Slum Online by Hiroshi Sakurazaka Page B

appealing. The object of my search didn’t exist in RL, with its multitude of lossless-quality sound FX.
    I felt Fumiko’s gaze on the back of my head as we walked.
    One night in a Shinjuku hotel cost nine thousand yen. Enough to pay the subscription to Versus Town for ten months. Enough that I’d have to cancel my cell phone and use the money to pay for the game instead. Enough that it hurt. Not enough to make me complain to Fumiko.

CHAPTER 5
     
    I PRESSED THEBUTTON and became Tetsuo. It was 1:50 in the morning. In Versus Town it was the middle of the day. Tetsuo headed for Sanchōme.
    Sanchōme was the sort of place that ordinary people would have associated with the term “virtual reality.” There were houses no one lived in, stores with nothing for sale, characters hanging around doing nothing in particular. Shops stood along the road, their shelves lined with cans and boxes that were, in fact, only textures pasted on the polygons of the shelves. The buttons on the vending machines were textures too. You couldn’t even push them. There were crosswalks painted on the streets, but not a single car. At least for now, characters in this city existed only to fight.
    If the stories were true, Sanchōme was also the stalking ground of the mysterious ganker.
    Today’s objective: finding the ganker and fighting him. No matter how good he was, Tetsuo should be able to give him a run for his money. Who knows, Tetsuo might even be the first character to beat him. If Tetsuo could beat a character who himself had beaten one of the top four, then Pak, arguably the best and easily the most famous character in Versus Town, was sure to want to fight him. And if Tetsuo could beat Pak, there was no one left to beat. Everyone would know he was the best.
    I tapped the stick twice. Tetsuo broke into a run.
    Sanchōme was squalid and cluttered. Compared to Main Street, the roads felt tight and claustrophobic. Objects whose purpose I couldn’t begin to guess littered the roadside. Tetsuo spent all his time in Itchōme and Nichōme, so he hadn’t learned the ins and outs of Sanchōme’s virtual world.
    I kicked a reddish brown cylinder blocking the road. A clanging sound FX. It must have been a steel drum.
    The drum was just the tip of the iceberg. There were metal pipes, cans of kerosene, rocks thrown in for variety, shapes I couldn’t make heads or tails of—a truly extravagant display of polygons lay rotting in the streets. Each time I rounded a corner I was greeted by a new piece of debris, making it difficult to run in a straight line. It felt like an RPG dungeon they had turned over to the intern to design. Tetsuo weaved his way through narrow alleyways, dashing from one clump of litter to the next.
    In spite of it being midday, the streets of Sanchōme were devoid of other characters. The only signs that anyone was there at all were fleeting glimpses Tetsuo caught of shapes darting out of one building and into another. The buildings themselves were a mix of Western-style houses with facades of woven ivy textures and Japanese houses with polygonal tiles set neatly on their roofs. Some of the houses were clearly occupied, but none had signs declaring to whom they belonged. I wanted to follow the runners and exchange some words, but each time a door flew open, I felt my resolve shrivel.
    There was no private property in Versus Town. Tetsuo could go into any of the buildings these characters were darting in and out of. But what you could do and what you should do weren’t always the same thing. Sanchōme probably had its own unwritten code of conduct. The thought of invading the privacy of characters Tetsuo had never met before didn’t sit too well either.
    Still wanting for any specific destination, Tetsuo roamed the mazelike streets. He had been exploring for about thirty minutes when he came across a solitary man who was repeatedly jumping into a wall. His body was wrapped in a deep indigo shinobi outfit, and on his feet he