We study the QCD phase diagram away from the strong coupling limit (SCL) with fluctuation effects in the auxiliary field Monte-Carlo (AFMC) method. First, we give an effective action which contains next-to-leading order (NLO) finite coupling effects of the strong coupling expansion as well as fluctuation effects. Second, we examine NLO effects of the strong coupling expansion in AFMC at zero quark density. We find that the chiral condensate is reduced by both NLO terms from temporal plaquettes and fluctuation effects, and almost no dependence on NLO terms from spatial plaquettes in the current analysis. These behaviors can be understood from the modification of the mass and the wave function renormalization factor by auxiliary fields as in the mean field analysis and the fluctuation effects in the strong coupling