Third-person POV
It is now 2024, almost 2 years since the 2022 SAO incident that traumatized the world and caused it to shun or distrust full-dive VR as a result. But starting as early as January of that year, a NerveGear-like-accessed game called Mars' World came into existence but in small batches. Unlike the deadly SAO and the NerveGear, MW utilized a similar-looking gear called Head Gear. This doesn't have a kill code when players die in the game and allows players to log out at any time. This was the product of one developer named Akira Yamamoto, a former colleague of Akihiko Kayaba. Almost 3 years ago, Akira shamelessly copied the blueprints for the NerveGear and left Akihiko to modify it to make it safer.
As for MW, it was an open world unlike the floor-by-floor model of SAO. It featured a fantasy, magical world with aesthetics of Ancient Rome and Greece and other biome-like kingdoms outside of Greco-Romana (the kingdom with the Ancient Greco-Roman styles). Other kingdoms accurately depicted Ottoman, Georgian London, Ancient India, Ancient China, and Medieval Japan (Akira, or SekaiTravels20, was still developing the desert and tropical islands biomes). For weeks, it only amassed a very small and curated number of players across Japan, the Philippines, the UK, and the US due to its vetting process of screening out potentially unruly players and secret production and logistics.
The year was 2024, two years after the release of SAO. In Japan, one such player is a 15-year-old, Hungarian-Spanish high school student named Kajetán González. He had came over from Barcelona, Spain by plane. 11 days after his first day in a Kawasaki private school had started, on a quiet afternoon in his dorm room, Kajetán accepted a package that contained the Head Gear. It was sent as a free sample with no payments needed to be made. When he opened it, he was mortified because it was eerily similar to the dreaded NerveGear.
"What the…?" he whispered in fear. "¿Que?"
Flashbacks of two years of following the news update of the 2022 SAO incident regularly flashed before his eyes and the sheer luck of not being in Japan at the time of the midnight queue for the Nerve Gear.
But then, calming down, he noticed a letter from Akira, addressing the differences between a NerveGear and a Head Gear and Akira's vision for the Head Gear and Mars' World. So, calming down, Kajetán drew the curtains of the windows of his school dorm room for privacy and did a silent, Christian Protestant prayer before laying down on his bed and putting on the Head Gear, activating it.
Minutes later, he appeared in Greco-Romana (the starting point for all new players since all guilds were located there), where a welcome system window greeted him and showed the player registration to him.
So, Kajetán entered the following:
Kajetán González
15
Username: Barcelona_y_Budapest10
Profession: Mixed - Gunslinger and Builder
Avatar: the same as his real life appearance of black hair with blue highlights and a black right eye and a blue left eye (heterochromia).
Before that, he checked the system interface if there was a log out button.
Blow in the hole and there it was:
[Want to log out? Yes or No?]
He was astonished and took the leap of fate by pressing Yes.
Seconds later, he was back in his dorm room in the real world, all unfazed and unscathed.
Seeing this divine-like csoda ("miracle" in Hungarian), Kajetán was astonished and then logged back in.
Now reappearing in Greco-Romana, Kajetán returned to his system interface of choosing his beginner weapons and tools based on his dual professions. He eventually chose a pair of Glock pistols as his starter weapons and a starter tool kit and an empty blueprint paper for his builder's building projects.
With that, he headed to the designated guild for players with more than one profession to register and follow the tutorials.