Nika-chan's Return

"UOOOOGH!!!! Let me eat meeeeeeat, yo!!!!"

"Here ya go, coming right up～"

"Yum, yum! Delish! Deliiiiish, yo!! There are flavors other than bitterness, yo!!"

A pink-haired, fragile-looking girl had appeared out of nowhere, ravenously tearing into the meat.

The speech pattern made it obviously Coworker. What was this character's name again? Mika? Nike? Something like that… Oh right, Nika-chan.

"Hah, hah… I've calmed down, yo…"

"Welcome back, Alto-shi. How many days has it been?"

"… … Half a year."

… What?

"It's been half a year, yo… Ugh, the suffering was unreal, yo…"

"That's terrifying. For reference, it's probably been about one hour on our end."

"That's terrifying, yo. Basically a prison sentence, yo… If I wasn't in sales, I'd have lost my mind, yo."

You know how when a prison sentence exceeds someone's natural lifespan, they supposedly get digitized and have their perception accelerated to fit it all in? And since the brain gets destroyed in the process, they die anyway, making the death penalty seem merciful by comparison? That kind of thing.

Not that I'd ever actually heard of it being carried out, so it was basically an urban legend.

"Alto, didn't you say it'd be about a week?"

"The thing is… the first week was just a trial, yo. After that, it was supposed to let you get your real-life affairs in order, then lock you out of logging out until your character dies or you clear it, yo…! What a terrifying game, yo…"

So Alto experienced a subjective half year. If even this guy needed half a year to clear it, just how brutal was that scenario…

"Nika-chan started out frail, so I just trained her as hard as I could without overdoing it, yo… The only food available was Defilement, after all. If I'd at least had chicken breast or protein shakes, I could've done it in two months, yo."

Food really is essential for building a body, yo, he nodded.

This Slime fully agrees. Though in my case, I just dissolved and ate iron and whatever else I could find to increase my body mass.

"Having nothing but Defilement to eat must've been truly awful."

"I ended up caving and spent SP on Bitterness Resistance, yo… Even then, it barely helped… Oh right, right, this was supposed to be Nika-chan's treat, yo. Got it, yo, got it, yo. Penpen, got anything sweet, yo?"

"Sure do～. I asked Tria-shi and made it ahead of time. A new apple pie!"

"Then give it to Nika-chan, yo. I'll swap to Alto's body, yo."

"Here you go, Spirit-sama! Please, help yourself!"

With that, Coworker swapped over to Alto's body. The Halo's glow shifted.

"Spirit-sama… this is delicious, so so delicious…! I'm so glad I didn't give up… W-wait, is this… heaven? Am I… dead?"

"Ho ho ho. You're alive, yo. So eat as much as you want, yo. Penpen, thx, yo."

Nika-chan bit into the apple pie with tears streaming down her face.

Penpen quietly dropped a scoop of ice cream onto the apple pie. What the heck, I want some too. Hot and cold and sweet-sweet, it's basically a god of sweetness. The Sweetness God has descended.

"Just how awful does Defilement taste, anyway?"

"Without resistance, you'd writhe in agony like you were dying, yo. I brought a bit with me, wanna try it, yo?"

"Morbid curiosity says yes."

Penpen brought over a plate, and Alto dripped a single drop of Defilement onto it.

The plate rotted. A white, ceramic plate.

"… Oh, nope. You'd die if you ate this, yo."

"How did she manage to eat this stuff?"

"This plate's done for… Please don't drop any on the floor, okay?"

"Looks like girls born with Defilement resistance were made into shrine maidens, yo. Anyway, I'll dispose of this by eating it, yo. Say ahh… wait, I'm in Alto-chan right now, yo! That was close!"

"Lemme taste～"

Hey, stop! Before I could do anything, Miitei-chan reached out and gave it a poke. She immediately detached her fingertip and separated it from her body. That bit of Slime fizzled, dissolved, and crumbled away into nothing.

"Blegh, so bitter… Spirit-sama, this seems like what those guys were calling Special Gear D."

"That's the stuff that dissolves humans into mush. Scary. Alto-chan seriously almost died just now."

"That girl's finger just came off, yo!? Is she okay, yo!?"

Oh right, we still needed to do proper introductions on this end too.

 

＊　＊　＊

 

"I'm Miitei, the Slime! I'm gonna make everyone my little sister and become the Big Sister Queen!"

"I'm Nika, the shrine maiden. There are so many angels here… Is this heaven after all?"

"I'm Ginko, a silver wolf beastkin. Please, call me Gin-chan. I'm a maid."

I had the second characters properly introduce themselves.

Big Sister Queen? What even is that.

"I destroyed the lab and killed all the researchers!"

"Oh, nice. I ended up destroying a whole town."

"… I only wiped out a noble family. Tch, I lost."

Those introductions sure were violent. I thought this game was supposed to be about saving people from despair, but aren't these girls producing a whole different kind of despair? Is this okay?

"My special skill is Fission! I can become two people!"

"Umm, strength training… I guess? Does being able to eat anything count as a special skill?"

"I'm good at cleaning and laundry."

Miitei-chan chimed in with "I can eat anything and clean stuff up perfectly too, so I'm the big sister!" What kind of argument is that? Cute, though.

"Nika-chan, you can't eat rocks or iron, right? I can, so that makes me the big sister!"

"Rocks and iron aren't food to begin with. Bring me something humans can actually eat. There's a difference between being able to eat something and being able to enjoy eating it, you know?"

"I don't think humans can eat Defilement either, though."

Well well, at least the three of them seemed like they'd get along just fine. That's what matters, right?

"Man, to think that Miitei-chan, who had zero sense of self, can talk this energetically now… All that people-eating really paid off, huh."

"Nika-chan, who'd fallen into such despair that she'd even given up on dying and was just waiting to turn into a monster, now has such wonderful friends… Strength training solves everything, yo!"

"Gin-chan, who was on death's door and couldn't even speak, is now so full of life… Et cetera."

Don't just trail off like that, Penpen. These are important growth moments for the second characters.

In any case, with all our second characters now reunited, we were a party of six. So, what should we do next? Adding third characters didn't seem possible just yet.

… For the time being, helping out at Penpen's farm, maybe?

Oh right, I can unlock Home now too. That'd be nice…