They parted ways after Klein decided to help his real life friends.Īlmost a month into the game, 2,000 players had died. Kirito, unable to bear the heavy burden of Klein and his friends' lives, wordlessly disagreed. Klein then asked Kirito whether they could take his friends along. Kirito, realizing that there would be shortage of monsters near the «Town of Beginnings», urged Klein to leave the city with him. The Game Master Kayaba Akihiko informed them that the only way to log out was by clearing all one hundred floors of the floating castle of «Aincrad», and that death in-game spelled death in real life. Without warning, the two were both teleported to the central plaza of the « Town of Beginnings». Failing to find the logout button, Kirito and Klein discussed the implications of the "unable to logout bug". After Klein successfully defeated a « Frenzy Boar», he tried to log out because he ordered pizza. Klein asked for Kirito's guidance after presuming that the latter was among the one thousand participants of the «Sword Art Online Closed Beta». After defeating the monster with his four-hit Sword Skill, Horizontal Square, he recollected what occurred two years ago. In the 74th Floor Labyrinth, Kirito had a battle with a Level 82 « Lizardman Lord». The name of the castle was « Aincrad», a world of battles with swords that continued floating and had engulfed approximately six thousand people. The current front line is the 74th Floor. With these conditions, the huge castle had been steadily conquered for two years. However, once someone made a breakthrough and arrived at a city of the upper floor, the « Teleport Gates» there and of every cities in the lower floors would be connected making it possible for anyone to move freely through these levels. Only one stairway linked each floor to another, and the stairways existed in dungeons where large numbers of monsters roamed so discovering and getting through was no easy matter. Inside, there were a couple of large cities along with countless small scale towns and villages, forests and plains, and even lakes. It was impossible to even guess how much data it consisted of.
Above, there were 100 floors stacking straight upwards its sheer size was unbelievable. It took a various group of craftsmen one month to survey the place the diameter of the base floor was about 10 kilometers, large enough to fit the entirety of Setagaya-ku within. Two years after the start of the death game, out of the original ten thousand players at the start, less than seven thousand remain with twenty-five floors left to clear.Ī huge castle made of stone and steel floating in an endless sky. Death in-game means death in the real world, due to the NerveGear, a console that simulates the in-game character controls by redirecting brain signals. The only way for them to escape is by clearing all the floors of Aincrad, the floating castle that is the setting for the game, and defeating the final boss. A solo player named Kirito, who had the luck-of-the-draw to once play the beta version of the first VRMMORPG, « Sword Art Online» (SAO), was among the 10,000 players who were trapped inside of the game during the first day of its official service.