Glass Cannon
For one thing, the moment my attempt at conversation had been shot down, there was no doing anything of my own initiative. Left with no alternative, I trudged back to the Leader's Room—and tried, at the very least, to sort through my situation in my head.
There was no mistaking it. This was Undercity.
Hard as it was to accept, now that I understood this was no dream, adapting came first—however disoriented I felt. In the game's lore, this was a subterranean city buried deep beneath a shattered surface, stocked with only the bare minimum needed to survive. Like so many collectible mobile games, the player's avatar was a commander-type figure with effectively zero combat ability of his own. Which meant that if I wanted to get anything done down here—anything at all—I had no choice but to lean on the other Replicas, Ariel included.
This is the worst.
The problem was that the majority of the Replicas—effectively my entire workforce—were locked in power-saving mode for want of resources. And the one unit that could still move, Ariel, was in the state she was in. A gacha game that starts you off at negative affinity, huh.
Yeah, not gonna be easy.
Staring down the bleakness of it all, I braced my forehead against my hand, propped an elbow on the desk, and idly poked at the faintly glowing panel set into its surface. This time, I poked at Replica management. Every detail of it was rendered with a vibrancy that felt all too real, but as long as my hands were busy with this, I could turn my face away from reality under the pretense that it was, at least a little, still a game.
The equipment and progression attached to each character looked roughly as I'd left them before quitting, but at present most of them were locked under an unavailable status. The only activated Replica was, predictably, Ariel alone—effectively the game's default unit.
Affinity... just as I feared.
The favorability ratings I'd raised with no small amount of real affection had, almost all of them, sunken back down to numbers hovering around zero. A handful of the more oblivious or younger Replicas still sat as high as five, but they, too, were deactivated and stamped unavailable.
The moment I closed the character management screen, the remaining resource counts in the panel's upper corner caught my eye.
Usable Data—the resource burned when restoring and repairing destroyed Replicas—was in comfortable supply. But Power Stones and High-Efficiency Batteries, which drained steadily whether you liked it or not, had been scraped nearly bare. By the lore, Power Stones ran the city's facilities, while High-Efficiency Batteries kept the Replicas themselves alive and moving. And logically, if the game went unopened for years, that drain was supposed to stop as well.
Meaning it really isn't a game, is it?
As if to spell out just how unyielding this reality intended to be, the dwindling reserves made the case for it. First order of business: collect Power Stones and batteries... Years had passed since I quit the game, but the moment those numbers registered, some long-dormant gamer instinct twitched in me and I was up out of my seat. Granted, the Leader—in essence just an ordinary survivor—didn't have exactly impressive specs, but I had at least max-enhanced the junk universal weapons. Not any particular character's exclusive weapon; the trash-tier commons.
Gear makes the man, as they say. Armed with those, I figured Stage 1-1 would be within reach even solo. So I bustled about the Leader's Room assembling my kit, then turned a key to open an aged cabinet—and from within, a dust-caked hazmat suit revealed itself. Judging by how long it must have sat untouched, it looked phenomenally worn.
So this is a hazmat suit.
I shelved the sentimentality and pulled the suit and weapons on, and a heavy, weighty presence quickly settled over my entire body. These were things I'd only ever seen as icons, or read as lines of flavor text. Something about them was faintly wondrous, and the vividness of their touch against my skin made me swallow, dry-mouthed. The universal weapons looked crude beside a character's exclusive gear—to think the junk that always popped out of equipment pulls like garbage and piled up as dead inventory would ever be put to real use. And more to the point: this was the first time I'd held a gun since my military reserve training.
So, armed, I set out to get a proper feel for what this underground city actually looked like, one step at a time. Unlike the game, where a single tap of a button carried you anywhere, here I had to physically walk to get anywhere at all. Oh. So this is what this place looked like. With scenery that had only ever been flat images on a screen now standing around me in full three dimensions, I got a little carried away without meaning to, wandering far longer than I needed to while committing the layout to memory.
The Restaurant—which, back in the game, you could only visit alongside Replicas whose affinity ran high enough—now stood sealed shut, its cooking robot dark and silent, perhaps because the city's power was running too thin to spare. The maintenance bay, its operations halted. The scrap-metal streetlamps, each one clinging to a glow that looked ready to gutter out at any moment. Something about this place feels like it's one breath from total collapse.
The game had never been a cheerful one, granted, but the mood of the city was bleaker even than it had been at the tutorial. And every last scrap of this decay had set in because one player—I—had simply stopped showing up. A formless, prickling discomfort crawled over me, and before I knew it my right hand rose to scratch absently at my left arm.
I had no idea how much difference the resources from one measly first stage would make to an underground city I'd built up, but sitting still wasn't an option. All the more so with Ariel being as uncooperative as she was. So I readjusted my gear, made a short, quiet vow, and started walking—destination undecided.
And then, at last, I arrived. The Surface Elevator. The screen just before mission launch; the place where you selected your stage. This world had beam weaponry, memory and personality replication, an entire subterranean city of high technology—and yet, for reasons passing all understanding, the elevator was a manual, cogwheel-driven contraption. Still, this was the one road between here and the ruined surface above.
How much can I haul back, I wonder? The monsters of the surface were all animals that had swallowed Power Stones and High-Efficiency Batteries and mutated. Yes—those very same resources this underground city ran on. A cliché straight out of every apocalypse story. Unintended consequences of technological progress, so on and so forth. Well, long-winded prologue aside, the point was a simple one: kill a monster, get its resources.
Let's do this.
I set the universal weapons down on the elevator floor for a moment and began turning the handle connected to the gears. Creaks and shrieks of metal began to ring out, echoing through the cavern like wails. It was loud—so loud that even I, standing right there turning the crank, wanted to clamp my hands over my ears. Ugh, this is punishing. In the game, the character leading the party would spin this thing with effortless cool; apparently I lacked the muscle for that. And cranking away in the hazmat suit, I was soon dripping with sweat in the very city that had felt cold to me mere minutes before.
The surface, once reality's patch had finished installing, was a wretched sight in every conceivable way. Bizarre grass had sprouted in wild, heedless tangles between the bones of a destroyed civilization, and poisonous air drifted through it all as though it had every right to be there. Like a player running a stealth build, I tucked myself behind the wreckage and began scouting the area, slow and careful. This zone corresponded to the first stage, after all. Nothing formidable would spawn here—but the problem was that my body was even less formidable than the mobs.
The weapons themselves could delete a first-stage monster in the blink of an eye. The reverse, unfortunately, was equally true. Above all, I can't be the one who gets hit first. Which made me, in the textbook sense, a glass cannon... no—a cannon made of paper even flimsier than glass. Why am I putting myself through this, again? Even as I cautiously swept my surroundings, the lament slipped out of my head like a low whine.
I'd never been the courageous type. Much less the sort to throw his body into something with actual lives on the line just to scavenge a little junk, the way I was doing now. And yet. Why was I meddling my way into a life-or-death errand? I didn't know the reason. But my body had already decided for me.
There.
As I pressed on, sweat pouring off me, two grotesque dogs came into view through the wreckage of the dead city. Mutated Wild Dogs, almost certainly—the very first trash mobs a new player ever meets. Trash among trash; the kind of thing a fresh character and starter weapon could put down with room to spare. I trained the muzzle on them and rested my finger on the trigger. The rifle was capable of full-auto fire by default, so all it should have taken was a comfortable, sustained squeeze—but for some reason, my finger would not move.
I'd been through target practice plenty of times, but even against something shaped like that, this was my first shot at a living creature. You have to. You have to do it. Rat-tat-tat-tat. The flame spitting from the muzzle and the deafening roar of gunfire blew my senses clean away for a moment. I'd fired. I'd actually done it. The rounds caught one of the dogs and it was hurled backward, a monstrous hole torn through it—while the other showed not a flicker of shrinking back or cowering, and began charging straight toward the source of the gunfire. Straight toward me.
Killing intent—something you could live an entire twenty-first-century life without ever once facing. That unmistakable murderous will, enough to make my flesh prickle numb, locked my body rigid, if only for an instant. All it would have taken was one more squeeze of my index finger. But in the space of a blink, the monster was already upon me. The whole world seemed to slow to a crawl. And in that final moment, what surfaced in my mind was—strangely—not old memories, not my family's faces, but today itself.
—Leader?
It was Ariel's face—Ariel, met in the flesh, in this unfamiliar place. The person who had needed me had been let down by me. And maybe, just maybe, I'd developed a spiteful little stubbornness about that very fact. Around the time I accepted that small realization and gave myself up to it, in a world where all sound had died, a fist went sailing past.
"Hyaaah—!"
"Do you want to die!?"
In the same instant as my surrender, the sound of the world—which had cut out along with it—came roaring back to full volume, carried on a voice I knew all too well. At the moment of my death, the one who had appeared was Ariel.