“Hello.”
Xia Yan returned Klein’s enthusiasm with a smile and greeted him.
Kirito, standing beside Klein, wasn’t very good at socializing. He simply smiled and nodded at Xia Yan, acknowledging his greeting.
“Hey, little brother, are you alone too?”
Klein asked.
“Mhm.”
Xia Yan nodded.
“Then how about we team up? This guy and I are both alone. We met in town, and he invited me to team up. It’s way more fun to play this game in a team, you know!”
Klein, being very familiar, patted Kirito’s shoulder with an air of good camaraderie, then tried to put his arm around Kirito’s shoulders.
“You’re the one who insisted on dragging me into this team, how did it become me inviting you?”
Kirito evaded Klein’s embrace with obvious disdain.
“Hey, my dearest friend, don’t do that. At least give me some face in front of the newbie.”
Klein immediately cried out in distress.
“I think your face is already thick enough for nobody to pierce through.”
Kirito retorted immediately.
“It seems like you two have a great relationship.”
Xia Yan smiled as he said this.
Clearly, they were the kind of friends who love to tease each other.
“See, even the new player thinks we are close!”
Hearing Xia Yan’s comment, Klein beamed and boasted to Kirito.
Kirito sighed, shrugged at Xia Yan, expressing his helplessness in the face of Klein’s thick face.
“Let’s add each other as friends first.”
Xia Yan suggested.
“Alright.”
Klein immediately agreed and sent a friend request to Xia Yan.
Seeing this, Kirito also sent a friend request to Xia Yan.
“Klein, Kirito?”
After receiving the friend requests, Xia Yan looked at the two of them with an odd expression.
What luck!
He had actually bumped into the protagonist, Kirito, and his best friend, Klein.
Only Klein’s appearance was vaguely familiar from Xia Yan’s memories.
But Kirito completely subverted his image. He was no longer the baby-faced kid from Xia Yan’s memory.
The Kirito standing before him was a tall, 1.8-meter youth. His looks were still top-notch, but he had lost the baby-faced youthfulness and instead was filled with a heroic aura.
No wonder Xia Yan hadn’t recognized him at first.
The difference was too great.
“What’s wrong?”
Both of them were a little puzzled.
“Are your names abbreviations of your real names?”
Xia Yan asked.
Kirito immediately showed an awkward smile, turned his head away, and looked at something else: “Hahahahahaha—!”
“You’re amazing, you figured it out!”
Klein opened his eyes wide and said, “I did use one character from my real name as my ID.”
“Yan? Little brother, are you the same as us?”
Klein looked at the new name in his friend list and asked curiously.
Hearing this, Xia Yan nodded.
“That’s so much fate!”
Klein immediately let out a strange cry, his expression even more excited.
He couldn’t believe that just by chance he had met someone who shared something with them.
Even though the common ground was a little ridiculous, for gamers like them, this kind of shared trait was enough to become a topic that connected them.
“That’s quite a coincidence.”
The awkwardness on Kirito’s face lessened. It was as if he felt less ‘special’ when he was surrounded by the same kind of people.
“Yan, you’re also a closed beta tester, just like Kirito, right?”
Klein asked with a smile.
“I guess you could call me half a closed beta tester.”
Xia Yan shook his head.
“You’re kidding, right?”
“Half?”
Klein and Kirito were slightly confused.
“At the time, I couldn’t get into the closed beta because of other things going on in my life, so I wasn’t in Japan.”
Xia Yan didn’t hide anything: “After the closed beta ended, I bought some information about the game. Compared to the other players, I have a bit of foresight, I guess.”
Hearing Xia Yan’s reply, Klein widened his eyes with disbelief. He even exaggeratedly struck various sword-wielding poses, chopping at monsters and saying, “I saw you doing this and that and killing the wild boar. It’s completely unlike a newbie. I spent two hours trying to learn how to use SAO’s sword skills!”
Kirito was also surprised. Just like Klein, seeing Xia Yan kill monsters with such proficiency, he had already guessed that Xia Yan was a closed beta tester like him, only with a different name and appearance.
But hearing Xia Yan’s denial, he was surprised.
During the closed beta, many new players didn’t even know how to swing a sword.
Even he himself, in the closed beta, took several days to learn how to use sword skills.
“How should I put this.”
Xia Yan glanced at Klein with a hint of a smile and said, “If I had a steel sword in the real world, I could chop you into eighteen pieces in one second.”
“Don’t say such scary things all of a sudden!”
Klein immediately pretended to be terrified and tried to burrow into Kirito’s arms.
Kirito, of course, avoided him with disgust, earning him a melancholic look from Klein.
“I’m just telling the truth.”
Xia Yan shrugged.
“Is it really that scary?”
Seeing Xia Yan’s serious expression, Klein swallowed nervously.
“So, you’re a swordsmanship expert in the real world?”
Kirito thought for a moment.
“I wouldn’t say I’m an expert, I just know a little bit.”
Xia Yan said humbly.
“It’s ridiculous that swordsmanship learned in the real world can be used in SAO.”
Klein looked like he was questioning his entire existence.
“It’s possible.”
Kirito nodded and said, “Even though we have virtual bodies in SAO, our memories and thoughts are still our own. Kayaba Akihiko designed many of the techniques based on reality to make the game more realistic, and we can perform real-world movements with these virtual bodies. In other words, if you learned some sword techniques in the real world, it’ll be easier to pick up in the game.”
Kirito himself was the same.
His grandfather was a swordsmanship expert, and he personally taught Kirito swordsmanship when he was a kid.
However, as he grew older, Kirito became interested in electronic devices and abandoned his swordsmanship training.
“No way, didn’t I get such a raw deal? I wanted to learn swordsmanship properly when I was in school, but the kendo club was full of guys, so I gave up.”
Klein looked like he had suffered a great loss and was filled with regret: “If I had learned kendo back then, wouldn’t I be able to slash and slash monsters already?”
“You gave up because the kendo club was full of guys, what kind of excuse is that!”
Kirito sighed, covering his face.
........
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