Playing God 1

  Rui Asahina

  This shit wasn’t fair. I put up with this shitty, dystopian Earth for twenty-seven years. I grew up in a corpo-town, eating nutri-packs and stealing from my neighbors just so I could get enough to survive.

  That was the trick: Survival, not prosperity, was the dream. Being good at your job wasn’t enough because the only reward for hard work was more work. Promotion? Forget about it. The corpo-states that divided up Japan weren’t meritocracies; they were cruel, unfeeling engines of capitalism that treated human lives as currency.

  No, the best strategy was not to excel at your job, but to keep your head down. Don’t be the nail that stood out, lest you get hammered down. Kiss ass. Suck dick. Build connections and be just helpful and friendly enough without drawing attention to yourself.

  That was the kind of life I led. I started working when I was eight. School? Fuck that. I was taught my letters and numbers, then told to crawl in those maintenance pipes.

  Having another life’s memories wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. It helped me survive, sure, but it also reminded me of everything I used to have.

  I once had the chance to eat a slice of orange that my manager gave me from his lunchbox. It was stale, kinda sour in a slightly-too-old way because even he couldn’t afford the fresh shit, but it was the best thing I’d ever put in my mouth.

  I fucking cried at the experience.

  Ten years. It took me ten years to become someone semi-irreplaceable. I wasn’t the manager. I wasn’t even the foreman. I was the foreman’s assistant, someone with barely enough authority to check the shift schedule.

  But it was enough. I had no intention of being the stuck up nail. I kept my head down and did my best to get through each day without making too many enemies. I went to work, got off work, traded some of my precious corpo-yen for a coworker’s self-made nutri-pack mead, and got plastered to forget about my life.

  Then it happened: YGGDRASIL.

  I’d always wondered what the fuck I was doing here. I was no Mother Theresa, but I’d considered myself a good man. Nothing special maybe, but good. I supposed I’d never had the opportunity to do truly evil things, but it wasn’t like I was a murderer or rapist or anything either. I lived life, occasionally gave to charity, and didn’t hurt anyone.

  Was being in HR really so evil that God tossed me into this hellhole for reincarnation?

  But I now understood. This wasn’t a curse from God or Buddha or whatever other divine entity. This was an opportunity, my one chance to ascend to godhood, to create an ideal version of myself.

  This world made so much more sense when I stopped thinking of it as my final destination. Rather, this was the preparatory stage, the place where I was meant to build my future. I could consider it a trial of sorts, one last test before I could enjoy an afterlife of my own making.

  So when the Nine Lives Anthology, a subsidiary of the Maruyama Zaibatsu, announced the game, I grabbed on with everything I had. I quit drinking. I called in every favor I could and scrounged up every spare yen, all to invest into a game that was clearly meant to keep us commoners happy and reap back the money they spent on our wages.

  Nothing else mattered. I lived in cramped company housing, ate bog-standard nutri-packs, and made damn sure that I spent every second possible in YGGDRASIL. It got to the point that refueling my nanite canisters became my biggest money sink. And, once in a blue moon, I even scraped together enough yen to buy some things from the cash shop.

  I drafted literally dozens of characters. Who did I want to be? Did I want to be as strong as the Hulk? As fast as the Flash? Maybe a cool, anime sword saint like Dracule Mihawk? Or a mage with a spell for every occasion like this reality’s protagonist, Momonga?

  No, that wasn’t right. I’d make that decision eventually, but the first decision wasn’t about my job, but my race. Having the right class almost didn’t matter at the start because YGGDRASIL was a game which actively penalized your EXP gain when you died. You could lose levels, and classes, with ease. It was a system that encouraged players to experiment with build combinations, speccing and re-speccing into different classes to fit different playstyles.

  The races though, those were more permanent. Race change items existed of course, but most were event-only prizes or available for limited time in the cash shop. The ones available in the overworld had heavy EXP costs or karmic requirements attached to them, or were tied up at the end of long quest chains.

  I didn’t want to be human. That was the very first decision I made about my character. It felt a bit like making myself a fursona if I was being honest, but I didn’t want to make a character that would age and die once I got to the New World.

  There were ways to cheat death of course, but why do extra work when I could have immortality handed to me? There was also the chance that unnaturally extending a human lifespan would result in mental or spiritual degradation I didn’t yet know about. No, my character had to be immortal from the outset.

  That said, I also had to pick a species that wasn’t overtly evil. I was well aware of how Momonga’s lichdom influenced his thought processes and I wanted no part of that. If I was to spend an eternity, I wanted said eternity to be one of sound mind.

  For that matter, species with inconvenient or immoral dietary needs like mind flayers were also out. Birdmen and harpies too, mostly because I liked having articulate lips and opposable thumbs.

  I made a shortlist of nine or ten out of dozens of possible races. In the early days of YGGDRASIL, there wasn’t much information about the advanced racial classes. Though I had some idea of what was possible thanks to the anime, for the most part, I was as ignorant as anyone else.

  But YGGDRASIL was a Japanese game in the end. Though inspired by Norse mythology and the prophecy of Ragnarok, it was made for Japanese people, by Japanese people. I could assume that the developers would show a lot of love for the folklore of their homeland, if for no other reason than the ease of access and sense of familiarity that provided.

  I was right. The very first expansion to Midgard was the uncreatively named the “Far East,” which boasted a series of quests heavily inspired by different Japanese folktales.

  Going off this assumption, and my list of criteria for my future vessel, I decided I wanted to be a kitsune. Stereotypical? Sure, but it was the most ubiquitous yokai for a reason. With the potential for both good and evil, I felt that my personal morality would not be compromised. Nor, for that matter, would I have to deal with any inconvenient dietary needs.

  Most of all, it was versatile. Though the race leaned towards magic, with a high AGI stat, physical classes focused around stealth or martial arts weren’t off the table either. I could do much worse for a foundational race.

  X

  I was now twenty-seven years old. It’d been nine years since YGGDRASIL’s launch. If my timeline was right, there was roughly a year until the game closed for good.

  I never did become the rank one player in any of the nine worlds. The game was way too much of a pay-to-win game for that to be possible with my income. I was usually top twenty in any world I bothered to join, but World Champion was beyond me.

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  Instead, I made my presence felt in other ways. Rather than compete with guilds and other top players for the well-known dungeons and mines, I chose to head out into the sunset and see all the things that the devs had made. After all, YGGDRASIL was a game that was so large that by the time of closing, not even half of its overworld had been fully mapped.

  Through the resourcefulness and magical aptitude of the kitsune class, I became the first person to explore every last nook and cranny of Midgard. I opened every chest, defeated or outwitted every boss, and completed the unsaid mission that the devs assigned: Delight in the world we have made.

  And when I turned all that data over to the top players in a highly lucrative auction, I was rewarded with a unique class of my own: World Explorer.

  As far as “World” classes went, it was a little underwhelming. It lacked the dueling potential of World Champion and the massive AoE destruction of World Disaster. In fact, it wasn’t a PvP class at all. It did remove the stat cap in Agility, but that was all.

  No, most of its boons were passive. Enhanced perception, represented by a greatly expanded minimap range. Enhanced intuition, represented by markers that pinpointed treasure chests and hidden doors for me. Removal of all movement penalty and environmental damage. A massively expanded inventory. A personal island, the Explorer’s Refuge, where I could keep my discovered treasure.

  Nine years into the game, I did it. I finally had a character I wouldn’t mind taking into the New World. It wasn’t about being a god or lording it over the natives. I just wanted to live my life, occasionally do good deeds, and meet interesting people.

  I was an explorer, monk, and priest, a sort of wandering jack of all trades. I’d never claim to be the best at anything, but seldom was I ever truly out of options. And with my personal stash of items, I finally felt ready.

  Which left me with the million dollar question: What about Ainz Ooal Gown?

  I… I didn’t like them. They were desperate, hopeless salarymen LARPing as evil overlords.

  That was fine when YGGDRASIL was a game, but their creations would be released onto the New World. And not only would Momonga prove utterly incapable of stopping them, he’d enable their nonsense while acting like that shit was his idea. It was a degree of ineptitude I found hard to swallow.

  Even so, once upon a time, a small part of me had wanted to join them. At one point, I told myself that I could change the guild from the inside if I joined early enough. I had the opportunity. Nine’s Own Goal, Ainz Ooal Gown’s predecessor clan, was led by Touch Me. Had I played on the paladin’s sense of justice, perhaps I could have led the guild down a brighter path.

  And if I got to build myself my “perfect waifu” while collecting Shaltear, Albedo, and the rest for my personal harem, then all the better, right?

  Fuck no. I took that part of me out back and 86’d the bastard. That was the “I can fix her,” of isekai adventures. Touch Me might have gone along with such a plan, but plenty in the guild would have refused, if for no other reason than the game’s mechanics. Many of their races would suffer if their karma points rose too high. To them, I’d have been the bad guy, imposing real world morality to a game and sucking the fun out of their only means of recreation in the world.

  I didn’t see it as a god-given duty to protect the New World’s natives from Nazarick, but their existence was antithetical with my own nature. And unlike Momonga, I wouldn't even be able to claim ignorance.

  Demiurge’s hobby was “ranching.” He farmed humans like livestock so that they could be skinned alive because human skin apparently made low-grade magic scrolls. Shaltear beat and raped her own vampire brides and was prone to bouts of berserk bloodlust. That wasn’t even getting into some of the more grotesque members of the tomb like Neuronist.

  Most of all, they wouldn’t leave me alone.

  Nazarick would never tolerate another max level player in the New World. To them, I would represent an existential threat to their precious “Ainz-sama,” especially when taking my own personality into account. Even if I struck an accord with Momonga, I doubted I’d ever be free of Demiurge and Albedo’s machinations.

  No, the conclusion I came to was that Nazarick had to go. I refused to spend the rest of eternity in the New World running for my life.

  I prepared accordingly. I was only one man, but I was an enemy they didn’t know they had.

  I acquired items with the intention of directly countering each of the Floor Guardians. I incentivized multiple raids against their guild base, providing their rivals with information about their members. Occasionally, I even gave their rivals the exclusive rights to a dungeon I discovered, if only they’d work to sabotage the guild.

  Once or twice, I was even lucky enough to get their members to quit the game altogether. The rest had to work that much harder to farm resources to upkeep their ridiculously large guild base, which turned the game into a chore for them.

  Ulbert didn’t have World Disaster because I kept using World Explorer to track him down and sold his location to anyone who wanted it. World Disaster, though boasting the greatest destructive power in the game, could only be earned by killing the previous holder. I personally ensured that “ultimate evil” wannabe never held the class for more than two days.

  I was aware that what I was doing was wrong. From their perspective, a mysterious backer was griefing them for zero reason whatsoever, turning their one joy into a chore they continued only out of spite.

  But from my perspective, I was weakening an enemy I would inevitably face. As far as I was concerned, this was do or die. The more diminished Nazarick’s treasury when Momonga transmigrated to the New World, the less gold he’d have to resurrect fallen allies.

  X

  Then, the close of YGGDRASIL was announced. By this point, Ainz Ooal Gown only had a handful of active members. Momonga, loyal idiot that he was, went out on resource-gathering missions on his lonesome to upkeep a guild base no one wanted.

  So naturally, I camped his ass at the nearest celestial uranium deposit. And the emperor moonflower meadow. And the weekly scarletite auction. And everywhere else I could guess at. It wasn’t like the upkeep requirements for guild bases were secret by now.

  “What the fuck is your problem?” he screamed at me as I emerged out of stealth. Illusion magic was dead useful for this sort of thing. He cursed me out as we began yet another duel.

  I’d revealed myself to him several months ago, when he was truly the last person in his guild. He saw me as a predatory monster, someone who was keeping him from honoring the legacy of his friends. Suffice to say, I’d thoroughly burned this bridge.

  I dodged his Vermilion Nova and launched the super-tier spell I’d prepared in advance. “Grand Summoning: Hyakki Yagyo.”

  As a kitsune who’d reached the kyubi class, I could begin to accumulate renown. The most famous members of the kyubi, oni, and tengu respectively qualified for the Sandai-Yokai class, representing the three greatest yokai of Japanese mythology: Tamamo no Mae, Shuten Doji, and Emperor Sutoku.

  Naturally, as one of the three leaders of all yokai, I could call upon the Hyakki Yagyo, the Night Parade of One Hundred Demons. It was similar to Odin’s Night Hunt in concept, though obviously with a Japanese theme.

  My familiars weren’t strong. Though it was classified as a super-tier spell, its summons were only level 40, with its general, Nurarihyon, being level 70. Even a mediocre PvP player like Momonga would demolish them under normal circumstances.

  Except, Momonga wasn’t level 100 anymore. Over the past several weeks, I’d killed him so much that he was level 72 now, and that after he’d farmed himself back up to something respectable.

  A mage’s greatest weakness was casting time and he was no different. Without the likes of Touch Me or Bukubukuchagama to act as his frontline, he could be rushed down with sheer numbers before he could get any of his death magic off.

  So he died and I continued to play a game of cat and mouse. Until one day, the game truly came to an end, and real life began anew.

  Author’s Note

  The term “86” is used in restaurants to mean you’re out of an ingredient. E.g. “86 on scallops,” means there are no more scallops and wait staff should inform customers accordingly.

  It supposedly has several origins. One says that during the Great Depression, large soup pots held 85 servings and the 86th person was out of luck. Others say that it refers to the F-86 fighters used during the Korean War. When an enemy plane got shot down by an F-86, it was “86’d.”

  My favorite anecdote, and the one used here, is that it comes from the mob phrase “Bury them eight miles out and six feet under.”

  Kitsune are such a popular take on the Overlord stuff. I think I’ve seen more kitsune than any other race except Momonga himself and dragons (bc of course). Still, I plan for this to be a multiversal romp so maybe it’ll work out. We’ll see.

  Rui’s Build

  Name: Rui Asahina

  Screenname: Charlie Foxtrot

  World Items: Ame no Nuboko, Yatagarasu

  Racial Classes: 35

  Kitsune: 15

  Kyubi: 10

  Sandai-Yokai: 5

  Inari Okami: 5

  Job Classes: 65

  Onmyoji: 15

  Kannushi: 10

  Monk: 15

  Ki Master (Physical): 10

  Ki Master (Spiritual): 10

  World Explorer: 5

  Attributes

  HP: 60

  MP: 110* (Limit Exceed: Inari Okami)

  P. ATK: 60

  M. ATK: 60

  AGI: 110* (Limit Exceed: World Explorer)

  P. DEF: 85

  M. DEF: 85

  RES: 62

  SPE: 110* (Limit Exceed: Sandai-Yokai)

  Total: 742