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.