Prologue

I woke up to freezing coldness.

It was dark and cold. Where is this place? I opened my eyes and looked around, only to find a veritable ocean of stars before me. It was my first time seeing such an amazingly grand starry sky. There were bright and dim stars, a colorful nebula and an asteroid field which seemed surprisingly close by.

“What the hell?!”

Asteroids, which looked like a bunch of scattered floating rocky debris, were practically right before my very eyes. The heck! I’m sure there’s no place on Earth where you can actually see these things from this up close. It’s quite common to see this type of scenery in games and movies though. But it’s absolutely impossible to see them from a distance which made them visible to the naked eye for real.

“A dream…? No, this biting cold—”

The bone piercing coldness just felt way too real. The feeling of being lightheaded right after waking up and this rising sense of uneasiness also seemed eerily real.

“Just where is this place anyway…?”

The place where I’m currently at doesn’t seem to be very big. Am I sitting on some sort of chair? There’s something like a seatbelt installed…… Wait up. Instead of that, what is this weird floaty sensation? Just what the hell is going on here?!

Because I was suddenly thrown into an unknown situation, I was close to having a panic attack, but my eyes gradually got used to the darkness.

“This is……”

A familiar interface came before my eyes. Yeah, this room… No, this cockpit was really familiar.

“This was the game’s… Krishna’s cockpit? Is this actually a dream after all?”

No matter how I look at it, this seems to be the cockpit of the custom ship I had in a game I’ve been playing for a couple of years now— the Krishna.

The game was an MMO called [Stella Online].

It was a game designed with a lot of freedom afforded to the players. It was set in a vast universe where you could go on grand adventures, enlist yourself as a mercenary and make your mark on the battlefield, purchase a fully armed spaceship and engage in interstellar escort missions and the like. It was a game where a lot of players with different play styles gathered and interacted.

I played a standard Mercenary style. In order to purchase a high spec battleship with strong combat ability, I did any and every possible job which could earn me in-game currency, such as becoming a transporter-for-hire.

I generally played with the goal of earning enough to get a ship with a certain level of combat ability, followed by farming credits once again by undertaking mercenary work with the said ship and then finally replacing my current ship with a newer, better one. Ad nauseam. That kind of thing.

My current ship, the Krishna, was something which got released from an in-game event a few months back. Players had to bring their A-game in order to get one for themselves. It was still relatively new.

Its official model name was the [ASX-08 Krishna]. It was quite a unique ship and I simply just called it Krishna.

It was a dangerous machine that combined the maneuverability and speed of a small craft and the firepower of a heavy cruiser. Depending on the situation, even shooting down a full-fledged warship was doable.

“Anyways…”

I operated the touch panel interface of the ship’s controls and brought the life support systems online. Warm air soon permeated throughout the cockpit.

“That was close… If I lost consciousness again in that situation, I would’ve suffocated to death!”

Evidence of oxygen depletion inside the ship was still present on a small screen which displayed the temperature and oxygen levels. It indicated the average temperature within the whole ship was now slightly below minus 10 degrees.

For now, I’ve managed to avert a life-threatening situation, even if I still don’t have any idea about what’s going on.

“Really now. What’s with all this shit?”

I crossed my arms and sank in thought while gazing at the bright cockpit controls before me. No matter how I look at it, this really is inside the cockpit of my personal starship in the game Stella Online.

I’ve heard of guys dreaming about being inside the games they’ve been playing sometimes. Things like playing horror games and ending up dreaming of being chased by terrifying creatures or playing sword and sorcery RPGs and dreaming of slaying monsters with one’s own sword in hand. It was a common enough story.

“But am I currently having a lucid dream or something?”

A lucid dream is a dream during which the dreamer is aware that they’re dreaming.

But I also heard one often wakes up after realizing they were just having a lucid dream… The problem is, there’s no sign of me waking up at all. Moreover, the gradually increasing warmth inside this cockpit and the other sensations I’m experiencing all over my body felt nothing like a dream as well.

“Hmm…?”

Even after mulling over my current situation over and over again, no definite answer came to mind. I tried pinching my cheeks and poking my head. They were definitely painful. Is this not a dream after all?

No, that can’t be. Right?

I thought it seemed surprisingly easy to operate, so I tried it and managed to maneuver Krishna just fine. I had a little trouble with the foot pedals and the control stick because I was so used to controlling the ship with a keyboard and mouse, but I managed to get the hang of them after a while. Since I was now controlling the ship directly, it became possible to perform more detailed maneuvers.

“There really isn’t no sign of me waking up huh?”

I repeatedly accelerated and decelerated and genuinely felt my body pressing onto the seat due to the constant shifts in speed and the seatbelt digging into me due to inertia. But my stubborn head still refused to wake up from this absurd dream.

“Alrighty, let’s try firing off some weapons then.”

I’m actually starting to get into this shit. I brought the weapon systems online and activated the ship’s ordnance. Afterward, a part of the ship’s hull transformed and four manipulator arms came out.

The manipulator arms each had a military-grade pulse laser cannon equipped. They were considered to be the weapons sporting the most firepower in Stella Online, and were sometimes called Heavy Lasers. And I had four of these bad boys with me.

In addition, two gun barrels extended out from both sides of the cockpit. These were large-caliber canister-shot cannons and were called shotgun cannons in the game. They fire off powerful canister rounds that scatter highly destructive shards and were optimal during close combat. Most small warships would get wrecked from two well-placed shots.

I had another ‘trump card’ on hand, but I don’t plan on firing it at all. That’s because its ammo was way too expensive.

“Alright, here we go!”

I locked on to a large asteroid nearby and fired the four laser cannons.

“Whoah!?”

The azure energy beams fired by the four cannons directly hit the asteroid in question and utterly destroyed it in one shot. Its fragments scattered and hit the energy shield deployed around Krishna and caused the shield to flux.

“That was quite the firepower…”

So this was the power of a heavy laser that’s able to deplete a warship’s energy shield in seconds and completely destroy it after directly piercing its hull… It sure wasn’t half-assed.

And with this, I can’t keep running away from the issue any longer.

I gotta acknowledge this situation as ‘reality’.

This was no dream. It was as real as it gets.