The National Online Game "Battle-Cast: Dungeon Alive"

In this world, there are dungeons.

More precisely, one day dungeons suddenly appeared and began eroding the world.

Parks on holidays, shopping malls, schools. Targeting crowded places, the dungeons manifested, triggering the catastrophe that came to be known as the "Dungeon Disaster."

Afterward, at enormous cost, the dungeons were conquered and vanished from the world.

Research by clever folks eventually uncovered the cause of their emergence.

The electronic sea spawned by the development of the internet, an aggregate of thought noise, and so on—in any case, they discovered that the pollution accumulating on the internet, commonly called "Debris," would bleed into the real world once it crossed a certain threshold and take the form of a dungeon.

Not only that, they also found that "Debris" manifested as dungeons within the electronic realm as well, and could be eliminated by sending special digital avatars to conquer these dungeons and destroy their cores.

These avatars, built on research and applied principles derived from "Debris" itself, had the property of absorbing the noise generated by any action and "growing" from it.

In other words, they were essentially video game characters.

And so.

In order to conquer the "Debris"-born dungeons, the nation decided to train specialists. "You can earn money playing games!" Applications poured in before recruitment had even begun. A certain genius game creator then proposed a groundbreaking idea, which was adopted.

Thus was born the national online game "Battle-Cast: Dungeon Alive" (commonly abbreviated "BCD").

The most revolutionary aspect of this game was that HP was money, and conquering a dungeon paid prize money.

(In reality, when a digital avatar is destroyed inside a "Debris" dungeon, that avatar is itself absorbed into the "Debris," generating removal costs. The system was apparently modeled on this.)

The countless applicants simply became the players of this game.

If, among them, people emerged who could make a living by conquering dungeons for prize money, that would mean the original goal of training "Debris" removal specialists had succeeded exactly as intended.

Prize money could then be set on real "Debris"-created dungeons too, and players could be turned loose on them.

This yielded a two-birds-one-stone result: the government's coffers were barely dented, applicants were filtered, and highly motivated dungeon conquerors were trained.

On top of that, thanks to the genius game creator's proposal, "anyone could create and publish a practice dungeon."

A system was also put in place so that whenever a player took damage inside a dungeon, a corresponding sum would be paid back to its creator. Of course, if the dungeon was cleared, the creator was on the hook for the prize money…

Thanks to this, alongside players, a new breed emerged: Dungeon Masters, who stood against players from the dungeon side and made their living that way.

From the operators' perspective, they were wonderful collaborators, mass-producing practice dungeons of their own volition.

On these two wheels ("Players" who conquered dungeons and "Dungeon Masters" who created them), the game… no, the nation's dungeon countermeasures, achieved tremendous success.

And, as the name suggests, the game had been designed from the start on the assumption that it would be streamed. As a result, on top of dungeon prize money, popular players and Dungeon Masters began to rake in multi-millions from streaming revenue as well.

Once that happened, a raging storm of people chasing after those successes was the natural next step, and—

—the world had officially entered the Great Dungeon-Streaming Era.

 

*

 

"Gyaaaaahhhhhh!!!"

Returning from the battlefield, the girl let out an irritated scream at the entrance to her apartment.

The aspiring-ojou-sama-type B-Caster, Karona Ryutanji—or rather, the person on the inside, Saya Shinohara.

In stark contrast to her twin-drill ojou-sama look in her streams, she was a plain, shabby-looking regular person with black hair and black eyes. For the record, she was of legal age.

A nearly empty eco bag dangled from her hand.

"Damn it, those old ladies are way too strong!!"

She had suffered a crushing defeat at the time-limited sale. A one-pack-of-eggs-for-50-yen mega chance, squandered. Saya cursed her luck. There was supposed to be a three-packs-per-person limit, but by the time she had rushed over, only a single pack had remained, and it had been snatched up right in front of her.

"But… today, I won something, so yakiniku! Meat party!"

With that, she pulled a pack of chicken breast out of her eco bag. Behold, a luxury item without so much as a discount sticker! 100 grams for 100 yen!… A truly premium cut! For Saya, anyway!

"Still, I just barely scraped by again today…"

With a sigh, she flopped the chicken into the fridge and shut the door.

Today's prize money had come to 100,000 yen. Half of that would go to rent and utilities, and at least another 30,000 yen would be eaten up by equipment repair costs, which left her actual take-home at just 20,000 yen.

20,000 yen a day wasn't bad, she supposed, but as the result of a gamble where she'd bet her entire life savings of 100,000 yen, it was cutting things awfully close.

"Someday I want to eat all-you-can-eat domestic black wagyu steak… I want to try an all-you-can-eat luxury sweets buffet too… I wonder if Shine Muscat grapes really do sparkle…"

Lost in such daydreams, Saya tucked the chicken away in the fridge.