Dimension Contender is a fantasy-style RPG built out of the most common clichés there are.
An invasion from the Demon Realm that began without warning.
A Hero born in answer to it, chosen by an oracle.
The cliché that paints the romance and the adventure of joining hands with companions and striking down the Demon God.
Naturally, the protagonist, the Hero, has to overcome every hardship and trial for the sake of world peace.
Of course, from the player's side, it was all a matter of going CLICK— on the other side of a screen.
"Hero. Please strike down the Demon God and bring peace to the Middle Realm."
"Pardon?"
"You must pierce the Demon God's heart with this Holy Sword."
"Me?"
"Yes."
"Why?"
[Main Quest: Prevent the destruction of the world!]
Being told to do it in person is a bit of a problem.
***
The release of a spin-off DLC for Dimension Contender.
Naturally, there was no way someone who had enjoyed that game as much as I had wouldn't buy it.
I went to the address that came in the mail and paid at once, and the moment I pressed the play button and opened my eyes.
Oh my, ta-da!
I'd been summoned into the world of the game!
"And that is already a story from ten years ago."
The point in time back then was the start of the main scenario, not the DLC.
The alliance formed between the Middle Realm and the Heavenly Realm to resist the Demon Realm's invasion.
What was born of that alliance was me. The Hero, Yujin.
"I still recall it vividly. The moment I handed this sword to you."
Belios.
The very one who had given me the Holy Sword ten years ago, and a high angel with four pairs of wings.
"That's a coincidence. It was flashing through my head like a revolving lantern just now too."
"You accomplished a feat close to impossible. Truly, the prophecy was not mistaken."
"Heh……."
Dimension Contender is a thoroughly trite game.
Back in the day I liked that trite flavor, actually. It felt classic.
Once I became the Hero myself, though, it wasn't.
Look at it even now.
I went to all the trouble of killing the final boss, and then, as if he'd been waiting for it, didn't he go and shank me in the back?
And with the very Holy Sword that had walked the whole journey with me, no less.
The so-called "true mastermind" cliché.
There's no need to be trite in this particular way.
"Thanks to you, the god's resurrection has been brought closer. All of this is thanks to you, Yujin."
"Kurgh……."
SHLUCK—as the sword slid free, blood poured out of me like a broken faucet.
I had already emptied out every drop of strength in the final battle against the Demon God, so self-healing was out of the question.
But instead of forcing the wound shut, I stared at the something occupying one corner of my vision.
[Main Quest: Prevent the destruction of the world!]
The main quest I hadn't forgotten even once in the past ten years.
'Come to think of it, even in the game I never once saw a notice that the main quest had been cleared after killing the Demon God.'
In the game, killing the Demon God rolled the ending credits and that was that.
I hadn't thought much of it at the time. So this was the inside story?
Just then, another system window rose up.
[Spin-off DLC: The First Step.]
[Play? Y/N]
"Heh heh."
This crazy game.
It shows me this only after the main story is over?
This, at the end of a ten-year journey?
It was absurd and ridiculous, but it didn't matter.
"What is so funny?"
"Just. All of it."
Belios stood there looking down at me with lofty arrogance, as though he stood above every living thing.
But the bastard didn't know the system existed. Nor how I had grown strong.
I'd hidden it on purpose.
This fucking racist. I knew from the first time I saw him, from the way he kept his eyes narrowed like someone had slit them open.
This bastard, I figured, had something going on.
"Is that so…… It is quite all right, Yujin. I shall remember your name. Through your sacrifice, the world will be sustained once more."
"Even with all those victims left out of it?"
The Heavenly Realm's invasion had already begun.
The things that had descended from the sky on angels' wings were ravaging at will a Middle Realm worn ragged by its long war with the Demon Realm.
But the victims born of that were only a fraction.
If even the war with the Demon Realm had been part of those bastards' sketch, then didn't that make the ones sacrificed during the war victims as well?
"Yes. The ruin of the Demon Realm and the Middle Realm. They are indispensable sacrifices for the birth of the god. That is surely why the god sent down a being such as you."
Shouldn't someone at least hear the opinions of the ones being sacrificed?
But I hadn't been granted enough time for that sort of chat.
"Then I shall take it now. That possibility you hold."
SWISH—
I would die anyway if he left me alone, yet apparently he needed something beyond that.
The bastard sent out a blow that would sever my breath entirely.
However.
"I'm not going quietly."
Now I used the move I had kept hidden.
CRUNCH—
I bit down on the capsule I'd hidden between my teeth.
Its contents were none other than the Demon God's blood.
"What……!"
A power not permitted to the people of the Middle Realm, who used mana.
Magic power.
And the Demon God's blood, the source of that magic power, filled my body with it in the blink of an eye.
As though it had been there from the very beginning.
Though it was no more than a single drop, it not only restored a moment's vitality to my dying body, it granted me strength beyond that.
"Die."
BOOOOOOM!
When I thrust out my blood-soaked fist, an explosion of magic power shot forth.
I didn't even know how to use the unfamiliar energy, so it was a blow I had simply let erupt.
Perhaps because he hadn't expected it, Belios failed to dodge my last thrashing struggle completely.
"GRAAAGH—!"
His shoulder sprayed blood like my own heart was doing.
Below it, nothing remained.
Heh. So one measly arm was all I took.
"You…… to the very last!"
It was a shame, but killing him had never been my goal.
It would have been nicer if it had worked out that way.
My real goal was the portal that only I could see, the one that had appeared the instant I chose Yes.
And it had formed directly behind Belios.
As though it were telling me to clear him out of the way and come here, the portal hung open, and I squeezed out the last of my strength and charged toward it.
Perhaps judging it a follow-up attack, Belios drew back.
"Screw you, bastard."
I stretched my middle finger out at him while he was flustered.
His next attack did take my wrist off, but.
"Heh heh."
He couldn't finish me as I was sucked into the portal.
All he'd get to look at was a middle finger lying abandoned on the ground.
Imagining that was funny, but.
I couldn't carry the thought any further.
My vision blacked out, and my consciousness sank deep below the surface.
[Player 'Yujin' has died.]
***
Dimension Contender opens with subtitles scrolling up over a black screen.
A short explanation of the world, and of what sort of being the player is.
Rather like the famous intro of St*r Wars.
A similar sight unfolded before my eyes now.
[The ruin of the Demon Realm and the Middle Realm, wrought by the Heavenly Realm's machinations.]
[All of it was the Heavenly Realm's scheme.]
[But hope still remains.]
[The First Step.]
[Return to the time before all of this began, and prevent the ruin of the Demon Realm.]
DING!
[Main quest changed.]
[Main Quest: Prevent the ruin of the Demon Realm!]
[We wish you success. Yujin.]
[Regressing one hundred years into the past.]
Notices popped up one after another, like society shoving an unfair contract at a fresh new hire.
And so.
I was born again.
"Waaah."
In a world regressed a full hundred years before the era I had lived in.
"A baby."
I had become the Demon God's son.
***
Sixteen years had passed since the time regression.
That was more than enough time to understand the situation I was in.
I'd been summoned into the world of a game while living on modern Earth in the first place.
Accepting ridiculous situations like this was one of the things I was good at.
Of course, even I needed about a week.
And the conclusion I reached after a week of brooding as a newborn was this.
'Fuck, I need to get stronger.'
That was all there was to it.
Go to the world of a hundred years ago and stop the ruin of the Demon Realm?
Why me?
That thought crossed my mind too.
But in the end I had already been dragged into the center of this world, and lounging around would lead to no ending but death.
And above all.
'The Heavenly Realm. Those sons of bitches.'
My hunger for revenge against those bastards was the biggest thing of all.
In fact, I'd spent most of that week working out exactly how to beat them to death.
What? Die for the resurrection of a god?
I don't even know the bastard's face?
'You bastards are the ones who made me a Hero.'
Oracle, my ass.
They summoned me while I was living perfectly well on Earth, and what they had to say was that I should go give the Demon God a good whack.
So I was thrown onto the battlefield and worked into the ground for ten years.
'I won the war for them. I killed the Demon God for them.'
I did all of it for them!
And what came back was betrayal.
That journey wasn't for the sake of some trite ending like that.
So for the past sixteen years I'd held out on pure spite and guts.
But everything in this world has an order to it.
"The Heavenly Realm bastards only moved in earnest right after the Demon Realm invaded the Middle Realm."
Yet the system was telling me to stop the ruin of the Demon Realm.
'The ruin of the Demon Realm…….'
In the history I had originally come from, the Demon Realm was destroyed by the "Void."
The Void, a third dimension beyond the universe where nothing but emptiness existed.
According to the game's lore, the things that dwelled there flung themselves endlessly at other dimensions to devour them.
The reason was nothing grand. To make them walk the road of ruin, just as they did.
Pure evil must be a phrase coined for those bastards.
'And the Demon Realm was the dimension that took their attacks on the front line.'
But was the Void really the only reason for its ruin?
Remembering how the Heavenly Realm, those bastards, invaded the Middle Realm as if they'd been waiting for it, the Demon Realm's ruin might have been their scheme too.
Judging by the system telling me to prevent it, that wasn't a hopeless notion either.
'Anyway…….'
Just as I'd resolved back in my newborn days, I had to grow stronger.
Because there were things, exactly like the ones in front of me, that weren't content to destroy the Demon Realm and meant to invade the Middle Realm as well.
DING!
[Sub Quest: Hunt the Void parasites on the castle outskirts!]
[Hunt target 29/30]
[Quest Reward: KP 100]
Iron Boar.
The name of a wild boar with a body the size of one of those boulders you'd find at any local landmark.
A demonic beast marked by horns hard as steel and muscles that looked ready to burst.
But as the system window said, it had already been eroded by the Void.
"They never get sick of it."
Barely a day went by without them wandering all the way out to the area where I lived to raise hell.
Quest aside, having monsters like that swarming around where I lived was hardly a welcome thing.
When I planted myself squarely in front of it, the Boutan, having spotted its prey, scraped roughly at the ground with its hind hooves.
"What is this, am I a bullfighter now?"
I'd heard ordinary Iron Boars weren't that enormous, and that this was the Void's erosion at work.
Of course, the ones I'd seen before the regression were that size as standard, so there was nothing to marvel at.
SQUEEEEEE—!!
In that brief contest of nerves, the beast's patience ran out first.
From its side, that was only natural.
A tiny human it could gulp down in one bite standing there blankly glaring at it. Of course that would be outrageous.
And just as its monstrous bulk came flying at me like a battering ram.
VWOOOOM…….
A certain "energy" stirred inside my body.
It moved along the road I had made with tremendous violence, raced through my body, and erupted out of my outstretched fist.
The energy that had blown off one of Belios's arms before the time regression.
Magic power.
It had now settled inside my body in place of mana, and it slammed into the Iron Boar's skull.
And then.
BLAAAAAM—!!
The boar's face, as large as a human torso, burst, and bloody water pattered down in every direction.
At the same moment.
DING!
[Sub Quest: Hunt the Void parasites on the castle outskirts!]
[Quest complete.]
[Reward: KP 100 granted.]
Karma Point.
I felt the karma I'd earned piling up in one corner of my soul.
And when I turned my gaze to one side of my vision…….
[KP Held: 100,091]
"Finally."
Sixteen years.
The time had come to spend the points I'd gathered over sixteen years, never once turning down even the pettiest quest.
But I couldn't use them here, on this spot.
"Tsk. Guess I'll settle for this today."
And as I turned my back.
SCRAMBLE—!
I felt the gazes that had been watching me from here and there scatter all at once.
It was a fairly familiar sort of thing.
Ever since I began moving in earnest at twelve, those stares were a given whenever I stepped outside the mansion.
As always, I kept ignoring them and headed in the direction of the mansion.
It still felt far too early to face them.
Before long, the mansion.
The residence of the man who had been my archenemy before the regression, and who was now my father.
The Demon God Enoch.
'No.'
He hadn't ascended to the throne of god yet, so for now he should be called Demon King.
A figure who held one of the seventy-two seats that governed the Demon Realm.
Enoch was returning to this mansion today.
A reunion a full ten years in the making.