Loner High-School Girl And The God-Tier Game — Me Is Loner

Monday, July 29, 2047.

Yesterday was one disaster after another, and now a brand-new threat is closing in on me. The threat is called school, and it is standing right there in front of my eyes.

You can’t save. You can’t log out partway through. The tests (bosses) are unreasonable. Parties and guilds are compulsory. Honestly, it’s the worst dungeon there is. It compels you into contact with other human beings, forces a coming-of-age arc on you, puts you to manual labor like cleaning, and the reward for all of it is precisely nothing. I simply cannot do this.

On the walk to school I pass the convenience store I’ve seen a thousand times. Another three minutes straight ahead and I’m at the high school. Any high-difficulty quest is a cakewalk next to this commute. I’d feel safer in a Demon Lord’s castle than at school.

I step into the classroom, and the giddy hum of the day before summer break rolls out to meet me.

“Summer break starts tomorrow~!”

“I heard a new theme park opened in AR. Let’s go once break starts!”

“So my boyfriend went and had our first kiss in virtual instead of for real. Can you believe that?!”

“Eh~, I don’t really see the problem.”

Ahh… I can hear all these fun conversations. Naturally, not one human being speaks to me. Me is loner.

Getting here early hits me with a powerful wave of loneliness. But I refuse to stand out by being late, not even on a one-in-a-million chance, so I end up coming early anyway. Gloomy-creep brain.

Summer break starts tomorrow. Normally it wouldn’t start until August, but this year the scorching-heat days are forecast to begin tomorrow, so we’re getting an early closing ceremony instead.

“Morning, one and all.”

Sakurai, our teacher, comes in. Everyone takes their seats.

“All right, closing ceremony. Log in to the assembly hall with your Simple Devices. Don’t get the URL wrong.”

I switch on the choker around my neck and full-dive.

A Simple Device isn’t headgear like a Full Device; it’s a choker, and it can only reach an Another Real terminal somewhere nearby. Local connection only, as they’d have called it in the old days.

We gather in the assembly hall, a plaza built to look like a gymnasium, wearing our school avatars… or rather, our real-world bodies exactly as they are. Why go to the trouble of holding an assembly in the virtual world? Time efficiency. The clock in AR (short for Another Real) doesn’t run at reality’s pace: one hour in AR works out to only about twenty minutes on the outside.

Classes themselves are held in reality, because the law is explicit about it. ‘Use of AR at school shall be limited to thirty minutes of real time.’ Apparently, learning through AR loses efficiency sharply past a certain point, and it does a number on your mind besides. Before the law existed, there were supposedly schools running twenty hours of lessons in a single day through AR. Yeah, of course that would break you.

In the assembly hall, the principal lays out one gracious lecture after another. Crimes involving AR are on the rise, so be careful… She keeps pouring the same old wine into new bottles, but the thing she actually wants to convey never changes, which makes it extremely boring.

Incidentally, the principal is speaking without a microphone. She’s an old lady already past sixty, but her voice reaches the ears of every single student. She has the call function switched on to every student present here, so even a small voice carries to all of them.

This is the virtual world, so sleepiness doesn’t exist here, but it’s dull enough to make me want to yawn anyway. I want to touch a gun. I want to pull a trigger. Right as I’m thinking it…

“Ahem. Well then, I shall leave my own remarks there. Next, Student Council President Tsukigami Seika will give us some points of caution for the summer break. Miss Tsukigami, if you would.”

“Yes.”

A girl with long silver-white hair steps up onto the platform. Every time I look at that person, I think the same thing. God is not fair.

“A first-year student council president… she’s so cuuute.”

“That’s with no makeup, right? Isn’t that insane?”

She casually demolished the common wisdom that the student council president is a third-year, and she’s popular enough that the previous president handed the chair over to her back in June. A monster.

Beautiful, top of her class, a perfect superhuman. She has fans outside the school as well as in it. She comes from a good family, too: her father is the president of a major game maker, and her mother, if I remember right, is a hugely famous fashion designer.

She can do anything, she has everything, she’s popular, and she’s cute. Nothing like me.

Still… the student council president’s voice…

Somehow, it feels like I’ve heard it somewhere before…

“…And so, everyone, please take care to avoid trouble, and enjoy your summer break.”

The president finishes her speech. We sit through the student-guidance teacher’s talk after that, and the closing ceremony is over.

“Haaah.”

The closing ceremony is done and my class has been dismissed, but I still have to stay at school. As a club president, I have work to do.

This school requires you to join a club. I picked the Plastic Model Club, and counting me it had a grand total of four members. Two third-years and one second-year. The third-years are ghost members¹, and the one second-year dumped the presidency on me and became a ghost member too.

Honestly, I think it worked out. I have my opinions about my seniors, but getting to do club activities completely alone is a good thing.

Today I have to submit our summer-break activity plan to the student council. It’s mandatory for every club in the cultural division. The plan doesn’t need much detail. A training camp or the like would be a different story, but with no special activities planned, a rough goal is enough. All I wrote was a list of the model kits I intend to build over the break.

The other cultural clubs will be swarming the student council all morning, so I plan to hand mine in during the afternoon.

I grab my bag, with the lunch Azuha packed for me inside it, and scurry off to the stairs. Up one floor, then up another.

Spare desks and chairs and other equipment stand lined up in front of the door to the roof. The roof isn’t open, so I can’t go out there, but this space isn’t sealed off either. This is where I always eat, alone.

Three electric fans sit among the equipment, and there’s an outlet, too, so I run all three off it and eat my lunch in the cool air. Why an outlet exists in a place like this, I have no idea. Maybe it feeds a device up on the roof for deploying AR.

“Yeah, at the very peak of summer it’s still hot up here.”

Still, better than eating in the bathroom. A hot bathroom stall is hell.

“Today’s lunch is delicious, too.”

Azuha’s such a perfectionist, honestly~. The sausages are properly cut into little octopuses², and there’s a heart drawn on the rice in pink furikake³.

— Clack.

“Huh.”

That was a footstep. Coming up toward me from below.

Someone’s climbing the stairs?! Wh-wh-wh-what do I do?!

While I’m busy panicking, the footsteps arrive right in front of me.

“You. What are you doing there?”

The person standing there is the last one I could possibly have expected.

Before I know it, I’m rubbing my eyes.

“Miss… Tsukigami.”

“Mm-hm. That’s right. Koshiki Rei.”

A bolt from the blue.

It feels exactly like lightning dropping out of a sky without a single cloud in it. No. Not lightning. This has the impact of a meteorite.