.Hack//ZERO ME:1020

ME:1020

I stared at Sora’s back while he walked in front of me.

The alpine field around us reminded me of places like Tibet or Nepal.

Steep mountains stretched out around us, and clouds rolled by like a sheet.

The ground was composed of dry soil, sand, and gravel while dust filled the air.

I breathe in the phantom winds, and I imagine the scent tickling the back of my nose.

Sora was limping again this time, and it seemed even worse than it had been before. On top of that, he sometimes held his shoulder like it was injured.

Except you couldn’t be injured in The World. Pain wasn’t something you could really experience here.

It was probably just an elaborate act. Maybe he was meticulously putting on this show in an attempt to make me believe it.

I couldn’t even try to do something like that myself, but assuming someone were to rewrite the game’s code enough, it should be possible to recreate those movements.

And yet, as I watched Sora walking around like that with his arms dangling limply, I felt something I couldn’t explain.

I wanted to shake him and tell him to cut the act. But at the same time, I wanted to take his hand and try to console him.

But still…

You can’t feel this world. It’s not just pain that doesn’t exist here, its smells and tastes, too. You can’t sense any part of it.

Which meant you couldn’t feel warmth or comfort, either.

Though I had to wonder – if I could feel those sensations – would Sora’s strange, stone-like arms be warm or cold?

“What should we do doo~doo~?”

Sora turned around.

“Doo~doo~ don’t care.”

I did my best to act nonchalant, but really, I was just happy that Sora was acknowledging me.

“Es tu copying me?”

“Non, you’re just rubbing off on me.”

“Oh-ho~…?”

Sora tilted his head in a way that made him look surprisingly childish and somehow vulnerable.

But I pretended not to notice.

“I don’t like that habit of yours, but apparently, it’s contagious.”

“Well then, pardon moi.”

Sora shrugged with exaggerated movements and held up his hands. But the motions were still stiff.

And again, I pretended not to see it.

“I’m not kidding.”

I’d started talking more like Sora, recently. Adding random doo~doo~’s to my sentences and the like.

I absolutely hated this stupid way of talking, even when I was the one using it.

“Then let me officially welcome you to the ranks of us idiots, ka-ching.”

But he just smiled and laughed at me for it.

Yet for some reason I ended up laughing along with him and staring at Sora’s profile for a moment.

There was a question that was bubbling up inside me.

A question I desperately wanted to know the answer to.

Why had he given me a fake member address?

He’d said he wanted to be friends, but apparently that was a lie.

But I didn’t think I’d ever be able to bring myself to ask him. Actually, I was sure of it.

I had already tried sending Sora a bunch of messages using the member address he gave me, but every time, it got sent back to me with an error saying it couldn’t find the proper recipient.

I tried every fix I could think of, thinking there might be a simple typo – like a O switched with a 0, 2 with a Z, or 1 with an I, then it would make sense. But none of the combinations I tried worked.

So, I gave up trying to contact Sora.

Instead, I just got better at tracking down where to find him.

In the area generation system for The World, you can find your way to all kinds of fields with different monsters or events just by combining three words.

And I discovered that Sora seemed to like using the words ‘Betrayal’ and ‘Empty’.

All of the areas I managed to find him in were ones that used one or both of those keywords.

And every time he showed up in one, he always acted like he had found me first.

“You’re late, ping~pong~!”

“We hadn’t planned a meetup, ding~dong~.”

Every time I talked like that, I covered my mouth and Sora grinned wider.

As soon as he realized how much I hated it, he started talking like that even more frequently.

If a boy in my class had done this to me, I would have ignored him by opening my textbooks or going to the library.

Honestly, even Sora was close to crossing the line.

But I could never convince myself to walk away from him.

Because with Sora, even his sarcasm and teasing made me feel special somehow.

So why did I still feel trapped?

I couldn’t think about that now though. Not when I couldn’t guess what might happen next.

I didn’t want to wait.

I didn’t want to go a day without seeing Sora anymore. Yet even when I did get to see him, it wasn’t enough to satisfy me.

Because I knew it wouldn’t last.

We could see each other like this for now, but someday, Sora was going to get bored of me.

It wasn’t that I thought he’d come to hate me; eventually, he would just lose interest in me and leave.

Even now, it wasn’t like Sora was meeting up with me because he liked me. It was just a way for him to pass the time.

Already, he was so fickle that one day we could talk for an hour, but the next day he would disappear after just a few minutes.

And it was never that I had upset him, or he had something else to do.

He would just vanish at the drop of a hat, then reappear the next day and not explain himself.

How much time does he spend playing each day? What time does he usually log in?

I’ve wanted to ask him those questions so many times, but could never bring myself to voice them.

Because if we started talking about things related to real life, I was afraid that this version of Sora would disappear.

What was his real name? How old was he? Where did he live?

Even though I wanted to know about the real Sora, I felt like the Sora in front of me should be enough.

So, I didn’t want us to know each other’s birthday or addresses or anything like that.

What kind of person was he? What was really going on in Sora’s head? Those were the things I wanted to know.

“Liar.”

I cursed at Sora under my breath.

“Moi?”

“Basho’s disciple. It’s spelt with different Kanji than your name.”

In the member address he’d given me, his name was spelt with the character for ‘suffering’. I’d memorized the motions for writing it down. But when I looked up Basho’s disciple, his name had been spelt with the character for ‘great’.

“Bingo!”

I was hoping to burst his bubble by catching his fib, but he wasn’t even fazed.

“Then why?”

“Because it looks cooler that way.”

“Now you’re just spouting nonsense.”

Sora never reacts the way I expect him to.

Every time I think I’ve caught him in one of his lies, he just complimented me like he had planned it that way from the start.

I stayed quiet for a moment, and Sora turned to look at me. I hadn’t expected that either.

“Goblins. Want to go hunting?”

“We’re way too strong to be taking on such low-level monsters.”

“Then, want to go PKing?”

He was always suggesting things like that.

“PK who, exactly? Somebody you know?”

“Non, non. It can be anybody.”

“That’s cruel!”

“Oh-ho~! And you’re such a good girlie, are you?”

Sora was trying to bait me.

But I wasn’t about to fall for such a simple ploy. I could at least ignore that much.

“How many? Just how many people have you killed?”

“Hmm… don’t remember!”

“Seriously? You’re horrible!”

He was almost certainly telling the truth. Sora has killed more players than he can even recall.

“Is it fun for you?”

So, I decided to ask.

“PKing? Non, pas vraiment.”

That answer I had expected.

Sora was free.

I wanted to ask if he was having fun, but I knew the answer would be the same.

“Tick~tock~, you in or not?”

“There’s not even anyone else here! Am I supposed to kill you? Do you want to die?”

“Non, non, of course not.”

“Bien, because I’m not going to kill you.”

Sora backed down easily.

“Has it ever happened to you before? Getting PKed?”

“Why do you ask?”

Sora’s voice suddenly lost its pep, and he met my gaze directly.

The look he gave me cut right to my core. The hair on the back of my neck stood on end.

“……Just felt like it.”

“Do I have to answer honestly? Or can I lie, beep~bop~?”

“I’d prefer the truth.”

“Well, that’s irritating, boo~boo~. If you’re going to lecture me, can you get it over with quickly? The shorter the better.”

Sora’s smirk slowly returned.

And I took a deep breath.

“That……that’s not-!”

“Hmm?”

Sora just turned his back on me. He didn’t even bother waiting for me to finish my thought. There was no point listening to my excuses.

“You know what!?”

I ran after Sora, but he wouldn’t look at me anymore.

“I was PKed less than a week after I started playing. I had agreed to form a party with some other PCs, and we set a time and place to meet. But when I got there, somebody else entirely was waiting for me instead of the people that we had promised to meet there. I’m not trying to patronize you here.”

The words just started spilling out of me on their own.

I realized that what I was saying was stupid – that I was just dragging things up that were better left buried.

Nobody needed to hear my sob story.

“Which means… it was all a set up from the start.”

“Huh?”

“It was all planned right from the start. They had to have been in on it! Only an idiot would think otherwise.”

Sora just nodded along as I ranted. He didn’t seem to think any of this mattered.

The stiffness in my shoulders eventually faded away.

“The acted friendly. They helped me when I was alone.”

“Nice people like that don’t actually exist.”

“You think so?”

“Of course. It’s obvious.”

Sora nodded casually.

“Well, that’s too bad.”

“Why? It was my own fault, after all.”

“Non, non. That’s not what I meant.”

I don’t know how to describe the sense of vulnerability I felt looking at the screen in that moment.

I felt so angry. I even thought that I wanted to die for a second.

But all of that vanished in the next instant. It was like they just got wiped from my mind. And all of a sudden, I realized I couldn’t even remember what jobs they all used.

I still felt the fatigue in my body, however. My senses had dulled, and everything felt far away. I would never be able to escape that feeling – no matter how high I raised my level. It was like I was trapped in the back of my own mind behind a thick layer of sludge, and every time something happened, it just grew thicker around me.

“It feels like I’m stuck this way. Always being disappointed.”

“So, in short,” Sora looked up at the sky. “You just hate that you were made a fool of.”

“Maybe.”

“If you want to get revenge, I could help with that.”

“PKK?”

PKs were Player Killers, so if you killed one of them, that made you a PKK. And if a PK killed a PKK, that would be a PKKK.

“Non, non. You’re thinking too small. You need to aim higher. And farther.”

“What do you mean ‘farther’?”

“Secret tee~hee~.”

Sora just grinned at me, obviously thinking himself terribly clever.

“What a boring reaction. You’ll never get farther like that.”

“So basically, as expected?”

“More or less.”

Sora sounded disappointed and let his shoulders drop.

Then I went crazy and started laughing.

“I feel like such an idiot.”

“Not ‘like’ one. You are an idiot.”

“I think just getting revenge would be too easy for you, Sora.”

That was the first time I had said his name out loud. I wonder if he noticed.

“Why don’t we go to the Cathedral?”

I didn’t want him to realize that it had been the first time, so I moved the conversation along quickly.

“Why?”

“Just because.”

“Because it’s the place we first met?”

“Ah…”

I was at a loss for words. He remembered. Sora remembered our first meeting, too.

“Because it’s a safe place.”

“I hate that place.”

“But you were there.”

“I hate it there. I really hate it.”

He sounded so childish saying it like that.

I wanted to laugh it off, but I couldn’t.

Because he wasn’t joking around this time. He was really, truly disgusted. That was a side of him I’d never seen before.

The air around Sora started to shimmer like in a heatwave.

“Hey…”

My voice caught in my throat.

Sora’s face had lost all form of expression. All signs of the player had disappeared and left only a vacant husk behind.

The outline of his character started to distort. Red and blue cross-sections separated and flickered like a 3D image.

A hook-shaped pattern appeared on his body.

Here we go again.

It was time to say goodbye for now.

“Wait……no, stop! Sora, don’t go!”

I screamed for him.

The sound of shattering glass echoed all around me.

Light flooded my vision and pain radiated through my head behind my eyes.

“Don’t…!”

He was going to disappear before I could reach him.

Just this once, I reached out for Sora.

If I could reach him just this once, that would be enough.

There was something―― I took hold of something.

And that something took hold of me.

Finally, colors and shapes took form within the light.

“Sora……!”

I listened carefully, holding my breath as I tried to look beyond that light.

And there was Sora, on his knees, hunched over, with his shoulders shaking like he was crying.

A strange haze was covering Sora’s body.

And it took the shape of a person.

That white shadow moved gently, wrapping around Sora.

I looked up from there, and finally saw her.

She looked barely five years old, but she was so beautiful that she also seemed like she was almost fully grown.

Her entire body was painted in shades too pure to be called white or silver. Her skin was as flawless as a porcelain doll.

Her eyes carried a lovely innocence, yet also strength. Just like her hair, her pupils had no color in them whatsoever.

But the thing that caught my attention was her smile. It was a very natural smile – almost angelic – and made her look more like she was a real person instead of some apparition.

Soft light radiated from her entire body, making her look pearlescent.

A sleeveless, robe-like dress completely covered the girl’s body from her neck to her toes. But the fabric was thin and had a silk-like sheen to it, so it revealed the slender outline of her body underneath it.

As the hem of her dress rustled, I caught a glimpse of her toes below and felt my heartbeat quicken.

Quicken with fear, that is.

“Who are you? Get away from Sora!”

Was she some kind of NPC? A random character created by the system?

If she was, that would mean I was doing something very stupid by shouting at her.

But if I did nothing, then she wouldn’t react to me at all.

I started wondering if I should have brought better equipment.

The girl made a shrill sound like a pigeon.

It took me a few seconds to realize that I was also smiling.

The moment I heard that voice, my body froze.

She had such a clear, innocent voice…… it was like the voice of a devil.

“Ah……”

Sora started mumbling something.

And when I heard his voice, I finally understood what was happening.

This was not some event.

Sora was actually in pain.

He was suffering.

“Get away from him!”

The words spilled out of my mouth. I screamed at her to leave.

And then the girl turned to look at me.

Her eyebrows were so pale I could barely make them out against her skin.

Was that a look of confusion? Was she trying to say something? To deny me? Scorn me? Mock me?

Sora was suffering. He was suffering right in front of me.

But his moaning cut off abruptly. At that moment, his body jumped and started convulsing.

“Sora!”

The girl floated gently in the air.

As if she had actually understood my words.

She parted her lips to speak.

“…………”

But her voice didn’t reach my ears.

It couldn’t, because Sora’s screams were drowning out everything else.

The girl moved.

She looked at me with a confused and frightened expression.

And something in me snapped.

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