I took a quick look around and found a small piece of paper. I scrawled upon it all I could remember just before the Swarm’s collective consciousness completely washed my memories away.
I was an eighteen-year-old college student, born and raised in Japan. I didn’t have a lot of friends in real life, but I had plenty of them online. I knew most of them from gaming. When it came to video games, I was a chatterbox.
I led quite the sad life, if I do say so myself. What I lacked in reality, I sought after on the internet. Still, I had no regrets, and I couldn’t claim zero attachments to the somewhat empty life I led in Japan.
I will definitely make it out of this world. I promised the Swarm victory, but at the end of the day, I had my own selfish motives. Rather than focus on the goal of achieving some as yet unknown and unknowable victory, I chose to hone in on my desire to find my way back to Japan.
I made no effort to hide it either. The Swarm likely knew this from the collective consciousness that connected us, but they remained silent on the matter. They seemed to tacitly approve of my wish to go back. Or maybe they intended to leave with me and sweep my world with the black currents of the Swarm.
Whichever it was, the Swarm didn’t reject my intent to go back to my own world. I vowed to find a way to leave this world and return home... except I had no idea where to start. But someday, I will surely find it.
Thus, my first order of business was to confirm the situation. Scouting was the first order of business in this kind of game, after all. I needed to get a grasp on the terrain, our enemies’ positions, and the resources I needed to produce more units—that is, more Swarms. I needed to confirm the logistic path to those resources as well as all other pertinent information about this region in order to emerge victorious.
Those were the Four Xs: eXploration, eXpansion, eXploitation, and eXtermination.
I needed resources. I needed a stronghold. And I needed an enemy. But truthfully, I was still hesitant to fight this so-called enemy. Where was I to begin with? The map was too large. I’d never seen these tunnels, and I didn’t recall ever playing a map with tunnels of this size.
I could clearly remember all the maps I’d ever played. In fact, that was an island of perfect clarity in my otherwise hazy sea of memories. There wasn’t a single map I didn’t know, from the single-player maps, to online ones, to unique, user-made maps. On one hand, this could have been some really niche, unknown player-made map, but there was no chance a map this large wouldn’t be highly-rated by other players, so even that seemed unlikely.
To that end, I divided my Ripper Swarms into pairs and sent them out to scout. Their information came directly to me via the hivemind, and I used it to draw a map of the area. If we’re going to win, we’ll have to secure this area, I thought.
A gold mine. Hunting grounds. A densely packed military installation of unknown affiliation. I was fixated on gathering information in the name of the victory I had promised the Swarm and for the sake of going back to my own world.
But honestly, as far as starting positions went, this one was golden. No matter how much you tweaked the difficulty settings, you’d only start with two to three Worker Swarms and a Ripper Swarm if you were lucky. The Arachnea was a faction that overwhelmed the enemy with sheer numbers, so having this many Swarm units so early in the game was usually forbidden to keep things balanced. It was no simple feat to get these numbers right away.
The Marianne’s main resource was faith, which increased with the number of citizens it had and allowed the faction to increase the limit on their number of troops. The Gregoria mined gold, the favorite food of their dragons, to mobilize their forces. The Flame, a fellow evil faction, increased its number of units according to how many sacrifices it made. There was a loophole, though, where the Flame could sacrifice worker units—who didn’t subsist on meat—to increase the sum of its sacrifices.
Usually it was hard to build up a number of units in the early game, but the Flame could do it relatively easily. Its worker units subsided on the most basic foods—fruits and agricultural crops—and could be sacrificed to unlock higher-level units, such as attacker units that were the Flame’s counterpart to the Ripper Swarms. That said, for how easy it was for this faction to produce units, the units themselves were unsurprisingly lacking in strength.
The Arachnea, on the other end, lived on meat. It typically gathered meat from hunting grounds, which were generated as part of the map, in order to increase its unit production. Only Worker Swarms could be produced from gatherable plants, with all other units requiring meat to produce.
The game’s map generation took that into account, of course, and distributed hunting grounds accordingly. There the Worker Swarms hunted deer and rabbits, carried their spoils back to base, and produced even more Swarms that way. But so long as you knew how to do it, it was perfectly possible to gather your initial army units—in this case, the Ripper Swarms—and rush your enemies’ positions before they could set up fortifications.
I had done it several times myself, laying waste to several factions right away. For this method to succeed, you needed to swiftly seize every possible meat resource in the early game, devote them all to producing Ripper Swarms as fast as possible, then rush an enemy base. If the rush was successful, the Swarms obtained as much meat as the units they’d killed, enabling them to produce even more Swarms as a result.
Massacre, devour, and propagate—once this loop begins, the game is all but won.
While it wasn’t impossible, it was certainly a difficult strategy to pull off. Despite that, I already had hundreds of Worker and Ripper Swarms under my command and a number of assorted facilities established from the onset. Whatever difficulty setting had given me this starting setup was an unusual one.
When I viewed the situation like it was the game, it felt as though I had picked up another player’s match after they left. Was there another player at the helm here before I came along? If so, what happened to them? Where are they now? And if the Arachnea existed before I came here, does that mean there are other factions too? While I couldn’t help but wonder, some of these questions weren’t anything for me to worry about. Whether there had been another player before or not, the Swarm had shown their loyalty to me. If any such player existed, they were surely gone from this world already.
The Swarm only accepted one queen. In other words, there was no other player using the Arachnea but me right now—unless, of course, there was another player using the same faction. And if there was anyone like that, they may have had some kind of clue relating to how I could go back home.
Additionally, I’d have to be cautious when it came to interacting with the other factions. I could talk to other humans, which meant there was a chance to broker peace with them, but they’d be wary of me because I used the Arachnea. The Arachnea fundamentally didn’t deal in diplomacy, favoring declarations of war, so they’d likely suspect me right out of the gate. I could see myself being quickly hated by others.
If this had all been an elaborate setup, I would have started laughing out loud, but the Swarm’s collective consciousness in my mind was all too real. I could feel them, experience their senses, and understand their desires.
In other words, victory.
The Swarm didn’t know what that victory meant, and therefore I couldn’t understand it either. But they still yearned for it. Victory. A victory I would lead them to. A victory we could take pride in. Victory and nothing else.
“Your Majesty, your clothes are ready.”
Beyond the state of this world and the nearby terrain, I needed to figure out my own situation. Being eighteen, I was considered an adult by Japanese legal standards. At least, that’s how it should have been, but my body looked somewhat younger now, perhaps fourteen or so. The hooded jacket I wore in place of a housecoat was rather loose on me and tended to slip off my body.
I had no idea why I had become younger or how I had gotten here to begin with, so I did my best to gather my thoughts. What was I doing before I found myself here? I don’t know. The last thing I remember is turning on my PC. My beloved PC is barely capable of running the minimum specs for the game, but there I was, hoping to play a round or two—and then this happened?