Chapter 3 - When Faced with a Losing Event, Resist with Your Fists
—After leaving the small chamber where I awoke, I walked down a narrow passage for some time. Guided by the faint light, I reached a second chamber. Peeking inside from the entrance wall, I was struck with awe.
“Whoa…! Whoooa…! No way, it’s real…! A real golem! A real monster!!”
My first-ever encounter, my first monster. The chamber was just as plain as the last, with no notable objects besides the glowing crystals, but crawling around inside was a rock creature about a meter tall.
It was bipedal, but too stout to be called humanoid. I called it a golem on a whim, but it looked less like a clay doll and more like a round rock with long arms and short legs.
“Is that an enemy…? I’m completely unarmed.”
If it's hostile, this is likely a combat tutorial. And even if it's a real enemy with no tutorial, it looks slow. Even if it spotted me, I could probably dodge it with a light jog. It shouldn't be hard to slip past it and dash into the new path I see on the other side.
“…Guess I’ll go.”
Whatever it is, this is the very beginning of the game. It’s best to try everything once.
With no weapon to ready, I was naturally empty-handed. There were no obstacles to hide behind either, so I decided to be bold and strode into the chamber. The golem, which had been clumsily wandering the room, immediately noticed me and stopped dead in its tracks.
Nope, it’s just a rock. I couldn't see anything like eyes on its torso, which was the center of its limbs… and yet, I could clearly feel that it was watching me.
“H-hello there…?”
I cautiously attempted to communicate. The response, of course, was silence—no, it moved.
Slow. But fast. Its speed was about that of a small child's jog, but it was a world of difference from its previous sluggish wandering.
The rock creature headed straight for me—
“Whoa, that’s terrifying!?”
Seriously, that’s scary! I’m a total newbie to both VR and fantasy worlds! A lurching, rock-thing with arms and legs running at me is just plain horrifying!
—Hey now, what are you planning to do with that raised hand? If it’s for a handshake, you don’t need to swing it up with that much force!!
“So it really is an enemy!”
The battle started abruptly, but aside from my fear of the unknown, it wasn't critical enough to feel like a real crisis yet. This was VR combat, which meant moving my actual body—in other words, it was practically a real fight. But it’s not like I’m unathletic.
I was active in a club in middle school, and in high school, I survived three years on the hellish road of part-time jobs. I'm reasonably confident in my physical abilities, and I have some idea of how to move my body efficiently.
Surely, I can easily dodge an attack this wide—
“Hiek…”
VWOOSH!! An impressive whoosh of air accompanied the rock arm as it passed right by my body. The whip-like limb was certainly slow enough for me to track with my eyes, but that didn't mean it lacked power.
As if to punish me for my cocky attempt to dodge with minimal movement, the golem's rock arm smashed into the rock floor with a sickening thud, easily shattering it.
…Eh, what is this? Don’t make me fight something like this unarmed.
“…Discretion is the better part of valor!!”
My pride, a fledgling thing just minutes into the game, had yet to fully form. Admitting defeat less than ten seconds into the fight, I spurred my legs, which were threatening to freeze, with a pathetic war cry and fled.
—I tried to flee.
“What—?!”
Given our positions, I tried to retreat back the way I came to regroup, but a wall of rock erupted from the ground, blocking my path. I managed to plant my hands and avoid a face-first collision, but the exit to the passage was now completely sealed.
So, I turned back to dodge the golem and head for the forward passage—
“Ah…”
I watched as the golem absorbed the newly raised rocks around it, growing larger at an accelerating rate, and understood everything.
“This is a losing event, isn’t it…?”
The very beginning of the story. An unavoidable, powerful enemy. Zero means to fight back.
With all these elements in place, anyone with a bit of gaming experience would realize it. This was a so-called losing event, where defeat is guaranteed.
Most likely, some kind of rescue will arrive the moment the golem is about to finish me off—or, if this is a game where players are expected to die and revive repeatedly, this is where I experience my first death.
Either is possible, but the common denominator is that “resistance is futile.” For a seasoned player, this is the moment to either die quickly or throw yourself into danger to advance the story.
I absentmindedly watched the now massive rock arm, incomparably larger than before, as it was raised again, and I pondered.
—To resist, or not to resist.
To be honest, before I dedicated myself to my part-time jobs, if you asked if I was a heavy gamer, I’d say no. I was a light otaku, so to speak, who dabbled in novels, manga, anime, and games, just a little more deeply than the average person.
I had played some notoriously difficult “masocore” games on analog consoles, and in the early-game death events common in them, I had always quietly accepted my fate.
This time, I could just follow the developers' intentions and let myself be crushed. I was a little scared to experience death in VR for the first time, but [Arcadia] is an MMORPG, a genre where player lives are relatively cheap. I'd have to get used to the countless deaths to come sooner or later.
—But that would be boring. My sky-high tension, having finally reached this world I’d longed for for three years, screamed this fact loud and clear.
It may be virtual reality, but everything I see, hear, the feel of the air, the temperature, the smells—every sensation is real. In my subjective experience, this world is no different from reality.
For someone like me, a representative of the average person who’s never been in a single real fight, this giant golem blocking my path and about to turn me into a stain on the ground is a complete unknown.
I'm an adventure-starved modern boy. In a situation like this, you have to fight back, right?!
“—A man's gotta have guts! Hollywood diiiive!!”
I managed to dodge the descending rock arm with a diving leap. I ended up doing a spectacular face-slide on the ground, but since pain isn’t replicated in [Arcadia], I didn't feel any. The damage I took manifested as a jolt of impact and a rather unpleasant numbing sensation.
My HP took a pretty nasty hit from the face-dive, but getting hit by that rock chunk the size of a small car would have been an instant kill for sure. I’ll take it!!
—Alright, no time to be impressed by my first experience with damage-numbness.
“Against a righty… counter-clockwise!”
In my personal experience, the standard strategy for a one-on-one boss fight in a high-freedom 3D action game is to run circles around them. Against a right-handed opponent, or one who primarily attacks from their right side, circling counter-clockwise to get to their left is usually the safe bet. Your mileage may vary.
The golem had bulked up all over by absorbing the terrain, but its right arm had grown particularly large. Since both its initial attack and its second attack after transforming were with its right, it was safe to assume that was its main weapon.
I thought it would become slow after getting bigger, but that didn't seem to be the case. Still, it didn't seem capable of agile movements. Getting behind it was relatively easy—my first attack is gonna be a bare-knuckle brawl! Let’s go!!
My only means of attack without a weapon is my own body! Eat this, a straight punch straight out of a manga!!
I haven't moved this virtual body much yet, but even in this short time, I can tell it’s high-spec. Unbound by physical limitations, I suppose. Its reaction speed and the smoothness of its movements are on a completely different level from reality.
I haven’t even seen a level display yet, but my avatar moves far better than my actual body! With a surprisingly sharp motion that amazed even me, I stepped in precisely and slammed my fist into the golem’s wide-open back.
“Ow—?!”
Yep, no damage. Instead of the unmoving rock, it was my right hand that screamed in protest. An intense numbness, so sharp I almost mistook it for pain, shot through my arm, and in the corner of my vision, my HP dropped even more dramatically than it did from the face-slide.
I honestly saw that coming. So I won't let it get me down!
I braced my body as my fist was repelled, and without losing my footing, I followed up with a fighting kick against the golem, which still had its back to me. Hey, Mr. Rock, did you know? They say a kick has three times the power of a punch!!
“Still, no good!!!”
Unlike the bare-fisted punch, the front kick through my shoe didn’t send a shockwave back at me, but it didn't seem to do any damage either—and just then, something changed.
With a bell-like chime, an orange cursor and a single HP bar popped up above the golem's head. Inscribed above the bar was probably this thing’s enemy name—
“[Chosen Stone Doll], huh…”
To be blunt, it's a rather simple, plain-looking golem. I mean, a giant moving rock is intimidating enough, but design-wise, it's just a lump of rock.
Despite that, the somewhat meaningful name sparked a premonition.
“This isn't… a losing event, is it…?”
I stared down the golem as it turned around with a slow, ponderous motion, as if to show off that my attacks hadn't hurt it at all, and I voiced a murmur that contradicted my earlier certainty.
I think the developers intended for me to be killed by this thing once, here in this dead-end, as the official route. Given the complete lack of explanation right at the start and the absence of any system intervention or tutorial after the fight began, I have to assume that.
But I noticed it. It was probably because of my second kick, but its HP gauge had been chipped away by a millimeter.
If there's no branching outcome to this battle, there's no reason to give the boss HP and not lock the value. That means there's a branching route in this fight that triggers by depleting some or all of its HP!
“Though this is all just random guesswork and delusion!”
Honestly, I'm just having fun theorizing in the middle of this unknown situation, so it doesn't matter to me whether I'm right or wrong. Even if it takes a hundred kicks to the back to deal what amounts to chip damage, if it can be damaged, then I'll carve it up!
“Roar, my right leg!!”
—And so began the long, long brawl between an unarmed man and a pile of rocks.
Regarding the issue of the protagonist talking to himself too much. He's just so hyped up about finally reaching the virtual world after three years of hard work that his tension is through the roof. He'll calm down and return to his normal character eventually, so please watch over him.