When seventeen year-old Runner was sentenced to death for stealing a loaf of bread in MegaCity One, his dreams were literally at an end. But then he opts to sign up for the Remnants of Men, a government sanctioned search for a rumoured fresh water lake beyond a radiated wasteland. At first, it seemed like a second chance to a new life, the transformation from zero to hero. But after an encounter with a rabid gang of men suffering an acute insanity, he soon comes to understand that he is one of many discarded into the wasteland to study the cannibalistic effects of a new drug called the Sixth Sense. Olivia Patterson has had one too many doses of the Sixth Sense and owes a massive debt to a shadowy rebel and loan shark called Death-Throe. Being the daughter of the City's dictator, she knows too well that the gallows awaits any who associates with the rebel. In an attempt to free herself, she acquires an asset in the form of Runner and finds herself always at the edge, for if he survives it means freedom for both, but if he dies...

What would you do if life were a video game? Set in the year 2022, Sword Art Online (SAO) is a Mass Multiplayer Virtual Online Roleplaying Game (MMVORG), where you put on a helmet, and the surroundings around you evolve into a video game world. Taylor is a small town girl, quiet and shy, who doesn’t interact with her friends in the real life much. Her only means of escape – is Sword Art Online, where she plays as a boy character as a beta-tester. Why? Boys typically play video games more than girls, and Taylor decided that people wouldn’t play much attention to her if she were a guy. But then, things go too far on the public launch of the game. The game creator not only removes Taylor’s mask as a girl, but he also removes the “logout” option, the player’s only means of escape from the real world. Things are real. To Taylor, SAO is exactly like the real world, and she has to learn to face her fears as she makes new friends. But what she fails to realize in time, the most important thing in the game. If your HP dies in SAO, your character dies in the game, thus, ending your life in the real world. And Taylor has to figure out, just how real that is.