Death March to the Parallel World Rhapsody Read online

  Cursing, I selected the two remaining Meteor Shower icons. But again, the symbols only disappeared, with no other effect.

  One of the arrows finally broke through the rock and grazed my shoulder.

  “Damn it! I’m gonna die because of a bug? What kind of sick bad ending is this?” I grumbled, but my anxious complaints soon faded to a weak murmur.

  Why? Because I had spotted countless meteorites breaking through the clouds, crashing down.

  I stared stupidly at the sight.

  Thanks for your patience—we’re finally back to the scene where all this started.

  Real name: Ichirou Suzuki.

  Character name: Satou.

  This is how my life in another world began.

  Level Up

  Hello, Satou here. Like a typical Japanese worker ant, I’ve always spent my days neck-deep in my work, but I don’t think it ever wore me down so much that I wished I could run away to somewhere else. I was busy, but I felt like my work was worth doing. It’s true, I swear!

  The pain I felt right before that dust cloud overtook me seemed to have knocked me out for about two hours. The dust had probably been a consequence of all those meteorites hitting the earth, I figured.

  The menu displayed the time in a simple format in the corner of my vision. How convenient.

  I strained to move my body, which was half-buried in dirt.

  Huh? I can’t get up…

  It felt sort of like when you can’t get out of bed on a winter morning. I could move my hands a little, but it was difficult to do much more than sluggishly wiggle my fingers.

  CLANK.

  The metallic sound shook me out of my half-conscious state. “No way…,” I muttered, but deep down I was already sure what it must be. The lizardman who had fired the first arrow before.

  As if to confirm my suspicions, a single red dot came into view on my radar. The lizardman on my still-open map screen was the only enemy left alive. How could he have survived all three of those ridiculous meteor attacks? I didn’t think that was possible. Maybe he had avoided the bulk of the strikes by being closer to me than the others?

  “I guess I lose this round, huh?” I grumbled. I was somewhat frustrated, but for the most part the lethargic state of my body seemed to have dragged my mind down into resignation as well.

  CLANK.

  But when I saw the enemy appear at the top of the cliff, that apathy of a player who’d just lost a strategy game vanished completely. The lizardman was bleeding from all over his body, staining the remains of his tattered blue armor red. He spat out a spear he’d had clenched in his teeth onto the cliff and hauled himself forward.

  At that moment, his gaze fell on me and refused to break away. My arms and legs shook pathetically. I’ve had dreams before where I wanted to run away and couldn’t move, but I’ve never dreamed anything that made me tremble so much.

  Using the spear as a cane, the warrior shambled toward me, dragging along his broken leg. The thing’s body was absolutely covered in wounds. If I’d reacted a little sooner, I might have been able to catch him by surprise with a body slam and knock him off the edge of the cliff—but it was too late for that now.

  Despite his battered state, the lizardman’s eyes were still burning for a fight. He definitely wanted to kill me. He pulled a sword from the scabbard at his waist—and tossed it at my feet. The sudden movement knocked off a piece of his armor and sent it clattering to the ground.

  Now that he’d gotten this close to me, the smell of blood was so strong that I nearly gagged. It would have been far too realistic, if not for the HP gauge floating to the right of the lizardman’s head. Underneath was the label Lizardman: Level 50.

  It seemed to be some kind of augmented reality (AR) feature resembling the ones used nowadays in smartphone games and the like. “Is this supposed to be a game?” I grunted, trying to trick my limbs into moving. For some reason, my body felt a little lighter as I did so.

  I had no idea what the lizardman was saying to me, but I could guess. “You want me to take this sword and fight?” Barely recovered, I struggled to get my body to move, reaching for the sword. As silly as it might seem, considering I was dreaming, the fear I felt was completely real.

  I gripped the weapon as if grasping at a straw. At that moment, for whatever reason, it didn’t occur to me to beg for my life.

  My mind raced. I had never taken any kind of fencing or kendo lessons. I hadn’t even lifted a hoe on a farm or used a mallet to make mochi on New Year’s Eve. So my only experience with a blade was what I’d seen in anime and manga and stuff like that, with no actual bearing in reality.

  I grasped the sword tight with both shaking hands and desperately planted my feet. The lizardman sneered as he readied his spear. Unlike my fake swordsmanship, my opponent’s posture showed a high level of mastery.

  The word he kept repeating is difficult to describe—I might spell it out as mokuugwa or makueuga. Of course, I had no idea what it meant.

  As he shouted, he jabbed the glowing red spear into my shoulder. It hurt—a lot. I’ve heard people say you feel heat more than pain with a stab wound, but no, it was pretty much just pain. It was unbearable. My mind was too focused on my shoulder to come up with any sort of action to take.

  Pulling the spear out of me, the lizardman then stabbed at my leg as if toying with me. As the spear pierced my thigh, I was struck with a fresh wave of agony and toppled unceremoniously onto my backside.

  Considering how pathetic I was, I wouldn’t have been surprised if I’d passed out from the pain at that point, but instead, for some strange reason I stopped feeling it. Maybe it was my imagination, but my fear seemed to be fading, too. Perhaps I was so scared, my emotional limiter had snapped?

  My arms and legs stopped shaking, and I was finally able to think straight. The HP gauge I could see by my opponent’s head was nearly zero, but I doubted I could fight him and win. If I tried coming at him with my sword, surely he’d easily counter my attack and put a quick end to things by slashing my throat.

  Luckily, it looked like my enemy’s movements were as pained as mine. I had to create some kind of opening while he was tormenting me and make a break for it.

  As I stood up, I grabbed a fistful of the dry soil. Throwing dirt in an opponent’s eyes might be cheap, but I didn’t have the luxury of a fair fight right now. I watched the lizardman carefully and struck his spear with my sword just as he drew back. I must have underestimated my remaining strength, because the shove threw him off-balance.

  Now’s my chance!

  I flung the dirt at his face with all my might. It scattered in midair, but enough of it still reached the creature’s face. Unfortunately, my opponent was a step ahead of me—he defended himself by throwing an arm up in front of his eyes.

  Damn it, you’re supposed to be mortally wounded! But at least his arm was blocking his vision. Aiming for his legs, I swung my weapon and let go, flinging it forward. But I had apparently swung too hard—it flew toward the lizardman’s torso instead.

  I had planned to run away the moment I released the sword, but the scene unfolding before my eyes stopped me in my tracks.

  “Huh?!”

  The sword had left my hands with shocking speed and cut right through the lizardman’s middle, dividing him in half. Blood gushed out of his severed body.

  Oh god… I’m not good with gory stuff. And I’d never seen anything so gruesome before, not even in movies.

  “He’s disappearing…” Just like an enemy in a video game, the lizardman’s corpse was fading away. However, the traces of blood left behind were proof that the battle had been no illusion.

  I sat down hard on the ground and looked up at the sky, then finally took a deep breath. Whew! This dream is exhausting… If I have to dream something so realistic, couldn’t I be on a tropical beach or something, making out with hot girls in bikinis?

  I took off my polo shirt to try to treat my wounds. It was chilly, but not so much that I’d c
atch a cold. Putting it into Storage, I used my T-shirt to wipe off the blood.

  Strangely enough, I’d stopped bleeding. I would’ve expected a stab wound from a spear to last a lot longer. When I rubbed at the hardened blood with my finger, it fell away in clumps. Underneath it was perfectly clear skin—not even so much as a scar.

  The pain had stopped, too, I realized. Maybe this gamelike dream had a system where you healed automatically after clearing a mission? I opened the status screen to confirm; sure enough, my HP had been fully restored. On closer inspection, in fact, my maximum HP had increased. Not only that, but my level had jumped from 1 to 310!

  The crazy speed of that sword throw before must have been because of my high level. My strength, as well as all my other stats, had been raised all the way to the max value.

  I must have leveled up so much because of all the enemies I defeated with those Meteor Showers. Wanting to see the aftermath of the Meteor Showers, I looked over the edge of the cliff. The scenery below was terrifying. A veil of dust still hung in the air, obscuring the wasteland, but the ground I could make out through it was dotted with craters. The area where the army had stood was thoroughly pockmarked, too.

  My assumption had probably been right: The lizardman I’d fought before must have escaped a direct hit from the meteorites because he was some distance away from the rest of the group. Since he had still been on the verge of death, the shock waves alone must have been incredibly powerful.

  As for the canyon in the distance, the Valley of Dragons, it seemed like a good deal of the area had caved in. It looked less like the aftermath of a magical in-game attack and more like the battered surface of the moon. Well, that was only to be expected if a small pocket of land was hammered with three attacks of more than a hundred meteorites each, I guess.

  The scenery looked like something from a movie, so maybe that was why it didn’t feel real. Ah, right—this is a dream anyway…isn’t it? It was too vivid for a dream, yet far too strange to be real life. If anything, it seemed more likely I was inside a game.

  Well, if this is a game, you’d think beating all those enemies would trigger some sort of event.

  Trying to gather more information, I looked at the log screen. It started with the message WELCOME TO OUR WORLD. Normally, this would seem like a pretty significant statement, but since FFL starts with that same message, I skimmed past it.

  The log showed what icons I had used, the defeats of the lizardmen and other enemies, and the defeat of some dragons that had apparently been the former rulers of the Valley of Dragons. It also included notifications of level-ups and the acquisition of various titles and then, finally, my victory over the last lizardman. After this was a line that said SOURCE: CONQUERED THE VALLEY OF DRAGONS, but I had no idea what that meant and simply ignored it.

  Next was a log of all the spoils I’d gained in battle. Even the corpse of that lizardman was listed among the loot, which would explain why it had disappeared. Am I supposed to become a necromancer now, or what?

  Remembering my opponent’s graphic death, I made a Graveyard folder in my Storage and stowed all the corpses in there. After a moment’s thought, I gazed at the folder and clasped my hands together in a brief prayer.

  As I continued checking my status, I noticed that those emergency skills for beginners that I’d used earlier had been registered in the magic menu. I hadn’t been able to access that menu, but now it seemed I could use the new magic skills on the list if I selected and enabled them.

  I wish this dream didn’t have all these annoying systems.

  Testing out Search Entire Map wouldn’t necessarily prove its effectiveness, so I decided to try out the Meteor Shower spell. A quick check of the map confirmed that I was alone, so it shouldn’t be a problem. I had to test it out while I had the chance, lest I find myself in a dilemma and try to use it only to get a NOT ENOUGH MP message or something.

  I selected Meteor Shower in the magic menu and chose use. Perhaps because there weren’t any enemies on the map, a pop-up appeared that said Please select a target. I guess I have to mark a target area for destructive magic, like in WW. I picked a site about three times as far away as the Valley of Dragons.

  Apparently, this was good enough, because my MP meter decreased immediately. I felt like something was being drawn out of my body, much more intensely than when I had used Search Entire Map. This hadn’t happened the first time I used these skills, probably because I wasn’t using my own magic power then. This time, my MP went down by a thousand points or so, about a third of my total.

  I looked up at the sky. No meteorites yet. Going by the first time, they should be showing up any moment now. Finally, I saw something burst through the clouds like before, but…

  What’s going on? They’re HUGE!

  The boulders streaking toward the ground were almost a hundred times the size of the rocks I’d summoned before. No, considering how far away they were, they must have been even bigger. Before I could start wondering why, I instinctively broke into a run. Away from the hail of meteorites, obviously!

  Meteorites probably wasn’t the right word for these giant chunks of rock tearing through the atmosphere. A wave of sound bore down on me so hard my skin rippled, and I ran even faster, shrieking at a volume that rivaled the thunderous roar. I have no idea what I actually screamed, if anything. I do remember the incredibly strong air resistance, like I was running through water.

  As I fled, I eventually noticed that I was going way too fast, but it was too late to hit the brakes. I braced my legs with all my strength, but I still couldn’t stop. The physical stress shredded my sneakers like scraps of paper. My heel smashed through a rock, and when my hands hit the ground, my fingers carved out ten grooves in the stone.

  But even that wasn’t enough to stop my movement, and I went flying off the edge of the cliff into the air. Since I’d managed to kill most of my momentum, I was able to land on a protruding rock formation about fifteen feet down.

  Man, that was three times scarier than a free fall.

  Periodic tremors in the earth made it impossible to stand. I clung to the protrusion, not wanting to fall all the way down. A tidal wave of dirt, like a muddy river, flooded across the ground. Occasionally, I’d see rocks the size of a car rolling along with the dust, sending a shiver up my spine.

  Once the earth had stopped shaking, I attempted to climb back up the escarpment to see the results of the Meteor Shower. The air was still hazy with debris, so I wrapped my T-shirt around my face in lieu of a mask. It smelled of blood a little, but it was better than breathing in dust and having a coughing fit.

  When I pressed my fingers into the cliff face, they made little finger-size holes. The rock didn’t seem to be particularly brittle, so I was able to climb up with relative ease.

  Upon reaching the top again, I remembered that I was now barefoot, so I searched through my Storage. I found some sandals and tried taking them out, but they were covered in blood, so I hastily put them back.

  If I have to use something bloody anyway, it might as well be my own blood. I took the red-stained polo shirt out of Storage, ripped it in two, and wrapped each half around one of my feet. Not exactly stylish, but it would do for now.

  When I raised my head and peered into the distance, I saw something that looked like a mushroom cloud. Moving to the edge of the cliff, I could make out a red light on the surface. Was it lava that had burst out from underground, maybe? It might have just been fire, but since I couldn’t tell from here what the situation was, I decided to look at the map.

  I switched the map display from 2-D to 3-D. Judging by the fact that my target marker was now floating in midair, the ground must have collapsed considerably. The land around where the meteors had struck was warped and distorted, too.

  Gazing at the mushroom cloud, I silently opened the magic menu and switched the Meteor Shower spell from enabled to disabled, rendering it unusable.

  This spell is dangerous. If I used it over and over, I
’d turn right into a demon lord. They say a wise man stays away from danger, so I was better off keeping it sealed away.

  The reason it was so much stronger than the first time was the increase in my level or my intelligence stat, or so I figured. And it looked like my other attributes had powered up, too. That I was able to make holes in the rock with my fingers was probably thanks to a heightened strength stat, and my ability to endure the recoil from that was probably my higher stamina. And that mad dash that was fast enough to create air resistance must have been my agility stat at work.

  I picked up a pebble and fiddled with it experimentally, but luckily, it seemed like I was able to control my new strength perfectly. I didn’t feel any stronger than usual as I held it then rolled it around between my fingers. But when I tried for a moment to use enough force to break it, it crumbled in my hand.

  At one point, I’d accidentally sneezed while holding the pebble, but I didn’t crush it or anything. That was a relief.

  Maybe it was all the dust blowing around, but the weather was starting to look dodgy, so I found a tent in my spoils and set it up to take a break. Munching on a protein bar, I found a Well Bag among my loot, which I used to quench my thirst. Apparently, this was some kind of Magic Item that never ran out of water. Very convenient, but trying to figure out how it worked seemed like it could keep me up at night, so I decided not to think about it too much.

  Rain had started falling at some point, and it seemed unlikely to let up anytime soon. Since I had some time to kill, I decided to check out the rest of my spoils.

  Most of the items were damaged to some extent, probably squashed by the meteorites. There were all kinds of tools, equipment, and everyday necessities, but with most of them broken, I made a few dedicated folders and set them aside.