Zeltran: Arc 2.1s

Ayano was dead. For real this time. She’d dreamed about dying before; everyone has. But this was no dream. She could still see the glowing red eyes of the Laughing Coffin player as he stabbed her through the heart. The words “You are dead” were clearly printed in front of her. This was it.

She closed her eyes and thought of her brother. Poor Tai. He’d never get an explanation as to why she’d died. Hell, he wouldn’t even find out until a few days from now. She’d left in the middle of the night, and he would only notice she was gone in the morning. It would take him at least a couple of days to find out where she’d gone and what had happened to her.

She opened her eyes. “Waaaaaaiit a second…” She was wearing NerveGear. Ayano didn’t know much about what the afterlife was supposed to be like, but she knew they didn’t have NerveGear there.

“Ayano! You’re back! How are you back?” Her mother shouted for the nurse, then began fumbling at the NerveGear. After a few seconds, she got it off. “Hey, sweetie. How do you feel?”

That was when the pain hit. She had a pounding headache, her limbs felt like lead, and there were needles and tubes all over the place. “Like shit.”

It was later explained to her that there was a fault in her NerveGear the whole time she was in SAO. This fault prevented the unit from killing her when she died in SAO, like it had been designed to do. It also explained the random muscle spasms she had during the first year or so in the game.

This sucked. She had come to terms with death, accepted that her life was over, and said a mental goodbye to her brother. Now she wasn’t dead, her brother was still stuck in SAO, and he thought she was dead. “I’m not going home,” she told her mother. “I’m going to get better in this hospital, and then you’re going to take all these stupid needles out of me, and then I’m going to stay in this room until he wakes up too.”

The physical therapy was the worst. She’d done some pretty ridiculously boring things in SAO, but this was worse: monotonous, repetitive, torture. And the worst part was knowing that if she didn’t do it every day with a smile on her face, her parents would make her go home.

Finally they took her off the machines and started giving her real food, not that Jell-O crap you always get in hospitals when recovering from whatever you went in there for in the first place. She slept a lot then.

Eventually, they left her alone. She spent a lot of time sitting next to her brother. Little by little, she learned his basic vitals, and was able to tell when he was in combat after a few days of studying the displays of all the little sensors meters and things they had him hooked up on. She learned how to change his IV and do all the nurse-y things that the nurses had to do.

Then the waiting began. She knew that there were only two ways out of SAO, and she prayed every day that he would wake up, that she could apologize to him for running off and getting herself killed. If he died in SAO, he would die for real, and she would never be able to tell him how sorry she was. He was either going to die or he was going to wake up and think he was dead. Hooray.

There was nothing she could do about that but wait. And wait she did.