Loner High-School Girl And The God-Tier Game — Golden Age (1)

July 30. The first day of summer break.

I ate breakfast, used the bathroom, took a shower, then strapped on my headgear and lay down on the bed. My drive to play this game has never been higher than it is right now.

Fifty percent of that is… pure curiosity about Infinity-Space. Pure excitement.

And the other fifty percent…

“Miss Tsukigami…”

Shoot Meteor Girl. That’s what I’m aiming for…

“Time to give it everything I’ve got!”

I dive into the world of Infinity-Space.

“…Ahh, what a good sleep.”

I wake up in the Space Station’s bedroom.

The room is lined with row after row of capsule beds, and I woke up in one of them. Sleeping in a capsule bed is how you log out of Infinity-Space, and when you log back in you start from the same bed you slept in. Your avatar stays behind in it after you log out, but inside a base a capsule bed can’t be destroyed, so it’s safe.

You can set one up outside a base too, but out there it’s given a durability value, and if that value drops to zero the bed is destroyed, leaving your defenseless avatar lying in the open. And if you force a logout without using a bed at all, apparently you get sent straight back to the Space Station’s bedroom. With a death penalty attached, naturally.

For a game everyone calls god-tier, it sure has a lot of fiddly little restrictions. Then again, maybe that touch of inconvenience is exactly what draws people in. A game isn’t automatically good just because nothing limits you. If you could save and log out anywhere you liked, there’d be no tension to it.

“Hm? What’s this?”

There are two new messages in my message box.

‘Shiki. Pardon the message. This is Shiina, the one who lent you a spaceship. I will be waiting at Cafe Time Break in Space Station Channel 2921 at 30:00 on July 30.’

Time in this world runs three times as fast as it does in reality, so a day here is seventy-two hours long. Thirty o’clock is what the real world would call ten. It’s twenty-four o’clock now, so… six hours from now.

Going by the timestamp, she must have sent it right after I logged out last time. Ugh… I don’t want to go, but it’s not like I can get out of it.

“And the other one is…”

This one looks like a system message.

“A Special Mission?”

I check the manual.

‘A Special Mission is a side story that occurs when you fulfill certain special conditions. It develops as an independent story, and clearing it grants rewards such as items, titles, and chips. Items and titles obtained in a Special Mission cannot be acquired anywhere outside that Special Mission, so be sure to pursue them aggressively.’

So on my last trip out, I must have tripped a Special Mission’s trigger conditions by pure accident. The coordinates put it on the Sand Planet. The same place I went last time.

Looks like I could get some useful items out of it, and it sounds fun. There’s no reason not to go. I want to go shopping too, but my loadout could change depending on what the Special Mission pays out, so maybe I’ll deal with this first. If my armaments turn out to be short, I can always come back and buy a set that matches the mission.

I climb straight into a spaceship and punch in the coordinates from the system message. Off to the Sand Planet! With every setting cranked to maximum speed, I get there in a matter of seconds.

“A forest…?”

I set down right around the spot where Shiina and the others’ spaceship had been. A yellow flag is planted on my minimap, and wherever the flag is, that’s where the mission starts. I head over, and find a single retro television sitting there.

“A cathode-ray tube, is that what these are called? The kind you only ever see in old movies.”

There’s no power source plugged into it, but I go ahead and press a few of its buttons anyway. With a flash, the TV comes to life, and a sepia-toned landscape spreads across the screen. Then the audio kicks in.

“1911 to 1985. An age when guns were loved, and when guns loved back.¹”

The sound quality is terrible, bad enough that every word comes through doubled. Retro flavor, I guess.

“Rapid economic growth. Technological innovation. A world in constant flux. Through all that change, people fretted over where the age was headed, and still they burned for their dreams, always.”

A man’s voice reads the mysterious passage out, and before I know it, I’m riveted. Maybe it’s the musty old television and its audio, or the sepia landscape on the screen, but a feeling settles over me, as though I’ve slipped back through time into the 1900s.

“I was born in this age. I shouldered many dreams, and I stole many dreams away. It was a world full of mystery, unclear and inconvenient, a world where nothing at all about the future could be known. And precisely because of that, people pictured the future freely, imagined it however they wished. I was fortunate to have been born in this age. No matter how much history people pile up from here, no matter how magnificent a history they build, I will always call this age the ‘Golden Age.’”

When the narration ends, a window appears.

YES… but before I press it, I check the details.

Armaments: the M1911 and nothing else. Role forced to Gunner, for the duration of the mission only. Level 1. In other words, a mission that tests nothing but raw player skill.

And on top of that, the only reward is an enhancement to the M1911. I’ll bet the vast majority of players won’t touch a mission like this. It looks hard, and the payout is cheap for the trouble.

Me, though? Foolish question.

“YES.”

The instant I press the button, my body is sucked into the television.