Sword Art Online Gameverse x Reader

Chapter 76: The 25th Floor Boss

<Author's Note: I've done some storyboarding and planning, and whilst this chapter is INCREDIBLY exposition heavy with minimal character-to-character dialogue it will allow for me to tell new more interesting stories sooner as well as progress the plot, as a 75-chapter-per-ten-floors isn't a feasible schedule to continue with. I definitely enjoyed taking it slow and thorough, but now all the backstory and connections have been laid and it's time for the more interesting parts of the story! >

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Lind: "So, that's the plan! We will be the reserve team to back up the ALS should they need to retreat. Unfortunately, they decided to rush in way too soon and many of us in the DKB aren't levelled up nearly enough for this Boss Raid... but fortunately we have the backing of the KoB as well as U/N and their companion - I have no doubt that this group of players will be more than capable of finishing off whatever is left should the ALS need to retreat!"

The surrounding players, both of Lind's DKB and the KoB guild were cheering at this rallying speech.

It had been just over a month since we cleared the Ninth Floor and gained access to the Tenth Floor, the front line clearers were finally starting to pick up the pace - I no longer had to wait as long for backup, and at this point I was only just reaching the highest potential level per floor before they would request my attendance...

Considering how much less time we spent on each floor I ended up with a lot less adventures on these past fifteen Floors- very much unlike the first ten Floors before people started to pick up steam.

Hmmmm... thinking back on it all...

*FLASHBACKS*

On the Tenth Floor, after I returned to the Field to start grinding after celebrating Koharu's Birthday I was actually quite late to the scene and some players were ahead of me, for example there were these two eccentric players: Yulier and Thinker I met, Yulier had gotten herself lost within the Bamboo Forest of that Floor, me and Argo, who I met by chance out on the Field, escorted her back out of the Forest where we then ran into her friend Thinker. 

Turns out they're the leaders of a guild called «MMO Today» which specialises in helping out the less fortunate players. They gave us some tips about this Floor and wished us luck as they went back to town with the materials they had managed to harvest from their expedition.

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On the Twelfth Floor there were rumours of Player Killers popping up, it was now known by the masses that there were wolves among the sheep, once I was done with my grinding on this Floor I spent almost all my time patrolling the Twelfth Floor, keeping an eye out on the players around me. It wasn't until the day before we defeated the Floor Boss that I encountered anything, a small party of players were beset upon by player killers.

I ran in to help the players to realise I wasn't the only ones keeping an eye out for this exact situation. I was backed up by several members of this new guild that had popped up: the Knights of the Blood, with their backup we had the numbers to be able to subdue the Player Killers without having to kill them. Instead they used Corridor Crystals to teleport them to a Dungeon underneath the Black Iron Palace on the First Floor, it's being used as a player-run prison for orange players now apparently.