Sequel Prayer: Day 3650
Arcadia Tactics Sequel Prayer — Day 3650
A consistency post.
The act of uploading the exact same message to a community board, over and over. I had been doing it for ten years now.
“At first it was just a protest against the company.”
Arcadia Tactics. My life’s game. The game that had reshaped my entire existence from elementary school onward for fifteen straight years.
But for reasons no one ever explained, the developers stopped making a sequel. Updates vanished. What began as a protest had long since become me shouting alone into an empty void.
Thanks to that, the board now looked like this:
Arcadia Tactics Sequel Prayer — Day 3649
Arcadia Tactics Sequel Prayer — Day 3648
Arcadia Tactics Sequel Prayer — Day 3647
Arcadia Tactics Sequel Prayer — Day 3646
My sequel-prayer posts had completely wallpapered every page of the board.
No one came anymore. Who would visit the forum of a fifteen-year-old game that no longer even received updates? The rare visitor who wandered in usually fled in disgust after a single glance.
I typed that reply and was about to push away from the desk when another message appeared.
The perfectly ordinary question made something snap inside me.
I wasn’t normally this short-tempered. But every person has a reverse scale. For me, that scale was Arcadia Tactics—the game I loved most, the game that was my life. Having it dismissed as some long-running bit pissed me off.
Pretty well was an understatement. I knew every character’s abilities, every relationship, every hidden event buried between them. With no sequel in sight I had simply kept digging, and the knowledge had piled up.
In that instant, the world stopped.
A beta tester for the sequel? More than that—there was a sequel in development? For real?
No. Don’t take the bait. No reason to get your hopes up over some random stranger’s words. How many people had already claimed “sequel in development” just to troll me? Had even one of them been telling the truth? Every single one had been a lie. I treated the claim as false, yet still let a single thread of hope slip into my reply.
In that instant—
Thud.
My consciousness suddenly receded, and I heard the sound of my own body collapsing across the desk.
“Argh, fuck!”
I sat bolt upright with a shout. At that exact moment—
“Kyaaaaaaah!!!”
That wasn’t my voice. A young woman’s piercing scream tore through the room and set the whole place into uproar.
Dozens of maids in uniform and armored soldiers burst through the door. The female knight at their head turned to one of the maids.
“What happened?”
“Young Master… Young Master has…”
“Young Master…? Gasp!”
The moment our eyes met, the knight froze solid. Then she snapped into motion.
“What are you all standing around for?! Albert—go inform the family head at once! Adam—fetch a physician! And I will remain here with the soldiers to secure the room!”
“…?”
“Young Master! Are you all right? Do you know who I am?”
I had no idea. Or rather… I felt like I had seen her somewhere before.
Long black hair tied back, eyes that glowed a vivid red, slender features overall—a dark-beauty type of girl. I knew this woman’s name.
“Asilia…?”
Leadership:61
Might:97
Intellect:85
Politics:63
One of the absolute top-tier combat characters in the entire setting was standing right in front of me.
“Franz. Why aren’t you eating? Are you still feeling unwell?”
A middle-aged woman’s gentle voice reached my ear. Her name was Rachel. My mother. No—my real mother was Korean. This was the mother of the new body I had possessed.
“Ah, I’m fine. The food smells wonderful. Haha…”
I hid the tangle of thoughts behind a forced smile and lifted a spoon. The food itself was excellent. They had clearly gone out of their way to prepare a special meal for my awakening.
“It’s already been five years since you lost consciousness.”
That came from my father—or rather, the father of this body. He had the classic look of a strategist, and true to that impression he was the head of a renowned eastern house of advisors. His intellect and political ability were high, just as his appearance suggested.
“You have a great deal of study to catch up on. If you don’t begin immediately, you’ll never close the gap.”
“Darling! The boy only just woke up from his sickbed today—how can you say something like that so suddenly?”
“Patient or not, he is the eldest son of House Meyer. He is also the heir. Seventeen years old. At that age it wouldn’t be strange for him to already have a child of his own, yet he spent all that time unconscious and has fallen far behind.”
“…“
That was the truth of it. The Franz Meyer I had possessed had fallen from a horse as a child and become a vegetable. In the original game he never woke up before the ending; the inheritance simply passed to his younger sister, Lucill Meyer. My transmigration had forced him awake.
“A full five years. Five years of necessary study left undone. Just as knights train so they can survive the battlefield, strategists like us must study if we are to survive. Starting tomorrow you will resume the lessons you missed. You will have to work twice as hard as anyone else if you hope to make up those five years.”
“Darling!”
“Be silent, my lady. This is a conversation between the current family head and the next.”
“But…”
“Or do you have some objection? Answer me, Franz.”
“…“
The arrow had swung back to me.
How was I supposed to answer?
I was not Franz Meyer. Nor did I know Franz Meyer particularly well. In the game his entire treatment amounted to a single line of lore: “There was a man named Franz Meyer who became a vegetable, so the inheritance passed to his younger sister Lucill Meyer.” Even if I wanted to act like Franz Meyer, I had no idea what his original personality had been.
“Hmm…”
I thought it over for a while. What answer would sound natural? Then I reached a conclusion.
“Father is correct.”
“I will begin studying tomorrow.”
No matter how long I searched, I could not find a perfect answer. In that case I would simply take the action most advantageous to the person called Franz Meyer—that is, to me.
Honestly, the first moments after landing here had been pure shit. I had asked to be a beta tester for the sequel, not to get isekai’d into another world.
But looking at it carefully, the situation wasn’t all that bad. If it had been some completely unknown setting I would have been screwed, but I had dropped into a world I knew inside and out. With the information I already possessed I could probably manage somehow. And according to that information, the smart move right now was to let the retainers know “the heir is functional again” so they wouldn’t start getting ideas. Father clearly understood the same thing; that was why he was forcing the studies. Therefore—
Move in the direction that benefits me first.
That was the know-how fifteen years of game play had drilled into me.
“I lift my eyes to the rain-washed sky and see, between the dark clouds, a pure white moon risen above the palace. This is a poem composed by the thirteenth emperor, Josef III, in Imperial Year 366. Now then, next we have the tulips…”
Thwack! A sharp impact against my skull jolted me wide awake.
When I opened my eyes, a large-breasted woman with purple hair, dressed in priestly robes, stood holding a pointer and glaring at me. That pointer was clearly the source of the pain.
“You have been dozing continuously since roughly ten minutes after class began. Is your body still unwell from insufficient recovery time?”
“No. The class is just boring…”
She had been going on and on about who wrote which poem and what it meant. If she had at least been talking about imperial history I could have treated it as game lore and endured it, but poetry? I simply could not take it.
“Lord Franz is remarkably honest for a member of House Meyer.”
“What do the rest of the family usually say?”
“That they drank too much the night before, or that they stayed up late reading and are tired. Excuses of that sort.”
“Isn’t it better to be honest than to make excuses?”
“No. Even an excuse is preferable for us instructors. When you openly declare that the lesson is dull, it becomes a matter of reputation and reflects poorly on me.”
“Then from now on I’ll lie.”
“I would be grateful if you did. For the sake of my standing as a teacher, if nothing else.”
She said that and sat down. We faced each other across the desk.
“Aren’t you going to start the lesson?”
“If I read poetry again, I know you’ll simply fall asleep.”
“Ah, that’s because I still haven’t fully recovered from my illness…”
“You already told the truth earlier. Lying about it now is useless.”
“Is that so?”
Her name was Evelyn—a famous cleric and instructor. She had been invited as a special lecturer solely to teach me.
“You dislike literature class, then?”
“Yes. Honestly, what use is literature to a noble? This is an age of constant war, isn’t it? Wouldn’t it be better to learn the sword, the spear, or at the very least military strategy for commanding troops?”
“The more I look at you, the less you seem like a Meyer.”
“What are the others like?”
“The rest of the family long ago finished even this elementary literature and have reached the stage of composing their own works. House Meyer is, after all, one of the foremost strategist houses in the Empire.”
A chill ran down my spine. Composing literature themselves? Just thinking about it was stressful. Writing is pure suffering. Reading is where the happiness lives.
“I understand the feeling that literature is useless in chaotic times. Yet literature is, in fact, of great help in surviving such times.”
“What is that supposed to mean? Is literature going to fight the enemy soldiers in my place?”
This was a fantasy world, so maybe it actually could.
“The poem I mentioned earlier.”
“The one about the rain-washed sky and so on?”
“I’ll praise you for remembering the first line even while half-asleep. ‘I lift my eyes to the rain-washed sky and see, between the dark clouds, a pure white moon risen above the palace.’ This was composed by the thirteenth emperor, Josef III.”
“What does that have to do with chaotic times?”
“He wrote it one month before raising his army.”
“…!”
Only then did understanding begin to dawn.
From the story I knew, Josef III had not been of the direct imperial line. He was a collateral branch. And the symbol of the Lunaris family—the imperial collateral house—was the moon. Therefore the meaning of the poem was…
“Rain is blood or the tears of the people. Dark clouds are the chaos of the age. The pure white moon is House Lunaris. In other words, he—the head of House Lunaris—would end the chaos and become the new master of the palace, the new emperor?”
“Hmm… I revise my assessment. It seems Lord Franz truly is a Meyer after all. Correct.”
“Ah…”
I thought I understood why she claimed poetry was useful in chaotic times. A poem could carry one’s political situation or future intentions and convey them to others. If someone later tried to pin you down—“Doesn’t this poem mean such-and-such?”—you could simply play dumb: “It’s only a poem.” So if I wanted to read other people’s hearts, I couldn’t afford to neglect poetry either.
“Since you appear to be awake now, let us resume the lesson. The time is the present, snow is falling…”
Her class continued for about an hour, and this time I managed to stay awake until the end. I had realized it was not a useless lesson after all.