In the game, Nacht had found the hidden Realm of Dragons and received the blessing of the eldest drakes, inheriting the Dragon Factor from them and becoming a demiwyrm. All to be able to pick from the dragon skill tree, of course. Nacht had changed her race and class four times. Half of her body was made out of pure draconic power.
Still, Nacht’s appearance was that of a young woman; she looked much more like a human than she did a dragon. Her only particularly noticeable scales were the inverted ones around her thighs.
“One more thing to check...” Toru said. Items and equipment could wait, but his spell choices could not. “Magic, huh...?”
Neglecting to learn the extent of his strength in a strange world would be tantamount to suicide. But the disaster from earlier was seared into his brain. The part of him that had craved mass destruction by means of overly flashy magic was long gone.
“Let’s not do anything dangerous,” he said. “Something with a small area of effect. Restrained. Maybe just a little badass.”
He decided to cast the lowest level Ars Draconis spell. There was a lake nearby—perfect to extinguish any out-of-control fires. He gulped. He probably could use magic. The thought excited him in spite of himself, and he focused on the mysterious power inside him.
Suddenly, Nacht struck a pose, crossing her arms dramatically. And without any conscious input on Toru’s part, she began to speak.
“Hear me, O dark fire...” she began. “Consume my enemies! Burn until nothing remains! Ars Draconis: Helldrake Eruption!”
Huh?! What the heck am I saying?!
Toru was taken aback. That would have been embarrassing for a middle schooler, let alone a university student. Toru wished he could vanish on the spot. And worse, nothing had even happened.
Stupid Nacht! Toru thought. Dumb, stupid Nacht!
He had been so careful, even thinking to aim the spell toward the lake, but in the end, all he had managed to do was make some kind of bizarre pose. He gave up. Clearly, the magic wasn’t going to do anything. And then, he felt a strange sensation, like energy leaving his body.
Immediately, the lake caught fire. Its once-placid surface was consumed by pillars of black flame—not just one, but six, stretching up toward the heavens.
“What?!” There was steam everywhere, and the six pillars had merged into one.
“What...?” Toru repeated. What on earth was happening?
No! No, no, no, no, no! This isn’t possible! Was that Ars Draconis? The school that only has spells from the four main elements? The consummate eyesore? The thing everyone told me not to bother to use, no matter how I got my magic? This is just...way too absurd...
His mind felt like it was full of fog. “Am I...overpowered?”
There wasn’t a drop of water where the lake had once been. Jet-black embers fluttered through the air. He had tried to hold back this time, but once again, it had ended in catastrophe. He was profoundly sorry.
“I-I didn’t do it!” Toru blurted out, then ran. He never found out what became of the lake.
~ ‡ ~
“Jeez... I’ve really gone and done it, haven’t I?”
It may not have been on purpose, but Toru had reduced an entire lakefront, once teeming with life, to ash. It was deeply regrettable. Then why couldn’t he bring himself to care? If his usual self—Toru from Japan—had done something like that, the guilt would have absolutely crushed him. And yet here he was, utterly unconcerned. He shook. This sudden change in attitude disturbed him.
“What’s happening to me?”
There was only one thing he could think of. The body he had been reincarnated into was Nacht’s. Right now, the part of him that thought of himself as Toru Aikawa was out in front, but his sense of self was being absorbed by the body’s memories of being Nacht. Even at that moment, Nacht, the character he had made, might have actively been in the process of overwriting his identity.
That must have been why he’d been relatively unbothered by the destruction they’d wreaked. His mind was no longer his own. Nacht’s memories must have been influencing his own thoughts. He could feel it deep in his psyche.
This wasn’t baseless conjecture either. There was, for example, the absurd bit of dialogue they’d said. “Hear me, O dark fire...” Toru the university student would never say something like that—and even that was ignoring the humiliating pose they’d struck. He had left that adolescent nonsense back in high school.
But Nacht, on the other hand...
In character in the game, using Iotonore’s voice, she very well might have said something like that. After all, she was created from Toru’s obsessions—the parts of himself he’d left behind out of shame. Yes, Nacht was liable to say something that cringey.
It struck Toru that he no longer felt bothered by what was happening. Having a girl’s body, superhuman speed, and unimaginable magic power had all become perfectly natural. “Maybe I should just come to terms with it...” he said. “Just accept that I’m Nacht now...”
An ordinary university boy probably wouldn’t have made peace with everything—the reincarnation, the other world, being his game character—so quickly. But even that no longer bothered her. “Should I change how I talk?” she wondered to herself. “You know, act all bombastic and superior and haughty, like a middle schooler playing pretend?” It was one thing role-playing with her friends. As a joke, it had been fairly well received, but to act like that for real would just be cringe.
And yet, now that she had become Nacht, she understood something. Deep inside, this was how she wanted to act.
“Ugh, look at me,” she said, “standing here talking to myself. Well, I guess it’s not like there’s anyone else to talk to in the woods.”
She was alone in a dark forest, and her senses were much sharper than they used to be—sharp enough to tell her that there were no beasts within a good hundred yards. She must be lonely. Toru was used to being by himself, but Nacht had always been surrounded by people. Her friends, the members of the guild Outer Cafeteria, were never far from her side. But now, she had no idea how to get to their old base, the Un-Castle. It probably didn’t even exist in this world. She was stranded, with no way to contact her guildmates.
“I should start looking for people,” she said to herself. “Not because I’m lonely or anything! I need to figure out what I’m going to do next! Anyway, I’m pretty sure my third class had a spell for this.”
Nacht began casting a spell. “Expand Magic Field...” she chanted. “Ars Anima: Soul Search!”
If she recalled correctly, this spell would locate all self-aware beings within its range, distinguishing between hostile and friendly entities. As she finished casting, a great, complicated mess of information entered her mind.
Nacht was lonely. She began looking specifically for human souls. “There’s four right outside the forest!” Three of them were filthy. The color of their souls made her stomach churn. But the fourth...
“Beautiful...” Nacht murmured. She wondered if the other three were attacking the fourth. If they were, she had to hurry, so she took off running.
“This should be fun!” she said. Excited to meet the person with the beautiful soul, she sped up. The ground beneath her cratered from the force. She was only running, but the impacts of her footfalls were creating a terrible din and destroying the land around her. Not wanting a repeat of the incident with the lake, she activated Twilight Wings, one of her Origin Skills.
They looked like shadows or mist at first—the substance of night given solid form, wrapped around her shoulders like a cloak. Then they concentrated and solidified behind her back, shining with a dark light. In Real World Online, the distinction between dragons and wyrms wasn’t eastern-style versus western-style dragons as it was sometimes understood, but a matter of power. Wyrms were simply an advanced version of dragons. For that reason, while Nacht was considered a wyrm, her wings took the form of western-style dragon wings.
Free from the bonds of gravity, she took to the sky. “Funny,” she said. “It’s my first time flying like this, but these wings feel perfectly natural! This is fun!” As one would expect, Toru had no experience using wings, but somehow, they felt right at home on Nacht’s body.
“I should be careful, though,” Nacht mused. “I don’t want to destroy the world around me!” She equipped a dark-colored bracelet—a cursed item, the Band of Weakness. Normally, this wouldn’t be an item someone would want to equip; all it did was lower all your in-game stats by a third. There was a quest you could do to break the curse and transform it into the Band of Might, but even the Band of Might was mediocre at best. Nacht would have rather just worn one of the bracelets she’d gotten from the real-money store, and so, fortunately enough under the present circumstances, she had never done the quest.
Nacht smirked to herself as she put the bracelet on. “Tch...” she said. “Enough! The time is not yet ripe to unleash the power contained within my arm!” It was an absurd thing to say, but she found that she wasn’t ashamed in the slightest. She supposed she had to admit it—she really was Nacht. Her mind was no longer in turmoil. It had completely accepted her new body. Her soul, which until now had been at odds with itself, had become one.
I’m Nacht...
In that case, Nacht’s thoughts should probably take precedence over Toru’s.
Her body, welling with strength, streaked through the night sky at top speed. The scenery passed by like a frame-by-frame playback as the information her spell was giving her entered her mind. Her dragon eyes, surrounded by rings of gold, showed her a vision of a girl being attacked by three men with lecherous smiles. They had her surrounded. “Filthy souls,” Nacht muttered to herself. “No wonder.”
The girl’s scrawny body was unsteady on its feet. Her soul was flickering in agony, struggling to bear the absurdity of fate and her own resentment for her powerlessness. The Soul Dragon within Nacht could see it clearly.
“Lovely...” she said.
Silence fell. Nacht’s eyes met the girl’s.