When the intermittent noise and the ringing in my ears finally cut out, my consciousness snapped awake in an instant.
I opened my eyes, and a plaza lined with medieval-style stone buildings, surrounded by greenery and centered on a large fountain, leaped into view.
It’s even more realistic than the trial version! Even the smells are reproduced-this is a world no different from reality!
After finishing my look around, I lowered my gaze to my own body.
Ohh! A body with bulging muscles! Thick arms, thick legs, a swollen chest, and abs chiseled to perfection!
This is exactly the build of a musclehead warrior! Yeah yeah, nice!
The link with my avatar character moves without any discrepancy.
It really feels like my own body.
That’s right! What about my face? Have I properly become my avatar character?
I hurried over to the plaza fountain and looked at my face reflected on the water’s surface.
I’ve got horns, short black hair, red eyes…
Wait, I’m not handsome-it’s the same face as the real me. Just with horns and red eyes.
It’s the face of a virgin mob character3…
The noise was pretty bad, so maybe my biometric data was read on its own and caused a discrepancy in the avatar modeling data.
Still, I expected a more game-like model, but the realistic facial modeling is impressive as expected of V.F.L.O.
Well, it’s a closed beta, so I’ll hope the bug gets fixed by the official release.
While I was feeling let down by the quality of my avatar with its near-real face, a menu window popped up in front of me.
The menu window’s contents are Status, Skills, Inventory, Party Members, Quests, Logout, and Help.
It’s a relief that the in-game time is displayed in the corner of my vision.
It’s currently 11 o’clock.
Also, Quests is glowing, so that must mean I should select it.
When I press the glowing Quest from the menu window, a message floats up.
[Tutorial 1: Please touch a save crystal]
A tutorial quest… so it is.
That being the case, this isn’t an online server with other players yet-it’s a solo server for the tutorial.
Finish this, and then I’ll be connected to the online server-that kind of flow.
A marker pointing to the destination appears in my vision.
The blue crystal floating on the pedestal in front of the fountain seems to be the save crystal.
I immediately moved over and touched the blue crystal.
[The save crystal allows you to save your game progress and log out, and the last crystal you touched becomes your respawn point upon death. Regarding the death penalty, please be careful as your HP, MP, and ST maximum values will decrease for a certain period of time.]
Okay, okay, so I should make sure to touch the crystals in towns and places I move to.
I intend to avoid the disaster of being sent back to the starting town when I die.
[Reward: 1,000 Regin added]
Tutorial reward get! Money is important.
I pick up the leather bag lying on the ground and look inside.
So this is the Regin1 currency usable commonly in the V.F.L.O. world.
They look like pretty small coins.
No wait, I forgot my hands have gotten huge.
Compared to my enlarged hands, they’re about the size of a 500-yen coin, I’d say.
Starting money is precious, so I need to make sure I don’t drop it.
Clutching the leather bag of coins carefully, the next message window opened.
[Tutorial 2: Let’s register with a guild! ① Adventurer ② Producer ③ Clergy ④ Magus]
It seems there are four guilds selectable in the tutorial.
I’m sure guilds other than these four exist too, but with a musclehead2 character whose INT [G-]5 is fixed, playing a production, clergy, or magus role would turn into an impossible game4.
With this character, the Adventurer Guild is the only choice.
When I select ①, the destination is indicated by a marker.
I leave the deserted plaza behind and head for the Adventurer Guild, following the marker.
Trivia:
- The protagonist’s avatar keeps his real-life plain face despite the muscular body and horns, hinting the bug may be tied to biometric data being force-read during the noisy connection.
- The INT[G-] stat being fixed foreshadows that the musclehead build locks him out of caster and crafting roles entirely, making Adventurer the only viable path.
- The save crystal’s death penalty lowering HP, MP, and ST caps for a duration quietly sets up future stakes where dying near a new town carries real mechanical cost.
Translation Notes:
1 ↩ Fictional in-game currency name; kept as a proper noun since the narrative treats it as the world’s common coin.
2 ↩ Japanese slang literally “muscle brain,” meaning a character built purely for physical strength with no intelligence; rendered here as “musclehead” to keep the self-deprecating gamer tone.
3 ↩ Self-deprecating otaku slang combining “virgin,” “mob/background character,” and “middle-aged guy”; the nuance of generic, unremarkable loser status is central to the protagonist’s humor.
4 ↩ Japanese gaming slang for “impossible game,” i.e., a playstyle that is unwinnable with the current build; translated as “impossible game” to preserve the gamer register.
5 ↩ Stat notation indicating an INT stat fixed at grade-minus, blocking magic and production builds; kept verbatim as an in-world UI notation.