Prologue

Prologue

 

DAZZLING LIGHT AWOKE ME. A glowing, technicolor hallway stretched out into the distance. Far ahead lay our destination—no more than a fragile, tiny gleam. A single star on the horizon.

“Hey. You’re not asleep, are you?” someone grumbled behind me.

Whose voice was that? Where even am I?

A holographic display contained information about this strange flight. A steering column sat before me, equipped with more buttons and gauges than I could wrap my head around. I studied that crazy light corridor outside the windows. It seemed to go on forever, but maybe it was just a display too? Nah, it looked way too realistic to be a video.

“Master Hiro?” The next voice was more worried than angry.

Master Hiro? My name is Satou Takahiro. Still, why does that voice sound so familiar?

Footsteps padded toward me.

“Ouch?!” Something smacked me in the head.

“You’ve got some nerve, napping in the cockpit.”

“E-Elma, violence is bad.”

I turned, holding my aching head. Two women stood before me—one angry, one worried, just like their voices.

“Oh!” I gasped. “Now I remember.”

“Remember what?”

Elma. That was the pissed-off one. Long, tapered elf ears poked up out of her fine, silver hair. Those pale locks accentuated her fair skin, slim figure, and modest chest. Despite her elfin appearance, she was decked out in high-tech merc gear from head to toe and kept a laser gun on her hip. Really, the ears were the most elf-like thing about Elma.

She’d ended up on this ship through an unfortunate accident. During a large-scale pirate crackdown, her ship had gone on a rampage and had almost destroyed itself crashing into an imperial vessel. I’d paid off the steep penalty she faced, but it left her so deeply in debt to me that she was working on my ship to pay it off.

“I remember…stuff about you two…and other stuff,” I answered.

“Did you forget about us?” the girl hiding behind Elma asked, looking crestfallen.

“No, no, I’m just too sleepy to think,” I said.

The other girl was Mimi, a bubbly woman with light-brown hair and eyes. She hid adorably behind Elma, which sadly meant I couldn’t see much of her impressive chest. If Elma was modest in that area, Mimi was downright outrageous, like a light cruiser compared to a battleship.

Like Elma, Mimi had fallen on some hard times before becoming a member of this crew. She too had ended up in debt, but in her case, it was due to her parents’ unfortunate deaths. I paid her debt to the colony and gave the poor girl a place on my ship, where she could be safe from life on the streets.

Mimi’s debt didn’t really seem like her fault. Something about the outrageous fees stank of bureaucracy. The colony blamed her parents, but that didn’t check out with me. After silencing a nasty public servant with a wad of cash, I spirited her away from her colony. The whole thing was an unpleasant affair, and I was glad to get Mimi out of there. With the money I earned as a mercenary, I could have easily just supported Mimi on my own, but it didn’t hurt to give her a job on the ship. Thus, she was training to be an operator in charge of our communications.

“Sleepy or not, it’s just plain cruel to forget your own crewmates,” Elma said. “Especially after you keep taking turns with us.”

“Taking turns? That’s not a nice way of describing it,” I said.

“It’s true, though.”

“Well, I can’t deny that.”

I had a…certain kind of relationship with Elma and Mimi.

There was a lot about this universe I didn’t quite get: customs, habits, laws, and so on. So much remained inscrutable to me as a Japanese man. One of the weirdest customs I’d learned was that women on a man’s ship were instantly seen as his mistresses.

Weird, right? It was weird to me too, but what could I do? I was still learning about this place and all its customs, so for now, I had to just go with the flow.

Besides, both Mimi and Elma had joined my crew knowing full well what it meant. I was their best option, and it wasn’t like I’d offered to help just to get in their pants. I truly did want to rescue both of them and build up my crew in the meantime.

Little did I know my kind offers were basically propositions. It didn’t matter what I intended—that was what they heard, and they were both in such dire straits that refusing my offer would leave their lives and bodies in grave danger. Mimi would have been stuck in the slums, passed around by thugs like a toy until she was discarded in some miserable back alley. Elma wouldn’t have fared much better. If she failed to pay her debt, they would have sent her to a prison colony full of former space pirates eager to get their hands on a pretty little mercenary like her.

So, really, they didn’t have many appealing options when I made my offers. That was how we kind of all ended up in a relationship together. You might accuse me of being a monster just trying to use them for sex and, well, I can’t entirely disagree. But hey, they offered themselves freely to me. Would anyone really say no to a cute little shorty and a fiery elf?

Yeah, didn’t think so.

I was no saint. I tended to think with my junk at times like these; no monuments would be erected to honor my pure intentions. I was the kind of guy who always picked the sexy options in video games. Sorry, not sorry.

I began, “Well, if you don’t like being with me—”

“Nobody said that,” Elma interrupted. She turned away, but not quickly enough to hide the flush in her cheeks.

“I like it,” Mimi said, blunt and earnest as ever.

“As do I,” I said. “I love you girls.”

“I love you too!” Mimi chirped.

“Y-yeah, yeah,” Elma muttered.

Mimi beamed at my words, while Elma went on scowling. Aww, they’re so cute.

 

***

 

Well, it’s about time I properly introduce myself. My name is Satou Takahiro, but people in this world know me as Captain Hiro. Might be because I pilot the only ASX-08 Krishna battleship in the whole universe. My Krishna, I call her.

Right now, we were cruising in that very Krishna along the hyperlane that linked the Garnam and Arein systems. It was one of the most common ways of traveling in this universe, where humanity had left its home far behind to explore the vast potential of every star and planet on the endless horizon.

Waking up in a sci-fi universe like that was quite the shock. I came to right here in the Krishna, which I only recognized because it was a ship I’d piloted in a video game. That’s right: before waking up here, I was just some guy who played too much Stella Online, a space game where I could fly around fighting, trading, and making money however I liked.

The reality was quite different. Here, Krishna was one of a kind. Sure, a lot of things about this universe were similar to that of Stella Online—like the ships and products from the game—but there were a number of differences too. While I still had to battle space pirates, all-consuming crystal life-forms and other baddies, none of the star systems on my Galaxy Map matched the ones I knew from Stella Online. There were also a bunch of empires controlling things here that I’d never even heard of in the game.

Confusing didn’t even begin to describe it. In the game, no player had even reached the center of the galaxy, and that meant I had no way to know for sure if this was the same universe or not. It could have simply been so huge that I hadn’t seen this part of it yet. When I checked Earth’s Solar System, for example, I came up totally empty-handed. That didn’t mean much since the players of Stella Online hadn’t found that system yet either.

I figured the best thing I could do after finding myself here was kick back and enjoy it. I had the Krishna, and I could still pilot it. Plus, I had some cash from my in-game life as a mercenary. Might as well make the most of it, right?

It was easy enough to fall back on being a mercenary here as well. With the help of Mimi and Elma, I knocked out scores of space pirates and even played hero during a major galactic scuffle waged by two warring empires.

All that hard work drew some unfortunate attention, though. Lieutenant Serena was as beautiful as she was dangerous, and she had her eye on me for recruitment. That was how we’d ended up in this hyperlane—we were running from Serena and the rest of the colony. I chose the mercenary life in order to be a free agent, after all. I didn’t want to get tied down to the Imperial Fleet. They could complain all they wanted, but I was keeping my freedom.

Besides, I had bigger dreams.

Where did all this fighting lead? For me, hopefully, a nice residential neighborhood on a safe planet. I wanted to get myself a freestanding house with a yard, most importantly so I could taste the sweet nectar of carbonated soda again. I know that sounds crazy, but can you believe there’s no carbonated soda anywhere in this universe? It’s outrageous! A home was my only path toward getting soda again.

Buying a house wouldn’t be cheap, though. For one thing, I’d need landowner rights in the Grakkan Empire. That quickly skyrocketed the price into the hundreds of millions of Ener. That kind of money would take some time to earn, so I might as well enjoy the universe in the meantime.

The girls had their own goals as well. Mimi wanted to savor all the flavors of the galaxy. While she had her sights set on all the delicious, weird, wonderful food the universe had to offer, I secretly hoped to add carbonated soda to her list of conquests.

Finally, Elma wanted to buy back her independence. That entailed repaying her steep debt of 3,000,000 Ener—or 300,000,000 yen—to me. No mean sum. She’d already made 260,000 Ener from our last battle, meaning she might be able to pay back her debt in a year. However, that wouldn’t get her a new ship, so she’d need more than that 3,000,000 Ener to truly regain her freedom.

And that was how this motley crew all ended up on their way to the Arein System, a place renowned for advances in medical technology. I had no idea what we’d encounter there. In fact, everyone in this universe believed I’d lost my memory entirely during a hyperdrive accident. The truth was that I knew nothing about this universe except what was in Stella Online. I couldn’t exactly tell people I was living out a video game, though. Still, that cover story about the memory loss worried Mimi and Elma, hence our decision to head for a system with good medical equipment.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t exactly refuse the treatment. That would only look more suspicious. And maybe there really was something wrong with me. I mean, I still didn’t know how I’d ended up in this place to begin with.

In summation, we’d made our way to the Arein System in search of freedom and medical tech. Yes, just freedom and medical tech. Nothing else, especially not because I was fleeing from a crazy lieutenant with her eyes on me. Nope, not at all.