I was walking down a road I knew by heart—and hadn't seen in decades.
The path from my part-time café shift to my cheap, lonely apartment in the downtown area. Narrow, a little cluttered, alive with the kind of small-city noise that you stop noticing until it's gone. I knew every crack in the pavement.
The reason it felt so nostalgic was simple: three years after the game bled into reality, this place had been wiped off the map entirely. I still remembered that day with a clarity I wished I didn't. It had taken most of my allies with it. Most of my acquaintances. Most of the people who had made this street feel like something worth coming back to.
"...But this time, I'll make sure to change that."
I had more than enough time. And now—starting from launch day, from the very beginning—things were going to go differently. I'd make sure of it.
"Oi, Kamishiro! How about some pork today? I'll give you a good price!"
"Young man! Fancy some ramen? Noodles are freshly made!"
The butcher uncle and the ramen auntie called out from their respective storefronts as I passed, the same way they always had. Their faces had blurred in my memory over the years—worn smooth by time and grief—but seeing them now, standing there exactly as they always had, my lips curled without my permission.
They hadn't survived the first wave. Neither of them. Whatever warmth they'd carried had existed only in my memory for thirty years, preserved there like pressed flowers—fragile, faded, real.
This time, I wasn't going to let that happen.
"Thanks, but I'm in a hurry." I gave them an awkward wave without breaking stride. "Maybe later!"
"Oh! Then I'll save you a seat for tonight—and you'd better show up! Miyabi keeps saying she's lonely since you stopped coming around!"
"M-Mother!"
The voice that shot out from inside the ramen shop was mortified and sharp, and it stopped me dead in my tracks.
I turned slowly.
Behind the auntie, half-hidden in the warmth of the shop's interior, stood a face I could never have forgotten. No matter how many years, no matter how many things I'd survived that should have burned every soft memory out of me—her face had remained.
She was red to the ears, her eyes darting anywhere but at me.
"Miyabi..." I whispered.
Just her name. Just saying it was enough to disturb something deep and still inside me—something I had genuinely believed I'd buried past the point of feeling.
Apparently not.
"..."
But it wasn't the time.
I turned away before the moment could take root, throwing one last line over my shoulder. "I'll visit tonight, I promise. Make sure you serve me your best, Auntie!"
I didn't look back. I already knew that if I did, I might not be able to keep walking.
Miyabi was not simply a woman from my past. She had been my lifeline—the last tether that kept me recognizably human through everything the game had put me through. The one person whose presence had consistently reminded me that I was still something more than a weapon pointed at the next monster.
And I had lost her too, in the end.
'I was too weak back then. I couldn't protect myself, let alone anyone else.'
I shook my head and kept moving.
This time would be different. This time I'd become strong enough that the word protect would actually mean something coming from me.
---
Back at my apartment, nostalgia hit the moment I stepped through the door.
The old dresser. The small table, ringed with old cup stains. The bed that had seen better decades. The ancient computer slouched in the corner like it was embarrassed to still be running, more than ten years past its prime.
My room. Exactly as I'd left it—or rather, exactly as I'd left it thirty years ago, which amounted to the same thing.
I didn't let myself linger.
I went straight to the dresser and took stock. My work uniform was out of the question, which narrowed things down considerably. In the end: a plain white shirt, a down jacket, and jogging pants—chosen entirely for ease of movement. The jacket was partly for the cold—the last day of December was not forgiving—and partly because it was the most practical thing to wear when concealing something you'd rather not advertise.
"The Red Axe Gang's boss... Mokuro, was it?"
I murmured to myself, pressing through the fog of decades-old memory.
"Vicious. Wouldn't think twice about killing someone for the right price."
Which, from my current perspective, made him a fairly convenient target for some early liquidity. His assets ran well into the hundreds of thousands—a few tens of thousands wouldn't even register as a loss to him. And I needed startup funds.
For weapons, I kept things sensible.
A knife—eight inches, a fillet blade—was too short to be a primary option against multiple opponents, but useful enough as a backup. I tucked it against the back of my waistband, nestled against the garter of my jogging pants. Light enough that it wouldn't shift when I walked.
Then I opened my construction site toolbox and pulled out something more practical.
A crowbar.
Light enough for my current body to manage without embarrassing myself. Decent reach. Versatile, reliable, and virtually indestructible in any scenario I was likely to encounter today. The ideal instrument for a peaceful conversation with a gang boss.
I wasn't going there to kill anyone. I still needed six clean months—six months of keeping my head down, playing legally, getting through the game without drawing the wrong kind of attention. This was just a friendly discussion. The crowbar was simply a conversational aid.
On my way out, something else caught my eye.
I paused.
"...I'll take this too," I said, mostly to myself. "Better safe than sorry."
I packed what I needed, locked up behind me, and stepped back into the cold. The wind came off the street in a sharp gust that cut straight through the jacket, and I shivered slightly before adjusting.
To avoid passing by the ramen shop again, I cut through a back alley—winding and convoluted, the kind of route that would've gotten most people turned around within two minutes. My sense of direction had been honed across thirty years of navigating places far more disorienting than this. I wasn't concerned.
The reason for the detour was simpler than it probably looked.
Miyabi had the sharpest intuition of anyone I'd ever met. One glance at me—armed, dressed for a fight, wearing the particular expression I apparently couldn't keep off my face when I was about to do something violent—and she'd have known. She wouldn't have stayed quiet about it, either. That wasn't who she was.
And I wasn't entirely certain that her saying something wouldn't cost me the resolve to go through with this at all.
A hypothetical. Probably nothing. But I wasn't in the business of taking unnecessary risks.
I picked up my pace, moving from a walk into a light jog, and redirected my thoughts by force.
It worked, more or less—and somewhere in the middle of it, without quite noticing, I'd made my way back to the alley from before.
The bodies were gone, as expected. Enough time had passed that they'd either walked it off or been collected by their friends. Including the one I'd left conscious specifically to guide me.
I stopped.
Ahead of me stood the surviving lackey—and arranged around him, clearly having been briefed on the situation, were ten men. Large, broad-shouldered, radiating the specific energy of people who were paid to stand in front of trouble and look intimidating about it.
I smiled pleasantly.
"You guys his friends?"
Ten to one. All of them bigger than me, at least in this body.
I wasn't remotely concerned.
This was nothing.
Just the appetizer.