Overlord - Prologue

While it was good that she told him that, she had no intention of hiding her hatred of the people who stole her job, so he looked back on that thirty-minute lecture — more of a protest, actually — with a small amount of dread.

Even if people with experience in the field knew it was pointless, he still believed in that rumor of the online world — that telling the voice to hurry up would let you into the game more quickly. Therefore, he said to the voice: “Let me in faster.”

Part 2

The world of darkness filled with light.

It was a strange feeling — though he closed his eyes, it felt like they were still open — but after it passed, he found himself standing in a room within a building. The brief disorientation he felt as his mind switched over to a fictional world quickly faded away.

He carefully looked around his surroundings.

The room was made of some kind of gray inorganic material, which looked like concrete, and it had a high ceiling. Though there were no obvious light sources, a side of the ceiling glowed with white light.

“Yo~ Momonga-san. Thanks for coming.”

Someone called out to him.

Suzuki Satoru — Momonga — had logged into Yggdrasil countless times before, but nobody had ever spoken to him in this room, so he was confused for a moment. However, because it was a familiar voice — or perhaps it was the voice of one of the people in this clan that he was closest to — his mood immediately changed, and he answered:

“Ah — Peroroncino-san, good evening. Glad you came.”

The voice addressing him came from a man with the head of a ferocious beast, with wings on his back. He wore a suit of shiny golden armor.

“Ya~ it scared me. Momonga-san is the first person I’ve ever encountered here.”

“Same here! It seems we logged in at almost the same time.”

“Well, this sort of thing happens. The real surprise is why it didn’t happen before now. After all, there should be a lot of people who get off work and log in right away, around the same time.”

His friend — Peroroncino — walked toward him.

With every step Peroroncino took, golden motes scattered from his armor and vanished in mid-air. Bathed in the afterglow, he cut an imposing figure.

“I’ve never seen that effect before. What’s up with that? Could it be that it’s from a data crystal dropped by monsters in the newly discovered area?”

“Nope~”

Peroroncino’s face did not change. A regrettable deficiency was that one’s avatar could not change expressions to match one’s voice. Still, his voice was perfectly clear, and so was the happiness in his words.

“It’s a character effect, from a cash shop item.”

Momonga felt like the ground had just opened up under him. He should have displayed an emoticon, but he was not in the mood for that. Instead, he stalked up toward Peroroncino.

“No way! Why? Peroroncino-san, how could you betray me like this? How could you betray our fiery friendship! Didn’t we both promise to play without using cash items?”

Indeed. Though they knew that one could pay to win with cash items, they had formed a No Cash Item Alliance, their souls blazing with the idea that they could compensate for weakness with skill. More to the point, Peroroncino and Ulbert had been the ones who came up with that idea first. Being the first to betray it as well was absolutely unforgivable.

“Momonga-san, I’m sorry!”

Peroroncino put his palms together in apology, but his words were unremorseful.

“You wanted to stuff all those effects in no matter what, but look now. Hasn’t your armor gotten weaker?”

In Yggdrasil, players could design their equipment as they liked. This included their powers as well. However, abilities could not be stacked willy-nilly; the capacity of an item for data was determined by the item’s construction and the material.

In contrast, special effects took up a smaller amount of data capacity, so it was not uncommon for them to be imbued in an item to use up the leftover capacity.

However, Peroroncino was a power gamer, and people of that sort sought power at any cost. They were the type who obsessed over skills and character builds. Thus, devoting even a little bit of data capacity to special effects was a waste.

“Well, I know that…”

Momonga nodded, having changed his tone a little. He had not been serious about his accusations anyway.

“Peroroncino-san, you’ve always been about perfect builds.”

“Indeed. I wouldn’t load useless data into my outfit.”

Peroroncino was trying to build the item combo “Sunfall”, which needed a stringent selection of many data crystals, as well as armor and weapons to install them in. Still, there was some payoff to his hard work; he had managed to recreate the look of the item.

“That’s why I had no choice but to install the effect into my avatar with a cash shop item! You should know, right? I don’t like using cash items either. If I could stick it in my armor, I wouldn’t need to do all that. It can’t be helped. Man, I’m so envious of Touch-san’s explosion effect and his landing effect. I wish I had those too.”

“Ah. Those. Yeah, those are pretty flashy.”