“Year? What do you mean?”
“Oh? It’s your first time meeting another visitor? Must be because you shut yourself away in a backwater city like Faltra the whole time. If you were in the capital, you might have met other visitors.”
For real?!
“Hmph... Cease your pointless blabbering and answer my question,” Diablo asked, reverting to his Demon Lord role play.
Noah simply snickered at him.
“How long are you gonna keep talking like that?”
Well, I can’t help it! I can’t speak to women without acting like a Demon Lord, be it this world or that one! If you want to talk to the real me, turn into a dog or a cat or something!
“Heheh... You would insult a Demon Lord?!” Diablo stuck to his guns.
“Well, yikes... Whatever, I guess everyone has problems to sort through. All right, let’s start really exchanging information. I’m from Cross Reverie’s closing days. The time when the developer announced the game’s servers were about to be shut down.”
“Shut down?!”
“Are you that surprised? An MMORPG where the gacha only drops weapons wasn’t going to last much longer. They did announce a sequel, though. The characters wouldn’t transfer and the system was going to be overhauled, but the setting was supposed to be the same.”
“A sequel...?!”
“Well, the game I was maining at the time had a school setting where you could roll cute school boys in the gacha. I only played Cross Reverie on the side, to burn time.”
A gacha game with cute school boys...?
Diablo couldn’t fathom what would be interesting about a game like that, but Noah was a woman back in the old world, too. Diablo never looked into it too deeply, but apparently games aimed at women often had male characters as drops in their gacha rolls.
“Playing social games on the train to work was all I lived for...” Noah moaned, cradling her head. “I played so many games... So why?!”
“Mm?”
“Why did I get incarnated into this bloody fantasy world instead of 《Stud Academy Men’s Love》?!”
“Don’t ask me!”
“I mean, leveling up in Cross Reverie was piss easy, so I maxed my character’s level, but...”
Getting to level 99 was easy in the game so long as one kept playing at a decent pace, but to go over level 100, one had to clear challenging quests and go to great lengths. After that, gaining even a single level became much harder.
Diablo reached level 150, the max level at the time, which only a limited number of top players in the game reached. But Noah, by contrast, only played Cross Reverie on the side. How did she max out her level, then? Something about her explanation felt off.
“Tell me, woman. What level are you?” Diablo asked her.
“Me? I’m level 300.” Noah replied casually.
“Wh-Wh-Whaaaat...?!” Diablo’s jaw fell open.
This shocked him even more than her admitting to be a visitor to this world. Noah simply waved her hand dismissively, though.
“That’s not that impressive, at least in the year I came from. You said your level is 150, right? That was the max level back during the game’s golden days. That’d be five years ago for me, in that world’s time.”
“Kuh... So you’re saying you came from the other world, five years after I was playing the game.”
“You catch on quick. What, were you a sci-fi nerd?”
“They’d bump up the level limit once every six months or so, so I figured it would go over level 200 within five years, but...”
“Well, during the social game bubble, all sorts of games would pop up like mushrooms after the rain. Cross Reverie’s sales were being overtaken, so they revamped the system. They’d shower players with free gacha pulls and presents, so leveling up became really easy.”
Diablo fell into a sour silence. That explanation did not please him.
“The game’s balance tipped, and that only cut its lifespan short — or, well, that’s what people would say. I didn’t really care, since I never played Cross Reverie’s old balance.”
“The game’s developers were stupid,” Diablo spat out bitterly.
Whenever something became popular, derivative works naturally popped up. This was true for everything, not just the entertainment industry. And when an up-and-coming competitor starts overtaking an existing work, there are only a few ways of dealing with it.
For a game, one of those ways was tuning the difficulty. Making it easier to win and quicker to level up would flatter the players. But then again, where was the sense of reward in leveling up without any effort? Where was the challenge? Players would demand easily obtainable rewards, but dropping the game’s difficulty only served to drain it of what made it fun to begin with.
It’s the struggle that made the achievement feel worth it!
Diablo sighed in disappointment, but it was then that Noah changed the subject.
“That’s enough about Cross Reverie, though. I don’t know the story behind how that game was made, but this world is a different place.”
“So it seems.”
“Personally, I see the life I lead here as my real life. So I won’t go back... not to a life of being stepped on at every turn.”
“No one treats you like that now that you’re the minister, right?”
“Yeah. But I can’t do it alone.”
“Oh?”
“How did you come to this world? I was incarnated into this world as a baby. My parents died a horrible death, and that made me think I’d need to change Lyferia’s political structure from the bottom up. No... I swore I’d change it. In front of their graves. Graves of soil, without any tombstones!”
“...It was different for me,” Diablo said, a bit overwhelmed by her vehement words.
Diablo was summoned by Rem and Shera. It was technically a teleportation of sorts, although he did assume his game character’s appearance. Noah’s way of coming into this world was different, it seemed.
“I don’t want to go back to that other world again,” Noah told him. “My life in this world is everything I have. Everything that matters. And if I want to reform this country, it’s not too late to do it now.”
“Really?”
“The situation is difficult, yes, but... I do want to make Lyferia into a utopia. A country without discrimination or discord.”
Building a country, huh...?
Diablo didn’t care for that.
“Hmph... I can’t relate to that feeling, but I can at least understand what you mean. I don’t think it’s a mistaken idea.”
“There’s something I want you to answer,” Noah said, eyeing him seriously. “Why are you so... reckless? Nothing you do ever makes sense. Are you trying to get back to that world again? Is that why you’re doing whatever suits you?”
Noah seemed to misunderstand Diablo. He wasn’t doing whatever he pleased. If he could simply tell her he was a socially crippled gamer who could only talk to others by pretending to be a Demon Lord, things would be that much easier. But no matter how candidly they might answer each other’s questions, Diablo could never say that.
He couldn’t reveal his true self just as much as he couldn’t live without breathing.
Same as how an earthworm had no legs. As how a pillbug couldn’t fly. He couldn’t reveal his true self, no matter how much he might be misunderstood, mocked, or loathed for it. Even if it made his life that much worse, he simply could not.
“Hmph! Just like you chose to live as a minister, I chose to live as a Demon Lord. And that’s why the lives of the people of this land mean nothing to me!”
“I’ve been looking into the things you’ve done with my personal intelligence network,” Noah shook her head. “You’re not being honest.”
So she knows.
“What are you, some kind of stalker...?”
“The High Priest Lumachina wouldn’t place her trust in you if you were such a terrible person. She can tell between people who have good intentions and those who act out of malice.”
She can...? Then how was she duped by those villains for so long? No... It’s because she could see through them that they tried to take her life... If she didn’t see through them, they’d have just used her, and she’d have been safe.
“Do you know Lumachina well?”
“I’ve only given her my regards during the kingdom’s religious rituals. She probably only knows me by name, too.”
“Then how... Did you meet her in the game?”
Diablo had seen some NPCs he recognized from the game walking around Faltra, like the clerks in the weapon and item shops.
“Lumachina had a special role to play in the game,” Noah nodded. “A special NPC in the game — we called them Admins.”
“Admins...?”
“I guess they weren’t called that back when you were playing the game? I mean, you met the Swordmaster.”
“You knew Sasara, too?!”
But what she said made sense, in a way. Sasara reached level 200 despite only training for a handful of years. A warrior like her was removed from the logic of this world.
“The Admins would give players difficult challenges to clear, and helped them level up in the process,” Noah continued.
“Cross Reverie was that kind of game...” Diablo nodded.
“But while Admins were granted special talents and powers, they had restrictions placed on them, too.”