Chapter One: At the End of the Frozen Wastes
11:47 p.m.
In a cramped studio apartment in the suburbs of Tokyo, the only source of light was the ghostly blue glow cast by the monitor on the desk. The room smelled of freshly prepared instant ramen, but its owner’s thoughts were nowhere near the bowl.
Noriko Sato sat cross-legged on a carpet littered with anime merchandise and light novels, her right hand gripping the mouse tightly as she stared fixedly at the indie survival strategy game she had recently become hopelessly addicted to. It was a hardcore masterpiece she had spent the entire spring break studying, tearing apart, and starting over again and again.
“...Wood’s really scarce, but that’s okay. I can trade with the prisoners.”
Muttering to herself, Noriko deftly moved the mouse and opened the trade interface. Looking over the list of supplies on the screen, she let out a cold snort, her tone full of a calculating practicality completely at odds with her freshman-year appearance.
“We’re not short on coal here at all. We can even trade away the old people and children... But that kind of trade only improves relations. If relations go up even without trading...”
She paused, then canceled the supplies she had been about to send without a second thought and waved her hand casually.
“Then there’s no point deliberately improving relations. Better to save it for myself.”
Noriko routinely managed the resources at her base. When her eyes swept over the defense panel, her brow furrowed slightly and she couldn’t help grumbling.
“And then there’s this... The base’s armory can produce iron, but it can’t insulate the place at all, so someone inevitably gets sick every so often. What a pain in the ass. This could obviously be fixed just by rerouting the pipes a little...”
As she complained, she nimbly adjusted the building layout, moving with the practiced ease of a seasoned apocalyptic commander. The ramen on the desk had long since gone soggy, a layer of lukewarm grease congealing across the surface of the broth, but she hadn’t taken a single bite. The steam simply faded away in the air-conditioned room.
Time flew by amid the clicks of the mouse and the howling sound effects of the icy wind.
At last, the end-of-run results screen for the game’s latest DLC popped up. Accompanied by the heavy beat of jazz drums, the results screen slowly unfolded—but compared with the previous installments’ merciless, in-your-face soul-searching, this time it quietly displayed nothing more than bland completion statistics.
Noriko raised an eyebrow and couldn’t help giving a mocking laugh.
“Tch. Looks like the developers got scared after all the players complained before. They don’t even dare criticize players as harshly as they used to.”
She pursed her lips, her voice carrying a hint of amusement and nostalgia.
“When the first game came out, a bunch of thin-skinned players got furious at the moral judgment in the end-of-run results screen and started an online backlash, accusing the dev team of looking down from on high and passing judgment on players’ humanity. To avoid being subjected to that disgusting judgment, those top-tier gaming experts online even came up with a perfect-clear strategy—the no-death savior run, where nobody had to be sacrificed...”
Remembering how she had once enthusiastically jumped on the bandwagon and taken on that extreme challenge, Noriko couldn’t help pressing a hand to her forehead.
At first, she too had thought that the ruthless playstyle of treating everyone like expendable resources was way too masochistic, so she turned to studying the no-death savior run circulating online. During that period, she followed guides every day, precisely calculating every piece of raw food and every resource, as well as the risks that each law or building might create, chasing the perfect, flawless-clear achievement.
But eventually, she realized that this playstyle was basically self-torture. To meet the no-death requirement, every step had to be executed with robotic precision, completely stripping away the fun of adapting on the fly.
Unwilling to give up, she even challenged the legendary Survivor Extreme Mode, which had no saves. By the end, she discovered that she wasn’t playing a game at all—she was memorizing a script. The timing of every event, the exact second each storm arrived, even the dialogue options when refugees knocked at the door—all of it was fixed and had to be memorized.
“By the end, there was no way to survive unless you memorized the script. How is that a survival simulator? It’s just cramming for finals...”
As Noriko recalled that painful period of being ruled by a memorized script, she let out a heavy sigh and leaned back, her eyes fixed on the monitor. Thinking there might be hidden story content or a follow-up statistic on the displaced civilians, she patiently sat there and waited.
Five seconds passed.
Ten seconds passed.
The game finally finished saying whatever it was the developers wanted to express. The screen went completely black, and the game returned to the title screen.
Noriko blinked, stared blankly for three seconds, then couldn’t help complaining at the monitor.
“...That’s it?”
After confirming that the story really was over, all the strength seemed to drain out of her. Her shoulders slumped, and she casually grabbed the cola from the table beside her, twisted off the cap, and took a huge gulp.
“Hiss...”
The cold carbonation slid down her throat. After catching her breath, she stared at the monitor with lifeless eyes and muttered,
“...I kind of want to experience that superstorm symphony again. And the other scenario, where the generator tower breaks down and you have to send someone to repair it...”
She gathered her thoughts and looked at the information displayed on the screen. Since this DLC had officially been confirmed as the game’s final expansion, she couldn’t help slumping her shoulders, her voice thick with disappointment and emptiness.
“...And this is the last DLC, too. So that’s it? It feels so disappointing.”
Noriko casually set the empty cola bottle aside and fell backward into the pile of scattered cushions. Her gaze left the computer monitor and landed on a cardboard box in the corner of the room, still only partially unpacked and filled with school supplies.
That spring, she had successfully gotten into a high school in Tokyo. To spare her the exhausting daily commute from her family home in Gunma, her grandfather had waved his hand and rented this little apartment for her near the school. Before moving in, she had made a long list: visit every game store around Tokyo, make a pilgrimage to Akihabara, and catch up on all the light novels she wanted to read.
And what happened?
She hadn’t gone to the game stores. She hadn’t gone to Akihabara. She hadn’t completed a single plan on the list.
And the final vacation of her middle school life—the precious spring break that should have been filled with endless possibilities—had somehow been spent entirely in a virtual world, scheming all day against superstorms and refugees.
Looking at the night sky gradually paling outside the window, Noriko suddenly realized that only a few days remained until school started.
She stared at the ceiling with lifeless eyes, an utterly honest thought rising in her mind.
“...I don’t want to go to school.”
Noriko lay sprawled in the cushions, staring blankly at the ceiling for a while. In the end, she resigned herself to reaching out and groping across the carpet for her phone.
The white light from the unlocked screen stabbed at her eyes, which had adjusted to the darkness. Out of habit, she opened social media, intending to scroll through some posts and distract herself from her back-to-school anxiety. Instead, the algorithm immediately served her a mobile game ad.
The screen showed a shoddily made post-apocalyptic survival game filled with cheap 3D assets. Its core gameplay consisted of slapping the words “post-apocalyptic survival” on top of a cash-grab mobile game about building furnaces like crazy. The ad even featured exaggerated fake-player meltdown voice-overs, while an enormous promotional slogan hung in the center of the screen.
Noriko raised one eyebrow in disgust as she stared at the sensationalized ad. The hardcore masterpiece she had just finished immediately surfaced in her mind.
She rolled her eyes at the phone and complained,
“What is this supposed to be? These models look like they’re from the last century... Wait, they even straight-up copied the furnace-building premise.”
Even so, the sight of the tiny furnace in the ad, constantly steaming as it recruited refugees, precisely tugged at the emptiness the game had left her with.
Noriko stared at the crude furnace icon, her expression slowly turning complicated. Her finger hovered above the screen for a moment. She silently condemned herself for having no standards, but her body honestly tapped the download link anyway.
“...Whatever. If it’s plagiarism, it’s plagiarism. It’s not like there’s anything else to play right now...”
She watched the download bar slowly advance and hummed to reassure herself.
“Even if the gameplay in a cash-grab mobile game like this is guaranteed to be braindead, as long as I can relive a little of the thrill of building furnaces in a big-budget PC game, playing it for a bit can’t hurt...”
The progress bar finished at an unbelievably fast speed. Noriko casually tapped the icon, completely unaware that she was about to plunge headfirst into the bottomless abyss of mobile gaming.
At the start of the game, its signature 3D furnace stood prominently in the center of the screen.
Noriko raised an eyebrow at the smooth interface and the special effects unique to cash-grab mobile games. At first, she was a little surprised.
“...Huh? It’s actually smoother than I expected.”
She followed the tutorial’s instructions and tapped a few times. With crisp notification sounds, the resource numbers rocketed upward, and she didn’t need to carefully count every piece of wood the way she did in the PC version.
After she finished building the structures according to the tutorial, a familiar building icon appeared. Noriko’s eyes lit up, and a trace of anticipation entered her voice.
“Oh, a lighthouse? Great! Then I can send out an expedition team to rescue more people, right?”
However, the moment she opened the lighthouse, the magnificent wilderness map and supply assignments she expected failed to appear. Instead, she got a crude interface and a cold countdown timer.
Noriko frowned in disgust.
“...Why does this feel so cheap?”
Just as she was puzzling over it, a system prompt suddenly appeared in the center of the screen, instructing her to build barracks to defend against wasteland raiders. Noriko stared at the words on the screen, sinking into deep confusion.
“...Wait. Barracks?”
She blinked. A whole row of question marks instantly popped into her head, and she couldn’t help muttering at her phone.
“That’s not right... The original game didn’t have soldiers or raiders. Is this a survival strategy game, or some bargain-bin war mobile game...?”
And yet, a few days later, the cash-grab mobile game she had relentlessly mocked at first revealed a terrifying level of social addictiveness.
On the first day, she merely watched coldly from the alliance channel, silently laughing at the bizarre online weirdos who stayed up past midnight and argued over virtual strongholds.
“Fighting over a stronghold at two in the morning? Who would play something this boring?”
On the second day, she began recognizing several regulars in the alliance and even casually tapped the button to help speed something up.
“...Since everyone’s online, I might as well play a round.”
On the third day, she started setting an alarm herself.
“Why is my alarm going off again?”
After joining an alliance in a daze, Noriko not only met a group of equally bizarre online weirdos with dark circles under their eyes, but also completely wrecked the peaceful rhythm of her spring break. Every night, when the alarm went off, she had to crawl out of bed and log on with her allies to seize strongholds, compete for engineering stations, and frantically help plant flags and expand the alliance’s territory across the desolate map.
By the time she came to her senses, the precious vacation that should have been spent eagerly anticipating high school life, a time filled with endless possibilities, had been completely consumed by this virtual territorial war.
Cherry blossoms bloomed across the campus in April. Today was the first day of Noriko Sato’s high school life.
And yet, all she could think about was last night’s Alliance War.
When Noriko sat at her desk in the freshman classroom wearing her brand-new uniform, her mind was nowhere near the entrance guidelines the teacher was explaining at the front of the room.
Perfectly concealed by her textbook and pencil case, one hand was pressed firmly beneath the desk, where the mobile game’s alliance chat was secretly open on the screen. As she listened to the teacher, she calmly calculated that night’s tactics in her head.
“...We have to take that engineering station tonight.”
“Noriko?”
The homeroom teacher suddenly raised their voice, a sharp gaze shooting straight toward the back of the classroom.
Noriko: “...!”