Zeltran: Arc 2.1r

Hideaki hated food poisoning. It was bullshit. He’d had to miss the launch of SAO because of it, and he was gonna be miles behind the other players by the time he was able to go for three hours without getting atomic diarrhoea.

“Aki, get down here! You need to see this!”

“Do I have to, Mom? I feel like shit!”

“You really need to see this, Aki!”

“Okay, coming!” He trudged downstairs to find his mother standing in front of the TV. The Headline read: “SAO a Trap: Thousands of Players Trapped in New Game”. “Woah…”

“You’re lucky you got sick, Aki, or you’d be just like the rest of them! They can’t even force quit by taking the NerveGear off, a bunch of them tried that and it killed them!”

“Yeah, I guess you’re right. That sucks.” He was starting to feel a little better about not being in the game with the rest of the players, but part of him wished he could see what they were seeing.

“I wonder why he did it. Kayaba. Why would he want to do something like this.”

“He’s probably got a God complex from creating the first VRMMO.”

“Aki, don’t say things like that!”

“Sorry.” His mother could be so sensitive sometimes. The rest of the time, she was making racist comments about the Chinese. He never understood that, but he hadn’t grown up in her generation either.

Hideaki REALLY hated food poisoning. The new game ALO had launched this morning, and where was he? In bed, with food poisoning. AGAIN. He’d only gotten it twice, and both times it was on the day a VRMMO launched. What a load of bullshit. At least there wasn’t a “death game” possibility with ALO: the Amusphere eliminated that problem.

It was almost like someone was trying to tell him not to play VRMMOs. Nah, that was stupid. Aki didn’t believe in Providence or anything like that. Sure, he believed in God, but his idea of God was just the creator of the universe, not someone who had a hand in shaping events as they happened. Not that it made a difference right now whether there was a God: he still had food poisoning, and he was still missing the launch of ALO. Next time a new VRMMO came out, he was going to skip dinner the night before it launched to avoid this problem.

It had taken him two weeks to master the flight controls in ALO, but to Aki, it was time well spent. He could get around much better than most of the veterans, and it was already coming in handy. Aki wasn’t much of a close-combat fighter. He preferred to lob firebombs at people, from range. Preferably long range, since his grenades tended to get, well, theatrically large.

Right now, though, he was trying to figure out how to make explosives that could be triggered by an unsuspecting player. Once he did, he could make land mines, booby-trapped doors, and all sorts of other IEDs. He’d taken about three seconds to decide on Salamander for his race, because DUH. Firebombs and the race aligned with fire magic? It was a no-brainer.

He’d gotten some interesting results with his last few tests; unfortunately, they’d all either gone off too late to be useful as traps or blown up in his face as soon as he’d made them. He’d probably set the record for most deaths by suicide weeks ago, and he was still blowing himself up. At least the vast majority of those times were by accident.

The times that weren’t, though… Those were spectacular. And laughably destructive.

He hadn’t been able to burn down a whole forest yet, surprisingly enough. Maybe he’d try that next.