A Severe Case of Exploration Addiction
Teaming up with Nacchan to see Oceanus had been, in more ways than one, a remarkably successful move.
After I ended my stream that first day, she stayed on by herself, chatting with the Eighth Stars and pushing the exploration ever onward. By the time she logged off, the rate stood at 51 percent, just as she had told me.
The next day, though, I got home from school and logged into Ashen City ahead of schedule—and Nacchan was already online.
"Um, uh, Natsune-senpai?"
"Ah, Izumi! I'll share the log with you."
The moment she did, my Ash Desert exploration rate read 97 percent.
"...D-did you keep exploring all by yourself?"
"Yep! I stayed behind yesterday and just kept going, and it was actually pretty fun. So today I woke up and kept at it on my own!"
"...Eh?"
She had been doing it alone because exploration was fun?
Well, sure. Exploration can be fun. One of the joys of a survival game is wandering until you stumble on something new. But what Nacchan and I had been doing was nothing of the sort. It was Ash Desert exploration—not the thrill of discovery, but the same task repeated until your eyes glazed over. An advanced refining manual might turn up, yet it was the sort of drop you could not even use right away.
And that was fun?
"Izumi, hurry up and let's move on to the next region! I want to know what the other ones drop!"
...This was a severe case of exploration addiction.
Even so, thanks to the alliance, we were closing in on Oceanus at a ridiculous pace. Three days. That was all it had taken.
Beyond the Milky Way~
there's a world I share with you~
...And along the way, I had gotten to feed a certain desire of my own.
It was a vast room.
Neglect had left corrosion creeping through every corner, but an emergency generator was still intact, so switching on the lights was no trouble at all.
"Whoa! It's seriously huge!"
Nacchan was looking around in open amazement. Fair enough. In a game set after the end of the world, anyone would jump at a place like this. I had been thrilled the first time I saw it, too.
"A-and if we go in here, probably..."
I tapped the keyboard, and with a heavy clack the enormous door swung open. Inside waited ornaments drowned in dust, and games installed purely for gambling.
"W-wait, is this..."
"A c-casino."
That was right. The developers of Ashen City had built it as a courtesy to anyone playing multiplayer: a casino where you could kill time on all sorts of minigames. Poker and chess, roulette, blackjack, slot machines. Wager the materials you had stockpiled, pick one of those games, and a win could pay out as much as five times your stake.
"We can play everything in here, right?"
"Yes."
"C-come on, let's try it, Izumi! Call the others too!"
"Sh-shall we?"
We had only stopped in while exploring for Oceanus, but a little fun along the way ought to be fine. It was not even real money. Nothing could go wrong.
...Or so I believed, right up until that moment.
"This is insane! It's rigged! Suzuha! Give me my steel back!"
"Whatever do you mean, Tsubaki-senpai? I played a perfectly fair match. The computer is the dealer. Cheating is impossible."
"This is ridiculous! This roulette wheel is clearly broken! There is no way I have not won a single spin!"
"...This is a disaster."
My vocabulary contained no better word for it.
"...Yeah."
Fortunately, Nacchan agreed with me.
What were they talking about? Nacchan and I had played lightly and called it quits. Anyone could see the problem was the addicts who showed up later.
"Then we go again! Next round, two hundred steel each!"
"Gladly. Though I suspect Tsubaki-senpai's funds are running rather thin..."
"I am not giving up! No matter what happens, I am going to make it big on this roulette wheel!"
Nacchan and I tried to tell them not to get too sucked in. It did not help. The one small mercy was that Yuzuki-senpai, Aki, and Utsumi lost interest quickly and left. Akabane had not even shown up—
"Akaka! So this is the casino Suzuha mentioned. This one shall join as well!"
"Ohohoho! Then once I am finished with this roulette wheel, it is a match, Yukari!"
"No! How can you even get four of a kind?! Do you have any idea what the odds are, Suzuha?!"
"What is already on the table cannot be helped, Tsubaki-senpai!"
...And so the ranks of the gambling addicts grew by one.
"S-should we really just leave them?"
"I-I think we did our best..."
We had tried to stop Kurokami-senpai when she dumped every material she had saved onto the roulette wheel. We had blocked Namikawa-senpai from going all-in against Koga at poker. We had explained the rules of blackjack from the beginning, because Akabane did not actually know them. If we had done that much, surely we were allowed to get back on the road.
Luckily, each of their viewers seemed to be eating it up.
Not that I felt no guilt. Still, they had chosen the content themselves.
I'm not the one in the wrong.
Ah. Probably.
"Th-this is the last region..."
We had started in the Ash Desert and gone on through the Ash-Gray River, the collapsed city, the corroded shopping district, and the rest. The final region Nacchan and I had come to was Ash Village.
"Yeah."
From Tuesday through today, Saturday. Long, if you called it long. Short, if you called it short. Four days. The journey we had taken together for Oceanus would end here. Strictly speaking, a special condition that still had not appeared would have to be met—but as a simple tour of Ashen City's many districts, this was the last stop.
"All right, then let's start exploring Ash Village too!"
"Yes...!"
Turning that over in my mind, I began the final exploration.
Ashen City's exploration rate is split into two figures: total exploration, and regional exploration.
Total exploration is a shared pool that does not care which region you are in. Collect materials and techniques other than items players can craft themselves, or complete a regional map, and the number climbs. Regional exploration is exactly what it sounds like—a figure that tells you how much of a single region you have covered.
Right now, Nacchan's and mine both read 99.99 percent.
"Th-this is finally, truly the end..."
"Whoa. It still doesn't feel real. What do I do?"
The two of us were standing in the fallen government office, the last zone of Ash Village. Map this place, and exploration would end. The game would tell us the special condition for reaching Oceanus.
"Izumi."
"...Yes."
"For four days, we've been allies, right?"
"Th-that's right."
"It might be funny that I'm only saying this now, but... how about we start calling each other more comfortably?"
"...Eh?"
"I'll call you Izumi, so I'd like you to call me by my name too. Ah, no. You're an Eighth Star, so is Nacchan easier?"
"Huh? Uh, um, th-that's..."
What was Nacchan saying? Me, calling Nacchan Nacchan? That was absurd.
"Y-you're after my organs after all, aren't you...?"
"Pfft!"
"Ehehehe.... Izumi, you really are cute."
This is a dream. If it were not, none of this would make sense, so it had to be a dream.
"So... do you hate the idea?"
"Um, uh, well..."
If she asked whether I hated it or liked it, of course I liked it. When my debut as a member of the StarsFlow Second Generation was confirmed, one of the things I had looked forward to most was getting close to Nacchan. But the more I hoped for it, the more some part of me was afraid. What if we grew close, and then Nacchan learned who Kayano Mina was and ended up disappointed? I knew it was a useless worry. Even so, the what-if scared me anyway.
"Hkk—!"
My heart nearly stopped.
Unfair. That is cheating, Nacchan. I am going to die of cardiac arrest. Asked like that, there was no way I could refuse.
"Th-then I'll call you N-Nacchan too..."
"Talk casually, too, Izumi! We're friends now!"
"..."
At the sound of her delighted voice, my eyes slowly slid shut. The world I had always thought was nothing but cruel turned out to be rather beautiful.
"All right, then you do the last mapping, Izumi."
"Uh, m-me...?"
"Yep! This trip started because you suggested it, so you should be the one to finish it. And you really can talk however you want, okay?"
"Ah, um, o-okay..."
At that, I entered the mapping command. Ten seconds later the map was complete, and the two figures that had pointed at 99.99 percent hit 100. A quest alert chimed, bright and clear.
And there it was.
"...Huh?"