Chapter 39

Five days would pass before Harry woke from his magic induced coma and Madam Pomfrey worked diligently during that time to heal the damage that his magic and the potions had been unable to heal on its own (bar the magic resistant scars and the slowly healing wound in his shoulder). At the end of those five days, Harry looked far healthier than he had at any point since he'd been found back on his eleventh birthday, though he still looked painfully thin and frail. The fact that he didn't look a day older than eight (and even that was a bit of a stretch considering how short and scrawny he was) only made his appearance all that more tragic when one took in the numerous scars that decorated his body.

Not even Snape (who had once been determined to hate the child of his biggest rival) could dredge up enough hate to insult the child or complain about the attention he was receiving in light of what he must have suffered.

Sadly, Harry's awakening was not the happy occasion that all of those involved had imagined it would be as it was painfully obvious that there had been some mental and emotional scarring due to whatever ordeal the child had suffered through to tear his soul from its rightful home and force his magic to preserve his body. Expected as that scarring was, none of the adults watching over the young wizard were quite prepared for the child's insistence that he was trapped in some kind of game, his staunch refusal to believe roughly ninety percent of the information they gave him, or his casual dismissal of their very humanity.

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Sunday, November 14, 2021 3:43 PM

Harry returned to consciousness in the blink of an eye.

One second he knew nothing and the next he was laying in darkness on a comfortable bed feeling as if he'd been worked over by a Boss Monster recently.

It only took a moment for his memory of the final moments of Aincrad to slam into his brain and when it did, Harry let out a rage filled scream of grief over the memory of all he'd just lost. When his scream died down into sobs, Harry reached up with both hands and covered his face (ignoring the searing pain that cut through his right shoulder with the movement) as he saw again Kirito's shocked disbelief when Asuna shattered in death, Kirito's face filled with grief, desperation, and rage (the teen so utterly broken due to Asuna's death) when he killed Kayaba before both man and teen shattered, and the obvious grief on Agil's face just before the man vanished from right in front of him.

Numbness settled over Harry as he ran his hands over his face and through his hair (still ignoring the pain of moving his right arm) before he sat up and gazed blankly at the unfamiliar stone walls and antique furniture of the room he found himself in. A glance upwards revealed his golden HP bar (currently sitting dangerously low, which would explain why he felt so tired) and green curser still floating above his head and he let out a resigned sigh as he opened his Menu in the hopes that he could find out where he had ended up.

Harry couldn't resist torturing himself with a brief check of his Friend List to see all five of his friends grayed out (the color had come to signify the death of the players whereas prior to being trapped in the game, the color had just indicated the players were offline) and the grief drowned him a second time as he stared at the evidence that his friends were gone.

"Agil," Harry sobbed brokenly, the loss of the man he'd come to see as a father hurting the most because the man had always seemed so strong. It didn't help that he never even told the man how he truly saw him or how much he'd come to care for him in the two years they'd known each other. "Damn you, Kayaba! Give me back my father! I need him. I need them all. They were all I had."

The sound of the door opening followed by a soft gasp pulled Harry from his grief and he glanced up to find a middle aged woman dressed in an old fashioned maroon and white healer's smock and hat. Reaching up with one hand, Harry closed out his Player Menu and warily studied the unfamiliar woman before he glanced up to note that she was an NPC according to the green cursor surrounded by a simple green ring floating above her head. Her presence only confirmed what he'd been trying to deny right from the start; he'd been ripped from SAO and thrust into some other VRMMORPG environment instead of waking up in his body.

"I wonder if this means that my relatives really did kill me off," Harry apathetically mused out loud as he watched the woman bustle forward once she got over her shock.

"Oh by the blessing of the Lady of the Lake, it is good to see you awake at last, Mr. Potter," the woman declared as she pulled out a stick and began waving it over Harry. "We'd begun to fear that you would never wake up."

"Who are you and where am I?" Harry asked in Japanese out of habit, his mind not yet registering the fact that she was speaking English or that she'd used his actual last name.

"I'm sorry, dear, what was that? I'm afraid I didn't understand a word of what it was you were asking me."

This time, Harry picked up on the fact that she was using English and his wariness increased since there had been very few players that had known that he spoke English. The fact that it was an NPC using English only heightened his unease because the system shouldn't have that kind of information. Harry frowned after a moment though as it occurred to him that he might have been shunted onto the nearest server when Aincrad self-destructed; which for him would mean an English server. Since he was, as far as he knew, the only British player that had been trapped inside of the game; or at least the only player located within the British Isles as the game had not been sold outside of Japan (his uncle's purchase the only exception as far as he knew).

"Mr. Potter…?"

Harry continued to ignore the NPC Healer as he reopened his Menu and flipped through the options. When he didn't find any more information on what game he'd been thrust into, he switched back to his Player Stats in order to see what level he was currently at, only to frown when he saw there were now two pages to his Stats Page. The first page was new and it depicted his Stats for the current game (most of which were currently blank) while the second page held a list of his SAO Stats at the end of the game. Thinking of SAO only brought the grief back though and he closed out the Menu as tears slipped down his face; he no longer felt curious enough to determine where he stood in this new game.

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