Instant Death

『Congratulations! You have been selected to monitor the next generation of open-world RPGs, The End of the World! 』

It started out as a very shady, spam-like email.

It was a sudden email from a development company she had never heard of.

Normally, she would have ignored this kind of spam mail, but Yoko Hiiragi thought it could be good.

Because Yoko was unemployed.

At the moment, all she had were some savings and unemployment insurance, but she was thinking very naively about making a living as a writer, blogger or video creator.

So, she was really trying to deal with scam emails. She thought it would be a good idea to do something like that.

First, she went online to see if anyone else had received a similar email.

There seemed to be a fair number of recipients, but most seemed to have decided it was spam and deleted it.

Some of them, it seems, had installed the client software and were playing it without any particular alarm.

At least the game itself seemed to be real.

Looking at the gameplay video, it looked like an orthodox open-world fantasy RPG.

As far as she could tell, it was not a very interesting game with a simple picture, but open world games were all about the freedom to do whatever you want.

If you knew how to do it right, you could become a popular video game player.

With nothing else to do, Yoko decided to play the game.

She isolated her spare PC from the home network, just in case, and followed the instructions in the email to install the game.

It wasn’t an online game, but it was essential to have an internet connection as the resources were retrieved from the server as needed.

As soon as she started playing, Yoko felt that the game was just too much work.

Overall, the game lacked a sense of comfort.

First of all, the world was unnecessarily large.

There was no deforming whatsoever, and the world had a real-world scale to it.

If there is a royal city with 100,000 inhabitants, there are actually 100,000 NPCs, homes and workplaces for them, granaries to feed them, and a social infrastructure.

Between these cities were long, uneventful roads, vast grasslands and forests.

She traveled there while managing your urine, satiety, sleep and other statuses that only get in the way.

And the time was the same as real time. There was no such thing like a day in the game is an hour in real life.

Normally in an open-world game like this, you’d expect to be able to fast-travel to key locations, or skip through time, but this game didn’t have any of those features.

It may be realistic, but it was a cumbersome game.

That said, she didn’t find it boring.

Oddly enough, the reactions of the NPCs were quite varied.

NPCs lived their own lives in the game and react in various ways to what you say and do.

In this game she could talk to NPCs in chat and they would respond appropriately.

We were told that a high performance AI was used, but it was said that people were controlling them.

It was a very realistic world, but it was nothing more than a world simulator.

It may be entertaining, but The End of the World was designed to be entertaining.

In contrast to the realism of that world, the player characters were fictional.

The player character had levels, stats, and skills and with a little bit of effort she could quickly rise in level, gain skills based on their actions, and achieve superhuman strength.

Yoko was immediately hooked on the game.

It was fun to go wild in the real life like open world.

She enjoyed playing recklessly, as if to beat the frustrations of reality up.

After a while, she received another email.

『“End of the World” VR Edition Announcement』

This was an announcement about a new version of the game, especially for players who had played it a lot.

VR required special equipment, all of which could be rented from the developer.

She was no longer skeptical and signed up to test the new version.

She was also hooked on the game, which was played with goggles worn on the head and gloves worn on the hands.

Just as she was getting used to the VR, she received another email.

『The End of the World FIVR』

FIVR stands for Full Immersion Virtual Reality, a technology that projects your entire body’s senses completely into the game, giving you the experience of being inside the game.

The email was an invitation to a limited number of players who had played the VR version of the game and were being paid a substantial amount of money.

The number of applicants was very small, so Yoko applied without the slightest hesitation.

She received an email sayings he’d won, but she didn’t think it was anything suspicious.

She was lucky. She had to pat herself on the back for doing the right thing so quickly.

As expected, the FIVR equipment was not small enough to be installed in an ordinary home, and the technology was still under development, so it was not possible to rent it out.

So Yoko was invited to the company’s laboratory, where she signed a number of contracts.

She didn’t understand the contents of the contract, but she didn’t want to lose her privilege by saying anything unnecessary.

The monitoring test was to last for several months.

During that time, she would not be able to leave the lab, let alone leave the VR equipment.

She was told that food and excrement would be properly handled, but Yoko did not know the technical details.

It sounded suspicious but she had heard that in space-related research, there are experiments in which people were held for long periods of time. Yoko didn’t think it was too much to ask.

Yoko put her affairs in order.

Since quitting the company, she had mostly stayed indoors and had no one close to her, but even so, being away from home for several months required a certain amount of preparation.

After finishing her preparations, Yoko came back to the institute and was shown to the VR equipment.

It was a long, thin capsule that was large enough for one adult to lie in.

As she undressed and laid down in the capsule, the lid came down and it became pitch black, and she could not hear any external sounds.

Then, suddenly, she lost consciousness.

＊＊＊＊＊

When she woke up, she was on her bed.

She sat up and looked around.

She thought she was in a strange room, but it soon dawned on her that she was in a room in a mansion she had bought in the End of the World.

What was not immediately apparent was the difference in resolution.

The goggle-type devices she used in End of World were powerful, but a game was still a game. If she looked closely, she could see that it was polygonal, and the textures were rough in places.

However, the scene in front of her eyes now seemed to be reality itself.

Yoko had more than a little doubt.

It would be much easier to recreate the mansion from the game faithfully than to create FIVR, she thought.

Just let them think the game was about to start, put them to sleep, and transport them to a well-made set.

But her suspicions were soon confirmed.

When she executed a gesture command with her finger, a system window appeared in front of her.

Apparently the commands were the same as in the VR version.

Then, as she tried to manipulate the window, she noticed that her hands were strangely white and limber.

A quick touch confirmed it.

It was a man’s body, albeit a delicate one.

Oh, so that’s how it works…”

When she checked my status, she found that she had inherited the same status as in the VR version.

In other words, she had to play as a male character, Hiiragi Yosuke.

She got down from the bed and tried to move her body. She didn’t feel any discomfort. It didn’t seem to make any difference to the fact that she became a man.

When she looked into the mirror on the wall, she saw a ridiculously beautiful young man staring back at Yoko, that only existed in fiction.

It was a familiar face, one that she had spent a great deal of time making up in character creation.

“Well, okay. The point is, you want me to roleplay as a man, right?

She guessed she couldn’t change it now, and she originally chose to be a man in the game where she could create her own character, so she was a little surprised but not too disgusted.

Yoko decided to play as Yosuke, thinking that it was an experience that she wouldn’t normally have.

After regaining her composure, Yoko continued to check.

The clothes she was wearing were also obtained from the VR version, and had been given various effects.

There was no doubt that this situation was a continuation of the previous one.

Yoko then selected the Air Cutter magic from the system window. She wondered what would happen if she used magic here, and if she could really use magic. She wanted to find out.

With her fingertips, she pointed at the object, the bed.

With a loud crash, the bed was split in half.

“I can break this?”

【TIPS: Lock objects you don’t want to accidentally destroy. 】

As if to answer her question, a message appeared in her field of vision.

In the VR version, buildings and furniture could not be destroyed, but in the FIVR version, it seems that anything can be destroyed. However, this may be inconvenient in some cases, so it seems to be possible to disable the destruction.

“Yosuke-sama! How may I help you?”

After opening the door roughly, women in a maid uniforms appeared.

They were Yoko’s servants.

This game was designed to be realistic, so she couldn’t carry much luggage. So she hired people to do various chores for her.

“It’s not so good when it’s realistic.”

She thought she had picked reasonably beautiful women, but upon closer inspection, they didn’t look so good.

They had pimples, open pores, and poorly aligned teeth.

These were things that had been covered up in the VR version due to the resolution, but now it was starting to bother her.

Isn’t there a tutorial or something?

The game seemed to be following the VR version, so there was no need to explain the system aspect.

However, she should get to know early on what it means to fight with this body.

“Are there any more bandits around here?”

“Yes, they seem to still be hanging around.”

This mansion was located in the mountains and was originally occupied by bandits. 𝑓𝘳ℯ𝒆w𝘦𝘣𝙣𝘰ѵ𝘦𝚕.c𝗼𝓶

She took it away from them, but it seemed they were still hanging around here.

“Okay. I’ll be out in a bit. You two clean up the bed and get a new one. One of you follow me with a weapon.“

She left the house and looked around.

In her my field of vision, she saw a compass, a display that showed the approximate location of surrounding objects.

If she checked it, she could see a number of red human-shaped icons nearby.

Red meant it was an enemy. If they were humanoid enemies, they were probably bandits.

Yoko started to walk carelessly.

Her covert skills, which she had wasted time improving through repeated surprise attacks, came in handy, and she succeeded in getting to the bandits’ side without being noticed.

Yoko ordered her maid to prepare a sword for her.

It was an ordinary sword with no special effects, but it would be a good way to try out combat.

Just like in the VR version, the sword muscles seemed to be compensated according to the level of the swordsmanship skill.

If she swung her sword properly, it would be considered as an attack command and the most appropriate attack would be automatically executed.

Yoko gently approached the bandit and slashed at him from behind.

The upper half of the bandit’s body easily fell to the ground.

Blood spurted out and internal organs spilled out. The smell of blood and guts filled the air, and Yoko couldn’t help but throw up.

“Yosuke-sama! How may I help you?”

A maid came running up to her, worried.

Yoko had no idea what it was like to kill someone. She didn’t feel guilty about killing bandits, they were just NPCs in a game. She had only thought of them as treasure chests that dropped equipment, but now that they were so real, she felt a physiological disgust that made her unable to move.

【TIPS: If you are not comfortable with grotesque expressions, increase the level of the cruelty filter. 】

Then, such a message was displayed on the screen.