Supporting Characters in the Game are Obsessed

The Elf Doctor living in the Cyberpunk world said to me.

“It’s depression.”

“Huh?”

The Elf Doctor seemed used to my reaction and continued talking without even giving me a glance.

“Statistically, more than 75% of citizens living in Neon City feel depressed at some point. So you don’t need to be too surprised.”

“Oh, is that so?”

“Of course, if you’re truly diagnosed with depression, your social score will drop, and you may face disadvantages.”

So what then?

I frowned at the doctor’s vague way of speaking.

A low social score means you get penalized in the systemic censorship like some communist country back in my previous life.

This was not something I could let slide.

Whether I had eye implant surgery or not, a green light flickered mechanically along the doctor’s iris.

“First, here’s a precision question. When did you first think you were depressed?”

“I never felt that way!”

I’ve never felt that way; what is this?

Of course, for the sake of my precious social score, I had to ensure I had never felt depressed.

In fact, any normal citizen living in the extreme ‘capitalism’ and reckless ‘transhumanism’ of Neon City would have answered just like me.

Dropping social score?

Absolutely not.

For example, if my loan interest suddenly multiplied by five times, I’d be in a situation where I could only say, – “That’s not so bad, right?”

Whether the doctor cared about my feelings or not (and he probably did), he continued impassively.

“Feel free to think back to your childhood. There’s no need to overthink it.”

“…No, that’s not it.”

It wasn’t that the question was hard; it was that this situation could seriously mess up my social score.

My claim of not being depressed was just brushed aside cleanly.

“……Hah.”

What a headache.

It seemed this was not a situation I could just pass by.

Childhood, huh….

Thinking back, it had been quite some time.

After all, I had ended up living in a game world.

1. Living in a Game World (1)

It was summer.

“…Kya. I cleared it.”

On the screen in front of me, the ending credits were rolling up.

The names of many people who contributed to the game scrolled by.

But I didn’t have the luxury to enjoy the ending credits.

I stretched my arms and leaned back in my chair.

Crack. With that sound, my hazy mind cleared up a bit.

“……What time is it? Woah, it’s morning?”

Sunlight streamed through a crack in the curtains.

So, the time I spent was….

About 20 hours.

…I really went crazy just playing games.

What I had left was….

A wrecked condition, a disrupted day-night cycle, a sense of guilt for wasting the weekend, and a few lost strands of sanity.

Hmm.

It was a very fulfilling weekend.

I might have played for about 20 hours straight, but the actual playtime was even longer.

Because for a whole month, I had been sacrificing weekends just to play the game.

The game genre was cyberpunk… it was long, but.

It was slightly lacking in essence.

A cyberpunk world where different species like Orcs and Elves coexist.

I found that part more fun to think about, but.

Also, there was hardly any magic to call it arcane punk.

Of course, the big reason I got into it was the 50% discount.

Anyway.

That month focused solely on gaming had further shrunk my already small social circle.

But I had no regrets.

Thanks to that, I was now looking at the ending credits before me.

I declared it a victory for myself.

[THANKS FOR PLAYING…… AND─.]

While I was momentarily spaced out, new letters appeared on the monitor.

The descending credits had eventually ended.

Only one sentence remained, thanking me for enjoying the game.

I couldn’t tell why it said AND instead of END.

Sure. I played for 20 consecutive hours because it was entertaining.

But I was too tired to soak in the afterglow of clearing the game.

Ugh, my eyes hurt.

Gently massaging my bloodshot eyes that had started to sting long ago, I spammed the Enter key with one hand.

“I’m definitely going to sleep, no matter what happens.”

[A new mode has been unlocked.]

“I’ll just check this out before sleeping.”

Well, I couldn’t help it.

A mode only available after clearing it?

My inner gamer shouted to just check out the new mode and then hit the sack.

I had originally planned on doing a second playthrough anyway.

So it’s not a stretch to think of checking it out.

But since I was sleepy.

It was too much to play right now.

I’ll just create a new character and sleep.

Naturally, creating a female character was the norm, but since I’d already played the first round as a female, I decided to go with a male this time.

Thinking I’d go with a male character, I didn’t have to worry about customizing the appearance.

I quickly skipped through the basic settings.

Let’s see.

“Is this it?”

The setting for determining the character’s background or starting location, ‘scenario’ setting.

Among them, one choice popped out that I hadn’t seen at the start.

[ – Challenge – Outsider of the City]

[ – You are an unwanted being in the city. You awaken in an old garbage dump of the city… SKIP]

Yeah. Skipping right away.

I felt sorry for the planner who must have worked hard to build the game’s setting, but I wasn’t curious about the background settings right now.

If I really wanted to know, I could just check it again tomorrow before gaming.

It wouldn’t do to bother with setting details when I was this sleepy.

I quickly checked the ‘attributes’ section that had the most significant impact on gameplay.

“Weakness, frailness, animal rivalry, weakness to drugs, weak concealment… ugh.”

They really made the character a total loser.

To make matters worse, along with the negative attributes I mentioned, more bad traits kept piling up.

At least the absence of a trait like “Chrome Allergy” was a relief, right?

Was this telling me to go for a second playthrough?

Or not?

Was this the inner M tendencies of the creator manifesting in the game?

Heck, even when I tried to delete the attached negative traits by moving the mouse, they wouldn’t vanish.

All I saw were concise letters saying ‘This scenario does not allow for attribute modification.’

…This isn’t how it ends, right?

Surely they wouldn’t leave me a total loser character.

Of course, there was no rule saying I had to select this scenario for the second playthrough.

Still, since this scenario was nominally given only to those who cleared the first round, I couldn’t ignore it.

Scrolling down, finally, I spotted yellow letters indicating positive attributes, different from the red indicating negative ones.

There seemed to be numerous positive attributes, but.

The most prominent was.

“……Exceptional magical talent?”

Oh.

Now this was appealing.

“Can’t resist a concept play.

But it turned out being a Wizard was actually possible in this game.

As I said earlier, I hardly saw the word magic while playing through.

I didn’t think I could play as a wizard until after clearing the first playthrough.

I would look up strategies tomorrow.

For now, I just wanted to create the character and wake up to jump back in the game at dawn.

With those thoughts in mind, I pressed the start button for the game.

*

And when I came to my senses,

I was standing in the middle of a garbage dump.

Moreover, my body had transformed to that of a 10-year-old child, and though I initially thought it was a dream,

Sadly, it was not a dream.

To be honest, I was a little excited at first.

Getting transported into the game I was playing, isn’t that a common plot in novels?

Of course, that excitement didn’t last long.

Only about a day.

Without so much as food, not even a sip of water,

I had to flee from the killer drones cleaning up the organic waste of the garbage dump.

And when I finally met someone who could talk, I was hit once, without anything in my pockets, and then rolled down to the mountain of trash.

That snapped me back to reality.

What crime did I commit to suffer like this; even now, I don’t know.

Wouldn’t sleeping right after creating the second character have avoided all this?

I’ve pondered this over dozens of times, but no answer came easy.

I had to survive, game or not.

And thus, I managed to survive for about 10 years.

I can’t be precise on the time since I went back and forth in the garbage dump for years after that.

It wasn’t a situation where I could care about time.

In any case, in that process….

I tried to connect with the game’s protagonist to drink from the straw (there was a protagonist)

Because of all the hardships, I managed to escape the garbage dump and enter the heart of the game’s story, Neon City.

Ignoring the eyes of my surroundings who looked down on me as I joined the protagonist’s team, I piggybacked off the flow like a sponge.

Finally, I advanced the main storyline and even succeeded in saving the almost doomed city.

(Of course, about 95% of that was completed by the protagonist alone.)

Now that it’s all over,

I just needed to live peacefully and happily.

“Hmm…. I’m thinking I might ultimately be diagnosed with grade-3 depression, though.”

“Ah.”

…When I reflect on it like this,

I really wouldn’t be surprised if I fell into depression.

But aside from that, avoiding a professional diagnosis of depression was the correct move.

Even if I got a clean bill of health, it would stay on record forever, and they wouldn’t easily let me recover from a dropped social score.

It was something that could disrupt my happy-happy (subjective) life in Neon City.

And I had learned a ‘magic’ to solve this situation a while back.

Among all the magic I could use,

The most useful and most utilized magic.

Checking the Elf Doctor’s response, who was somewhat fidgeting and not uploading the diagnostic result, I was almost 100% certain it would work.

That was.

I pulled out the magic (a data chip filled with credits) I prepared for situations like this.

I hid it with my body from the sealed surveillance camera I had already checked.

Right away, bribery magic.

The Elf Doctor placed the electronic document he had been holding on top of it without changing his expression, as if he was very accustomed to it.

“Ahem, cough. I will notify you of the results via message later.”

“Oh dear, thank you for your hard work.”

People say elves don’t take bribes, which is a strange rumor, but.

Not at all.

It works quite well.

Elves living in Neon City have already tasted both the bitter and sweet.

Most of the elves I encountered didn’t fit the usual image of elves people assume.

Perhaps the rumors spread by lower-ranked citizens living in the lower classes created that image of elves.

Still, being an elf.

At the entrance of the hospital sat a bonsai, a rare sight in Neon City.

But upon closer inspection, it turned out to be a mechanical decoration.

With an air purifier function attached as well.

At this point, I recognized that the doctor was sullied by the mundane world.

I still struggled to understand the sentiments of these city dwellers.

“Well then, I’ll be taking my leave.”

Since the situation was resolved, there was no need to waste any more time.

The Elf Doctor probably wanted me to hurry back too.

So he could check the data chip filled with credits.

Before I knew it, the Elf Doctor stood up to send me off. Was it the effect of magic?

Being a wizard saved me.

“And by the way.”

“What?”

“You seem to be under a lot of stress. It might help to do something you enjoy without thinking.”

“Ah…. Something I want to do, huh. Thank you.”

“Not at all. Enjoy your Neon City.”

Thus, my first tense mental diagnosis concluded.

*

[…So, are you saying you plan to just game for a week without going outside?]

“Yeah.”

[……. ]

The doctor says to do that.

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