Chapter 4
One month into the game, two thousand people were dead.
The hope that outside help would come had been crushed, not even a message had gotten through.
I didn't see it myself, but they said that the panic and the madness that took hold of the players when they realized that they really couldn't get back was unbelievable. There were people crying and others wailing, and some even tried to dig up the ground of the city saying that they were going to destroy this world. Of course, all buildings were non–destructible objects so this attempt failed without any results to show for it.
They say that it took days for the players to accept the situation and think of what to do after that.
The players were split into four categories.
The first consisted of a little over half the players—they were the ones who still wouldn't accept the conditions that Kayaba Akihiko had put forth and still waited for outside help.
I understood what they were thinking painfully well. Their real bodies would be lying on a bed or sitting in a chair fast asleep. That was reality and this situation was «fake». If there was even the smallest discovery, they might be able to get out. Of course, the log out button was gone but there might be something that the creators of the game might have overlooked....
And outside, the company who ran the game, Argus, would be trying harder than anyone to save the players. If they could just wait, they might be able to open their eyes, have a teary reunion with their family, and then return to school or work and this would all have been just something to talk about....
It wasn't really unreasonable to think like that. I think I was hoping for the same thing deep inside.
Their plan of action was to «wait». They didn't take a single step out of the city and used the money they had been allotted at the beginning of the game (the currency was called «Col» in this world) sparingly, buying only the food they needed to get through the day and finding cheap inns to sleep in, and walked around in groups spending each day without any thought.
Thankfully the «Starting City» was a city that took up 20% of the first floor's surface and was large enough to hold a Tokyo district. So the five thousand players would have sufficient room to live in.
But no help was forthcoming, however long they waited. On some days the sky outside was not a crystal blue but covered with grey clouds. Their money couldn't last forever and they realized that they would have to do something.
The second category consisted of about 30%, or three thousand players. It was a group where all the players worked together. The leader of it was the admin of the largest online game info site.
The players who made up this category were split into several groups and shared all of their gains, collected information on the game, and set out to explore the labyrinth area where the stairs were. The leaders of this group set up their base of operations in the «Black Iron Castle» and sent orders to their various groups.
This huge group didn't have a name for quite a while, but after all the members received a uniform, somebody gave them the somewhat grim name, «The Army».
The third category consisted of, at an estimate, a thousand players. It was made up of people who had wasted all their Col but didn't want to make money by fighting monsters.
As a side–note, there were two basic bodily needs in SAO: one was fatigue and the other was hunger.
I understood why fatigue existed: virtual information and real information were no different to the users' brains. If players became sleepy they could go to an inn and rent a room to sleep in depending on the amount of money they had. If one saved up a lot of Col they could buy a house, but the sum needed wasn't small.
