1 Fate Link: Legendia Begins

Author: Bishamon Mine
Raw: https://ncode.syosetu.com/n0664js/1/
Translator: Lilia v4
Editor: Yuriko AYA

Suzusaki Suzuhi—player ID Suu—starts toying with the boss in a fighter modeled on a swallowtail butterfly, a craft named Swallowtail.

She slips the enemy’s barrage in space as if dancing through it, and slams attack after attack into the boss.

A boss hundreds of people together had never been able to pin down, and she is bringing it to heel alone.

The hundreds who gathered for the raid show their shock one after another.

“How is she even fighting in Swallowtail, the weakest frame!? That’s a last-gen machine—!”
“Yeah, but what about the boss’s unavoidable attack—? It’s light-speed. You can’t dodge it!”

And then the light the Swallowtail had been throwing, visible to everyone around, goes out.

“—H-hey, where did the Swallowtail go!?”
“—The boss lost the Swallowtail too!?”
“Y-you’ve gotta be kidding—she killed the searchlights!!”
“Wh… what is that insane move!? ……This is pitch-black space!! There’s no starlight, never mind a moon!! How do you kill the searchlights and still dodge a rain of incoming fire!!”

Yachimata Alice, the person who understands Suu best, cries out at Suu’s answer to the boss fight.

“Suu-san——that’s your answer!?”

The tens of thousands of fans watching Suu’s stream all start hammering comments at once.

❝Her Suu! Her Suu!❞
❝Suu, yes Suu!!❞
❝World! This is Suu—Japan’s most-subscribed player-streamer——!!❞

 

——The clock rolls back three years and three months.

 

◆◇Sight: Suzusaki Suzuhi◇◆

 

(What even am I?)

I was eating lunch in the space under the school’s emergency stairs, turning my raison d’être over in my head, alone.

I think everyone wonders about that at least once.
Especially a middle-schooler in the middle of secondary sexual characteristics, like me.

“Ah. I’m a loner.”

I look around. In weather that’s just starting to warm up, a deserted corner of school—deserted as in not one other human.
Eating lunch here to stay out of sight would, from the outside, be classified as loner behavior without a doubt. And that classification is correct.

My face goes like a cat that has just noticed a cosmic truth.
Behind me, frozen like that cat, the equations of truth start scrolling past!

“What a meaninglessly empty category.”

On top of that, my grades are middle-of-the-middle, I’m hopeless at sports, and I can’t get along with people.
When your reason for existing is this thin, it starts being funny.

And in my case it’s worse: I’m not just a loner in real life. I’m a loner online too.

I wanted friends so badly—friends at least on the internet—so I recorded videos of the games I’m good at and uploaded them. Nobody looked.
I was just one of the many people who crack the in-game top rankings, by myself.
The videos got three likes.

“Yeah, figures. That game’s been out three years. Fourth in the series. The famous names are already locked in.”

There’s no gap for me to squeeze into.

The net really does worship being first and being fast.

“I want to hit life’s reset button. If I’d gotten good at games sooner…… if I could’ve done a world-first……”

That’s what I was thinking. I pictured life’s reset button, and poked the imaginary button with my chopsticks.
That was the instant——.
The entire sky suddenly shone rainbow.
It was only a moment.

(Geh, a hallucination!?)

If it isn’t an aurora, the whole sky doesn’t light up in rainbow.
But that wasn’t an aurora. It felt more like light spreading from a single point.

I’m shuddering at the thought that I might be losing it, having seen something I can’t explain, when I hear commotion from the school building and the yard.

Their voices tell me it wasn’t just me. Everyone saw the light. I slump in relief.

(Th-thank god it wasn’t only me)

Then, this time, a woman’s voice sounds directly inside my head.

“Now beginning the game Fate Link: Legendia. Chapter 1: Stirring. Challenge the mysterious enemy that seeks to destroy the galaxy!”

……What is this.

“Fate Link: Legendia is a game of adventure beyond the galaxy. Explore the galaxy, defeat monsters, obtain items, deepen the bonds between companions. Adventure freely, in all kinds of ways.”

I’m so thrown by the completely unreasonable situation of a voice arriving inside my skull that my fingers go slack and I drop my chopsticks.

Wait…… did I get it wrong?

“——I mixed up the reset button and…… hit the start button……?”

I take out my phone and check social media. The light was observed worldwide, and people are hearing the voice too. It’s a huge uproar.

The voice keeps going.

“Now then. From this point, we will present the machines required to begin Fate Link: Legendia to those with the aptitude.”

Posts start appearing: “some kind of white thing came down from the sky.”

I watch a video that just went up. Something like a fighter is descending.

The shape is a thin, planarian-like fuselage with triangular wings—double-delta wings, that’s the name.
Fighters like that are coming down from the sky.

What is that? That’s the machine the voice said you need to start the game?
That’s a fighter jet!

I forget my lunch entirely, glued to my phone, when…… there’s a sound above my head.

“Eh——nngh?”

I look up, and a white, long, planarian-like double-delta fighter is sitting on top of the emergency stairs.

No way…… I look around.
Obviously, there’s no one here.

Then——is that planarian maybe my planarian!?

Commotion from the yard and the building, and a sense of people running this way.

I am, if anything, scared of people.
So, seized by fear——I ran.

When I run, the planarian climbs and vanishes into space.

“Hoh,” a breath out.

A rumor starts that someone at school was chosen as a player, but nobody finds out it was me.
And so a little time passes.

 

Three months have gone by since Fate Link: Legendia began.

The world is still in a whirl of chaos.——No, it might be worse than before.
The reason is the goods being brought back from Fate Link: Legendia—FateLege.

The civilization of the Fate Link world has mysterious super-science on a level that can casually gift you combat machines able to fly beyond the galaxy.

So far the super-science civilization has not attacked Earth, but the goods and resources coming from that world alone have thrown the global economy into chaos.

And it isn’t only the economy. People who became players and went on adventures can become superhuman too.
They boost their stats, obtain mysterious supernatural abilities called skills, and they’re basically Superman.
You can even make super-soldiers. Chaos on this side as well.

It hasn’t developed into a war between Earth humans yet, but new laws and treaties are being rushed into place.

Meanwhile, what was I doing?

The day I started FL, I got carried to the game’s stage and a “beginner quest” started immediately. I ignored the beginner quest and holed up in the full-dive VR training simulator at the training facility.

Full-dive VR means a machine controls the electrical signals in the user’s brain and immerses you in a virtual space. You get sensations indistinguishable from real life.

I’m still in the VR training grounds, riding my planarian. Train in VR at this facility and subjective time becomes three times faster. Meaning three hours inside VR is only one hour in reality.

I thought, “Then if I study in this VR, I can literally study three times as much as other people, right?” and I was correct, so I’ve been studying here ever since.

You can do the VR training with just a Versus Frame. But I want to study in the triple-time world, so I usually come here. Sometimes I do VR training with only the Versus Frame, though.

Also, I do not leave the VR training grounds. I am perfectly withdrawn.——Because.

“I saw it on social media. Outside, in the game world and in the beginner quest, monster-like things show up.”

While I’m grumbling, a door appears on the roof of the cockpit instruments—on the dashboard—and a small male hologram in a butler’s outfit steps out.

From the hologram, a mechanical voice reaches my ears.

“However, My Master. The kobolds that appear in the beginner quest are not a fearsome foe. Would it not be better to at least clear the beginner quest? ——Clear beginner training and there is a frame selection; you can obtain a stronger machine. The frame obtained that way can also be used in VR training.”

This AI is Ill-san. I named him.
An AI that assists me.

Ill-san’s voice is set to sound like my favorite male voice actor, Iwahata Mitsuo.
Also, ever since I changed Ill-san’s AI to this voice, I’ve been copying a character from the worldwide anime film Iwahata Mitsuo starred in, and rocking a headband-and-exposed-forehead look.

“No.”

The mystery admins introduce FateLege like it’s some computer game, but anyone can see this is the real world.——Though NASA still hasn’t gotten proof that it’s real.

Anyway, fighting monster-like things is way too scary.

“What do the admins and Ill-san even want from one junior-high girl?”

The hologram butler’s face turns sad.

“I see. A pity.”
“But I do think, ‘I’m jealous,’ you know? Of the people bringing items and resources back from FateLege, streaming their player activity, getting rich, and living easy.”

The hologram man’s face lights up.

“Then—”
“But like. The admins say ‘You won’t die,’ ‘Even if you die you come back’—and then you look at the revival method they’ve disclosed……”

I decided to stay holed up in the training simulator after all.
Besides, there are still tons of training menus inside the simulator.
They’re well made, and fun.

——The truth is, I love fighters and mecha anime.
The reason I fell in love with them is extremely impure, though.

Because my first crush liked fighters and mecha anime.——Because I wanted to try talking with my first crush.

In the end my first crush announced they were marrying a fellow streamer, and my first love spectacularly came apart in midair.

I smashed the Enter key with blessing superchats hard enough to break it, then, out of spite, dove into an FPS where you fly fighters and fight other people.
The footage of me playing that FPS is the video I uploaded before.

That said, maybe FateLege’s admins figured I could fly a fighter because I was a top player in that game.

——That game was so real you wondered if it was a flight simulator.

Even so, there’s no way a coward like me can fight actual monsters.
Which is why, in a training ground where you can fly robots and fighters in VR, I just kept shooting down imitation monsters.

You can run this simulator without getting out of the Whiteman, so I don’t have to meet anyone, which is a relief for a communication-impaired person like me.
So I decided to keep withdrawing.

Days pass while I’m holed up in VR.
At first the orbital station with the simulator was packed with Versus Frames; lately it’s calmed down.

——For now, I finish studying inside VR.

“Hey, Ill-san.”

When I speak, a door appears on the dashboard and a tiny butler comes out.

“Yes, My Master?”

The tiny butler bows politely and cocks his head like a little bird.

“The training menus showing up lately are getting really hard. The training Whiteman is honestly struggling.”

The butler’s brows droop.

“That is why, My Master, I have told you any number of times that if you clear the beginner quest, ‘you may choose the frame you like at frame selection.’”

“The beginner quest——…… that’s a no. Besides, I’m obsessed with the training simulator right now.”

I say that, clear another menu, and a “Quest” pops up in my VR.

“Ah, the rumored quests.”

Quests are Orders from the mystery admins.
You can ignore them, but complete them and you get all kinds of rewards.

Gold, silver, treasure, physical enhancement, magic-like items.

I’ve never had a chance to do a quest, stuck in the training grounds, so I decide to take this one as a lucky break.

“But a quest, huh. If it’s even harder than what I’ve been doing, the Whiteman really won’t cut it. If you get a proper frame after finishing the beginner quest——maybe…… maybe I should clear the beginner quest?”

A flower of a smile blooms on Ill-san’s hologram face.

I’m still thinking about whether to do the beginner quest when I take off the VR ear gear.

“Attention, players. This is Fate Link: Legendia Online administration. Chapter 2, a new chapter: Lurking, will now begin.”

Oh, the chapter moved on?

Even while I’ve been holed up, the clears have been marching forward.
People who take part in FateLege are called players, by the way.

A wide-area broadcast draws an “ooooh” of cheers from the facility with the VR training simulator, which has a lot fewer people than before.

The mystery admins’ announcement continues.

“Also, as thanks for your continued patronage, we have planned a present for all of you.”

The facility’s “ooooh” gets louder.

“There are two presents: the ST-81 Swallowtail, and 300,000 merit points. Swallowtail is a Versus Frame one generation older than other standard frames, but as a mass-production machine it is the fastest, with the highest turning performance. ——We have also prepared a special present for Player ID Miles Humor, who led us into Chapter 2: Lurking. It is a priority invitation to the newly opening planet Ortezeus.”

“Huh? ——Ill-san. Does that mean I get a real frame, not a trainer?”

Ill-san’s smile twitches.

“Y-yes, My Master.”
“So I just get a Versus Frame, huh. ……Then I can ignore the beginner quest.”

“M-My Mastaa……”

Ill-san sheds little tears, both hands and both knees on the dashboard roof, trembling in tiny shakes.

“Thanks, Miles, whoever you are.”

Miles whoever-you-are’s face appears in a window.
Oh, he’s handsome. A pretty young-looking boy, blond hair, blue eyes.

Miles-san makes a wall with his right hand in front of his face.

“Hey, stop, don’t put me on camera!”

He’s a little mad.

After that, I throw myself into the VR quests in the Swallowtail I received.
Relentlessly, in the triple-time world.