An Englishman in the Glocken

Chapter 1 - Old Allies

For Koharu, today was a day that only four years ago seemed unimaginable. Her 21st birthday, living a life that she wanted to live; not that that her father wanted her to live, or that Aincrad would've forced her to live either, but her own choices.

It was a funny thing that, despite the trauma and horrors they'd all witnessed in Aincrad – the people they'd lost, the creatures that may as well have crawled out from the depths of hell itself and the unwinnable situations they'd all encountered – none of them had been particularly apprehensive about using Full Dive technology again.

In fact, she'd almost jumped at the chance when an old friend from Aincrad had asked if any of them would be willing to help her out with some work duties involving the game Gun Gale Online, or GGO for short.

Simple tasks such as helping sort through player reports of people using cheats or hacks, and then assisting her in confirming or denying those reports, before handing their findings off to her to deal with the players in question – whether that was banning their accounts, putting penalties on, or in the most egregious of circumstances, contacting the authorities, who would come down on them hard.

No one wanted a rerun of Sword Art Online after all.

Still, it was her birthday, and they were supposed to be having a good time; not reminiscing on those old days...

"To the best girlfriend I could ever have wished for!" Jet held his half-drunk pint into the air.

"To Koharu!" Rain raised her champagne flute into the air around the middle of the table.

"To the birthday girl!" Philia did the same, the glasses clinking as they met.

"Indeed, to many more happy birthdays after this one!" Sanya held her glass into the air, meeting the two flutes and pint glass.

"Cheers!" The glasses were all tapped together to produce a satisfying clink.

"You know you didn't have to arrange all that earlier for me, right?"

The party earlier had been quite something – arranging for almost everyone they'd met during their days in SAO, regardless of where they'd had to come from was no mean feat of organisation, and despite how much she loved Jet, she was certain he'd had some help from Asuna at some point during the planning...

"You think we would ignore your birthday, not least an important one such as your 21st? Preposterous!" Sanya was always quite animated in the way she talked, but she reckoned that she was now starting to approach the point of being cut off from any more drinks...

Still though, it had gotten late, and almost everyone had gone home or logged out, which meant that the quintet of the Concord had moved the party to the nightclub on the Glocken, the main hub of GGO.

The SBC Glocken was a remarkable setting for the game, as it technically meant the game's hub world was a vehicle, rather than a place. A downed Space Battle Cruiser, the Glocken was as large as many cities, and probably a great deal more defended. The massive ship lent its interior to the core elements of GGO almost perfectly – tight corridors, a myriad of corners and dark passages, and above all else, a grimy and worn look that contributed to the aesthetic of GGO.

A post-apocalyptic world, some millennia after a nuclear holocaust that had devastated the Earth, and now, the players of the game were the descendants of the settlers that had returned onboard the crashed spacecraft that were the SBC Glocken and SBC Flugel, fighting amongst themselves for...

Actually, even Zeliska, a developer on the game hadn't been able to give her a straight answer on that front, instead telling her that some things never changed, and that humans would still squabble amongst each other, regardless of the situation.