The Beginning of Another World

by Mamare Touno

  Battles didn’t unfold as planned.

  It wasn’t that the monsters were tough. All it took to topple a goblin or a gray wolf was a single glancing blow from Naotsugu’s sword. Not only that, but a direct hit from one of Shiroe’s attack spells would kill a monster, even though, as an Enchanter, his attack spells were the weakest of any magic user’s. The level gap was just that big.

  However, being able to defeat the enemy didn’t mean the battles were easy. The first time he encountered a wolf, and the time he was swarmed by little green goblins brandishing bloodstained, rusty axes, Shiroe was so terrified that his knees would barely hold him. He was breathing ten times faster than he normally did, but even with that much air in his lungs, he felt like he wasn’t getting enough oxygen. It was hard to breathe, and his field of vision narrowed. If he hadn’t kept telling himself over and over that the enemy’s attacks wouldn’t do any damage, he might have turned and run.

  A little while later, that desperate guess—that they couldn’t take damage from these enemies—proved to be correct. At level 90, Shiroe’s HP was slightly over eight thousand, and as a Guardian, the class with the strongest Defense, Naotsugu had thirteen thousand. Against them, goblins could only inflict damage in the single digits. Even if the goblins came at them with ferocious shrieks and swung axes down on them with terrible force, it hurt less than taking a punch from an elementary schoolkid. Once they knew for sure that was the case, Shiroe and Naotsugu were finally able to calm down.

  Even though they stopped taking any damage once they’d relaxed, the fighting was still hard. Here, too, the weird tension produced by the conflict between natural physical laws and the Elder Tales specs reared its head.

  In Elder Tales battles, once players had formed a party, as Shiroe and Naotsugu had done, they chose team plays and strategies almost unconsciously while keeping an eye on each other’s HP via their status screens. Were other enemies approaching while they fought the enemies in front of them? Was the enemy merging or summoning reinforcements? Which enemy should they take down first? Which enemies was it safe to weaken to a certain level and leave for later? These insignificant scraps of information could have a major effect on the outcome of a battle.

  Under the circumstances, though, it was hard even to check each other’s HP. If they concentrated on their foreheads, the HP display came up in their mind’s eye. However, it was incredibly difficult to keep track of numbers and statuses while battling on rubble-strewn, uneven ground. As a magic user, Shiroe had the leeway to watch the whole battlefield from the rear, but Naotsugu had to attract enemy attacks on the front lines and protect the rest of his party, and having lost the wide field of vision and the ability to grasp his surroundings that he’d had in the game, he was practically flying blind.

  “This is a lot hairier than I thought it would be.”

  Naotsugu heaved a deep sigh as they ate the Chinese steamed buns they’d brought for lunch. Since the monsters here were so weak, they were able to fight without worrying about their HP, but how well they’d fare against an opponent on their level was anyone’s guess. Dejectedly eating the bland, salted muck that only looked like Chinese steamed buns, Shiroe and Naotsugu compared notes on the battle.

  Neither of them had any real-world fighting experience. They had no idea how to get used to the sensations and the fear battles brought, and they weren’t sure whether trying to do it this way would actually work. That said, they both knew that if they were scared of puny-level monsters, they’d be in big trouble if anything more serious happened later on. Since Elder Tales was a fantasy adventure game, fighting monsters was a major element. Whether this world had been influenced by Elder Tales or was the world of Elder Tales itself, getting used to fighting was going to be a big prerequisite of survival.

  Fortunately, they were both far tougher physically than they’d anticipated. Since they were high-level players, Shiroe’s and Naotsugu’s bodies didn’t seem to get fatigued. Even if they managed to wear themselves out by fighting or traveling, it only took them a few minutes of rest to recharge. They spent nearly all the daylight hours outdoors and used the hours between evening and true night to go to taverns and visit acquaintances in town, looking for new information and talking with players who were in the same situation.

  During those first four days, at least on the surface, the town of Akiba remained quiet. The big panic Shiroe had anticipated didn’t happen. That might have been because the players had been given the bare minimum required for peace of mind: Food was readily available—even if it tasted abysmal—and they’d seen that death in this world didn’t equal extinction. Of course, that didn’t mean nothing happened. Several trends began to appear, and while they weren’t large, they weren’t safe to ignore.

  First, the goods offered for sale at the market were rapidly disappearing. Many players seemed to have come to the same conclusion as Shiroe and taken their own items off the market. The remaining items belonged to players who had been lucky enough to not have logged in that day, and as the days went by, even those began to sell out. There were rumors that some of the big artisan guilds were buying up raw materials, and quite a few items became impossible to get. Many players belonged to production classes, but they seemed to have suspended their activities due to the current situation.

  Another trend was the guilds’ recruiting war and the search for guilds by unaffiliated players. Apparently, humans did feel more at ease when they belonged to something. The disaster seemed to have spurred many unaffiliated players, gamers who’d been content to spend their days carelessly until now, into taking the plunge and joining a guild. If a player was in your field of vision, it was possible to tell their name and which guild they belonged to by checking a menu. However, there was no easy way to see statistics about the whole situation from within the game. For that reason, all Shiroe had to go on was the general ratio of the players he saw, but he felt that the number of unaffiliated players was dwindling.

  Of course, as unaffiliated players who were also level 90, Shiroe and Naotsugu were approached by any number of guilds as they wandered through town. Both turned down every single invitation.

  Unlike Shiroe, Naotsugu didn’t seem to have any particular negative feelings toward guilds. When Shiroe asked him about it, he laughed. “Hanging out with somebody is an end result. You just start running, and you pick up friends along the way. That’s how it’s usually done.”

  The Debauchery Tea Party hadn’t been a guild, and it hadn’t been formed the way guilds were. To Shiroe and Naotsugu, former Tea Party members, a guild was just a name, and names weren’t important. In the first place, neither of them had any illusions that belonging to a guild would have protected them from the initial disaster or the resulting chaos.

  Unlike Shiroe and Naotsugu, though, many players seemed to feel that the guilds were the only things they could rely on. The twins Shiroe had been with on the day of the disaster seemed to have joined a guild as well. He only saw them once in town, from a distance, but they seemed to be safe, which was a small relief. As if to fulfill unaffiliated players’ desire for the reassurance of belonging somewhere, several guilds had launched expansion strategies. Some expanded by recruiting unaffiliated players and swelling their ranks, but it was more common for several small guilds to merge or for big guilds to target and appropriate particular players from other guilds.

  Shiroe didn’t understand why the guilds would want to boost their numbers. When he asked Marielle, she said it had to do with the current atmosphere in Akiba.

  Ever since the disaster, many players seemed to feel that they’d been exiled to this other world. Even Shiroe and Naotsugu felt to some extent that the situation was unfair. However, the irritation the players felt at this unfairness seemed to be much stronger than Shiroe had anticipated. When an entire guild shared this feeling, it turned into active rejection of anything that was not part of that particular guild. In other words, “Everyone who isn’t us is the enemy.” It was all right to t
rust members of the same guild, but no one else. In this harsh atmosphere, it could have been a natural attempt at self-defense.

  However, that atmosphere had grown too intense, and little by little, friction between the guilds was increasing. Of course, since Akiba was a noncombat zone, there would be no sudden outright attacks. If there were any attempts at starting a fight, at stealing, or at keeping someone prisoner, the guards would immediately teleport in and forcibly arrest the aggressor.

  That said, sharp words and harassment didn’t necessarily count as “combat.” There were all sorts of ways to slip harassment through the gaps in the definition of combat, especially now that players were physically part of this world. Small guilds were often the targets of this sort of harassment. Marielle gave a small smile that was both slightly troubled and intended to gloss over that trouble.

  It was while they were talking to Marielle that they uncovered something serious about the zones. Shiroe had absently opened his mental array of icons. Down below the information menu and the guild-related items, he discovered that an unfamiliar item had been added to the list. Although he wasn’t used to seeing the item here, he had seen it before. It was the menu that showed the information on the zone he was currently in, and it displayed all the usual items: JAPANESE SERVER / THE TOWN OF AKIBA / URBAN AREA—NO MONSTERS / NONCOMBAT ZONE / ENTRY PERMISSION (UNLIMITED) / EXIT PERMISSION (UNLIMITED).

  Shiroe, Marielle, and Naotsugu had been standing and talking in one of Akiba’s deserted streets, and so of course the display described Akiba, the zone they were in. No problems there.

  The problem was in the next line.

  THIS ZONE HAS NO SPECIFIC OWNER AT PRESENT. TO PURCHASE THIS ZONE, YOU’LL NEED SEVEN HUNDRED MILLION GOLD COINS. MONTHLY MAINTENANCE FEES ARE 1.2 MILLION GOLD COINS. PURCHASE? (YES / NO)

  That notice was a menu that appeared during purchases of small zones. A smaller abandoned building, for example, or a hotel room or the Crescent Moon League guildhall. Now, although it would take an astronomical sum of money to purchase it, Akiba itself was up for sale.

  At first, when Shiroe mentioned it to them, Marielle and Naotsugu laughed. Once they checked their own menus, though, they were struck dumb.

  Shiroe had a long history in Elder Tales, and he was a high-level player. As players went, he was comparatively wealthy. The total worth of everything in his bank account was about fifty thousand gold coins. He could declare categorically that seven hundred million gold coins wasn’t an amount any single player could pay.

  However, if one of the major guilds invested all the resources at their disposal—even then, he thought it probably wouldn’t be possible, but there was no guarantee that it wouldn’t be.

  If, hypothetically, someone bought the town of Akiba, the purchaser would be able to set entry restrictions. If they didn’t like a guild or an individual, they could make the town off-limits to them at the system level.

  When Marielle assembled the members of the Crescent Moon League and everyone split up and investigated, they discovered that almost every zone was now for sale. In other words, all zones—urban areas, fields, and dungeons—had been declared ownerless and put up for sale. The only exceptions were places that already had owners, such as the Crescent Moon League guildhall. Zones like that had acquired the option to revert the right of ownership to a deed item.

  By the fourth day after the disaster, Shiroe and the others were no longer able to shrug off the major guilds’ increasing strength as straightforward expansion strategies.

  2

  On the morning of the fifth day, Shiroe and Naotsugu left their usual inn and headed for the market to buy food for the day. Oddly for him (although it could have been because he’d just woken up), Naotsugu trudged along listlessly.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “…Nnergh. The idea of having to eat that craptastic food for the rest of forever is really bumming me out.”

  Shiroe knew exactly how Naotsugu felt. He’d never considered himself a gourmet, and he hadn’t had brag-worthy eating habits in the real world. Now, though, he realized just how well he’d eaten before.

  Those fast-food fried chicken bentos really were tasty. That sixty-eight-yen instant ramen. Mm, and yakisoba bread… All incredible luxuries, come to think of it.

  The same went for black tea, coffee, and soft drinks. That every single beverage tasted like city tap water had been really tough to take. From what Shiroe knew, all beverages were made by combining well water with other ingredients. When they’d tried drinking it, just to see, even well water had tasted like city tap water, which meant that the “city tap water” taste was probably all in their heads, and the water was just plain water.

  The idea that water mixed with something else was still just water made them feel as if they’d been cheated somehow.

  “…That’s all there is.”

  “Well, yeah. I know that. I just think they probably feed you better in jail even. I saw what they served at Abashiri Prison on a TV special one time, and it looked pretty good.”

  “Yeah.”

  Come to think of it, it did feel that way. Up until middle school, Shiroe had gone to a public school. The lunches he’d eaten there hadn’t been gourmet in any sense of the word, but they’d been far better than this world’s universal soggy rice cracker fare.

  “So, I’ve been thinking.”

  “About…?”

  “What if this is some divine torture chamber where we’re being forced to eat craptastic food?”

  Shiroe was about to tell him that was insane when he realized he had no way to disprove it. It sounded like a far-fetched, nutty idea, but reality was already pretty far-fetched and nutty, and he couldn’t just laugh it off as crazy talk.

  “If so, that particular god is pretty good at torture.”

  “That’s what I say. What if the food was poison and eating it made you cough up blood, but they kept making you eat it anyway? Doesn’t that sound like hell? Like there’d be tormenting demons who force-fed it to you.”

  You know, that does sound like it could be a Buddhist hell, Shiroe thought.

  “It’s not like that, though, is it? It’s probably some kind of nutritious, and it isn’t poison. Even the taste isn’t so bad you can’t choke it down. For one meal, it’d probably be okay. But it’s the only thing we’ve got. There will never, ever be any other flavor. This is all we get, from here to infinity, and we’ll just keep getting more and more bummed out—that’s some pretty high-level harassment, wouldn’t you say?”

  “That’s why I said they’re good at torture—not that I don’t wish they weren’t.”

  As Shiroe and Naotsugu were talking…

  …a pebble bounced off the asphalt at their feet with a faint click.

  When Shiroe looked up, he saw a tall man standing in the entrance to a crumbling three-story building that had once been some sort of shop.

  “That’s Akatsuki.”

  Black hair, black clothes, regular features. The man had a scarf wrapped around his face, hiding his mouth. He nodded to Shiroe.

  “Friend of yours?”

  “Yeah. This is Akatsuki,” Shiroe told Naotsugu as they approached the man. “He’s an Assassin.”

  Shiroe had gotten to know Akatsuki about a year ago. Akatsuki was an extremely taciturn player. This was partly due to the fact that, in this day and age, when practically everyone used voice chat, he preferred old-school text chats. Of course, that only made him a more authentic Assassin. There were quite a few role players like Akatsuki in Elder Tales. To Shiroe, role players were players who took atmosphere very seriously.

  Even before Elder Tales went real, Akatsuki had not been “that guy who plays a character called Akatsuki in the game,” but “a guy named Akatsuki who lives in this world,” and everything he said or did in the game had reinforced that image. Calling it acting would have been rude. Role-playing was part of the fun of games like Elder Tales, and there was no reason for other players to criticize it.r />
  Besides, Shiroe thought Akatsuki was a pretty skilled player. He was quiet, curt, and didn’t have a shred of personal charm—in that sense, he was very nearly the opposite of Marielle—but when Shiroe had been in parties with him, Akatsuki had performed his role flawlessly, and he’d never forgotten to be considerate to the other party members. Cheerful words and actions weren’t the only ways to be considerate. Players like him were invaluable these days.

  More than anything, Shiroe liked the fact that silences never got uncomfortable. In some relationships, silences tended to feel stony and strained, but Akatsuki and Shiroe were a bit alike in a few ways, and even when they’d hunted together for long stretches, the silence had never gotten awkward. Shiroe felt as if it was because they’d been communicating through something other than words, instead of simply being mute. They’d pieced together a conversation from small, intentional actions and exchanges: The timing of a team play, a slight gesture when providing support in combat, the rests between battles. An Assassin with a professional’s pride who could be relied on during quests: That was Shiroe’s image of Akatsuki.

  “Hi, Akatsuki. Did you need something?”

  Akatsuki got his intent across with a slight dip of his jaw, then withdrew into the depths of the shop, which looked set to come down around his ears. Apparently, this particular shop wasn’t an independent zone; it was just a huge object within the Akiba boundaries.

  Accepting Akatsuki’s invitation, Shiroe and Naotsugu followed him into the dim ruin.

  “Hey, Shiro. What sort of guy is this dude?” Naotsugu whispered.