He carefully looked around his surroundings.
The room was made of some kind of gray inorganic material, which looked like concrete, and it had a high ceiling. Though there were no obvious light sources, a side of the ceiling glowed with white light.
“Yo~ Momonga-san. Thanks for coming.”
Someone called out to him.
Suzuki Satoru — Momonga — had logged into Yggdrasil countless times before, but nobody had ever spoken to him in this room, so he was confused for a moment. However, because it was a familiar voice — or perhaps it was the voice of one of the people in this clan that he was closest to — his mood immediately changed, and he answered:
“Ah — Peroroncino-san, good evening. Glad you came.”
The voice addressing him came from a man with the head of a ferocious beast, with wings on his back. He wore a suit of shiny golden armor.
“Ya~ it scared me. Momonga-san is the first person I’ve ever encountered here.”
“Same here! It seems we logged in at almost the same time.”
“Well, this sort of thing happens. The real surprise is why it didn’t happen before now. After all, there should be a lot of people who get off work and log in right away, around the same time.”
His friend — Peroroncino — walked toward him.
With every step Peroroncino took, golden motes scattered from his armor and vanished in mid-air. Bathed in the afterglow, he cut an imposing figure.
“I’ve never seen that effect before. What’s up with that? Could it be that it’s from a data crystal dropped by monsters in the newly discovered area?”
“Nope~”
Peroroncino’s face did not change. A regrettable deficiency was that one’s avatar could not change expressions to match one’s voice. Still, his voice was perfectly clear, and so was the happiness in his words.
“It’s a character effect, from a cash shop item.”
Momonga felt like the ground had just opened up under him. He should have displayed an emoticon, but he was not in the mood for that. Instead, he stalked up toward Peroroncino.
“No way! Why? Peroroncino-san, how could you betray me like this? How could you betray our fiery friendship! Didn’t we both promise to play without using cash items?”
Indeed. Though they knew that one could pay to win with cash items, they had formed a No Cash Item Alliance, their souls blazing with the idea that they could compensate for weakness with skill. More to the point, Peroroncino and Ulbert had been the ones who came up with that idea first. Being the first to betray it as well was absolutely unforgivable.
“Momonga-san, I’m sorry!”
Peroroncino put his palms together in apology, but his words were unremorseful.
“You wanted to stuff all those effects in no matter what, but look now. Hasn’t your armor gotten weaker?”
In Yggdrasil, players could design their equipment as they liked. This included their powers as well. However, abilities could not be stacked willy-nilly; the capacity of an item for data was determined by the item’s construction and the material.
In contrast, special effects took up a smaller amount of data capacity, so it was not uncommon for them to be imbued in an item to use up the leftover capacity.
However, Peroroncino was a power gamer, and people of that sort sought power at any cost. They were the type who obsessed over skills and character builds. Thus, devoting even a little bit of data capacity to special effects was a waste.
“Well, I know that…”
Momonga nodded, having changed his tone a little. He had not been serious about his accusations anyway.
“Peroroncino-san, you’ve always been about perfect builds.”
“Indeed. I wouldn’t load useless data into my outfit.”
Peroroncino was trying to build the item combo “Sunfall”, which needed a stringent selection of many data crystals, as well as armor and weapons to install them in. Still, there was some payoff to his hard work; he had managed to recreate the look of the item.
“That’s why I had no choice but to install the effect into my avatar with a cash shop item! You should know, right? I don’t like using cash items either. If I could stick it in my armor, I wouldn’t need to do all that. It can’t be helped. Man, I’m so envious of Touch-san’s explosion effect and his landing effect. I wish I had those too.”
“Ah. Those. Yeah, those are pretty flashy.”
The person in question was the leader of their clan, as well as the person Momonga was indebted to. He was in love with transforming heroes, and if the topic came up, he would be more than happy to begin discussing masked heroes who had debuted on wireless radio wave broadcast more than 150 years ago.
Thus, one could say that it was his style. One of his special effects was programmed to automatically trigger a meaningless explosion behind him when he struck a certain pose. The other one—
“Still, the explosion is one thing, but those words… The first time I saw them, I honestly had no idea what kind of face to make. I mean, they’re…”
“Really? I kind of like it.”
— Justice Has Arrived. The words would appear behind him, when he took the appropriate pose.
“Eh? Seriously? Peroroncino-san, you’re amazing. You’re really amazing.”
“Amazing?”
“Well, I think among us, only you like that sort of thing.”
“Ah, it’s true, my big sis said she wasn’t into it… Wait, does that mean I’m the one with weird taste?”
“…If I agree with you, it’ll reflect on Touch-san’s tastes too, so I’ll reserve comment.”
“…Isn’t that the same as just agreeing with me?”
Although their expressions had not changed, the mood in the air had become very solemn. Well, it was not really that gloomy. Or rather, it felt more like they were playing around.
Momonga laughed.
For some reason, talking about these unimportant things made him very happy.
He felt like he could keep chatting like this forever, but that would only impose on his friend Peroroncino, and he wanted to see his other friends too.
Momonga pointed to the tunnel.
“We shouldn’t talk here. Let’s go to the meeting point.”
“Yes, yes, I got it.”
The two of them walked forward, with matching strides.
The tunnel was made of the same inorganic material as before, which could be easily mistaken for a prison, and it extended straight ahead. Although there were doors on both sides, the two of them ignored them and kept moving forward. One could say that the doors beside their destination were little more than decorations, and they could not open them even if they really wanted to.
“Speaking of which, what’re we going to do today?”
“It wasn’t written on the mail, but we’re probably going to take people to level up. I mean, the new people are all somewhat low-levelled. Still, they can still fight if they want to, even with a difference of two or three levels.”
“Well, it’d be good if we could enrich ourselves along the way.”
In Yggdrasil, defeated monsters tended to drop money easily. This was because there were many crafting classes in the game. Most of them made scrolls or wands and staves, which were frequently used by magic casters, and which they could use as well.
If less money dropped, magic item production would become very difficult, and magic-using classes would have to think twice about going on adventures with intense combat. This went against the design philosophy of having players explore the world. Therefore, the game was much more generous than its contemporaries with dropped money.
“What do you mean? Data crystals? Or money?”
“Money, of course. Though there’s some data crystals I want too…”
The two of them walked side by side.
The two of them were in their full gear and were walking shoulder to shoulder, so they needed a lot of space. However, the dimensions of this tunnel were designated as variable, so the path would automatically change to match their body sizes. This was why they could walk this way.