Prologue

Before one girl and another even younger one stood a figure in full plate armor brandishing a sword.

The blade swung, sparkling in the sunlight as if to say that taking their lives in a single stroke would be an act of mercy.

The girl shut her eyes. She didn’t want to be biting her lower lip. She just had no choice but to accept what was about to happen. If she had even a little power, she probably would have been able to shove the figure away and escape…

But she was powerless.

And so there was only one ending.

She would die.

The blade came down—

…The pain still hadn’t come.

She unscrunched her eyes.

The first thing she saw was the sword, stopped mid-swing.

The next was the figure holding the sword. The knight was practically frozen, looking at something off to her side. His unprotected stance manifested his internal shock.

The girl turned to follow his line of sight…

…and saw despair.

It was darkness.

A patch of raven black, ultrathin but so deep it seemed as if it went on forever. It was an oval rising up out of the ground, its bottom half cut off. It was a curious sight, but at the same time, it made her feel indescribably uneasy.

A door? was what came to mind when she looked at it.

A heartbeat later, she would be proven correct.

Something glided out of the darkness. And when she saw what it was—“Eegh!”—a dry shriek escaped her lips.

A human would have no chance against this being.

Hazy red light flickered flame-like in the vacant orbs of a bleached-white skull. The gaze was trained unfeelingly on the girls as if they were live prey. Skinless, fleshless hands, both sublime and terrible, clutched a staff so gorgeous it seemed to be the concentration of all the world’s beauty.

It was as if Death had donned an intricately ornamented raven-black robe and been born into this world from another along with the darkness.

The air instantly froze.

At the entrance of the Absolute even time seemed to stop.

As though her soul had been taken, the girl forgot to breathe.

With no sense of time, inhaling was difficult, and she nauseously gulped for air.

A messenger from beyond has come to lure us away. But that didn’t seem right. The knight behind them had frozen as well.

“Ngah…” She heard an exhalation that could not even be called a scream, but whether it had been her, her trembling little sister, or the knight with the sword before them, she didn’t know.

Death’s fingers—of which only the bones, picked clean, were left—stretched out slowly and then violently snatched at, not the girls, but the knight.

She wanted to look away, but she was too scared. She had the feeling that if she looked away, the monster would transform into something even more horrible.

“Grasp Heart.”

Death incarnate made a clenching motion, and metal clanged noisily next to the girl.

She was scared to take her eyes off Death, but she lost to the tiny bit of curiosity still dwelling inside her and looked at the knight lying facedown on the ground. He wasn’t moving.

He was dead.

Yes, dead.

The danger threatening to take her life had evaporated in a laughably simple way, but she couldn’t celebrate. Death had only assumed a more concentrated form.

Sensing the fear in her gaze with its entire body, Death moved toward her.

The darkness that had been contained within her field of vision began to expand.

It’s going to swallow us up.

She hugged her sister close.

The idea of running away didn’t even occur to her anymore.

If her opponent had been a human, she might have been able to act on the faint hope of “maybe,” but the being before her dashed that hope as if it were nothing.

Please let it not hurt, at least…

That was the most she could hope for now.

Her little sister clung to her waist, shaking with fear. She wanted to save her, but she couldn’t. All she could do was apologize for her powerlessness and pray that they would die together so she wouldn’t be lonely.

And then…

***

The End and the Beginning

1

In the year 2138, there exists something called a “DMMO-RPG.”

This stands for “Dive Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game.” While connected via an intracranial nanocomputer network called a “neuro-nano interface,” which combines the best of cyber- and nanotechnology, players experience physical sensations as if they were really inhabiting an imaginary world.

In other words, you play as if you’re actually in the world of the game.

And among all the various DMMO-RPGs that had been developed, one stood above the rest.

Yggdrasil.

It had been released twelve years earlier, in 2126, by a Japanese developer who had been waiting for just the right moment.

Compared to other DMMO-RPGs at the time, Yggdrasil gave players an incredible amount of freedom.

For example, consider the class system, a fundamental element of character customization. Counting the advanced classes as well as the base ones, there were well over two thousand. Since each class had only 15 levels, players could have seven or more classes by the time they hit the overall level cap of 100. As long as they met the basic requirements, they could dabble as they pleased. Though it would be inefficient, a player could acquire one hundred classes at level 1 if they wanted to. In other words, the system was such that, unless they were deliberately created that way, no two characters would ever be the same.

Then, by using the creator’s tool kit—sold separately—players could edit the appearance of their weapons and armor, as well as the advanced settings of their in-game residences.

The environment awaiting players who ventured into this world was enormous. In fact, there were nine worlds: Asgard, Alfheim, Vanaheim, Nidavellir, Midgard, Jotunheim, Niflheim, Helheim, and Muspelheim.

A vast world, a staggering number of classes, and graphics that could be tweaked to one’s heart’s content—it was precisely the amount of customization that poured nitroglycerin onto the Japanese creative spirit and led to the game’s explosive popularity. It got to the point where in Japan the word DMMO-RPG was practically synonymous with Yggdrasil.

But that was all in the past now…

*

In the center of the room, a gigantic circular table shone with an obsidian gleam. Around it were forty-one magnificent seats.

Most of them, however, were empty.

Once, all the seats had been filled, but now only two figures remained.

One wore an extravagant raven-black academic robe with purple and gold trim. The collar was perhaps a bit overembellished, but strangely, it suited the wearer.

The bare head of the figure in question had neither skin nor flesh—just bone. Reddish-black flames burned in his gaping eye sockets, and something like a black halo shone behind him.

The other one wasn’t human, either. More of an amorphous black blob, almost like coal tar. His constantly shifting surface meant that he had no fixed shape.

The former was an elder lich—an undead being that was what remained of a caster who had pursued magic ability to its extreme—and the most elite type: an overlord. The latter was an elder black ooze, which was a slime race that had some of the most powerful acid abilities in the game.

Both races occasionally appeared as monsters in the most difficult dungeons. The various types of overlords used the highest-level evil magic while the elder black ooze had the ability to corrode weapons and armor, so both were famously hated.

But these two weren’t monsters.

They were players.

The races players could choose from in Yggdrasil were split into three main categories: basic humanoid races (humans, dwarves, elves, and so on); subhuman races, who weren’t pretty but performed better than humanoids (goblins, orcs, ogres, etc.); and grotesques, who had monster powers and got more ability points than other races but were penalized in other ways. Including all the elite races, there was a total of seven hundred at the users’ disposal.

Naturally, overlords and elder black oozes were two of the elite grotesque races that players could become.

The overlord spoke without moving his mouth. Even for what had once been the pinnacle of DMMO-RPGs, it had still been impossible to animate expressions to align with conversation.

“It’s been a really long time, HeroHero. Even though it’s the last day Yggdrasil’s servers are open, I didn’t think you would actually come.”

“For real—long time no see, Momonga,” another adult male voice answered, but compared to the first, it sounded pretty lifeless.

“It’s been since you changed jobs IRL, so…how long ago was that? Two years?”

“Mm, yeah, about that. Geez, it’s been that long.…Damn. My sense of time is messed up from working so much overtime.”

“Sounds rough. Are you doing okay?”

“My health? It’s pretty much in tatters. Not doctor-visit level, but pretty close. Ugh. I really wanna just run away from it all. But I gotta eat, so I’m working my ass off and getting whipped like a slave.”

“Yikes…” The overlord Momonga leaned back to exaggerate his wince—this conversation was kind of killing the mood.

“It’s seriously awful.”

Momonga was already put off, but HeroHero’s follow-up sounded exactly as awful as he said things were.

Their gripes about their jobs in reality gathered steam: how their subordinates had no communication skills, how the spec documents were liable to change from one day to the next, how their bosses would grill them if they didn’t meet their quotas, how they could barely ever go home because there was too much work, their abnormal weight gain caused by the crazy hours they kept, the increasing number of pills they took.

At some point, it was like a dam broke inside HeroHero, and Momonga shifted to a listening role as the complaints flooded out.

Talking about one’s real life in a fantasy world was frowned on by many. “Please keep your reality out of my daydream” was certainly an understandable sentiment, but these two didn’t feel that way.

There were two requirements that all the members of their guild, Ainz Ooal Gown, had to meet. One was that members had to be working adults, and the other was that they had to play grotesques.

Since that’s the type of guild it was, real-life work woes were a common topic of discussion, which was fine with the members. The conversation these two were having was an everyday occurrence in Ainz Ooal Gown.