No Game No Life - Volume 1 - Chapter Pr

PROLOGUE 

—Urban legends. These whispers traveling through the world, as countless as the stars, represent a kind of wish. 
—Like the urban legend that humans have never been to the moon. 
—Like the Freemason conspiracy hidden in the dollar bill. 
—Like the Philadelphia Experiment into time travel. The nuclear shelter on the Chiyoda Line, Area 51, the Roswell incident, etc.— 
Looking at these innumerable urban legends, one can see a clear pattern emerging. Namely…they are composed of a wish: “It sure would be cool!” It’s said that there’s no smoke without fire. But when you think about the nature of rumors and how a big fish gets embellished until it’s too big to even be a fish, you can see how these urban legends come to form. In short, they’re based on true stories but are not themselves true. To put it bluntly, they’re mostly BS. And yet they don’t quite deserve to be complained about, or even wondered about, really. Since ancient times, people have always preferred fate over coincidence beginning with the very fact that the birth of humanity was the product of astronomically unlikely coincidence. Thus, people wanted to think, from their instincts, from the rules they had experienced, that someone intentionally made humanity. That the world was made not of chaos, but of order. Imagining someone in the back pulling the strings, to find meaning in an absurd and unreasonable world…at the very least, wishing that it could be true. So, too, can it be said that urban legends are generally another product of this earnest wish. 
—So. There are urban legends numerous enough to light up the sky. What isn’t as well known is that some of them are actually true. 
—Just to be clear, this isn’t to say that any of the previously mentioned urban legends are true. It’s simply that there do exist urban legends emerging from a different principle. 
—For instance, a rumor too surreal to believe becoming an urban legend. 
Here is an example of such a rumor. It’s a rumor, whispered around earnestly on the Internet, of a gamer named “  ” (Blank). They say he holds unbeatable records in the online rankings for over 280 games. That there’s a gamer who’s swept up all the world’s top ranks with his player name “  ”. You probably think, “No way.” Of course, that’s what everyone thinks. The hypothesis they’ve come up with is simple: 
That it’s become a trendy convention among game devs to just leave their names as a space in the rankings for their games so people wouldn’t know who they were, and it isn’t an actual player—. 
Yet, bizarrely, people keep on claiming that they’ve actually played him. They say he’s unbeatable. They say he’s shut out chess programs that have even beaten grandmasters. They say his play style defies common sense and is impossible to read. They say they used tools and cheat codes and they still lost. They say…they say…they say—. 
Those who are even a little interested in such rumors probe deeper. Why? It’s simple. If he has the top online ranks in console games, PC games, and social network games, then he must have an account. If he exists, then you should be able to look at his history. But there’s no way such a person could actually—. 
—And they sneer and search—and there’s the trap. Because there actually is a user registered with the name “  ” on every console, on every SNS, and anyone can see “  ”’s history: and there can be found a number of trophies that could literally be expressed as “countless.” Because “  ”’s match records list not a single loss. 
—And so the plot thickens. Even though the facts are solid, the rumor becomes even more unbelievable. 
“It’s a hacker who’s erased his loss records.” 
“It’s a gamer group that invites only the best players.” 
—Etc., etc. Thus, a new urban legend is slowly born. 
—On the other hand, in this case, some of the blame does lie with the party who originated the rumor: “  ”. After all, he has an account; he’s been given his place to speak. Yet he says not a word and responds to no contact. Since he releases not so much as a byte of information, everything about him except that he’s Japanese is a mystery. No one knows his face—and this is yet another factor that accelerates the growth of an urban legend. 
—And so. 
—It’s time for an introduction. 
This is it. The uncontested king of the global rankings for over 280 games. The legendary gamer who continues to make unbeatable records. “  ”—in the flesh—! 
 
“……Ah…I’m gonna die; I’m gonna die… Ah, I died… Come on…Res me already!” 
“…Slurp… I guess…it was too hard to use two mice with my feet…” 
“What, just res me already—Hey, no fair, little sister! I haven’t eaten anything in three days, and here you are leisurely slurping instant noodles—in the middle of a battle!” 
“…Brother, you want some…? We’ve got some CalorieMate…” 
“CalorieMate is for the bourgeois; who’s gonna eat that? Just res me!” 
“…Sip… Mm, sure.” 
Shvaa…pwing! 
“Righto, props… Wait, what time is it?” 
“…Uh…still, eight o’clock in the middle of the night…” 
“Eight a.m. is the middle of the night? That’s a new way of looking at it, my sister. What day is it?” 
“…Dunno…it’s my first, second—fourth, cup of noodles…so, I guess, fourth?” 
“No, no, my sister, I didn’t mean the number of days we’ve been up. I mean what day of what month?” 
“…You…don’t have a job… What does it matter?” 
“It matters! There are events on online games and tournaments!” 
—This young man and girl enjoying their online game spoke across the room without bothering with eye contact. The room was—probably big enough for sixteen tatami mats. Pretty big. But, with the countless consoles, four PCs each—eight total, along with the wiring that snaked around the floor with a modern art–like complexity, the opened game boxes, and the scattered noodle cups and plastic bottles they called “rations,” there wasn’t enough space left in the room to feel the original size. In the pale light of the LED displays they had chosen, like true gamers, for their fast refresh rate and the faint glimmer of the long-risen sun through the blackout curtains…they conversed. 
“…Brother, aren’t you gonna…get a job?” 
“—Well, are you gonna go to school today?” 
“…” 
“…” 
They spoke no further. 
The brother: Sora (“Sky”/“Empty”). Eighteen, unemployed, virgin, unpopular, socially incompetent, video game vegetable. A young man with messy black hair, in jeans and a T-shirt, looking just the part of a shut-in. The sister: Shiro (“White”). Eleven, truant, friendless, bullied, socially phobic, video game vegetable. A girl who, with her pure white hair, looked far too unlike him to be related, hair which still dangled low and apparently uncared-for, covering her face as she sat in an elementary school sailor uniform she hadn’t worn outside the house since she’d switched schools. The characters for their names put together spelled Kuuhaku: “Blank.” 

 

—Well. So, this is another kind of urban legend. You can leave it in the shadows. Or you can have your dreams. 
 
—Very well, then: We see the processes by which urban legends form. In short, that they represent people’s wishes, as explained earlier. For this world is chaos. Without fate and full only of coincidence. Unreasonable. Absurd. Devoid of meaning. And those who notice this but who don’t want to admit it wish that the world could be just a little cooler. And this is what is born from that earnest wish: an urban legend. 
—So, it’s time. Let me make this uncool reality a little cooler for you. I offer you a new urban legend. 
—And on that note, as a convention. As a grace. 
—I’d like to open as follows: 
—Have you heard a rumor that goes like this?— 
They say that people who are just too good at games will one day get an e-mail. The body contains some cryptic words and a URL inviting them to a certain game. And, if you beat that game— 
 
“…I’m pooped…gonna sleep.” 
“Hey, wait! If you go, who’s gonna heal—” 
“…You can do it, Brother.” 
“Well, theoretically, yes! If, in addition to the two characters I’m controlling with my hands, I control the two characters you abandoned with my feet!” 
“……Hang in there.” 
“Wait—please, Shiro, I beg you! If you sleep now, everyone’s gonna—or, well, I’m gonna die!? Aaarrggghh, damn it, fine, I’ll show you!” 
By now, the sister had stacked up five empty noodle cups. In other words, this was the fifth day the siblings’ banter had continued without sleep. As the sister lay her head on a console to sleep, ignoring her brother’s desperate, resigned cry, a sound entered her ear: Bink. It was the tablet telling her they’d gotten e-mail. 
“Brother, mail.” 
“Your brother’s busy playing four characters on four different screens. What do you expect him to do?!” 
Manipulating four mice dexterously with both hands and both feet, this was all the brother could say as he whirled around the controls for a party of four like a lone dervish. 
“I mean, it’s probably just spam. Forget it!” 
“…Maybe…it’s from a friend?” 
“—Of whose?” 
“…Of…yours?” 
“Ha-ha, that’s a good one. I do believe my beloved sister just fired off a crack that cuts to my very core.” 
“…I hope…you get…why I didn’t say ‘of mine.’” 
“Well, it’s probably spam anyway. Wait, are you gonna sleep or not? If you’re not gonna sleep, help meeeee! Ah, ah, I’m gonna die, I’m gonna die!” 
The brother: Sora. To repeat—eighteen, unemployed, virgin, unpopular, socially incompetent, video game vegetable. Not that he was proud of it, but the idea that someone like him, who not only couldn’t get a girlfriend but couldn’t make a friend of any kind, could possibly have a “Friend” category in his list of e-mail senders was easily rejected. Evidently this applied to his sister, Shiro, as well. 
“…Ughh… What a pain.” 
Still, Shiro mustered a consciousness that had been on the verge of sleep and rose. If it was just spam, then whatever. But if it was spam for a new game, well, that couldn’t be missed. 
“…Brother…where’s the tablet?” 
“Three o’clock, second pile, under the fourth porn game from the top—gahh, my feet are gonna cramp!” 
Ignoring her brother’s groans of suffering, Shiro followed his directions, fished through the pile—and found it. Perhaps you ask why a pair of shut-in losers would need a tablet? But that is a silly question. Of course—for games. On the other hand, there was another way that this pair was using said tablet. They had countless accounts and e-mail addresses for their countless games, so while reserving their PCs mostly for gaming, they had the tablet set to sync with over thirty e-mail accounts just so they could check their mail. You could call this “efficiency first.” Or just “dumb.” 
“…The sound was bink… That’s the notification for our third main address… This one, right?” 
Displaying her monstrous memory, Shiro placidly dug through their e-mail. And—as, in the background, her brother let out a “whoop,” apparently having managed to emerge victorious in a real-time battle while controlling four characters all by himself—she read the e-mail. 
—One new message—Subject: Dear “  ”, 
“……?” 
The sister tilted her head. It wasn’t especially unusual for “  ”—that is, Sora and Shiro—to receive e-mail. Requests for matches, requests for interviews, inflammatory challenges—there were plenty, but this… 
“…Brother.” 
“Whatever could it be? My beloved, sick, twisted sister who just claimed she was going to sleep to force her brother to face a game all by himself, bound by physical restrictions, and who then didn’t even go to sleep?” 
“…This…” 
As if she hadn’t even heard her brother’s sarcasm, she showed him the e-mail on the screen. 
“Huh?—The hell’s this?” 
It seemed the brother also recognized there was something special about the e-mail. 
“Save OK, drops OK…” 
He made sure his progress was saved successfully and then closed the window for the first time in five days. He opened a mail client on the PC. And he squinted. 
“How do they know Blank are a brother and sister?” 
—Indeed, the brother knew that there were people online claiming “  ” was more than one person. But that wasn’t the problem. The body just contained this one sentence with a URL: 
“Dear brother and sister, don’t you ever feel you were born into the wrong world?” 
“…The hell’s this?” 
“……” 
The words were a little—no, extremely—creepy. And the URL was unfamiliar. There was no country code like “.jp” at the end. It was a URL of that sort that led to a specific page script—a direct link into a game. 
“What do you…wanna do?” 
The sister asked as if she didn’t particularly care. But it was apparent that she, too, had taken an interest in this e-mail, whose sender seemed to know who they were. If she hadn’t, she would’ve just put her head back on the console and slept. She left the decision to her brother—because she recognized it as his area of expertise, that is— 
“Trying to play mind games? Oh well, it might be a bluff, but it might also be fun.” 
He ran security software to check for malware, then clicked the link. But…what appeared was unbelievably simple. An unadorned online chessboard. 
“……Yawn…good night…” 
“Hey, hey, wait. This is a challenge to Blank. If it’s a high-level chess program, I can’t beat it on my own.” 
The brother stopped the sister, who seemed to have immediately lost interest and was trying again to go to sleep. 
“…Chess… Give me a break…” 
“Yeah… I mean, I know how you feel…” 
There was software that had shut out a grandmaster at the top of world chess: The sister had beaten it twenty times in a row. This was long ago. It wasn’t surprising she’d lost interest in the game. But— 
“Blank can’t lose. At least stay up until we can see how good they are.” 
“…Ughh… Fine.” 
And so, Sora made his first move, then his second. Shiro watched disinterestedly. Actually, more just sleepily. She watched heavily as if she were rowing a boat. But then—after five or ten moves. Shiro’s eyes, until then 80 percent closed, opened up and stared at the screen. 
“…Huh? What’s he…” 
Just as Sora began to feel uneasy, Shiro stood up and spoke. 
“…Brother, my turn…” 
The brother handed over his seat obediently. This indicated that the sister had judged that the brother couldn’t win. In other words, that the opponent was worthy of playing the greatest chess player in the world. The sister proceeded with her moves. 
—Chess is a finite, zero-sum, two-player game with perfect information. It’s a game with no room for luck to intervene. In theory, an unbeatable strategy does exist, but only in theory. Only if one can grasp all of the vast number of possible games: 10 to the 120th power. Practically speaking, such a thing is impossible. 
—But Shiro says it is not. She says with conviction that all you have to do is read all 10-to-the-120th-power possibilities. And she did in fact beat the world’s top chess program twenty times in a row. In chess, the person who goes first merely has to pick the best move to win, and the person who goes second can only draw. That’s the theory, anyway. She played this game against a program that explored two hundred million possibilities a second. She won twenty times in a row, alternating who moved first, just to demonstrate the imperfection of the program. And yet. 
“…No way.” 
She opened her eyes in surprise. 

—Meanwhile, however, her brother was noticing something strange about the way things were going. 
“Calm down. The player’s human, is the thing.” 
“—Huh?” 
“A program always makes the best move. It has unlimited concentration, but it can only move according to established strategies. That’s why you can win. But—this guy.” 
The brother pointed to the screen. 
“He’s making a bad move on purpose to lure you in. You assumed that it was the program’s mistake. That was your mistake.” 
“……Nghh.” 
The sister had no counterargument for her brother. 
—It was true that, in chess…no, in almost any game…her technical skill vastly outmatched his. Truly: a genius gamer. However, in mind games, reading the opponent, and manipulation, in all kinds of insight into that wild card of the opponent’s emotions—the brother’s skills were superhuman. This was why “  ”—the combination of Sora and Shiro—was unbeaten. 
“Don’t worry. Just calm down. If the opponent’s not a program, then there’s even less chance you could lose. Just don’t let him rattle you. I’ll explain his traps and strategies, so cool it.” 
“…Okay… I’ll try.” 
This was it. The mechanism behind a single gamer running away with the top global ranking for so many games. 
… 
This game, played without time control, extended over six hours. The adrenaline and dopamine secreted by their brains made them forget they’d been up for five days straight, swept away their fatigue, and pulled their concentration up to its limits. Six hours—yet the battle felt as if it actually took days. Finally, the decisive moment came. The emotionless voice echoing from the speaker. 
“Checkmate.” 
The siblings—won. 
““?”” 
After a long silence… 
““Hhfffffff………”” 
They exhaled all their breath. It spoke to a match such as to make them forget to breathe. When they were finally done, they laughed. 
“…Wow… It’s been so long…since I played a game this hard…” 
“Ha-ha, it’s the first time I’ve even seen you think a game was hard.” 
“…Wow… Brother, is the opponent…really human?” 
“Yeah, there’s no mistaking it. I could see him hesitating when you didn’t take his bait, getting slightly confused when the traps he’d laid didn’t go off. It’s a human for sure—either that or a monster.” 
“…I wonder what he’s like.” 
The sister, who had shut out a program that had shut out the grandmasters, was becoming interested in an opponent. 
“Well, it could actually be a grandmaster? Programs are precise, but people are complex.” 
“…I see… In that case… Next, I wanna…play shogi, with the Ryu-oh…” 
“I wonder if the Ryu-oh is open to playing online. Well, we’ll give it some thought!” 
As they conversed, grinning with the feeling of satisfaction produced by endorphins after a match, it happened again. 
—Bink! The sound of another e-mail notification. 
“Must be our opponent just now? Come on, open it up.” 
“…Okay, okay.” 
And—as for the e-mail’s contents? Just this: 
“Marvelous. With skills like that, surely you must find it hard to live in this world?” 
All it took was one line. Their psyches flash-froze. The pair had just weathered a raging battle on the LED display. From behind them shone artificial light. The hum of the fans of computers and game equipment. Countless wires wriggling across the floor. Scattered trash. Clothes strewn everywhere. A space hidden from the sense of time, walled by the curtains that blocked out the sun. Isolated from the world—sixteen tatami mats’ worth of cramped space. That was their world—all of it. 
—Bitter memories rushed through their minds. The brother who had been born no good and who was therefore too good at reading people’s words and motives. The sister who had been born too smart, and because of that and her pure white hair and red eyes, had no one who understood her. The siblings who had been abandoned, even by their parents, then left alone in this world and who finally closed their hearts to a past that not even the most generous interpretation could recall as happy—no, to a present as well. The sister looked down in silence. The brother pounded his anger onto the keyboard at the one who had made his sister look down. 
“Thanks for your goddamn concern. Who the hell are you?” 
The reply came almost immediately. 
—Or was it even a reply? An e-mail ignoring the question came. 
“What do you think of this world? Is it fun? Is it easy to live in?” 
Reading this, he forgot even to be angry and met eyes with his sister. There was nothing they needed to confirm. They knew the answer. 
—That it was the most fail kind of game ever. 
…A stupid game with no clear rules or goal. Seven billion players all taking their turns whenever they wanted. Penalized if you won too much.—The sister who, thanks to being too smart, was alone and bullied with no one to understand her. Penalized if you lost too much.—The brother who kept failing and getting yelled at by his teachers and parents, yet kept smiling. No right to pass. The bullying only got worse if she was silent. If she spoke too much, she’d be hated for crossing a line. And he’d be hated for seeing through to people’s true motives. There was no way to tell the goal, read the stats, or even identify the genre. Even if you followed the rules that were laid out, you’d be punished—and worst of all: those who just ignored the rules stood at the top—. Compared to this awful life, any other game was just too easy. 
“Tsk—asshole.” 
Sora patted the head of his young sister who was still looking down. 
—The pair who had just displayed a godlike performance were nowhere to be found. The two that were left were downcast—downtrodden—some of the lowest weaklings in society. Nowhere to go, cast out by the world—nothing more. The irritation brought the fatigue back in a rush. As the brother moved the cursor to the Start button to turn off the computer for the first time in a while, he heard: Bink!—another e-mail notification entering his ear. His hand proceeded to Shut Down regardless. 
—But his sister stopped him. 
“What if there was a world where everything was decided by simple games—” 
The two read this suspiciously, but with imagination and longing they couldn’t conceal. 
“What if there was a world on a board where the goal and rules were clear? What would you think?” 
They looked back at each other, grinned in self-deprecation, and nodded. The brother put his hands on the keyboard. So that’s where he was going with this. 
“Yeah, if there’s a world like that, we really were born in the wrong one.” 
—He echoed the words of the initial e-mail. And hit Send. 
—For a moment. 
Faint static rippled across the computer screen. At the same time, everything in the room halted with a thump, as if the breaker had been tripped. All except for one thing—the screen that showed the e-mail. And— 
“Wha-what?!” 
“…?” 
There was a sound as if the house was creaking, a sound like the crackle of electricity. The brother looked around in a panic as the sister spaced out, clueless as to what was happening. The static grew inexorably stronger and finally took over like the snow on an untuned TV. And then from the speakers—no. Unmistakably from the screen. This time it wasn’t text—a voice came back. 
“I agree. You certainly were born in the wrong world.” 
Not only the screen, but now the whole room was taken over by the static. Suddenly, white arms extended from the screen’s surface. 
“Wha—?!” 
“…Ee—” 
The limbs reached out from the screen and grabbed the siblings’ arms. They were pulled in with a force that was too strong to fight. Into the screen—. 
“Then I’ll let you be born again—into the world you should have been!” 
—…And then—. 
Everything turned white. It was because he’d opened his eyes—it was the light of the sun. He knew this by a burning sensation on his retinas that he hadn’t felt in a long time. Finally, the brother realized something from the sight that entered his pupils as they started to adjust to the light. He was—in the sky. 
“Wwaaaah?!” 
His cramped little room had become, all of a sudden, a wide and sweeping vista. 
—But his scream was not because of the strangeness of the landscape that entered his eyes. Sora’s brain was accelerating to grasp the situation, almost enough to fry his mental circuits, and that was why he was screaming. 
“What… what the hell?!” 
—No matter how you looked at it, no matter how many times. There in the sky was a floating island. And no matter how many times he second-guessed his eyes and head, out at the limits of his vision, flying through the sky, was a dragon. The giant chess pieces visible deep in the mountains beyond the horizon were huge enough to confuse his sense of perspective. It belonged in a game—a fantasy landscape. This was clearly not a landscape from the Earth he knew. But more importantly—most importantly—from the clouds sweeping out under his eyes, he realized that the feeling of weightlessness was because he was falling. That they were unmistakably in the middle of a skydive with no parachute. Taking all this in and turning his shriek to— 
“Oh, I’m about to die.” 
—levels of conviction took the brother all of three seconds. But then his tragic conviction was broken through by a voice ringing out resoundingly beside him. 
“Welcome to my world!” 
Before the grand and strange landscape, a falling boy spread his arms wide and beamed. 
“This is the utopia you’ve dreamed of, Disboard, the ‘world on a board’! A world where everything is decided by simple games! That’s right—even people’s lives and countries’ borders!” 
She was maybe ten seconds behind Sora. Shiro, seeming to have finally grasped the situation, opened her eyes wide and grabbed on to her brother, looking as if about to cry. 
“Wh-wh-who—are you—?” 
Shiro raised a cry of protest with all her strength, yet as if whispering. But the boy went on smiling happily and said: 
“Me? Well, I live over there.” 
As he said it, he pointed to a giant chess piece beyond the horizon such as Sora had seen. 
“I suppose if I were to put it in the terms of your world—I’m God, I guess!” 
The self-proclaimed God said this with deliberate cuteness, sticking his index finger to his cheek. 
But what difference did it make now? 
“Whatever. Hey, what are we supposed to do?! The ground’s coming—aghhhh, Shiro!” 
“…~~~~~!” 
Drawing Shiro’s hands into his chest, Sora put himself beneath her, though the gesture was questionably meaningful. Shiro shrieked into Sora’s body with a muted cry. Meanwhile, the boy who claimed to be a god told them jauntily: 
“I hope to see you again. Probably not too long in the future.” 
—With that, the pair’s consciousness faded. 
… 
“Ugh…ughhh…” 
The feeling of soil. The scent of flowers—when he came to, Sora was lying on the ground. He groaned and got up. 
“—Wha-what just happened…?” 
—A dream? Sora thought so but didn’t say it. 
“…Ughh…what a weird dream.” 
Sora’s sister woke up after him and groaned. 
—Aw, Sister. After I made a point of not saying it, too. You didn’t have to go and set the “It wasn’t a dream” flag. With these thoughts, he stood up, and no matter how he tried to pretend he didn’t notice, there was soil under his feet. An unfamiliar sky soared overhead, and— 
“Gaaaah!” 
Sora realized that he was standing at the edge of a cliff and stepped back in a panic. 
—Looking over the panorama from the cliff, he saw an unbelievable landscape spreading out before them. 
…No, that’s not it. Let me rephrase that. There was an island in the sky. A dragon. And giant chess pieces beyond the mountains on the horizon. So it was the same weird landscape they had seen while falling. So it—wasn’t a dream. 
“Hey, little sister.” 
“…Hnh?” 
The siblings spoke as they looked out with vacant eyes. 
“I’ve often thought that life was an impossible game, a game for masochists. But this…” 
“…Yeah…” 
They spoke in unison. 
““It’s finally glitched out… What…the hell? This game is epic fail…”” 
And then they lost consciousness once more. 
 
—Have you heard a rumor that goes like this?— 
They say that people who are just too good at games will one day get an e-mail. The body contains just a few words and a URL. And, if you click the link, a certain game?will start. If you beat the game, they say you disappear from this world. And then— 
There’s an urban legend that says you’ll be invited to another world. 
…Do you believe it?