Chapter 18 - Promise

                                    

                                          



Aincrad could be beautiful at times.
Okay, that may sound weird after how many people died in the Death Game, but I couldn't help it. I am sorry that so many people died, only there wasn't anything I could do about that now. More people were eventually going to die as each day passed, but that didn't stop some people from enjoying the game as it was, myself included.
Besides, admiring the scenery was the only thing I could do when I had to wait for my friends to arrive. It wasn't like I had my phone from the real world to keep me busy. The newspaper was lousy most of the time, and sorting through my inventory happened more than enough times that I was just looking through it at this point. It was boring. Boredom could kill... don't fact-check me on that, though. I may be wrong.
People-watching was somewhat interesting, though.
Okay, saying that in my head sounded just as creepy as it does sound. What I meant was that everybody who wasn't an NPC since they, Non Playable Characters, were not programmed to go a certain way, do a certain thing, or say certain things. That uncertainty made things feel alive. And in a world as dull as this one at times because of the nature of it, those moments were extra special because they showed that reality was not always as cruel as it seemed. Just... ignore the strange stares from players when they notice you watching them.
Nobody noticed me enough to have more than a handful of them, though. What did that say about me as a person?
It wasn't like I wanted to be in the spotlight, stand on a podium and shout my name to the world, but doing something like that seemed so... beyond me. It wasn't something I imagined myself doing ever in a million years, not in a billion lifetimes. Maybe that made me strange. But if not everybody was a little strange, then what else could keep life exciting? Trauma? Bad experiences? Longing moments when people say, "I wish," and become envious of other people's lives? No way. Nobody would be willing to give up that information.
I certainly wouldn't...
My life wasn't that interesting before SAO, anyway. I ran away from home and grew up on the streets, working one job to the next until I could stand on my own two feet and financially support myself. It wasn't easy. Getting a Nervegear and SAO was my reward, my selfish reward that trapped me since that fateful day seemingly so long ago. After that happened, I thought just maybe my luck was so horrible that I stood no chance to begin with.
It wasn't just my luck either. My skills in the game were so bad that my friends often teased me about being the "weakest player" in the game. I knew they were joking, but each time they said it, it felt more true because no matter how hard I tried to get stronger, I could never do it. My level went up, and my numerical values were higher than the low-level players, but I had a feeling even a newbie could outplay me. The reality was crushing, soul-crushing.
I didn't know what else I could do anyway. How could a player get stronger? How could a weakling like me get stronger when I'm already doing what should make me stronger? It was like a game bug that messed with my stats, specifically, replacing the values with a negative number instead of what is in my menu. The game system would have fixed it, though. So it wasn't a game bug.
The game wasn't that cruel, right? To not fix a bug like this?
It wasn't like the game didn't fix bugs. There were stories about around the time the game first started, bugs were rare but quickly fixed by the system. The Cardinal System, if I recall. One time, a player revealed they had an infinite ore drop caused by some glitch. They managed to make a full set of armour before the game fixed the bug, but the ore was still theirs. It was a strange bug nobody in their right mind would walk away from.