"Whoa... my life is over."
I muttered the words to myself.
The hardcore fleet RPG, Galaxy of the Rakshasa.
In this game, the protagonist becomes an Imperial Officer of the Galactic Empire and hurls themselves into a desperate struggle against humanity’s natural enemy, the Zork.
As a player, you could take the role of a strategic officer commanding entire fleets, or you could step into the boots of a Space Marine and enjoy an endless cycle of ground combat. You could be a psychic, a scientist, a merchant, a doctor, or even a pharmacist. If you were feeling particularly rebellious, you could become a space pirate.
You could be a singer or an actor spreading government propaganda. You could be a revolutionary aiming to topple the empire, or even a specialist tattoo artist who inked the sigils that enhanced psychic abilities. There were even countless players who spent their time as simple plumbers or farmers.
Essentially, it was a game designed to let you experience life under a perpetual wartime regime.
Naturally, there was no scripted "player story" to speak of. Even the NPC scenarios were procedurally generated by an AI. The only fixed event in the entire game was the initial encounter with the Zork.
One year before the game’s official start date, the Imperial Officer Academy’s training ship, the Ikazuchi, encountered Zork that had been revived within ancient ruins on a colonial planet. The ship, along with its escorting battleship, was shot down. All fifteen hundred soldiers and students on board ended up inside the bellies of the Zork.
The acting captain of that ship—or rather, the student playing the role of captain for the exercise—was me, Leo Kamishiro.
I was the son of a Marquis whose family was currently facing financial ruin. I was an incompetent coward, a man bordering on scum who had used his family’s waning influence to become the Student Council President. Because of that position, I had been handed the captaincy for this training mission.
If that was all there was to it, it might have been fine. The world needs people whose only talent is warming a seat, after all. An idle incompetent is far less dangerous than an aggressive one. I had figured my family name would do all the heavy lifting for me.
Unfortunately, Leo’s luck was abysmal.
In peaceful times, this exercise would have ended with me doing nothing but staring blankly at the monitors. But right now, the training ship was shaking violently. If I had made even a single inquiry or ordered reconnaissance, I might have bought enough time for a few people to escape. But I had been spaced out, and the anomaly had gone ignored.
That shaking? That was the feeling of a Zork anchor slamming into the hull.
To make matters worse, the crew of our escort, the battleship Shiranami, were also incompetent. Compared to them, even the student version of Leo looked like a saint. They had continued the exercise without so much as an investigation. The result was total annihilation.
In the game’s lore, this was an incident summarized in the archives by a single line of text. In short, I was a "literal nobody-tier mob." No matter what I did, my impact on history was supposed to be non-existent.
And then, just a moment ago...
When the ship shook, I hit my head on the corner of a block of tofu I was about to eat. That was when I remembered. Wait, haven't I been reincarnated as that nobody-tier mob?
And the realization hit me at a point where it was already almost too late.
I put my somewhat warped brain into overdrive. Standing on the bridge right now was Claire, the bespectacled sub-heroine. A girl in glasses. A glasses-wearing Executive Officer. Let me say it again for emphasis: a glasses girl.
In the game, she appears before the players as a "spectacled upperclassman" archetype. She gets devoured here, but her brain backup is eventually recovered, and she’s regenerated as a clone. Her revenge arc—filled with angst over her own identity—was a real tear-jerker.
Unlike Leo. Leo was just background noise!
Long live the glasses girls!
...Wait, I don't have time for this!
"Claire, I’m activating the Anomaly Detection System," I said, hitting the button.
Now, all I needed was for Claire, acting as the Executive Officer, to hit the acknowledgment button for the system to boot up.
"But Captain, the manual says we have to obtain clearance from the Shiranami first..."
"Just do it! It's not like they're going to court-martial us for checking the sensors!"
"Understood. But I'm putting this in the report later!"
Click. The Executive Officer's authorization went through.
The anomaly detection scan began immediately. An anchor alarm flared to life. An anchor was, essentially, a boarding chain. It was a common pirate tactic. A pirate would use an electromagnetic tether to reel a ship in so their boarding parties could swarm the hull.
But our opponent was the Zork. They didn't use sci-fi tech like "Photon Anchors." Theirs was a physical thread. It was incredibly durable; your only options were to blast it with live-ammunition weaponry or burn through it with specialized cutting gear.
Specialized optical cutters hadn't been developed yet, and this ship wasn't equipped with physical rounds. We were stuck. It was over.
A red alert flashed across the monitors.
"Leo, I’ve detected an anomaly... Something is firing anchors into the hull!?"
"Might be space pirates," I lied, knowing full well what it actually was. "Get the cameras online."
"Cameras coming online... What on earth is that...?"
A creature resembling a gargantuan hermit crab appeared on the main screen. It was a Zork—a crustacean-type space organism. They ranged in size from human-scale to the size of a dreadnought. They looked like something caught between a crab and a spider. Seeing the smaller Zork clinging to the backs of the larger ones flying through the void was like a monster pulled straight from a fever dream.
Their exoskeletons were insanely hard; the optical weapons mounted on this ship couldn't even scratch them. You could crack them with high-mass physical projectiles if you tried hard enough, but those were in short supply. To make things worse, their flesh was toxic. If you didn't burn the remains at high temperatures, the soil would be poisoned so badly you couldn't even farm the land.
They were an existence designed solely to spite humanity.
...The prehistoric civilization that managed to seal these things away must have been incredible. They had been trapped in ancient ruins throughout the galaxy, but the development of Planet Sanctuary had inadvertently woken them up. Now, they were beginning their invasion from countless sites at once.
Their purpose and ecology were mysteries—or at least, they were to everyone except the game’s developers. Either way, today was Day One of the invasion.
"Claire, notify headquarters that the exercise is cancelled. Order all trainees to head for the escape pods and evacuate to the nearest military base immediately."
"But we need the instructor’s permission—"
"We’ll be dead before we get it."
"...Eh?"
"Forget it. Just send the notification to the escort ship as well."
"Y-Yes! ...Wait, I can't get through! The signal is blocked!"
We probably had about thirty minutes until the escort was wiped out. From there, it would take maybe fifteen minutes for this ship to follow. However, evacuating all the trainees would take at least an hour.
No matter how I crunched the numbers, the math didn't add up.
Should I just save myself? No, that was impossible. Our actions were tracked by chips in our brains. Even as a trainee captain, deserting in the face of the enemy was a death sentence. My entire family would be stripped of their status. Even if I survived, I’d be forced to live as a space pirate. In the worst-case scenario, the Empire might even glass my home planet just to be thorough.
The title of Marquis was basically a participation trophy for anyone who played the game long enough. There were probably hundreds of thousands of them among the player base. At that scale, no one noticed when you were executed—it was the equivalent of an account ban. Hundreds of people were "executed" every day for botting or cheating. There was no escape.
"Everyone out. Now. Just authorize the evacuation, Claire. Otherwise, we all die."
"Y-Yes, sir!"
The sirens began to wail throughout the ship.
"Claire, you get to a pod too. I’m staying behind."
"What?"
"I don't have a choice. Someone has to stay and operate the Combat Drones."
The security drones had a redundant, annoying safety feature: to prevent hacking, they required a biometric pulse from a senior officer every sixty seconds. It was a fail-safe to prevent the ship from being turned against itself, but in this situation, it was a death trap. It meant one of the senior roles—Captain, Executive Officer, Paymaster, or Security Chief—had to stay behind as a sacrifice.
As the Captain, that person was me. If I didn't stay to cover the retreat, I'd be executed anyway.
Where's my cheat ability? Where's the overpowered starter buff? Give me the manager! I want to punch whoever's in charge of this reincarnation!
I grabbed a Pistol-type Beam Weapon. A physical firearm would have been better, but the ship didn't carry them. They'd become standard issue after the Zork incident, but right now, nobody even knew these monsters existed.
"Camera, record my vitals and the combat feed. Upload all data to the Empire Cloud. Make sure the IC chip backup is synced."
I could technically be cloned from the data in my head, but the "me" currently standing here was still going to die. But if I was going to be eaten, I was going to make sure these Zork bastards felt it!
"Claire."
"What is it?" In her panic, Claire had dropped her formal tone.
"Open the wireless channels to the whole ship. I'm going to broadcast the battle."
"U-Understood. But what are you going to do?"
"What does it look like? I'm going to die. The least you can do is let me give a final speech."
The classic "Step over my corpse!" trope. Every guy yearns for a moment like that. I wanted to give a grand, villainous speech or offer cryptic advice while laughing from a position of power. Plus, it would serve as ironclad evidence for any future court-martial.
"Okay. Recording starts in three... two... one... Go."
At Claire's signal, the red light on the camera flickered on.
"Attention, fellow trainees. This is your Acting Captain, Leo. We are currently under attack by an unidentified force, and communication with our escort has been severed. I am declaring an emergency evacuation per the training manual. Get to the pods and head for the nearest base. Do not attempt to fight; we would only be in the way of the professionals. I will remain behind with the security drones to cover your retreat..."
I suddenly blanked on the rest of my rehearsed lines.
"I expect you all to survive. And once you're safe, make sure you avenge me. After all, the next time you see me, I'll be a clone! Hahaha!"
I heard a soft sob. I had meant it as a joke, but it seemed to have fallen painfully flat. I glanced over to see Claire crying. The atmosphere on the bridge was as heavy as a funeral.
"Claire, don't sweat it!" I said.
I was dying anyway, mostly just to serve as a plot device to show how strong the enemy was. The thought actually annoyed me.
I checked my gear. I had a metal knife meant for outdoor survival training—it was actually more reliable than a beam blade against these things. I had a few grenades; the blast force should be useful. My gun was just a beam pistol, but its output was roughly the same as a rifle; it was just harder to aim.
I pulled on a Space Marine full-face helmet and lowered the integrated goggles. I snapped my combat gloves into place. If it came down to using these, I'd be lucky to last another ten seconds.
The only reason this gear was even on the bridge was because we were supposed to have an engineering seminar later. I turned around and saw Claire was still there.
"Get moving. Evacuate."
"Good luck, Captain."
"Hey, when I get back, you owe me a date. See ya!"
I marched out of the room with as much bravado as I could muster. I pulled up the drone controls on my handheld terminal. On the screen, I could see the security drones—tiny treaded machines with turrets—zipping through the corridors.
Alright, let’s start the stream.
Microphone and cameras: Online.
Time to show them how a "mob" fights.