You’re a liability, kid. Kiku doesn’t want any of your other friends coming and asking questions, y’know. It’s for your safety, theirs, and ours.” At the time, I just sighed and obliged.

  The concrete walls didn’t scream safety to me. They honestly gave off the impression that I was in some deep military bunker. It wasn’t my first time seeing such bland walls, but I would digress. The rehab center I spent three months at during my physical and mental rehabilitation was covered in a clean monochrome all throughout. The only time I saw color or atmosphere was when I looked out of a window at Tokyo, but even that was desaturated and appeared more bland than ever.

  "Thomas," Kikuoka called my name with a concerned look. "Are you alright?"

  "Yeah, I'm fine. Let's get this over with."

  With the swift turn of a key, the deadbolt released from the stainless steel door, and its contents were soon realized as we entered. Rack-mounted servers lined almost every surface, coming with a surprisingly soft hum with so much hardware that needed to be cooled. Everything was probably spun down right now, waiting for another major takes to compute. Not to mention, one of the walls had no such servers on it.

  Instead, it was covered in keyboards, mice, and monitors that were cable managed and organized to near perfection, if it wasn’t for the unremovable coffee cup stains. Directly in the center of the table was a device, with two concentric metal rings, and a tinted front glass piece that followed the metal until they intersected. It was…

  "An Amusphere?"

  "Yes. It's actually the same one that we used for your assignment earlier this week. We insisted to let you keep it but you were extremely busy assisting Ms. Asada."

  I just rolled my eyes and walked over to grab the device, putting it on over my head. Then, I took a seat in one of the plush office chairs. Kikuoka approached another chair–or rather, looking willing enough to approach. Everyone else was in the back of the room, quietly waiting for.. something to happen?

  Either way, I activated the headgear, and logged in to get this over with.

  I opened my eyes to… a blank white space. It was nearly the same size as the original room, but every surface was pure white.

  "What do you think?" A voice asked behind me. I turned around to see… Chrysheight.

  "You brought your ALO avatar?"

  "You're in your ALO avatar as well.. it seemed fitting to come from the same world." I looked down and sure enough, it was my old SAO gear wrapped onto a new body, my fairy body.

  "Alright… Formalities are outta the way, what do you have to show me?" I glared, crossing my arms and shifting my weight onto one foot. Kikuoka began with a shaky breath of all things.

  "Over the past month, we've been finally getting search warrants regarding the disappearance of your family. I can't show you everything, since it still has to be confirmed by eyewitnesses and cross-checked with other evidence, but… I can assure you, they weren't taken away from you by an outside party."

  "Meaning?"

  "Meaning, they weren't taken away by extremists."

  My brain stopped for a moment. For the longest time, I had assumed that an extremist party–specifically against foreigners living in their native country–had burned down the house I once lived in for five years. By the time I got out of Sword Art Online and could think rationally enough about the current situation, it was damning news. Some time between the start and end of SAO, the house that encapsulated five years of my life, five years of my memories… was gone. Burned to ash. It was a miracle that no other buildings were harmed, but that left numerous unanswered questions.

  "Now, before we watch, I need to read something to you."

  "What do you mean?"

  "It's a letter that was left on a computer. They managed to recover parts of the data, and they got a warrant to collect the other parts of the file from a cloud save that happened just before the incident."

  Kikuoka opened his menu and manifested a sheet of paper in front of him. He grabbed and drew it closer and began reading.

  What he read was reminiscent of a love letter, like a partner lost to time, unable to come back. In truth, it was moving, but it also made it seem like…

  …I was the last person in their mind before they died.

  After the letter was read, Kikuoka cleared his throat. "Now, the video."

  Another quick scroll through his menu, and a remote appeared in front of him. He grabbed it, pointed it close, and pressed a single button.

  The room went dark and an angled CCTV recording of a neighborhood street was shown on a large holographic screen. It immediately reminded me of a view of a gas station I went to when I was younger. Because it was the gas station. It was the same one I went to every day for five years, up to when I was locked into SAO. The clerk got older by the years, but she was a nice woman, and had a smile like sunshine.

  The video was quickly skipped to a section where four figures stood in front of a Japanese style house, holding hands next to one another. Two figures ran out resembling pets. The glow on the front side of their bodies was bright orange, like fire. The figures puffed their chest up, then simply walked into the flames.

  My mind froze. My jaw slowly began to drop ever so slightly as I continued to watch. As time slowly ached forwards, my brain began to function again. Questions and rationals were forming by the millisecond but were quicker swiped away with a thought of, "No, why?! That doesn't make sense!!" Chaotic thoughts racked in my brain like a hail of gunfire at a single target. Audible tones began to rise as time quickly passed. Questions kept coming, bullets kept firing, the cartridge shells spitting onto the ground, the entire audio spectrum rising and rising and rising. Nothing made sense. Why did they do it? Why did they walk into a fire that they created? What did it mean? Did they not love me? No, that was insane, the letter they left behind contradicted that, but just- why??

  But then one of the thoughts spoke true words.

  "It was… as you just saw… suicide."

  "Why..?" My throat croaked. My face felt like it was on fire at the same time, but I couldn't tell if it was from burning rage, or hot tears.

  "We spoke to your neighbors after your parents passed. Every time they were at another's for dinner, the mood was always downcast. It seems… they were all severely depressed from your ab-" Kikuoka stopped at the same time I felt his eyes probe me in an invasive way.

  I took two crisp steps to turn around, and looked Kikuoka dead in the eye. "Seriously?! What gave you the right goddamn mind to think I want to watch them DIE?!" Kikuoka seemed to shiver as I yelled at him, but also took a deep breath to attempt to continue.

  "Thomas, I can assure you-"

  "Of what- Of fucking what?! Is this supposed to be some sort of reaction test?!" I quickly began to close the distance between me and Kikuoka, continuing to stare him down. Once close enough, I shoved him down onto the floor and stood above him.

  "Listen here, bud! And listen well! I'm not gonna deal with your bullshit anymore and I'm damn sure not going to do anymore "assignments," got it?! I'm tired of the shit you put me through. You think you have me in your back pocket, but I'm done being a goddamn puppet to you! That goes for Kazuto, too!"

  I cracked my knuckles and sent a single crisp swing to Kikuoka's face. It connected, and dropped him to the floor. Even though I knew it wouldn't hurt him–only a little bit of numbness came from VR–I still wanted to drive home the point. But even then, it knew it'd be fruitless.

  "What do you have to say for yourself?"

  Kikuoka opened and closed his mouth several times before coming to a brief answer. "I'm… sorry, for putting you through that."

  I just snarled and cursed at him. "Pathetic bastard. Never call me again."

  Two years in that godforsaken game.

  Killing monsters wasn't so bad, I hardly remember it.

  But killing those mid-level players, watching as their friends cry…

  I see it every day. It's not the PTSD, it’s the guilt and the antidepressants..

  It's been two years but it feels like millenia.

  Every word is getting longer, the mosquitos keep getting louder.

  When your HP runs out, time stops, and you're stuck in the castle forever.

  It's… splits of skin on a dying body.

  I know what comes next. I need to ask you a favor…

  I need your strength, Oyogu…

  No…

  I need you.