Hoping Today's Actions Become One Step Closer to the Goal
The Virtual World.
It was the greatest masterpiece in human history — a creation born when intellectuals from every nation, convinced that the countless crises and conflicts of their age might drive humanity to extinction in the not-so-distant future, gathered together and built something extraordinary.
And not long after the Virtual World was completed, a world war swept across the entire globe. In a single moment, every civilization collapsed, and human history itself came to a full stop. In that light, the intellectuals' fears and the actions they took could only be called rational.
The truly tragic part, however, was this: in the process of history grinding to a halt, the current generation lost the key that controlled the Virtual World. And the people of the new civilization — the ones who should have inherited it — were left with no choice but to treat that world as nothing more than a treasure chest stuffed full of knowledge, prying it open by force like a band of raiders.
Building ironclad security to keep the Virtual World — a place where every scrap of information had been dumped without discrimination — from falling into malicious hands had been an entirely reasonable decision. But for the descendants left completely destitute by a great war that had scoured away everything humanity had ever carved into existence — culture, knowledge, history, all of it — that security was nothing short of a nightmare.
It was a tragedy born of a single miscalculation: the intellectuals of that era had never once imagined that the previous generation of humanity would lead everything they had built straight into ruin.
Still, whatever the case, the great war as a turning point in history was already behind them. The people living in the new civilization today continued to challenge the Virtual World, determined to reclaim humanity's glory. Some did it for wealth. Some for honor. And some, perhaps, simply to satisfy their own personal desires.
And so they called themselves Salvagers — those who hauled deeply submerged information back out into the open — and they fought endless battles against countless obstacles. Even when that work meant staking their own lives on the line.
A barren space of death where neither sound nor light could be felt, as if one were floating through the vacuum of outer space. Those who had experienced this empty void even once called it the Abyss — a deep darker than darkness, heavier than the ocean's floor.
And true to that name, the Abyss's environment gnawed indiscriminately at every being exposed to it. In that dizzying hostility, no creature living in the Abyss would dare step outside a Delic unless they were prepared to die. No matter how absurdly powerful a whale might be in ruling the depths of the sea, once it was dragged onto land its body would collapse and it would perish. Even a Predator Species could not defy the Abyss's merciless laws.
Which meant that the most alien existence in this Abyss — the one who had come up with the idea of nesting out in the external space known as the Data Trash Heap — had, for her, been an extraordinarily lucky stroke of fortune. The choice to stake out her territory and hang lights high in the sky, as if advertising I'm right here~, made for an excellent food-supply strategy: it drew in the losers who couldn't endure life inside a Delic and turned them into prey.
In any case, if you followed the light sources that felt so jarringly out of place in the Data Trash Heap, you would quickly find their origin — a cluster of massive light towers several meters tall. Spaced at regular intervals like streetlamps along a road, the structures illuminated a surprisingly orderly landscape below.
The area lit by those towers was large enough to rival a decent soccer stadium. The mountains of scrap metal that had once been piled in crooked, chaotic heaps were nowhere to be found; the ground had been flattened as thoroughly as if someone had spent days grading it smooth. Clean paths painted in white and black paint ran across that ground, and following those paths would lead you to three striking buildings.
"Hmm, is this the right feel? Ha! No, wait — the force is landing a little awkwardly…"
And on the rooftop of the largest of those impressive buildings — the Stage — stood a girl, swinging something with focused intensity. To describe her appearance more precisely, she was somewhere between a girl and a young woman. Her height wasn't particularly tall for an adult woman, but the slender, refined jawline and slim build free of any childish roundness made a strong case that she was no child. At the same time, the overflowing vitality in her expression kept her from looking fully grown, settling her somewhere around high-school age.
That girl was, remarkably, swinging a massive object that would have reached up to her neck if stood beside her — a half-scissor blade polished like black gemstone. The Scissors Blade, as it was commonly called. By any ordinary measure, something of that thickness should have weighed several kilograms at least. Yet she whirled the enormous Scissors Blade around as if lifting a sheet of paper were no different… and then, with a deeply troubled expression, she let out a sigh toward empty air.
"Ugh… I can't use this swordsmanship tutorial video. The Scissors Blade and the sword in the footage are just too different in shape — the forms won't match up at all. At least I can figure out how to put power into a swing, I guess."
Looking resigned, the girl planted the Scissors Blade into the floor like a stake, then waved her freed hand through the air. The drain of CP that had been leaking from her body cut off at once, and the blue hologram floating in the air vanished along with it.
MRV. A form of augmented reality she had developed through various experiments over the past month — a stretch of relatively uneventful time following her collab with Menchi. The principle was simpler than expected: take video data obtainable from the Virtual World, interpret it as a 360-degree view, and project it appropriately onto the cornea. Done. Her body could hardly be called organic matter the way a real human's was, and she had already long been capable of floating data across her skin. This was merely an application of that ability.
"But this feels way more real than I expected. Could I maybe use this as streaming content?"
An idea suddenly sparked in her mind. Right now it was still an incomplete technology, limited to practicing a swordsmanship tutorial video she'd happened to pick up in the Data Trash Heap. But if she could layer color and sound onto this technique? Then even inside the Abyss, going to a zoo or an art museum together wouldn't be theoretically impossible.
How exactly she would apply that to a camera so they could enjoy it together… that was a question she couldn't answer offhand, given that she didn't fully understand the underlying principles yet.
"Well, I'll think about that slowly. I've got enough streaming content for now anyway… and if things get really tight, I can always just collab with Menchi again."
Arms crossed, she seemed to wrap up that chain of thoughts. Then she pulled the Scissors Blade free from where it had been neatly planted in the floor, crouched down, and checked whether any holes had been punched through the Stage's ceiling. Result: no problem. Confirming that the rooftop had only taken a few modest scratches, the girl sprang to her feet and, without the slightest hesitation, gripped the Scissors Blade tight and flung herself off the rooftop railing.
Given the Stage's considerable size, diving from that rooftop was no different from a bungee jump without a cord from several meters up. But she spun her body with practiced ease, absorbed the full impact through her legs, dusted off her knees as if brushing away a bit of dirt, and set off down the path with a total lack of concern.
"Hmm-hmm-hmm~ What time is today's stream again? Right… thirty minutes. I should start getting ready."
Humming under her breath with a leisure that made it impossible to believe she'd just dropped from a tall building, the girl closed one eye in a wink to check the current time, then broke into a light run along the path as if out for a casual stroll.
But at the end of that path, after she had sprinted the whole way, there was nothing waiting but a cliff — a drop so deep the light from above never even reached the bottom. Fall from there, and even someone who could land casually from several meters up would end up in a very bad way. Yet she didn't slow down. If anything, she picked up speed, as though she fully intended to hurl herself off the edge.
And in the instant when a few more steps would have sent her plunging straight into the depths — the girl coiled power into her springy legs and jumped with everything she had!
A terrifying act of self-destruction, carried out without so much as a scream or a grim resolve. But in the direction of her leap hung a house, fixed upside-down to the ceiling — a thoroughly strange house with its door flung wide open. The height difference to that house was a dizzying twenty meters or so… yet however strong her legs were, she sailed cleanly through the open doorway with the Scissors Blade still in one hand, as if it were nothing at all.
Naturally, nailing a jump of that height with perfect precision was no easy feat, and the girl smacked her head against the ceiling on the way in. But her body was so solid that the impact registered as little more than a mild itch; she simply scratched the top of her head lightly and moved on.
"Phew… Noise, is the stream ready?"
Time really did move faster on this side. The silver-haired, purple-eyed girl who had just entered the house addressed the small girl sitting on the bed, tapping away at something with focused intensity. Noise — as she was called — had clearly noticed the arrival, given the whole head-bonking commotion. She looked up with her usual blank expression and nodded.
"Yeah. Finished it earlier. …But Nia. Why don't you use the pulley?"
"Huh? Oh… because lowering it and raising it again is a pain…? Hahaha…. Ah, Noise! You're going down to check on the plants later, right? Want to go together…?"
"…"
"Ahaha…. I-if you don't want to, that's fine…."
Changing the subject the moment things get inconvenient, huh. Noise stared at her expressionlessly, applying silent pressure over the habit of making those occasionally dangerous jump-entries. The girl called Nia could only laugh awkwardly and drop into the chair in front of the computer, fleeing Noise's gaze.
"I don't mind."
"R-really? Then should we eat something together while we're down there? I'll put in tomatoes — the ones you like!"
"Tomatoes…"
Perhaps the allure of a food that was truly impossible to find in the Abyss was simply too much to resist. Noise's hands stopped on the keyboard, and she stared blankly into empty air as if already lost in the magic of tomatoes — no doubt imagining whatever dish would include them. Feeling the pressure from her ease off dramatically, Nia breathed an inward sigh of relief.
Whew… I really shouldn't do the jump-entry when Noise is around…. She's been scolding me about it a lot lately….
It was dangerous, so she couldn't even argue. Sweating nervously on the inside, Nia checked that the stream start time was almost upon them and straightened up in her seat.
All of that was well and good. But what she needed to focus on was the stream. Maintaining her territory inside the Abyss consumed a great deal of CP, after all.
And so, once again, she went live. Hoping that today's actions would become one step closer to the goal of bringing Nia's videos back to life.
Today marked roughly four months since she had become Nia. And since she had started streaming… it was the three-month anniversary.