by Hiro Ainana
Copyright
Death March to the Parallel World Rhapsody, Vol. 1
Hiro Ainana
Translation by Jenny McKeon
Cover art by shri
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
© Hiro Ainana, shri 2014
First published in Japan in 2014 by KADOKAWA CORPORATION, Tokyo.
English translation rights arranged with KADOKAWA CORPORATION, Tokyo through Tuttle-Mori Agency, Inc., Tokyo.
English translation © 2017 by Yen Press, LLC
Yen Press, LLC supports the right to free expression and the value of copyright. The purpose of copyright is to encourage writers and artists to produce the creative works that enrich our culture.
The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book without permission is a theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like permission to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), please contact the publisher. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Ainana, Hiro, author. | Shri, illustrator. | McKeon, Jenny, translator.
Title: Death march to the parallel world rhapsody / Hiro Ainana ; illustrations by shri ; translation by Jenny McKeon.
Other titles: Desu machi kara hajimaru isekai kyosokyoku. English
Description: First Yen On edition. | New York, NY : Yen ON, 2017–
Identifiers: LCCN 2016050512 | ISBN 9780316504638 (v. 1 : pbk.)
Subjects: | GSAFD: Fantasy fiction.
Classification: LCC PL867.5.I56 D413 2017 | DDC 895.6/36d—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016050512
ISBNs: 978-0-316-50463-8 (paperback)
978-0-316-55613-2 (ebook)
E3-20170107-JV-PC
PROLOGUE
Death March to Disaster
Stars streak across the sky.
Dozens and dozens of them.
Have you ever seen a shooting star?
I’m sure many people have. Maybe you’ve been captivated by their fleeting beauty or made a wish on one as it fell through the night sky.
But have you ever watched a meteorite rip through the heavens toward the surface? Have you seen it tear the sky to pieces with a thunderous roar, crashing into the ground with a terrifying impact?
Maybe some of you have seen something like it on TV or on the Internet somewhere. But even then, I’m sure nobody ever thought they wanted to see a meteor shower up close, hurtling down all around them.
And yet, at this very moment, I’m watching more than a hundred falling rocks pour down right before my eyes, one after the other.
No—I shouldn’t say it so passively, as if it’s someone else’s problem. Because I’m the one responsible for this disaster in the first place.
Because of a choice I thoughtlessly made just ten minutes ago, a meteor shower is gouging out the ground. The meteorites make landfall everywhere, from a few hundred feet away from me to the enormous canyon in the distance, crushing all the enemies within that large radius.
The dots on the radar in the corner of my field of vision disappear like a bothersome stain being washed away. I can’t see it from here, but most likely, countless lives are being snuffed out at each meteorite’s point of impact.
And shortly after each one disappears into the earth, I hear the sound of the impact and feel a tremor under my feet. And then, just as a massive tidal wave of debris is about to reach me—
Suddenly, a searing pain hits me like the wrath of God. It’s as if my skull is breaking open and my body is splitting apart.
As the pain stops, my body is lost in the dust cloud.
Let me rewind a bit.
I was working overtime on a day off in a last-ditch effort to get a long-overdue project completed in time for its final deadline. As a programmer for a subcontracting company, I work on outsourced projects like PC and smartphone games that are commissioned by larger companies.
However shady our company might be, one person never has more than two projects at a time. But because of too many last-minute changes and bugs, the younger programmer assigned to this game had gone AWOL right before it was due! What a loser!
In fact, the job turnover rate here was so high, Junior and I had been the only two programmers in the entire company. Since there was no time to find a last-minute replacement, I got stuck finishing up his projects in addition to my own.
“All right—entry of all classes’ input/output and comments, complete. Now I just need to let the auto-documenter prep the docs from the source code and draw up a correlation diagram, and then I can get down to some serious debugging.”
I stretched a little, cracking my neck. Looking around, it seemed like all hands were on deck—you never would have guessed it was a holiday. Unfortunately, this was par for the course at my workplace.
At the next desk over, the supervisor for debug commissions was grumbling as he worked, but nobody paid him any mind. Who had the time? The game designers and planners nearby worked alone in silence, all with the same dead, vacant eyes.
By the time I had made coffee and returned to my desk, my PC had finished its processes, and the data needed for debugging was complete. Without this data, it was no wonder my former coworker had done such a terrible job. I guess it’s pointless to complain about Junior when they tossed him into the fray without any on-the-job training, huh? There were four programmers working here only half a year ago when he started, and now there’s just me, so I think that says more about this company than anything…
“Mr. Sa… Er, Mr. Suzuki—the client is complaining that WW is too hard for beginners and asking us to fix it… What should we do?” I looked over my shoulder to see Mr. Tubs, the director and lead designer, looking at me helplessly—as always.
I heard you start to call me Satou, pal. Can’t you at least get my name right? I’ve been on the team for over six months! And why do you look sort of happy about even more problems? I don’t get why so many developers are masochists.
WW is short for War World, a PC browser game we’ve been developing in earnest for some time. It’s a strategy game with some social media elements, set in a fantasy world.
“Didn’t I tell them that if we make it any easier, their target demographic won’t play it…?” We’d spent countless meetings with the client deciding on this difficulty level. I guess all those pointless meetings really were, well, pointless. Great.
“Well, they shot this down before, but what if we added a bonus feature where new players get the ability to find all the enemies on the map, plus a three-use-only bomb spell that can wipe them out? We could give them an extra-special title or something if they get through without using it, so the more-skilled gamers can have an incentive not to activate it.”
“We don’t have much time, so
let’s go with that. Set it up, would you please, Suzuki?” Mr. Tubs was as carefree with his requests as ever.
“Wait a minute. I’m working on debugging the smartphone MMO right now, so can you get the okay from the client first? If we just stick it in there without asking, we won’t have time to change it later if they don’t like it.”
“All righty, I’ll call them right away!” Mr. Tubs waddled away into the smoking area, cell phone in hand.
I resumed my work, grumbling to myself all the while. Before long, Mr. Tubs gave me the thumbs-up, and it got later and later as I continued working, staving off my hunger with junk food.
Correcting the countless mistakes in Junior’s work would take up most of the night before I could finally leave the rest to the debugging team.
What was the name of that game again? Since we always referred to it as “the MMO” or “that RPG,” I had forgotten its actual title.
…Oh, right—“Freedom Fantasy World.” I guess we’d avoided calling it that because it was confusingly similar to WW’s old title, Fantasy War World. But I did remember that the old spec documents were always labeled FFW and so on. Eventually, they took the Fantasy out of WW’s title, and the RPG’s name, which had apparently been temporary, was switched to Freedom Fantasy Life, with FFL as the new abbreviation. So there was no longer any real cause for confusion, but by then it was already too late.
“Suzuki, we’ve got a bug report from the group checking Storage.”
“What is it this time? If it’s about the infinite free items, I already took care of it.”
“No, that was a problem with the inventory in FFL. This time it’s an item duplication bug in WW, they said. Could you take a look at the attachment we sent you?”
“Okay. Damn, duplication bugs are always tough to get rid of…”
Ugh. Working on two projects at once is so complicated. By the way, “Storage” doesn’t refer to any external storage or hard drives—it’s the name of WW’s inventory system.
I continued my work correcting errors in WW, dealing with each bug report as it came in from the debug team. At some point in the process, Mr. Tubs sent an e-mail asking me to remove the capacity limitations from WW’s Storage for the beta test.
He e-mailed because he doesn’t want me to yell at him in person, the bastard. I’m definitely gonna make him buy me dinner or something after all this.
The FFL debug team needed to check some limitations, too, and asked me to temporarily deactivate the level restrictions. Shouldn’t that be the server group’s job? I cursed them out under my breath as I worked. Man, this is going to be another all-nighter, isn’t it?
The error correction continued well into the morning until, miraculously, we were finally able to deliver the FFL app to the client. It definitely wasn’t bug-free, but fortunately, an advantage of online distribution is the ultimate last-resort weapon known as the “update patch.” I could almost hear the users booing me for thinking it, but I was too tired to care.
I made my corrections to the other team’s work for WW and sent the program file to Mr. Tubs via intercompany mail. After thirty hours without sleep, it was time for a well-earned nap in the peaceful area underneath my desk.
Go ahead and laugh at this corporate slave. Right now, sleep is justice!
Have you ever heard of lucid dreaming?
It’s when you’re dreaming, but you’re aware you’re dreaming.
Right then, I was in a desert wasteland.
Yes, a wasteland. If you can picture the Grand Canyon, that should give you an idea.
How did I know this was a dream? For one thing, I remembered falling asleep under my desk just a few moments ago. For another, there were the four icons in the bottom-right corner of my field of vision along with the gadget labeled Menu and the radar display in the top right. It was the interface from WW, the game I had been working on not long ago.
However! This wasn’t the first time I’d taken a nap during a death march and found myself working even in my dreams. That I was doing it in a desert instead of the office or my room was a little weird, but it was probably just because the room I was sleeping in was really dry or something.
The scent of the parched earth tickled my nose. A dream where I could smell things… That was unusual. Through a little trial and error, I figured out that I could open the menu just by thinking about it. To my amusement, some kind of bug prevented me from actually touching it with my hand. Luckily, I could operate it with my mind, too.
The menu items seemed to be a mix of FFL and WW, but I guess you couldn’t exactly expect dreams to be consistent. My character name was Satou, as usual. People often call me that by mistake, so it’s what I generally name my test characters. My status and such were standard for a new level 1 character, and my equipment consisted of the protein bar, wallet, cell phone, and other things I’d had on me when I fell asleep.
Typical half-assed dream logic.
As I surveyed my surroundings, I saw one area where the ground cut off completely. Figuring it was a cliff or something, I headed toward it.
Clearly, I was pretty high up: I was standing on the edge of a steep drop-off that went down at least three hundred feet. Similar pillars of high land rose up from all over the wasteland. At the bottom, the same reddish-brown earth stretched as far as the eye could see.
In the distance, I could see some kind of rift, possibly a canyon. I tried to check it on the map, but everything outside my immediate area was blank. Assuming this dream had a “fog of war” system like WW did, I would only be able to see areas I’d explored. A label in the upper left said Valley of Dragons, so maybe that’s what the rift was? I squinted as best I could, but I didn’t see anything that looked like a dragon.
Instead, I saw something very different.
It was emerging from the shadows of the nearest cliff, kicking up a cloud of dust as it came. Like a cavalry charge in a fantasy film.
My eyes instinctively fell on the four icons in the bottom-right corner of my vision: one that read Search Entire Map and three that read Meteor Shower. The emergency skills for beginners that I’d come up with after the meeting with Mr. Tubs. Driven by a vague sense of unease, I selected the Search Entire Map icon.
The radar automatically located any enemies, and a cluster of red dots confirmed the approaching group was hostile. Since the radar’s scope was limited, I opened up the bigger map to check their configuration.
The advancing army was a group of high-level enemies. There were so many of them, the map’s entire upper half was flooded with red.
…Isn’t this…a bit over the top? There’s way too many.
The approaching band was labeled Elite Lizardmen. There were around three hundred of them, most about level 50. An unarmed level 1 player like me definitely wouldn’t stand a chance.
When the group was less than two thousand feet from the cliff, their marching suddenly halted. I ducked behind a rock, out of sight, and peered out at them.
They seemed like some kind of mounted army, but it was no ordinary cavalry. I could tell their mounts weren’t horses, but the dust obscured my view too heavily to determine much else.
One of the riders broke away and came closer to my hiding spot, finally giving me a clearer look. The mount wasn’t a horse at all but some kind of velociraptor-like dinosaur, and the armored rider was not a human but a lizardman.
The lizardman was shouting something in a language I didn’t understand, but there was no question that he seemed to have figured out I was here. I guess I could chalk that up to absurd dream logic, too.
He seemed to wait a moment for my reply. When none came, he apparently grew tired of waiting and took up a longbow, aimed it right at me, and drew the bowstring back with a powerful arm. The outline of his body briefly glowed red, but I had no time to worry about that.
The lizardman let his arrow fly, and it cut through the air, whistling straight toward me. Yes, completely straight—it moved in a perfect line, seemingly
untouched by gravity. In that instant, I resigned myself to dying in my dream, but the arrow only grazed my cheek as it flew past.
My face felt hot, as if it had been burned. Unconsciously, I put my hand to my cheek and felt something slippery. Looking down, I saw that my fingers were stained red, just as I’d feared.
I touched my tongue to the fresh blood and tasted iron… Is this really a dream…? The question sprang unbidden to my mind.
A thunderous sound like torrential rain interrupted my thoughts. The army was firing on me, their arrows raining down in a perfect arc. I quickly slid into a hollow in the rock—well, I tumbled into it clumsily, to be more accurate.
Before I had a chance to catch my breath, a hail of arrows pierced the ground where my body had been just moments before. The first shafts to land snapped and scattered as the arrows behind them struck home. Eyeing the razor-sharp arrowheads, I shivered as if my back had been doused in cold water.
The arrows accumulated within thirty feet of my hiding place. Those lizardmen were talented marksmen, but I had no time to waste on admiring them.
The only thing on my mind was fear.
Those of you who have been chased by monsters in your dreams will probably understand how I felt.
I had very few options. I could stay there squatting beneath the rock and die, try to run away during a break in the cascade of arrows, or fight back.
I selected one of the three Meteor Shower icons that were still in the corner of my vision. The icon vanished, leaving behind a temporary trace.
But that was all.
“Oh, come on! Are you telling me the command implementation isn’t working yet?”
As if to further fan my panic, another wave of arrows rained down. Slowly but surely, the barrage was whittling away my hiding place. “Just how strong are these arrows, anyway? Are these guys Robin Hood’s merry band or something?”
Cursing, I selected the two remaining Meteor Shower icons. But again, the symbols only disappeared, with no other effect.
One of the arrows finally broke through the rock and grazed my shoulder.