Our story begins with Swords & Sorceries VII. An online VRRPG.
Boasting a fully immersive VR world, it had been popular since the groundbreaking DreamTech game console first launched.
The game was the seventh entry in its series, and it had a dedicated fan base that was continuing to grow. Its hook was that it could synchronize with a player’s synapses via special equipment, stimulating their five senses in real life as they played. Since this offered a far more realistic experience than games on competing consoles, more and more people were drawn into the game and its world.
Sure, the equipment you needed was fairly expensive. But there was no end to the line of players looking for thrills in a realistic setting—and its vast world, promising all sorts of grand adventures, pulled them in.
Satoshi Osako was part of the game’s dedicated fan base. Today, like any other day, he was out in that digital world as his character, Zelos Merlin, enjoying adventures alongside his party.
Zelos’s eyes were hidden behind the bangs of his long, unkempt hair, and his face was covered in stubble. He was, in other words, the textbook definition of an average-looking middle-aged man. He was clad in top-rank gear, but it was all tied together with a plain design so as not to stand out.
What was more, he was a mage of medium build, wearing the sort of dirty gray robe you’d associate with shady types. Nobody would expect him to be one of the game’s top five players.
Yet despite it all, he was one of the “Destroyers”—the best players in the world.
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At its core, combat damage in Swords & Sorceries was determined by an individual’s skills and level. But one of the game’s flagship features was that players could make not only their own equipment and items but also custom spells. Essentially, players could create these spells by putting together symbols that represented fifty-six letters and ten numerals, allowing them to conjure up all sorts of magical effects.
Known as a Spell Circuit, this technique let players etch sigils into their subconscious to modify their starter magic, changing its power and effects. But it had an unusual quirk: the more delicate and complex the spell became, the less its power increased, and the less mana it would consume.
On rare occasions, however, even an attack that should have zero attack power however you looked at it would come out unusually powerful. And so the players, of course, decided to come together for some research.
This phenomenon caused an uproar right around the game’s launch, giving it a reputation as a crappy game for a period of time.
But before long, the players’ desperate search for an answer revealed a hidden mechanic of sorts. They found that by using the character’s own mana as a catalyst, it was possible to tap into the mana of the world itself and increase the ability’s power.
What’s more, it appeared that one could cast a spell in this manner using any magical formula, however clumsy or crude, so long as it met the requirements and could be used efficiently.
The problem was that things like the open world’s mana weren’t displayed as numbers. This left players scrambling to try and find just how much mana they needed to consume as a catalyst.
The uproar that had occurred at the game’s launch had stemmed from players modifying their abilities at random without any hints. In other words, it was a matter of mere coincidence.
Ultimately, it was left up to the players to discover hints about this hidden mechanic out in the open world or in dungeons, and each player was free to choose whether they wanted to take that on as a challenge or simply ignore it.
As a game, Swords & Sorceries offered a tremendous amount of freedom. But the players who really got hooked on it were those who had a considerable degree of real-world knowledge; most of the player base was content to simply use the existing spells as is. Creating spells took quite a long time, and many felt that just going out and exploring the world was a more enjoyable use of their time.
Still, improved spells could potentially have their cooldown and cast time reduced to zero—an advantage that left other players increasingly unhappy about the gap in power.
But Satoshi had gotten hooked, hard. Whatever those other players thought meant nothing to him.
Satoshi’s party let each of its members enjoy the game however they pleased, and they weren’t the type to turn their custom spells into “spell scrolls” to sell to other players. This had gotten them flamed online, met with crowds of players who were angry at them for not making their powerful spells public. But Satoshi and the others paid no heed to the abuse; if anything, they were thrilled to blow off the expectations of others. They simply went about their own way, developing all sorts of spells as they wished without caring about the eyes of others.
The game had been out for some seven years by now, but the top player rankings were invariably dominated by Satoshi and his party. You could say they were addicted.
Their magic had become abnormally complex, and the inscrutable system that made it all possible continued to be met with disapproval from those who were playing to beat the game. But at its core, the system was set up so that tips about spell creation could be found easily enough by searching the open world or the cities that served as bases.
As Satoshi and his party were fond of saying: “Don’t expect someone else to do the hard work for you!”
Satoshi had once made quite the name for himself as a programmer at a top-tier company. But for whatever reason, he had been laid off from his job, and he now lived a solitary life out in the countryside.
Each day he’d take care of the fields, then game obsessively. He was, to put it bluntly, not far off being a shut-in.
In his fictional world, he was a “Great Sage,” wielding power vast enough to make anyone envious. And the allure of this only made Satoshi more and more obsessed with the game. He was still a bachelor at the age of forty, and his only real family to speak of was an older sister. For him, this virtual world was a place to be at ease—one where he could simply be himself.
He probably would have been popular once, if only he had put some effort into his looks. But his laid-back approach to life had seen him slip past the prime age for marriage.
Satoshi—armed as he was with knowledge from his old career—played an important role in his party’s creation of powerful spells, but the other members were no slouches. They each boasted skills of their own that would inevitably bring about even more fiendish spells. The whole party was made up of single-minded research fanatics, and they took great pride in their skills.
Just for fun, they had kept up their efforts to make even higher-power, more mana-efficient spells, and cleared all sorts of difficult quests. And now, Satoshi was standing alongside his companions in the game’s story mode, fighting what was thought to be the game’s final boss—the Dark God.