The email arrived at three in the morning, Tokyo time.
Haru Endo wasn't asleep. He was sitting on the floor of his bedroom, his back against the bed, his laptop balanced on his knees as he watched the recording of his own defeat for the fifth time.
The regional semifinal, and fifth place. Outside the world-championship cutoff. The notification appeared in the corner of the screen, discreet and almost lost among the open tabs.
"Exclusive Invitation — Ascension Beta Program"
He didn't recognize the sender right away. The name appeared in small letters—Koga Interactive—without the flashy logo that usually accompanied official game-developer announcements.
Still, he opened it.
The message was short and highly formal, but with a tone that tried to sound friendly, as if someone had written it specifically with him in mind.
"Dear player Tsukikage, Your performance during the recent season has caught the development team's attention. You have been selected to participate in the Ascension Beta Program—the next generation of immersion in the universe of a game you already know.
Mandatory attendance at the central facility in Shibuya on the 14th at 10:00 a.m. Bring a form of identification. This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity."
Haru read it twice. This wasn't the first time he'd received a testing invitation—players in the upper-middle ranks were often invited to promotional events, user-experience studies, that sort of thing. But the formal tone, the requirement to show up in person, the name of a company he'd never heard of—all of it carried a different kind of weight and intrigue.
He closed the laptop and stared at the ceiling for a while. After thinking it over, he decided to go. After all, what could go wrong? If it was a sequel to one of his favorite games, it would be great to be one of the beta testers. And if it was a new game, there was nothing wrong with testing it.
The Koga Interactive building had no sign on its facade. Haru checked the address twice before going in, thinking he'd taken a wrong turn. It was a dark glass building, with no visible identification except for a discreet number beside the revolving door.
At the reception desk, a woman in a gray uniform checked his name against a list, asked nothing else, and directed him to the eighteenth floor.
There was no waiting room. There were no other candidates. Haru stood in front of the elevator for a moment, somewhat confused, before realizing that it might have been intentional—perhaps each selected candidate had their own appointment, kept separate from the others, with no contact between them. It made sense, when he thought about it. Large companies tended to prevent beta testers from comparing notes before they'd even signed anything.
On the eighteenth floor, a man in a suit was waiting for him in a small room with a table, two chairs, and nothing on the walls except a clock.
—Endo-san. Thank you for coming.
The man introduced himself only as Kimura, the chief user-experience engineer. He had the kind of smile that seemed rehearsed—always present, but never particularly expressive.
—Before anything else, we need you to fill out some paperwork.
He slid a clipboard with several stapled pages across the table, along with a pen. The first page asked for the basics. Full name. Date of birth. Address. Emergency contact—Haru hesitated there because he wasn't sure whom to list, and ended up writing down his mother's number, even though he hadn't spoken to her in months.
The second page was different. It had random questions, such as:
Do you smoke? Do you regularly consume alcohol? Do you have any known heart conditions? Have you ever experienced seizures, fainting, or episodes of loss of consciousness? Do you take any ongoing medication? Do you have a history of anxiety, panic attacks, or other disorders that could be aggravated by intense sensory stimuli?
Haru looked up at the engineer.
—Is this standard for a game beta?
—It's standard for this beta—Kimura replied without changing his tone. —The level of immersion we're offering requires more rigorous risk management than any previous version of the product. We'd rather err on the side of caution.
Haru checked "no" for every question, one by one, and handed back the clipboard. Kimura quickly checked it over, made a small clicking sound with his mouth that Haru took to mean he'd been approved, and handed him a third page—this one longer, printed in tiny type, and divided into numbered paragraphs.
—This is the participation agreement. I need you to read it carefully before signing.
Haru looked at the wall of text and felt the automatic urge to skim it and sign at the end, as he did with any app's terms of service. But something about the way Kimura had said carefully made him stop and actually read it.
The document began with standard legal language—a declaration of adulthood, legal capacity, and a waiver of liability for minor physical discomfort during use of the equipment. Then came a clause concerning the transfer of image rights: any recording, log, or biometric data collected during testing would become the sole property of Koga Interactive and could be used for development, marketing, or research purposes without the need for additional consent.
Farther down, a paragraph caught his attention.
The participant acknowledges that the Ascension Beta Program consists of an immersive-reality experience accessed through a direct neural interface, and that any anomaly, system failure, unexpected behavior in the environment or of any elements within it must be reported immediately to the development team through the internal support channel, available at any time during the session.
—How am I supposed to report something if I'm inside the game? Haru asked.
—There's a voice command. We'll explain it before you go in. —Kimura pointed to the next paragraph with his pen. —Keep reading.
The final paragraph before the signature was the longest of them all.
In the event of the successful completion of the Program's primary objective—reaching the Central Sanctuary and completing the Awakening Ritual without interruption of the session due to the avatar's death—the participant will receive 300,000 (three hundred thousand) U.S. dollars, as well as lifetime, free access to all future updates to the product, including exclusive content not made available to the general public.
Haru read the sentence several times. He repeated it to himself as if he were looking at a lottery prize. Three hundred thousand dollars was more money than he'd seen in his entire life, more than every tournament prize he'd ever competed for combined.
—Is this for real?
—Very real. —Kimura didn't smile this time. —Few candidates complete the primary objective. But those who do receive exactly what's written there.
Haru looked at the paragraph's final line once more.
"...without interruption of the session due to the avatar's death."
He found the choice of words strange. Any ordinary game would simply say "without losing all your lives" or "without getting a game over." Avatar's death sounded unnecessarily formal, almost clinical, for something that was supposed to be nothing more than a fictional character.
He almost asked about it. But Kimura was already staring at him, waiting, and the silence in the room had a weight that made him swallow the question.
Even so, Haru didn't hesitate. He signed.
—Very good. —Kimura gathered the pages and put them in a folder without examining them again. —Just one more thing before we proceed. Within the environment, you'll be identified only by your player handle. No personal information will be shared with the... with the rest of the environment. Complete privacy.
Haru found the pause before "the rest of the environment" strange, the same hesitation as someone searching for the right word to avoid saying another one.
—The environment is just artificial intelligence, right? That's what the invitation said.
—The world is populated by non-player characters with adaptive behavior. The latest generation. —Kimura stood up, signaling that the conversation was over. —You'll be surprised by how real they seem.
He was led down a narrower hallway to a larger room with low lighting, where a reclining chair waited beneath a helmet suspended from thin cables that descended from the ceiling like inverted roots.
A technician silently adjusted the sensors at his temple without saying a single word, then left.
Kimura remained standing near the door.
—One last thing, Endo-san. If you encounter any behavior outside what is expected within the environment—anything that seems like an error, an inconsistency, something that shouldn't be there—use the "report" command immediately. Don't hesitate.
—What do you consider "outside what is expected"?
Kimura didn't answer right away.
—You'll know when you see it.
The door closed. Haru lay back in the chair. The helmet slowly descended until it covered the entire upper half of his face, and the real world disappeared into a soft darkness filled with gentle static.
—Countdown initiated—a synthetic voice said, far too close, as if it were inside his own skull. —Five. Four. Three.
He reflexively closed his eyes, even though he knew he didn't need to.
—Two. One.
When he came back into existence, there was sound before anything else. Distant drums. A bell ringing at irregular intervals. Overlapping voices, unintelligible, like a crowd he still couldn't see.
Then came a smell, something sweet and burnt at the same time—caramelized sugar mixed with charcoal smoke. Haru opened his eyes.
He was standing in the middle of a narrow street lined with wooden stalls. Red and white lanterns hung in rows above his head, swaying slightly even though he couldn't feel any wind.
The sky was a deep purple, without stars or a moon—just color, as if the night had been painted there on purpose. He looked at his own hands. Skin, fingernails, the small scars he knew by heart. Everything was exactly as it should be.
A discreet panel blinked in the corner of his field of vision.
『Welcome, Tsukikage』 『Level: 1』 『HP: 100/100』 『Hunger: 100/100』 『Thirst: 100/100』
He slowly turned, taking in the entire street. No one else was nearby, no other player, at least not one he could identify by a floating handle above their head.
Only one figure sat alone in one of the closed stalls, fiddling with something in her hands. A child, more specifically a girl. Maybe eight years old, maybe younger. The name above her head had no number, only a name. “『Sora』”
Haru stood still for a moment, unsure why it drew his attention so strongly. The girl raised her eyes and looked straight at him, as if she knew exactly where to look. Then she smiled and went back to playing with whatever she was holding, as if he had never been there.
As he watched the girl, Haru heard voices. They seemed to be coming from the street behind him. He turned his neck to see if someone was coming, but when he turned his face forward again, the child was no longer there. She had vanished.