Chapter 1
HUH, MUST HAVE fallen asleep before I could log out, Kagami thought.
He looked up at the sky before rubbing the sleep from his eyes. He wasn’t sure how long he’d been asleep, but it couldn’t have been that long. His little sister would have barged in to wake him up if he’d been napping for more than a few minutes.
Sitting up with a yawn and a stretch, he found himself deep within a forest. Flowers dotted the landscape, and through the swaying trees, he could see the outline of a mountain range. At the foot of the towering peaks, a series of burnished silver towers glinted in the sunlight.
Kagami gazed out at the scenery with his chin in hand as thoughts slowly formed in his foggy mind.
Firstly, why had he passed out while gaming? It was rare but not unheard of. When players fell asleep, the game registered them as AFK and their avatars stopped moving. But under normal circumstances, the game would force sleeping players to log off automatically after a few minutes of inactivity. He’d never heard of anyone waking up inside the game.
And yet, here he was—wide awake and looking at the Linked Silver Towers, home of the Nine Wise Men. He was unmistakably in AEO. It might have been a bug, but that would make it the first one that he’d ever encountered.
Another concern that was much more pressing: he could smell! The unmistakably natural aroma of a forest’s growth and decay tickled his nose on the passing breeze. His VR system could replicate touch and tactile sensations, but taste and smell were still beyond its technical limits as far as he knew. He breathed in through his nose again and marveled at the new, unexplainable sensation.
This called for an additional test. He tore up some nearby grass and gave it a chew. It filled his mouth with the bitter, astringent flavor of grass, and he quickly spat it out before wiping his lips with the back of his hand. The awful taste made him salivate, and even the consistency of the drool was painstakingly reproduced.
Wonder and surprise aside, he couldn’t understand how herbivores could stomach such food. He dropped down to take a closer look at the foliage when the high-pitched squeal of metal grinding against metal echoed through the trees. The roar of battle filled the forest and the earth trembled beneath his feet.
This was the AEO Danblf recognized!
At least this was easy enough to make sense of. He’d come to the border to subdue a pack of monsters, but someone else had been unlucky enough to run across them first. Or maybe another Wise Man had been assigned to finish the task he had failed to complete last night.
“Ho ho! Not likely,” he chuckled to himself as he ran toward the noise.
The woods gave way to a grassy plain where he saw a knight proudly flying a familiar coat of arms. The armored warrior raised his sword and cut down a small green creature wielding a knife. Two or three more goblins bum-rushed the knight as their compatriot fell.
The battlefield was a riot of silver and green. The Magic-Clad Knights charged forth in their gleaming armor with battle cries on their tongues. They were the elite forces of the Kingdom of Alcait, and they descended like an armored wave against the opposing horde of goblins.
Based on the scene before him, Danblf realized he might have slept for longer than he thought. The knights would only be dispatched if he’d taken too much time. It wouldn’t do to show up late to a fight and not pull his weight, so he prepared to cast a spell.
[Evocation: Dark Knight]
A dark portal opened above the grass and a large armored form rose from it. The knight was fully encased in chill-inducing jet-black armor, and ominous dark flames flickered about its body. It had no face, just two glowing red lights where eyes should have been. The Dark Knight had arrived.
The monsters stopped in their tracks and shrieked threateningly at Danblf’s minion. That was unnerving—they shouldn’t be programmed to do that. Goblins were cannon fodder. Perhaps they could be described as daring, or at least oblivious to impending danger. They always charged headlong into fights regardless of the odds. But these goblins chittered away in what could only be described as fear.
No matter. There was a time for pondering game mechanics, and a time for action. Danblf gave the Dark Knight the order to attack.
The battle became a massacre. His minion’s gigantic sword cut through the air like an arc of lightning. Each violent swing rendered a handful of goblins into bloody chunks and scattered their death cries to the wind. In seconds, the war whoops of the nearby monsters became desperate shrieks. Though they tried to flee or surrender, the Dark Knight’s wrath was merciless.
After purging the creatures in its immediate vicinity, the Dark Knight moved to intercept another group of larger goblins wearing bulky armor. Against most assaults, the armor would have been quite resilient—but when the Dark Knight fell upon the pack, their shrieks of terror blended with the shrieks of the summoned knight’s sword cutting through the thick metal of their armor. Other goblins had crowded around their larger brethren in hopes of finding safety in numbers, but the Dark Knight cleaved through armored and unarmored monster alike. Their morale broken, the mob began to break ranks and run from the Dark Knight’s insatiable bloodlust.
In just a few moments, the entire goblin horde had been routed. A few moments more left them lying dead on the battlefield, the earth stained black with their blood.
It was over. Of the two colors that had once decorated the field, the green was broken and the silver regrouped into formation. The men stood tall but were wary of the Dark Knight.
Must have been nearly a hundred of the little buggers, thought Danblf. He glanced over the bodies to confirm the job was done and dismissed the Dark Knight from the battlefield.
With that chore taken care of, it was back to puzzling over the odd evidence he’d encountered in the past few minutes: the smells, the tastes, the unfamiliar reactions of the goblins. Only one possibility made sense.
There had been an unannounced patch last night.
It was hard to believe that the sense of smell and taste in VR could be reproduced at such an intense level. He was truly experiencing the game world with all five senses. As far as he knew, no other company had developed anything this revolutionary. It was kind of strange that they’d debut a breakthrough technology in a video game, but there was no other possible explanation.
Well, props to the dev team, Danblf decided. The update was probably why my system didn’t shut down when I passed out.
With that mystery solved, he noticed the sound of clanking armor drawing closer and turned to see a knight bearing a shield engraved with the symbol of the great tree and moon—the coat of arms for the Kingdom of Alcait. Danblf knew that that shield would turn away swords, spells, and dragon fire alike. The elite knight’s mirror-like armor reflected and blended in with his surroundings, and his red cloak marked him as the captain among his men.
The knight raised a hand to halt his illustrious unit from a respectful distance away before stepping forward alone. His swept-back gray hair was flecked with white, and a slanted scar was carved across his chiseled face like a badge of honor. He was elegant and handsome—although not at Danblf’s level—but his face was unfamiliar.
Odd. The Wise Man thought he knew all the elite-level captains in Alcait.
“Pardon me, miss,” the captain said. “That knight in the black armor—I assume that was a summoning technique. Was it yours? We weren’t sure if it was reinforcements or not.”
Danblf looked for the person the knight had addressed, but he found no one else on the battlefield. Was this some sort of joke? Or an insult? As he glanced around, he saw one of the goblin corpses roll to the side before an unknown creature emerged from underneath and fled into the forest.
“Hrmmm, so there are still…survi…vors?”
The moment he spoke, he knew two uncomfortable things were true. The first was that whatever had escaped wasn’t a goblin.
“What the hell?!”
The second was that he was speaking in a high, lilting voice.
Danblf stared at the knight, dumbfounded. His image was reflected in the mirror-shined armor of the knight captain standing before him. He moved his right hand, and the reflection moved its left. A woman stared back at him and widened her eyes. He was speechless.
He recognized her—silver hair hanging down to her waist, quick-witted blue eyes, cheeks with just a hint of blush, a small nose, and cherubic features. She was wearing Danblf’s gear, but the proportions were all wrong.
She was Kagami’s ideal female warrior that he’d created with the Vanity Case.