Part 4

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Volume 1

Prologue

— 4 —

As the battle ended and the excitement died down, the weight of the matter slowly dawned upon me.

After making sure the female bandit was secured, the lizardmen merchants offered me a ride to the town on their wagon. I took them up on the offer and hitched a ride with them. But I was freaking out mentally.

It wasn’t just the scenery outside the window, the smell of the forest, or the sound of the wind. The bandit’s realistic situational decision-making, the solid feeling of impact as my blows struck home, the pain in my chest from running out of breath that should have been controlled and limited by the VR machine, and finally, the vibrations and small vertical movements I could feel as the wagon moved forward…

Various inconsequential things that could—or rather, should—have been omitted from a game now manifested themselves in front of me as reality.

I could no longer ignore the matter.

Right now, I wasn’t “playing a game.”

I was “inside a game.”

It may be difficult to believe, but nothing else could explain the current situation.

The changes that made this world seem like reality were on a level that couldn’t be explained by a surprise patch. Yet, on the other hand, this world followed the rules of the game surprisingly accurately.

But more than anything, what brought me to this conclusion was the exchange I had with Maki right before all this happened. At the time, she was holding what could have been the Lucky Mallet. According to legend, the Lucky Mallet could grant any wish made as it was swung.

Right before the changes happened, these were Maki’s words:

“IF YOU LIKE YOUR GAMES SO MUCH, WHY DON’T YOU JUST GO LIVE IN ONE, YOU JERK?!”

Considering the situation, I could deduce that Maki, fed up with what I’d said, yelled those words while swinging the Lucky Mallet in anger.

Fulfilling the requirements of “making a wish while swinging the mallet,” the Lucky Mallet did as she commanded and sent me into the world of a game.

Ugh, this is absurd… I thought, despite it being my own theory.

Even if alternate worlds existed somewhere, it was hard to believe that one of them would just happen to be identical to the world of Nekomimineko. If I was right, the Lucky Mallet probably created a world identical to Nekomimineko the moment Maki made her wish. And then it sent me there to boot.

Which would mean a whole new world was created just to grant a wish my cousin made out of spite. Seriously, how absurd could you get?

Even ignoring all that, being sent to some random world just because of a dumb exchange straight out of a comedy manga… It wasn’t even funny.

Actually, thinking about it a little more, this was really no laughing matter.

Why, out of all games, did it have to be this one?!

Nekomimineko was not your ordinary game. Events created just to cause trouble for the player lay in wait around every corner, the game balance was ridiculous from start to end, and if that wasn’t enough, instant death bugs were scattered everywhere. It was the worst game.

I don’t know exactly how many times I cleared my save data and started from scratch, but my deaths probably easily numbered in the hundreds. Including the times I reset and loaded mid-game, that number definitely surpassed a thousand.

In this game, where even level 300 plus players died regularly, I only had the stats of a newbie, back at level 1.

In other words, now that the game was real, I was faced with the challenge of perfectly clearing it with no resets under the constant fear of death.

There’s no way I can do that! Facing this sudden reality, my face paled.

“Wass wrong? Are syou alright?” One of the lizardmen called out to me in concern.

“No, I’m okay, Mr. Reinhart.”

I somehow gathered my thoughts and replied with a smile to their leader, Reinhart.

“Is that sso? Well, if there’ss anything bothering syou, les me know. Yous are our ssavior. We wills do what swe can.” Despite the heavy lisping accent unique to lizardmen, he had a way with words.

Now that I thought about it, with a cool name like Reinhart and his accommodating personality, he might actually be a hunk amongst the lizardmen.

…Hmm.

When this was just a game, nobody would call out to me when I was down like this. There could be other differences as well.

I was lucky to come across such friendly people. If I let this opportunity pass me by, then I’d surely regret it.

Deciding to gather some information from Reinhart and the lizardmen, I opened my mouth. “In that case, I’d like to ask you a few things.”

 ***

Having spoken with the lizardmen, I came to understand a few things.

From the conversation we had in the wagon, it seemed like they—who were supposed to be simply AI-controlled NPCs in-game—were now no less intelligent than humans in the real world, at the very least. In fact, Reinhart had journeyed to a variety of places and also had a knack for storytelling, so even with his blunt tone of voice, I found myself getting sucked into his stories.

With that being said, their knowledge wasn’t all the same as in reality. They accepted things like HP, levels, skills, and other such game constructs as normal. Just like me, they were unable to open the menu screen; apparently, you needed to use certain items to see this information.

However, even though they accepted the various “elements of a game” that defined this world, they didn’t seem to have the notion that “this world is a game.” Though, this was already true back when this actually was still a game, so it wasn’t all that surprising.

In addition to the people, this world most definitely shared the same setting as the game I played, with the stage set in the Kingdom of Licht.

And it wasn’t just the geography and names of places. When I tried to confirm what I remembered about Licht’s history and customs, it matched everything Reinhart spoke of, except that he was able to tell it with a much higher level of detail. It perfectly matched the game’s setting down to the minutiae; even the parts that were just made up by the games’ staff on a whim and made no sense when you thought about them realistically.

By the way, the language used in this kingdom was the Continental Common Language, which was basically just modern Japanese. This was the obvious decision given that New Communicate Online was a Japanese game, but either way, I was grateful that I didn’t need to worry about a language barrier.

The lizardmen also asked a few things about my background, but I just dodged their questions by claiming I was a traveler from afar. In this world filled with demi-humans and people with weird hair colors oft-seen in games, black hair and black eyes may have been a rare sight, but it didn’t seem like they thought it was something worth prying into.

The question from Reinhart that troubled me the most was about the skill combos I used to defeat the bandit, but I just told him it was my trump card so I couldn’t get into it and requested that, if possible, they not speak of it to anyone else, which they obediently agreed to.

Now that I thought about it, I’d never seen NPCs animation-cancelling in-game. Nothing good would come from standing out too much, so I silently decided to limit my use of cancelling where others could see me, as much as possible.

After chatting for a while, Reinhart jolted suddenly and gazed out of the window. “…We’re almoss there.”

Following his lead, I too stuck my head out of the wagon and looked forward.

As I did, I was greeted by a familiar giant gate and the outer walls surrounding the town in front of us.

“That’s…”

The entrance to the Kingdom of Licht, and the very first town of Nekomimineko, Ramlich.

…I wonder why.

A giant gate that you wouldn’t see anywhere in Japan. A sturdy wall to protect the people inside from the threat of monsters. Behind those were the tall European-style buildings that I had seen before in-game.

More than the female bandit and the lizardmen—more than even seeing real weapons and armor—these felt overwhelmingly real.

It was at this point that I finally came to acknowledge it.

It seemed…

…I’ve really come to “another world.”

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