I had planned to make this release last week to celebrate the beginning of the Progressive series in the SAOverse (Aria begins on 2 December, while the Illfang battle takes place on 4 December) by dedicating the week's release to a similarly-named story written way back in SAO's web novel days: The Progressers. However, Mtt injured himself and wasn't able to finish up the story in time, so let's be open-minded about the matter. It's the thought that counts!

Anyway, The Progressers is the first installment of Kawahara Reki's doujinshi series of stories that he released in a doujinshi event known as COMITIA. The first ME was written and drawn in manga format by the author and features a story about a Field Boss battle on the 56th Floor (a scene from this story is also featured in episode 5 of the SAO anime's first season). Although this story had already been translated by Tap years ago, when the Material Editions were compiled into the Material Edition:Remix compilation that the author published through Dengeki, the artist of the Phantom Bullet and Project Alicization manga took up to redo the art for MEs 1 and 3 with more up-to-date designs of the characters, and we decided to retranslate the story to republish it with the new art.

For the most part, aside from the new art, the Remix version of ME1 isn't all that different from the original story. There have been a few changes, such as shortening some dialogues, removing some bubbles, and re-ordering some panels, but there are no major changes to the story itself. Heck, even the tons of Kawahara's notes from the original release got brought over... and yikes, here I thought my releases had tons of notes...

Anyway, I hope you enjoy the release. If you have any suggestions/requests for what to work on, feel free to leave a comment or contact us through Twitter/Discord/Email. Mttblue2 wants a break next week due to RL stuff, so I guess I'll translate an AGGO short for next week.

Finally, a standard thank you to all of those who contributed to the SAO Scans project for helping us get the raws.

Any feedback is appreciated.

-Gsimenas