The train that had been running for quite a while came to a stop at Tokyo Station, the terminus for all trains in Tokyo. It was usually a bustling place packed with countless people, but now, as expected, it was wrapped in silence with not a single person in sight.
“So, where am I supposed to go now?”
He had made it all the way to the final stop, but Tokyo Station itself didn’t seem to have anything especially noteworthy. Just as Kojiro was wondering if he should head outside first and starting to move,
Rustle rustle
Kojiro’s sharp hearing caught a suspicious sound. Wondering if there was another monster like before, he went on alert, and soon spotted a robot about his own size standing in front of a shop in the distance.
‘A Burst Linker other than me?’
Curious, Kojiro approached the robot and studied its appearance more closely. It looked about the size of an ordinary adult man, with a smooth gray body and mechanical parts that made it obvious at a glance that it was a robot. And above all, the most eye-catching thing was the inexplicable apron for customer service it was wearing.
Kojiro was basically a robot himself when in his [Duel Avatar] state, but he couldn’t sense even the slightest trace of the unique presence Burst Linkers had from the robot in front of him.
Kojiro cautiously approached it. Perhaps sensing his presence, the robot stopped what it was doing and turned its head toward him.
That inorganic movement convinced Kojiro that the other party was an NPC, in other words, an AI-controlled nonhuman.
Curious, Kojiro spoke to the robot.
“Can you talk?”
“@#$%%^&*?”
“I can’t understand you.”
Still, this was the first non-hostile encounter he’d had in the [Unlimited Neutral Field], so he needed to gather as much information as possible. The robot, apparently not just wearing that customer-service apron for show, handed Kojiro a menu.
‘Am I supposed to choose something to order from this?’
Looking through the menu, most of the items were drinks and light snacks you’d commonly see in a café. And beside them were numbers.
“Coffee is 1P? Does that mean Burst Points?”
“@#$%^&*.”
He still couldn’t understand it, but the robot nodded, so it seemed he was roughly right.
Wait, then did that mean you could eat food in the Accelerated World too? Kojiro had never felt hungry in the Accelerated World before. If anything, after a normal duel, his real-world stomach sometimes complained because his brain had been overworked, but that was another matter.
But the moment he held the menu in his hands, he strangely began to feel hungry.
“Then I’ll have a gold chocolate donut and a hot coffee.”
“@#$%^&*.”
Once the order was placed, Kojiro confirmed that his Burst Points were automatically deducted. Then the robot handed him a neatly packaged donut and a steaming cup of coffee.
‘It looks delicious, but how am I supposed to eat this?’
Kojiro decided to try it on the off chance. He brought the donut up to his mouth, or rather, the lower part of his helmet. Then, with a soft whir, the lower section of the helmet slid slightly upward. Startled, he touched it with his left hand and clearly felt the shape of a mouth inside. What on earth was this mechanism?
Kojiro then bit into the donut he held in his right hand.
“This is good.”
The flavor spread through his mouth more naturally and delicately than anything he had ever eaten in virtual reality. The sweetness of the chocolate and the crumbly texture unique to a donut delighted his tongue. Then he took a sip of coffee, and the bitterness of the properly cooled brew washed away the sweetness lingering in his mouth.
Kojiro thanked the robot.
“Thanks.”
The robot merely muttered some incomprehensible machine language and returned to its work. Kojiro confirmed that there were no other shops or robots nearby, then finished the donut and coffee as he left Tokyo Station.
There were probably more facilities in this [Unlimited Neutral Field] that could be used by paying Burst Points in a similar way. With that thought, Kojiro’s next destination was the huge shopping center right in front of Tokyo Station.
The place where the NPC selling simple snacks had been was the café-dense area of Tokyo Station. Kojiro reasoned that the NPC’s characteristics and location might be linked to the geographical features of the real world as well.
As expected, the fairly large shopping center had shops displaying a wide variety of goods at a glance, along with NPCs with familiar-looking appearances. And on the signboard of one of those shops, in large letters, was written [SHOP].
Kojiro naturally walked up to the robot and asked for a menu. The robot muttered more incomprehensible machine language, and then a purple window appeared in front of Kojiro.
Apparently this NPC handled a much broader range of goods than the one from before. At a glance, unlike the small stall he had seen earlier, this one had a wide variety of options available.
Just from a quick scan, the catalog included food, weapons, clothes, miscellaneous goods, houses, and even information. Then Kojiro’s eyes caught one item.
[Drone Language Interpreter]
Putting aside what exactly a “drone” was, if it was a language interpreter, maybe it was something that translated the robot’s speech? Kojiro thought he should buy it if he had enough points, then continued scanning the catalog.
Among the items, there were more than enough whose names alone made them worth buying.
‘Leaving everything else aside, I definitely want that [Tokyo Complete Map].’
The item Kojiro was after, [Tokyo Complete Map], turned out, according to the item details, to be exactly what its name suggested: a map showing all of Tokyo. Not just that, but a treasure map that covered special dungeons, locations, and boss monsters existing throughout the city.
However, the price was enough to make even Kojiro, who had far more points than most Burst Linkers, let out an involuntary gasp.
On top of that, the highest-tier item in the map category was the [Japan Complete Map]. Of course, in the [Unlimited Neutral Field], it was theoretically possible to travel anywhere across Japan without restriction, but could there really be dungeons or boss monsters all over the country?
Kojiro silently vowed that he would someday get his hands on that item, if only to find out.
Beyond that, the [Information] category in particular was packed with things that made him curious just from their names.
‘[Tokyo Five Great Underground Labyrinths], [Seven Arcs]... what are those? [Imperial Castle]? Even the name sounds like it’s a special place.’
Unfortunately, with Kojiro’s current points, there was no information he could afford to buy. Putting his disappointment aside, he roughly skimmed through the categories from beginning to end, then touched the item he had first noticed.
The price of the [Drone Language Interpreter] seemed just barely within Kojiro’s reach. That was thanks to the beasts and giant monsters he had defeated on the way here.
‘I guess I should thank those monsters, then.’
“I’ll order the [Drone Language Interpreter].”
“@#$%^&*.”
The robot took the order, disappeared for a moment, then held out a small card. When Kojiro accepted it and looked it over, a small hologram appeared above the card. He pressed YES in response to the English prompt asking whether he wanted to use it, and the card split cleanly in two and vanished.
“Did that work?”
“Is there anything else you need, customer?”
Unlike the alien-sounding speech from before, the robot’s words suddenly came through normally. So, as expected, “drone” must have referred to these NPCs. Kojiro asked with an eager expression.
“You can understand me?”
“Is there anything else you need, customer?”
What was this, could it be...?
“...Can you only say that?”
“I’m sorry. Lower-ranking drones like us do not possess advanced intelligence.”
The conversation didn’t quite mesh, but it seemed this drone was one of the lower-ranking varieties among drones. Even the answer it had just given felt less like a response tailored to the situation and more like something it was programmed to say in advance.
“Then how do I meet a higher-ranking drone?”
“Is there anything else you need, customer?”
“...”
Getting information out of it seemed harder than he’d expected.
After a rather exhausting conversation, Kojiro learned that in order to meet a higher-ranking drone, he would need to buy more information from the catalog.
So in the end, it all came down to feeding more points into the shop. That drone was pretending to be stupid, but it actually seemed to have a surprisingly good business sense. As Kojiro had this pointless thought, he started to feel the fatigue in his body.
Looking up at the sky, he saw that the sun, which had been in the east when he first dove in, had already sunk toward the western horizon.
‘So even the [Unlimited Neutral Field] has a sunset.’
The day in the Accelerated World was coming to an end.
‘What should I do? Should I head back to the real world soon, or stay here a little longer?’
Still, he had paid 10 Burst Points to come here, so Kojiro thought it would be a waste to return after just one day. Of course, after hunting the monster he had encountered at the start, he had more than made back the 10 points he’d spent, but because of the [Drone Language Interpreter] he had just bought, he was basically broke again.
‘And from what that drone said earlier, there seem to be places where you can pay points and stay the night. Since I’m here anyway, maybe I should hunt monsters around Tokyo Station and earn some points.’
Having made up his mind, Kojiro started moving in search of lodging.
Today had been eventful enough, so if possible, he wanted a place where he could rest properly. That was what Kojiro thought.
“How much?”
“The one-night rate is 10P.”
“...”
Ah, right. I’m broke right now...
Kojiro had found a [Lodging Shop] in the area packed with hotels serving tourists around Tokyo Station. But the amount the [SHOP] demanded was more than his meager points could handle.
In fact, if he really pushed it, staying there wasn’t impossible. The problem was that if he died even once in this [Unlimited Neutral Field] and lost 10 Burst Points, he would be at risk of having [Brain Burst] uninstalled altogether.
Even Kojiro, as bold as he was, couldn’t take that kind of risk in an [Unlimited Neutral Field] where anything could happen.
Fwoosh! Fwoosh*
And that was why Kojiro was now preparing to sleep rough, with a campfire lit in the spacious plaza installed on the grounds in front of Tokyo Station.
“Haa, if I’d known this would happen, I would’ve left myself a little more room with my points.”
Kojiro muttered in complaint as he poked at the fire. Still, he had plenty of experience with sleeping rough from his previous life, so he quickly perked up and lay down in a comfortable spot.
Above him, the bright moon and stars that symbolized the night were strewn across the sky like embroidery.
“Hm. This is the kind of sight that makes me want a drink.”
Even in his previous life, Kojiro used to drink alone at night, using the high moon and bright stars as his accompaniment.
“I should check whether the shop sells alcohol too.”
Kojiro muttered that as he scanned the stars overhead with his eyes. Starting with the brilliant white glow of Vega, then Altair shining down to the lower right, and the bright star off to the left. He remembered learning in school that those three stars together were called the Summer Triangle.
‘I’m pretty sure they were called Vega, Deneb, and Altair.’
Above them, a cluster of slightly dimmer stars was gathered, and when he turned his gaze farther left, he saw a ladle-shaped constellation with a long handle.
The Big Dipper.
It was a constellation Kojiro from his previous life knew well.
Back then, he hadn’t known why those stars shone, where they were, or what they meant. Not only because he had been holed up in the mountains training, but also because in the era he had lived in, “stars” belonged to myth and legend, not science.
Still, he remembered the positions of those stars clearly. The stars Kojiro had once gazed at while drinking alone hundreds of years ago were shining in exactly the same places even now in the [Unlimited Neutral Field]. In fact, they shone even more clearly than in the real world’s sky, clouded as it was by environmental pollution.
Even after hundreds of years, and even if hundreds more years passed, those stars would still be shining in the same places.
Thinking that much, Kojiro felt a strange emotion rising in him. It was a feeling only Kojiro, reincarnated into the modern age after crossing hundreds of years, could experience.
Compared to this long flow of time, how small a being was humanity?
And yet, if humans were also the ones who created this infinite world,
then how vast a being were humans?
The moment he entertained that contradictory thought, something at the center of Kojiro began to change.
Before he realized it, Kojiro sat up straight. The processing speed of his consciousness circuit suddenly surged. His eyes were fixed on the blazing campfire, but they weren’t really seeing it.
Kojiro was observing inwardly.
All sorts of things that could not be expressed in words rose and vanished in his mind.
And then, at last,
“Huuuuuuuu.”
Kojiro let out a very long sigh.
Just when he had been about to grasp the thread of some realization, it slipped through his fingers like smoke.
“Haa, I thought I was about to catch something.”
Kojiro muttered in disappointment, then eventually lay back down again.
Whether he knew it or not, the stars in the sky only continued to shine brightly.
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