Sword Art Online: Phantom Reaper || SAO OC

44 - Truth Of The Blade

Nyx opened his eyes and found himself standing in the center of a small, square-like stone cave. He listened and looked around him but couldn't see an exit or anything strange. All he could see was a fairly large, vaguely familiar-looking chest behind him. It was a simple wooden chest adorned with golden symbols and patterns across its exterior.

As he touched it he heard a familiar voice, one that he never thought he would hear again. He looked up and saw what looked to be an avatar spawning in front of him, wearing crimson armor accented with a white outline. This character looked incredibly familiar for some reason and after blankly staring at it for a few seconds he opened his mouth to speak.

"Heathcliff?" Nyx said in disbelief not understanding why or how he saw Commander Heathcliff standing in front of him.

"Heathcliff... I suppose there was a time I was called that."

Nyx stayed silent for a moment before he remembered that who he once knew as Heathcliff was actually the original developer of Sword Art Online: Akihiko Kayaba.

"It's strange, isn't it? I'd hoped that no one would ever find this, and yet you've managed to do it twice when once should have been impossible enough."

Nyx stared at Heathcliff in silence trying to understand what he was talking about, but his mind had gone completely blank. He reached for the chest and it opened up, revealing a familiar sword laying at its base. His eyes shot open at the sight and he felt as though time had stopped. "The Phantom Blade..."

He knelt down and reached over into the chest to take out but stopped when he heard Heathcliff's voice "I will warn you against taking that."

"Why shouldn't I? Because you didn't want anyone getting to it?" Nyx asked with an icy tone.

Heathcliff nodded and looked down at him with his ever cool expression "The Phantom Blade was never meant to make it into the final game. There were severe errors in the code that made using the sword's abilities a liability to the player that wields it."

"The hell kind of errors would stop me from taking this right now?"

"The kinds that lead to problems like memory lapses, changing the player's properties, and mental instability. Using its skills only caused the player that wields it more and more trouble."

Nyx stared at Heathcliff with a blank expression on his face. For a moment he doubted every word he said. He had no reason to believe him at first, but now that he knew that he was the developer of SAO, this warning seemed too believable to ignore.

"If that's the case then why was it even in the game?"

Heathcliff had a small, bitter smile for a moment. "I would've removed it, but that would've meant altering a lot of code that might have affected how the NerveGear sends and receives data to the brain. By the time I realized what the liability was, it was too close to launch to remove it. So instead I made the quest to obtain it theoretically impossible to complete. But even so, you somehow managed it. Not once, but twice. Truly impressive."

Nyx listened to every word in disbelief. "Wait, how do I know that what you're saying is true? It doesn't make sense for you to make something that messes with people's minds like that!"

A heavy silence filled the air for several seconds before Heathcliff responded "Many people would argue it made no sense for me to trap 10 000 players in Sword Art Online, and yet it's an undeniable fact that I did."

Nyx froze when Heathcliff said that. Memories of the day they were told that there was no escape from SAO other than to beat the game flashed through his head and he felt his stomach twist into knots as a feeling of dread washed over him.