Vol 1 Chapter 1 【Vol 1 – The Woman Next Door】

Mmm…?

When I woke up, I noticed a strange window flickering at the edge of my vision. It looked just like a Windows file explorer.

Seeing something so odd made me feel like I was still stuck in a dream.

But it wasn’t a dream. The pain when I pinched my cheek was all too real. My room looked the same as always. My cramped little place with its bathroom hadn’t changed at all.

The only thing different was the strange object in my field of view. I thought it might be an optical illusion, so I rubbed my eyes and even washed my face at the sink, but the flickering window wouldn’t go away.

Am I losing it?

Had all those years cooped up in my room finally scrambled something in my brain, and now I was seeing hallucinations? Was something pressing on my optic nerve?

Times like these call for a search.

I dragged myself out of bed and pressed the power button on my desktop, but it wouldn’t turn on. I thought it might be broken, so I opened the case and checked inside. Nothing seemed wrong. It had worked just fine yesterday.

That was starting to get on my nerves, but I kept calm and picked up my phone. No luck there either; it couldn’t connect to the internet.

What about this one? I lifted the laptop, which had been charging on the floor, onto my knees and pressed the power button.

The result was bleak.

It wouldn’t start either.

Both my desktop and my laptop, which had worked perfectly yesterday, were dead at the same time?

Lost in a fog of confusion, I tapped the screen of the phone still in my left hand one more time. Wondering if this was happening only to me, I pressed a friend’s number and waited.

Nothing. Dead air.

“Damn it,” I muttered, and started calling every contact I had, one after another.

Same result every time. Even my parents wouldn’t pick up. For some reason, I couldn’t even hear the dial tone.

It felt like everything happening was somehow tied to not being able to get online. Maybe the world really had ended. That idea made me rush outside, but everything looked normal. People were walking around like always.

I came back home and sat on the edge of my bed, deciding to face reality head-on. The window was still there, flickering in front of me.

In the end, everything that had happened probably had something to do with that.

I’d hoped it was a mistake, but this was a reality I could no longer avoid.

I stared hard at the small window hovering in my vision. No matter how long I glared at it, there was no reaction. So I reached out a finger toward the window overlaid on my field of view.

And then, to my shock, two messages popped up right in front of me. They appeared just like a computer window, with text clearly written on a semi-transparent pane.

【Status】 【Items】 【Save】 【Load】

“……………?”

What is this surreal feeling?

In an instant, my sense of reality evaporated. But no matter how many times I pinched and slapped my cheek, it wasn’t a dream. The pain traveled straight to my brain just as it always did.

Unreal, yet real?

【Status】 and 【Items】. And 【Save】 and 【Load】.

That’s unmistakably the kind of thing that shows up in games.

I had no idea what was going on, but pressing things would probably make it clear. I brought my finger to 【Status】.

Immediately, the semi-transparent window shifted to a different one.

Hasegawa Ryo Age: 25 Occupation: NEET Level: 1 Vitality: 55 Charm: 12 Funds: ¥5,010,130 EXP: 0

The window that popped up showed my personal information. Age twenty-five. That was right. The Level and Vitality parts didn’t mean anything to me, but the funds amount was spot on. I was a NEET, but I’d managed to turn the 500,000 yen I saved from part-time jobs into five million with some lucky stock trading.

Not that I had any exceptional talent for the market, of course. A gaming buddy had tipped me off, and that’s the only reason I managed to turn a profit. Nothing more than that.

And yet, there was my entire net worth, laid bare in the 【Status Window】.

Yeah. This is definitely a game.

Which would mean 【Save】 and 【Load】 are…?

I tapped 【Save】, and a message appeared.

【Save?】

When I touched it, a progress bar filled up under the message, and then a timestamp appeared: May 2nd, 10:30 AM. As far as I could tell, there was only one save slot. Unlike other games, I couldn’t make multiple save points.

A reminder to use it carefully, I suppose. A bad save can lock a game into a dead end.

For now, I pressed 【Load】, and just like with 【Save】, a window appeared showing May 2nd, 10:30 AM.

【Load?】

The message appeared.

It was 10:33 in the morning. I glanced at the clock and quickly tapped the prompt—I had an experiment to run. Suddenly, everything went white in my vision, and then I was back. I hurried to check the time again: exactly 10:30:22.

I had gone back in time—exactly three minutes.

This was real. I was really inside a game.

A cold sweat prickled my skin. Excitement and disbelief tangled into something I couldn’t quite name.

Interesting. Reality turning into a game, of all things.

If this is a game, then presumably clearing it will send me back to the real world. At the very least, there had to be a reason I’d ended up inside one. Thinking about it that way, I found myself wanting to dig a little deeper into the window in front of me.

— ponponmaru