Chapter 4

“W-Watamaki…!” babbled Yuuma. “What’re you doing in Sug’s party?!” shouted Kenk. A wave of displeasure seemed to emanate from Sawa and Nagi. But there was no time to worry about that right now. Sugamo, meanwhile, was too busy laughing in their faces to notice that Kenk had insulted him. “Ha-ha-ha! Who else’s party would she join? Unlike you chumps, we haven’t just been goofing around. Have you even done any quests? No? Because that’s what makes us us and you you. So move out of the way!” Sugamo bashed shoulders with Kenk, forcefully pushing Kenk aside as Sugamo jostled for the lead. He was dressed in a long, heroic cloak and equipped with a fancy sword and shield. His equipment gleamed under the torchlight. Judging from what Sugamo had said, he and his party had probably gone through the entire main quest. All their impressive gear must have been quest rewards. In MMORPGs, however, the players’ skills and abilities were what mattered most, not the stats on their gear. Obviously that held doubly so now that they were in the world’s first VRMMO. Kenk was still trying to push ahead of Sugamo. Yuuma grabbed Kenk by the belt and pulled him backward, whispering into his ear. “It’s okay. Just let them go first. It’s a separate instance inside either way.” “Fine… You’re right, I guess.” Kenk slowed down reluctantly. “Later, losers!” Aria shouted as she passed them. Sumika followed her. “Good luck, guys!” she called with a smile. Last up was the fourth member of Sugamo’s party, a boy named Kai Kisanuki. He didn’t even make eye contact as he passed Yuuma’s group. Kisanuki always seemed to be hanging out around Sugamo, but he was much smaller and quieter and tended not to draw attention to himself. There were rumors that Sugamo bullied him behind the scenes, but that seemed hard to believe, seeing as he had been invited into Sugamo’s party alongside Sumika. Kisanuki was dressed in a hooded cloak and leather armor, but that alone wasn’t enough to tell which class he had chosen. “Don’t forget about our bet, Kondou! You’re gonna owe me those chocolate puddings!” shouted Sugamo, still sprinting in front of his party as he drew the sword from his back. As if responding to their approach, the double doors with the dragon relief began to shudder open with a heavy, ominous sound. It was dark inside. Yuuma couldn’t see a thing. “…Sug’s got some nerve, shouting Kenk’s real name like that in game! He’s such a noob, I can’t stand it!” hissed Sawa as Sugamo’s party pulled away. Apparently she had been biting her tongue until they left. Kenk turned to her in surprise. “But didn’t you just use my—?” Kenk started to say, but quickly turned his attention back toward the door after seeing the look in Sawa’s eyes. Sugamo and Aria whooped and hollered as their party charged headfirst into the blackness beyond the doors. Two or three seconds later, Yuuma and his party followed suit. Everything went black for a moment, and then red light began pouring in from above as the four friends were teleported into the boss room. The boss was a dragon-type enemy. It certainly looked impressive, but it wasn’t nearly as powerful as they had expected. The developers had probably temporarily scaled its difficulty down for the launch event. As the party’s Warrior, Kenk tanked the blows from the dragon’s two front claws and tail while Sawa, the Mage, used her Waterwall spell to mitigate its fire breath. Nagi, a Priest, was able to easily heal the remaining chip damage. The only one without a clear role to play in the fight was the Monster Tamer, Yuuma. First he tried flanking the dragon from the side with his shortsword, and then he tried attacking it with low-level magic, but neither seemed to do much damage. In the end, most of the boss’s HP was whittled down by Kenk and Sawa. About four and a half minutes after the fight had begun, it was over, and the dragon scattered into a giant ball of red particle effects. Unlike trash mobs, once the boss was defeated, a fanfare played and the results were displayed on-screen. Everyone increased in level. There were no gold, equipment, or material drops, however. Instead, silver cards floated slowly down from the ceiling—one for each of them. Written on the cards was the word Congratulations, and beneath that CLEAR TIME: 4 MINUTES 33 SECONDS. “We did it, right? We beat them!” shouted Kenk, striking a victory pose. Naturally he meant Sugamo’s party, not the dragon. Yuuma was also about 70 percent sure they must have won Kenk’s bet, but he chose to shake his head instead. “We don’t know that yet. Their gear looked a lot stronger than ours.” “Gear is for the weak! VRMMOs are all about skill!” said Kenk before Sawa promptly cut him off. “You’re as much a noob as Sug is. You’ve only been playing for about three hours.” “Speaking of which,” said Nagi, a worried look on her face, “the playtest is almost over… Should we just wait here? Or do we have to make it back to town ourselves?” “Back to town?! We’d never make it that far…” Yuuma walked over to her and shook his head again. “Even if we ran as fast as we could, it would still take us more than twenty minutes to get back to the starting town from here. We can probably just wait, can’t we?” “I guess so…” Nagi cocked her head. Her hair, which curled toward her face, swayed slightly. “But don’t you think they should have made an announcement by now? Speaking of which…” Nagi’s avatar had eyes that tilted downward slightly, just like her eyes in the real world. They now glimmered with faint uneasiness. “…how are we supposed to get out of here? When we’re ready to leave the game?” Kenk interjected quickly, “Hold on—you mean you weren’t listening during orientation?” he asked, obviously taking great pleasure in knowing something the others didn’t for a change. “Inside the curric…the curricu—” “The Caliculus,” said Sawa, throwing Kenk a bone. Kenk cleared his throat and continued, “Inside the Caliculus, there’s a lever toward the bottom left they said you can pull in order to open the lid. Don’t you remember?” “Kenk, sweetie, I’m talking about before that…,” said Nagi, an exasperated look on her face. Kenk blinked. “B-before…?” “We can’t move our real bodies at the moment. Before we can pull the lever, we first have to log out of Actual Magic and disable the BSIS.” BSIS was the acronym for the Caliculus’s Brain Signal Intercept and Scan function. It was the part of the Caliculus that read motor commands issued by the brain and relayed them to the user’s avatar. It also interrupted those signals before they could be sent to one’s actual body. Nagi had clearly been paying much closer attention during orientation than either Yuuma or Kenk; the woman running the orientation had mentioned the BSIS just once. But more importantly, Nagi was right. This wasn’t like in an anime or a novel. Yuuma and the others hadn’t actually been transported to another world; they were still lying prone in their own respective capsules, seeing sights and listening to sounds that were created entirely by their QRESTs. They couldn’t leave the capsules of their own accord, however, because the BSIS (pronounced bee-sis) had effectively paralyzed their bodies. There was no way to operate the emergency escape levers unless the BSIS was first disabled. “Come to think of it…they didn’t explain how to log out…,” said Sawa, furrowing her brow. She made the pinch-out gesture with her right hand to open the menu and navigated to the System tab, but then she immediately shook her head. “There’s no logout button. They didn’t say anything about an exit point, either… That means…there’s no way to leave the Caliculus—to leave Actual Magic—on our own…” Yuuma began to grow a little uneasy. His sister was the smarter one, always doing better than him on tests. He tried putting on a calm façade to dispel his own worries. “I mean, I know we’re special guests, but we’re still test players, right? Maybe they just didn’t want us logging out willy-nilly…because of test stuff. Besides, the test should be over soon anyways…shouldn’t it?” “Yeah. Of course. Test stuff. You’re probably just worrying over nothing, Nagi,” said Kenk, matching Yuuma’s tone. The two girls sighed in unison. Boys… Just then: Red light suddenly sprung up beneath their feet, enveloping their avatars. Everything went red as the ground beneath their feet seemed to melt away. “Au—augh…!” Kenk yelled. “Y-Yu!” “Yuumy!” Nagi and Sawa shouted, both reaching out at once. Instinctively, Yuuma tried to grab their hands, but the light changed from red to white. It suddenly grew intense, obliterating the girls from view. Yuuma felt as if he were floating. Was he moving upward? Downward? Confused, he attempted to scream, but even his voice was gone. At last, the white light disappeared, traveling upward, and darkness closed in from below. Instinct told him to run, but it was like his body was gone. Nothing of Yuuma remained but his own untethered consciousness. The thick darkness seemed to swallow him whole. Kenk! Nagi! Sawa…!! Even with no voice, he attempted to scream the names of his three friends. No one answered him. He felt like his mind would continue falling forever into the inky void. Anybody…!! Yuuma poured every ounce of will into his last scream. This time, it seemed as if something had heard him. He glanced downward, in the direction he was falling. That was when he saw it. Yuuma’s memories ended there.