Golden Experience

—I’m trying something new, so I want to look completely different from the usual me.

It was finally time for the open beta test of this highly anticipated game. Normally she wouldn’t be interested, but because she unexpectedly had a huge block of free time, she thought she’d try her hand at VR gaming, which she had always disliked for no real reason. This VR apparatus was normally reserved for healthcare purposes, but it could also be used for other things; she thought she might as well see how it worked for gaming, another reason to do it.

She had heard that this game was revolutionary compared to all the VR games that had come before it. “The game truly brings you to another world,” or so all the famous celebrities claimed.

If she could really live in another world, then she wanted to see how a life completely different from the one she had led up until now played out. With that thought in mind, she declined to let the avatar be generated from a full scan of her body and dove right into the character creator.

“Skeleton… I wonder how that’ll look. Maybe it’ll be cute. I’ll pick that as my race… Whoa, it’s really just all bones! Where’d all the meat go?!”^[2]

For someone like her, who didn’t game, she didn’t really have a concrete concept of how “skeleton” would work as a race in a game. She didn’t think it would literally be just a skeleton. However, this was a rare chance to try something new. She may not have realized it at the start, but now it was the race that she had chosen. It might have felt a little too foreign at first, but as far as “different from the usual her” went, nothing could be more different than this.

“All right! I’ll be a skeleton!”

After picking a race, next was configuring skills. That said, she had no idea what skills were good in games.

“I wonder what skills would be good for a skeleton… I’ve got no clue… Ah, it’d be cool to be able to use magic. Let’s learn some. Since I have no idea what’s good, I’ll just pick whatever sounds neat instead.”

She went to the trees for [Fire Magic], [Water Magic], [Wind Magic], [Earth Magic], [Ice Magic], and [Lightning Magic], and learned one skill from each.

“I still have some XP left… Ah, since I’m a skeleton, I got an extra 100 XP! Cool beans~. All right, let’s use the rest on my stats. Magic probably gets better with this ‘INT’ one? Then I’ll just use it all on ‘INT,’ since it’s my leftover XP anyway.”

And so, she finished creating her character.

“My name will be… Let’s go with [Blanc]! I’ve got beautiful white skin after all. ’Cuz it’s really just bones.”

Next, Blanc chose to start in a cave in monster territory, then logged in.

After sitting through the tutorial, Blanc spawned in a dark, wet cave surrounded by natural stone walls. “Dark” was a bit of an understatement, though, since there was absolutely no light, making it pitch black. For Blanc, though, it really was only dark due to the effect of her [Skeleton] race special ability [Night Vision].

According to the tutorial support AI, apparently new players would spawn somewhere with enemies that they could defeat. Blanc decided to first find the entrance to the cave. However, since she had no idea where it could be, she just picked a random direction and started walking.

Having never been in a natural cave before, neither in real life nor in VR, she kept tripping on various objects. After several minutes of walking, the road split: on one side, the cave continued as normal; on the other, it turned into a passage, or more like a tunnel, that was so small that she’d need to crawl on her hands and knees to keep going. However, the tunnel looked smooth and slippery, like it was clearly trying to say that it led somewhere.

After pondering for a moment, Blanc chose the suspicious tunnel. This was her first game, after all. She wanted to make choices that she absolutely never would under normal circumstances.

The floor of the tunnel was smooth as well, so crawling on it didn’t hurt. However, she should feel some pain simply from crawling while supporting her own body weight. Her knees and palms should have turned completely red as well. Fortunately, she currently had a body of bones; she felt lighter than she normally was, had no skin that could be harmed, and had no muscles to get sore. Blanc patted herself on the back for being insightful enough to choose to be a skeleton as she continued clattering down the tunnel. The cramped tunnel finally ended, and she found herself in a place that was just barely high enough to walk.

“I seem to have reached some kind of… room…”

There was an ant here. But it was about the size of a Shiba Inu.

“Eee…”

And it wasn’t alone. Three ants turned toward Blanc and began to approach her, their antennae constantly flicking around. They would normally have just been black silhouettes in the darkness, but with her Night Vision, Blanc could see them looking right at her.

She recognized something about them; she had seen something similar before in the VR library, in the pages of an illustrated reference book depicting insects from the far past: the face of a hornet.

“GYAAAAAAAAAH!!!” Blanc screamed reflexively. The ants interpreted the screaming as hostile and rushed to attack her.

“Ah, fuck! This ain’t no time for screaming! Monsters! I-I need to attack, um, magic…”

The ants were fast, but not so fast that Blanc wouldn’t be able to react in time. As long as she calmed down, she should be able to cast her magic. However, the ants got to her first since Blanc wasted too much time calming herself down. While she was going over how to cast magic in her head, the ants were already chomping at her legs.

“Waaah, the ants are eating me…!”

The ants mercilessly crunched on Blanc’s leg bones. The dog-sized ants had large pincers, while her boney legs were quite skinny. They vigorously broke off one of her legs and chewed on it in their mouths. The game’s default settings filtered out most of the pain, but seeing her own leg being held aloft in the jaws of giant ants was a brand new, horrifying experience. And even if there was barely any pain, the sensation of having her bones being attacked directly was unforgettable on a primal level.

“Ohshitohshitstopitstopit…!”

Blanc tried to somehow kick off the ants, but since she was all bone, her kicks didn’t have much effect; the ants’ jaws actually dug further into her leg, causing her even more damage. After she kicked again, a different ant clamped onto her remaining leg, causing her to fall over.

“Agh! …Eh?”

As though waiting for Blanc’s head to drop down, the last ant pointed its butt at her curled-up body. Or wait, since this was an insect, it wasn’t its butt, but rather it’s abdomen?

“Hol… Wai—”

The ant sprayed a foul-smelling liquid from the stinger at the end of its abdomen connected to its poison sac, and it splashed all over Blanc’s upper half. Her body began letting off unhealthy-looking streams of smoke as it dissolved.

“Ugeh…”

Blanc’s field of vision faded to black. In the total darkness, the only thing she could see was a message accompanied by what looked like a timer steadily counting down.

<<One hour until automatic resurrection. Would you like to respawn immediately?>>

“Ah, so I died… But for real, having my legs bitten off and getting sprayed in the face with acid is way too hardcore! Why the hell does it feel so realistic?! It didn’t really hurt, but still… This could really fuck someone up in the head! Wow, this game is haaard… You’ve gotta be good to play this. Or maybe I just really suck. But well, it might be gross, but it’s not like super painful or hard or anything; if I think of it like paying for my own mistakes, then I guess I just gotta get over it…”

She had gotten confused when the first other living thing she encountered in the game—setting aside the question of whether a skeleton was “living”—was suddenly so hostile to her. Now that she could consider things rationally, though, she just felt frustrated, thinking to herself “I should have done this at that point” or “I should’ve been more like that.”

“All right, if I wait and revive here, the ants will probably attack me again, so respawn? That way I’d return to where I first started. Ah, I wonder if there’s some kind of penalty for dying.”

Before she respawned, she should check out the Help for details on the death penalty. Looks like if you die and the system determines that you need to be respawned, you lose 10% of your XP.

“That’s harsh! …Ah, but if your total XP is low enough, then there is no penalty. Let’s see, the max amount with no penalty is 200 XP… Skeletons are right on the line, huh. If goblins die once, then they’ll end up weaker than they started. Ew.”

Monster races took on demerits to start with more XP, but you’d lose all that if you messed up even once. Pretty crazy.

“I guess skeletons really are the best. So I’ll just respawn… there.”

After a moment of dizziness, Blanc was once more standing in the cave where she first woke up.

“This time I’ll be more careful… or rather, this time I won’t go into that tunnel. I bet I’m not supposed to go that way until I get stronger, yep.”

TL notes: Hoo boy. Japanese puns.

^[1]: Stereotypical L/R joke that only makes sense in Japanese. The character’s name is “ブラン,” which can be read as “Bran” or “Blan.” The title of the chapter is clearly a riff on “Brand New Game,” but the naming joke is because she went with “Blanc,” as in French for “white,” which is why she jokes about having white skin.

^[2]: 「すけるとん……ってなんだろ。なんかかわいい響き。種族はこれで……って骨じゃん！ スケるにしても程があるでしょ！」

Literally: “‘Sukeruton’ (skeleton)… I wonder what that is. It sounds kinda cute. I’ll pick that as my race… Wait, it’s just bones! Even if it’s supposed to be see-through (sukeru/透ける), this is a bridge too far!”

It would have been hard to think of a joke revolving around misreading “skeleton” without making her sound incredibly stupid or like illiterate, and I didn’t want to go back and change the race name for the sake of this one joke, so I just avoided it altogether and relegated the explanation to TL notes!