The Angler
I somehow managed to hold on to my hazy mind and ran toward the pond.
Though "ran" was generous — by my old standards, the speed was barely faster than a brisk walk. I was out of breath after only a few steps, and with my field of vision so much lower than usual, I couldn't even judge distances properly. Every blade of grass brushing my ankles felt disproportionately large, and the hem of this unfamiliar outfit kept winding around my legs with every step, but I had no room in my head to worry about any of that.
Confirming the ominous premonition that had haunted my mind since the moment I opened my eyes came first.
"Haah... haah..."
The moment I finally reached the edge of the pond, I braced my hands on my knees and gulped down ragged breaths. Right in front of me, the sunlit water rippled calmly as if nothing had happened, but now that I'd actually made it here, I couldn't quite muster the courage to look inside.
It can't be.
Maybe I was just having a strange delusion. Perhaps I was still slumped asleep at my computer, and everything I saw, heard, and felt right now was simply an unusually vivid dream.
After persuading myself like that over and over, I slowly lowered my trembling gaze.
A small human figure was reflected in the clear water, where sunlight scattered and broke apart.
"..."
At first, I couldn't think at all.
Jet-black hair spilled down past the shoulders, and the face peeking out between those strands was small enough to be covered entirely by two cupped hands. Only after I'd confirmed the slender neck, the narrow shoulders, and a body so tiny it couldn't even be compared to the adult male frame I'd lived in all my life did the conclusion I'd been desperately avoiding bloom vividly in my mind.
The person reflected in the water was a young girl.
There was not a single trace of the healthy adult man I'd been for twenty-eight years. Instead, a girl I'd never seen before stared back at me from beneath the water, wearing the same dumbfounded expression I had.
And yet, strangely, the face didn't feel completely unfamiliar.
I had seen it somewhere before.
Not once or twice, either — for a very, very long time.
"Ha... hahaha..."
Something between a laugh and a sigh leaked out from between my lips. I shook my head slowly, as if denying reality, and of course the girl in the water shook her head with the exact same motion.
"It's a dream, right...? This can't actually make sense."
No one answered.
Out of options, I chose the most primitive method available — I grabbed my cheek with my small hand and pinched as hard as I could.
"Owch!"
The pain came far sharper than I'd anticipated. I flinched and let go, and the pinched cheek flushed red in an instant. I stared blankly at the mark, then collapsed onto the bank of the pond like a puppet with its strings cut.
If this really was a dream, it was far too vivid.
When I pressed my palms to the ground, the texture of the soil and grass came through completely. Every time the wind blew, my long hair tickled my neck and cheeks. Even my ragged breathing and pounding heartbeat were so relentlessly real that calling all of this a simple dream strained credibility.
What on earth happened to me?
I desperately combed through my memories.
I'd left the office on time like always, taken the bus home, showered, and turned on my computer. I'd logged into the game, gone fishing, cracked open a can of beer, and — because work had been a bit hectic lately — drowsiness had flooded over me and I'd slumped face-down onto my desk. I remembered all of that clearly.
And then... nothing.
"Did I die of overwork or something...? No, I even left on time yesterday..."
Absurd thoughts even surfaced — had something been in that beer? But then again, one can of beer reducing me to this state didn't make any sense either.
"...I'm losing my mind."
When I dragged my shrunken hands down my face, the unfamiliar sensation shook me back to reality. My palms were small, my fingers were slender, and the slightest turn of my head sent hair sliding down over my shoulders.
Even in the midst of all that confusion, something kept nagging at a corner of my mind.
Both my current body and the scenery before me were things I'd never seen before — and yet, somehow, they felt uncannily familiar.
I looked around slowly.
Blue grassland stretching to the edge of my vision, a picturesque pond settled at its heart, rocks large and small lining the water's edge in irregular rows, and beyond them, dense woods continuing onward.
When I finally turned to look at the spot where I'd woken up just moments ago, my eyes landed on an old wooden fishing rod lying abandoned in the grass.
"...Wait a second."
Something clicked in my head.
I scrambled to my feet, my eyes darting between the pond and the surrounding scenery. At first I dismissed it as a ridiculous thought, but the more features I compared, the harder it became to deny.
"This is... the place where I used to fish in Ryu Origin."
A chill crept up my spine.
The screen I'd been staring at right up until the moment I fell asleep last night replayed vividly in my head. The tranquil pond, the grassland swaying in the wind, and a tiny character sitting motionless with its fishing rod cast out.
Only then did I understand why the girl's face in the water had felt so familiar.
That face belonged to the avatar I had created myself and stared at countless times.
"...Huh?... Seriously?"
I swallowed dryly and looked around once more, but no matter how real everything seemed, this alone wasn't quite enough to conclude that I had actually been transported into the game.
Fortunately, there was a way to check.
Any modern person steeped in countless games and web novels knew exactly what you were supposed to shout first in a situation like this.
I straightened my back for no particular reason and carefully addressed the empty air.
"St... Status Window."
Nothing happened. The wind merely rustled a few blades of grass.
Wondering if my voice had been too quiet, I tried calling "Status Window" again, more clearly this time — same result. Flustered, I called out "Status" and "Menu" in turn, and when that produced no reaction either, I spat out every word I could think of: "Logout," "Return," "Skills," "Inventory," "Stats" — all of them.
But far from any translucent window appearing before my eyes, all I got was a single bird drifting leisurely overhead.
It was starting to get embarrassing.
Still, I couldn't give up on my last shred of hope. I glanced around furtively, then murmured in the smallest possible voice.
"God?... Please save me."
Chirp, chirp.
The only response was birdsong from somewhere in the distance.
"Oh, come on! Shouldn't SOMETHING show up?"
In the end, I crouched down in the grass and clutched my head. Falling into what looked like a game world was absurd enough, but the system — the one thing that absolutely had to exist if this really were a game — refused to appear no matter how I called it, leaving me unable to judge what I could even do.
Still, comparing the surrounding scenery against my memories, the odds were fairly high that this place was somewhere near Ryukel, the small starter town of Ryu Origin. Above all, my current body resembled the avatar I'd used far too closely for all of this to be a simple coincidence.
The problem was that of all things, it had to be this avatar.
"Why... why this character, of all people..."
Ryu Origin had countless combat classes and life professions, and I'd created a whole roster of characters to enjoy every bit of content the game offered. Among them had been combat characters decked out in top-tier gear, and even one I'd invested in so heavily that he could take on most bosses solo.
But the body I'd ended up in wasn't any of those.
It was a hobby character I'd made purely for fishing.
Its class was, naturally, Angler; its gear focused entirely on fishing efficiency; and it spent most of its playtime just sitting by the water. Its combat ability was as good as nonexistent — it had never been created with fighting in mind in the first place.
"...I'm doomed."
Suddenly, I felt like I might cry.
It wasn't that I'd clung desperately to my old life, but I hadn't wanted to abandon everything and leave for another world overnight, either. Until just yesterday, I'd been working at my job, checking game updates on the commute home, and unwinding with a can of beer and a fishing rod.
It was a dull, unremarkable daily routine — but it was mine.
And now my job, my home, my computer, even the body I'd lived in for twenty-eight years — all of it was gone.
Without thinking, I looked up at the clear sky. As if I were the only person in the world whose life had been turned upside down, the cloudless sky was infuriatingly peaceful — and just as I sat there, staring blankly for a while, a small sound rumbled from my belly.
Grrrrble—
Apparently my stomach didn't care about the circumstances.
"Seriously... read the room."
Yelling at my own stomach wasn't going to change anything. I wiped away the moisture gathering at the corners of my eyes with the back of my hand and slowly rose to my feet.
Sitting here moping wasn't going to magically conjure a way back to reality, so I decided to get food first and sort out my thoughts after.
When I picked up the wooden fishing rod I'd found earlier, a rough, weighty texture settled into my palm — far coarser than I'd expected. It was a strange feeling, holding in an actual hand something that in the game had taken no more than a few mouse clicks, but oddly enough, my fingers moved with the natural ease of someone who had always known how to grip a rod.
I settled onto a flat rock at the edge of the pond and cast out the line.
Plop.
A small bobber settled onto the surface, and round ripples spread outward in every direction.
Even the thoughts that had been churning my mind into chaos seemed to slowly settle as I quietly watched those ripples. Maybe this was exactly why I'd loved fishing in the game, too.
It was still strange how my lengthened hair tickled my cheeks whenever the wind blew, but the time I spent gripping the rod and watching the bobber felt inexplicably soothing.
And so, gazing out at the water, I called up the story of Ryu Origin piece by piece.
Players became adventurers, traveled across the land, made companions, and built their own parties. Through countless incidents and battles, they grew — and at the end of it all, they rose up against the Seven Calamities that had appeared all across the world. That was the game's grand overarching plot.
But no matter how I looked at it, that epic story and the current me had nothing to do with each other.
An Angler without even the hope of combat ability, in the body of a young girl too weak to run properly, in a world where even the Status Window wouldn't appear — for someone like that to step up as a hero saving the world wasn't reckless bravado. It was practically suicide.
"Forget becoming an adventurer — I'd probably die if I ran into a slime, wouldn't I...?"
At that exact moment.
The quietly floating bobber twitched once, hesitated, then twitched again — and a heartbeat later it was yanked straight under the surface as if something had seized it.
"Hm? Oh — oh, one's on!"
Faster than my thoughts, my body reacted.
I sprang up from my seat and pulled the rod taut, and a heavy resistance traveled up the strained line. The fish beneath the surface thrashed violently left and right, doing everything it could to escape.
This was my first time fishing with a real rod, yet remarkably, I didn't panic. Without simply hauling on brute force, I guided the rod along with the fish's movements and waited for the moment its strength gave out — even the way I worked my wrist and kept tension on the line felt natural, as though it had been drilled into my body ages ago.
Before long, a silver fish burst through the surface, scattering sunlight.
SPLASH—!
"Oh...!"
The fish I caught in both hands was bigger than I'd imagined. In the game I would have tossed it into my inventory without a second thought, but right now, all I could think was that this was my very first meal.
"Fish! I've got food!"
The person who'd been moping about her life being over just moments ago was nowhere to be found as I pranced around the edge of the pond with the fish held aloft, celebrating all by myself.
"Food! There IS food!"
Then, abruptly, my feet stopped.
I looked at the fish in my hand. I looked around. I looked back down at the fish.
No fire. No knife.
Obviously no cooking equipment either.
"...What exactly did I think I was going to do with this?"
My joy didn't last even a few seconds.
Letting out a long sigh, I placed the fish in the basket that had been lying beside the fishing rod where I'd first woken up. I couldn't eat it now, but once I reached town I could sell it or find a way to cook it — far better than showing up empty-handed.
Looking at the pond one last time, I made up my mind.
Staying here wouldn't change anything.
"First stop — Ryukel."
A city meant people, at the very least. I could seek help at the Adventurer's Guild, and if combat was truly off the table, I could look into surviving as a merchant or some other life profession.
Seven Calamities of the world, epic adventures — none of that was my problem right now.
Survival came first.
Shouldering the basket and tucking the wooden rod under my arm, I set off in the direction Ryukel should be, tracing the map in my memory.
How long had I been walking since I entered the forest?
On a game screen it had been a trivial distance, but on my own two feet, it was an entirely different story. Tree roots sprawled carelessly across the path, rocks large and small threatened to roll my ankles, and above all, my shrunken body was out of breath after the slightest incline.
"Haah... I'm sure it was this way..."
I stopped to catch my breath and looked around, but the scenery differed in small ways from what I remembered.
In the game, you picked a destination and the character navigated there on its own; open the minimap, and your location appeared instantly. But a real forest unfolding before my eyes was far vaster and more tangled than any backdrop on a monitor — a single tree, a single boulder, was enough to lose your bearings.
Worse, at some point a hazy mist had begun to settle around me.
At first I assumed it was a common forest phenomenon, but the further I walked, the mist didn't thin — it only thickened. Before I knew it, even a tree just a short distance away was reduced to a faint silhouette, and the air brushing my skin turned damp and cold.
And then I noticed another wrongness.
The birdsong had stopped.
I couldn't even recall when the chirping and insect noises that had echoed through the forest until just moments ago had fallen silent. Even the wind that had stirred the leaves seemed to have died, and a strange stillness pressed down on everything around me.
"The town really shouldn't be this far away..."
I slowed my steps and lowered my voice.
It seemed I'd taken a wrong turn somewhere. No matter how many times I'd studied the game map, navigating a real forest without a minimap was an entirely different problem — it might be wiser to retrace my steps and reorient myself.
Just as I was turning to do exactly that —
Beyond the mist, I glimpsed the outline of something enormous.
At first, I thought it was a rock.
The dark shape looming through the hazy fog was massive as a small hill, and it had been crouched motionless for so long that the thought of it being a living creature never even crossed my mind.
Whoooosh...
The moment a low, heavy breath rolled through the entire forest, that assumption shattered to pieces.
I froze in place, clutching my fishing rod.
As the mist was pushed apart by its breath and slowly dispersed, black, hardened scales gradually came into view. Only after I'd taken in the massive body weathered like ancient rock, the carapace rising from its back, and the head that called a dragon to mind did I finally grasp that the thing before me resembled no animal I knew.
Looking closer, I saw deep wounds carved all across its enormous body.
Dark-red blood had crusted between shattered, split scales, and blood that had not yet dried trickled slowly down, staining the shallow water crimson. I couldn't tell what it had fought, but the mere fact that a creature of this size had been wounded this badly was enough to chill me to the bone.
Run — that should have been the first and only thought. Yet somehow, I couldn't move.
Whether it was fear, or curiosity toward a being I'd never seen before, I couldn't tell myself. But as I listened to its labored, ragged breathing, something hard to explain slipped in between the fear I'd felt only moments ago.
Before I knew it, I'd taken a step forward.
At that instant, one of the enormous closed eyes opened slowly.
"...!"
I stumbled back a step on pure instinct.
The massive pupil emerging from the mist fixed precisely on me, and that single gaze alone carried such overwhelming pressure that my body locked up entirely.
Then, a low, ponderous voice — impossible to tell whether it reached me through my ears or resonated directly in my skull — vibrated through the air.
"...A human."
I couldn't answer. I only swallowed dryly.
The enormous being narrowed its eyes, as if even looking at me were too much trouble, and continued in a voice steeped in deep weariness.
"Tiresome creatures. Begone from my sight."
The instant those words landed, alarms blared in my head: run, now.
If that colossal being so wished, it could tear something like me apart with a twitch of a single claw. And I was an Angler with no combat ability whatsoever — there was nothing I could possibly do against a monster like that.
And yet my eyes kept drifting back to its wounds.
Up close, its condition was far worse than it had appeared from a distance. Several of its seemingly hard scales were cracked and broken, and blood still seeped from between the deep gashes. Its massive body heaved painfully with every breath, and in the eyes that had glared at me moments ago, there was something heavier than hostility — the profound exhaustion of a life worn down to its very limits.
I bit my lip, and finally asked, carefully.
"You're... you're hurt, aren't you? Are you okay?"
Only after the words left my mouth did I realize how foolish they sounded.
Asking are you okay — looking at that state? Anyone could see it was anything but okay.
And yet, I couldn't turn away, not even after its warning.
It wasn't that I wasn't afraid. If anything, I was terrified — my fingertips trembled and my legs had gone weak. But walking away and pretending I'd never seen a living creature wounded this badly sat wrong with me in a way I couldn't ignore.
In the end, I edged a little closer and crouched down carefully beside it.
The enormous pupil followed my every movement.
It seemed wary of humans, but showed no sign of attacking; if anything, it simply stared at me in silence for a long while, as if it couldn't comprehend a tiny human who wouldn't flee even after being told to leave.
"Ha..."
At last, a low sigh escaped its mouth.
"Little human, what exactly are you doing?"
I couldn't answer right away.
Up close, it was even more enormous — a slight turn of its head looked like it could swallow me whole.
After a moment's hesitation, I slowly extended my trembling hand.
I wasn't trying to touch it.
Perhaps I wanted to show I bore no hostility — or perhaps I wanted to confirm to myself that I wouldn't run. Even I couldn't say which.
"...You."
Its great eye turned toward my small hand.
"Does it hurt a lot?"
No answer came.
Only the mist drifted slowly between us, and the enormous being simply watched me in stillness, the way one might observe a creature it had never seen before.
And I did not look away from that gaze either.