S.A.O Project Alicization - OC/Male Reader Insert

Project Alicization ----- Chapter Thirteen

A virtual world that was indistinguishable from reality.

It was a theme that numerous fictional stories had covered for decades. Shino could name right on the spot at least five books or movies based on the idea.

When the age of full-diving, NerveGears, and AmuSpheres in every home had arrived, the media was overrun with thought pieces and blog articles wondering if the time had finally come when we'd lost track of whether or not our reality was truly real life. Shino remembered being nervous about the concept before she took her first dive.

But once she tried it, for better or for worse, that concern vanished. The AmuSphere's VR experience was a true miracle of cutting-edge technology. The full sensory experience of the virtual world was brilliant and beautiful-which only highlighted its difference from the real world. The sights, sounds, and textures of everything were too pure, too...simple. There was no dust in the air, no clothes fabric fraying with wear, no scratches or dents in the tables. Every 3-D object that was coded had a hard limit in terms of the designing company's manpower and the CPU power of the device displaying it. That might change in the future, but in 2026, technology could not create a virtual world that was indistinguishable from the real one...

Or so Shino had thought, until she heard what Kazuto Kirigaya had to say.

"But Kirito...that means that you could be in the...STL, they call it? Right at this very moment. They could be feeding you memories of Asuna and me," Shino said with a teasing smile, trying to hide the shiver crawling over her skin. She figured he would just laugh it off, but even worse, he frowned and stared at her.

"H-hey, stop that! I'm real!" she protested, waving her hands, but Kazuto looked even more suspicious.

"If you're the real Sinon...you'd remember the promise you made to me yesterday."

"P-promise?"

"You said that as thanks for coming out here to meet you, I could have as many Dicey Cheesecakes as I want. It's the most expensive dessert on the menu."

"Wh-what?! I never made that deal with you! Oh...b-but that doesn't mean I'm a fake! Come on, Asuna, tell him I'm real!"

She looked to her friend for help. Asuna grabbed her hands and whispered, "Shino-non...did you forget? You promised me I could have as many Berry-Cherry Tarts as I wanted..."

"Whaaat?!"

Maybe she was the one who was trapped in a virtual world and having her memory manipulated. Then both Kazuto's and Asuna's cheeks puffed out, and they burst into laughter with Shi as he watched on. Shino finally realized that she was not the teaser but the teased.

"How dare...Not you, too, Shi! I'm going to hit all of you with a hundred homing arrows each next time I see you in ALO!"

"Ha-ha-ha! Sorry, Shino-non, forgive me!" Asuna laughed, hugging the girl. The simple friendliness of that gesture filled her heart with warmth, which she tried to hide by turning away in a huff. Still, she couldn't keep a smile away for long, and she soon joined in the laughter.

Kazuto added a slow comment to the more relaxed atmosphere. "The tech sounds really creepy when you hear all these terms like fluctlight and pneumonic visuals...but I think I actually connect with the world the STL creates more than the AmuSphere's. When you get down to it, it's basically more like a waking dream..."

"A...dream?" Shino said, not expecting that word to come up. Rather appropriately, the boy who played a spriggan fighter with a penchant for putting others to sleep in ALO continued. "Yeah. You're calling forth objects that exist as saved memories, creating a world by combining them together, then doing stuff in it...Doesn't that sound like how dreams work? In fact, they say the brain patterns of people in the STL are very close to those of being asleep."