Mighty Novel X

Novel From Beyond 2

(Emu's POV)

CR's medical office.

Poppy and I returned from the virtual realm, but there was no one in the office.

When I peeked into the hospital room through the window of the medical office, I found the comatose Parad lying in bed. Hiiro-san and Kiriya-san were taking care of him. As long as those two are there, I'm not worried about Parad.

I have to clear Mighty Novel X before my symptoms worsen.

"Kurotopi said in the tutorial that the main character of Mighty Novel X is me, and the game field is the real city we're in right now."

"Yeah. He said there's a novel spot somewhere in this town, right?"

"I have an idea."

----------------------------------------------------------------------

The fourth district of Seito City. On a street in a quiet residential area.

I was straddling the driver's seat of a CR emergency bike and turning the gas pedal. Poppy, riding in the back seat, was holding on to me with her arms around my waist.

Memory is a strange thing.

Even though I hadn't been to the town in years, I could still feel the familiarity of the place.

The route I took to school every day.

Perhaps because of the unusually large number of hills, this area is not so commercially developed, and the majority of the town is residential. There are more single-family houses than condominiums, and stickers saying "Beware of Fierce Dogs" are placed all over the gates and telephone poles, and even people who are used to living here are startled by the sudden barking of large dogs. At the time, I used to think it was like the man-eating plants that suddenly jump out of clay pipes in action games.

The steep uphill slope, which was rather difficult for me to climb on my way to school after waking up from sleep, became a test for my thigh muscles and transformed into a devilish downhill slope that caused modest damage to my legs and back when I returned home. It's like the damage floor in RPGs where you lose HP when you walk through it.

I've loved games since I was a kid, and I used to think of everyday scenes and events in this way.

Assuming that you have 100 HP, you can recover 20 HP by eating one of your favorite hamburgers. When walking on a tiled road, if you step on the tiles one by one in a regular pattern and keep walking, you will get a no-miss clear. When I saw old people lounging in the sun in front of the eaves of a building, I felt like they were NPCs who only speak the lines they are given. And so on.

People often say that if you only play games all the time, you'll become a useless person, but I still think it wasn't all bad for me.

The game logic added to the scenery of the town I was looking around stimulated my imagination, or rather, not just an immediate interpretation of what I saw, but an infinite number of imaginary stories. Maybe it's because I liked it so much, but I lost track of time when I was thinking about games. It could make an hour become five minutes.

As I was thinking about it, we quickly reached our destination.

After stopping the first aid bike, Poppy and I took off our helmets and got off the bike.

In front of me, I could see a coin-operated parking lot with space for four cars. It was in such a residential area that I doubted whether anyone would use it, but there were three cars parked there. Two of them were family cars, and one was the company car of a nearby construction company.