It didn't even take fifteen minutes for the video to explode over the net. All of Japan split into two: those who excitedly awaited the event, first ever of this scale for AR gaming, and the people who shunned Nemesis for using the ghosts of the past for their own gain. The hype further escalated when Nemesis Project announced on their beloved controversial event's website the following details: on the first of August, at 7:30 p.m. the raid against the forces of Adversity's Echoes would be held in an area rented out by Nemesis in the middle of Tokyo. The players would start at the edges of the map, inching their way to the center in an exhilarating tooth and nail battle. There, all would become clear.
There were, however, a few who found themselves on neither side of the spectrum of opinions, with their own reasons for anxiety and anticipation for the coming weeks.
"What? Kaze, look at this." Mai scrolled on her almost futuristically new smartphone, uneasily tapping her foot next to her couch, and barely scooting over to Kaze's, who quietly kept replaying the announcement video over and over, entranced in the recognition of his target of enmity.
She shoved the phone in front of him with the tone of a kid who had seen something recognizable on TV, "I just took a better look at the area Nemesis are preparing. See: that's Horin park, near the center of the play area. The space is gigantic... the phone measurement says the map is seven hundred meters from side to side... Like two NAR stadium floors merged... Incredible."
Paying her no heed, Kaze pinched his lower lip while narrowing his eyes at the currently displayed frames of the Knight's monologue just below Mai's phone. His eyes briefly darted to the top of his own trusty rusty phone's scratched screen to see a message from Ryuusuke which read "Guess you really were right." with a website link he'd nearly memorized attached to it.
"How did they even do it," The girl attempting to snap him out of obsession added as a spontaneous thought, pointing at various dots on her map. "Renting an area like that in Akihabara for an hour... Where'd they get the money for this? And one of the four starting points to the raid – this one – it's right next to the Fire Station, and there are residents who live there. How can Nemesis guarantee that this play area will be free of non-players? Won't this affect traffic? Will the Fire Station not object? Is this even legal? And..."
Mai droned on and on about questions to which she could not pose any answers. Kaze only realized he'd ripped a bit of dry skin from his lip when he felt a subtle burning sensation from the spot he'd been squeezing seconds ago.
Voicing his concerns, or maybe just thinking out loud, the observer spoke out, coldly invoking critical reasoning. "They made his model so real. It wasn't animated, the motions are too fluid and human-like, yet somehow not... Maybe a 3D avatar worn by someone. If so, is that someone the actual Knight, or an actor...?"
"I'm sure it's just motion capture with the help of a separate voice actor, Kaze." The chatterbox girl comforted the silent schemer's worry.
He turned around in response, shocking her with the challenging gaze of his light brown eyes surrounded by the lighter hair that resonated and flared with luminosity. "Is that what you really think, Runa?"
Mai froze, caught unawares by the sharp reply. She inhaled of the softly scented air of her house, absorbed the blue skies beyond her living room's windows in her eyes, then stared back at the Kaze's own, the color of a dimmed sun beyond the safari horizon. Somewhere in that safari, her anxious heart clashed with his determination. She swallowed, and all the sound drowned.
"We didn't hear him speak much, but there were occasions. He used to talk just like that, and his voice..." Mai hugged herself once more, avoiding any more direct exchange on this topic with Kaze by wrapping the hands around each other just like on that night, like on all of those nights, to create a shield of barely comforting safety, though the warmth of the campfire wasn't there anymore. "He has always had this ominous air around him, a false supremacy that he himself didn't believe in. Like he was a walking catastrophe that survived itself, and fought to convince itself that it hadn't broken into pieces in the process..."
YOU ARE READING
Ordinary
General Fiction2024 was a year of innovation. One of the greatest things to come out of it was the technology of full-dive VR, as well as AR. It was also the year of a great disaster. Almost three hundred teenagers from all over Japan were captured, tortured, forc...
