“They’re charging again! It’s like they’ve never heard of strategy!”
“Ready, Princess!”
That’s right. They used to call her “Princess.” She did what she wanted, said what she wanted, and caused trouble for everyone. She had an aloof, condescending way of speaking and went wherever her impulsive desires led.
It was like her consciousness was submerged somewhere deep underwater. As if she were stretching her arm out skyward, reaching...
“Run! Get out of there! Someone help!”
“Damn it! I can’t reach you!”
“I’m sorry! I’m out of MP!”
Her friends’ voices were shaking. But there was no need to worry, ##### told them. They just had to sit back and watch. She ate mooks like that for breakfast. It was all just talk, of course. There was nothing she could actually do.
“Somebody heal!”
“I still have twenty seconds on my recast!”
“Everyone, calm down. I’ll hold them off. The rest of you, run for it.”
“Guildmaster, no! Wait, is that an Ultimate-tier item?! B-But even with that—!”
“We’ll never know if I don’t try. Now go! Leave them to me!”
Yes. She had been saved. The memory flashed dimly through her foggy mind. And then, quite suddenly, her consciousness began to fade until it vanished entirely, lost in the reverberations of the screams around her. It was then that, somehow, she thought she heard a voice.
“You really are a nuisance, girl...”
~ ‡ ~
Suddenly, Toru regained consciousness. He’d felt the phantom sensation of being stuffed into something preposterously large, and then he was awake.
“Where...am I? Am I...alive?” His relief at finding himself alive was suddenly overshadowed by shock. Something was wrong. Namely, his voice. “Hwhah?!”
It was too high. It didn’t sound like a man’s voice at all.
What the heck?! But I’m a guy! I’m...!
Toru’s voice was, in a word, normal. He had a completely typical voice for a boy. Back in choir, he’d sung bass. Nobody would have called it particularly attractive. And yet, the voice that had just come out of his mouth was the beautiful, clear voice of a girl.
No. Don’t panic. Calm down, me.
Doing his best to quiet his frantic emotions, he checked to see if he could move his body. In doing so, he noticed his limbs—slender, fair, and unblemished. “Ahhh! Why? I look like a girl.”
Did the accident cause this somehow?
It didn’t make any sense. Far from waking up in a hospital bed, he seemed to be in a dense forest, in front of a lake. Stranger yet, he seemed to be in a girl’s body. This couldn’t be real. His mind would not accept it.
What finally broke Toru out of his confused stupor, oddly enough, was the sight of his body. Despite having never in his life gotten a manicure, his fingers ended in deep crimson nails. And then there was the dress he was wearing—majestic and as black as midnight. He recognized it.
“Is this...my third passive skill, Red Dragon Claw? And I’m pretty sure this outfit is Night’s Embrace.” He was starting, deep down, to figure out what had happened. “No way,” he said. “There’s no goddamn way...”
There was a panicked voice in his head telling him to reject the idea. His brain was sounding all sorts of alarm bells. He was afraid to see what his face looked like, even if he had a pretty good guess.
In the end, he couldn’t resist the urge to look and peered into the lake. The clear water was reflective like a mirror. He saw the reflection of two moons floating on its surface, as well as his own body, standing on the shore. He recognized it immediately—it was the body of the character he had been obsessed with.
“I knew it! This is Nacht’s body!”
Nacht Schatten. The character he had made with the help of an artist he knew. He had poured all of his passion, all of his barely suppressed adolescent fantasies into her. He’d made her a fierce dragon who was at the same time the most beautiful girl he could imagine. It was a contrast that he found very appealing. It was all ironic, of course, but that was the idea behind Toru’s third character in Real World Online.
He’d put no points into her defense stat and instead maxed out evasion. He’d cleared every dragon-related quest in the game and obtained the unique class Dragon Princess. He’d given her every weird fixation of his that he could think of.
“What the heck?” he asked aloud. The whole situation was indescribably strange. He had been in an accident, only to find himself alone in a forest as if he’d been deliberately placed there. And just in case he thought he might still be on Earth, he needed only look up at the twin moons in the sky overhead to correct that notion. Then there was the matter of him being in the body of his RWO character.
There was only one possible explanation. He’d been reincarnated.
He tried to refute it, but the evidence was plain. Somehow, all those web novels had been right. But that still left the question of why.
“Why did it have to be my gag character?!”
Sadly, there was no denying the fact that Nacht simply wasn’t very strong. Toru’s friends had helped him power-level her, but even though she was almost at maximum level, her Origin Skills and Class Skills had been chosen for their showiness or their cuteness over their practicality. She struggled in fights against monsters of the same level without backup and could only challenge raid or world bosses that were at least ten levels below her.
As her iconic demidragon—also sometimes called demiwyrm—self, Nacht could access the highly coveted and extremely flexible dragon skills, which excelled at both physical and magic attacks. Dragon Princesses were meant to stay in the middle ranks of the party, reacting dynamically as the battle required. Without a doubt, their abilities had the potential to make them one of the strongest classes in the game. Nacht, however, had put absolutely everything into magic.
“Magic power is everything! Blast them away with a single shot! Who needs defense?!” That was the theory, anyway. In practice, Nacht was simply too fragile to take part in most battles. When asked why he had built his character that way, Toru would simply reply, “It sounded fun!” But in truth, there was another reason: the Ars Draconis.
Ars Draconis was a school of magic that sat at the very peak of the dragon skill tree. As it happened, however, most dragon players focused on physical damage over magical, so some of those spells had never even seen the light of day. It was unacceptable. Nacht would not stand for it.
They were endgame spells, to be sure, but the incantations were absurd and melodramatic to the point that it had become an in-joke, and the spell effects themselves were universally considered loud and obnoxious. But the complainers got on Toru’s nerves, and before he knew it, he had put all of Nacht’s points into magic.
Nacht embraced the romance of the glass cannon, dodging around battles with her high evasion and firing off blasts like a mobile weapons platform. She wasn’t very good at it, though, and needed her friends’ help to do most things. And if she ever met an enemy that resisted her magic, she had no recourse but to run away with her tail between her legs.
Toru wept. If he had known he was going to be reincarnated as her, he would have made her a more serious character. “I’m a low-powered character in an isekai!” he lamented. “I’m not gonna have cheat powers, or a harem, or anything!”
He certainly wouldn’t be the main character. The main character would probably be one of the top five fighters in the game, and charming, and, more to the point, a man. That’s right! Nacht was a girl!
The world of RWO was one without resurrection items, spells, or anything else. It was rather infamous for its lack of a way to bring back the dead. But to make up for that, its battle system was extremely fair. If one stuck to battling monsters on their own level and took adequate precautions, even a casual player was unlikely to be faced with death. There were many ways to protect oneself against suddenly dying too. But even with such a fair system, a character like Nacht, who was designed more as a joke than anything else, would need an absurd number of advantages before she could even think about reigning as a god of battle. It was very upsetting.
“Wait. Hold on.” Toru took a step back. “If I’m Nacht, does that make this the RWO setting?” He looked up at the sky. The two moons he had seen reflected on the water’s surface shone down on him.
“Two moons...” he said. “But I’m pretty sure there was only one moon in RWO. There’s only one in the Bloodmoon Vampire illustration.” It was possible that this was a world that was neither RWO nor Earth.
Toru looked around. The overgrown forest felt uncanny in the pale light of the moons. “I haven’t seen this location either. This isn’t Reanold Forest or Leineh Lake. And it definitely isn’t the Holy Dragon Lake. It looks a little like Moonbeam Shore, but in that case, the Abyss should be right there.”
Forest aside, the lake, which was shaped like a slightly twisted half-moon, probably wouldn’t be big enough to have been named. Named lakes in RWO were, as a rule, big enough to take an entire week of gameplay to cross, taking it a few hours at a time. And that was with the Blessing of Acceleration. This lake was small enough that Toru could see the other side of it.
That being said, the world of RWO was preposterously huge. There was no way for one person to know all of it, and all Toru had to rely on was the map inside his memories.
“Oh! I know!” he exclaimed. “I should check if this is in-game.” He tried a verbal command. “Open voice chat!” Nothing. “No? Okay, then... Open menu!” This, too, received no response. “Hmm. Does that mean this isn’t in-game?”