RE;Sword Art Online

"Hey... who're you?"

Klein, who had been also staring at his mirror, fell backwards. We both looked at each other and shouted at the same time.

"You're Klein!?"

"You're Kirito!?"

The man in front of me said the same words came out of both of my mouth.

Then I was gripped by a sudden foreboding and realized what Kayaba's present, the Hand Mirror, meant.

I raised the mirror in a rush, and the face stared back at me.

Kirito's world collapsed.

His fingers trembled, his breath hitched, and then, all at once, the weight of his own existence shifted. His mind screamed that the mirror reflection, was someone else, someone he really knows staring back to him...

A black hair lay neatly over the head, two weak-looking eyes could be seen beneath the slightly long hair, and a delicate face that made people mistake me for a girl even now when I go out in casual clothes with my sister.

The calm face of a warrior that Kirito had even a few seconds ago was no longer there. The face that was in the mirror...

No.

Not someone else.

Himself.

Not the confident swordsman he had built, the virtual warrior he had shaped over countless hours of creating. Not the cool, controlled version of himself that had carved through dungeons and outmaneuvered enemies. No—this face was his, the real one.

His breath came in shallow gasps. His hands clutched at his chest, at his arms, at his face, as if trying to prove that this wasn't real. But it was. The sleek, defined form of his avatar had vanished, leaving behind the frail, awkward, ordinary boy he had hidden away. The one he had locked behind a keyboard, behind the walls of every MMO he had ever played.

Panic swelled in his throat.

"Ah... it's me..." he whispered, barely recognizing his own voice.

Our voices had changed too. Perhaps the voice modulators had stopped working.

He looked at his reflection again, his mind screaming in denial. This wasn't who he was supposed to be here. This world, this game, a place where he wasn't the quiet, loner kid struggling to speak to others, the boy who shrank away from the real world.

Kirito's fingers curled into fists, his nails digging into his palms. He had built something for himself here. The Kirito who was fast, strong, capable. Who could take on the world without hesitation. Who mattered.

But now?

Now he was just Kazuto.

A boy. A nobody.

He swallowed hard, fighting the overwhelming weight in his chest. It felt like standing at the edge of a vast, endless void.

Kirito felt small. Powerless.

The mirrors fell from our hands and hit the ground. Then were destroyed with a soft, smashing sound and turns to polygons.

When I looked around again, the crowd was no longer filled with people who looked like characters from a fantasy game. A bunch of normal looking teenagers and out of shape middle aged men and old people had now taken their place. Their shining armor and elaborate robes looked out of place, it was like something you'd see if you gathered a bunch of people in real life, like a cosplayer lost at a convention venue. Distressingly, even the sex ratio had changed, this had never felt more artificial... or more real.