It was morning. After waking up, I stepped out in front of the inn to stretch, planning to take a stroll and maybe do a bit of fishing by the river, when I noticed the sky not far off had taken on that ominous look. Those were the shatter patterns of a wave.
“I daresay, I never expected a wave to hit so close to the Second City again.”
“Right?” said Tsumugi. “I totally thought it would happen around Mikakage.”
“Yes. For it to happen so close...”
Yeah, everyone really thought it was Mikakage’s turn. I did too.
“But in hindsight,” I said, “it’s not hard to see why it wouldn’t happen there.”
“Why would you say it wouldn’t happen in Mikakage, milord?”
“First off, there’s that entry system. You can’t even pass through the checkpoints if you haven’t ranked up your visa, right? That sort of thing puts a serious restriction on players who just want to take their time playing freely. The waves are technically supposed to be open to all players, so holding it there would just be unfair.”
“I daresay, ’tis a bit late for that.”
“Yeah, you and Shouko didn’t get to join the second wave, after all.”
“We got exempted from it. And that’s because we were in the middle of unlocking the Third City, Cal Mira. But if Mikakage’s quests became a requirement for wave participation, a ton of players would be locked out.”
Sure, we’d missed the game’s main, titular event, but that was only because we were in the middle of a large-scale quest that was arguably just as important. But telling players in a Second Life Project game that they couldn’t join the wave just because they hadn’t finished Mikakage’s quests? That was something else entirely.
“Secondly, the Mikakage thing just happened recently, right?”
“You mean the Demon Lord’s Invasion Event, I daresay.”
“Bingo. Having major events in the same location back-to-back would get stale, don’t you think?”
“Sure enough, it makes sense why they’d want it somewhere else.”
“Even so, isn’t it weird for it to happen near the Second City again? I daresay, both the first and second waves happened around here. They’d be more justified holding it in the middle of the ocean again.”
I couldn’t deny that. The first and second waves both happened between the first and second cities. With so many new areas made accessible, it didn’t make sense to have another wave near the second city.
“Where did the second wave take place, exactly? Shouko and I were off on Cal Mira, so we never got the details.”
“The second wave happened in a field called the Riyute Highway, I daresay. It’s a trail not far from the Second City.”
“It’s not a popular place, so maybe that’s why it didn’t leave much of an impression.”
“I see. Well, I’m not the one who made the game, so I can’t say for sure what the reasoning is behind wave locations. But at least from a logical standpoint, Mikakage isn’t a suitable place right now.”
As I’d already stated, Mikakage simply wasn’t a player-friendly zone in its current state.
With Cal Mira, the dungeon system made it easy to set up a good environment for the battle. Even Shipboard Combat wasn’t a huge problem—as long as you’d been on a ship before the wave hit, you could maneuver well enough to avoid being useless.
“Well, if they treated it like an emergency wave response, I think they could just shut down the checkpoint system and let everyone travel to the area,” I conceded.
“I daresay, you could take advantage of that to sneak past the visa system.”
“In that case, the players who worked hard to level up their visas just to make progress might feel like it’s unfair,” Shouko pointed out.
I myself wasn’t going to complain about something like that, but it wasn’t out of the question.
“Mikakage’s got a unique thing going for it compared to the rest of the game... Either way, it looks like the area’s been skipped over for this wave. Or maybe, the location selection has some degree of randomness.”
The Second Life Project had a rule that once a player finished a session, they couldn’t participate in the next run of the same game. Even if they spread knowledge from their previous playthrough, the devs made sure to tweak everything a bit to keep it from being useful.
That was part of why there was all that talk before the game started about Spirits being a weak race.
“They say you can rationalize anything if you try hard enough. I daresay, perhaps we don’t need to overthink it.”
“That’s just how it is. What we need to focus on right now is preparing as much as we can.”
“With that said, we’ve already made a lot of progress in our preparations.”
Shouko was right. We’d fully equipped ourselves one way or another. Since she, Yamikage, and I were all Spirits and raising our Energy cap involved fighting a wide variety of monsters...we’d made a point of visiting the hunting grounds we’d previously ignored.
By now, we’d made a full loop through all the relatively accessible areas.
“Maybe we should wrap it up and do our final preparations in Mikakage?”
“I’ve been exchanging intel with my friends,” said Tsumugi, “and it looks like our levels are a bit behind. I guess we can’t catch up to people who’ve been grinding it out seriously.”
“But you don’t plan on losing to them, do you?”
“Of course not. This isn’t like the place our sis came from. This game doesn’t need that sort of extreme play.”
Sure enough...level wasn’t everything.
People around us seemed to see us as top players with wealth to spare, but honestly, we’d just been going at our own pace... We were having fun without pushing ourselves too hard.
“Let’s regroup with sis and start planning for the wave!”
“Yes! I’ve finally got a sense for Cooperation Skills.”
“I daresay, we should report to Lady Sheryl as well.”
Come to think of it, I haven’t really talked to Sheryl in a while... She’s been holed up for a long time, after all.
And so, we decided to return to Cal Mira to meet back up with everyone.
But that was when we ran into...a bit of an incident.
Alto had vanished without a trace.