After the sensation of my mind going blank for a moment in the dim room passed, I blinked.
Something was strange. I looked around, and it had become broad daylight.
“What the hell is this?!”
It wasn’t a monitor screen. It was the real world. My voice bounced off the glass of my helmet and echoed hollowly.
“No, seriously… where the hell is this…”
I tried to pinch my arm, but the slightly thick environment suit was all that got caught between my thumb and forefinger. Pinching myself would be difficult. In any case, though it was a little dull, I could still feel sensation.
“This environment suit… it’s the one from the game I was playing, right? This really isn’t a dream, is it?”
Just in case, I bit my tongue.
Ow.
It hurt.
Good. I guess I really had entered the game world…
“…No, wait. This isn’t the game I was playing?!”
The game I’d been playing, Into The Sub-Terra. Commonly called IST, it was an open-world survival crafting game.
The kind that comes up if you search the tags open_world_survival_crafting. Mining resources on an alien planet and building a base.
No people show up except the protagonist.
Maybe because it was an indie game with a list price of 28,000 won, which I’d bought during a 50% summer sale, there weren’t even any voice actors aside from the multitool.
But there were people here. Not just people—there were buildings that smelled of civilization. Pretty impressive, well-built structures, as if the setting were the European Renaissance.
This was… one of those so-called fantasy trip whatever things.
At least it wasn’t the time travel type.
People had hair colors like blue, red, and pink, and the shapes of their faces were strange too. They didn’t look Western; they looked anime-esque.
“Hey! You there in the strange outfit!”
Someone suddenly pointed at me and shouted. That person had purple hair and some kind of uniform. Maybe he was a guard of the town or city.
Startled, I hurriedly aimed the gun-shaped object I happened to be holding at him.
“Huh? What do you think you’re doing?! Pointing that strange thing at a person!”
The man who had spoken to me frowned and got angry.
“Bloody hell?!”
Doubly startled by another voice that suddenly rang beside my ear, I dropped the gun-like object onto the ground.
Then the man looked at me with a sneer and continued.
“Hmph. Still, I suppose even someone like you knows you’ve wronged a guard. No need to be that overwhelmed with gratitude, so pick up that pathetic weapon of yours again.”
The excuse that I’d said that because I’d recently played an FPS game with a British protagonist came to mind, but who was I supposed to make excuses to?
The voice ringing by my ear right now?
That sounded like it came through bone-conduction earphones, right? Something about “Master” or whatever?
“Am I… hearing things?”
Flustered, I muttered to myself out loud, and that “sound” answered again. It even corrected my pronunciation.
If I hadn’t been prepared for it, I would have been startled again.
Ah, whatever. At the very least, it wasn’t something I could figure out right now.
To survive, I should start by accepting the situation as it is. Analysis could come later.
Then the first thing I had to do was… pick up the thing I’d dropped.
It was something that often appeared in survival games.
“Equipped on the hand,”
“gathers resources from wherever it’s fired,”
“and creates buildings at the spot it’s fired using the resources gathered that way.”
It was an object that satisfied that entire system, and since it made a little more sense than bare hands, something like this appeared in SF settings. In SF, making even a little more sense was an important matter.
In any case, it was an absurdly over-technology piece of equipment, so having something like this in this insane situation was truly fortunate, but…
As soon as I picked it up, the voice from earlier was heard again. No, it “rang.”
It was definitely not an auditory hallucination. It wasn’t just on the level of hearing words chattering through bone-conduction earphones; my head itself was vibrating.
Its identity and the very concept of it were both confusing. But I swallowed the fact that this “multitool” could talk whole.
Along with… the fact that I’d entered some completely unrelated world that wasn’t even the game world I knew.
For now, I was in the middle of talking to someone who seemed like an NPC, after all.
“Tch! Anyway, your clothes are strange, and you’re holding a strange object too. You’re an adventurer from somewhere, aren’t you?”
The shape of the mouth of the person in front of me didn’t match the sound I was hearing. Listening closely, I could hear incomprehensible words mixed in as well.
Was the environment suit translating for me, perhaps…
No, that wasn’t the important part!
What he’d just said contained other important information. This person had used the term “adventurer” as if it were a job.
For that to be a viable occupation, it meant the world had to be messed up enough that people could make a living off it.
So is this still one of those game-world possession things, at least?
A world like an RPG, where if you go outside town, monsters that kill people are swarming everywhere?
But why, of all things, instead of the game I was playing…
No, that didn’t matter either. There was something more important right now.
“Yes, well…”
Since the other party had guessed my identity for me, I went along with it for now.
“Tch! You look awfully green too… Anyway, since you’re an adventurer, I suppose that’s how you ended up wandering all the way here. You came because of this too, didn’t you?”
The man held a piece of paper in front of my face.
Writing.
The letters on the flyer were clearly characters I had never seen before, but the environment suit overlaid them in Korean, as if automatically translating something I’d taken a photo of with a phone.
“Lady Izel Asant, daughter of the Asant Barony, has gone missing in the northeastern forest. A reward will be given to anyone who discovers the young lady’s whereabouts or rescues and returns with her in person.”
Barony, lady, reward.
Of course, the reward wasn’t important to me right now, but in this chaotic situation, I had been given something to do.
It felt like a small relief. Work. Someone was assigning work. I focused my mind more in order to do that “work” well.
Information. Important information. Northeast. Forest.
I fully determined what I had to do. While my head had cleared a little, I broadened my vision beyond the task immediately before me.
I needed to find more information.
From this paper too.
Even if there were social classes, this meant a certain level of education was guaranteed, and if so, in civilized areas, the eyes watching suspicious people would also be sharp.
If I knew what the guy chattering beside my ear was, I wanted to answer, “You’d know too if you watched some isekai stuff.”
Usually things passed smoothly enough, but there were plenty of cases where they didn’t. I had to adapt. If I couldn’t, I’d die.
The buildings around me, the clothing, the transportation, the voice of the person speaking to me.
The “worldview” needed to live in this world.
Everything that was more important than anything else to my survival.
“You’ve seen enough, haven’t you? Hurry up and get going.”
This man’s condescending attitude.
Just what level of status did this person have, and what was the state of public order in this region like, that he would try to order around a suspicious-looking “adventurer” with a jerk of his chin and lord it over me right away?
No matter what, being looked down on from the first meeting did irritate me somewhat, but I suppressed it. Naturally, if I wanted to live, I had to.
And if I lacked information, it was better to get out of the sphere of civilization as soon as possible.
“Thank you for the detailed explanation. I’ll go take a look!”
For now, I yielded to authority and bowed my head, but inwardly, I was a little annoyed. Did I have to get insulted from the moment we met?
No, fine. Right now, there was information more urgent than anything else.
The voice babbling in my ear answered with confidence, and a “waypoint” pointing in that direction appeared on the environment suit’s HUD.
This voice. Could this thing interfere with my environment suit too? Then this wasn’t the time to get defiant just because it was suspicious.
I followed the directions without complaint.
Above all, this was urgent. The unpleasant man behind me, whether he was a guard or whatever, might come after me just because he found me suspicious.
I had to get out of this dangerous “civilization” as quickly as possible.
***
I ran for a good while and reached a place where civilization disappeared. Though the ground was dirt, even the hardened road made by frequent foot traffic was no longer visible; a full-fledged forest path stretched on.
By the time it became hard to keep ignoring the strange voice muttering by my ear, I stopped and checked my surroundings.
“…Where in the world am I?”
“No. You figured out the direction exactly earlier, didn’t you? Map. Turn on the map. Can you do a map too, by any chance?”
In one corner of the environment suit’s screen, a flat map like the one I’d seen in the game appeared. The terrain was clearly not the map from the game, but the area around here.
“…Why does this work?”
Right now, in this situation, the strangest guy was saying the most sensible thing. That only made me even more confused.
“So… what exactly are you?”