Chương 1: Book 1: Chapter 1 - Disconnect

Like the dew I fall, like the dew I vanish—Such is my life. Even Naniwa's splendor is a dream within a dream. - Toyotomi Hideyoshi. [TEAM CHAT: FINAL RING // MATCH TIMER: 00: 03: 12] KitsuneKing: Smoke left. Two under bridge. SaintOfSalt: Hold position. Do not chase. Kintsugi: Three rounds. No armor. IronJun: Then shoot better.

The city was already dead by the time Shimon Ayanokouji crawled into the remains of the elevated station, dragging a rifle with three rounds left in the magazine and a damage warning pulsing at the edge of his vision. Apartment towers leaned over streets of fused asphalt, collapsed transit lines hanging like broken ribs, emergency sirens crying from unseen speakers, and a low ceiling of smoke lit from beneath by random fires.

It was beautiful in the way competitive maps were beautiful, which meant every ruined wall was cover, every burning car was a sightline hazard, and every piece of urban tragedy had been placed with the loving precision of a murderer arranging flowers. His real body was nowhere near the battlefield. It was sitting in a dark Tokyo apartment with an interface band resting against his temples and an empty energy drink slowly warming beside his keyboard. His eyes were closed, though that made no difference anymore.

The image in front of him was not passing through his optic nerves in the usual way. It came through the biochip threaded into the base of his skull, a very expensive piece of experimental hardware that processed his sensory data and fed it directly into the parts of the brain that needed it. To the public, full-dive gaming was still mostly headsets, haptic rigs, and expensive glove controllers. To Shimon, it was a private miracle he was not legally permitted to explain to anyone.

The chip had a polite company name, several classification numbers, and a non-disclosure agreement thick enough to stop a knife. Officially, he was part of a long-term adaptive neuro-interface study. Unofficially, he was a test subject who had turned out to have excellent reaction times, a high tolerance for neural sync, and just enough ambition to turn those advantages into an e-sports career.

His teammates knew he used a customized medical interface because that much could not be hidden from League hardware inspections, but they did not know what it really did.

They did not know that his reflexes had been quietly tuned since childhood until dropped objects seemed to fall through syrup, until sudden motion at the edge of his peripheral vision tugged at his attention like a hook, until a glass or pen slipping from a desk became not an accident but something to be stopped before his conscious mind had even begun to spark. The company called it predictive response smoothing.

Shimon had once watched Mochi, his black-and-white cat, sit perfectly still on his desk, eyes half-closed and tail barely moving, until a moth passed too close to the desk lamp. Her paw struck with lightning speed. Shimon thought he could probably be faster if he tried. [PARTY STATUS] KitsuneKing — HP: 31% // Armor: 0% SaintOfSalt — HP: 64% // Armor: 12% IronJun — HP: 18% // Armor: 0% Kintsugi — HP: 9% // Armor: 0%"Shimon," Jun snapped over comms, "left side. Now."

"I'm pinned," Shimon answered, pressing himself tighter against the broken concrete. His avatar's breath came fast and ragged in his ears, an artificial panic layered over his real pulse. Jun's voice lowered.

"You're always pinned."

"Because people keep focus shooting at me," he complained. An old complaint, worn with time and annoyance.

"Just get good." Shimon risked half a glance around the edge. A white beam carved past his face and burned a molten line through the wall behind him, close enough for the pain-filter to send a warning sting across his cheek. He pulled back, blinked against the afterimage, and tried to ignore Jun's irritated breathing over the channel. Somewhere below, the last ring was closing through the city, eating cover and forcing both teams into the same ruined avenue.

"Confirmed," Shimon commented wryly.

"Still pinned." Hana's voice cut through the comms with the steady calm that made her such a good captain and such an infuriating human being.

"One flanker above you on the bridge. Cloak failed. I can mark him for half a second now that my CDs refreshed." A red ping flashed above the cracked avenue, there and gone before any normal player could have made proper use of it. Shimon exhaled, let the sound of the match narrow, and allowed the chip to do what it did best. It did not aim for him, no matter what the company lawyers liked to argue in their documentation. He was no cheater using an aimbot.

It did not make choices, did not play the game, did not think. It simply shortened the distance between recognition and response, tightening the slack in the nervous system until the world seemed to move with a fraction more patience than it offered everyone else. That fraction had made him a professional. The pro-gamer raised the rifle, tracked the distortion of the stealth field as it crossed the broken bridge, and fired. The first shot missed, sparking off a support beam.

Jun made a noise of disgust, but Shimon had already corrected, already felt the tiny adjustment in the grip before the criticism reached him. The second round caught the flanker in the leg. The enemy stumbled and slammed against the railing. He fired the last round before the player could recover. [ELIMINATION] Kintsugi eliminated NOX_RedHare. Enemy Squad Remaining: 3"One down," Shimon confirmed.

"About time," came Jun's aggrieved response. A missile hit the platform before Shimon could answer. The world went white, then gray, then became a violent smear of heat and noise. The pain filter caught most of it, but not all. His jaw clenched hard enough that his real teeth hurt, and for one nauseating moment he was aware of both bodies at once: the avatar tumbling through smoke and concrete, and the actual Shimon sitting rigid in his apartment chair.

[WARNING] HP: 3% Status: Concussed Motor Assist: Unstable He landed on the upper level of the ruined station, half-hidden among twisted rails, and looked down through the wreckage. Jun had fallen back behind the shell of a burned taxi with nothing but a pistol. Hana had a pistol, no shields, and one grenade. Shimon had no ammunition, no armor, and three percent health, but the enemy squad had made the mistake of bunching together under the platform in their haste to finish the job.

He started laughing because it was perfect.

"Hana," he said, "learned to throw yet?"

"Suck a lemon," she replied.

"High arc. Over me. Three seconds delayed fuse." Thankfully, Hana did not waste time arguing, which was one of the reasons she was captain. The grenade rose, a small black dot turning end over end over the smoke. Shimon forced his avatar upright, ignored the motor-assist warnings crawling across his vision, took two clumsy steps with the broken rifle still in his hand, and threw himself off the platform. For two stretched-out moments, the city opened beneath him, and he hit the lower level.

Then the grenade detonated above and behind him half a heartbeat later, and the hostile markers disappeared, and the entire stage fell into the strange silence that always followed a match ending. [MATCH COMPLETE] VICTORY Team Hachiman advances to the Quarter-Finals. For half a breath, no one spoke. Then Jun screamed so loudly that the channel distorted.

"YES! Yes, you stupid bastard, that actually worked!" Shimon's avatar lay face-down in a crater, one arm bent under him at an angle the animation system had clearly given up trying to make dignified. Over the comms, Hana laughed, soft and tired, the way she did when the match had gone badly enough that even winning felt like surviving a car accident.

"Quarter-finals tomorrow. Same time. Shimon, try not to be late."

"I am always on time."

"Ten minutes early or you're late," his captain corrected. The victory screen unfolded across the burned-out sky, bathing the rubble in gold. Their symbols rose one after another: a fox mask, a white halo, an iron oni, and Shimon's own cracked lacquer bowl repaired with a seam of gold. Kintsugi. Broken, patched, still useful. He had chosen the emblem years ago because he had been pretentious and thought it was cool. Anything was better than his name. Shimon Ayanokouji. He disliked it on principle.

Shimon was already uncommon enough, a"kira kira" name, and Ayanokouji was worse: long, old-fashioned, overly dignified, the sort of surname that sounded as if it belonged to someone descended from the pre-war zaibatsu. His parents had thought his first name combined with his last sounded cool. He thought it sounded like a character from a bad anime or manga. Shimon, seventh son of the Ayanokouji household, had spent most of his early life wishing for something short, forgettable, and easy to misplace.

He was glad when they moved to the States. They didn't understand why his name was strange there, and after he learned to speak English properly, less so. He could speak it before, but there was speaking, and there was speaking without an embarrassing accent. By the end of it, his social position sure beat being like some of the other students lower down on the tier list. Things could have been worse; he could have been from a black family from the developments. [GLOBAL FEED] Team Hachiman defeats Red Gate.

Quarter-Final Match Scheduled: 21: 00 JST, Tomorrow. The team said their usual goodbyes that he half-listened to before he touched two fingers to the right side of his head and gave the command.

"Log out." The burning city came apart by layers. For half a second there was only the blind gap between one reality and the next, that unpleasant full-dive absence where the brain waited for the real world to be returned to it. Then his apartment came back. It was a narrow studio in Tokyo, dark except for the sleeping monitors on his desk, the small red light on the router, and the weak reflection of rain crawling down the window. He much preferred it here to the States.

Here, at least, he had a much lower chance of being gunned shopping for groceries. The young man sat for a while with the interface band loose around his neck, waiting for his body to feel fully inhabited. His shoulders ached from the session. His mouth tasted of canned coffee and the horrible aftertaste of too much sugar. On the small bed, Mochi lifted her head and regarded him with the severe yellow-eyed disappointment of an animal who believed all human achievement was a distraction from feeding her.

"We won," Shimon told her. Mochi blinked once and promptly ignored him.

"Yes, I understand that this means nothing to you." He reached for the hook on the side of the desk to hang up the interface band, missed it, and knocked an empty glass toward the edge. The glass started to tip over. Before the conscious thought had fully formed, his hand had already crossed the distance and caught it before it fell.

"I'm getting faster," he muttered. The company's doctors had always enjoyed measuring things like that. Enhanced reflex latency. Improved peripheral event recognition. Subconscious motor prediction. Reduced response lag under stress. The language made it sound sterile, almost gentle. He had been the seventh son in a family where every additional child had turned money into an even more precious thing.

Six older brothers meant six sets of school fees, six appetites, six wardrobes of hand-me-downs that wore thinner by the year, six futures his parents had tried to keep from collapsing into one another. The company had approached them because his family fit the trial profile: multilingual environment, low enough income to qualify for assistance, educated enough parents to fill out monthly developmental reports without too many errors.

The implant was described as harmless, reversible in theory, and potentially life-changing. In exchange for participation, the company would cover education, medical costs, food support, and eventually a stipend. His parents would send monthly feedback on sleep, language development, appetite, coordination, attention span, emotional regulation, headaches, nightmares, social adjustment, abnormal incidents, and whatever else the researchers decided mattered that year. They had not sold him.

Shimon believed that most days, but they had rented him out. Whored him out to science, if he was feeling unkind. His parents had been tired and frightened and trying to keep seven sons fed in a country that punished poverty. Where everyone was only a few medical bills before bankruptcy. But the company had paid, the forms had been signed, and he had grown up well enough. Speaking of money, he had decided to send part of his "paycheck" to cancer research by making a few clicks on the screen.

Pressing the send button always gave him a measure of relief. It probably did not amount to much, not in any grand or measurable way, but it was his small act of defiance against nature and the general cruelty of being human. Given enough time, everyone's body seemed to find some way to betray them, and cancer was one of the more common names for that betrayal. This, he had come to realize, was his modest way of pushing back. Of helping the world, if only by a fraction.

He set the glass back on the desk with exaggerated care. Mochi hopped down from the bed, padded over to her bowl, and stared at it despite the fact that there was still food inside.

"That is food," Shimon said. Mochi meowed.

"That is expensive food, you know." His pet meowed again.

"Fine. I'm going out anyway. Try not to be too awful when Eri comes around tomorrow." Before leaving, he stopped in front of the narrow mirror by the door. The face looking back at him seemed too awake for the rest of his body: black hair longer than his sponsor photos allowed, a narrow face, pale skin made gray by too many nights indoors, dark eyes with the faintly bruised look that came from sleep debt and screen light.

He was lean rather than athletic, not weak exactly, but built like someone whose body had learned endurance from stress rather than sport. The chip had given him reflexes, not muscle, and if it had made him into anything superhuman, it had done so with terrible branding. This novel's true home is a different platform. Support the author by finding it there. As a child, he had hated real sports with true sincerity. Baseball had too much waiting and then too much pressure all at once.

Basketball he never had the height for. Soccer was mud, elbows, and older boys who were always somewhat faster than him. Enhanced reflexes did not always translate into enhanced skill. He had been the kind of child who avoided things when those things came at his face at speed. Games had been different. Games had rules that could be learned privately and mastered without changing rooms, grass stains, or his father on the sidelines pretending not to look embarrassed.

In games, the chip's strange quickness gave him an edge he had to work less for.

"Ayanokouji Shimon," he said to the mirror, testing the order and disliking it immediately. Then he tried in the western order.

"Shimon Ayanokouji." That was not better. Mochi meowed again from behind him.

"Yeah," he said.

"I know." He pulled on his shoes, grabbed his wallet, and opened the door. Mochi made a quick attempt to slip past his ankle into the hallway, but Shimon caught her with one hand, tucked her against his chest, and scratched under her chin until her offended silence softened into reluctant purring.

"You are not coming to Lawson," he told her, setting her back inside.

"Guard the apartment from ghosts or stuff." The hallway smelled faintly of something weird and floor cleaner. Someone had left a burnable garbage bag near the elevator even though pickup was not until morning, and the fluorescent light above it flickered with a tired persistence that made the whole building feel older than it was. Tokyo, Shimon had decided, was very good at keeping things clean where people could see them. Every city had its dirty guts; some were simply better at hiding them.

Outside, rain slicked the street black and pulled the signs apart into long trembling reflections. Vending machines hummed beneath artificial lights. A delivery drone passed overhead with the mosquito whine of cheap rotors. A cyclist rolled through the intersection holding a clear umbrella in one hand. The young man walked with his hood up, hands in his pockets, with the peculiar awareness of someone who could pass for local at a distance. In Boston, strangers had seen an Asian guy.

In Tokyo, strangers saw someone who looked only vaguely Japanese. It was not exactly hostility, most of the time. It was more like watching a calculation quietly change behind someone's eyes. Japanese-American. Not pure. He bought fried chicken, two onigiri, bottled tea, and a pudding from the convenience store on the corner. After paying, the young man sat at the narrow counter by the window and ate while the rain blurred the street outside.

Halfway through the chicken, a call icon pulsed at the edge of his vision as his chip connected with the smartphone in his pocket. [INCOMING CALL] DAIGO [The okay one] Shimon considered ignoring it, but only for a second. Daigo was the second-oldest of his brothers, and the one who had inherited the family talent for pretending concern was sarcasm. He pulled his phone out and pressed the answer button. Daigo's voice had a slight tiredness behind it.

"You alive?"

"Sadly for my haters, yes. We won, of course."

"Congratulations." Shimon smiled despite himself. Behind his brother's voice came the sounds of morning: running water, a cabinet closing, someone moving around a kitchen. The time difference made family feel even further away.

"Love you too."

"You eat yet?"

"I'm eating now," Shimon replied with a mental shrug.

"Convenience store?"

"No."

"Liar," sighed his brother resignedly Shimon looked at the fried chicken in his hand.

"It has protein and probably minerals." Daigo snorted.

"Mom watched the clip. She also asked if you're remembering to call Grandma." The gamer sighed.

"I called her Sunday."

"In Japanese? You know her English is… not so good."

"Yeah." Shimon looked out at the rain and remained quiet. The chip sat silently in his skull, capable of translation, text reconstruction, full-dive sync, payment authentication, transit guidance, health monitoring, and a hundred small conveniences that were supposed to make life frictionless when it connected to the net. It did, mostly. It also meant he never knew how much of his life he was actually living and how much had been quietly adjusted before it reached him.

Daigo's voice softened in the way of older brothers.

"You okay?"

"Yeah. Quarter-finals tomorrow. We'll win," Shimon answered automatically.

"Go home and get some sleep. Call me tomorrow," his brother replied with equal automation before hanging up. Like that, the call ended, leaving a small sense of disconnect. The pro-gamer ate the rest of his unhealthy food, dumping the containers into the burnable rubbish when he was done. After that, ignoring his brother's words, he still did not go home. Walking in whatever city he was in after a match had become a ritual.

Some players drank, some watched replays until sunrise, some streamed their post-game analysis and monetized their insomnia. Shimon walked until the match stopped replaying behind his eyes. He passed shuttered ramen shops, coin lockers, a shrine squeezed between two office buildings with stone foxes wet from the rain, and a pretty young woman crying into her phone. The city was never truly quiet, but past midnight it changed character. The daytime pressure eased. The crowds thinned into individuals.

Eventually, the streets narrowed, and the buildings grew older. That was when he saw the archive, half-hidden between a clinic and a stationery shop, a place of pale stone and dark glass. He had found it weeks ago by accident while avoiding a rainstorm and had returned often enough. He read the sign with a small smile. New Kanda Metropolitan Archive Annex Public Reading Floor Open 24 Hours Another fancy way to say public library.

Shimon stepped inside, letting warm air and the smell of paper, old dust, machine-cleaned carpet, and floor polish close around him. A security guard sat behind the desk, chin tucked toward his chest. Shimon communed with his biochip.

"Local Archive Search Mode." [LOCAL SYSTEM LINK DETECTED] NEW KANDA METROPOLITAN ARCHIVE ANNEX Guest Access: Approved Text Recognition: Active Language Assistance: Active Visual Reconstruction: Active The shelves grew labels, not physically but in the soft white-blue overlay the chip laid across his vision. Titles spread themselves when his gaze passed over them. Arrows traced optional paths along the floor. History, folklore, military records, poetry, urban planning, private collections, restricted reproductions.

He wandered into the older stacks with no particular destination, following the kind of tired curiosity that appears when a person is too awake to sleep and too drained to make sensible choices. He liked history more than he admitted. Not enough to study it properly, but enough to know more than most. Sengoku campaigns had been one of his old obsessions: Oda, Toyotomi, Tokugawa, and so forth.

He knew the map in the simplified way games taught maps, as a series of clans, provinces, resource nodes, and future scripted events and battles. The history section was dimmer than the rest of the archive. The shelves were taller, the books less touched, the air colder and stale. A dark red spine caught his eye because no translation appeared above it. Shimon stopped, leaned closer, and watched the characters on the spine crawl in and out of focus before the chip reluctantly rendered the title.

The Crimson Age of the Warring Kingdoms Author Unknown Classification Error: Unverified Chronicle"Classification error," Shimon muttered, clicking his tongue.

"Great. Haunted book behavior, or someone just left one of their books from their private collection to inflict upon the public." He should have left it there, and later he would remember that thought with a sharp useless clarity. Instead, curiosity took him, and he pulled the book down. It was heavier than it looked, bound in something that was not leather though it tried to feel like leather, and warm enough beneath his fingers that he nearly put it back.

Red lines ran through the black surface of the cover in an oddly disturbing pattern. He opened it. The first page was blank. Then characters rose through the paper like blood soaking through cloth.

"What the hell?" The chip began to feed his brain slowly the meaning behind the difficult characters. When the Imperial Moon cracked the realm was not divided by men and the will of heaven. There were hungers given names. This was the beginning of the Crimson Age. It all sounded like drivel to him. Worse than any Netrot. The archive lights dimmed, or seemed to. Mist slid between the shelves, thin at first, before thickening. Growing as if alive and electric in its intent.

Then the mud appeared, and it spread over the polished floor in dark patches, followed by broken arrows, a torn sandal, and a helmet split open down the side. Rain began to fall, though the ceiling should have still been above him. The shelves disappeared, and a line of soldiers crossed the aisle ahead, not clean museum samurai or actors from a historical drama, but men in dented armor with hollow eyes and mud to their knees. One had blood running from his ear, and another clutched a spear.

They moved past him in, and the book in Shimon's hands turned a page by itself. Names appeared that he did not recognize. The chip whispered broken translations about the Red Reed Lord, the Black Snow Widowmaker, the corpse tax of Mount Ibuki, and a battle at a river that never existed. Dates were close but wrong. Places were named wrong. Victories went to men whom he had never heard of. Castles burned that should have survived.

Details grew worse: oni auxiliaries, shrine-bound contracts, men who ate the hearts of their enemies, and children born with symbols branded under their tongues. Shimon forced the book shut, but it simply opened again. The archive had vanished from the corners of his vision. The shelves stretched too far, the ceiling had become smoke, and the warm clean smell of paper curdled into wet ash and iron. Blood, his brain supplied, and then tried to reject the information. He gagged and held his head in his hands.

"Emergency disconnect!" [DIAGNOSTIC REQUEST RECEIVED] Neural Interface: Stable Cognitive Load: Elevated Visual Projector: Disengaged Auditory Overlay: Disengaged Olfactory Overlay: Disengaged External VR Feed: None Detected System Error: None Found He stared at the words until they stopped meaning anything useful. The rain hit his face cold and real, and when he blinked, the book was gone, the archive was gone, and Shimon Ayanokouji stood ankle-deep in mud under a gray, unfamiliar sky.

For several seconds his mind refused to accept the scene in front of him. It kept trying to name it as a map, a sim, an illegal neural hijack, a prank, a seizure, a stroke. None of those explanations survived the smell. He was standing in a misty field after a battle, and the aftermath was worse than any cinematic charge from a movie could have been. Bodies lay where they had fallen, some in armor, some in rags, some too young to have grown properly into either.

A horse kicked weakly, screaming in a thin, exhausted rhythm until it suddenly stopped. Crows hopped among the dead with hunger in their eyes. Shimon staggered backward and felt his sneaker sink into something soft. When he looked down, he saw a hand protruding from the mud, fingers curled as if asking for help. He made a girlish sound, stumbled away, slipped, and caught himself on one knee. Mud soaked through his jeans. Something sharp sliced his palm, and a red line opened across the skin before the pain arrived.

Real pain that was not filtered, not capped, and most certainly not translated into a warning icon.

"No," he said, and the word was small enough to vanish in the rain. A dull orange screen flickered open in front of him. [SYSTEM INITIALIZING...] Soul Anchor Established Language Adaptation Requirements: Minimal Current Location: Unknown Status: Recently Displaced Class: None Level: 1 Health: 8/8 Mana: 10/10 Stamina: 8/8 Exp: 0/100 Main Attributes: Body 7, Mind 10, Spirit 10 Sub Attributes: Dexterity 43 [Enhanced], Fortune 18, Charisma 9 Skills: Lightning Reflexes 14/20, Analysis 11/20 Welcome to the Crimson Age.

Shimon stared at it as his thoughts came apart, not in clean dramatic fragments, but in a sudden rush of worry. The apartment. Mochi, his mochi-mochivation. The quarter-final tomorrow. Daigo saying something stupid to him. His family waiting for him to call. His contract. The NDA. His team. His body, maybe still sitting somewhere in a glorified library. Or maybe not. Mochi was alone with half a bowl of expensive food and no way to understand why he never came home. At least Eri was coming tomorrow…

"Mochi," he whispered miserably. A groan came from nearby, and he flinched so hard his back hurt. A man lay ten feet away, lacquered armor split open, one arm bent the wrong way, lips moving in what might have been prayer or begging. The language adaptation of his chip did nothing useful. Whatever strange magic that had dragged him here did not make dying men easier to understand. Then another sound came from somewhere; thick, great laughter, low and human and much too close for comfort.

Three shapes grew more distinct, coalescing before taking on the shapes of men. They were moving through the bodies, wearing bits of armor taken from corpses and tied badly over stained clothes. One carried a short blade, one had a hatchet, and the third dragged a sack. One crouched beside a dead warrior and sawed at the cords securing his armor. Another pried rings from swollen fingers. The third kicked a body to see whether it moved. Then he saw Shimon and their eyes met. The man smiled a shark's smile.

Shimon raised both hands automatically.

"Wait. Wait, I'm not—" The words came out wrong, English first, then broken Japanese, then something else warped by panic. The looters heard enough to know he was afraid, and that was all they needed. The man with the hatchet said something to the others, pointing at the pro-gamer. One laughed.

The one with the sack looked Shimon up and down and grinned at his shoes, his hoodie, his watch, all the modern little pieces of another world that suddenly made him look less like a person and more like a collection of valuables. Shimon backed away, shaking his head before he knew he was doing it. The man with the short blade came first, not fast, not with the clean aggression of a game enemy, and not with any red outline, attack indicator, or visible level hovering helpfully above him.

He was only a dirty man with bad teeth and a blade, walking toward someone he had already decided to rob. There was no time to think properly. Shimon looked around and saw mud, corpses, broken arrows, a ruined wheel, a torn banner, and a spear shaft snapped near the middle, its blade still attached. He grabbed it because it was the only thing in reach that looked more useful than his hands. The wood was slick, too heavy, and wrong in every way.

The looter lunged, and Shimon thrust because terror had reduced the world to one instruction: keep the knife away. The biochip did not save him, not exactly. It could not make him brave, could not teach him how to fight, and could not turn a broken spear into a weapon he understood. Yet it gave him time. And, some old animal part of his brain saw the angle of the short curved blade and moved his hands before fear froze them solid.

The spear point missed the man's chest and caught his forearm instead, sticking into bone with a sensation that traveled up the shaft and into Shimon's teeth. The looter screamed and dropped his weapon. Shimon screamed too, horrified by the simple fact that he had actually hit someone. The second looter came in with the hatchet while Shimon was still trying to pull the spear free. For half a second it stuck in something.

He yanked harder, the broken shaft tore loose, and the first man fell backward clutching his arm and cursing. The hatchet came down. Shimon stumbled away, and the blade narrowly missed his head and shoulders. He slipped, fell into the mud, and lost the spear. The hatchet man stepped over him. Shimon kicked upward in blind panic. His sneaker struck the man's knee, not hard enough to break it but hard enough to make him buckle, and the hatchet chopped into the mud beside Shimon's face.

He scrabbled around and grabbed the spear again with both hands and shoved upward, not as a technique, not even as an attack in any clean sense. Still, the spear point went under the looter's ribs. The man made a wet, surprised sound, and Shimon felt the resistance give through the shaft. The looter's weight came down on him. For one terrible moment they were face to face, close enough for Shimon to smell sour breath and see the confusion in the man's eyes.

The young man shoved him away and scrambled backward, slipping in mud and blood. The man tried to stand, failed, and sank onto his side. The third looter stared. So did Shimon. The first man, the one with the cut arm, had stopped laughing and was dragging himself backward through the mud. The third looked from his companions to Shimon, then to the broken spear shaking in Shimon's hands. Shimon wanted to tell him to run, or maybe to beg him to run, but what came out of his throat was only a hoarse, animal sound.

It was enough. The third looter bolted, and the wounded one ran after him as best he could, leaving his short blade behind. The Asian American did not chase them. He could not have chased them if the world had depended on it. He remained on his knees with the spear held in both hands, shaking so badly that the loose blade rattled against the broken shaft. The man he had stabbed made one more sound and then no sound at all. Rain fell and the crows watched from their meals.

Shimon's body burned, and his stomach twisted until he dropped the spear and vomited into the mud. The orange screen opened again, clean and calm and obscene against the backdrop of the corpse field. [COMBAT RESOLVED] You have survived your first hostile encounter. Skill Acquired: Spears 1 Skill Acquired: Pain Tolerance 1 Condition: Tired Condition: Shocked Experience gained 37. Shimon wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, leaving mud and blood across his sleeve. He did not know how much of it was his.

The system waited as if expecting gratitude. A new notification appeared. [QUEST RECEIVED] Survival Objective: Survive until Dawn. Optional Objective 1: Kill more hostiles. Optional Objective 2: Find suitable shelter.. Reward: Basic Class Selection & Experience Failure: Death Shimon laughed because the words optional were so absurd that his mind caught on it like a nail. The sound came out thin, cracked, and too close to sobbing.

The dead man lay beside him with the spear under his ribs, and Shimon looked away before the sight could become something permanent in his head. Somewhere beyond, horns sounded, distant but not distant enough. The rain kept falling as if the world had no opinion or cared about what had just happened. Tokyo was gone. His team was gone. His family was on the other side of a world that should not exist.

His cat was alone in his apartment, and Shimon Ayanokouji—seventh son, human test subject, professional full-dive gamer, and quarter-finalist in the Open Professional League—was kneeling in a corpse field with blood on his hands, surrounded by a scene that looked like it had been lifted from a badly directed Warring States period drama.