Canon's eyes opened. For a moment, she couldn't believe what she was seeing. However, this feeling of surprise didn't last long. Rather, it was replaced a few seconds later by confusion, and then a dawning sense of horror.
The moment before, she'd been fighting a group of trolls atop a high mountain peak, when her weapon had suddenly disappeared from her hand. Crying out in surprise, she'd looked up to see the gigantic enemies looming over her, already preparing to strike. The sheer, bleak cliff behind her left no route of escape, and, without her weapons, she was suddenly helpless. Shutting her eyes, she had braced for the impact, hoping to withstand it with some of her HP left.
To her confusion, when she opened them, she found herself suddenly standing somewhere completely different: Nova City. Specifically, the main square. While she supposed this was one of the game's main respawn points, she hadn't gotten the death message or had any respawn delay, which meant she hadn't died, had she? But stranger yet, as she looked down at herself, she found all of her familiar gear suddenly gone, replaced by a basic, form-fitting light armor suit which, although done in her usual burgundy and gold coloring, had never even been in her inventory to begin with. Besides, this was just level 1 gear. It would be useless to her! Opening her character screen and inventory with a small sweep of her hand, she had hoped to just find her old gear displayed there so she could re-equip it, but, she became further baffled when she saw her inventory - empty - and her stat display, which read that she was a level 1. All her hard-earned stats had suddenly been removed! She actually gave a small cry of surprise at this, but it was drowned out by the murmur of the equally confused crowd all around her. Opening a side-window, she decided she'd try to log out and back in in the hopes that whatever glitch had occurred would be negated, somehow. But when she opened the side-bar, all she found was a blank screen where the familiar, ever-present button had always been. Now her growing feeling of uneasiness turned to fear, and, in an instant, that fear became proven to be reality.
For in the next moment, in the skies above, a hooded figure appeared, and delivered the death sentence of ten thousand people, amongst whom stood Canon, her violet eyes wide with shock and disbelief. As the skies suddenly became overcast and snow started to fall - the date on her menu changed suddenly to January 1st, but she didn't notice that at the moment - Canon simply stared upward toward where the message had just been delivered. This... this was a joke, right? So many people, trapped in a death game with little chance of surviving... Something like that could never happen, right? Someone would put a stop to it... right? They'd all be logged out soon, wouldn't they? Or maybe this was just some kind of practical joke? Yeah, that had to be it, didn't it...? But then... why couldn't she log out? And where was everyone else? This crowd was only a small fraction of the player base, so where did everybody else go? Maybe... was this reality after all? No. No. No no no no no no no no no no NO NO NO! This couldn't be happening, it couldn't be happening, this couldn't be REAL!
Canon stumbled weakly backward, and slowly turned her eyes upon her character screen with disbelief. All of this... she wanted it to go away. She was scared. She wanted to log out now. Why couldn't she just log out?! She'd rather have been pathetic than afraid, so why couldn't she just go back to reality...?
She was jarred out of her thoughts by shouting from behind her, but even then, she hardly perceived it. Yet, it continued to draw closer... until suddenly, a fast-moving object struck her from behind. Giving a slight cry, she found herself knocked to the ground as, in the next instant, a heavy weight briefly crushed her down, then vanished again as, stepping on top of her and continuing her frantic flight, a girl with vibrant red hair proceeded to dash through the crowd, brandishing a sword. Canon tried to rise, only to be caught by the stampede that followed as players frantically ran this way and that. The young warrior watched in horror as she actually started to take damage from the impact of countless feet treading over her. One HP gone, two, three, four, five, six... these numbers soon became dozens, and dozens became scores, until her hit points gauge was over half empty.
And then, all of the fear she'd felt until that point exploded. Panic took over. She didn't know if it was a prank or if this illusion had, in fact, become reality, but she knew one thing above all else. She didn't want to die. She wouldn't die, she was scared of dying. With all of her strength, she began to flail about, lashing out at everyone around her. People fell from atop her as slowly, she forced her way up. Then, taking off in a mad dash in a random direction, Canon began plowing her way frantically through the crowd. She would collide with someone, fall, then rise immediately and just keep on running. Never once did she look back. No, all that mattered to her was getting away, escaping from all this and going... somewhere. She didn't care. But she had to run, had to run or she'd die. She couldn't die. She was too afraid to die!
At last, the crowds around her thinned, and, she realized, she escaped the crushing press of bodies. Slowly, as her HP began its tedious and slow recovery cycle, her heart, too, began to calm. But that fear that welled up inside her hadn't changed. Now that she had accepted the possibility of her death, everything around her had suddenly become a threat. In that moment, she realized that, even if she couldn't prove it, she now also couldn't deny the potential danger she was in. If her HP reached zero, there was a chance that she, Suzaku Kanna... would cease to exist. And that chance, even if she had no way of knowing for sure whether or not it was in fact reality... was enough to terrify her. She wanted to run, wanted to escape from all of this. She wanted to hide somewhere, and pray that this would all end quickly. Suddenly, she realized, she wasn't so strong as she had thought. In fact, she'd never been strong at all. That's right... everything she was, everything she thought, it was all a lie. Deep down, she was the same terrified little wretch as before she had ever begun this game. She suddenly missed her family, her classmates - even the ones who bullied her. She missed being kicked down and called names. She missed her blurry vision and all the colds she caught out in the real world. She missed studying and the endless hours of schoolwork that would yield no successful results. She missed being alive, even though it had seemed like a hardship to her before. Canon was terrified, scared, and lonely... but even still, she didn't want to die.