One week.

That was how long I had been stuck in that bootcamp, pretending to be a tutorial. No breaks. No mercy. Just me, scrambling for food and dodging death.

After a while, time lost its shape. Days slid over one another. Everything merged into one long stretch of soreness and hunger. I was shouting at the sky, demanding to know what crime I had committed to earn this fate.

Then the game decided I needed a personal nemesis in compact form.

Enter Pokey.

Pokey was not an ordinary brambler. He moved with a weird intention, as though he recognized me, yet I never heard him speak. His timing hinted at some strange awareness. He always appeared the moment I began to steady myself, always arrived when progress finally felt possible.

It stopped being surprising. It turned into a grim routine. I was breathing too loudly or straightening my spine, and that walking pincushion burst from cover with quills already angled toward me.

Maybe he reacted to the scent of despair.

I had lost count of the times he had driven those quills into me. He moved too fast, struck too clean, and each blow carried the sting of a joke that wanted to be lethal.

At first, I thought he was just another Kiiroi. Now I started to think he had a nameplate somewhere that read “Pokey. Professional Menace.”

So yeah, I held a bit of a grudge.

And that day, I had enough.

It was hot. The air hung heavy. The trees stayed still, yet somehow carried a quiet edge of uneasiness.

I was slick with sweat, lungs dragging for air, already worn down before the real trouble began.

Then I heard it.

Leaves stirring. A low chitter.

I turned, and there he was. That damned vicious ball of spines.

We locked eyes. His body tensed. The sun slid over his thorny hide. He stayed still, waiting. I knew what was next.

I bolted.

Running was the only move left. But not from fear. Not this time. I was ready for it.

A trap waited ahead. My handiwork. It had taken hours to dig, to layer branches and dirt, to stack the odds on my side.

All that effort and a whisper of hope. Now it was his turn to step into it.

I wove through the trees. My feet hit the path as though I had done it before, every root and dip ingrained in memory. Behind me, I could hear him following, spines shifting and readying to fire.

I pushed forward. Just a little more. Just a few more steps.

Then I jumped. My foot hit the far side of the trap, and I skidded to a stop.

Pokey did not.

There was a snap of branches, a fast, panicked squeal, and then silence.

I turned, and he was gone.

I walked over slowly and looked down.

There he was at the bottom of the pit, thrashing, claws scraping at dirt that gave way beneath them. He was stuck.

He shook. Quills rattled. He was angry.

I just stood there, sweat dripping down my neck, grinning because for once, I had dug my way to the top of something that refused to let me win.

That was what victory felt like. Not clean. Not glorious. But mine.

I crouched near the edge of the pit and watched him scramble. I wanted to feel bad. Maybe there was a flicker of guilt in the back of my throat, a sting that came from stepping on your own blade.

But that thought did not last long.

He had ambushed me over and over, never gave me a second to breathe. Every hit, every sneak attack, every time I dragged myself back to that cave with needles stuck in my skin. It all built to that moment.

I reached for a rock. It was heavy, but not massive. Just enough to get the point across.

Pokey looked up. His eyes went wide. He gave a tiny shuffle meant to pass for charm, a pathetic attempt to smooth over the trouble he had caused.

But I shook my head. “Nice try, Pokey! HA! HA! HA!”

Then the System decided I had had enough fun.

“COUGH! COUGH! COUGH!” I wheezed mid-laugh and nearly dropped the rock.

I cleared my throat like a pro. “Where was I? Oh right, you reap what you sow, Pokey.”

Without a single shred of pity, I dropped the rock.

By the time I made it back to the cave, I was hauling his little body behind me. He was dead, but he still looked annoyed.

It left a strange feeling. Satisfaction, mostly. Yet something weary stirred beneath it, a sense that the tutorial had slipped away from me and the game had pushed me straight into a trial meant for players who already knew the rules.

First thing that came to mind was food.

I thought about tossing him over a fire and calling it dinner. Not because I was hungry for revenge. Okay, fine. Maybe a little. But mostly because brambler meat was supposed to be high quality.

The Online Store, that interface that had been available to me since day one, was not just for emergency shopping. It turned out it let me sell things. Stuff I found. Stuff I made.

Even better, I could design items, toss them into the marketplace, and every time someone out there bought one, the System sent me a cut. Passive income. Game economy magic.

It got better. If I threw an item I had created into the Online Store, the System would craft another similar one. It had limits, though. A strict rule was built in, something about cheating. If I uploaded anything stolen or made by the Midoris, it wiped everything. No backup. No warning. Just gone.

Still, I was not out of options.

I could make things work. I always had. You handed me two wires, a busted circuit, and a kitchen knife, and I would find a way to build something dangerous. Or at least useful.

Anyway, I shelved that thought for later. I had more important things to focus on—

Bullets.

Judging by the way this world kept throwing nightmare fuel at me every ten minutes, I was going to need a lot more firepower.

And knowing the System, when the Gunner weapon unlocked firearms, it would probably hand me a pea shooter and wish me luck.

Yeah, no thanks.

Lucky for me, I had spent an unhealthy amount of time watching what I generously called documentaries. And by documentaries, I meant those deep dive YouTube learning channels mixed with the occasional late night Wikipedia rabbit hole.

Research. Very academic.

What I planned to do was slap together some rough prototypes, run a few half-baked tests, ideally without blowing my own face off, and then convince the in game store to mass produce the bullets and sell them right back to me.

BOOM. Instant ammo supply chain for my future gun invention.

And yeah, I know it’s not airtight. But come on, it was a start.

The System had this habit of throwing a wrench in things whenever I started to feel good about my progress. Still, I could dream.

Once I sold Pokey, the payout hit almost immediately. Five hundred gold.

That was not a typo.

Believe me, I triple checked.

Five hundred.

I had not seen that coming. The same creature who had turned my life into a slow motion slapstick routine was apparently worth a small fortune. I was about one inch away from writing him a thank you letter.

Night came, and I stretched out in my cave. A fire crackled nearby. Stew warmed my hands. The comfort it gave came from sheer exhaustion, the sort you earn after a long struggle that ends in your favor.

Dinner was rabbit stew with slices of Faerie Apple.

The apple might have stepped out of an enchanted cookbook. Its flavor hit hard, sweetness whetted by a bold edge that lingered on the tongue.

I had learned to test anything weird with the Tools/Items menu before I even thought about eating it. The System scanned it and told me what was what, whether it was edible, toxic, or something that might make me grow another arm. No guesswork required. Not dying after sampling magic fruit counted as progress.

Stomach full, still alive, and for once, not bleeding? I would take the win.

I brought up the Player Status. Time to check the numbers. I wanted to see if all the pain and ambushes had earned me anything useful.

________________________________________

AKIRA SAKAMOTO (AOI PLAYER)

LEVEL: 6

CLASS: MARKSMAN

SUBCLASS: GUNNER

TITLE: LOVER OF PEACH

MAIN STATS

HEALTH POINTS (HP): 110 — 100%

MANA POINTS (MP): 300 — 100%

STRENGTH (STR): 6

DEXTERITY (DEX): 4+1

WISDOM (WIS): 3

CHARISMA (CHA): 1

INTELLIGENCE (INT): 30

LUCK (LCK): 2

UNALLOCATED STAT POINTS: 10

OVERALL PRESTIGE (P): +120% (MAX 1000%)

________________________________________

My lips curled into a full on victory grin as I stared at the screen.

Ding, ding, ding.

I had actually leveled up.

STR and DEX both got a bump. Made sense, since I had been doing jungle acrobatics while dodging death traps for days.

I had also finally figured out how the health system worked. Turns out, getting stabbed, bitten, or smacked in the face by forest freaks lowered my HP. Who could have guessed?

The good news was that resting or chugging a health potion patched me right up.

The store sold them in low, mid, and high-tier flavors. Basically potion sizes at a fast food joint, just with less sugar and more survival.

I bought a low-tier one for emergencies. Set me back a hundred gold. Pricey? Yeah. Worth it? Also yeah.

I would rather cough up the gold than bleed out over a squirrel ambush.

Besides the physical stats, I noticed WIS nudged up a point too. I had been using my big old brain a lot lately. Setting traps. Outsmarting Pokey. Being the genius I was clearly born to be.

LCK jumped a point too. Probably for the rare achievement of not dying every five minutes.

Honestly, the whole thing felt torn between a miracle and a clerical mistake in the code. Someone at System HQ might have sneezed and nudged my stats by accident.

But one stat refused every nudge—

INT.

The System seemed to lounge somewhere behind the code, calmly sipping tea and laughing in my direction.

Maybe the problem went beyond numbers. Maybe the System wanted something with depth, something rooted in emotion. Actual feelings. Horrid thought.

That was when my mind drifted off on its own.

What if I forged an item that stirred my INT upward? Something personal. Something that carried meaning and earned the System’s approval through raw sentiment.

I pictured a Mai figurine carved from wood. Every curve shaped with care. Fragile in appearance. Beautiful.

That vision sharpened until the piece stood in a glass case in my mind. A lone figure in a perfect beam of light. Every detail shaped by a hand that suddenly understood art in a way that bordered on divine craftsmanship.

Then reality kicked in.

I glanced over at my current tools, a half rusted knife, a rock, and pure vibes, and sighed.

There was no way I would do Mai justice with that budget setup.

She deserved better than a half melted popsicle stick with eyes.

Nah. I wanted masterpieces, not weird little totems that would haunt someone’s dreams.

If I was going to craft something real, something meaningful, I needed proper gear. Tools with finesse. Materials that did not crumble if you so much as looked at them funny. Until then, that vision would just have to wait.

I leaned back against the wall and let my thoughts wander while night settled over the forest in a slow, heavy sweep.

Crickets chirped. An owl spoke from some distant perch. Leaves rustled at the cave’s mouth, trading quiet secrets meant for someone far more welcome than me.

I stretched out on my glorious leaf bed, ten out of ten on the discomfort scale, and stared up at the rough stone ceiling.

Another day down. Tomorrow would probably bring more workouts and more hunting down whatever Kiiroi creatures had not learned to fear me yet.

But even with all that swirling in my head, one thought kept circling back—

Mai.

Not Rei. Not my parents. Not even my phone, which, honestly, said something.

Just… Mai.

I kept trying to figure out why.

Maybe because I had seen her the most. Our houses were practically conjoined twins. We shared buses, classes, and arguments in the convenience store aisle. She had always been there.

Or maybe…

Maybe I just missed her…

A soft snore escaped my lips, echoing gently through the cave like an accidental punchline.

Akira Sakamoto, out.