Sword Art Online Progressive Volume 01

Sword Art Online Progressive Volume 1 is the start of the reboot of Sword Art Online, a light novel series by Kawahara Reki. It was released on October 10, 2012.

Summary
The volume contains Kirito's adventures at the first and second floors of Aincrad, including a rewrite of two side stories.

Aria in the Starless Night (Aincrad 1st floor, December 2022)
It has been a month since Kayaba's tutorial, Kirito is in a dungeon and found himself watching a person fighting a Ruin Kobold Trooper. Kirito decides to appoarch the player and tries to give some advice on how to fight more efficienctly, soon realizing that the player was female. The rapier user decided to end the conversation with Kirito as the monsters were going to re-spawn soon and begins to walk away before fainting. Kirito quickly transport her outside the dungeon. After the player had finally rested on the grassy field, she wakes up and notices Kirito who saved her; she responded to him by stating that saving her was an "Unnecessary Effort". After the rapier user reminisced about how her old ordinary life changed when she borrowed the «NerveGear» from her older brother: «Yuuki Koichiro». Kirito notifies the player about the upcoming meeting for the boss raid at the town call «Tolbana». When they reach to the town, they parts ways.

Kirito finds Argo and learns that the buyer had raised his price 29,800 «Col» for his Anneal Blade however Kirito again refuses the offer. Kirito later met up with Asuna as she was having lunch by the fountains at the town centre. During their brief conversation, Asuna realizes that the meeting was about to start and they both head to the meeting.

Interlude - Reason for the Whiskers
Kirito has just opened the gate of the second floor of Aincrad, while hidding, he sees Argo running from some guys, he follows them and identify that the guys were part of a guild from the Beta test period that simulate to be ninjas.

He enters in action and stops them until a monster attacks them and they run off, Argo thanks Kirito and he tells her that he wants to know the reason behind her whiskers. She instead decides to give him the extra skill hidden on that floor.

She takes him to a hut in the mountains of the second floor, where an NPC is waiting for a disciple, Kirito accepts the quest, and the NPC takes him out of the hut and tells him that he has to break a big rock with just his palms, and before starting he paints his face and tells him that he won't be able to take off the paint until the breaks the rock. That's when he realizes that Argo tried to do the quest on the Beta period, but wasn't able to clear it, so she kept the whiskers.

After three days Kirito breaks the boulder and clears the quest, obtaining the Martial Arts extra skill.