Golden Experience

What went wrong? She was outed right away. Either this Wayne guy had much better intuition than Rare thought, or he was just plain sharp. Or maybe Rare was just way dumber than she thought she was. Not a conclusion she particularly wanted to entertain, all things considered.

“I don’t know what you’re trying to say, but you need to authenticate your brain waves in order to log into the game. It’s absolutely impossible for me to be someone else. Well, if it required a fingerprint or iris scan like they used to have ages ago, there might’ve been ways to fool those.”

And this avatar was undoubtedly Kerry’s, whom Wayne had met before. In other words, the person before Wayne was the Rare that Wayne knew—Kerry’s body—and at the same time also the actual player named “Rare.” For Wayne, this was the highest purity Rare he had ever met.

“So was that what you wanted to ask? If so, then are we done here?”

“Hold on, you still have answered my question!”

Huh? We’re still going with this topic? Rare thought. What’s making him go this far?

“Fine. Then let me ask this instead: Why don’t you think I’m Rare?”

“First is… the way you talk. Rare really gets into her character, like roleplay. How do I put this, she really talks like a female mercenary.”

He was correct; before Kerry learned to speak more politely, she had a rather crass style of speech. When she had met Wayne for the first time, Rare had a feeling she spoke to him like that. This was a blunder on Rare’s part.

“Aha. Well, I thought it was ’bout time to switch it up. Can’t blame me for that, can you?”

She somehow adjusted her style of speech to match. Since Kerry recently started only speaking formally, she couldn’t remember the specifics.

“Next, the way you walked in the forest. Last time we came, you followed after me…and I got the sense you were nervous. But today, you led the way in such a brisk, confident manner. It’s true that it’s been two weeks since then, but even in a game, it’s hard for me to believe that you got completely used to traveling in a forest in such a short time.”

He was exactly right. Right now, Rare was mimicking the way that Kerry navigated the forest. Rare had originally gotten accustomed to walking in the woods from another VR game, but it was true that it wasn’t a skill that could be mastered in a short period of time. Last time, Kerry did in fact kind of plod after Wayne slowly. The reason why she built up so much stress was from pretending to be weak—not just in combat, but in all sorts of ways such as this. This was another blunder on Rare’s part.

“Another thing; when you talked about login authentication just now, the impression I got from talking to Rare before was that she wasn’t all that knowledgeable about hardware or software. Seeing that Rare going out of her way to explain outdated biometric authentication security measures is incredibly unnatural.”

Of course she didn’t understand any of it. The residents of this world—NPCs like Kerry—knew nothing about VR equipment or computer systems. Rare talked too much out of habit, but here it sure came back to bite her. This was yet another blunder on Rare’s part. Goodness gracious. Rare was a certified idiot.

“Aren’t you… the friend that Rare would sometimes talk to via friend chat? Also, I don’t know if ‘Rare’ even is a player name. Since I never friended her, I just know she called herself ‘Rare’ when we first met, but I never checked if that was her actual player name.”

Rare had indeed been incredibly careless, but it was also true that Wayne was very sharp. She never imagined that he could reason out this much with such pinpoint accuracy.

Spectacular. She didn’t think she’d get to experience this murder-mystery feeling of a perpetrator being steadily cornered in this game. Despite the fact that the game did include the freedom to do almost anything. It should be possible to come up with various perfect crime scenarios, especially when including magic and skills into the mix. She should really consider doing that if she ever found some free time; she added that to her mental to-do list.

“I see, I see… So what you’re saying is that there are two players with the exact same physical appearance, one being me, and the other being the Rare that you met before?”

Here she would casually suggest that it was a trick with two players. As far as Rare was concerned, as long as he didn’t somehow land on the actual truth, that Rare herself had a completely different appearance and NPCs had a way to use inventories and friend chat, then there was no problem. If the fact that Rare didn’t look like Kerry got out, then it would naturally connect to the question of how she could control Kerry’s body; she didn’t want knowledge of these skills to get out.

“So that… really was it…”

Having interpreted Rare’s words as a confession just now, Wayne hung his head.

“If you’re going to ask why I did something like this, well, I can’t say there was any particular reason…”

The reason was really that Rare just didn’t want to go to town herself, but if she said that, it would lead to learning that she didn’t look like Kerry, so she would say no more.

“It wasn’t exactly a badger game, but, well, it was to PK unsuspecting players. You can only hunt NPCs once and that’s it, but with players you can do it over and over again, so that was part of why. Even in the closed beta, I pretended to be an NPC to dupe stupid players and kill them off…”

“…You did what? You pretended to be an NPC in the closed beta to PK…? And now you’re…”

“That’s right. It was my best work. I did it a bunch of times, but I’d get found right right away if I tried again in the same city. So I had to immediately move—”

“That was you! One of those ‘stupid players’ you killed was me!!!”

Rare jumped at Wayne’s sudden outburst. But now the pieces were falling into place. He looked completely different now, but while Kerry was pretending to be Rare, that goodie-two-shoes feeling she got from him did remind her of one of those idiots from before. Not that she knew exactly which one among her past victims he was, she just vaguely had that impression.

“So that was it! What a twist of fate! It was laughable how moronic you had been before, but this time, for you to see through my scheme and reveal my cards, I must applaud your tremendous growth! It makes me so happy!”

“Grrgh…! Damn you…!”

“Ah, feel free to draw your sword. I intend to do the same.”

“You said this was some kind of badger game…! Then why didn’t you do it yourself?! If you had the same face, then why… why did you involve her in this?!”

Because they didn’t actually have the same face, and in the first place she just blurted out “badger game” without really thinking about it, but she couldn’t reveal any of that now.

“I think you should have realized, but acting is not my forte. However, for her, she’s honest at her core, so she was better at it. She built up a lot of stress, though, so I won’t have her do it anymore.”

“But you were the one who caused that stress!!!”

—Actually, no, if anyone, you were, Wayne.

But again, there was nothing to gain from saying that. After feeding him one last bit of misinformation, she would have him exit the stage.

“I’ve made this forest my domain. I haven’t thought of how exactly yet, but I plan to go out and PK as many players as I can from here on out. And you’ll be the first.”

“Fuck you! If you think I’ll let you get away with this—!”

“You’ll do what, exactly? Are you going to band together with everyone else to kill me? That’s fine by me. If I kill you enough times, one day you’ll be so weak you won’t even be able to lift a finger against anyone else.”

As she made that declaration, Rare raised her hand to the sky. Kenzaki Ichirou, who had been on standby high up in the air, dropped down right into it.

“That sword…”

“Well then, ta ta for now. I’ll be waiting for you.”

Before Wayne could blink, she closed the distance with [Flash Step] and took his head with a [Slash].