Chapter 13 — Congratulations! You’ve Been Chosen!
The young man who had introduced himself as Yousuke Hiiragi was actually a girl named Youko Hiiragi.
Congratulations! You’ve been chosen! You have been selected to participate as a tester in the next-generation open-world RPG, End of World!
A suspicious email, looking like nothing more than spam, was what started it all. A random message from a developer she had never heard of. Normally, such a nuisance email would have been ignored, but Youko thought it might make for some good content.
She was unemployed. At the moment, she was surviving on her savings and unemployment insurance, but she still had notions of making a living as an author, blogger, or comic artist. So she thought that responding to such a scam email might actually provide some good content for her.
Searching the internet, she found that a considerable number of people had received the same email. Most ignored it, but a few had installed the client and were playing, so it appeared that, at the very least, it was indeed a real game.
Watching some gameplay footage showed it to be a typical open-world fantasy RPG. As far as she could tell, it was rather plain and uninteresting, but the selling point of open-world games was the freedom they afforded. Depending on her approach, if she made a video reviewing the game, she could gain some popularity.
With nothing better to do, she decided to try it out. Just to be safe, she used a spare PC she had lying around, isolated it from the rest of her home network, and installed the game, following the instructions in the email. It wasn’t an online game, but it was set up to pull resources from a remote server as needed, so an internet connection was required.
At first, she felt it was a pain to play. Everything about it seemed to be lacking in user comforts. First of all, the world was far too large. It was quite literally the size of Earth and built entirely to scale. If there was a city that housed a hundred thousand people, there would in fact be hundreds of thousands of NPCs, houses and places for them to work, sufficient farmland to provide them all with food, and the social infrastructure needed to keep a large city running.
Between the cities were extremely long roads or empty fields and forests where there was almost nothing going on at all. The player needed to manage annoying needs like hunger, sleep, and bathroom breaks as they traveled, and everything occurred in real time, unlike many similar games where, for example, one hour in real life might equal one day in the RPG.
Normally, open-world games also had options to teleport or fast travel, or ways to speed up in-game time, but this one had none of that. While it was certainly realistic, it was mostly just irritating to deal with.
Still, if asked whether the game was boring, her answer would have been “No.” Reactions from the NPCs were incredibly varied. You could speak to them using the chat interface, and they would respond appropriately based on the situation and their own personalities. It seemed to be using some form of advanced AI, but she wouldn’t have been surprised to find there was a live person on the other side typing back responses.
Based on this, one might get the impression that it was a painstakingly realistic world simulator, but there was more to it than just the realism. End of World was made for the amusement of its players. In contrast to the believable structure of the world, the players themselves were exceedingly fantastical. Player characters had levels, stats, and skills. With minimal effort, their levels would rapidly increase, they would gain skills based on the actions they took, and they would rapidly become superhuman.
Youko was soon completely absorbed. Going wild in such a realistically crafted world was thrilling. She enjoyed rampaging around as if to vent her own frustrations with life.
Eventually, she received another email.
Announcing End of World—VR Edition.
It was a notice informing her of a new version of the game for players who had become deeply involved with it. The upgrade would require a significant amount of extra equipment, but it could all be rented from the developer.
Her initial suspicions long forgotten, Youko applied to be a tester of the VR version. In possession of new goggles and gloves to see and control the game with, she grew completely addicted. And just as she’d become fully acquainted with the VR version, she received another email.
Announcement of End of World FIVR Test.
FIVR was an acronym for Full Immersion Virtual Reality, a technology in which all of one’s senses were integrated into the game, making it feel like the user had actually been transported there. This version was only available to a small number of the VR test players, and it came with a considerable amount of monetary compensation. The number of applicants they were accepting was extremely low, so Youko applied without hesitation.
The response came immediately, but she didn’t think that was suspicious either. She figured she had just been lucky. Her decisive action in responding quickly had been rewarded.
As one might expect, an ordinary house couldn’t accommodate the equipment required for FIVR technology, and as that technology was still in development, it wasn’t something the company could easily lend to players. So Youko was invited to visit the developer’s lab, where she gladly signed all sorts of contracts. She didn’t know what they were all about, but she was worried that if she complained, she would lose her chance.
The testing phase was supposed to last for a few months. Never mind being unable to leave the facility, she wouldn’t even be allowed to log out during that time. Life support functions would be provided, but she didn’t know the details of how the technology worked. It seemed somewhat suspicious at this point, but she had heard similar stories of people being restrained for extended periods of time during research related to space travel.
Youko had no strong doubts, so she set about getting herself ready for the test. After quitting her previous job, she had holed up at home, so she wasn’t close to many people, but if she was going to leave her house unattended for several months, there were some preparations she needed to make first.
Once she completed those, she returned to the lab, where they took her to the VR machine. It was a long, thin capsule, just large enough to hold an adult. She stripped off her clothes and lay down inside. The lid closed over her, cutting off all light and sound.
And then she was suddenly unconscious.
When Youko woke up, she was lying on a bed. She sat up and looked around. At first she thought it was an unfamiliar place, but she soon recognized it as a room in the mansion she had bought in End of World. She hadn’t realized it at first because of the difference in resolution.
The goggles she’d been using for the VR version were high-end technology, but VR was still just a projected image. If one looked closely, it was easy enough to pick out the individual polygons and notice where the textures hadn’t quite been applied correctly.
But the sight before her right now looked exactly like the real world.
She couldn’t help but have her doubts. She felt it was far more realistic for someone to have replicated her mansion in real life than it was to develop such realistic FIVR technology. All they had to do was put her to sleep when she thought she was logging into the game, and then carry her over to a faithfully recreated set.
But those doubts were soon shoved away. After performing the command gesture she was used to using in the VR version, the system window appeared before her. Obviously, something like that couldn’t happen in the real world, so she must have been inside the game.
As she was going through the menu, she noticed that her hands were strangely pale. Hurriedly checking her body, she realized what was wrong. The body was gorgeous, but it was that of a man.
“Oh, I get it.”
Glancing at her status window, she realized that her game data from the VR version had been carried over. In short, she was playing as her male character, Yousuke Hiiragi.
She got out of bed and tried moving around. Her movements felt natural. Despite the gender swap, nothing much had changed. Looking in the mirror on the wall, a young man with looks so flawless they couldn’t have existed anywhere outside of fiction stared back at her. She had spent hours perfecting that face in the character designer.
“Well, that’s fine. I guess I just need to role-play as a guy, then.”
She generally made her characters male in games where she had the choice, so while the change was a surprise, it wasn’t an unwelcome one. Deciding to take it as a chance to have an experience that would normally be impossible, she embraced her new “life” as Yousuke.
Pulling herself together after the shock of that discovery, she continued to familiarize herself with the situation. The clothes she was wearing were those she had obtained in the VR version, and they had various effects built into them. There was no doubt that her save data had been ported over.
Next, she selected the Air Cutter spell from the system window. She was wondering how magic would work in this version, or if it would work at all, so she wanted to test it out. Pointing with her finger, she selected her target. As she did, a violent crash resounded as the bed was split in two.
“Oh, so I can break these now.”
TIP: Lock objects that you don’t want to accidentally destroy.?
As if in response to her comment, a message window popped up in her vision. In the VR version, she couldn’t break things like buildings or furniture, but in the FIVR version they were destructible. Since that could prove to be an inconvenience, it seemed there was a way to prevent it from happening.
“Master Yousuke! What is the matter?!”
In a panic, a number of women in maid uniforms burst through the door. They were Youko’s servants. In keeping with the realism of the game, one person couldn’t carry too much at a time, so Youko had hired a number of people to handle her miscellaneous tasks.
“Hmm...you don’t look so great in real life, do you?”
She had originally chosen them for their good looks, but seeing them up close like this, she felt they weren’t that attractive at all. They had acne and open pores, and their teeth were crooked. Youko suddenly grew curious about what else the lower visual quality of the previous versions had hidden from her.
“Is there no tutorial or anything?”
Since it was building on the VR edition, there was no need for a detailed explanation of how the system worked, but she needed to learn how to properly fight in this body sooner rather than later.
“Are there still any bandits nearby?” she added.
“Yes, they are still lurking in the area,” one of the maids responded.
The mansion she currently occupied was in the middle of the mountains and had originally been a bandit hideout. She had taken it over from them, but some of the former thugs had continued to hang around.
“Good. I’m going out. Clean up the bed and set up a new one. One of you, grab a weapon and come with me.”
She left the mansion and looked around. A compass display appeared in front of her eyes, showing the approximate position of nearby objects. Studying it, she could see a number of red human indicators. Red marked enemies. And if they were humanoids, they were likely bandits.
Youko set off on a casual walk through the woods. The time she had spent practicing ambushing people in order to raise her stealth skill paid off, allowing her to walk right up to the bandits without being noticed.
After giving orders to her maid, Youko readied her sword. It was an ordinary sword with no particular abilities, but that made it perfect for her test run. She swung it a few times. Just like in the VR version, the strike was enhanced according to her level of the Swordsmanship skill. As she randomly swung the blade around, the system recognized it as a command and executed an appropriate attack automatically.
Youko approached one bandit from behind, slashing his back. His upper body separated from the legs easily, falling to the ground. Blood sprayed and organs tumbled out. The smell of blood and viscera filled the air, and she immediately began to vomit.
Her maid ran to her side, worried. “Master Yousuke! What is the matter?!”
Youko had underestimated what it meant to kill a person.
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