Prologue[]
[December 23rd]
“That’s all for today. Good work you two,” said Kaiba as he closed his textbook and put it in his bag. Kumiko and Hibiki stood up and made a bow.
“Thank you, as always, Mr. Kaiba,” Kumiko said.
“Yeah. Today’s lesson was interesting,” followed Hibiki.
Kaiba looked back at Hibiki. “Oh? So that means none of the other lessons are interesing?”
“Ah, n-no! I was just saying that this one was more fun than the others,” said Hibiki as she put her hands up.
Kaiba nodded. “I see. That’s good, then.” He put the rest of his teaching materials in his bag and headed for the door. Then suddenly, he stopped in his tracks, waited a moment, and said, “Have either of you seen my dice? You know, the ones I always roll around in my hands? I seem to have lost them someplace.”
The two girls shook their heads.
“I see. Well, I’ll see you two on the 25th for the Christmas party.”
Kumiko and Hibiki both waved goodbye to their teacher as he left the room, then walked up to the whiteboard and started wiping it clean. Kumiko stopped for a second, put her hand to her chin, then turned to her friend and spoke. “Hey, Hibiki.”
“What is it?” responded Hibiki, who also stopped.
“We should get Mr. Kaiba a present for Christmas.”
“Oh! That’s a great idea!”
“What should we get him, though?”
“Hm…I don’t know.”
“Should we go shopping tomorrow for one?”
“Yeah!”
Hibiki smiled at the thought. She hadn’t been to the mall with Kumiko in a long time, so she was very excited to go out with her friend.
[The next day]
Hibiki and Kumiko walked through the mall, looking at different stores and window-shopping at each one of them. It was a very large mall, with 4 floors and at least 100 different shops on each one. They were there in the morning, with the white snow of December falling lightly onto the cold ground. Kumiko and Hibiki kept warm by staying close together until they reached the temperature-controlled indoor mall. Since there weren’t many people, the two girls enjoyed wandering around the mall, trying on different products that took their fancy.
As time passed, more and more people started to appear, so Kumiko said to Hibiki. “Hey, take my hand so we don’t get lost.” Hibiki nodded and took her friend’s hand in her own. They continued to browse through the shops, searching for the perfect gift for their teacher, until it was about 5 in the afternoon. By that time, both of the girls were tired and were sitting down on a bench with smoothies in their hands.
Hibiki sighed. “We can’t find anything…”
Kumiko made a supportive smile. “Don’t worry, we’ll find something eventually.” “I hope you’re right,” Hibiki replied. “It’s getting late. We’ll have to go home soon.” Hibiki took a few sips from her smoothie, then thought hard about what her teacher would like. But it was useless. She couldn’t think of anything. So instead she looked around to find something that might inspire her. Her eyes darted around the area, examining the name of each store and its displayed objects. They rested on a store that said, “Tabletoppers”.
What were those again? Hibiki thought to herself. She started to remember piece by piece. That store sells old classic tabletop role-playing games, with game boards, pieces, rulebooks, guides, and dice. Then Hibiki had found her idea. Dice! Mr. Kaiba loves playing with dice!
“Kumiko!” she suddenly shouted.
“Eh?! W-What is it?” Kumiko replied, surprised from the shout.
“Dice! We can get Mr. Kaiba dice!”
“Dice? Oh that’s right, he lost his old pair.”
“Yeah, except this time, we can go to that store!”
Hibiki pointed at Tabletoppers, leaving Kumiko confused.
“Tabletoppers…?”
“Yeah. Remember how in the first role-playing games, you had to play with rulebooks, guides, paper, and…”
“Dice!” they shouted simultaneously.
“Great idea, Hibiki! Let’s go!”
“Yeah!”
Kumiko and Hibiki got up from the bench and headed towards the store, then bought a pair of 36-sided die, meant as replacements for lost pieces. Hibiki held up one of the die and examined it in her hand. The die was very intricate, with several numbers engraved into the sides, along with other symbols, like one that said “skip” or another that had a black skull on it. Hibiki noticed that both die were exactly the same, and felt like it would’ve been cooler if they got two different pieces.
The two left the mall and went onto the sunset-lit streets. They were filled with tired businessmen and enthusiastic shoppers alike, and the sound of cars was reduced to a dull roar compared to the idle chatter of pedestrians on the sidewalk.
As Kumiko and Hibiki walked, the amount of people increased rather than lessened. After all, Japan looked truly alive at nighttime. Hibiki wanted to grab Kumiko’s hand to prevent them from getting lost, but she felt too shy and kept quiet about it. The number of people kept growing bigger and bigger, and Hibiki looked back to ask Kumiko if she had enough money to buy a cafe au lait, when she realized that her friend wasn’t behind her.
“Kumiko!” she shouted, and started running.
“Oh! My cellphone!” she realized.
Hibiki opened her flip-style cellphone, only to despair when she saw that it was out of battery. She cursed herself and decided to go find Kumiko the hard way. Hibiki searched the massive floods of people coming in from every direction, and became extremely worried.
“Kumiko! Kumiko! Where are you?!” she cried desperately.
Hibiki didn’t like large crowds in the first place, and always relied on her friend to guide her through. However, that friend was nowhere to be found, and Hibiki felt like she was having a panic attack. However, she knew that she couldn’t just stand there looking helpless, so she tried to think about it rationally.
Maybe she went back to the store. Yeah, that could be it.
Hibiki ran through the mess of people on the sidewalk, trying to get back to the place where they had bought the dice. She just had to cross one more street to get to the mall, and sprinted across, not acknowledging the bright red light on the other side of the crosswalk.
“Hibiki!”
Hibiki heard her name being called, felt a strong push, turned around, and saw her friend there. Then she heard the terrifying sound of a human body getting smashed by a 33000lb slab of metal at 45kph. A pair of dice had fallen on the ground in front of her. One had landed on a “skip.” The other had landed on a black skull.
Chapter 1 [Declared "unallowed" by VRMMO Creator][]
[Arthapia Castle, Council Meeting Room]
The Daitoa raised his hand and called the meeting to order. “Now then,” he said, “Let us begin our discussion.” One of the knights present raised his arm. “Yes, what is it?” said the Daitoa. The knight stood up, holding a piece of paper in his hand, and began exclaiming: “There is the urgent matter of Fort Helmsgar.” Upon hearing that last word, several other people present turned their heads to the knight, now interested in what he had to say. “It was taken by the Fiends recently.”
The room suddenly burst into a flurry of miscellaneous whispers.
“This isn’t good at all.”
“Helmsgar? The weapons armory?”
“Fiends?! How could the Fiends have taken it?!”
Another knight calmly raised his hand. “If I may?”
The Daitoa refocused his attention and turned to the knight. “Yes, what is it, Sir Eldred?”
The knight relaxed in his seat. “That problem has already been dealt with.”
The Daitoa looked baffled. “It has?”
“But of course, your Majesty. We’ve sent one of our greatest knights to fix the problem. She is dealing with it this very moment.”
“Marvelous. May I ask, whom did you send?”
Eldred smiled.
[Fort Helmsgar]
“C-Commander!”
“What do you want? And what is all this rumbling?”
“An enemy force is attacking!”
“What?! How many?”
“Well…”
“HOW MANY?!”
“J-Just one, sir!”
“One?”
“Yes!”
“Well then hurry up and kill him!”
“We can’t sir!”
“And why the hell not?!”
“Because sir, it’s the-”
The grunt was cut off, as all of a sudden one of the walls burst open, and a young girl white and black hair holding a large cannon sword walked through. She looked at the commander and his lackey as if they were annoying insects. The commander let out a squeal of terror and ran off in the opposite direction. “Underling, deal with her!” he shouted as he fled. The underling was frozen in fear for a moment, then shook his head.
“Ah, damn it!” he cursed as he unsheathed his small dagger to try and fight off the intruder. Holding his dagger in an expert stance, he charged straight towards his enemy, who seemed to be making no movements at all. The minion was sure that he would at least get one hit on her, but that one hit never came.
The girl spun her cannon blade’s chamber once and then let out a powerful pulse of sound around her, sending the henchman flying back. She scoffed and walked up to the subordinate’s fallen body. Due to the fact that he was lightly armored, the hit was powerful enough to disable, but not kill him. The girl decided that killing him would’ve been a waste of time that could be spent going through the rest of the fort, so she passed over his twitching body and went on forward. Other guards appeared in the hallways, but none of them fazed her in the slightest. She simply swung her cannon blade and knocked each one away without batting an eyelash.
As she ventured further into the facility, she reached a large room, and in the center, stood a tall armored warrior wielding a heavy-looking double-bladed battle-axe. The warrior growled loudly as the comparatively petite girl entered, and looked as if he was waiting for her to approach him. The girl leisurely walked up to the warrior, spinning her cannon blade’s chamber, and pointed the end of her blade at the warrior’s chest. She pulled the trigger, and a powerful concentrated sound wave flew out from the cannon barrel and into the warrior, forcefully launching him back several meters and heavily damaging his armor. The warrior made a roaring grunt of pain as he hit the ground, and tried getting back up, to no avail. The girl felt that killing this one was necessary, and so she walked up to the panting form and severed the connection from his head to his body. Afterwards, she shook the blood off the blade and went on forward.
The girl felt nothing from brutally killing another player like that. She felt emotionless, like on all the other times she violently murdered someone else in the game. At the end of the day, it was just another normal mission in a video game. Inhumane executions like these were nothing to her. She saw something much worse in the real world, after all. The girl walked through the hall to the entrance of the next room, and stopped for a second to listen. She picked up no sound whatsoever. No movement or energy could be detected, either. She thought it was obviously a trap. In her pocket was a small pressurized magic storage device. She charged the device with sound and light energy, opened the door slightly, and tossed the device inside. The girl hurriedly closed the door, and heard a clearly audible “BANG!” from the other side. She threw open the door, and saw several dozen guards armed with crossbows covering their ears and shielding their eyes. Her cannon blade chamber spun once, and the girl pulled the trigger as she made a wide horizontal slash. A large sword wave was produced by her movement and cut through the rows of enemies cleanly. However, even after that powerful attack, there were still a few stragglers trying to escape. The girl dealt with quickly as to not waste any time.
Fort Helmsgar was rather large for a weapons armory. There were several corridors and passageways that connected to multiple areas within the compound, each one containing some amount of players standing guard. These insignificant grunts, the girl felt, were nuisances that should be cleared out before proceeding. She would walk into a room, sword drawn, and easily eliminate the sub-par guards within the span of ten seconds. It was more tedious than difficult to her. Nevertheless, she cleared the entire fort room by room until she finally reached a pair of tall tough-looking doors.
The girl checked her map, and made sure that she had already checked all other possible hiding places, such as the basement and the attic. After doing so, she took in a deep breath, exhaled, and pulled the doors open to the Heavy Weapons Storage.
The Heavy Weapons Storage room was supposedly the second largest room in the facility, right after the Assembly Hall, where she had killed the large axe-wielding player. As the girl walked in, the room was nearly pitch-black, save for the light coming from the hallway she entered from and a few lit candles along the walls. The girl walked cautiously, knowing that the last few remaining hostiles could be hiding anywhere.
She loaded her cannon blade with a single spin and ventured into the darkness, expecting enemies to jump out any second. As she walked, she spotted an arm in the dim light. She sped to it, raised her sword, and made a powerful slash…only to see that the arm had no body attached. Blood dripped down from above her. The girl looked up, and saw the body hanging from the ceiling, the face permanently twisted into an expression of pure terror. She observed the scene in disgust and moved on. Another body was found, bifurcated. And then another, dismembered. It felt like walking through a sadist’s minefield.
The girl eventually came upon the commander of the fort. He hadn’t been bifurcated, dismembered, decapitated, castrated, or graphically killed in any way. Instead, it looked like he’d been shot. The girl knelt down and examined the body. That’s strange, she thought. I thought this game didn’t allow firearms. The blood had already stopped running, and a small crystal was lodged in the wound. The girl stood up, but suddenly the sound of a small cannon firing rang through the building. She reflexively did a rolling dodge backwards. A small crystal bolted through the air where she had just been at an incredible speed. The girl re-steadied herself and got ready for the next attack. “Show yourself!” she shouted.
A female voice came from the shadows. “Oh my, you must be the other intruder. Nice to meet ya~”
“Who are you? Are you a ghost?”
The voice laughed. “That’s quite a compliment. But no, I’m not a ghost. Who I am doesn’t really matter right now, either.”
“Why are you here?”
“Hm? These guys refused to give me weapons. Remember the crystal lodged in that commander’s chest? That was mine.”
“So it was you…how did you do that?”
“I found some cool thing in here and decided to try it out, that’s all.”
“Why don’t you come out of the shadows and fight like a warrior?”
“Because I’m not one. Ah, but I am out of time. I must get going now.”
The girl heard the sound of crystal grinding against metal, and then a crash of dense steel. When she went to investigate the source, a large circular hole was cut out of the wall. There was a large circular lump of steel on the ground beside it.
The girl opened up her communications panel. Eldred’s voice came through.
“How’s everything going?”
“Mission complete.”
“Any leftovers?”
“One, but it seems she wasn’t on their side.”
“I see. Come back to base for the time being. Good work, ????.”
“Understood.”