Chapter 2: Scattered Thoughts

"...Alright... calm down... there’s a chance this is just a dream, right? It can’t be the game, but nothing says it’s reality either!..." Nio stands up on the throne, which is much bigger than her, and then leaps forward.

"..." The sound of the impact is like something extremely heavy crashing to the floor. Nio doesn’t feel pain, but it would be impossible to feel pain from just that anyway.

"No... this means it’s not a dream... I felt that fall way too vividly..." Nio drops to her knees on the floor, legs apart, then quickly lifts her underwear a little — something the game would never have allowed.

"...No!! No!!! No!!! No!!! No!!! No!!! M-My little brother!!! Aahhhh!!!! It’s gone!!!" She screams in pure anguish. Despite her cute female avatar, the reality of her life was that Nio in the real world had been a man.

Her choice of a female avatar had followed an inspiration from the past. Thanks to a friend of his and a funny drawing, he decided he wanted his avatar to be the best of both worlds.

The avatar ended up being a girl because of the friend and a dragon because of the drawing. Of course, the avatar’s gender barely mattered in the game in most cases, so a female avatar was never a problem.

It was purely a gamer aesthetic choice. It was either that or picking an ugly humanoid dragon with a pleasant personality, since the focus of the character had always been the Gap Moe.

Nio, a dragon of the secret race [Nightmare Dragon] who devoured the Yggdrasil tree but has an adorable appearance — that kind of Gap Moe was very interesting to the old Nio.

But now her aesthetic choice had come back to bite her, by swapping her gender in this new world. That would be terrible, but being a dragon, was gender really the worst of her problems?

"W-Wait, if I’m following my own Lore exactly... no... I... I wouldn’t do what Nio used to do... would I?... Is it too late for me to commit Seppuku? N-No! I’m not going to dwell on the embarrassing parts of my personal character Lore written in my bio..."

"I’ve got way bigger problems!! If I’m real and my NPCs became real, then..." Nio looks around. The grand black-and-white hall — this is the [Palace of the 9 Heavens], Nio’s personal base. She was a solo player and didn’t want guilds or anything like that.

This base is a giant floating island, normally always in the skies, powered by a super-battery of [Lunar Jewels]. It’s called the Palace of the 9 Heavens because it’s divided into 9 sections, each one looked after by a special NPC — only in the first 8 sections, of course, because the one who takes care of section number 9 is Nio herself.

The island itself is fairly "ordinary" — a giant rocky chunk of earth with the surface covered in green grass and an all-white palace taking up most of it.

"This is awful!! Both me and my NPCs have evil alignments... on top of that, my cute voice and way of speaking match the performance I used to put on with a voice modulator... meaning I’m being forced to speak the way Nio spoke in the game... I’ll probably be forced into her habits too..."

"Hahaha... this sucks... all my NPCs are a bunch of maniacal psychopaths!!... Some of them even have an extensive list of horrific personal tastes!! My god, I went and created monsters!!" Nio rolls on the floor, thinking about all the problems she’ll have with her creations.

Not counting the more common NPCs she also created, just focusing on the 8 most problematic ones, she completely ignores the dozens of servant-style NPCs, guards, and other roles.

"In the game, the personality, biography, and Lore of the NPCs were all just roleplay. Besides the game’s own NPCs, player-made NPCs didn’t matter what atrocities you wrote — nothing changed. You could even put in really criminal stuff and the game wouldn’t moderate it at all."

"But now? Now they have those horrible personalities I made? And worse, they have the Lore?! Some of them did terrible things!! Aahhh!! No!! Why did I have to be such a fan of Gap Moe!!" Nio had built her entire avatar and playstyle 100% on the premise of maximum Gap Moe.

In other words, a lot of it is exactly what she wouldn’t want — an appearance and an attitude at odds with each other. The Palace of the 9 Heavens itself has an angelic look, when in reality it was one of the bases with the highest PK rate in the game, having accumulated thousands of deaths from players who invaded.

"I... lost everything... my dignity, my money... wait, am I super rich now because of the in-game currency?" For a moment, Nio considers the advantages. She amassed a lot of things, and her own avatar is extremely powerful.

Níðhöggr, in Norse mythology, gnaws at the roots of Yggdrasil. It represents decay, entropy, and inevitable destruction.

While Tiamat represents primordial chaos, the monstrous origin of creation, the primeval sea from which everything emerged. When you combine the two names, something curious arises — a being that represents both the end and the beginning.

Níðhöggr is that which destroys, while Tiamat is that which generates. Naturally, it was an aesthetic choice, but thanks to that, Nio trained to the max to make her avatar extremely strong and befitting of the name.

"O-Okay... I was lucky that between the plan of a super-powerful, chaotic cute girl and a guy who looked strong but was weak, I went with the strong girl..." Nio swallows hard. All the NPCs she created were previously planned around her appearance.

Meaning, if she had chosen to be weak, her NPCs would still probably be some of the greatest atrocities in the world. That lets Nio breathe a little easier, because even though they’re all still absurd atrocities, she’s strong enough to stop them if necessary.

"Strength! I’m strong — really strong. I was among the top 100 strongest players in the game out of billions of people. I might not be number 1, but if the game only brought into reality the people who were part of the world’s Lore and who could survive the mass extinction event..."

"Probably only me, my base and NPCs, and my natural enemy are alive... but where are we?" Nio gets up from the floor, confused. The game’s universe was completely destroyed. That means for her to be "alive," she’d have to be in another universe or something similar.

"...Okay... I need to think calmly... losing my penis, turning into a girl, turning into a dragon, having NPCs with problematic personalities is the least of my worries... where I am is the worst part. And do I still have my original strength?" Nio can feel that she’s powerful.

But she doesn’t know just how powerful she really is, and whether anything threatens her. As a max-level player in the game, very few things were real threats. But in this place she appeared in, is that still the case?

"...I have two options... call someone among my 8 apostles... or try to leave my palace and see the outside..." She stands indecisive, more out of confusion. She’s been making a lot of jokes and trying to play things off lightly.

But her heart is racing, and the fear of the future is immense. If it weren’t for Nio’s personality, she’d be crying in despair — not because she went to another world, but because of the fear of the things she created and of her natural enemy, who might have come to this world as well for being part of the Lore.