The end of the world was right in front of us. The steel castle and the endless sea of clouds had all been erased by the bright light, leaving only the two of us behind.

Asuna and I hugged each other tightly, waiting for the final moment. It felt as if our emotions were being purified by the light. All that remained inside of me was my love for Asuna. I continued to call out her name even as everything was being unraveled and scattered.

Light filled my vision. Everything was being covered by the pure white veil and disappeared after becoming tiny particles of light.

Asuna's smile mixed in with the overflowing light that engulfed this world.

—I love you… I love you—

Her voice rang out like the sweet chiming of a bell as the last of my consciousness disappeared.

The final line that separated us disappeared and we became one.

Our souls seeped into each other; combined, then scattered.

Finally, we disappeared.

—Chapter 24, Sword Art Online Volume 1 – Aincrad

Link to Reality

Chapter I

November 7th 2024

Black. For a single moment, everything was black.

Is it over yet? Am I…?

Before Kirito could finish the question currently occupying his mind, darkness around him got swapped with various arrays of color and before he could come to terms with what was happening, the space around him changed once again.

Looking around, he found himself in what might be called a dome, or rather a simple circular room filled with monitors from the top to the bottom, separated by something long and orange. He didn't notice it at first, but the floating large white letters that displayed «Welcome to ALfheim Online!» had been hovering directly in front of him and he could only wonder how he could have missed them until now.

"Eeeeh?"

He automatically took a step backwards as a virtual keyboard materialized before him.

"First enter your gender and character name," said a clear, obviously fabricated voice.

Kirito looked down at the keyboard, but before he was given a chance to react, let alone type anything, the keyboard disappeared. Just before it did, Kirito could swear that he'd seen both his name and gender already chosen. He hardly would have bothered to change it, but some sort of a warning or a button to confirm it on his part would have been appreciated.

Not a second after the keyboard disappeared, several different, three-dimensional, translucent, human-shaped images appeared.

"Now select your race. Please select one of the nine races."

Deciding to push his confusion in the back of his mind for now, Kirito took a good look at each of the offered figures, not one of them quite to his liking. The clothes were unlike anything he'd seen offered in SAO to this day and for some reason, all of the nine proffered characters seemed to have wings.

Exhaling, he chose the image that wore both dark clothes and had grey wings, wondering if this was the Afterlife. He'd heard stories before, about people believing that what comes after death changes from one person to another, perhaps according to their expectations. Somehow, Kirito didn't find it in him to feel surprised that his afterlife would be based upon a VRMMORPG.

"Your character appearance will be decided at random. You will now be transported to the Spriggan territory. Good luck."

He thought about thanking the virtual voice for the last two words as the world around him faded to white on the off-chance this might be a continuation to SAO rather than the afterlife, but would there really be any point?

Together with Asuna, he'd watch Aincrad fall apart until they'd both disappeared along with it, or so he'd thought. For some reason he'd believed that he'd feel several seconds of awful headache while the NerveGear fried his brain and after that everything would be over, but as he lost every sense of the ground and his body plummeted down head-first he realized that wasn't the case.

In the distance he could see something resembling a town. The lights flickered in the darkness of the sky, a single castle standing out as the brightest part of the city.

Kirito wondered how the bright atmosphere had suddenly changed to that of a dark night. Against the rising sensation of panic and excitement, he tried to take some control of his fall, though it proved useless as his body continued heading down in a straight line no matter what he tried to do. As he got much closer to the ground, Kirito realized that if he didn't find a way to stop, he was going to crash down hard and thinking about the height he started falling down from, it was going to cut his HP in roughly half and that was if he was lucky.

As he came to that realization, every nerve in his body felt as though it was on fire. He started screaming and frantically waving his arms around in order to, if nothing else, change his own position.

He didn't know what was going to happen if he ended up colliding with the ground full force, but certainly it was nothing good. After everything he had been through, allowing himself to lose against something so simple like a free fall seemed both stupid and ironic.

At that moment he felt as though he'd grabbed onto something with his left hand. There was an itchy sensation at his back which he chose to ignore in favor of looking down at the ground that was getting much closer, a hundred—no, seventy meters. His hand moved sharply in the right and, much to his surprise, so did his body. Kirito didn't have the time to wonder about it as he realized a moment too late that he was going to crash straight into one of the pillars surrounding the castle.

"WAAAAAAH—oof!"

Kirito wasn't about to lie and say that the impact hurt, but the force was still enough to momentarily daze him. When his back crashed against the ground several seconds later, he could pretty much add 'seeing stars' onto the list of his accumulated experiences.

With a moan, Kirito pushed himself into a standing position and looked around. Unlike what he'd expected, the town he'd fell in was filled with people. They were either walking, running or talking to each other, only several of them having noticed Kirito's embarrassing landing judging by the way they were looking at him. Kirito smiled awkwardly and scratched the back of his head and they looked away, some in amusement, some as though annoyed. What was the same about them all were the dark shades of clothing they wore, either brown, dark grey or black.

Kirito looked down at his own clothes, hoping against hope that he was still in his chosen outfit in the SAO, but no such luck. His trousers were of dark grey shade and so were the shoes, while his shirt was a plain, dark-brown one with none of the refined SAO style. If nothing else, he could feel a sheath on his back, but as he unsheathed the sword, he felt his chest tightening at the sight of a plain beginner's one-handed sword. It wasn't Elucidator. It was not the sword that had been his faithful companion for a long time.

He tried to remember what happened to his sword, but the last thing he remembered clearly before ending up on that sky platform with Asuna was his other sword, the Dark Repulsor made by Lizbeth, being destroyed due to his critical mistake while fighting Kayaba. And Elucidator… oh, right. He'd lost it just a few moments later.

Kirito's fists tightened.

If he is here, that means that Kayaba had either made a fool of both him and Asuna by making them think they'd actually won, or something… something else happened. Something he didn't know yet.

Afterlife in the form of VRMMO? What a foolish idea.

A surge of rage passed through him, but he forced the urge to scream Kayaba's name to go away.

If he was here, that meant Asuna had to be here as well. They'd disappeared together. The only thing that could have separated them was either true death or logging out, but none of those things had happened. The only other explanation he could think of was that he'd logged into another VRMMO, but for some reason had lost memories of everything that happened after the end of SAO.

Or… or not. It could be—no. He dismissed the idea without finishing it. It wasn't possible. Creating a game like SAO took a long, long time and many resources and he'd personally witnessed it all getting deleted. The possibility of Kayaba transporting him into another game as an act of revenge for losing was not possible either way he looked at it. Even if somehow he'd managed to do it, there was a great inconsistency about the very idea – one that Kirito was certain not many would accept.

He'd understood that much while fighting him. Kayaba wouldn't go against his own rules. He wouldn't go out of his way to extract revenge on somebody. Not to mention… remembering that melancholic look on his face while he watched Aincrad fall apart, Kayaba showed no shred of emotion. He was honest, however. When he'd congratulated Kirito and Asuna, he'd been honest about it, or at least Kirito wanted to think that way.

However, that still didn't answer any of his questions. Where was he? Where is Asuna? He couldn't be sure unless he approached them, but the humans around him seemed to be players, rather than NPCs. As many of them as there were, he didn't want to believe all of them were NPCs.

So, what should I go? I can't just ask go and ask somebody if this—that's it!

Inwardly shouting at himself for how foolish and silly he was being, Kirito brought his middle and index fingers of his right hand together and pulled down. He mentally berated himself for not thinking of it right away. No matter what, the status window should be able to give him all the information he needed. The date, the time, the name of the game if he was lucky… everything.

Unfortunately, nothing happened.

He repeated the motion twice, thrice, but nothing happened.

He started breaking out in cold sweat, repeating the motion several more times in a rush before the panic really set in and he tried with both hands.

The sound and light effect that came a moment later from where he'd used his left hand and his shoulders sagged in relief and his breathing got steadier.

"It's there, it's there," he murmured before scrolling through it.

His relief was short lived. In contrary to his expectations, he found the «log out» button at the bottom of it and that unnerved him for several other reasons. For one, would the NerveGear fry his brain if he tried to log out? He had no way of knowing, not after having every single one of his expectations blown to pieces in the past five minutes. He might go on hoping for the best, but did he have it in himself to risk it?

He shut his eyes tightly as he lightly touched the button and heard a sound effect of another window opening. He opened his eyes slowly, hesitantly, gulping down at the question «Do you wish to log out?» and the two options, «Yes» and «No», that appeared.

YES!

He screamed on the inside even as his finger lingered millimeters away from the touchscreen window.

Could he really do it? Could he really log out and go back to living in reality?

His hands were shaking as he debated on the inside.

Could it really be this easy?

Is it… is it finally over?

He shut his eyes again as he touched the «Yes» button. When after a few seconds nothing happened, he gathered the courage to sneak a look. Before him there was a window displaying a note: «ERROR: System can't detect the console! Try again later!»

What had he been thinking? Of course it wouldn't be that easy.

Kirito could only sigh as he closed the window and started browsing the rest of the menu. He paused when he reached the Items, looking through a long list of question marks and other nonessential signs that accounted for nothing. His inventory was shared with Asuna and vice versa so it explained why the list was so long, but it explained nothing else. He gritted his teeth before closing the status menu entirely. It was clearly going to be of no help.

What should I do? Asuna…

Kirito shook his head before opening the status menu again. If nothing else, he needed to get an inn for the night. He sighed as the amount of money he had was the same as back in SAO. Then he caught sight of both his HP bar and level.

"W-what?"

The space where his level should have been listed was deprived of anything, while his HP bar was deep in the red with roughly several points remaining.

"Impossible. This much from just a fall?"

He'd once lost roughly half of HP when he'd fallen into a dragon's nest with Liz, but the heights had to be ten times to the height of the tower.

Kirito shuddered. His HP, the last he remembered, was outrageously high even by his own standards. He'd been going for it, yeah, trying to raise it as high as possible to reduce his chances of losing to the death game, but here… here it seemed to be at a beginner's level, along with another bar he hadn't noticed before.

"Mana points…?"

Scrolling through the remaining of his status window, he found that every remaining skill slot was still the same as it had been in the SAO – all except for one. Where his dual wielding skill should have been was a line of question marks replacing both the name and the status itself. Muscles on Kirito's face tightened and he suddenly felt as though there was a part of him missing. He'd noticed it before, when he realized Asuna wasn't with him in this strange place, but now it seemed to increase.

He was alone.

The promise he'd made to Asuna weighed heavily on his mind.

I'll protect you – that's what he said. And he'd failed, in more ways than one. Granted, she was fine in the end, alive, the last he'd seen her, but he didn't want to let something like that happen again. Never again. Now, though, here he was, alone in a strange world with no Asuna in sight.

Forever together – that's what she said. In his heart, he'd promised he'd make it that way, yet not ten minutes later, she was gone.

I'll find you – that's what he decided. Because no matter what the reason behind his inability to log out now was, he refused to let that stop him from reaching Asuna. System failed to stop her from saving him. He'll be damned if he let a system stop him from finding her.

That settled, he still needed a plan and any information he could possibly gather about what sort of a virtual world this was. Attracting attention was hardly going to be of help and playing solo now, when he still knew absolutely nothing, was going to be difficult. Posing as a newbie might get him in trouble, but he was confident he could take care of himself.

An outline of a plan steadily forming in his mind, Kirito headed in a random direction, deciding to take a room in the first inn he found. He needed the time to think and standing in the middle of a city wasn't going to be of much help.

Author's Note: Yes. As you can see, it is another one of the 'Kirito ends up in ALO right after SAO' stories. So far I've seen two stories with similar premise and I've gotta say I'm a bit disappointed. So yes, I decided to play my own version of ALfheim AU story premise. It was a promising arc, really, but it could have been handled better. Sugou as a bad guy had much more potential, for one.

Anyway, I'm not going to rant. I'm a big SAO LN fan and I feel both the light novels and anime had told a really good story. I know this can't measure up to the original, but here I am, trying either way. Do me a favor, readers, if you spot any grammar or spelling mistakes, tell me. I try, but some things might still slip through.

P. S. Don't kill me for abbreviations. I just can't get myself to type hit points instead of HP and the like.

Reviews are appreciated. Credits for the image go to the amazing MangoTiango from deviantart!