Wish I Called In Sick Today

Chapter 1: Never Trust the Government

My name is Matt. This is the story of the incident that cost me 3 years of my life, many dear friends, and luckily after the fact my girlfriend, Piper. I will tell you now that she is crazy. After I got out, we got into a fight and broke up because she said I wasn't there enough for her in that difficult part of her life. As I said earlier, I was trapped in this VRMMORPG (Virtual-Reality-Mass-Multiplayer-Organized-Role-Playing-Game) called Sword Art Online. The only way to escape was to beat the game, 100 floors with powerful bosses on each level becoming increasingly difficult, especially on the Quarter-Floors. Did I mention that if your HP reaches 0 in the game, your brain is microwaved in the real world. It took 3 years to escape, and this was the difficult part of her life she spoke of.

After we broke up, my life became even better than it was when I escaped. She has a magical ability to be self- centered. Back to that fateful day 3 years ago in 2025, I was contacted by the U.S. government to do a job for them. We had all learned of SAO, the Death-game, where 10,000 players had gotten trapped after putting on the Nerve-Gear, a revolutionary headset allowing you to have full body motion and sight in the game. After 2 years in the game, a player named Kirito caught on to what was really happening, and discovered the creator of the game, Akihiko Kayaba, as a player. After the 75th boss, the Skull Reaper, Kirito faced off against him to save the remaining players. Asuna saved Kirito, but was lost (she was later recovered in a different game, but that is a different story) in her sacrifice. Anyway, he saved everyone. My story begins when the government hired me in a group of 300 players to go back into the game and see what remained. Before we went in, I met everyone in the group except for 2 people standing in the back. Had I known who they were from the beginning, our trip/setup would have been much smoother. We put on the Nerve-Gear and entered Aincrad. It was all intact just as it had been described. I was amazed at what I saw. Everything was even clearer than the real world.

We were supposed to go around floor one in the Town of Beginnings for a while, leave and report back. Each of us would be paid 1.4 million dollars for our time and trouble. I don't like our government, but if they offer you a simple job to go around in a video game for a few hours and make you a millionaire, you would take it, too. As everyone knows, a simple government job is never simple. We went around on schedule and decided to logout and tell them what they wanted to know. However, like the original players, our logout button was missing, or did they remove it like Kayaba did? No...... they wouldn't put us in here if they knew this unless we were meant to be Guinea Pigs in a government experiment.

We soon realized that our only way to escape was the same as the players from the game originally, we panicked. It took 10,000 players 2 years to beat the game, and they had not even beaten all 100, they took a shortcut by the name of Kirito. With only 300 of us, what chance do we have? We decided to break up into different guilds. We did, but those 2 mysterious players stayed alone with each-other. After a month, we were ready to take on the boss, Ilfang the Kobold Lord. We had no idea what really laid ahead of us.