Esther de Baronia - Chapter 1.3

Somehow he came to see her and talked to her, but she didn’t change as usual.

It was still Karon’s monologue, similar to the way a button is pressed to make a gesture.

It’s not that he’s bored, but he can’t seem to disguise the coldness that he has been secretly feeling.

Is it time to stop?

He opens the menu screen and looks at the clock to see that it’s almost time for maintenance.

During maintenance, the entire server is shut down, so if you’re logged in, you’ll be forcibly kicked out.

Five minutes to go.

He doesn’t feel the need to bother to log out, so he sits deep in his chair and shuts his eyes.

He had achieved everything he set out to do, and he had everything he wished to gain.

He has been building up the country with Rushka through the terrible rush of war in the beginning.

It was so overpopulated that there was no strategy wiki, and he had to look around on his own to find out what he didn’t know.

He doesn’t even want to remember how long it took him to collect all the Ancient Rarities that he found.

There are many times when he looks at a demon and thinks it’s too poor to be a part of what he wants.

His body refuses to accept that he’s determined never to return to it.

It’s a useless operation and he finds every maintenance depressing, but for once he’s grateful for that.

In the future, he knows he will continue to be quite annoyed by maintenance for several hours while playing after coming home from work, so he thought he shouldn’t let this anger get the better of him and move on to another game.

“…you look tired.”

He uttered a strangely targeted fixed phrase and wondered if he could communicate, but he laughed and waved his hand in the air.

“Well, ……, hey, what’s the timing?”

Two minutes left.

There was no time to waste, but the NPC had declared war on him, and a message appeared in his field of vision with a cute little beeping sound.

“Hmm?”

But the message is garbled or something, and he can’t read some parts of it.

What? or “*” in the text, and then the moment arrives.

It’s a momentary pain, but it lingers in his head, and he wrinkles his brows and presses his temples to see what is happening.

The next moment.

“Aaaaahhhh!!!”

Suddenly, an intense headache races through his brain and he starts rolling around on the floor with the whites of his eyes.

The electric shock that hit him without warning is like an iron stake being driven through the back of his eyeballs.

His  head feels like it’s going to explode, he feels like he’s going to melt and collapse, the intense heat and pain runs down his spine and through his body. Then, his body starts to convulse.

Every VR headset has a safety feature. After three hours of continuous play, the player is allowed to take a break for an hour, and if the total number of hours played in a day exceeds nine, the game is disabled until the next day.

The game is designed to make sure that enthusiastic players get enough sleep and food to prevent problems.

And as a device that directly affects the brain, it is naturally equipped to detect any health problems.

If there is a problem with the player’s health, restrictions can be imposed to prevent accidents.

However, none of this applies to Karon.

He should have made himself turn off the power and stopped playing, but he continues the game, even though it was giving him a splitting headache.

Death.

That is the only thing that is clear in his headache.

He shakes violently, his limbs tense, and he feels his consciousness fading away into a blank.

The last thing he saw was a string of reddish-black letters and the beautiful sky-blue hair of his second-in-command, weeping against his own body.

On that day, a game was suddenly shut down.

The management couldn’t care less about a game that has three servers with the lowest player population in the world and only double digit logins at all times, so the servers were shut down without notice.

The reason is unknown.

The apology from the management said that it was a virus or a problem with the server, but no one knows for sure.

All players who were logged in were automatically forced to log out, whereupon an unprecedented situation in the history of VR occurred without anyone’s knowledge.

The brain of the only player who was still logged in was somehow triggered to stop functioning.

Experts later suggested that this was due to the fact that the servers were shut down in a state where the system was out of order, skipping the necessary processes to terminate the service, but it was not clear if that was the case.

It is too soon for the management to find out, and they are preparing for the next production without a care in the world.

They have no idea that a man’s life has ended in a small flat.

That would be the end of the story.

But the story doesn’t end with the death of one man.

A mysterious phenomenon in the electronic world, which no one knows about, starts the next story.

The story that closed with the death of the poor man has turned into the story of the poor king and his companions.