Sword Art Online DLC

Chapter 3: In the Deep End

A bell chiming echoed through complete darkness, each echo lasted about 2 or 3 seconds yet they felt like they went on forever. A flash of an image of what looked like a darkened corridor in some kind of labyrinth with eerie red mist pouring out of it would appear for about half a second in between each chime from the bell. The Images kept flashing, some showed corridors, others pictured stairwells. The main similarity between each image was the darkness and the red mist. The bell chimes got louder, and louder, and louder then suddenly, Jyenka sat bolt up right clutching the left side of his face. A splitting headache made him grit his teethe and grip that part of his face more. Fortunately for Jyenka, the headache didn't last more than 5 seconds before disappearing like it was never there. "Was that a dream?" thought Jyenka  "I didn't know you could even have dreams in SAO."

Jyenka and Taijou headed out to the theatre in the Town of Beginnings for the next assault team meeting picking up breakfast on the way there. When they stepped in they began to look around for familiar faces.

"Wow, you two are actually on time today." Jyenka and Taijou looked to there left to see Silvia standing there with her arms folded

"Morning Silvia" said Taijou.

"Morning Silvy" said Jyenka immediately after. Silvia gave Jyenka an angry look before closing her eyes and letting out a sigh.

"Good to see you all doing well." The 3 of them turned to look at ThirtySix who now stood next to them.

"Likewise ThirtySix." Said Jyenka.

"You can Talk!?" shouted a surprised Taijou.

The commander of the assault team, Kirito, stood up on the main stage and everyone quietened down to hear what he had to say.

"Good work with your quests yesterday, with this we've been able to gather enough exp so that the average player level of the assault team is 20." Jyenka hadn't checked his level in a while so he opened his stat menu to see what it was, It read 17. "Great" thought Jyenka. Just then he'd hear a quiet condescending chuckle next to him, it was Silvia with her stat menu open displaying her player level of 24. "She just has to keep proving she's better than me, doesn't she?" Jyenka angrily thought.

"Now that we have this many players at this level, we'll begin making preparations to take on the boss." The other players in the seating areas looked at each other as a concerned murmuring filled the crowd. Everyone did have the right to think this way, after all it took the players 2 months to beat this boss last time and Kirito planned to get it done in just over a week. "I know this sounds reckless and that we should prepare more, but I'm confident we have the skills to do this." Kirito sounded like he wasn't lying although this wasn't enough to sway the opinion of the crowd. Before the people got too restless a man with brow hair and a red bandana tied around his head stood up.

"Listen everyone!" He said. "No matter what opinion you have, no matter how you see the situation, this is something we must do!" The crowd went quiet again. "I get it, your scared. Well guess what? I'm scared as well and this is my second time here. One of the things I learnt from spending time in this death game though was the strength of trusting in others. Also I want you to know that I have full confidence in my pal Kirito that we can pull this off so please, give him a chance!"  The crowd was moved by the mans speech enough to calm down and listen to what Kirito had to say.

"Thanks for the backup Klein" said Kirito. Klein gave Kirito a thumbs-up and sat back down. "we'll be organising the raid party by combining the groups of 4 we made yesterday into 3 large units. the first unit will be the defence, the second unit will be the offensive switchers (They'll be utilising the 'switch' skill to gain more damage and give the other unit a chance to recover.) Finally we'll have the standby unit, these people will hang back and be ready to switch with anyone who needs to. This battle strategy has been made with the survival of every player in mind. It was also built around Ill Fang the Kobold Lord's attack patterns, for the first two thirds of the fight he'll be using a one handed axe, but in that last third he'll switch to his Odachi. In this final phase his attacks will become more erratic and obviously, he'll start to hit harder. During this phase it is key to prioritize well timed switches in order to avoid as much damage as possible while having a high DPS. The best thing that you can do during this fight is remain calm and stick to the process, this is at the end of the day a video game and good battle strategy will be rewarded. I'll send an email to all of you now outlining which roles you'll be playing during this fight." As Kirito finished saying this a notification appeared in everyone's message menu's. Jyenka opened his, it told him his party as well as 3 other parties would be playing the 'support' role.