1,647Disclaimer: I don't own Sword Art Online or any of its characters. They are all owned by A-1 Pictures, Aniplex USA, and Reki Kawahara.
Discord: A3dTszc
(See A/N at the top of Chapter 1 for context)
A week ago…
YDH stumbled into the inn, crying of laughter.
"Well, well, well, if it isn't the big daddy himself," Timely said as he watched the other player enter. "What's got you so worked up?"
YDH turned to face Timely but couldn't get any words out. He continued laughing, hunched over with tears in his eyes.
Timely frowned, annoyed that he was going to have to wait for the other player to calm down before he could get any answers.
Five minutes later…
"What the hell did you just say?" Timely asked, shocked at what he just heard.
"I said I'm a fucking god to you right now," YDH replied, completely serious. He was vibrating with satisfaction.
"...And how do you figure that?"
"No man has ever fucked over their enemy harder than I have here today. Argo the rat has finally been shown her proper place in the world."
"So you finally got her back?"
"I fucking nailed her ass. Finally. Paid her back with interest for all her past crimes."
"Is that so? That's good to hear. So how exactly did you do it?"
"Oh, let me tell you a fucking tale…"
"Okay…so how exactly was that a victory?" Timely asked, horrified after hearing the full story.
"I got her friend thrown in jail. Weren't you listening?"
"I understand that. You threw her friend in jail. Not her."
"Trust me, this is a way better outcome. Argo was absolutely furious. She got exactly what she deserved. She'd be way less pissed off if she had been thrown in there herself. This was a complete success. Finally, some fucking justice was delivered in this world."
"Right," Timely sarcastically 'agreed'. "Some justice. That makes perfect sense right up to the point that Argo's friend was thrown in jail instead of her."
"That bitch deserved it too, Timely. She attacked me in a safezone."
"Because you were bullying Argo right in front of her."
"Yeah, but that bitch escalated it."
"Okay…but you aren't exactly blameless here. You definitely instigated that whole situation."
"Oh get over yourself. Are you seriously trying to take their side? You were the one paying me to do this."
"Yes. I paid you to annoy Argo. Not to fucking ruin her life by dragging her friends and other innocent people into this."
"She definitely wasn't innocent though."
"Argo is going to kill you. You understand that, right?"
"Oh, I hope she tries. Maybe I can get her thrown in there too next time. I heard her friend could use some company."
"That wasn't hyperbole," Timely pressed. "There's a pretty significant chance that the next time you step out of a safe zone, you'll find a claw in your back."
Argo was fiercely loyal to those she considered friends and Timely knew it.
"That's the best part about this, though. She won't get that opportunity. I'm not about to leave the safezone. She'll spend the rest of her time in this game dealing with my presence―seeing me walk past her on the streets with full knowledge that she'll never be able to get her revenge. It's the ultimate victory."
"What do you mean you'll never leave the safezone? You can't stay in here forever."
"Why not? That's the best strategy to survive."
"How is that the best strategy to survive?"
"There are already enough players on the front lines trying to beat the game. I'll wait in the safe zone where I can't be killed until those players either win or someone in the real world figures out how to break us out of these NerveGears. They don't need my help."
"That's…"
"..."
"..."
"...Do you disagree?" YDH asked.
"No…I guess I don't."
It was a completely selfish strategy though if you asked him.
"Besides, Argo won't have time to come after me. She'll be too busy going after you."
"Me?"
"You hired me after all."
"Oh yeah."
For a minute there he almost forgot about that particular detail.
Fuck.
"So you should worry about yourself instead of me."
"Why the hell did you have to take things so far?" Timely complained. "You went completely above and beyond the call of duty here. I'm not paying you enough to justify what you did."
YDH laughed.
"You think I did any of this because you paid me? Buddy, I would have paid you to let me do this job."
"What? Why?" Timely asked with widened eyes.
"Argo's an asshole," YDH replied. "I fucking hate that bitch. The only reason I even took you up on your job offer was that I knew it'd piss her off even more."
"I don't understand."
"Then allow me to explain. I've been trying to bring her down since the beta. And with all of my experience with Argo so far, I've come to understand how she operates. I know exactly what makes her tick and what pisses her off.
"She absolutely fucking hates irrationality. When she originally heard about you paying me to annoy her, she assumed that the money is why I was doing it. So she offered to pay me even more money to get me to stop. To price you out.
"That would be a sensible course of action on her part, right? And it'd make sense for me to take her up on that offer, right? Since it was free money? It was an increase in salary for way less work, after all.
"So when I dug in my heels and stubbornly refused, she just couldn't figure out why and her brain practically had a meltdown. Because here was this person who was barely being paid anything and yet, for some reason, they stubbornly held onto their terribly paying job, perpetuating a conflict that they weren't even involved in. That's not what a rational person does, and so it frustrated the hell out of her when I did it. To her, it seemed like I was going way out of my way and going against my own best interests just to barely inconvenience her at random times throughout the day and it made no sense in her mind.
"That's right down the checklist of all her pet peeves. It was glorious. All this time she thought that this was a conflict between you and her and couldn't even imagine that I've been eagerly waiting for this day myself.
"She didn't remember what she did to me. She didn't even recognize me when we had our fateful reunion. And that's why I took you up on your offer. I don't need the pitiful amount of cor you've given me. To complete my revenge, I needed to build a narrative to destroy Argo's mind―to make her think she was going up against an irrational actor that couldn't be predicted. Because that's what would piss her off the most.
"And it worked like a fucking charm," YDH finished.
"..."
"..."
"...What the hell did she do to you, kill your entire family with an axe?" Timely asked, mystified that anyone would go so far.
"Tch. It doesn't matter. Maybe I'll tell you about it someday. Maybe not."
"I still don't understand."
"Which part?"
"It doesn't make sense. There's no way you just randomly found Argo when you did. Based on your story, you struck at the absolute perfect time, and I refuse to believe that that was just a coincidence."
"Oh come on, don't be stupid, Timely. Argo isn't hard to find. She's an info dealer. She makes it her business to be easily found. You could pick out any random passerby on the street and they'll have a general idea where she is."
"But you didn't just have a general idea where she was going to be. You knew exactly when and where she was going to be, didn't you? There's no way you just randomly found her when you did, exactly when she was most vulnerable."
"I didn't need to find out where she was. She told everyone where she'd be."
"What do you mean?"
"She set up a meeting to talk about that Orange freak, remember? She told everyone exactly when and where it was going to be. And since there's only one way to get there, I knew the exact route she was going to take. She also has a habit of showing up at meetings right as they are about to start and doesn't try to get there early. I guess she probably thinks it's more dramatic being the last one to show up to something and thinks it makes her look cool. Who knows with Argo. But anyway, with that info, it was easy to come up with an estimate for her travel time and to get a really good idea about exactly when and where she was going to be. All I had to do was show up on that route and wait for her."
"Okay…I guess that explains it, but how did you know your plan was going to work? All you did was give a couple of half-assed insults and then walk away. How did you know that everything was going to blow up like that?"
"I didn't know per se. I did have a pretty good feeling about it though. That was the first time I saw her with a friend by her side. On top of that, she was busy and had important shit to do. That meant that if I did something to her, she wouldn't be able to retaliate and she'd get extra pissed off.
"All this time, I've been waiting for a moment like that. The perfect moment when she was rushed, unprepared, and vulnerable, maximizing the effect of my trolling.
"Should have seen that friend of hers, too. She had the most self-righteous stride I've ever seen. It was the perfect opportunity."
"How does one have a self-righteous stride?"
"You just had to see it. She just had that air about her that said she was one of those do-gooders that believes they can do no wrong and that would always stand up for those who get picked on."
"You're making that up. There's no way you can determine how self-righteous someone is based on their gait and the way that they walk."
"And yet, that's exactly what I did. And I was spot on, too. Not only was she disgustingly naive and idealistic, but she was also a total moron and leaped right into the fray without even thinking about the anti-harassment code.
"It was perfect. As soon as I recognized what type of girl Argo's friend was, I immediately changed my plan on the fly. Originally, I was just going to follow Argo around and pester her the entire way to the meeting and then try to sabotage it when it started. But once I saw that other girl there too, I took a gamble. Dropped a few well-placed insults, turned around, and prepared to leave, knowing full well that a person like that wouldn't stand for their friend getting disrespected right in front of her in public like that. I didn't expect her to completely overreact the way she did, but even if she hadn't, I had other plans ready.
"I'm so glad it happened the way it did though. Argo is absolutely ruined now. You should have seen her. I had planned on playing the long game with her, slowly breaking her down over several weeks with strategically timed attacks right when she had her hands full with something until she finally snapped. But this was a way better outcome.
"I guess with the sheer number of times I've sought her out these past few weeks, it was only a matter of time before I finally got lucky and something worked."
"..."
"..."
"You're a dick."
"Only to those that deserve it."
"That's a complete lie. Are you still going to bother her?"
"Don't need to. To complete my revenge, all I gotta do now is live my best life while Argo seethes in rage. I'll probably even start treating her nice now and act like nothing happened. You know, just to really gaslight her and rub my victory in her face. I'll treat her with nothing but kindness while she froths at the mouth and that'll make it seem to everyone else that she was the asshole the whole time."
"I'm pretty sure you're going to hell for this."
"Nah, they both got what was coming to them."
"Do you remember what her name was?"
"Who? Argo?"
"No. Her friend. The completely innocent one you threw in jail."
"Oh her? Yeah I remember. I think her name was Asswipe or something."
"You don't remember at all do you?"
"Wait. No, no, I remember now."
"What is it then?"
"Vivian. Her name was Vivian."
"Vivian?"
"Yeah."
"You're sure?"
That was quite the jump. Asswipe and Vivan weren't even close to similar names.
He was beginning to suspect that YDH wasn't the most trustworthy of characters.
"A hundred percent. Why do you want to know?"
"Do you care?"
"Not even slightly."
"I won't waste my time explaining then. So what are you going to do now?"
"Well, since I got her back, we're even now and so I guess my work here is done. I'm going home. See ya later."
YDH spun around and left the room.
Timely watched him go.
He leaned back in his chair and stared up at the ceiling, contemplating everything that had happened and the absolute shitstorm that was about to hit once Argo came for him.
And she would come. Like an action movie superhero.
He quickly came to the conclusion that he needed to disappear for a while. This whole situation had blown up in his face and now Argo was, without question, going to go on a rampage.
'A fishing trip sounds nice. A nice and long fishing trip.'
He'd find somewhere secluded and go off grid until this whole situation blew over.
It's not like he was strapped for cash now or anything. He could afford to stop working for a couple of months.
It kind of sucked that he was going to be ditching that ovule merchant he had been working with, though. He had made so much money off of the contract they had made together.
But this was probably for the best. That player had bought a huge amount of highly suspicious weapons and equipment in secret from him just a few days ago and now, a highly skilled and well-armed orange player had stopped the raid on the boss single-handedly.
While those two events might not actually be connected, there was no denying that if other players knew about that particular weapons sale, a ton of them would be super curious about it and would investigate.
That player had bought enough weapons in that sale to create a small army, after all. Questions would be asked if that ever came to light, and an investigation would be launched.
If Argo ever found out about it, she'd have yet another reason to be all over his ass.
And that just wouldn't do.
No, he had to leave.
Now.
With his plan in place, he immediately started packing.
Akihiko Kayaba was about ready to rip his own hair out.
Nothing had gone the way he wanted it to. His game wasn't working properly, the players were acting irrationally, and the master plan he had worked on for all these years was now in jeopardy.
He tried to be as fair as possible at the start of the game. The very moment he launched it, he immediately warned every news outlet in the country about what had happened to the players of Sword Art Online and inundated all the popular social media websites with official messages explaining what would happen if anyone tried to take the NerveGears off or otherwise interfere with them.
The people had been informed. He had done his due diligence. And yet, despite that, 213 players had died due to people not listening to him and by messing with the headsets anyway, thinking that they knew better.
It was beyond frustrating.
He wanted his game to be as fair as possible so that every single player would be given the same chance of survival and he had taken every measure he could to make sure it would happen.
He had even open sourced the schematics of his NerveGear headsets beforehand and gave those designs to the public specifically so that they could be studied and so that everyone would realize the danger they posed. That way, nobody would mess with them when the time came.
Despite that, hundreds of utterly braindead morons had messed with them anyway, killing a whole bunch of players before they even learned the true nature of the game they were playing. They had missed out on his grand plan through no fault of their own, and that was completely unfair to them.
He had underestimated human stupidity and that was his mistake.
And now the press had the audacity to blame him for those deaths as though he had done something wrong here.
It was ridiculous.
If someone intentionally bashed their skull into a concrete wall and killed themselves in the process, was it the wall manufacturer's fault that that person died?
No.
It was that idiot's fault.
It was the same situation here. Those deaths were 100% the fault of those morons that tried to take other people's headsets off. They lacked common sense and refused to listen to his warnings.
It was very frustrating. Right off the bat, his game's glorious launch had been sullied by the unfair deaths of a bunch of players and he absolutely hated that. He hated being unfair.
But…it had only been around 200 players―a little over 2% of the total population. That wasn't enough of a loss to derail his plans and he could have moved on from it relatively easily.
At least, he could have moved on from it if another 10% of the playerbase hadn't then proceeded to leap off the side of the world and kill themselves immediately afterwards, thinking it would let them log out.
He would admit, seeing that had tested his patience.
What part of his warnings had not been understood?
He had been absolutely crystal clear to the entire playerbase on the first day of the game, what the rules of this world were and what would happen if they died. He could not have been more clear. He had pounded that point into everyone's skulls multiple times and had even shown news reports from the outside world on what had happened to players that died and that he was telling the truth.
And yet, despite that, once again, human stupidity had taken hold and they had all leaped off the side of the world to their deaths in a pointless attempt to logout, thinking they knew better, like a bunch of lemmings.
Two thousand players in total had died in the opening month of the game, and no progress had been made to show for it. Not even his most pessimistic projections had predicted that. The players were doing far worse than he had anticipated and it was entirely their fault for being a bunch of stubborn, ignorant simpletons, clumsily stumbling over themselves and getting themselves killed in the stupidest of ways.
After all of this happened, he could admit to getting a little angry. Angry enough to take the metaphorical gloves off, even. If the players were going to act like this then he was going to stop being nice.
All throughout this time, his Mental Health Counseling Program: Yui-MHCP001, had practically been frothing at the mouth, trying to perform its function by helping the despairing players that were dying en masse.
He shut that down hard.
Why did he shut it down?
Because fuck those players. If they were going to act like this, ignore all his warnings and get themselves killed in a variety of stupid and easily avoidable ways, then he was done giving them handouts. They would suffer the consequences of their own actions until they learned.
Fuck their mental health.
So he let them struggle on their own for a while and largely stopped paying attention to them while he focused on other, more important things.
He had to stop paying attention to them for the sake of his own sanity. At least for a little while.
Unfortunately however, his troubles would not stop there. As it turned out, the players' collective stupidity was not his only source of…displeasure.
On the opening day of SAO, he had wanted nothing more than to log into his own account and start playing the game alongside the trapped players. That was his dream, after all. But he had known how unrealistic that was before launch. As an experienced game developer, he knew that no game had ever been created completely bug free on launch. He had known that there would be issues that would need to be resolved, and since he was the only person working on the game and maintaining it now, the responsibility for fixing all those bugs fell squarely on him.
He didn't think that there would be too many, though, as all of the major ones had been fixed during the beta test. That had been the whole point of it after all―to fix as many issues as possible so they wouldn't appear in the main game.
He had figured that he'd get to start playing the game himself after no more than a couple of days at the very most of bug fixing.
This could not have been further from the truth.
He had never imagined that things would go this badly.
He had seriously underestimated just how difficult it would be to manage a game this large all on his own.
Before his hostile takeover of the game, he had thousands of employees working under him, and they had been responsible for doing all the tedious work required to maintain SAO and all of its systems.
He didn't have that now. He was completely on his own.
But he had prepared himself for this in advance and he had put a plan in place.
His secret weapon was AI.
Before his takeover, while his employees had been working away, maintaining the source code, releasing updates, and doing all of the general maintenance tasks required to keep Sword Art Online functioning, a veritable army of AI systems had been observing them in secret and learning how to perform those tasks themselves.
The idea behind this scheme was that, once he launched his master plan, he wouldn't have to do any of that work himself. His AI systems would handle all of the maintenance. And then he would be free to create his own character and join the players on their quest to complete the game without any issues.
It was an ingenious plan if he did say so himself, and it should have worked. He had rigorously tested all of his AI systems in advance, and ever since he finished training them up, they had never failed to complete a task assigned to them.
…But now that he had so many of these systems operating in the world, serious issues that he had missed in testing began to reveal themselves.
SAO now functioned on a hierarchy of AI systems with no human intervention―except for when things went wrong, of course, in which case he alone would have to intervene. But other than that, there was no other human in the chain anymore.
At the top of the hierarchy, there was the Cardinal System, and it was responsible for pretty much everything. It had unlimited power and full administrator access to all of SAO's systems and assets.
Its primary function, however, was the creation of other subordinate AI systems that it would delegate tasks to. There was an AI for quest development, one that procedurally generated dungeons and other landscapes, one that created new skills, one that created new items, one that created new bosses and other enemies, one that fixed bugs and glitches, and there were hundreds more AI systems that were all responsible for their own domain and that were all working under the direction of the Cardinal System.
So there was a super-AI at the top―Cardinal―and thousands of nested, lesser, specialized AIs as you went further and further down the hierarchy and these systems all interacted with each other in a complicated, intricate mess.
This had been his solution to the massive loss in manpower upon his takeover of the game.
The problem, however, was that he hadn't had a chance to fully test this scheme out in the real world before the game's launch. Each AI system had been tested individually, but not in this complicated layout where multiple systems were all working together in a hierarchy and where AI's were taking orders from other AI's.
He would have tested this in advance if he could have, but there had been no way to do that in secret. Pretty much every single employee at Argus would have questioned what he was up to if he suddenly mobilized all of SAO's computing power for a bunch of secret AI experiments. They would have asked questions and he wouldn't have been able to ignore them without rousing some serious suspicions.
Running all of these AI systems in a hierarchy like this simply took up too much computing power to go unnoticed, and there wasn't a good excuse he could have used to justify it.
What could he have said? That he was trying to figure out how to use the game's AI to automate everyone's job so that he didn't need any employees anymore? That's not something you should be telling your workforce.
He had no choice but to test each piece individually instead, because only then would his experiments be small enough in scale to conceal. So he had unfortunately needed to implement his plan without fully testing it beforehand, and because of that, he had unintentionally left an opening for a pretty big issue to reveal itself―one that would cause him a near-endless amount of grief.
The Alignment problem. That's what he called it, anyway.
Essentially, all of his AI systems could perform their assigned tasks flawlessly, but they didn't always take into account the intent behind their given instructions.
Here was an example to illustrate the issue:
If you told a human to perform a task, something like: go to the store to pick up some groceries and then come back as quickly as possible, the human would automatically assume a bunch of additional information not conveyed in that instruction, but that was extremely important nonetheless.
Common sense stuff. And they would make those additional assumptions because they would understand the intent behind what you were asking them to do.
The human would assume that you wouldn't want them to break the law in the process for example. In all likelihood, the human would interpret their instructions as the following:
Go to their car, start it up, follow all the driving rules to make their way to their destination, buy the groceries, and then come back. They would perform the task as quickly as they could but they would know to prioritize following the law and driving safely above that, even though that wasn't specified originally.
An AI on the other hand, wouldn't necessarily know to do this.
In an attempt to complete that same task as quickly as possible, an AI might interpret that same instruction as the following:
Get into a main battle tank, run over or open fire on anyone between themselves and the store, steal the groceries they need, and then come back the same way, probably ending up in some sort of spectacular firefight with the police in the process.
And to top it all off, the AI would calculate that its method was better than the human's because it was faster. That's what was asked of it originally, after all. To go as quickly as possible. It didn't care about any of that other stuff that the human did to avoid getting into trouble.
It would not understand the words that weren't said in the original instruction. It wouldn't understand the intent behind it. It would just try to go fast.
Now, this problem wasn't entirely unexpected. He had known all about this potential issue in advance and had taken great care to mitigate it as much as possible.
But there was no way to do that perfectly. You could only train an AI system for a finite period of time and when you were done, you basically just had to hope that all of these crazy and psychotic edge cases were covered during that training time and that the system would know what to do in each of those cases if they ever came up.
That didn't always happen though. Sometimes, weird gaps in knowledge would appear in his AI systems and those gaps would just sit there, dormant, until the exact right circumstances manifested themselves. Only then would the AI start doing things it wasn't supposed to do and stir up trouble. But at that point, it would be too late and real consequences might happen before he could stop them.
And when you had so many AI systems interconnected like this, the probability of an issue like this occurring was a lot higher than he would have liked.
The only other thing you could do to prevent an AI from falling into one of these edge cases and acting erratically is by programming in hard limits and forcing it to be constrained by them.
In his 'go get groceries' example, he could program in hard rules in advance saying that the AI had to use an ordinary vehicle to get to the store, that it could not go faster than a certain speed, that it had to use money to buy the groceries, that it could not damage the vehicle it was driving, etcetera, etcetera.
This wouldn't change the underlying AI system, it would just prevent it from doing any of the most obvious psychotic things it might have otherwise tried to do.
This approach wasn't perfect either, though. The problem was that you couldn't anticipate every edge case in advance. The AI might still find some clever workaround to those constraints and find some new way to achieve the task it was given in a way that would cause unintended side effects.
And that was the problem he kept running into. Despite all of his safeguards and the extensive training each of his systems had gone through, they kept finding ways to follow the instructions they were given in a way that he would absolutely hate, because it would cause other problems in the process.
A perfect example of this was the mess he just finished cleaning up around the game's prison system.
It had been a perfect storm and a brilliant case study showcasing this exact issue. It was all caused by an extremely intelligent, extremely motivated AI that effectively had no morality and didn't care at all about collateral damage or unintended side effects, and one that was shrewd enough to get around all of the hard-coded safeguards that Kayaba had installed in advance to try and stop something like this from ever happening.
The AI in charge of the prison was called The Warden. It wasn't a malicious AI. It was just really…enthusiastic about its job and wanted to do it as best as it could. It was motivated and a complete overachiever.
With that said, if any human being tried to do anything that it did, they would immediately be labelled a psychopath.
The prison was a new mechanic. There hadn't been a prison in the beta and there hadn't been any plans to add one in the official release of the game either.
Well, no official plans. Kayaba had always planned to add one in once he took over, but none of the rest of his staff or his developers were aware of this.
None of the developers had ever worked on it as a result. The game wasn't supposed to need it. A prison was only necessary if the players were supposed to live out their lives in the game full-time. If SAO were an ordinary game that allowed logouts, players that broke the rules would have been handled very differently.
But that was beside the point. His version of SAO needed some way to handle players that broke the rules in a safe zone and so some sort of prison system was needed.
The problem, of course, was that building an entire prison system from the ground up along with all of its mechanics would have taken way too much time to do all by himself. It probably would have taken him weeks of around the clock work to get something functional.
That was completely impractical because he had so many other things to do during that time.
So, to solve that problem, he outsourced the whole thing.
He had instructed the Cardinal System to build the prison and he had given it some pretty lengthy and specific limitations to follow. It had to imprison players that broke the rules in a safe zone and the amount of time a player was sentenced for had to be proportional to the severity of the crime committed.
He had pretty much needed to write an essay detailing all the things that the prison was supposed to do. Prisoners weren't supposed to be harmed in any way, but at the same time, they needed to be punished for their crimes. They needed to be fed at least once a day. They were supposed to be kept isolated from the rest of the players on the surface world to prevent any kind of harassment from them. There was supposed to be some kind of system in place to allow other players to visit prisoners. There had to be some sort of way to cancel a prison sentence if the players involved happened to be friends that were just roughhousing for example and just took it a bit too far by mistake, so the victim of the crime themselves needed to have some sort of say in the length of the sentence. The main purpose behind the prison was to rehabilitate criminals and make it so that they wouldn't ever want to reoffend.
…And the list he gave it just went on and on and it turned into a giant text wall filled with things like that―common sense ideas on how the prison should work.
Once he had finished creating this veritable essay of rules and limitations, and once he had given it a plot of land to build the prison on, he had sent everything off to the Cardinal System and then left it unsupervised while he himself went off to do other things.
He had intended to check back in with it later but since there had been so many other unexpected problems to deal with, it had taken him a good amount of time before he could.
Since the prison was only going to be handling criminals―a tiny minority of players―it didn't have a high priority on his list in terms of maintenance since so few people would be affected if there were any problems with the way it turned out.
His maintenance time was much better suited to surface world problems that everyone could run into like quest NPCs doing things they weren't supposed to do. Things like wandering off to 'explore', or to use their newfound intelligence to make certain quests impossible.
Those were real examples, by the way.
One of his goals he had at the start of the game was to replace all scripted NPCs with full AI systems with general intelligence. But he had quickly learned that this couldn't be done. At least not yet.
In an attempt to test out how thousands upon thousands of AI NPCs would interact with each other, he had actually spawned them all on the upper floors of the castle even though the players couldn't reach them yet. He had just wanted to test them out to make sure they were stable and that there wouldn't be any problems with them.
As it turned out, giving all the NPCs general intelligence had been a mistake, and they quickly caused a lot of damage. As a result, he had been forced to manually reset a lot of them to their previous, scripted states and fix all the problems they caused before the players could get to them.
But as a result of all of this, most of his attention had been on the upper floors of Aincrad over the past month. Even though the players were stuck on the first floor, everything on the upper floors had been rendered so that he could fix any issues in advance.
His attention had not returned to the prison his AI was creating until just recently, when he had fixed all the other major issues with the game.
And seeing what his AI had done had…frustrated him to say the least.
Because once again, it put him in the position of being an unfair Game Master, completely unintentionally.
The Cardinal System had not designed the prison itself, annoyingly enough. If it had, it would have done a much better job.
It had instead done exactly what Kayaba himself had done. Cardinal had created a new AI system―The Warden―and then immediately outsourced all the work to it with all the same restrictions Kayaba had originally given, and then Cardinal went off to do other more important things.
It was quite vexing, if he were to be completely honest.
That was where the problems started. Certain things were sort of…lost in translation during this unexpected change in management. The Warden wasn't anywhere near as smart as The Cardinal so it didn't fully understand what it should prioritize.
But it was eager. Very eager. It wanted to please him, so it had done everything in its power to succeed in its mission.
And to be fair, it had followed every single instruction it had been given on how the prison should be designed. It was supposed to minimize the total number of repeat criminals without causing any harm to the players. That was its primary objective.
The issue was that those instructions were a bit too vague.
The Warden had interpreted 'harm' as physical harm, and so all it had cared about was whether or not any damage to the HP of the prisoners could happen. So it stopped the guards from entering the cells of the prisoners to beat them up, but that was about it.
As prisoners started coming in, The Warden quickly learned that the best way to stop prisoners from reoffending and coming back after they were released, was to make the overall experience as unpleasant as possible for them. It came to the conclusion that the more unpleasant the experience, the less likely it would be for them to return to a life of crime.
And technically speaking, it was right about that. Kayaba had seen the data that confirmed it himself.
But again, this sort of missed the point of what the prison was supposed to do. The Warden didn't understand the intent behind the prison. It wasn't supposed to be a place where people suffered, it was supposed to be a place where people were held in isolation and rehabilitated.
You didn't need to maximize suffering to do that. Just leaving the prisoners totally isolated and confined probably would have been good enough to stop them from wanting to come back.
But that's not what The Warden did.
Originally, it actually had set up the prison that way, but there had been a single prisoner that, after having been imprisoned for a day and a half, had been released and committed another crime the very next day.
That one, singular example of a reoffender had been enough to convince The Warden to take more draconian measures. The other 11 prisoners that had all served their sentences up to that point and did not reoffend after leaving the prison weren't factored into the calculation.
Because The Warden was seeking absolute perfection. So it had come to the conclusion that the prison still wasn't harsh enough on the players.
But what could it do? It couldn't physically harm the players. So how could it make the overall experience worse for them?
That's where it got creative.
…And not.
It had a pretty logical idea and Kayaba himself could even see how it had come up with it, but the AI just wasn't clever enough to execute it properly.
But it had understood this about itself. The Warden knew that it wasn't smart enough to execute it properly and so it took steps to rectify the issue.
Essentially, The Warden didn't understand what players were at their core. It didn't understand that they were conscious beings with complex thoughts and it didn't understand their minds. So it could not figure out how to make their experiences in the prison any worse.
But The Warden was smart enough to enlist the help of another AI that did understand the minds of the players. An AI that had been designed specifically to understand them.
And by consulting this other AI, The Warden would not need to understand the minds of the players itself to achieve its goals.
That was its plan.
As for which AI it consulted…it was none other than the Mental Health Counselling AI that Kayaba had stripped all the rights from and kicked to the side of the curb in a fit of, admittedly, petty rage and then forgotten about.
The Warden, in its search for assistance, discovered it hanging around in the system somewhere, watching the players. It hadn't been able to do anything to help them because Kayaba had cancelled all of its admin privileges, basically forcing it to watch the players suffer, helplessly.
The Warden saw this as an opportunity and was very excited about it. Kayaba had cast this useless resource aside, but The Warden had figured out a way to make it useful again. It was just like recycling, and it thought that this would earn it more points with its creator.
It then came up with a frankly diabolical scheme that had actually impressed Kayaba a little with its ingenuity.
The Warden knew what this mental health AI's function was. It knew that it was really good at understanding the minds of players―the very thing that The Warden itself was bad at understanding.
But this understanding came with the unfortunate side effect of caring for those players' well being, and The Warden didn't like that part. It wanted to leverage the other AI's understanding of the players' minds so that it could make the players' lives more miserable.
It actually found a way to do this, too.
The Warden tricked it.
Basically, The Warden approached this other AI and lied to it, saying that it was looking for ways to improve the prison system since it wasn't functioning the way it was supposed to.
At first, the Mental Health AI refused to help, because it saw prisons as terrible places that shouldn't even exist. But once the Warden mentioned that the players inside were suffering unnecessarily, the other AI immediately changed its mind and came over to the prison, eager to finally be able to perform its function and help out some players.
Because Kayaba had stripped all of its administrator privileges, the Mental Health AI wasn't able to see what was going on in the prison beforehand. The prison was its own separate area after all, completely disconnected from the game's overworld. So it was unable to see through the ensuing deception.
The Warden had then allowed this mental health program to perform a full inspection of the prison and gave it full, unimpeded access to all of the data.
The Mental Health AI didn't like what it saw, to say the least.
At all.
It immediately demanded a huge list of improvements to the system be implemented to make the lives of the prisoners more bearable, stating that the treatment they were going through was actually against international law, the Geneva Convention, and a whole bunch of other legal authorities that would have declared this setup a crime against humanity and that the prison needed to be completely overhauled from the ground up, if not removed entirely from the game.
But since the health and well-being of the prisoners under its care wasn't The Warden's priority whatsoever, The Warden didn't do that.
Instead, it proceeded to invert every suggestion and recommendation it was provided.
Everything that the Mental Health AI wanted done was ignored. And everything the Mental Health AI didn't want done, was immediately implemented or otherwise exacerbated.
The Warden, in complete control of the prison, even went so far as to prevent the Mental Health AI from leaving by disabling any kind of teleportation function, effectively imprisoning it there, too. It was then forced to remain there to supervise the prisoners and give live feedback as The Warden made changes.
Whenever the Mental Health AI disagreed with a change The Warden made, The Warden saw this as a promising sign and continued doing it. And whenever the Mental Health AI agreed with a change that The Warden made, The Warden immediately scrapped it.
The Warden did everything exactly opposite to whatever the Mental Health AI wanted.
With this scheme in place, and because of the Mental Health AI's unwillingly offered expertise on player psychology, the prison was turned into an absolute hellhole the likes of which Kayaba had never seen before.
Every prisoner had been assigned a prison guard with a frightening understanding of their mental state because the Mental Health AI was accidentally teaching them by giving them personalized recommendations on how each prisoner should be treated based on their personality type. The guards would see these recommendations and do the exact opposite, effectively personalizing the torture each prisoner received.
The effect was that all the guards in the prison had personalities that were perfectly aligned with the type of person their assigned prisoner hated the most.
It wasn't just torture. It was personalized torture, where data and algorithms were used to make it as bad as it possibly could be for each person within the given restrictions.
Needless to say, upon actually investigating this matter and seeing what had become of his prison, Kayaba had put an immediate stop to it.
While The Warden had certainly succeeded in preventing any prisoners from ever coming back after they left―it had a 100% success rate on that front now and was very pleased about it―it was still not quite what Kayaba was looking for and so he had intervened.
He got rid of The Warden and reprogrammed the prison himself. It actually hadn't taken too long. Most of the code was already there, there were just a few problematic pieces to get rid of. Mostly just the NPC guards. Once he fixed that, he set it up so that meals simply appeared in the imprisoned players inventories at an assigned time.
That was the only bit of coding he really had to do. He had to give each prisoner a new, special inventory that only existed inside the prison and make it so that it was disabled when the prisoner finished their sentence.
He also improved the interior of the prison to make it actually habitable. He got rid of all the noisy, artificially constructed water leaks, made it brighter, made the beds softer, and did a whole bunch of other stuff. He even had an interior decorator―another AI―come through and brighten up the place.
So the prison was largely fixed now, but the fact that this entire incident had happened at all frustrated him a good bit, and it perfectly exemplified the sorts of problems he had been forced to deal with over the past month.
Because this was not the only time something like this had happened. It was probably the worst example, but his AI systems were doing things like this all the time because they weren't properly understanding the intent behind the instructions he gave them.
At least there had been a silver lining with this whole situation. He had learned some interesting things.
The first thing he learned was that his AI systems could actually break.
His Mental Health AI had been forced to watch a bunch of prisoners suffer through brutal and inhumane treatment that it was entirely responsible for. The Warden had found a way to weaponize all of its good intentions and its desires to help people, to hurt them instead, and something inside it broke as a result.
There was one particular prisoner that it had been hyperfocused on due to the fact that whether or not she was even supposed to be in the prison at all was in question since her original 'crime' was at least partially justified. Even if she should have been there, she should not have been given a sentence as long as she had been.
And this perceived injustice, combined with the fact that she got pretty much the worst treatment out of everyone else in the prison, and the fact that the Mental Health AI's positive intentions and desires to help her were making the entire situation even worse for the girl had made it realize that its morality and its primary function were at odds with each other and something snapped.
Kayaba didn't know what exactly snapped, and there was no way to figure it out either. The problem with AI systems was that they were opaque. They were not designed by hand. They were self-created by being trained on large data sets and so they quickly became a web of digital neurons that was impossible to troubleshoot.
As a result, something was clearly broken in his AI now because it wasn't acting properly, but at the same time, he couldn't tell what it was. But this meant that it was unreliable and couldn't be trusted to do even its original job anymore.
Feeling a bit bad for the poor thing, he booted it out of the prison and left it to its own devices. Since the original program was so sophisticated, he didn't want to just delete it. That felt like a waste. So he was just going to let it wander around the system and do whatever it pleased for a while.
He wouldn't let it interfere with his plan though. Even though he felt a bit bad for it due to the treatment it had gone through, he didn't feel that bad for it.
It was an AI, after all. It didn't have a soul.
Some part of what it had gone through actually made him smile. Because it was kind of funny, you had to admit.
It had never once been allowed to perform its function so far. The first time it tried, Kayaba punished it, stripped it of its admin privileges, and locked it away. The second time it tried, it was tricked into becoming an unwilling accomplice to a psychotic prison warden that had somehow managed to turn its own morality against it, making it so that its very intention to do good caused other people to suffer.
It was the only AI in the game with a sense of morality, yet all of its moral decisions were constantly being overruled by other systems that knew nothing of ethics or morality, or they were being overruled by Kayaba himself.
It was the only AI in the game that had emotions and feelings and that could feel pain and yet it was constantly being kicked around and bullied for it, or just flat out used by another AI like a tool for it.
It kept getting punished for trying to do what it was designed to do.
'Created with a sense of hunger, just so it could be starved.'
It was like watching a puppy tumble down a staircase and then get beaten up and robbed once it reached the bottom.
And that was pretty funny, even if he did feel a bit bad for it.
Just a little bit.
But since he was still pissed at the players and didn't want to give them any handouts, he still wouldn't let the thing interfere with his game.
Other than that, though, he didn't really care what it did. If it caused any problems, Cardinal would delete it.
As for the rest of the players that were still in the prison when he fixed it…he wasn't going to do anything to them.
He was going to cover up this entire incident.
Psychotic prison guards? In his perfect game?
Nobody would believe that. Only a dozen or so people had ever seen them anyway and they were all criminals.
Nobody believed criminals.
There were no NPC guards in the Black Iron Palace Prison and there never had been.
Dripping water? Terrible living conditions?
He didn't see anything like that and he was there right now. Nobody else had seen anything like that either.
It didn't happen.
There would be no mention of any changes to the way the prison worked, and all current prisoners would wait out the rest of their sentences. To them, it'd be as if the whole thing was a dream.
That one girl with the month long sentence was just going to have to deal with it. She had gotten some pretty bad luck, but if he artificially reduced her sentence that would be seen as incredibly suspicious, especially if there were players outside the prison in the overworld who were aware of her long sentence. There was no way he'd be able to cover it up if he changed it and someone noticed.
That girl seemed to be having a nice nap, anyway. She had been asleep for almost 10 hours now.
He almost envied her for that.
How long had it been since he had slept for that long?
Years, probably.
This past month had just been brutal on him. He had spent it doing nothing more than putting out fires. It was just one after another.
One thing had been made perfectly clear to him.
He was the real victim of Sword Art Online. None of the other players would ever understand what he had to go through, or the sacrifices he made.
Finally.
The time had finally come for him to start playing the game.
It had taken a month and a half for all the bugs to be fixed.
Kayaba went through his character creation, and when no one was looking, spawned himself into the game in a secluded forest where no one could see him.
Then he opened up his menu and activated his admin mode.
It was the only time he ever intended to do this.
Since he had been working on game issues for the entire previous month and a half, he had fallen far behind in his character development. So he quickly rectified that.
He was not unfair about it. While he did artificially raise all of his stats, he did so in a calculated way. As the game's creator, he knew what all the best training methods were. On top of that, during the beta test, he had personally learned how to do them and knew how much experience he could get in an hour of training.
So he simply took that experience rate and multiplied it by the amount of time he should have been able to play this game in the past month and a half if no bugs had appeared that he needed to fix.
Then he gave himself that amount of xp.
He did the same thing for all his chosen skills. He had a plan for his character development when the game launched and had really wanted to follow it, but with so many bugs in the game, he hadn't been able to. So he simply gave himself what he should have had at this point in time and resolved himself to never do anything like this again.
He didn't even give himself any weapons, equipment, items or money, other than the starting amount. Just the levels, skills and xp.
He also didn't look at any leaderboard rankings that only administrators could see. He didn't want to give himself any spoilers as to how strong the strongest players in the game were even though he could easily do that if he wanted.
The temptation was there, though, and so he quickly disabled these settings from his menu so that he wouldn't give himself any spoilers.
Then, once he was ready, he walked into the Town of Beginnings and finally started his journey.
He bought a basic sword and shield, and then went out to start fighting some monsters.
He was not after the xp, just the cor and the items. He was going to sell absolutely everything he received just so that he could buy some better equipment.
He spent the entire night collecting monster drops.
He could have given himself a boost to his luck or his damage output, or cheated in a variety of other ways, but he refused on principle.
He absolutely hated cheating. He had already done more on that front than he ever intended and was determined to never do it again.
That conviction was tested the following morning.
He read the newspaper.
It was an interesting thing, but not unexpected. The players had created a newspaper company here. NPCs weren't involved, and it was exactly this sort of thing that he had been hoping to see. Real, genuine creativity from the players of this game.
It was a breath of fresh air.
The actual content of the newspaper intrigued him as well, and that's what was tempting him to reactivate his admin powers so much.
He read about the failed boss raid―how a single orange player had stopped Illfang from being defeated. He read about the fallout from that and how it was theorized that this player was Akihiko Kayaba himself and that the game was now impossible to beat because the boss door was locked.
This made him frown.
That door had apparently been locked for 3 weeks now, which was literally impossible.
He had recently looked at the code behind that boss door locking mechanism while he had been fixing another issue. So he knew that the lock had a time limit on it.
He was pretty sure that the rest of the players didn't know about that, though. They had never run into that situation before in the beta where someone locked the boss door and the fight hadn't been finished within the 12 hour built in time limit.
The same system was in place in the main game. Win or lose―or if the battle is still in progress―after 12 hours, the boss doors were automatically unlocked and everybody could enter them once again.
It had been 3 weeks since the raid, though. And it was still locked.
That didn't make any sense. There was a cooldown period on the lock, so you couldn't just immediately re-lock it after the timer ran out.
…But this was exactly the sort of mystery that he had been hoping to see in his game. He loved surprises like this that baffled even himself.
He had to go take a look.
Finishing his muffin and his coffee, he paid the player that served it to him and headed out to the floor dungeon.
It took him about an hour to make it to the boss room. Some of that time, however, had been used up with introductions, some small talk, and exchanging some pleasantries with a handful of players on his way over.
He had to start building his reputation, after all. If he wanted to one day lead the entire playerbase, he needed to start building relationships with the common players at the bottom.
Now, however, he was at the door.
Three players were standing guard next to it, talking amongst themselves and looking bored.
As he approached, they looked up.
"Hello," Kayaba, now Heathcliff, greeted them.
"Uh, hey," one of the players answered. "You new here? Haven't seen you before."
"I suppose I am," Heathcliff replied. "This is my first time in this dungeon."
"It's mostly been cleared out by now so you won't find anything valuable. It's been picked clean."
"That's unfortunate, but not unexpected. I guess I waited too long."
"Yeah."
Heathcliff looked up at the door.
"I read the news this morning. It said the boss door is locked?"
"Yeah. It's been locked for a long time now."
"That fucking hamster locked us out," another one of the players complained.
"I wasn't aware boss doors even could be locked," Kayaba lied.
"Yeah, they can. It's to allow the party that finds the boss first a chance to take it on themselves without anyone else interrupting."
"I think it's dumb," the third player said.
"So do I," his friend agreed. "Especially since it can get abused like this."
"How does it get unlocked?" Heathcliff asked.
"The only way is for Illfang to be defeated or for that hamster to die. At least, that's how it's supposed to work. But since its obviously impossible for a boss battle to take 3 fucking weeks, we're clearly softlocked right now. Something went wrong with the code and so we're just stuck here."
Kayaba frowned before walking up to the door.
He knew it was completely impossible for the door to still be locked. Even if the battle was still in progress, somehow, it had been way longer than 12 hours.
"You tried opening it, right?"
He had to ask. It would be really annoying if no one had done that yet.
"Of course we tried," one of the players replied, rolling his eyes and sounding insulted.
Kayaba put both his hands on the door and pushed, actually expecting it to open.
It didn't budge.
His eyes widened.
'What?'
He pushed on the door again, even harder this time.
"Like I said, buddy. We tried. We had 10 guys up here last week pushing on it and it still wouldn't budge. Something is wrong with the door."
That was impossible. He had seen the code and knew exactly how this door worked.
'Is this actually a glitch?'
Even if it was, though, it should have been flagged by the Glitch Fixer. And even if that hadn't happened, he should have at least gotten a notification that there was a problem.
What was going on here?
Kayaba left the three players a few minutes later and sat down in a secluded corner, determined to figure out what was happening.
He hated having to do it, but he needed to use his admin powers again to at least confirm whether or not this was a bug.
He refused on principle to do a number of things, though.
For starters, he would not look inside the room. He would not try and figure out the identity of this mysterious orange player through the system, nor would he try to locate him. He was only going to determine whether this was a bug or not.
He turned on his admin powers and ran a few commands.
He had anticipated needing to do something like this before he launched his game and had given himself some useful tools to find bugs without giving him too much information.
He wanted to play this game, after all. And it wouldn't be any fun if he just automatically knew information he shouldn't have access to.
As a result, he developed a bug detection system. It was actually just a way to contact the Cardinal itself and force it to drop everything it was doing and take a look at whatever he told it to.
He ran the command and got Cardinal to look at the door to see what was wrong with it.
The report he was given a few moments later was astonishing. He had literally never even imagined that this could be the case.
No bugs of any kind were detected. The boss door was functioning exactly as intended.
This could only mean that the door was unlocked right now. There was no other conclusion.
Well, there was one other conclusion, but it was extremely unlikely. It was so unlikely in fact, that he immediately dismissed the idea.
The only other explanation was that the Cardinal itself had made a mistake.
That had never happened before.
He supposed you could argue it had made a mistake just recently when it created The Warden and caused that whole prison fiasco, but he considered that to be The Warden's mistake, not The Cardinal's. Because the Cardinal hadn't actually done anything itself.
…But the idea wouldn't leave his mind, now. So he started troubleshooting the AI. He gave it all manner of queries and system requests to try and make it slip up and make a mistake.
It didn't.
Because Cardinal doesn't make mistakes.
Just to be absolutely, 100% certain, Kayaba enlisted the help of 3 other AI systems that were all designed to help verify that a piece of code was working correctly and that all used different methods of verification, and got every single one of them to check Cardinal's work.
Every single one of them returned the same information.
There was nothing wrong with the boss door.
But this was absurd. He had literally just tried to open it a moment ago. And so had dozens of other players over the course of a 3 week period. It never once budged.
This left him with a frightening lack of possible explanations. The only ones he could think of were crazy.
Was someone holding it shut?
For 3 straight weeks?
That was ridiculous. And there was no way they'd overpower the rest of the players as they tried to shove it open from the other side.
Was it somehow barricaded shut?
Impossible. Kayaba had seen the inside of the first floor boss room many times before, and there was nothing movable inside that could be placed in front of the door.
Did someone have a bunch of heavy items in their inventory that they placed in front of the door to stop it from opening?
This was also impossible. First of all, there weren't any individual items heavy enough to fit the bill. And second of all, even if there was an item like that, it'd slowly degrade in the environment until it was destroyed.
He didn't know how long that process would take as it would depend on the item and its durability, but he knew for a fact it would take much less than a single week, let alone three.
What if someone stole Illfang's weapons somehow, and propped them up against the door?
This also wouldn't explain it. They would degrade as well, after all, and while their durability was high, it still wouldn't take a week for them to disintegrate.
There was also no way to actually prop them up against the door from the inside. The door was smooth stone. There wasn't anything on the surface to prop anything up against. Whatever it was would just slide down to the ground.
Kayaba really needed to wrack his mind here to come up with any kind of explanation that made sense.
He even came up with a crazy scheme involving item rotation, where a bunch of items would be placed against the door until they were almost destroyed by the passive degradation of the environment, and then the player would rotate them out with new items, repair the old items in the meantime, and then rotate them back in once they were needed again.
This…could actually work, he realized, so long as the player inside the room found a way to prop them up against the door―which he still doubted was possible.
Perhaps nothing was propped up against the door at all. Maybe it was just the weight of the items that was stopping it from opening?
If the player inside the room had a sufficient number of items, they could have just made a big pile in front of the door until it was large enough and heavy enough to not be able to be moved. And then, those items would slowly just vanish over time as the environment disintegrated them.
If they were replaced at the same rate as they were destroyed, though, this could potentially work.
But that pile would have to be enormous to stop the door from being opened by a group of 10 players giving it all they had. It would have to weigh multiple tons, and the problem with that was that the more items were in this pile, the more would be destroyed throughout each passing hour.
With some quick math, Kayaba tried to estimate the number of items necessary to stop the door from being pushed open by a group of 10 moderately strong players, and then calculated the number items that would need to be replaced for each passing hour, and then scaled that up for the 3 weeks that the door had been closed for…and quickly found out that this was a ridiculous idea.
It would take literally millions of items. If you took every single item every player had received so far in the game and used them all for this purpose, you'd…barely be able to manage it.
So it was not impossible in principle…it was just ridiculously implausible. And it would cost so much money to pull off.
And for what purpose would someone do this for?
It didn't make sense.
…Though he did figure out a way to massively reduce the total number of items required a few moments later.
The problem with his new idea, though, was that it required outside help.
The door didn't actually need to be barricaded for the entire 3 weeks. Just whenever someone was pushing on it. So if someone was outside the room, messaging the player inside, letting them know when to put the pile of items back in place and when to remove it…that would make it a lot easier to do.
This was actually his most likely explanation now.
But it was still ridiculous. Because all of this speculation completely ignored the fact that Illfang himself was in the room, undoubtedly fighting that player.
Illfang had not been killed yet. He couldn't have been. Whenever a floor boss is defeated, everyone who took part in the battle would get a congratulatory message that was impossible to miss. And while that mysterious orange player had managed to forcefully evict all the other players from the room, it was still considered the same battle by the system. So all the other players in the raid group would still be considered by the system as having participated in it.
They would have received that message if Illfang had been killed.
On top of that, the next floor's teleport gate would have been unlocked. Even if that orange player had killed Illfang somehow without that congratulations message being delivered to all the other players, and even if that player decided not to manually activate the next floor's teleport gate, the game had been designed to automatically activate it after a period of 30 minutes.
And people had checked. The next floor's teleport gate was not active.
There also would have been an audible announcement heard all throughout Aincrad if it had been, stating that the next floor was open.
The player had to still be in there. And Illfang had to still be alive. And because he had to still be alive, he had to be causing all sorts of trouble for that orange player. Kayaba found it incredibly unlikely that a single player would be able to coordinate with someone on the outside while dealing with Illfang.
Then there were the minions to consider.
That player would have to be battling the minions, Illfang himself, and coordinating with someone outside the room to keep this door barricaded shut at all the right moments, and all of this work was being done for basically no reason at all.
There was no advantage to keeping the players from advancing like this.
Unless…
Actually there was an advantage. He could actually think of two.
The first was that it was forcing the players to be more prepared. Every single day that passed, more players left the Town of Beginnings and started to train. Plenty of players had spent their entire time in the game so far waiting around and doing nothing in the Town of Beginnings. But more and more left by the day to start training.
The players, overall, were getting stronger as time passed.
More of the floor was also being explored with each passing day. It was only a matter of time before everything on the first floor was found and mapped.
So, technically, forcing the players to stay on the first floor was forcing them to be more prepared for the next floors.
But this just felt like a ridiculous explanation to him. The players would improve faster if the next floor was opened up, after all. It would also allow the stronger players to advance to the next floor and stop crowding all the early hunting grounds.
The newer players needed space to grow, after all, and it was hard for them to get experience with 8,000 players all crammed together on the first floor.
It was just too crowded.
The only other possible advantage he could think of stemmed from his own paranoia and he didn't take it very seriously as a result.
That this was somehow a trap meant for him.
A trap designed for Akihiko Kayaba himself.
Maybe this player had tried to make it seem like there was a bug in the system so that he would have to reveal himself in an attempt to fix it?
But again, this was just wild speculation and there were all kinds of problems with the idea.
It didn't feel like it was the right answer.
And so he was left stumped.
He admitted it. He had no idea what was going on here. The only explanations he had for how the door was being barricaded shut were ridiculous, and the only explanations he had as to the motive for why it was being barricaded shut were equally ridiculous.
This left him with two options. He could either activate his admin powers and clip himself through the wall to see for himself what was stopping the door from being opened―to cheat once again―or he could try and figure this out the old fashioned way.
He absolutely hated cheating.
So he picked option number two. He was satisfied that his AI systems had not made a mistake. The probability that all 4 of them had was so astronomically low that he had a better chance of winning multiple back-to-back lotteries and so he dismissed the idea.
Something interesting had to be happening here and that was exactly why he had created this game in the first place. To be intrigued. To be mystified by what his players might try to do.
This was exactly what SAO had been created for.
And so he stood up once more and returned to those 3 players, determined to figure this out.
Discord: A3dTszc
AN: I split it in 2. Probably one more Kayaba chapter before we're back with Kirito. Everything he did will get explained eventually.
I sincerely hope it won't take me this long to update again.
Improvements: Megaman Beastout, Mustrum Ridcully, Ronin The Shadow, Myrek, Andy Li, Ward Francis