Editing/Standardisation: kubor04
Formatting/Extras: APM
Original Translation: Blastron
Additional thanks goes out to mae and Legit-rikk. Join our discord
It had been an extremely ordinary day. All I expected to do was go to school, hang out with my friends, go home, play some games, take a bath, and go to sleep. That, at least, was how it was supposed to go.
I walked to school, rubbing sleep out of my eyes. I stayed up way too late last night playing an MMO, and I was paying the price this morning. I had somehow managed to get into a party with Baldy, and I completely lost track of time as we farmed dungeon after dungeon.
Baldy, by the way, was a kind of famous character in the MMO that I played. He was a quiet, older gentleman with a bald head who pushed the limits of what can be accomplished as a free-to-play character. He completely ignored status and romance, focusing instead on raising his physical ability to its extreme. He was a ridiculously amazing player, too, able to dance around the front lines of a battle without breaking a sweat. On top of that, he barely ever said a word in chat. His quiet, almost manly playstyle made him very popular with other players. I finally managed to get into a party with him, so it was only natural that I got a little too excited and stayed up way too late.
I arrive at school, stifling a yawn as I enter the classroom.
“Hey,” says my classmate Kyouya as I get to my desk.
“Oh, hey,” I reply.
“Yo!” says Kanata, “Whoa, what’s up? You look awful.”
Kyouya Sasajima and Kanata Ooshima were two of my classmates. We played a bunch of the same MMOs, so we were pretty good friends.
“Oh, yeah, check this out. Last night I got into a party with Baldy.”
“Whoa, seriously?”
“Yeah, seriously,” I reply. “I stayed up waaay too late playing with him.”
“Wow, I’m jealous. That was after I quit?” asked Kanata. We’d been playing together, but he had to go to bed and logged out well before I did. “Fuck, if I knew that was going to happen I would have stayed on a little longer.”
Kanata seemed really upset with himself, but in truth we never would have seen Baldy without him. We needed another person to fill the slot Kanata had left, and Baldy answered our messages in LFG.
“So, you really saw Baldy, huh? What’s he like?” asked Kyouya.
Memories of Baldy’s gallant figure flashed through my mind. “That man cannot be human,” I said. “Can you believe that he was able to advance while completely dodging the Bezebel Witch’s spells?”
The Bezebel Witch was a particularly nasty boss found in high-level dungeons. She was known for firing out a ludicrous barrage of magic attacks. The forums keep calling it a bullet hell. The worst part about this boss is that she never stopped firing. Attackers would be hit by wave after unceasing wave of magic blasts. Ordinarily, what you would try to do is either massively buff your magic resistance and try to whittle her down via suicide attacks, or set up a super-defensive front-line and fire equally large swarms of magic back at her.
Baldy, on the other hand, dodged every blast, got close, and killed her with melee damage. This was completely and utterly unexpected. My mouth actually hung open as I watched him go.
“Wow, that’s Baldy for you. I guess that’s why people call him Idaten(TL.1),” said Kyouya.
“Man, you have to have serious skill to pull off a crazy stunt like that,” said Kanata, tapping his arm. Certainly, I know that if I had the same stats and gear that Baldy had, I wouldn’t be able to do anything like that. “Man, I want to get better!”
“Want to grind out a few more levels after school?” I ask.
“Yeah, definitely!”
“Me too. Let’s find a particularly nasty place and train a bunch.”
“Hm?” I said as I rummaged around in my bag, trying to find my pencil case. I realized, a bit too late, that I had taken it out so that I could write down a few notes as I was playing last night and never put it back. “Ah, crap…”
“What’s wrong?” asked Yuika Hasebe, who was sitting next to me in class.
“I forgot my pencil!”
“Oh no, sorry to hear that. Would you like to borrow mine?” she asked, holding up a spare mechanical pencil.
I took it, gladly. “You’re a lifesaver.”
“You owe me one!”
“Haha, okay,” I said, smiling wryly.
That promise was not one I would be able to keep.
It happened in the middle of literature class, while I was fighting valiantly against falling asleep. Our very short teacher, who we affectionately called Oka-chan, was standing at the front of the class, textbook in one hand, reciting some sort of classical poem. Most of the class was reading along in their own textbooks.
In an effort to stay awake, I forced myself to look up. In the row in front of me, I saw Rihoko(TL.2), another one of my classmates. Rihoko wasn’t her real name, but she looked like a horror so we abbreviated that–Real Horror Child, Rihoko for short(TL.3). She was extremely gaunt, deathly pale, always wore a gloomy expression, and was generally a creepy sort of girl. I felt bad thinking about her like that, but there wasn’t really any polite way to put it. As if she was mocking my efforts to stay awake, Rihoko was fast asleep at her desk. I made myself look away.
That’s when it happened.
It was kind of like a fissure, floating in the empty air in the middle of the classroom, that nobody seemed to have noticed but me. It was hard to describe it as anything else but a crack in space. It was growing, too, and looked like it was going to split open at any moment. I saw it spreading through the air above me, but couldn’t do anything but stare blankly at it. Even if I had reacted differently, I don’t think there’s anything I could have done about what happened next.
In an instant, the space around us shattered in a blast of glorious light, and I was enveloped by blinding pain. That’s when I — no, we — died.
APM - Translation 