EX1 — Things Were Fun Back Then.

"I'm home."

The entryway she stepped into after opening the door was wrapped in darkness and silence, and the voice announcing her return vanished into the gloom without an echo. She already knew no reply would come. After all, the front door had been locked.

For Nekoma Ririka, this was nothing unusual.

Her parents treated Ririka kindly, but her father frequently went overseas for work, and her mother, employed at a hospital, was rarely home at this hour. Ririka understood this and accepted that both of them were working hard for her sake.

Even so, when she went straight from school to cram school nearly every day and returned to an empty house after eight at night, there were moments when she no longer understood what all of this effort was for.

Ririka ate the meal that had been left for her in the kitchen without bothering to heat it, took a shower, changed her clothes, and then shut herself away in her room.

Next year would be her entrance exams. She didn’t want to disappoint her parents’ expectations, yet she couldn’t clearly grasp why she herself was studying or why she was aiming for university in the first place. Was it just to make her parents happy? Because she believed her teacher’s claim that it would broaden her future options? None of it felt certain. And when she thought about how the days kept slipping by while she left something truly important behind, an unbearable anxiety welled up inside her.

She was tired today.

She knew she should probably study again—there was a mock exam at school tomorrow—but having just come back from cram school, she couldn’t bring herself to do it.

After a brief moment of hesitation, Ririka opened her laptop and launched a game.

Warfare Universe.

Ririka liked games, but this one was an overseas sci-fi war simulation—a genre she had never been particularly interested in before.

What sparked her interest was one of her cram school instructors.

That part-time instructor, who commuted from a neighboring prefecture, didn’t seem especially devoted to his job. Unlike the other instructors, he didn’t focus strictly on entrance exam preparation, and he would quickly go off on tangents, talking about things that had nothing to do with the lesson. Because of that, his classes weren’t popular. At first, Ririka had only attended because she couldn’t get into the classes taught by the more sought-after instructors.

Although it was supposed to be an English class, it often turned into introductions to classic overseas games or stories about the state of the game industry. Surprisingly, Ririka found those talks far more engaging than she had expected. They became a precious breather in her suffocating days of exam preparation, and even though the class was only held twice a week, she began attending it regularly.

His lessons were sloppy enough that it was questionable whether he was actually good at English, but he was obsessively knowledgeable about foreign games and movies. Before she realized it, Ririka had started looking forward to his classes—to listening to his stories.

One day, during a break, Ririka ran into that instructor in the hallway and mentioned that she liked games too, and that she’d been really into an MMORPG until recently. He told her that he’d logged into it once himself, but that he was currently hooked on another game. The one he recommended was Warfare Universe.

After confirming that she could afford the cheaper version without DLC using her allowance, Ririka bought electronic money at a convenience store on her way home from cram school. She then purchased and installed the download version through the PC client. Since it was a genre she wasn’t familiar with, she struggled at first, but she played a little each day. About a week later, she learned that the materials needed to build battleships could only be obtained through online matches, so she hastily threw together a fleet and jumped straight into online play.

She’d heard it was a masterpiece that had sold extremely well overseas, but perhaps there weren’t many domestic players. Matchmaking took a long time, and when she finally found an opponent, they appeared to be a highly experienced player.

She’d get the materials even if she lost.

With nothing to lose, Ririka started the match. As expected, her opponent was far more skilled. She was overwhelmed without being able to mount any real resistance and was quickly pushed into a losing position, left with nothing to do but wait for defeat. She already knew she was going to lose, so she wished it would end quickly—but the Leviathan-class battleship she had set as her flagship was absurdly durable, and the match dragged on without reaching a conclusion.

As she sighed and looked away from the PC screen, a message notification appeared on her smartphone.

"Sword Blaze is shutting down today, so let’s all get together one last time and say goodbye."

It was from a middle school friend she used to play an MMORPG with.

"What do you mean, ‘say goodbye’…?"

Ririka tossed her phone onto the bed. Those ties had been severed long ago—and it was them who had cut them.

At first, it really had been fun. Ririka, her friend, and another girl they had met in-game around the same time had formed a three-person party and gone on adventures together. But one day, a boy joined the party, and the atmosphere changed. He turned out to be the boyfriend of the girl they’d met in the game.

"Hey, could you not get so chummy with someone else’s boyfriend?"

Every time the boy spoke to Ririka, the girl grew irritated, and the mood within the party gradually turned tense. Ririka had never gone out of her way to talk to him, yet the girl’s dissatisfaction kept building. Before she knew it, even her friend—who had grown closer to that girl than to Ririka—began blaming her.

Your character’s way too calculated. It’s like some gross otaku old man’s fetish. What’s with the way you talk—are you kidding me?

And then, Ririka was kicked out of the party.

After she was left on her own, a strange man who mistook her for a fan of some anime began harassing her. Little by little, Ririka stopped logging into the game—Sword Blaze Online.

It wasn’t as though they’d suddenly had a change of heart and wanted to apologize. More likely, they just wanted to make her the butt of a joke.

Even so, knowing that a game she’d once been so deeply absorbed in—one she’d poured real time into—was ending its service left her feeling a little lonely. If today was truly the last day, maybe it would be fine to log in one final time. And if she happened to run into them, perhaps she could say a word or two.

On her PC screen, her fleet was still being bathed in enemy fire. She switched the display to windowed mode and launched Sword Blaze Online. Both games were set to low graphics, so it should be manageable. When she entered the password she had almost forgotten and logged in, a familiar landscape—one she hadn’t seen in a long time—appeared on the screen.

As expected, the other three weren’t there. They were probably playing somewhere else, or perhaps this had all just been a prank. It didn’t matter. If today was the last day, she would walk around this nostalgic world for a while.

"A lot happened, but… things were fun back then."

As Ririka murmured and looked up at the sky, it seemed to flicker. Maybe even on low settings, running two games at once was too much. Would it force-close on her? Ririka glanced around—

And then she noticed.