41 Chapter 41

"Come on, Mr. Potter, let's get you back into bed," the nurse instructed as she entered Harry's line of sight; the eleven year old had completely forgotten about the woman in the wake of dealing with the weird old man.

Harry considered ignoring her but upon further reflection realized that he was still exhausted and he'd been shivering due to his see-sawing emotions and the chill air that seemed to plague all castles for some time without realizing it. Once under the covers again, Harry continued to flip through the Menu; this time he checked his Inventory and noted that he still had everything he'd taken with him to that final battle.

He also found that he'd picked up four Items from the battle of the Skull Reaper; one of the Reaper's Scythes, the Reaper's Stinger (Harry's dried blood still coating the tip where it had pierced Harry's right shoulder), an Item called the Cloak of Mourning (it boosted one's offensive capabilities), and something that was called the Reaper's Crown (Harry had no clue what this one was). All four Items had been shunted to him automatically when the game had ended because he'd been the last one left who'd faced the Skull Reaper in battle after the others had begun vanishing.

Sighing, Harry closed out the Menu and curled up with his pillow as he cried himself to sleep still missing Agil and the others.

Friday, November 19, 2021 8:15 AM

Five days later, Harry sat on the same bed dressed in a fairly decent set of secondhand clothes that included a pair of black slacks, a white button down shirt over a white t-shirt, a gray woolen vest, a simple black tie, open fronted black robes, polished black dress shoes, and a sling for his right arm to support his mostly healed but still weak shoulder. The clothes had been given to him by the nurse earlier that morning. Today he was to be taken to acquire the supplies he would need to muddle through this new game in the hopes that the sooner he cleared the game, the sooner he could find a way back to Aincrad's server so that he could find Agil and the others.

The eleven year old studiously ignored the possibility that the server had been permanently shut down already.

Dumbledore had returned the previous evening along with four new adults (whom were introduced as Professor Minerva McGonagall, Professor Severus Snape, Professor Pomona Sprout, and Professor Filius Flitwick) plus the nurse (whose name he finally learned was Madam Poppy Pomfrey) to explain where he was and why he was there. The more Harry learned, the more he became disturbed by this new game. Someone had gone through a considerable amount of trouble to create a game that was attempting to supplant reality in his mind.

Dumbledore, who was apparently his in-game guardian according to the NPC, knew just enough facts about Harry's real life to make his story appear real but it was twisted just enough to scream fake to Harry; the eleven year old not realizing that it was his facts that had been twisted by the lies the Dursleys had fed him for eight long years.

First of all, there was the fact that Dumbledore claimed to have known Harry's birth parents but the man insisted that they had been killed by some evil wizard with a dorky name instead of in a car crash. That might have been believable if not for the fact that the man had gone on to insist that the evil wizard had tried to kill Harry as well but had failed. That instead of Harry being killed, something inside of Harry had weakened and defeated the big bad dark guy and sent him fleeing into the night to lick his wounds.

Now, Harry was proud of the abilities he'd cultivated and he knew that there had been few solo players within SAO that could claim to have defeated a dragon on their own let alone four of the fiercest in the game (the three wyverns no where near as powerful as the dragons) aside from himself but not even he was egotistical enough to claim credit for defeating a powerful and powerfully evil dark wizard at the tender age of one. Besides, his aunt and uncle had been most insistent that his parents had died in a car crash because they'd been out drinking and doing drugs. It also seemed far more plausible to have gotten his old lightning bolt scar in a car crash than because he'd been hit by an unblockable killing 'curse' that he somehow survived.

So that was a huge strike against the man's believability; babies don't defeat the bad guys in any story. They might be orphaned and grow up to beat the bad guys out of revenge but they had to be trained through a series of deadly trials to gain the strength first; even Harry knew that much about the heroes in any story (and he hadn't been allowed to read that many stories least he 'get ideas' about his own unnaturalness). Yet another strike against his supposed guardian was the fact that the man kept claiming that both of Harry's parents and Harry himself were magicals; all of them part of some super secret society of sorcerers and sorceresses.

Harry had been nine when he'd been trapped in SAO and in all the memories he could recall from his life before he'd been trapped inside of the game, he'd never once seen any evidence that he was anything other than an unwanted and unloved boy and a burden to his relatives. There had been no turning any one's wig blue, no unexplained trips to the top of the school building, and no talkative pythons being released from the zoo.

His relatives had called him a freak and blamed everything on him but there was evidence enough that his 'freakishness' had been anything that stood out differently from the Dursleys and most of that was explainable by normal standards. His hair refused to sit neatly, he was too small for his age (mostly the fault of the Dursleys anyway), he had never been sick with the flu (or any other common illness), he was smarter than Dudley (an easy feat), and he'd been dumped on their doorstep by someone instead of being placed into foster care or in an orphanage after his parents died.

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