Editing Toaru Majutsu no Index:Virtual On Chapter2 (section)

===Part 23===

What had happened?

Kamijou was not sure even after it had saved him.

He did not know how far he had to run, but there was no sign of the Grys-Vok girl pursuing them.

“Hey, Lilina. Did Furashina do that?”

“I don’t want to analyze it… I just know that’s better left untouched. Poking around there is sure to destroy my system.”

It was also unclear why Furashina Ririn was being targeted.

But what had just happened may have been the reason.

Both for those enjoying normal Virtual-On and those plotting something with the Defected version.

Meanwhile, the girl herself was carefree.

“Looks like it worked…yawn…ah…”

“Don’t go to sleep! Hey, don’t go to sleep! We’ve got to get out of here!”

“Sleeping is my proper state…mumble.”

“I can’t believe this!!”

Unable to stop her, Kamijou was forced to carry Furashina Ririn’s small body. Identical Lilina sounded exasperated on the portable device hanging from his hip.

“You could have carried her on your back or princess carried her, so why did you go with the old-fashioned ‘rice bag over the shoulder’ style? You look like a Greek sculpture.”

“It’s art!! Listen, if you call it art, you can get away with most anything! Any other explanation and I only look like a criminal!!”

“But now that you’re carrying her, you’re realizing how soft, warm, and nice smelling she is, so the blood is rushing to your head, right?”

“I have no idea what you are talking about.”

“Um, according to the heartrate monitor for the health check service…”

“Okay, fine! I admit it!!”

Human Transporter Kamijou Touma ran through the labyrinthine alleyways to quickly leave the scene.

He was wondering how far he had to go, but Lilina gave him an answer.

“We have reached 1 kilometer. We should be safe now. This would be out of the battlefield in a Virtual-On match.”

“What a pain…”

Kamijou lowered the “rice bag” and plopped himself down in a convenient bench. A girl was fairly heavy when converted into a pure burden.

“This is just way too much crap happening in a row…”

“Shall I open the To Do app and make a list?”

“There’s the Blue Stalker, there’s the endlessly battling zombie players inside the NPC Virtuaroids, and there’s Defected Misaka. And then there’s the people who used the Reverse Convert to make a portion of their Virtuaroid’s weapons their own, there’s Furashina who they were trying to abduct, and there’s her strange hacking skill.”

All of those things had Virtual-On in common, but were they really connected by a single thread? He could not tell. He had been involved in so many things, but he had not been blessed with much information on each individual one.

If he was to choose a top priority…

“Misaka and Furashina, I guess.”

He was also worried about that girl inside the NPC Virtuaroid, but he doubted pursuing her alone would solve this. He had no idea how many zombie players had been placed inside the NPC Virtuaroids all across Academy City.

There was of course the worst-case scenario in which every single NPC Virtuaroid had someone inside it.

He needed something more drastic if he was to save them all and not just one of them.

Instead of chasing the girl who he had no information on, it would probably be faster to pursue Misaka who seemed to know something about it all. But…

“The next question is whether Furashina’s incident is connected to Misaka’s problem.”

If so, it felt like all of the issues could be concentrated down to a single point, but would things really be that convenient?

Before long, Furashina Ririn blinked her red eyes while lying on the bench.

She rubbed her eyes in annoyance and then spoke.

“When you say Misaka, do you mean ''that'' Misaka?”

“Do you know her?”

Instead of a response, he heard an odd noise from his portable device.

Lilina screamed on the screen.

“Gy-gyawahh!! Please don’t access Touma-sama’s address book without permission. Damn, I can’t tell how you’re getting in! Are you directly manipulating the device’s machine language!?”

As he watched the screen scroll repeatedly, he recalled when Furashina Ririn had told him to hide when he tried to call out to Misaka in the park. She had called her a Hunter Hunter and told him to be careful.

“No, let me ask something else. How much do you know? You know Misaka is trying to rescue a friend from one of those NPC Virtuaroids, right? And what exactly is happening? Even with this Defection thing, wasn’t this all just a fun game?”

“Hm. I really ''shouldn’t be awake right now''.”

Furashina muttered something under her breath and then answered his questions.

The changes on the screen came to a stop.

“There is a group attempting to do something about the NPC players. And their method will likely have some effect. Even if that only means rescuing an extremely small number of the victims.”

“?”

“Whether Defected or not, this is all based on Virtual-On. That means they can make use of those rules. For example…”

The portable device’s screen changed even with no one at the controls.

It displayed a round frame and a few simplified silhouettes like those on bathroom signs.

“First of all, several parameters are sent back to the Defected players depending on the result of a match. A positive result means strengthening their body or mind, but a negative one means taking those things away and ultimately causing their very existence to ‘disappear’.”

Pieces of the silhouettes were gradually taken away like a jigsaw puzzle.

Furashina Ririn explained a horrifying thing in a calm voice.

“What matters here is not their ultimate ranking or number of wins vs. losses. It all comes down to the records of their matches.”

“The records of their matches?”

“Virtual-On is essentially a competition over points and destroying your opponent is merely one way of earning points. And I assume you are familiar with the negative judgments from the referees.”

“You mean…falling down or being hit while you’re down? So a list of their past judgments is used to rewrite the human?”

“When they use close-range vs. long-range, how often they dash and jump, how they approach or keep their distance from their opponent, and all other actions are subject to the scan.”

That was a shocking revelation.

When the training command log was opened, beneficial actions were colored blue and detrimental ones were colored red. The accumulation of those was wearing down their lifespans.

“B-but the points are reset at the end of a set, aren’t they? When the ref makes their decision and you get your winning star, it’s all wiped clean and you fight over the points again, right?”

“The command log remains, so it is not difficult to calculate out the totals,” said Furashina. “The processing done behind the scenes is merely being used in a visible form here.”

It was true that modern game systems recorded data that seemed irrelevant to playing the game: how many times a game had been booted up, what games people nearby were playing, and other things like that.

“Virtual-On has rules for its point judgments, but they do not always protect all players. When a game tilts too far in one direction, the judgments will be used to reestablish stability.”

When ranked by number of wins vs. losses, a temporary crisis did not matter as long as you turned it around by the end. But this was different. It was utterly insane to remake someone’s body just because they spent too long wasting time on the field or used cowardly methods. If whether each and every close-range attack hit or missed was being thoroughly monitored, then the Defected units were at greater risk thanks to their superior freedom.

“In other words, some people end up as NPC players by being destroyed and losing repeatedly while others end up that way by focusing on victory so much they end up making multiple rough plays during a single match.”

“Losing counts against you too?”

“Because you lose points. And losing intentionally by letting go of the buttons and sticks will make the matches boring and will likely be considered obstruction of gameplay.”

The puzzle pieces gathered back into silhouettes on the screen.

Furashina slowly breathed out before continuing.

“When the negative effects of the V-Disc reach a limit, they become a man-eating unit known as a Shadow. In this case, things have shifted a bit from that. They swallow the player and transform them into endlessly fighting sandbags.”

“…”

That was frightening enough, but that was not the focus now.

What was Misaka Mikoto trying to do to oppose that horrific result?

“Basically, you distribute the debt.” Furashina got right to the point. “As the Defected players accumulate rough plays, they are eventually turned into NPCs. They lose points from getting knocked down or receiving negative judgments…but in this case, the Virtual-On game will likely be played as a team with up to 4 members.”

“Wait…you don’t mean…?”

“If anyone on the team loses a point, it is counted as the entire team’s lost point. So even if someone makes a mistake, they can make up for it if someone else helps out during the same set. They can knock the enemy down to retake the point lost to the negative judgment.”

“Oh, I get it,” said Lilina. “They can bring the NPC player onto their team and continue in what amounts to a 3-against-4 match…”

Furashina must have been controlling the portable device because 4 silhouettes appeared inside a round frame on the screen. One of them was faded to gray.

“So a good match record there will be given to the NPC player as their teammate? So even if they have a single unfair rough play as a stain on their record, it can be diluted with 100 fair plays? And if their record is cleaned, they can return to normal even after disappearing!!”

Kamijou felt like he finally saw some hope.

Now he understood why Mikoto had been so angry. Everyone had been working together to salvage the NPC player’s record, but Kamijou had butted in, beaten them up, stained their match record again, and ruined everything.

They wanted to micromanage every single dash and long-range attack, so they could not forgive what he had done.

But something seemed odd.

Furashina Ririn’s expression contained no hint of pride.

“It is not that simple.”

“Why not? If they can dilute the negative record, they can save the NPC players! They just have to place the trapped NPC on their team and then keep ignorant players from hunting them before they can recover.”

“Do you know how many hundreds or thousands of matches must be played to dilute just one person’s negative record?”

“…”

His breath caught in his throat.

The weight of the gray silhouette on the screen changed entirely.

“There are no absolutes in Virtual-On. If the players attempting to save the NPC make enough mistakes, they too will receive rough play judgments that will stain all their records. They have no guarantee of winning every single time. More players will fail and be lost than NPC players will be saved.”

Saving 1 person would mean 10 sacrifices. Saving those 10 would require another 100 to stand up.

Was that what she was saying?

“It’s like a pyramid scheme…”

“It would still be difficult even if they formed two teams and played fixed games against each other. In Virtual-On, a draw is counted as a loss for both sides, so one side would have to win every time.”

“But what if they got help from non-Defected players? If they were just playing like normal, the Reverse Convert wouldn’t happen and there wouldn’t be any mistakes if both sides stood still and constantly fired long-range attacks at each other.”

“Defected and non-Defected players view the danger of the situation very differently, so it would be difficult getting most of the non-Defected to help. Even if it doesn’t mean much, most players would not want to ruin their score. And if you showed them the problem that was occurring, they would probably want nothing to do with it so they could remain safe.”

“…”

“More importantly, Virtual-On’s rules are built to make the matches more exciting. I would prefer not to imagine what judgment they would receive if they only fired at each other from a distance or planned out a fixed game in advance.”

“But it might be nothing.”

“But testing that out requires putting someone’s life on the scales. And it would be a player who had not even Defected.”

And what if every action during a match was influenced by the Reverse Convert, from the positive ones like giving a player Dordray’s toughness or Specineff’s psychological attacks (or the more direct weapons like Apharmd’s gun or Grys-Vok’s missiles) to the negative ones like loss of motor nerve control and autonomic nerve control? Not wanting to fight seriously and keeping a safe distance could be judged by the referee spheres. If that happened, all of the participants would be thrown into a life of debt. They would be too worried about themselves to give the NPC player a helping hand.

“Then there’s nothing they can do. It might look good at first glance, but the further they go with it, the more the debt grows. Not to mention that a Defected player challenging a normal player might lead them to Defect!!”

Mikoto might be aware of that.

She might be aware of it, she might have agonized over it, and she might have had no other option.

It was even possible she was taking part in the Virtual-On tournament while Defected. If so, the fangs of Defection might be forced onto the other participants.

It would be crass to ask her what had happened.

Most likely, someone close to her had been dragged into this. And while pursuing that, she had seen a deeper darkness further in.

“But in that case, what are we supposed to do…?” Kamijou groaned while sitting on the bench. “We can’t shift the debt onto someone else. I understand that, but is there some other radical solution? O-oh, I know. You can attack the portable devices and ref spheres, right? Then…”

“It is possible I could save 1 or 2 of them like that. But that is not a fundamental solution as more and more players Defect, disappear, and become NPCs. In the worst case, the rescued players might put themselves back in danger to rescue another NPC player. …Besides, I am only using a loophole, so the giant system itself still lies in our way.”

“Yeah,” said Lilina. “There’s nothing you can do if 100 people are swallowed up in the time it takes to save 1. Eh heh heh.”

The crushed Cypher and the girl inside it flashed through Kamijou’s mind.

He understood why Mikoto refused to leave them like that.

There was nothing they could do, but that was no reason to turn a blind eye and go on smiling.

“…”

Furashina Ririn narrowed her eyes sleepily while leaning back in the bench.

And then she spoke.

“Please search for the Blue Stalker.”

“What?”

“They are the true starting point of all this. And for me, they are also the ending point…”

“Hey, wait. What are you talking about!?”

“This is…my limit… This is the most…I can do…zzz…”

She began to snore like it was some kind of joke.

But he could not have her end the conversation unfinished like that. Especially when someone he knew might be directly involved.

“Hey, Furashina! Wake up, hey!”

“…Mumble, mumble…yawn…”

“You’re still going in and out, aren’t you? I won’t let you!! Kamijou-san won’t let you sleep tonight!!”

“Warning: that phrasing contains on obscene nuance,” said Lilina. “From a video game perspective, I supposed it would be rated C.”

“Oh, shut up! And all this yelling isn’t enough to wake her!?”

Things might change if he poured ice down her back or dumped spices on her nose, but he unfortunately had neither.

He tried to think of something he could do to wake her other than just shaking her and shouting.

“I’ve heard shining a bright light on the back of the knee can adjust when someone wakes up. Just like how the morning sun rids you of your sleepiness. I think they’ve used that as a way to help prevent jetlag on passenger planes.”

“Where did you learn that useless trivia? A quiz show?”

“Don’t underestimate Kamijou-san’s habit of doing housework with the TV on. And I’ve got a light source right here! Lilina, I need your help. Lend me your screen!!”

“Eh? Ahh!?”

He would try anything with the slightest chance of working.

In that mindset, Kamijou brought the portable device to the back of Furashina Ririn’s knee as she skillfully wobbled while still sitting up. But…

“Umm, Touma-sama.”

“What is it now? I’m trying to focus.”

“The general public could easily interpret this as a lowly pervert aiming for a super low angle shot of a sleeping girl. Are you sure this is okay?”

“Oh, yeah. This thing has a camera, doesn’t it!?”

“It saddens me as your navigator that you completely forgot about my functions. And some might ask what exactly you’re trying to scan with the Material Analyze here. Are you going for a white bodied Temjin decorated with a small ribbon and that smells like a girl? That ''would'' be revolutionary…”

“I was acting based on a perfectly wholesome idea, so why does it have to end like this!?”

Meanwhile, Furashina Ririn completely fell asleep.

There was nothing he could do now.

The Blue Stalker was the starting point of it all.

And they were also the ending point for Furashina Ririn?

“…What the hell is going on?”