Loner High-School Girl And The God-Tier Game — A Desert All To Myself

Floor 8, the Ship Dock.

I’d been wondering which ship the Ship Dock meant, and it turns out it’s the one in spaceship. Basically, it’s a landing pad for spaceships, a hangar with no ceiling. Space Girls climb into their ships and launch off into space one after another.

My body feels light. Maybe the gravity here is set low. Come to think of it, Space Girls are built to handle a space environment without breaking a sweat. A place like this, open straight out to the void, would kill a human on the spot.

“…Hey, Guide Girl.”

“How may I be of service?”

Once again, I flag down a Guide Girl.

“Um, those spaceships sitting around over there. Is it all right to just use them?”

“The spaceships here are free to use as you please. No rental fee is charged.”

Thank goodness~. I’m broke, so if they cost anything I’d have been well and truly softlocked.

“There are rocket-shaped ones and there are ball-shaped ones. Do they have different specs or something?”

“The rocket type seats up to three. The ball type is for one. Spaceships for four or more may be ordered at the control panel over there and used upon payment of a rental fee.”

Yes! Straight to the single-seater!

I walk up to a ball-type spaceship and look it over.

Does it open if I press this red button? Oh, it opened. There really is only room for about one person inside. It’s like a capsule hotel.

I stretch out inside the spaceship. A MAP of the surrounding area appears on the panel in front of me, and a message comes up.

For now, let’s head to a nearby Planet (what other RPGs would call a dungeon).

The star count must be how they rate the enemies’ level.

Sand or green, then. If I hadn’t taken a total loss I could have charged straight at the Flame Planet, but with my current armaments I’d rather not pick a fight with a high difficulty. Hmm~… the Sand Planet is probably a desert. And the green one would be nothing but a sea of trees, or something along those lines.

Oh, hold on. Before that, let me check whether the status-down has lifted. It has to have been about an hour by now.

“Good, the status-down is gone.”

Preparations complete. All that’s left is to pick: sea of trees or desert. Visibility in a sea of trees sounds bad. Sandstorms in a desert sound annoying. Honestly, either one works… yeah, let’s make it the desert.

I picked the desert over the sea of trees to check the graphics. If you want to gauge a game’s graphical fidelity, a desert beats a sea of trees every time, because a desert holds fewer objects and the rendering has nowhere to hide. Who cares about graphics, you’re probably thinking. But for a sniper, fine graphical detail matters enormously. Sometimes you work out the range to a target off a single pattern on an object beside it, so low-grade graphics are a genuine problem.

“Right, time to launch!!”

Nobody in here but me, so I let myself whoop.

A floating sensation washes over me. At the same moment, everything but the seat turns transparent, and the view all around me opens up completely.

“Whoa! Wow! Amazing!”

From outside you can’t see in; only from inside can you see out. Nobody is looking my way, after all, and I never spotted a single spaceship with its insides on display.

In the blink of an eye the ship lifts off, clears the station, and slips into open space.

I’m traveling through space. The illusion is so complete that it feels like I’m moving through the void under my own power. Pleasant doesn’t begin to cover it. It’s an overwhelming rush of feeling.

The grandeur of space, the loneliness of space, flow from my eyes into my brain, and from my brain into my heart.

A sand-colored sphere grows ahead of me… and a second later I’m already plunging into it. By the time I notice, I’m skimming over a colossal desert in my spaceship.

Machine Beasts are what Infinity-Space has in place of demons and monsters. They are beasts made of machinery, and by their nature they have no lifespan. Unless a Space Girl destroys one, it lives forever.

“Let’s set down somewhere with as few people as possible…”

The Sand Planet has lakes here and there, and forests too, but those areas are crowded. I land in a stretch of desert one mountain over from where I first came in.

“Mm~! Being alone is the best~!!”

I step down from the spaceship onto the sand. A vast desert, and just me. It gives me chills.

I scoop up a handful of the sand at my feet and study it.

Yep. The feel and the look are exactly the same as real sand.

Looks like I can rest easy about the graphics.

“All right, let’s do this! I’ll get past the worst start imaginable!!”

And then, two steps in.

My Radar reacts to an enemy unit, and a small MAP boots up at the edge of my vision. Two red icons blink onto it.

Mechanical dogs stand where the icons are, with names floating beside them. Mecha Dog Sword and Mecha Dog Rifle. The sword one holds a laser saber in its jaws; the rifle one carries a rifle slung across its back.

I draw my Colt Gov (the Colt Government) from the holster at my hip and shoot the rifle doggy in the head.

The gauge above its head drops by about 10%. Next I put a round in its right foreleg, and this time a separate gauge for that leg drops 10% from full.

I see. Durability is assigned per body part.

“Woof!!”

With a dog-like roar, the rifle doggy fires a beam from the rifle on its back. Space Girl reflexes are apparently a serious upgrade, because I dodge the laser round with ease. And then…

— BOOOM!!!!!

…The spaceship behind me exploded.

“My spaceshiiiiiiip!!!?”