So I Started The Game?

Waking up in an unfamiliar place… was a common pattern in isekai reincarnation stories. You could even call it a kind of formal beauty.

Lately people always said “trope, trope,” but maybe it was about time we just called it the classic path, wasn’t it? That was what I thought.

Anyway.

For the record, I hadn’t been asleep or unconscious. If anything, I had been wide awake—eyes blazing—and I had just been about to start my game, something between a way to unwind and a daily routine… my life’s work… no, my reason for living. And yet…

“Where is this, I wonder?”

Yeah, seriously… where was this?

Just a moment ago, I had launched the game and—like always—chosen Load. Yep, no mistake. Even now, if I closed my eyes, I could picture the title screen. I had definitely loaded and chosen to begin a new playthrough.

Right… I even felt like the sensation of pressing the confirm button still lingered in my finger. And yet, there was no controller in my hands.

A moment ago, I had been in my eight-tatami one-room apartment. There had been a 28-inch TV straight ahead, and a floor chair under my butt.

And now, in front of me… was a lavish room so huge that even multiplying my old room by ten wouldn’t be enough. A red carpet ran in a straight line… and at the far end, a massive, imposing door radiated presence.

I hadn’t been wrapped in light, and my consciousness hadn’t faded. The instant I pressed confirm, I had been here.

How did I know? …Because my hands were still frozen in the shape of someone gripping a controller. But there was no TV in front of me—only an extravagantly wide room.

In that room, I was sitting on a slightly raised platform. And it wasn’t a floor chair. At home, I spent eighty percent of my time on that floor chair—one I’d splurged on for a slightly nicer model. But the chair I was sitting on now… was, how to put it, pretty hard.

When I shifted a little because it felt uncomfortable, my clothes clinked.

No, wait—my clothes didn’t make metallic sounds like that.

With that thought, I looked down at my body… and what I saw wasn’t my saggy loungewear. It was something black and glossy and bulky… yeah, armor.

I covered my face with both hands—ah, the palms were leather… no, that didn’t matter right now.

No, calm down. For now, do that thing—count prime numbers or something?

One… huh? Was 1 a prime number? Or wasn’t it? Which was it again? I wanted to google it… but my phone was still on the table. …Whatever. I calmed down, for the moment.

I gathered my resolve and stood up.

I thought, “What if the armor’s too heavy to stand?” But I managed to rise surprisingly easily. Then, in sync with my movement, I felt something flutter behind me.

…A cape… and it was bright red… Wait. Even the armor alone was at the limit of my capacity, and on top of that I’d put on a cape too? My sanity was getting shaved down in all directions.

While thinking that, I turned around, and what entered my eyes was…

“…It really is a throne… a throne, right? This is a throne.”

There was a chair sitting there with an almost comical air of authority.

It was truly an absurdly authoritative chair. The black leather executive chair you saw CEOs sitting in on dramas looked like a folding chair next to it.

I figured I could probably live for the rest of my life just by selling this thing.

“…?”

I’d been staring at it like that, when… a sense of deja vu… Was it my imagination?

I stepped down from the raised platform and backed away a few paces while keeping my eyes on the throne… and yeah, it was familiar… kind of… no, extremely familiar.

I mean, it was the first time I’d seen it in real life, but still…

“…No way… This was totally the base screen from Legions…”

Legions… its official name was Sword and Legions… it had some subtitle, but I couldn’t remember it. The scenery spread before my eyes looked exactly like the background of the base-part screen from the game I had been about to play.

“…So I got sucked into the game? You’ve got to be kidding me. And of all things, into a game this bleak…?”

I collapsed to the floor, pressing down my trembling right hand.

Sword and Legions… it was a strategy simulation game with both RPG and SLG parts. At the start, the protagonist chose a country and took on the role of guiding it to become the hegemon of the continent.

Rather than running a country’s management—domestic affairs, military, diplomacy—like Nobbu’s Ambition, it was basically a game focused on fighting. You sent armies to battle, or dove into dungeons for the RPG part, aiming to unify the continent by force—though you could also form alliances, technically.

There were five countries the player could choose, and depending on how you progressed, routes branched and there were multiple endings, so it had a huge amount of content that took a long time to fully exhaust.

Each faction also had plenty of beautiful girls, and there were even individual endings—so if you tried to see every character’s ending, a hundred playthroughs wouldn’t be enough. Well, aside from the main cast, most individual endings were pretty brief, so unless you were ridiculously bored, there wasn’t really a need to see them all.

For unimportant characters, you could just search videos and watch as many as you wanted.

Anyway, I was hopelessly hooked on this game. Not the individual endings, but the scenario endings—I had seen every single one… and there were easily over twenty of them. Of course, I had watched all of them more than twice. For the past two or three years, this was the only game I’d played.

Since it had carryover playthroughs and playthrough bonuses, I had grinded it to the point where even the highest difficulty was a cakewalk… but I’d been thinking it might be time to start without any carryover.

“Was this really Legions…?”

I looked at the throne again. The more I looked, the more it felt like the exact throne I’d seen in the background of the base-part screen.

“…I’m not jumping to conclusions yet. Not yet, but… if this really is Legions… which country is this?”

There were five countries you could select in Legions. Each had a different flag color: blue, red, green, yellow, and white. Blue was the Kingdom of Randeur, red was the Dentel Empire, green was the Rosenbork Federation, yellow was the Hobritz Commercial Union, and white was the one the player could decide freely.

Among the selectable countries, only white was special: it had no main, protagonist-class characters. The player became the ruler, and used companions they edited themselves.

Furthermore, the white country only appeared if the player chose white—so if you chose any other country, it didn’t even exist.

And the problem now was… which country this was. If you chose anything except white… the opening began with the player passing through a castle gate. The player experienced the first battle as an ordinary soldier. After earning merit in that tutorial-like section and becoming a squad leader, the main story started.

But where I was now clearly wasn’t a castle gate. Even in the most conservative description, it was a throne room. Frankly, it was a throne room.

Th-this was bad.

The only opening that started from a throne room was the white country.

And what was bad about that… was that the white country started with only edited characters. Edited characters were ones the player could freely customize in appearance and abilities, but… in the initial state, you had very few points to allocate, so they were ridiculously weak, and you could only create five people.

And of course, your territory was surrounded by enemies. More like, you started surrounded by major powers.

In Nobunaga’s Ambition terms… it was like being placed in a location surrounded by states ruled by generals with stats in the 90s and high 80s, while you—the player—had five Oda Nobukatsu as your subordinates.

Did you get it? Oda Nobukatsu. All stats around 50, more or less. I doubted Nobukatsu himself ever thought he’d be evaluated like that by later generations.

Anyway.

In short, the white country was the one you chose when you wanted a guaranteed straight line to game over.

“No, it’s fine… Calm down, me. There’s no way someone could get transferred into a game world, right? I mean, look… Legions isn’t a VRMMO, and it’s not an otome game either, right? If anything, it’s not even an MMO—or even an MO. It’s just a consumer, territory-conquering game. I mean, sure, it has RPG elements. There’s a Demon King and an Evil God and stuff… huh?”

Right… It wasn’t just wars between nations. There was a Demon King and an Evil God too… Depending on the route, the Evil God didn’t appear, but the Demon King was always there… Wait. Was this world in trouble?

I’d been thinking I could just sneak away, but… wasn’t it in the setting that humans had a really bad time in the Demon King’s territory?

I stood up, as if trying to suppress my pounding heart. But my footing felt floaty, like I couldn’t trust myself to stand straight. The carpet underfoot was probably extremely high quality.

Huh? No way. Wait, wait, wait… The ruler of the weakest country? I could run away, right? I mean I had to run, right? If you lost as the ruler, even if you didn’t die in battle, you got your head chopped off, right? Running was the only choice, right?

But if I ran, the Demon King would come, right? If the Demon King came, that was bad, right…?

Wait, wait—It’s fine. Calm down. Count primes or something? Wait, 1 was…? No, no, it’s fine. In Legions, there was a system where you could abandon your country and become a wanderer. After that, you could join another country as a retainer and rise through the ranks… and there was even an Adventurer Ending where you just kept diving into dungeons.

In that case, there was also a Hero route where you went to defeat the Demon King as an individual, not as an army. The Evil God didn’t show up either… Should I aim for that route? The problem was… could I fight? I hated pain, and could I even kill someone? I seriously didn’t know… What was I supposed to do…?

“What the hell was I supposed to dooooo?!”

Clutching my head, I screamed at the top of my lungs. Screaming didn’t change the situation… If that could improve things, I’d scream more… I knew that, but I still couldn’t stop myself from screaming.

“Who is it that’s shouting so loudly in the sacred Audience Chamber?!”

Whether it improved or not, my scream did change the situation.