"Mama!"
The kitten, home at last, giggled and leapt up to fling her arms around the black-haired girl's neck, kicking her legs up to throw all her weight onto her.
But the girl before her didn't take to the clinging. She lifted her off and gently pushed her away.
"Mama?" Yimi tucked a finger into her mouth, uncomprehending.
Her mother, who had been within arm's reach, gradually drew away into the distance—or rather, it wasn't so much that she was leaving as that Yimi herself was steadily drifting off. The little girl rushed forward through the dark, frantic, first on two legs, then on all fours, and still she could never reach her family—as if this were simply the way reality was.
"Nngh—nngh! System!"
Jolted awake from the nightmare, Yimi kicked her little legs and called for the System first thing.
The System threw up a loading panel. "System Reorganization in progress. Current progress: 23%."
She could dimly recall a similar prompt—back before she left home, when Grandma was chasing after her with the cat carrier, Yimi seemed to have seen something much like it.
She rubbed her eyes; the dried tear-tracks had gone stiff on her face, deeply uncomfortable. She'd cried herself to sleep.
Another look at the System—still 23%, no higher. Whether it was stuck here or simply that slow, Yimi, who'd never touched a computer, of course had no way of knowing.
The System interface could still be called up; the reorganization bar just covered nearly half of it—opaque, impossible to shift aside. It hid the Main Quest from view, leaving only the System's overdraft-compensation energy and, in the corner, that unchanging 0/6.
"Mm…"
Yimi hugged her legs and sat on the ground, thinking of nothing, doing nothing—not even wondering why the place that should have been grassland had turned into forest—just staring blankly at the trees in front of her.
Even if she could have seen the Main Quest, right now she only wanted to sit here without moving. Maybe after another sleep the wiped-out progress would turn out to be a dream, and nothing would have happened at all.
"Grrr…"
But her belly growled with hunger—she must have slept a very long time. Yimi got hungry very slowly; in the first world she'd sometimes gone days between meals, and her daily three were only because she never got full. It had been ages since she was hungry enough for her stomach to growl.
Yimi held perfectly still and shunted the hunger away. Normally she would never do such a thing—just as she rarely bothered to shunt away even drowsiness—for "getting hungry and then eating" had always been, in her eyes, a pleasure to be savored.
She cradled her head in both hands, pressing down the ears on top, and stared dull-eyed at the trees across from her.
Rustle, rustle—
A lifelike, scene-interaction sound effect. A figure in a black cloak, dressed to look thoroughly sinister, parted the grass and stared in surprise at the kitten on the ground.
"This is…"
"Shh!" The woman behind him, dressed the same, hurriedly pressed a finger to her lips.
"Shush what? This one's got no cursor over her head—pretty obviously not a player." The man walked right out and looked down at the girl lying on the ground. He said it straight to her face, too. "Out past the town, that'd usually be a quest NPC, right? But no NPC cursor either. This floor should've been explored inside and out by now—could there really still be some unheard-of thing like this?"
Yimi glanced up at them and paid them no mind, not even asking about this world.
"Isn't that even better? Hidden quest items and the like—usually good stuff."
The black-cloaked woman crouched down. "Hey, you okay? Hm?"
Yimi still ignored her, sunk in her own gloom. But the woman let out a puzzled little hum through her nose.
"What is it?"
The woman flicked through a couple of times. "A new message just popped up in the Quest Log—but it's all garbled text."
"A bug?" The black-cloaked man took a step back from Yimi, without a shred of a normal gamer's curiosity toward bugs.
Seeing her partner's nerves, the woman waved a hand, amused. "Relax. It doesn't really affect anything. It's probably an NPC that got released half-finished—it hasn't even triggered any dialogue, doesn't seem to have a lick of intelligence."
The man shrugged. "Gotta hand it to Kayaba Akihiko. Never seen an NPC this good-looking before. Going by the original plan, it'd probably have been a real crowd favorite, huh? If it were up to me, I'd have voted for the little-girl design without a second thought."
"That lunatic didn't make this game to sell it, though. An open-world game where you can't hurt most of the NPCs—isn't that basically just egging players on to PK each other?"
Annoyed, the woman glared at the undeletable page of garbled text in the Quest Log, then bent to pat Yimi's witch hat—not even the "harassment warning" a normal NPC would pop the moment you touched it.
Yimi's little face scrunched up, but from this angle, and with the witch hat, the woman surely hadn't noticed.
Itching to try, the woman drew her sword. "The one and only thing I ask of an NPC is that it can be hurt. If there's some quest where you finish first and then claim the reward off an NPC, isn't it just better to cut the NPC down and grab the reward yourself? Besides, it's a bugged NPC anyway—maybe it can actually be killed."
The black-cloaked man hastily seized her arm. "Whoa, whoa—an undiscovered bug, wouldn't that sell for good money as intel? If you've gotta try it, at least wait till I've gotten some distance. If you get frozen up by the bug, you're finished."
"Fair enough."
The woman turned back and sheathed her sword.
Because of the man's sudden interruption, she failed to notice that the very instant she finished speaking, the little girl who'd refused to acknowledge her a moment ago had suddenly stood up. But just as she slid her sword home, she caught her partner's mouth falling slightly open. She couldn't make out the upper half of his face, but that didn't stop her mind from painting in his look of sheer terror.
Without asking what had happened, the woman instantly reached back and drew the blade sheathed behind her again—and the very next second she watched what looked like her own arm go flying, slam straight into her companion's face, then scatter into a photon effect and vanish.
But it hurt. That was the point.
The woman stared, uncomprehending, at the stump where her arm had been, instinctively confirming the fact no player dared believe or face. It was, without question, the game's photon effect for injuries—so why—
"I—I—AAAH!!"
Why did it hurt so much?!
"Is—is this some kind of joke?!"
Paying no attention to the woman collapsing in pain, the man—terrified but decisive—yanked out the game's Teleport Crystal and teleported away on the spot.
Only then, through the agony, did the woman remember to turn and look at the little girl who'd attacked her. That exquisitely sculpted little face was faintly scrunched. The kitty had been in a foul mood to begin with, and then she'd had to listen to this pair of scumbags chatter away in a heap of jargon she couldn't understand, plotting to her very face to do the kitty in.
A spark of life returned to Yimi's eyes as she looked down at her own little paw. This world's adaptive power was strange—or rather, there was basically none of it. The power that could normally convert freely among mana, spiritual power, mental power, even physical stamina seemed, in this world, to turn up nothing at all. She could still switch back to her old strength in every world, but just now she truly hadn't used her beloved Mana Burst—she'd simply attacked as the self that had adapted to this world.
Click-click-click-click— the sound of a scale trembling.
"Aah—aah! Get away!!"
The woman's breath seized. She stared in terror at the figure draped in sackcloth standing behind Yimi—a thing she'd sooner believe a monster than anything humanoid. But even that wasn't what truly threw her into panic. What did was the little girl herself.
Because the little girl she'd just written off as an NPC—the girl whom even the game's system had flagged with an NPC field—now had a three-dimensional HP bar hovering at her side.
Next to the layered, stacked HP bars of certain monsters, this little brat-thing really had only the one gauge—enough to make you wonder whether she or the weakest monster of all, the Frenzy Boar, was stronger. But her HP bar had been deliberately dressed up! The kind you could tell at a single glance was Floor Boss class!
Was this some kind of joke?! The woman on the ground, pupils all but quaking—if this game was detailed down to this level… She looked again at her own HP bar. That one hit had stripped away over ninety percent of her health—and she was a frontliner who ranked near the top of all of Laughing Coffin!
"It hurts… it hurts so much!"
And the pain of the wound just kept going. No matter how you looked at it, it was all far too wrong—because, however dangerous it got, this was still, at bottom, only a game!