Baaap!
An ear-piercing sound rang out, jolting awake the figure slumped over the computer desk.
The beeping that followed gradually cleared his startled mind.
He rubbed his still-tired eyes. In his field of vision, the laptop screen on the desk should have already entered sleep mode on its own. But because the blare of a large truck's horn outside had startled him awake, he had nudged the computer, waking the screen again.
The lit screen showed an open WPS document. On it were fewer than two hundred words he had written himself.
The rough idea of those fewer than two hundred words was that a young man using the alias Lance Plain had accidentally transmigrated into the Warhammer world and was feeling rather lost.
And that was it.
Because with fewer than two hundred words, how much information could there be?
"So this is what they mean by dreaming about whatever you think about during the day."
Kain rubbed his temples as he spoke.
Living like a salted fish, he had grown so bored that he wanted to write a Warhammer fanfiction story with some real substance to it.
He had spent half the day thinking, only managed to put down that tiny bit, then failed to withstand the attack of drowsiness and slipped into a dream. A rather interesting dream.
It felt long. It also felt very real.
At the very end, just as he was about to become the god of the Final Fantasy VII world, he was startled awake by the truck's horn.
He got up, walked over to the window, and looked down at the street outside. A dump truck and several cars were blocking one another, none of them willing to yield, all of them honking back and forth.
Were they insane?
After washing up, he went straight out. What he saw was a city seemingly shrouded in thick fog.
No, that was not quite right. It looked as if the fog had formed a wall, encircling the city and cutting it off from the outside world.
As though the entire world consisted of this one city alone.
Kain did not think too much about it and headed toward the breakfast shop he usually visited.
After placing his order, he ate while scrolling through videos.
"Mr. Kain."
"Hm?"
Kain paused, then looked back. Behind him was a middle-aged man also eating.
It definitely had not been him calling Kain.
Because that voice had clearly belonged to a girl, and it had sounded exceptionally pleasant.
Yet there was no one else in the shop.
An auditory hallucination, then.
Definitely.
Because the voice sounded exactly like Aerith from his dream.
It seemed he had been staying up too late playing games lately. He was getting a little neurotic.
"The Emperor's angels…"
A narrator's voice played from the video, explaining the content.
Right now, he was scrolling through Warhammer-related videos. The title was The Burning Galaxy, and it was introducing the turmoil caused by Horus's betrayal.
After watching a few videos, he finished his meal.
Normally, he could have finished in a few minutes. Somehow, he had dragged it out for half an hour.
After eating, Kain returned home, tidied up a little, then set out with a power bank and a digital camera.
His destination was the convention venue.
An hour later, he finally squeezed into the venue.
Looking around, most of the exhibition areas were for works that had been popular in recent years.
The old classics from the past, such as Gundam SEED, Code Geass: Lelouch of the Rebellion, the Haruhi Suzumiya series, and Fullmetal Alchemist, either had small booths or no booths at all.
There were fewer and fewer cosplayers for them too.
Even some of the terms had changed nowadays.
In the past, merchandise was just merchandise, and badges were just badges. Now people called them "goods," and some did not understand the term.
He did not know whether he was failing to keep up with the times, was too old-fashioned, or whether people just had to be different and invent names like that.
Hm?
Was that an FFF Group cosplayer? That was kind of impressive.
Some people passing by did not understand what he was cosplaying at all.
Kain went over for a photo.
A moment later, he was drawn in by the chatter of some people nearby. Apparently, someone was cosplaying a very delicate sort of character.
It was not that the outfit was especially revealing. Rather, the character being cosplayed was not one who could be aired on a proper broadcast.
When he moved closer to that area, he saw characters who were, according to their setting, mother and daughters. The one with the mature image was the mother—Miss Nimira?
The two who looked youthful and pretty were the twin daughters.
This was truly something else. And it seemed they really were mother and daughters, while the sisters really were twins.
By the time the sun was preparing to clock out, Kain had received a souvenir from one of the areas and was ready to head home.
When he passed through the Final Fantasy VII area, however, he suddenly stopped.
He stepped backward and saw cosplayers of Aerith and Tifa.
Tifa looked rather similar. Or perhaps it was more a matter of her being pretty than whether she truly resembled the character.
As for Aerith, Kain fell silent and gave her a thumbs-up in his heart.
He did not mean to look down on her. He respected her.
"I'm not that fat."
The voice sounded like another hallucination, making him briefly lose focus as he looked that way.
In that daze, he seemed to see a woman as beautiful as an angel, glaring at him with puffed cheeks.
But it was only a daze. Once he came back to himself, there was nothing there.
This was not good. He was starting to imagine things.
By the time he returned home, the sky seemed to have been covered by a black cloth.
He sat back down at his computer desk and stared blankly at the document with fewer than two hundred words. Then he walked over to a bookshelf cabinet where he kept some of the works he had bought.
After picking through them for a while, he finally took a PS4 from the lower cabinet and decided to revisit Final Fantasy VII Remake so he could refresh his somewhat blurry memory of the plot.
As for the other versions, he did not have them.
The remake was the first version he had played. For the other plot details he did not understand, he had relied on videos.
He really did not have enough time to play through all of them. He would wait until he had free time someday and properly catch up.
"Tifa is so pitiful."
It seemed as though that hallucination appeared again, the sort that felt like it would linger in his mind for only a second before being forgotten.
The plot currently on-screen happened to be replaying the destruction of Tifa's village and the deaths of her parents.
Some time later, after rewarding his stomach, he sat blankly in front of the computer again.
How should he start the plot?
He had no idea how to write it. Maybe he simply had no talent in that area.
"Forget it. I won't write."
"No. You can't give up!"
It was as if he heard those words again.
He closed the document.
He stretched, and drowsiness had begun to set in. Time to lie down.
After all, the temperature had dropped quite a bit today. In the south, there was no floor heating, and his legs were freezing.
The next second, he hurriedly grabbed the mouse, because it was about to fall.
It looked like he had knocked it while stretching.
But had he really knocked it?
It did not feel like he had.
But if he had not, would the mouse fall by itself?
As he clumsily caught it, he also noticed the change on his computer desktop.
The cursor had precisely moved to the folder named Tifa and Aerith Collection in the Quick Access bar on the left side of the open This PC window. One click, and it would enter that folder.
And it really did click.
Immediately afterward, the first video in the folder opened: a video of Aerith in a Christmas outfit unwrapping a gift box.
Though this Aerith was still not as beautiful as the Aerith from his dream.
(End of Chapter)
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