Keisuke sat in his chair at his desk and stared down blankly at a book. The book he was “reading” was one he had read many times over and didn’t gain much from reading it over for the ten billionth time. At the corner of his desk sat a small case no bigger than an informational pamphlet; this case was a case for a game he had picked up fairly recently. The game was called Alfheim Online, or ALO for short. The only reason he had not touched it was simply because it was a VR game, and quiet honestly with what Keisuke had gone through  with the death game, Sword Art Online, he wasn’t too sure if it would be safe for him to jump into another VR game so quickly. 

While this thought ran through his mind several times over he really couldn’t help the fact that it was a game, and on top of that a virtual reality game. It was like second nature to Keisuke to be in a virtual world; after all he was trapped in one for two long years, with his life on the line. He also knew very well that unlike SAO, ALO was safe and wouldn’t trap him in for eternity, making him risk his life.

「No point in me sitting here and moping around about a past experience.」

With a slight hope to his step he got up from his chair and reached up to his overhead shelf and grabbed his old Nerve Gear peripheral

「It's time to see some action again old friend.」

He gave the slightly tattered helmet a small dust with his hands before hooking it all up, once everything was set and ALO was loaded into the Nerve Gear he put the helmet over his head, at that very moment old memories flooded into his mind, some bad, some good, but nonetheless they were nostalgic. After a few brief moments he came out of his dreaming state and got into a comfortable position on his bed. Once he was settled in he stared up at the ceiling as the Nerve Gear booted up. Once everything was ready he uttered the two words that would send him into a whole new world. 

「Link Start!」

The swirl of various colours entered Keisuke’s vision before fading away quickly. For afew brief moments there was a black screen before the title screen of the game came into vision. Once he proceeded on he was told to choose a race to start as, it was also noted that the appearance of the avatar would be randomly generated. Keisuke nodded to himself as he slowly scrolled through the various races. 

He finally settled on the Spriggan race as it fit his style. Once he picked his race he was shown a screen to choose an in game name he thought for a few seconds before deciding on 'けい' Seeing as he didn’t want to bump into any SAO survivors he kept from using the alphanumeric letters and went with the Hiragana version of his old SAO name, which was ‘Kei’

Once he pushed enter he was shrouded in darkness before appearing in what seemed to be the Spriggan’s territory. Looking around he immediately noticed the huge pyramid. 

「Must be the main landmark.」

He said quietly to himself, before exploring anymore he wanted to see what had changed from the old Cardinal system he was used to from the SAO days. At first he tried to bring up the menu with his right hand, but he quickly learned that it was opposite so right away he swiped down with his other hand, making the menu appear from thin air. Upon a quick inspection he realized his old data from SAO was still in but ninety-nine percent of the items he had were useless, the only things that transferred were his stats, sword and currency. He sighed lightly before closing his menu.「Maybe the items can be of some use later? I’ll leave them be, I am sure there won’t be any problems.」

Once he was done with the initial inspection of the UI he looked around his surroundings, the first thing that caught his eye was a very familiar floating castle in the air. Keisuke did a double take before gluing his eyes on the castle that sat floating in the middle of the air. It was Aincrad. His mouth dropped, he was completely awestruck. From there he immediately began walking at a fast pace trying to get closer and closer to the castle. Before long Keisuke found himself in the middle of a forest, completely lost and nowhere near reaching the floating castle.