Suzuki Satoru walked down to the changing room beat. Another ten-hour workday grind has ended. A few of his coworkers were already putting on their protective suits and adjusting the masks. None seemed to pay attention to the unremarkable and very average-looking salaryman. Average height, average build, very typical face for a Japanese man in his early thirties. Nothing stood out about him at all. Suzuki, following suit of everyone around him, took out his own protective suit from the locker and put it on. A thin bleached-out spot on the shoulder reminded him that the suit is on its last legs and needs to be replaced soon. At least the mask was still in good condition and the breathing filters were relatively clean.
With the usual polite goodbye to the entrance guard, he was out on the street. Most of his coworkers rushed towards the nearest metro entrance, hoping to get ahead of the after-work rush. Since he lived just a fifteen-minute walk away the public transportation was just a waste of time and money. Metro fare was unjustly expensive, with those who lived in more distant regions of the city draining a noticeable amount of salary just to get to work.
Luckily, it wasn't even raining for now and there was no need to worry that the rain will eat through the weak spot in the protective suit today.
The dark clouds above were not welcoming, but then again, it was always cloudy over the big cities with the daily chemical-filled rain and the near toxic air on the top of it all. It would have been nice to live in the countryside with the relatively clean air, but that luxury was reserved for the upper classes.
A man rattles an empty can near him in a small side street. The chemical-eaten face makes him look like a zombie from a horror movie. He was one of the unlucky ones forced to live on the streets. Suzuki reaches into his pocket and drops a 500 yen coin in the can; an unspoken rule of the streets, give the homeless coin or two and in return you can safely walk the streets and no one will touch you.
Before he moved on, a girl standing beside the man with the rotten face, sixteen or maybe already seventeen years old, lifted her dirty sweater, flashing him. She still has normal skin on her face and her breasts are nice and perky. After a moment of hesitation, Suzuki turns away and walks on, overhearing the older man say to the girl solemnly,
"No one is going to take you home. Get used to this."
The temptation was surely there. To have someone waiting for him at home, to share a meal and a bed, an experience he had yet to have. Even though he was over thirty already, he never got a girlfriend. Not that he was bad-looking, but something about his introverted personality prevented him from connecting with people in real life.
That desperate glance from the homeless girl surely told him she was ready to do anything to get a roof over her head. However, with all the horror stories on the internet from the men who took such a girl home, it was a stupid idea to take such a risk. One out of ten would get a decent partner who just looked for a normal life. Far too many used their looks to rob or even kill foolish, horny men. Many others were drug addicts or mentally unstable. Lonely or not, Suzuki was not stupid enough to fall for such temptation.
One could dwell on the unfairness of the world all day and nothing would change. The girl, like many others, was down on her luck with no way out. Same as the man with the chemical-eaten face. Once you are out of income, you are on the streets with no way back to a somewhat decent life.
With the daily tribute paid, Suzuki walked on, not paying much attention to his surroundings. As a lower-income district, all the buildings were grey blocks with small windows. The only change of scenery were the colorful billboards or eye-catching ad signs that littered the skyline which otherwise was a depressingly grey backdrop. Ads for cheaper fast-food joints, newest games and tv shows or even porn and the low-end escort websites.
After a ten-minute walk and the familiar worn-down metal doors were in front of him. Suzuki opened the old, barely functioning lock and walked inside. It was just one more thing that should be replaced, but there was nothing worth stealing inside. His apartment was like a desolate wasteland, inside just the barest of furnishing and appliances could be found. There was this fear that one day the disregard for the lock would bite him in the ass, but once the doors were closed and the protective suit was taken off, the concern just went away.
First, the quick daily routine. A meal of colored gelatinous mass. It was one of those ready to eat, all the necessary nutrients present, packets. Proper food was expensive and a salaryman like Suzuki could not afford it too often and he had gotten used to it long ago anyway. It was cheap, nutritious and easy to consume. The taste wasn't too bad either, just your regular synthetic, but close enough to the real beef flavor.
Suzuki turned on the news on the computer screen… not that there was much he would care about. Even so, it was useful to at least know the major events.
Mass homicide in Shin-Koiwa district. A new mega fast-food restaurant in the city center. The monotonous AI voice reads out the headlines for him. Then, in the gaming news, he hears the remainder once again. On the Fourth of August 2138, the once-popular DMMO-RPG Yggdrasil is shutting down its servers.
'Dammit, only four days remaining.'
Just four days and the place he called his true home will be lost. With the depressing environment of large cities, there were many like him who chose to live lives in various Dive MMOs. They utilized the relatively new technology of VR combined with a full neural interface via the nano-machines. People could live virtual lives, at least partly. There was still no smell or taste and touch was rather limited in the virtual environment. The AI still couldn't even fully create the facial expressions, so most games still used prerecorded presets for the expression.
With the meal finished, Suzuki pushed the depressing thoughts of losing his virtual home away for a bit and took a quick shower. The last step before he could dive into the worlds of Yggdrasil.
He did a quick check to see if he needed to inject additional nano-machines. The human body broke the tiny things down rather quickly, so a regular refill was a must. Luckily, they were still well within the norm. Suzuki puts on the Dive VR helmet and after a quick load, his 'real life' begins.
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A mere moment later, a skeletal form stood in the virtual environment. It was dressed in a jet black robe with purple linings, his ribcage exposed, showing the clean white bones, an ominous red orb shone between the ribs. A pair of dark red flames burnt in the eye sockets. To give the already frightening form an even more intimidating effect, a dark aura surrounded the Overlord, the highest of undead types.
One would expect to find such a character in a long and exhausting dungeon as the last boss. That was the aesthetic Suzuki aimed for with his avatar, Momonga. He played a heteromorphic race, and because of the game encouraging open hostility between the human races and the heteromorphs or monsters, the more widely represented human population hunted the minority of the weirder races, forcing them to unite.
His guild, Ainz Ooal Gown, once was one such group. They were a rather infamous guild back in the day, role-playing as villains, fighting back against the much larger human and Demi-human population. Those were the days... Planning the raids together and clearing them as one united force, goofing around the massive guild base that they conquered and rebuilt even better than the already impressive dungeon was.
Even such small things as chatting or playing table games inside this fantasy world were the happiest times spent with close, online friends. Many times they stood together and protected their virtual home from invasions.
At one point, a coalition of fifteen hundred players tried to invade the Great Tomb of Nazarick. They reached the eighth floor of the great tomb and then failed. The strongest NPCs lived there, and when killed, the floor guardian called Victim, a floating embryo-looking thing, released a powerful debuff. It was enough to stop the advance and kill off the remaining invaders.
Even with the first seven floors devastated by the attack, the items the invading players lost in the tomb covered all the expenses and then some.
But it was back then. Slowly, the game lost its popularity and people left. Some to other games and some because of real-life obligations. Thirty-seven out of the original forty-one members quit the game and gave all their gear and inventory to him. Most of the names were still on the guild list, but with offline time up to five years, they might as well not have been.
The last remaining three, besides Momonga, played less and less and now even their names showed that they have been offline for longer than a year. They left him all alone.
He had kept up an e-mail correspondence with few, but lately, fewer and fewer responses came in. People had their own lives and the old gaming buddy wasn't on anybody's priority list. Suzuki had sent out an invitation to come back to the game on the last day, but until now there were almost no responses.
He glanced around the conference room. It was the usual spawning spot when logging in. The large round table was still there, with all forty-one chairs around it. Once this room was the ever-busy meeting place, but now Suzuki didn't want to stay here for long.
He activated the ring of Ainz Ooal Gown and teleported to the tenth floor, appearing before the doors to the throne room. Without it teleportation around the guild base was impossible, even for its members and NPCs. It was a safety measure to prevent easy conquest of the base. Most guilds had such measures and those who didn't lost their guild bases rather quickly.
Sixty-seven golems shaped like various demonic creatures guarded the entrance to the very heart of the great tomb. Named and shaped after the demons mentioned in a book called the Lesser Key of Solomon or the Lemegeton. There should have been seventy-two of them, but in the end the player who made them, Lucifer, got bored and didn't fully finish the work.
The grand throne room was a sight to see. It was large enough to fit hundreds of characters with ease. A long red carpet led from the door to the Throne of Kings, the guild master's throne. Once the room was almost unused, but now when there was no one else left, Suzuki found it fitting to sit on the throne as the lone king of a forgotten realm.
With a setting to adjust the moving speed of the character, Suzuki used a slower one to look more dignified while walking within the Great Tomb. It was purely for roleplaying, as running drained nothing. He enjoyed these little things, it made the game more immersive and gave him the needed escape from the real world.
A lone figure stood beside the immense throne, a demoness with a face of a goddess. Suzuki didn't know where her creator Tabula Smaragdina got the inspiration for the look, but the eccentric man had made a masterpiece.
She had long jet-black hair with two thick white horns sprouting out of her head, making almost a horizontal halo shape. A pair of golden eyes with vertical slit irises watched him approach. A gentle smile decorated her face, her default expression. Dressed in a long white dress with a spiderweb-like necklace covering the upper part of her breasts. Her slender arms were covered with long white gloves and black feathered wings sprouting out of her lower back.
Suzuki went through her settings and expressions from time to time to see all the emotes and actions she could take, as well as read the lengthy character background information more than once.
Tabula had written her with all the skills a perfect housewife should have. She liked to cook, sew and keep things clean and organized. There was a small line with her obsessive collector habits, clearly meant as a jab at Suzuki's own playing habits, but he didn't mind it that much.
He was an almost obsessive collector by nature and hadn't needlessly sold a single item he had found or purchased during the twelve years he had played the game. With an ever-expanding number of inventory slots that were purchasable and his own personal quarters on the ninth floor filled with various items, he could just pile them up.
Tabula liked to create characters with contradicting features and had written at the end of the lengthy text that she, despite being a succubus, was a pure maiden.
The idea itself was strange enough, but he also had added at the end that from the outside she was a perfect beauty and on the inside she was a slut.
A faint annoyance rose within him, remembering that line of text.
It was the only line Suzuki had erased from the text, the first time he ever broke one of the guild rules. When Ainz Ooal Gown first conquered the Great Tomb of Nazarick and made it their guild base, one of the first rules they implemented was to not change the creations of others without the permission of the creator. It was the only guild rule he had ever broken, even being the last one remaining.
Why he did it was not a question he himself could answer. Maybe he was unwilling to admit to himself that there was something enticing about the collection of data shaped like a perfect woman and that he didn't want her to be a slut?
Maybe it was Tabula's blatant disregard for the guild rules? He often took the items from the treasury and gave them to his creations without asking other guild members. He had tampered with creations of others regularly and often got into conflicts with other players by doing so.
Tabula lived in his own little world with rules being a rather flexible concept for him.
The final straw for Suzuki was when he discovered that Albedo held a world-class item. Ginnungagap, a wand capable of wide-area destruction.
There were only two hundred world-class items in the entire game and his guild had eleven of them, more than any other guild. And one such item was in the NPC's hands.
At first, he wanted to just take the item and put it back in the treasury, but instead, he repaid Tabula the same way the careless man had done to others. He changed the flavor text of his creation. In the end, he erased the only line he didn't like from Albedo's backstory. She wasn't a slut anymore.
After that, the thought of breaking this rule didn't bother him that much. After all, most of the guild members left without caring about the game or Nazarick anymore.
Like every other gaming day, Suzuki sits down on the throne, and Albedo turns looking at him with the same expression. He opens the guild management UI and starts going through the daily routine. Checking if all traps are in place. Confirming maintenance payments.
"Another hard day working, just with the two of us."
It wasn't one of the verbal commands she would react to. He would be beyond ashamed if anyone found out he talked to NPCs, but because of being alone and not interacting much with people even in the real world, he had developed a habit of speaking to various digital denizens of Nazarick.
"Not feeling talkative today, huh?" He said jokingly.
Albedo's face unexpectedly glitched and switched into an unhappy expression and then returned to normal with a similar glitching effect.
'That was strange. I thought devs fixed that glitch years ago.'
"Hey there, no need to get upset. I was just joking." Suzuki said as if the NPC did the glitch on purpose. Of course, he did it as a small RP expression, not because of an actual belief in the NPC being mad or saddened by his joke.
The administrative duties took about an hour, and as usual, everything was working as intended. His own personal money reserves would let him run the guild base for about six years, not to mention the uncounted billions of gold in the treasury collected during the guild's golden days.
With the monotonous task out of the way, Suzuki was lost on what to do next. Each day he would come online, do the administrative tasks and then go grind money on mid-tier monsters in a remote area where no other players would go.
'Might as well go do another grind, not that I have anything better to do.'
He gets up from the throne with Albedo's eyes following him and teleports to the entrance of the first floor. Once outside, he could look at the world map and use one of sixty saved teleportation spots.
'Let's just go to the usual area and hope for a nice drop or two.'
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A half-sunken ruin in a swampy area was his destination. Monsters there dropped a decent amount of loot and money, and even had a very rare chance of dropping even a divine level of gear. Of course, one would need to spend years grinding the mobs to see a single divine class item drop, but you never know when the luck strikes.
Three hours of monotonous grinding yielded enough money to pay maintenance for about two weeks and he even had a few rare and a single top-class item drop. Not that Suzuki needed either money or items anymore. It had become a daily routine to a level he would not know what to do otherwise.
He had noticed the lack of other players. Few played the game at the very end.
For a moment he considered raiding an empty guild base or two, but it was an unnecessary risk and he didn't want his avatar Momonga to end the game without a max level as each death in-game cost five levels.
Right after returning to the first floor, he stumbled upon another familiar NPC.
The floor guardian of the first few floors, Shalltear Bloodfallen, walked the pre-programmed patrol route with a determined expression.
"Stop!" Suzuki says.
The silver-haired girl stopped, responding to the command. She was the creation of Peroroncino, once the best friend of Suzuki. Both had drifted apart once Pero stopped playing the game. They have never met in real life and without the common game to play, communication died down. The once strong friendship slowly faded, leaving only memories.
The NPC in front of him was the only reminder of what once was. Shalltear had enticing red eyes and a very pale, round face. A beauty of mythical calibre. She looked around fourteen but had fully-sized breasts.
Pero had commissioned her flat, but the artist didn't like to make loli characters, so she ended up like this. A young-looking girl with large breasts dressed in a dark Victorian-style dress with red accents.
As a countermeasure, Peroroncino had written in her backstory that the young vampire padded her chest to look more mature.
Suzuki chuckled as he reread her backstory once again. Pero was a known pervert or at least roleplayed as one and had put a long list of various fetishes in his creation. Necrophilia was one of the more disturbing ones but Pero had explained he put it there so Shalltear had hots for Momonga.
Once there was a running joke among the guild members to pair up various female NPCs with their guild master. Momonga, who never had a girlfriend, didn't like the joke one bit. Mercifully, it died down, and most erased the taunting lines from their creations. Unfortunately, Pero was not one of them and the Necrophilia line stayed as-is. At one point Suzuki was tempted to erase the line, but unlike others, Pero had never messed with the creations of others and was very protective of his own creation.
He finishes reading the text, pats the girl on the head, and sends her back on patrol with command.
"Resume."
The guardian of the first floor resumed her patrol with the same determined expression, soon disappearing around the corner. The dark, brooding catacombs of the first three floors were the only ones most invaders ever saw. Shalltear was built to be the first line of defense and thus one of the stronger floor guardians.
With the grind out of the way and a few hours left, Momonga was at a loss. Nothing he would do mattered anymore. A mischievous thought of changing things around the Nazarick flashed in his mind. He had already done it a few times, might as well do it more. Not that anyone remained to even reprimand him for doing so.
There had to be at least a thing or two that he could change for the better. Sitting back at the throne, he went through the list of NPCs and their base routines for inspiration.
Maybe something needed to be improved. Some patrol routes changed.
'Right. Albedo doesn't have any kind of patrol route or room to stay.'
Tabula had not bothered to give his creation one. Like most of his projects, Albedo could be considered unfinished. Out of two of her sisters, only the first or oldest one, Nigredo, had a full fleshed-out routine and tasks.
"Let's give you a decent room to stay," Momonga says out loud.
Tools to create routines were easy to use and even a non-programmer like Suzuki could tamper around it with ease. The problem was where to find a room. He surely didn't have the time and skills to make one from scratch. After some thinking, he set on giving her one of the unused player quarters. They were much more spacious than the small customized rooms for the other NPCs, but since there were about sixty of them unused, even not counting the player-filled ones, he found no reason to not repurpose them.
Then he could use the vast library of various already made assets from the tomb and decorate her new quarters with various items, and even use preset clothing that was programmed to fit almost any humanoid form.
The task proved to be interesting and time-consuming enough for Suzuki to lose track of time. He snapped out of this trance only with the game's reminder that he has been playing for six hours already.
'23:35! Looks like it's time to stop for today.'
Just three days remaining and then he would have to find a new pastime.
Edited by Edgy.