Volume 1 - CH 1

Ahh, that’s right. He had fallen asleep before he logged out.

After he had sorted out the situation in his head, Kagami remembered that he had fallen asleep after he had received the morning call. And then pinching his forehead, he looked up at the sky.

He couldn’t tell how long he had slept. However, he judged that the fact that he hadn’t been woken by his young sister Mayu meant that he probably hadn’t been sleeping too long.

Squeezing his eyes shut and then opening them as though to clear away the sleepiness, he realised that he was in the dead centre of a grassy plain surrounded by a forest. Here and there the plain was dotted with nameless flowers, and in the distant he could see a splenderous mountain range. And he spotted amongst the mountains a number of dully shining silver towers.

In the middle of the plain, before the familiar scenery of the game, he lazily placed a hand to his chin and began thinking to sort out the situation. At this point, he still hadn’t noticed that feeling of wrongness that he had suddenly experienced.

First, “Falling asleep in-game” was a famous term amongst online gamers. It referred to falling asleep whilst in-game, and having your avatar stand there without reacting to anything.

However, the VR system was designed so that it would automatically shut down the system when you fell asleep, and cut off the equipment from the power source, so it was fundamentally impossible to wake up inside the game.

However, the towers among the mountains were, however you looked at them, the 『Linked Silver Towers』. Each of the nine towers was used as a base by one of the Nine Sages, so there was no way that he would mistake them.

The first thing that he suspected was that there was a bug. However, his thoughts never went past ‘rare things do happen sometimes‘. There was one more baffling point after all. If you compared the two points, this one was the more important.

It was that he could smell things. Each time the wind blew, a grassy scent tickled his noise and he felt a sense of discomfort.

The developed VR technology could reproduce the sense of touch, but the sense of taste and smell weren’t developed to a practical level yet. Despite this, when he inhaled through his nose, his brain was clearly telling himthat there was a scent. This was incomprehensible.

So when he tore off some grass by his feet and began to chew, he found that a bitter and astringent taste spread through all of his mouth. Unable to stand it, he spat it out along with a large amount of saliva, and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. The taste was annoyingly intense, and they even meticulously reproduced his saliva.

Unable to understand what herbivores were thinking, he turned his sight down towards a fairly closeby thicket of grass when it happened. A roar suddenly came from within the forest along with a rumble of the earth, and then the high-pitched sound of metal rubbing against metal resounded through the air like the roar of a gale.

It was a sound familiar to him.

Ah, that’s right. He recalled that he had come out to subjugate the group of monsters that had appeared at the national boarders. Had somebody unluckily run across them, or had somebody else taken his place to subjugate them this time? After thinking that the second wouldn’t happen and giving a wry smile, he began running.

If you continued past the forest into the grass clearing, you would find that knights proudly emblazoned in the emblem of their nation were cutting down small creatures the size of a child, with blue skin, and a pointed nose and ears. However, immediately after, two of three of the blue creatures with dully flashing knives in on of their hands grouped together, and attacked that knight. It was a complete battlefield.

The colours silver and blue filled up the plain. The knights dressed in armour shining like mirrors who were raising a battlecry were knights belonging to the same nation that the Nine Sages did, the Kingdom of Arkite, and the kingdom’s elite Magic Clothed Knight Order. The enemy that they were fighting were the common monster, the goblin.

With such a scene in front of him, ‘I sure slept for a long time, huh‘ Kagami realised. Because he was much too late in coming here, the kingdom’s knights were dispatched.

【Summoning: Dark Knight】

After activating his magic, a darkly shining hole opened up in a place hidden by the thicket, and a large black knight gradually rose from it. Fully covered in jet black armour that you could even feel a chill from, it spouted what appeared to be a black flame from its entire body, so its silhouette wavered ominously. It had no face, and instead in a space painted with darkness floated two shining fires like red eyes.

This black knight that gave off a presence obviously different to others, suddenly appeared in the middle of the battlefield of knights and goblins. Stopping their feet due to the appearance of the unknown black knight, the goblings screamed kii kii, as though to threaten it.

Having come this far, Kagami felt a sense of discomfort.

The goblins should not have been programmed to do something like that.

The oft killed goblins were designed as an always brave and daring monster; if you put it in a bad light, they were monsters that didn’t know their place.

However, what Kagami saw before his eyes was, no matter how you looked at it, goblins making a fuss due to “fear”.

However, concluding that it would be useless even if he contemplated it right now, he ordered the Dark Knight to clean them up.

And when he did, in an instant, the battlefield was transformed into a hellish massacre. The black greatsword cut through the wind, and created a gale. Each time its blade carelessly descended, five or six goblins let out a deathcry and scattered into the surroundings as pieces of meat.

Gradually, the goblin’s threatening cries changed into shrieks filled with despair and they began running to escape from that hell, but the Dark Knight who had been ordered to clean them up had not even a grain of compassion.

Without even time to shriek at the black clump that closed the distance, a number of unlucky goblins were sent flying through the air, torn to shreds.

The surrounding goblins who saw this couldn’t even take the bare minimum measures of self-defence, and without guarding were sent flying with a single swing of the sword, bodily fluids and entrails scattering, before the goblins bounced against the ground with lifeless eyes.

Having cleaned up the immediate area, the Dark Knight captured a group that included a goblin wearing armour who was a size larger.

The heavily armoured goblin gave off dull metallic sounds whilst screaming out orders with some impatience mixed in its voice. The armoured goblin was slow because of the weight of its armour, but it had quite a bit of stamina.A few of the goblins who were particularly clever realised that being around the armoured goblin would increase their survival rate, and so they enthusiastically herded around it.

However, with the Dark Knight who was bursting with bloodlust as the opponent, it was nothing but an act of stupidity. If they had wanted to survive, there was no option but to run in the opposite direction of those who were confronting the Dark Knight.

However, even that would not be allowed. The black killer’s blade chased after them, and in the face of this scene of absolute death, the herd of monsters had descended into terror, and forgotten about the meaning behind working as a group after all.

Having come to this, the goblins were nothing more than lone monsters.

This had all just happened in an instant. Without even being able to understand what was happening, the goblins dyed the earth with dark red blood.

Just as ordered, the Dark Knight had finished its performance of cleaning up all the goblins in the area and turning them into silent husks.

Of the two colours that had been on plains, the bule were now lying on the darkened ground, while the silver were grouped together in a formation, vigilant against the Dark Knight.

There were perhaps a hundred goblin corpses on the ground. Dunbalf gave a casual glance at the corpses to confirm that he had completed his chores, and sent away the Dark Knight.

And then he once again recalled the frightened monsters earlier. Smell and taste, as well as goblins that had taken actions he had never seen before.

There was only one conclusion.

It was the third game update.

It was difficult to believe that the world’s technology had developed to a level were smell and taste could be reproduced to such an extent, but it was a reality that the five senses were being conveyed to his whole body.

It was strange that such cutting edge technology was used for a game first, but it was also a fact that there was no way to explain it except this.

As expected of the 『Ark Earth Online』 staff. Dunbalf reached the conclusion that the reason it didn’t shut down despite him falling asleep was because of the version update.

After assenting all on his own like that, he noticed the sound of chafing metal.

The source of the sounds were the band of knights. On their shields was emblazoned the symbol of the 『Kingdom of Arkite』, a coat of arms of a great tree and a moon.

They were the Arkite Magic Clothed Knight Order. They could be distinguished from their armour and shield.

Their mirror like armour reflected the light and assimilated into the surroundings, and their shield boasted strong defence against magic or breathes spouted from monsters.

The man who appeared to be the leader of these elite knights stopped them with a hand signal, and took a step forward. His slicked back hair was silver-grey with streaks of white mixed in, and on his deeply chiseled face ran a slanted scar that was proof of his long service.

Atop his armour was what was probably the symbol of the commander; a red mantle. He couldn’t match Dunbalf, but he was sombre and handsome. However, Dunbalf had no memory of that face. This was despite knowing the faces of all the people that served as commanders to the elite units because of his position.

“The black armoured knight from before. I’m assuming it was a technique belonging to controller class arts. Was that your doing, Ojouchan? Would it be all right to consider you as reinforcements?”

The man who appeared to be the commander spoke to Dunbalf. However, Dunbalf didn’t realise that it was directed at him. There was something obviously wrong within the man’s words, after all.

‘Then who is he speaking to?‘ wondered Dunbalf, as he turned his head to check. And when he did, he noticed that one of the goblin corpses was moving, and something shot out from under there towards the forest.

“Nu, there was… a… survivor?”

The moment that those words left his mouth, he felt that two things were wrong. The first was that the survivor had characteristics obviously different to a goblin.

“What… is this?”

And, the one other was that what came out of his mouth was a lovely voice like a bell.

Looking at himself in the mirror-like armour of the knight commander before him, Dunbalf was dumbfounded.

It was the Arkite Magic Clothed Knight Order’s official equipment, the Clear Mirror Armour. The surface of the armour that reflected light was already basically a mirror.

Seeing his own form reflected there, he moved his right hand, and then his left.

When he did, without an off beat, the girl reflected in the commander’s armour copied him. No, it was already beyond the realm of copying; they were the same body.

And, he knew this girl.

She had silver hair that reached her hips, and with the corners of her strong-willed, azure eyes a little upturned, her faintly reddened cheeks, and her small nose, it was an innocent and cherubic face.

The clothing she wore was the same as what Dunbalf was supposed to be wearing, but what was inside the clothing had clearly changed.

Indeed, what lay inside the clothing was the form of his ideal girl; the girl that he had created with the 『Vanity Case』.