Loner High-School Girl And The God-Tier Game — Character Creation

Today is July 28, 2047. A Sunday.

The summer of my first year of high school, the very prime of youth. I wasn’t out at a café with friends. I wasn’t throwing myself into a club, or into romance. I was flat on my bed with the headgear strapped on, ready to full-dive into the digital world.

“I’ll just poke at it for a bit and log out in an hour or so. I’ve got to get ready for tomorrow, too.”

I flip the activation switch on the headgear. A system screen opens in the air in front of me. At this stage it isn’t doing anything a legacy VR visor couldn’t do. My mind is still back in reality. I work the screen and boot up the game my sister gave me, Infinity-Space. The full-dive starts here.

My consciousness cuts out for an instant, and when I come to, my body is in cyberspace.

I’m standing in front of the message screen, in a space like the inside of a wormhole.

There are essentially no men in Infinity-Space. Only women can play it, and every player lives as a Space Girl, a female-model robot.

Frightening, really, that a game only women can play sits near the top of the sales rankings. Single-gender titles aren’t unusual, incidentally. Full-dive brought a whole crop of problems along with it: vicious sexual harassment, sex crimes, abductions. So splitting games by gender became more common.

Personally, I’m grateful it’s women only. I’m bad with people regardless of gender, but it isn’t an even split. Against men, Aversion: Strong. Against women, Aversion: Weak. A certain male teacher tore into me years ago, and I’ve been hopeless with adult men ever since…

The message is read aloud in a woman’s voice.

“Umm, same as always, I guess…”

My family name is Koshiki. I take the tail end of it, and my name is Shiki. I’ll be soloing anyway, so it’s a name almost nobody will ever call me by. Simple is fine.

That holds for full-dive games in general. Mess with your build too much and the gap between that and your real flesh leaves you sluggish. An ideal body is a fine thing to run around in, but once you get used to it, your real one starts to feel wrong. Of course, if you have a chronic condition, or your real build is far too large or far too small, you’re better off making the ideal body anyway.

First, let’s settle the part that isn’t the body. The hair.

Whoaaa. There are so many hairstyles, and the fine settings are unbelievably detailed. If I wanted to, I could set the length in one-millimeter increments?! That’s incredible…

There’s nothing about the real me you could call girlish. Short hair, flat chest… I get mistaken for a middle-school boy fairly often.

Which is exactly why, at least in a game world, I want to live like a girl.

Long hair, and… maybe I’ll do two-tone. Black and white. And odd eyes, one red and one blue. Mm-hmm. Cool!

Next, the body. Height, 150 cm, same as reality. Build, also… the same…

No, hold on. My chest at least could stand to be bigger than the real thing, couldn’t it?! A little bigger wouldn’t hurt, right?! Padding it out by three sizes wouldn’t hurt, right?!

I hold down the + button, and halfway through inflating my own chest like a balloon, a tremendous emptiness comes over me.

Let’s stop… this is so hollow… and besides, big boobs would probably get in the way of sniping…

Reluctantly, I let the air back out of the balloon.

Clothes… let’s go post-apocalyptic. Post-apocalyptic plus guns is the greatest combination there is. A black leather jacket, black leather pants… and maybe I’ll get a little bold with the jacket and bare one shoulder. Sunglasses on, too.

Huh? Wasn’t there some comedian who dressed like this…? The one who’s always shrieking…

A stylish belt, then, and an inner layer. Long sleeves on the jacket. The sunglasses hide my cute eyes, which is a waste, so off they come… yeah. The unfortunate resemblance is gone.

The appearance is fine. Confirm.

Role. The equivalent of a Job in an RPG, I guess, and apparently it’s what sets your starting stats. The status fields run Armor, Thruster Output, Thruster Capacity, Precision, Radar, Stealth, and EN Capacity. Not one of those names looks like anything an existing RPG would use.

The Roles come in types. Balancer Unit, Gunner Unit, Sniper Unit, Bomber Unit, Attacker Unit, Guardner Unit, Scouter Unit… and on from there.

This game is set on space colonies, where Space Girls take down space monsters and other Space Girls with laser guns and laser sabers. Put simply, it’s mecha action, just played with androids instead of robots. Which is why every Role gets labeled a Unit, too. However much they’re shaped like girls, the characters in this game are frames. Weapons.

And naturally, my pick was:

“Sniper!”

The Sniper’s stats: Armor E (20), Thruster Output D (40), Thruster Capacity B (80), Precision B (80), Radar A (100), Stealth C (60), EN Capacity C (60). Robot otaku that I am, I can roughly guess what each one means, but I’m not certain, so I’ll look them up as I go.

As a robot otaku, I want to agonize over my loadout!

“Whoa! There’s a ton of these, too…!”

Eight armaments can be equipped in total. At this stage, it looks like I get to pick up to four.

There are thirty types of sniper rifle alone. Thirty, and that’s just among the ones I can choose at the start. And the armaments have stats of their own! Power, Range, Report, Recoil, Tracking, Muzzle Velocity, Ammo Count¹?! Ohhh no no no no…! This is bad. If I start weighing these, infinite time is going to melt away…!

Ngh…! No! Get obsessive here and the whole day is gone! Picking fast and getting on with the story is the efficient play! So, my call here:

“Let’s go with instinct…”

The handgun is for mid-range fighting; the sniper rifle, my main armament, goes without saying. Then the Shield Pieces. They’re hexagonal physical shields, each about the size of a fist, steered by brainwave. They can pack together into a circular barrier, or split apart and operate separately to answer attacks from several directions at once. The description called them an essential item, so I took them. Fifty of them count as one armament, which fills all four of my slots.

I take a look at the 3D model with the armaments actually equipped.

“Oooh…!”

The handguns ride at my hips, and the Shield Pieces sit from waist to thigh like a skirt. A sniper rifle in my hands… so cool…!

Apparently you can pull armaments out of the inventory freely, so there’s no need to keep everything equipped. But still… a heavy loadout is its own kind of romance. At least once, I want every armament slot filled and a photo taken in full kit.

All the other detailed settings, fine. Every field entered.

The wormhole fills with white light.

This thrill right before a game begins. It’s the best, every single time…!