Chapter 459: Alone With His Thoughts

The waiting room was too quiet, but it didn’t stop rendering other stuff around him.

Neville stood in the middle of the chrome-tiled floor with his mecha looming behind him. He had one hand on his hip and the other scratching the back of his neck.

He turned a slow circle.

The waiting room this time rendered a black floor with a faint hexagonal grid that pulsed teal every few seconds.

There were walls of brushed steel and one panoramic window on the far side that showed a fake skybox of asteroid debris drifting against a fake purple nebula.

Neville had thought the skybox was kind of pretty. But right now, he couldn’t fully appreciate it.

"—Miss Lilianna?" he called, walking around.

The acoustics in here were weird, but either way, he still tried to call out.

"Hey, where did you go? Don’t tell me you rage-quit because I clipped your wing. That was a fair shot."

There’s still nothing.

Neville scratched harder at the back of his neck.

"Did she get disconnected?" He unconsciously said out loud. "Is that even possible? If so, why isn’t she respawning? Did the round end?"

Neville sighed and let his shoulders drop.

There were those kinds of people in this world.

The sore-loser types. Even when you won fairly, instead of accepting the loss, they would still go for another round, unable to take a loss. He just never expected Lilianna to be that kind of person.

Then again, Lilianna had her teeth out for the whole night trying to make him lose in all sorts of games without being tired.

Whatever, after Grayson did whatever he needed to do, he would be free from all of this and finally get a drink or two to get wasted.

Neville flicked two fingers in front of his face to summon the menu.

Nothing happened.

He flicked again.

Nothing.

"And why can’t I—" he muttered, this time stretching his arm out.

He even did the deliberate four-finger swipe that the tutorial taught new players.

"Hey, the menu won’t open."

A small, cold something dropped into his stomach.

He tried the voice command.

"System. Menu."

Not even his own system appeared in the virtual world this time.

"Logout. Logout.Logout." Neville really panicked this time.

He tried the developer-cheat sequence that Shelly had once ranted to him about being funny.

How was it again?

Up-up-down-down-port-starboard-thrust.

Neville endured the embarrassment, but there was still nothing.

He tried the emergency disconnect button that could be found in the waiting room. It was a big red panic button at the bottom of one of the chairs in this waiting room.

But even that button was nowhere to be found.

Oh.

Oh no.

Neville had read enough trash novels in his past life. He had also watched his fair share of late-night anime in his early college years when he should have been studying.

He knew there was an anime with this exact kind of narrative.

He could half-remember the title, about high schoolers who got trapped inside a sword-and-sorcery VRMMO and couldn’t log out until they cleared all hundred floors of some dungeon.

Players who died in-game died in real life. The hero figured out a workaround eventually by hunting the bug responsible.

This wasn’t a dungeon or open world.

This was a mecha combat simulation game, and even worse, he was in a waiting room.

There was nothing to hunt in this bare place. There was not even a hidden boss room to clear in here. Much less of a quest log to start searching for an unknown bug.

Neville did three quick laps of the waiting room, pushing on the walls with both palms like an idiot. The walls and the skybox window were both solid.

The door to his own mecha bay was open, but when he tried to climb the boarding ramp, the safety field shoved him gently but firmly back.

"Right," he said to no one. "Right, okay. Don’t panic."

Neville tried to open the ranked queue panel.

It was Locked.

The mecha customization arch. Locked.

The cosmetic store. Locked.

The friends list. Locked.

Neville tried logging out as a different account, typing in his main account, [Gravy], and the field wouldn’t even accept his input.

At least, the username box just blinked at him.

Should he be thankful for that?

Neville swallowed; his virtual throat felt dry.

"Okay. Okay. Don’t panic. People are watching."

People were watching.

Neville’s eyes brightened with hope.

Didn’t Grayson say that he would record it and that people were going to watch this game in real time?

Sure, if he were visibly stuck in a waiting room with no opponent, somebody would notice. Somebody would yank him out of the virtual pod and wake him up.

"Hello?" he called, tilting his face up toward where he thought the streaming pickup was. "Anybody there?"

He paused and shouted even louder.

"Please, somebody, I’m trapped. Get me out of here!"

Neville kept calling for a few minutes. He moved into different parts of the lobby in case the pickup was directional.

He even waved his arms. He did the universal I-am-being-held-against-my-will hand signal he had learned from a kid-safety video in the modern world.

Neville even tried sitting cross-legged in the dead center of the lobby and shouting upward.

But there was still nothing.

And as the silence stretched, Neville’s panic suddenly cooled down, and he had a very, very bad feeling.

Because—

Neville sat there on the cold black tile and replayed round two in his head, frame by frame.

Lilianna’s mecha went eerily still and had just... popped and disappeared. Now, he was stuck in here.

And at the blackjack table, he had seen Lilianna’s eyes turn bloody red and inhumane. Not to mention that there had been something small and spike bone that pierced through her skin.

Neville’s blood went one degree colder.

If even his bathtub at home could grab a piece of his gene and detect which species he was, or if there was something wrong with his condition, what more of this super high-tech latest virtual pod?

Surely, if something was really wrong with Lilianna, it would notice it as an anomalous biological reading.