Joy Knows No Age
Regardless of age, fun was still fun.
About an hour had passed since I'd begun exploring this Delic packed with trees and grass — a place I'd casually named the Abyss Forest.
The smell of soil and plants, the soft rustle of leaves in the wind, and even the faint cries that seemed to drift from somewhere far away… Setting aside the minor glitch that no insects or small animals appeared anywhere the eye could reach, this place was the very picture of a perfect forest.
Wandering through it like a stroll, I came to one realization: the Abyss Forest was vast enough that it was hard to believe it was merely a fragment of an abandoned server.
"Haa… I've been walking straight in one direction without getting lost, but there's no end in sight. Just how big is this place?"
Of course, if you drew a straight line on a map between where I'd first arrived through the tree roots and where I stood now, the distance wasn't that far. At most, maybe two kilometers?
It wasn't as if I'd injured my leg and slowed down, or run into some serious obstacle blocking the path. I'd simply never wandered a forest even before becoming Nia, and I'd been carefully carving marks into the trees so I wouldn't lose my way back — that was the only reason my progress had lagged. My current pace was still perfectly reasonable by any normal standard.
Even so, the way the same scenery kept unfolding side by side, as if I were walking in place, left a lot that didn't make sense. If a Delic that was supposedly less than a fifth the size of the original server was already this vast, just how enormous had the original been?
That aside… the atmosphere is seriously creepy. Is a forest without bugs really this quiet? If the wind weren't stirring the leaves, there wouldn't be a single sound.
I took the entrenching shovel from my bag — a sturdy piece of gear that had cost me thirty thousand CP — and jabbed firm marks into the trunk of a nearby tree, then casually looked around.
It was a truly silent place. A lonely, hushed forest so still it was hard to believe Virtual Beasts were roaming somewhere in it. I hadn't found a single trace of any life besides myself the entire time I'd been walking, and it left me feeling a bit like Alice in Wonderland.
Naturally, there was no white rabbit with a pocket watch anywhere in sight.
Mmm… I won't hope for a Virtual Spirit, but I'd at least like to walk out of here with one decent Oopart… Surely it can't be completely empty…
Grrrumble—
Just as I was tucking the shovel back into my pack after carving the mark, a ground tremor I couldn't simply ignore rolled through from not far away.
It was far too modest to call an earthquake, yet still enough of a jolt that the earth had clearly shaken for an instant. I dropped low at once and turned my head toward the source of the rumble.
What was that?
I pressed one palm flat to the ground, checking for further tremors, and strained my ears in that direction. Almost immediately, a restless noise began to rise through the Abyss Forest itself — as if the whole place, long asleep, were waking. It was a distinctly ominous sensation that set my survival instincts ringing.
This is…
A chill of danger climbed my spine from the inside out. My heart started hammering, as if insisting I couldn't just stand there staring.
This might be dangerous.
With a grim expression, I forced down the unease and hurriedly scanned my surroundings. The forest that had been utterly silent — not even a single insect's cry — was now filled with eerie, unidentifiable howls so thoroughly that the earlier quiet felt like a dream. Some cries echoed faintly from far away; others were uncomfortably close.
What those sounds meant was all too clear. The Virtual Beasts of the Abyss Forest had woken up.
Once I grasped the situation properly, I understood just how much danger I was in. Creatures far above the level of any Virtual Beast I'd faced so far — monsters that might even reach Predator Species — were nearby.
There was one major problem, though. This monotonous, dull forest had nowhere suitable to hide.
No… maybe not nowhere.
Feeling the anxious sweat on my palms, I suddenly lifted my gaze. What met my eyes were the branches stretching high toward the sky.
If there was no cover near the ground, why not hide up in the trees?
It was a crude, simple solution — yet my instincts oddly insisted it was the right one. Of course, I'd never climbed a tree in my life. No experience meant no technique, and there was no manual to teach me. Pure brute force and stubbornness.
But with my current physical ability, technique wasn't necessary. When you could crush scrap metal with your bare hands, climbing a tree was as easy as climbing a ladder.
I'll head up for a bit… and wait until things settle. If it comes to it, I can jump from tree to tree like in the comics.
I gave a light pat with the back of my hand to a tree so thick it would take about four people linking arms to encircle it, drew a quiet breath, and offered a small prayer in my head.
Please let whatever was happening not go too badly. If this Delic suddenly collapsed on the day I'd happened to visit, it would be a real headache.
New experiences always arrived with a fresh jolt of surprise.
A living creature's brain is designed to conserve energy as efficiently as possible, so it tends to light up more for the unfamiliar and new than for the familiar. That was why something could feel thrilling and mysterious the first time you encountered it, only to grow dull and boring as you got used to it — the natural posture of living things.
But did that same biological mechanism apply equally to electronic lifeforms living in a virtual world?
It was a question that could be philosophical, or scientific, engineering-minded, even social… yet the conclusion I reached as a currently employed electronic lifeform was this:
…This is fun. I never knew tree climbing could be this much fun!
Electronic lifeforms, just like people, get that electric thrill in the brain the more enjoyable a first-time experience is. That was my answer.
The grounds for such a clear, decisive conclusion were simple: my first-ever attempt at tree climbing had been far more enjoyable than expected.
Well, to be precise, it was more like leaping from a branch as thick as a person's torso to the branches of another tree… but in the grand scheme of things, wasn't that still tree climbing? I'd climbed up into the trees, after all. That counted.
It feels a little like going back to childhood… Hup — the way one slip could send me falling… it's kind of exciting. Fun!
Thud.
Landing securely on a sturdy branch, I drew a deep breath and set one hand against the thick trunk beside me. Then, imagining how I must look from a third-person view, I found myself so embarrassed I instinctively ducked my head.
I wasn't some elementary school kid in their prime. Getting so absorbed that jumping from tree to tree became pure joy… Even if I currently looked like Nia, this was not the behavior of a fully grown adult. It looked way too childish.
…I should tone it down a little. If I'd done this in front of Noise, I'd probably be kicking the blankets in shame for a long while.
I propped the Scissors Blade I'd been reverse-gripping against the tree for a moment, scrubbed my face with both hands as if washing without water, and quickly cooled the sudden surge of energy.
The silver lining was that all this half-dazed hopping between trees hadn't been meaningless. If it had only put me in more danger, I'd have felt pathetic enough to sigh on the spot.
So what exactly is going on in this Abyss Forest? I've figured out at least one thing while moving around.
With a much calmer tension than before, I took the Scissors Blade in hand again and quietly observed the ground below my tree.
Crunch, crack.
There, astonishingly, a snake with its neck twisted halfway around was furiously biting into a vending machine half-buried in the dirt. The area around it was strewn with blood and chunks of flesh, as if a fierce fight had just taken place.
And it didn't stop there. When the snake tore into the vending machine with its powerful jaws and swallowed about half of it, a not-insignificant change came over its body.
The snake, its body half-warped and covered in wounds, began to heal those injuries as if shedding its skin!
Shrrr…!
As if overjoyed by the change, the massive snake let out a hiss like air escaping a tire and finished devouring the half-eaten vending machine. Once the whole thing was in its mouth, it seemed satisfied; with leisurely, contented movements, it slithered off into the deeper forest and vanished.
After enough time had passed that I patiently confirmed no other life signs remained nearby, I carefully climbed down from the branch and gingerly picked up one of the scattered chunks of flesh.
…Looking at it like this, I get it. This is Virtual Beast flesh.
Which meant these scraps were the remains of a creature that had fought the snake to the death over each other's lives — and lost.
And the vending machine the snake had eaten to recover… that was probably intact, still-formed data.
Looks like it fell from above.
I tossed the sticky Virtual Beast flesh aside and tilted my head up toward the sky.
I was starting to understand the ecology of the Abyss Forest. Intact data seemed to fall from the sky here on a regular cycle. Virtual Beasts, whose bodies corroded while they were active, hid somewhere until then to minimize data consumption. And the tremor I'd felt earlier had been the impact of that data striking the ground.
If I'd wandered around carelessly, I would have run straight into Virtual Beasts hunting for food. Climbing the trees was an excellent call. I should call it luck… or maybe I'm a genius.
Even as I praised myself, I glanced at the Scissors Blade in my hand and thought for a moment. If I fought that snake right now, what would my odds look like?
…At least it's a much easier opponent than the Predator Species I met before. It's a pretty big, long snake, but I don't get the feeling I absolutely couldn't win.
If I had to put a number on it, maybe a seventy percent advantage in my favor? I had no objective data, but somehow I felt certain of it.
In that case, there was no need to hesitate much about roaming this forest. Avoid enemies I couldn't beat; take only the ones I could. If I carefully observed targets from the treetops, a hit-and-run approach like that should be possible.
"All right. Then… shall I try a little hunting?"
What might be sitting in the bellies of the living Virtual Beasts out here?
With a flutter of anticipation, I tightened my grip on the Scissors Blade and carefully watched the deeper forest, where the fighting still continued.