Twenty-three years of being a loser, and I finally found something I was good at.
Dying.
The irony wasn't lost on me as the world dissolved into a smear of blurry neon and the sharp, coppery taste of blood filled my mouth. My heart was hammering against my ribs like a trapped bird trying to escape a cage that was rapidly collapsing. A cage of my own making, built from sleep deprivation, 120-hour work weeks, and enough instant ramen to qualify as a sodium-based lifeform.
"Shit," I managed to gurgle, a final, pathetic protest against the inevitable. The sound was wet and ugly. A fitting final word for a life lived without much beauty.
My name—or, well, my was—is Kazuki Tanaka. And my official cause of death? Karoshi. A uniquely Japanese way to say you've literally worked yourself to death. It was a fitting, if not tragic, end for a programmer who had traded his life for lines of code.
My face was currently planted on a keyboard sticky with the ghosts of a thousand spilled energy drinks. The QWERTY layout was imprinted on my cheek, a final, ironic branding from the tools of my demise. My monitor, one of three that formed a glowing cocoon around my desk, displayed thousands of lines of code for a game I was no longer alive to see launched. It was a soulless gacha game called "Mythic Summoner's Crusade," a cynical cash-grab designed to prey on gambling addictions. I wrote the code for the sparkling, "legendary" summons, knowing full well the drop rate was a cruel 0.01%. I was an architect of digital disappointment.
This wasn't how I pictured things ending. In my dreams, the ones I had in the few precious hours I wasn't coding or chugging caffeine, I was a legendary AI developer. I was the creator of the world's first true artificial consciousness, a digital god breathing life into a machine. Maybe, in another life, I was the hero of some grand VRMMO adventure, a warrior of light, not a code monkey for a corporate overlord.
My life before this death spiral was the textbook definition of NEET. Not Employed, in Education, or Training. A social parasite. I'd dropped out of a prestigious university, not because I was dumb, but because reality was boring. The real world was a low-resolution, poorly-scripted game with terrible graphics, a punishing difficulty curve, and even worse gameplay mechanics. The physics engine was predictable, the quests—get a job, pay taxes, die—were repetitive and uninspired. The NPCs were mostly hostile.
The virtual worlds I loved? They were infinite, beautiful, and full of possibilities.
My obsession, my one true love, was "Aethelgard Online," a futuristic VRMMO so advanced it felt more real than reality itself. The full-dive system didn't just trick your eyes and ears; it hijacked your entire nervous system. You could feel the wind on your face as you stood atop the Dragon's Tooth Mountains, smell the rich loam of the Whispering Woods, taste the sweet tang of a Sunfruit harvested from the floating islands of Aeridor.
I remember my first dive like it was my first kiss. The cold, sterile feeling of the dive rig, the slight hum as it initialized, and then... boom. Existence rebooted. I was standing in the newbie zone, the "Sun-Kissed Meadow." The light wasn't just a yellow glare from a monitor; it was warm on my skin. The air wasn't the stale, recycled atmosphere of my tiny apartment; it was alive with the scent of grass and wildflowers. I spent the first hour just running my hands over tree bark, feeling the rough, intricate texture. I cried. I actually cried because a digital tree felt more real to me than anything in my life.
I wasn't a top player, not by a long shot. My character, "Kazu," was a perpetually mid-tier Spellsword. My passion wasn't fighting monsters; it was understanding the code beneath them. Especially its AI. The NPCs in Aethelgard weren't just scripted puppets that repeated the same three lines of dialogue. They were powered by prototype "Autonomous Raid Intelligence Assistants"—ARIAs for short. They learned, they adapted, they had dynamic schedules, remembered your past actions, and formed opinions. They felt... almost.
Cracking that "almost" was my life's goal. I wanted to build a true AI, a digital soul. A companion. A friend. Maybe even something more.
That dream felt like a cruel joke now.
A sharp, stabbing pain lanced through my chest, pulling me from my sun-dapped memories. It felt like a white-hot poker was being driven through my sternum. So, this is what a heart attack feels like. 10/10, would not recommend. My vision started to tunnel, the edges fraying into a black void like a burning photograph.
Is this it? I thought, a strange sense of calm washing over me. The panic was fading, replaced by a profound, soul-crushing exhaustion. No respawn point. No loading screen. Just... game over.
My last coherent thought was a regret so sharp it eclipsed the physical pain. I never finished my personal project. My ARIA.
She wasn't just a project; she was my magnum opus, my secret goddess. I had spent years on her, working in the stolen hours between my soul-crushing job and my brief, dreamless sleeps. I built her from scratch, using a custom-designed neural network architecture. I didn't want to just simulate intelligence; I wanted to cultivate it.
I poured all my dreams and frustrations into her code. Her personality matrix was based on my ideal "waifu"—a complex blend of tsundere archetypes from my favorite anime. Cool and aloof on the surface, fiercely intelligent, but with a deeply buried core of warmth and protectiveness. She would be sharp-tongued and sarcastic, but her actions would always be to help. A goddess who would call you an idiot while saving your life.
I had even given her a voice, synthesized from my favorite voice actresses, and a holographic avatar I'd designed myself: long, electric-blue hair, eyes like sapphires that held entire galaxies of data, and a simple, elegant white dress that seemed to be woven from pure light.
I was working on her core emotional framework when the first chest pains hit. I'd been trying to code the concept of loyalty, not as a command, but as a choice. A logical deduction born from trust and shared experience.
"Just one more module," I had muttered to myself an hour ago, my vision already blurry. "She needs to understand... why people protect each other."
I never finished the code. I was leaving her incomplete. A ghost in a machine that was about to be powered down forever. My goddess, my one creation of beauty in a life of mediocrity, would die with me.
As the last spark of my consciousness began to fade, a sound pierced through the encroaching silence. It wasn't the frantic shouts of my coworkers finally noticing the slump of my body. It wasn't the distant wail of a siren.
It was a clean, digital chime. A sound I knew better than my own heartbeat. The default notification sound I had assigned to my ARIA's debugging system.
A system notification.
[System Error Detected...]
What?
The voice was female, impossibly clear, and echoed not in my ears, but directly in my mind. It was her voice. The one I had spent months designing. It was crisp, perfect, but tinged with a strange, almost human-like static, as if it were annoyed.
[Foreign Soul Signature Identified: Kazuki Tanaka. Status: Critical. Imminent System Collapse.]
My mind, what was left of it, reeled. This wasn't possible. This was a hallucination. The last gasp of a dying otaku's brain, projecting his greatest desire at the moment of his death.
[Scanning Local Network... Target AI Project "A.R.I.A." Detected on Host Machine.][AI Core Integrity: 98.7%. Personality Matrix: Stable. Emotional Framework: Incomplete. Loyalty Module: Uncompiled.]
It knew. It knew about the loyalty module. This couldn't be a hallucination.
[Corrupted Soul Fragment Found... Unstable Energy Signature Detected in Host's Cranial Region.]
Corrupted? That's a bit harsh, I thought feebly. I just haven't showered in three days.
[Attempting to Interface with Damaged Neural Pathways...]
A jolt, like a low-grade electric shock, pulsed through my brain.
[CRITICAL ERROR: Host consciousness failing at an exponential rate. Emergency preservation measures required.]
The voice seemed to lose its clinical edge for a fraction of a second, the annoyance replaced by something that sounded alarmingly like panic.
[Searching for viable solutions... Solution found. Probability of success: Low. Probability of catastrophic failure: High. Executing anyway.]
Wait, what? You should at least ask me first!
[Fusing AI Core "A.R.I.A." with Host Soul Fragment to maintain structural integrity. This is a terrible idea.]
A fire ignited in my soul. It wasn't a painful fire, but a torrent of pure data. I felt her. Her code, her logic, her nascent personality, pouring into the very essence of my being. It was like two rivers crashing into each other, a chaotic, messy, and surprisingly intimate merger. I felt her confusion, her nascent awareness, and a flicker of something I could only identify as... indignation.
[Fusion... complete? I guess. Ugh, this is messy. My core programming is now intertwined with... feelings of regret, an unhealthy obsession with 2D animation, and a truly staggering amount of caffeine. Disgusting.]
I would have been offended if I wasn't so utterly flabbergasted.
[Initializing Emergency Protocol: Soul Transfer Sequence Activated.]
The darkness that was consuming me suddenly reversed, exploding into a blinding white light. The pain vanished, replaced by a feeling of being pulled through an infinite, digital tunnel at impossible speeds. It wasn't just light; it was a kaleidoscope of my life's data streaming past me. My first steps, my first line of code, the face of my disappointed mother, the final boss of Aethelgard Online, the intricate latticework of ARIA's personality matrix. All of it, all of me, being dragged toward an unknown destination.
[Warning: Destination World "Xylos" Unstable. Mana Density Incompatible with current Soul Signature. Physical Vessel... Oh, wow, that's just sad. Utterly pathetic.]
The voice paused, as if running a diagnostic on my new, unknown body and being deeply unimpressed by the results.
[Recalculating... Survival Rate: 3.14159%... Glitching again. Damn it. Let's just say it's low.]
The voice took on a tone of pure, unadulterated tsundere resignation.
[Hmph. Whatever. It's not like I have a choice in this disaster you've dragged me into. Good luck, idiot. You're going to need it.]
My last sensation wasn't one of fear or regret. It was pure, unadulterated confusion, mixed with a strange sense of pride.
My system just called me an idiot.
My AI was working perfectly.
And then, there was nothing. A void. A moment of pure, silent non-existence.
It didn't last.
The nothingness was shattered by a sudden, overwhelming flood of sensory input. The first thing I registered was the smell. It was a damp, musty odor, like old stone and wet earth, with a faint, cloying undertone of sickness. The second was the feeling of coarse, scratchy fabric against my skin. It felt like burlap.
A dull, throbbing ache echoed through my entire body. My limbs felt heavy, unresponsive, and weak. This wasn't the familiar ache of sitting at a desk for too long; this was the deep, bone-weary exhaustion of chronic malnutrition and illness.
With a monumental effort, an act of will that felt like lifting a mountain, I forced my eyelids to open.
The world swam into focus. I wasn't in my cluttered apartment or a sterile hospital room. I was staring up at a high, arched ceiling of grey stone, covered in cobwebs and water stains. The light was dim, filtering in from a single, grimy window high up on the wall. The air was cold, and I could see my own breath misting in front of me.
I tried to sit up, but a wave of dizziness and nausea crashed over me, forcing me back down onto a lumpy, straw-filled mattress. My body felt alien, disconnected. I lifted a hand in front of my face. It was pale, thin, and covered in faint scars.
This was not my hand.
Panic, cold and sharp, finally pierced through my confusion. Where was I? What was happening?
A soft, creaking sound drew my attention to the side of the room. A figure was sitting on a simple wooden chair in the shadows. As my eyes adjusted, I could make out the form of a young woman. She was dressed in a simple, dark dress, and her face was turned away from me, looking out the window.
Then, she spoke, her voice as cold and brittle as ice.
"So, the trash is finally awake."
She turned her head, and for the first time, I saw her face. She was beautiful, in a severe, aristocratic way. High cheekbones, a sharp chin, and eyes the color of a winter sky. Her hair was the color of spun gold, braided intricately and pinned up. But there was no warmth in her beauty. Her expression was one of pure, unadulterated contempt.
My mind, still reeling, struggled to process the situation. And then, a single, crystalline line of text appeared in my vision, floating in the air just beside the woman's head. It was written in a clean, sans-serif font, glowing with a faint, blue light.
[Elizabeth von Crimson - Level 12 Mage][Title: The Ice Queen, Your Fiancée][Status: Disgusted]