After slaying the wolf, I cautiously examined my surroundings. The situation I now found myself in felt unreal; by all rights, I should have been more discombobulated than before. Yet I was oddly calm, able to operate as if I was just ignoring the tide of confusion.
I gathered what had been dropped in the wake of the fight against the wolf, pilfering the majority of stuff that seemed useful from the corpses, which must have been its prior victims. I didn’t feel guilty about it. For one, it was necessary, but even more salient was the fact that I had been numbed to feeling. Nothing ran through my head. I was merely doing my best to survive the day.
The resources the bodies had on them were sundries indispensable for surviving this place. That was the cold calculus. I put on the equipment I stole piece by piece: leather gloves, a mantle, a leather bag about my waist. I inserted as many strangely shaped knives into the belt of my jeans as I could, and I carried a one-handed sword.
As I purloined what I could from the corpses, I faced them and pressed my hands together in a prayer gesture. Lastly, I looked toward where the wolf had vanished. The greatsword that had been wielded during the battle was on the floor. I wanted to use it, but it was about twice the weight of the one-handed sword. Toting that thing around wasn’t realistic. No, what really caught my attention wasn’t the sword, but rather the shining green gemstone. There were many like it among the cadavers’ valuables as well. I had decided that if I tried taking them with me under the present circumstances, they’d just be dead weight—a liability that could spell my demise. So I’d refrained from placing any in my bag.
The color of this particular gem, however, was quite similar to the hue of the wolf’s fur. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I put two and two together. Preposterous as it was, I was somewhat confident I was right: in this place, objects were left behind when one took out a monster, and this gem was no exception.
It was a maudlin thought, but I figured maybe a strange kinship could have developed between me and the wolf. We’d both been attacked by those humans, after all. I picked up the stone and put it in my pocket.
“All right, now what?”
I’d done what I could up to that point. If some sort of hostile creature appeared, I had a means of counterattacking. Now I had to decide whether to wait there or to keep moving.
The gash in my thigh was shallower than I’d thought. Most likely, my body had flinched away reflexively. However, while stanching the bleeding through pressure had made it somewhat better, merely walking still proved troublesome. Movement increased the bleeding, and it was a safe bet that I’d lose my stamina, which in turn threatened death. There could be no doubt that moving too much came with a serious risk to life and limb.
On the other hand, waiting motionlessly was also a terrifying prospect. What I’d just gone through had been too frightening to make waiting for someone to save me a palatable idea. There were the monsters, but worst of all, the grim impact of having humans with whom I had pleaded for help simply cut me down had taken root in my heart. Even if I were to wait for someone, it was doubtful I could get whoever conveniently appeared to actually help me. So I chose to stay on the move.
“Guess I’ll use this sword as a cane...” I leaned on my sword to see how it felt. It wasn’t terribly suited to being a walking stick.
“If only I had better stuff. A better tool,” I said, as I scanned my vicinity once more.
【ITEMS】
Empty
Text displayed in midair met my eyes.
“Huh? What the... Huh?”
My confusion revved back up, as did my sensation of being unmoored from reality. A hoarse laughter came from my throat.
The text was displayed in a clean textbox that seemed to float within arm’s reach, like garbage glued to my retinas. No matter where I looked, it refused to disappear, much like a pop-up in some video game. There was no doubt now—in this space, such textboxes were something I’d keep seeing. It was then that I knew.
“Ha, ha ha... I mean, it’s just like...”
It was just like a video game.
I had low-key felt the words “video game” shaking in the back of my mind the whole time. There was the fantasy world. The Dungeon. The monsters—a giant insect, a giant wolf. The adventurers—the swordfighter, the archer, the flames of the mage. The way the slain shone upon dying. The shiny gem. The text message following a battle. The information menus and textboxes. Items in general. All common fixtures of video games.
Everything felt upside down, topsy-turvy. It was so surreal that all the colors around me might as well have been inverted. But I accepted it. I accepted the video gameness. And accepting my new reality was comforting, in a way. If my sheer terror ebbed, that was enough for me. I still wanted to run, but I could feel my horizons getting wider and wider, like I was in a dream.
“All right, if that’s the case, then first things first. Show me about me.” I figured it was worth a shot.
【 S T A T S 】
N a m e ： K a n a m i A i k a w a
H P : 4 / 5 1
M P : 7 2 / 7 2
C l a s s ：
L e v e l 1
S t r 1 . 1 1
V i t 1 . 0 3
D e x 1 . 0 1
A g i 2 . 0 2
I n t 4 . 0 0 ... ...
I stopped trying to parse it halfway through. It was all English. “Man, I’m having trouble understanding this. Wonder if I can make it easier to read.”
Then the display box switched languages:
【STATUS】
NAME: Aikawa Kanami
HP: 4/51
MP: 72/72
CLASS:
LEVEL 1
STR 1.11
VIT 1.03
DEX 1.01
AGI 2.02
INT 4.00
MAG 2.00
APT 7.00
CONDITION: Confusion 1.01, Blood Loss 0.52
EXP: 805/100
EQUIPMENT: One-Handed Steel Sword, Otherworld Garb, Elven Cloak, Leather Gloves, Otherworld Footwear, Spellseal-Inscribed Throwing Knife
“Ah, there we go; now it’s in Japanese.”