Alive Again?

Alive again?

My days were always the same. I'd wake without really opening my eyes, skim the notifications piled up on my phone, and put on some video that didn't mean anything. Scroll out of habit, and an hour would be gone before I noticed.

Once that started to get old, I'd scratch my stomach, crawl out of bed, and drop into the chair in front of the computer I'd left running. I'd check that the macros were still going, and if a character had died, I'd revive it and toss it back into the hunting ground. Then I'd cackle my way through the community posts that had stacked up overnight.

I mocked the people who dragged themselves to work to make a living, sneering at them as office bugs, and whenever a board turned up some juicy bait, I'd log into a burner account, throw more wood on the fire, and sit back to watch it burn.

If I got hungry, I bought a boxed meal. If even that was too much trouble, I went without. Savings, the future—I'd never given ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠either a thought. I just vaguely assumed that tomorrow would be the same day as today, carrying on exactly like this.

And that was where I was wrong.

Cheep, cheep—

"Mmm……."

The birds were louder than usual today, and sunlight tickled the corners of my eyes. I frowned. Had I fallen asleep without drawing the blackout curtains? Or maybe I'd opened the window to air the place out for once and been too lazy to shut it. Either way, the sun was up. I could start the morning routine.

Just like always, I reached out without opening my eyes, patting around beside the pillow for the phone that ought to be there. The blanket felt strangely unlike the usual one, which nagged at me, but I let it go. I hadn't washed the bedding in ages, and for all I knew my hand was just brushing some piece of trash I'd left scattered across the bed.

No matter how much I groped around, though, my fingers never found the phone.

"……?"

Had I knocked it off while muttering in my sleep? With no other choice, I yawned and pushed myself upright. My neck and shoulders were stiff, as if I'd slept wrong, so I stretched as I opened my eyes—and there were trees in every direction.

"What the hell is this."

Look up: trees. To the left, trees. To the right, trees. The place I'd been sleeping was a forest so dense that sunlight could barely squeeze through the thick leaves.

The scene was so out of nowhere that for a moment I couldn't say a word.

"……Where am I?"

I could say with absolute certainty that I would never, in my entire life, have walked into a place like this on my own two feet. Forget hiking—I barely even took walks past my front door. What possible reason did I have to be sprawled out in a forest this bursting with life?

A dream? Or else—no ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠way.

"Ah, that truck!"

Right. There was a reason. ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠I'd stepped out before dawn to buy a boxed meal and gotten into a traffic accident. That truck driver must have thought I was dead and dumped the body in the woods to hide it. No question. And yet here I was, perfectly alive!

Panicking, I scrambled for my phone. Whether I opened a map or called for rescue, I needed it if I was ever going to get home. But it wasn't on the left, or the right, or anywhere at all.

Had that damned truck driver taken it so I couldn't report him? No—these clothes didn't even have a pocket a phone could have fit in. Only then did I look down at what I was wearing.

"And what is this supposed to be……?"

Something like a robe, made of black cloth. It looked worn, and yet it fit my body with an uncanny precision, almost as if it had been tailored just for me. Had that lunatic of a hit-and-run driver changed my clothes, too……? Why on earth……?

And the design of this robe was familiar, somehow. I studied it in silence, and then the wrongness of it hit me. I hurriedly shoved my sleeves and pant legs up. There happened to be water nearby, so I rushed to the bank and looked at my reflection.

Gray hair threaded with a faint violet. Violet eyes. A pale-skinned girl whose face suited a tired expression.

I had become the macro character from the game I used to gold-farm—Eternal Arcadia Online.

"Seriously, what is this."

I'd imagined it before. I'd read a few stories about people possessed into games—you enter the world, you know the main story, you monopolize the hidden quests, you become a hero and save the world. That kind of story. Reading them, I used to think that if I ever ended up inside a game, I'd probably live that way too.

……But that only holds if you actually know the game.

Eternal Arcadia Online. Yeah. I had no affection for it. There was exactly one reason I'd played: it was popular, so the cash-out rate was good. Which meant I didn't properly know anything about it, the story included.

The story? To a gold farmer like me, it was nothing but an obstacle. Skip the main quests as fast as possible, finish leveling, then turn a macro on in a dungeon you can solo and hunt forever. Hidden content? Honestly, that stuff was just a hassle. Grind your specs up with a macro, or hunt down every fiddly hidden prerequisite one by one and dig up the secret treasure—on paper, the specs come out the same either way.

Boss patterns? I don't even remember what I did once I was inside a raid. I only ran raids my current specs could actually deal damage in, and I never looked at the game screen.

So what did I actually know? Hmm……. The going prices on the auction house, probably.

If someone had summoned me to this world with a purpose in mind, they'd brought exactly the wrong person. And this character, on top of that, had been built purely for macros, not for performance. I picked up a stone and tossed it into the stream, muttering like someone who'd already given up.

"Why this game, of all things……."

If you're going to reincarnate someone, wouldn't it be better—even from the game's perspective—to call a person who actually cares about it? Drop me into a gacha game I'd played seriously, or a single-player boxed game, and I was confident I could do well. What was I even supposed to do here?

Then it struck me, cliché that it was: the system that shows up in situations like this. I shouted into the empty air with a shred of hope.

"Status! Status window!"

That desperate mutter, begging for even the bare minimum a reincarnator ought to get, became nothing but an empty cry, washed away by the sound of the stream.

"There's not even a game system……?"

If this was a world inside a game, throwing in at least that much convenience was common sense. Systems had gotten so ordinary they showed up even in settings that had nothing to do with games. Still—if a window had appeared, it probably would have looked something like this.

For starters, Summoner was neither a particularly strong class nor an efficient one. Look at the class distribution and the balance, and it was closer to trash. You couldn't slip heavy damage in between boss patterns. The whole style was lining up a crowd of summons and fighting that way, so survivability against area attacks was poor, and because you depended on each summon's AI and couldn't control them directly, the class handled badly too.

The reason it had never received anything like a buff was that no actual person played this garbage. Every last one of them was a macro user like me. Those drawbacks flipped into advantages, on the assumption that you'd be one-clicking through it with a macro. No need to target anything yourself. The sustained damage came out steadily. And variables from anything sudden didn't matter, because you weren't going to respond to them anyway.

I'd set the race to Undead for a similar reason. Immunity to status ailments like poison, hunger, fatigue, and suffocation, plus natural health recovery that scaled with maximum mana, which meant less money spent on potions. In other words, every element of this character had been tuned to a single premise: that I would not be the one playing it.

Ah. Thinking about it now, this was genuinely unfair. If they were going to reincarnate me, they could at least have put me in the high-spec character I'd raised for raids. Don't tell me it was because this was the first character I'd ever made? If I'd known it would come to this, I would have made the height a little taller. I'd picked that preset for one reason only—the smaller hitbox meant some attacks with high hitboxes wouldn't connect.

I let out a sigh, rubbing the stitched seam around my neck with the back of a hand so drained of color it had gone past pale.

"So…… what am I supposed to do now."

With no tutorial at all, I was simply at a loss. In most novels the status window hands you a quest, the protagonist turns their brain off and follows it, and that's how the story moves. As I was now, I might as well have been abandoned in the middle of a forest with a single outfit thrown on me and nothing else. A reincarnation so pointlessly realistic it hurt. Everyone else started with at least one cheat ability. Why didn't I get a single convenient feature?

I wasn't actually going to have to study all of this myself, was I? If so, I'd rather just starve to death right here. Then again—can an undead even starve to death?

That was when I heard it. A rustling, from beyond the trees.

"Is someone there?"

I turned my head. What I saw was a very fierce-looking large dog……. No. A wolf.

Ah, right. In the game, forests were hunting grounds, weren't they? A wolf showing up wasn't strange in the slightest. But seeing one past a monitor and meeting one up close with my own eyes were completely different things. It was absurdly huge. Fangs showed through the gray fur, and drool dripped from its mouth. Something my size felt like its whole head could be swallowed in a single bite. Did people in the game really just slice things like this apart, one after another?

"Hang on, doggy. You're a good boy……? I won't even taste good if you eat me, right?"

My race really was undead, so the meat wasn't exactly fresh. There was a risk of food poisoning, too. And a wolf was a dog in the end, wasn't it? They had good noses. Sniff me, and it ought to figure out I wasn't much of a meal.

None of that persuasion seemed to land. The thing kept growling as it came closer. Dogs are man's friend. Wolves are dogs. Therefore wolves are my friends. My three-step logic did not appear to apply.

……I was going to lose my mind.

Now what? With this pint-sized body, I didn't look capable of threatening anything. Could I run, then? I'd always been slow on my feet, and now I was short on top of it. Outrun a wolf? Me?

Thunk.

"Agh!"

There must have been a stone where I'd been backing up, because I—brilliantly—tripped over it and toppled flat onto my back.

Grrrr…….

And just like that, I got to experience the view from prey: looking up, from the ground, at a wolf that had already been enormous.

"Uh, doggy……? If you open your eyes like that, you're kind of scaring me……."

The wolf didn't miss the opening I gave it. In a flash it lunged and came down on me, and I barely managed to seize its jaws in both hands and hold. Mouth forced shut, it thrashed even harder. The moment I let go, I'd obviously be wolf food, so I clung on with every ounce of strength in my hands.

But now what? How much longer could I hold out like this? And just how far did the grip this body could produce even go? While I was trying to take the measure of my own physical limits, a single thought flashed through my head.

Ah.

Right. This was inside a game, wasn't it? I was a summoner. Then I should summon something—anything! I had no idea how. It was the same helplessness as having to figure out a bicycle on your own, with no training wheels. Still, I couldn't die again the moment I'd been reincarnated, so I scraped together every scrap of vocabulary I had and started shouting every summoning-related word I could think of.

"Summon! Come forth! Arise! Awaken! Emerge! Manifest! Appear!"

Nothing happened.

What? Was that not how skills activated? Did I have to shout the exact skill name? Then what was the exact name? Damn it. I couldn't remember. Which figured—the last time I'd opened this character's skill window was half a year ago! And I can't ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠even memorize people's names properly!

And then, at last, the strength went out of my hands.

"……!"

The instant its muzzle came free, the wolf gaped that enormous mouth wide and came straight at me. I threw both arms over my face and screamed.

"Somebody, anybody, please save me!"

……But the pain I'd braced for with everything I had never came. What? Did undead not feel pain, either? No. Even then, I should have felt myself being bitten. Unable to make sense of it, I slowly opened my eyes—and there stood some skeleton, staring blankly at me.

A skeleton? Then what about the wolf? I flinched and curled in on myself, but the skeleton didn't seem particularly interested in attacking me. It approached slowly and held out its one and only hand. I was too dumbfounded to do anything but stare for a moment. In the end, I took that hand and stood.

"Th-thank you."

My eyes met the hollows of its sockets. I couldn't read its expression at all, but something about it was familiar. Don't tell me I'd just summoned this. A skeleton standing around in broad daylight—it did seem like my doing. So I'd succeeded at using a skill for the first time?

The thought made me pointlessly proud, and my mood lifted enough that the corner of my mouth seemed to twitch. But why did this thing only have one arm? I was tilting my head at the question when a wolf's cry rose again. This time there was more than one.

Grrrrrr…….

Right. I'd forgotten. Wolves are pack animals. But it was fine. I had a reliable ally now!

"All right, then—time to hit back—"

I didn't even get to finish. I saw it: the skeleton's other arm, the one I'd assumed it simply didn't have, clamped in the jaws of one of the wolves.

"Wait, why is your arm over there?"

I rounded on the skeleton and demanded an answer. It looked sheepish, and rubbed the back of its skull with its remaining arm.

This skeleton bastard. Was it a lot weaker than I'd thought……?