Survival in Another World With My Mistress!: Prologue (Vol. 1)

Prologue: The Sudden Beginning of My Survival Life

You've heard of survival games, yeah?

I'm not talking about getting your cardio in by chasing your buds in the woods somewhere with airsoft weaponry. I mean the kinds of games where you gotta collect materials to make a home base while managing your hunger and thirst. Y'know, like that one famous foreign-made game where the world's made of blocks and you gotta dig up the ground and cut down trees to build a house and go adventuring.

There aren't too many console survival titles, but my PC gamers in the crowd know what I'm talking about. I happen to be a bit of survival sim nut.

"Survival game" is the general descriptor, but they actually run a pretty wide gamut. You've got games set after the fall of civilization where you have to cut out a niche for yourself in the post-apocalypse. Others are cut from sci-fi cloth and set you up making a crash landing on some unexplored planet in an escape pod after your spaceship wrecks, and you've got to wrangle the local flora and fauna. You've got the occasional game that strands you up some snowbound mountain and wave after wave of games that drop you into a world overrun by zombies. And then there are the ones that aren't so dire, where you build your own town and go adventuring in a civilized world.

Sorry for rambling; I figured you might need a preamble to explain the kind of situation I found myself in now.

To make a long story short, what I'm trying to explain is quite simple: I love those kinds of games.

Yeah. I love games. Emphasis on games.

"How the heck did I wind up here?"

My name's Kousuke Shibata. I was a twenty-year-old bachelor. I had a white-collar job. I liked playing PC games, and every night, I went for a run around town.

And now I found myself standing at the edge of a vast wasteland with a dense forest behind me. I saw no sign of man-made buildings, let alone any kind of road. I was wearing my underwear, shirt, sweatshirt and sweatpants, socks, and my favorite walking shoes. The only possessions I had on my person were my smartphone, the key to my house, and my wallet.

I should have been fine since I had my wallet, right? I had a couple 10,000-yen notes in there, so I could flag down a taxi and find my way home no problem once they drove me downtown. And that would be true if this were Japan. Or even Earth.

"Where the heck am I?"

Up in the sky, I could see ocean, land, and clouds—like a whole other world made to Earth's specifications, so to speak.

You read right. In other words, I could see a terrestrial planet hanging in the sky plain as the sun and moon back home. It shared the sky with a crater-scarred moon. Both of them were huge. The planet took up about 30 percent of the sky, and the moon was the size of my fist when I held it up for comparison.

There's absolutely no way I'm still on Earth.

It was a miracle that I hadn't choked on the atmosphere, or roasted alive, or frozen solid.

Wait, I thought, could it just be a dream? I pinched and slapped my cheeks like you'd normally do in this sort of situation, but I still didn't wake up. Damn it.

"I'd be cool with this if it were a game. If this were a game. That doesn't mean I'd like to give it a spin in person!" I fell to my hands and knees, orz-ing like someone acknowledging their superior in the comments section.

Be that as it may, I couldn't stay on my knees forever. I'd get hungry and thirsty and have to take a crap, and eventually the sun would set. I didn't see any wildlife around, but that didn't mean nightfall wouldn't bring any out.

Only a fool goes out after dark unprotected, said my encyclopedic survival sim skills, and the handful of things I knew about actual life in the wild feebly chimed in. Surely there'd be zombies, skeletons, or some other warlike creatures—anything could be out there, no matter how grotesque or mind-bending to imagine.

This was no joke—I'd be easy prey for some nocturnal carnivore, stumbling blind in the dark. I needed to find a place where I could safely spend the night.

"But what do I do?"

In survival games, the player can always make basic tools so long as they have the raw materials. Sometimes they even use their bare hands to cut down trees or break rocks...but I couldn't do that.

Should I give it a try? Nah, there's absolutely no way.

I picked out a decently sized stone from the ones that were scattered across the wastelands as an alternative. It was about the size of two of those stones you'd place on top of jars for pickling foods, which were a bit bigger than my hand. If I struck it against a rock, I was sure that I could effectively chip away at it until it took on a sharp point.

Having a pointed tool like this would make exploration easier. It would be much more efficient for cutting vines and woodworking than my bare hands could ever be. It was a Stone Age solution, but I was better off with crude tools than no tools.

"Mmph!" I hit the stone against a biggish rock over and over. After a dozen or so tries, I finally got a point that looked good enough. I was worried that all the noise I was making might draw the attention of some creature higher up the food chain, but I was safe for the time being.

I called the stone with the pointed tip and easy handle Stone Knife #1. I tucked it into my sweatpants pocket since I'd spotted some other rocks that looked good for throwing.

Humankind's great advantages are the stamina for long-distance running and our talent at throwing things. Sure, dexterous fingers for making tools and higher reasoning faculties should be on that list, but I wasn't so confident in those. And I wasn't completely confident in my stamina for long-distance running either. After all, the most exercise I did every day was that nightly lap around the neighborhood.

"First, I've got to find shelter." That was one of the basic necessities for surviving.

Most people assume the most important thing is water. I did too at one point. But after playing so many survival games, I came to see the light. The absolute highest priority was finding a place to hunker down through the night.

In that game with the world made of blocks, I had gotten too absorbed in walking around collecting materials and been attacked by the zombies and skeletons that came out at night. In games where mankind's been destroyed and zombies run amok, I wound up being devoured by the zombies that started running around. In the snowy mountain survival game, I froze to death come sunset. Based on all of these experiences, I knew it to be true.

I'd die eventually without food or water. That much was a fact. But without safe ground of some kind, I wouldn't even make it through the first night.

"If this were a game world, then I'd be busy making a shelter that was raised off the ground right about now." In other words, a very simple shelter with the floor rested on top of pillars. In most games, hostile characters couldn't climb pillars without steps, so you'd generally be safe so long as you took refuge in a place that was too high for them to hop up and reach you. If it had walls and a roof, even better.

However, that didn't work all the time; some games had enemies that would aggressively strike down the pillars.

In any case, making walls and a roof seemed way out of my league for now, from both a material and a technical position. I turned my back on the windswept wasteland and headed towards the dense woods.

The wasteland had rocks and stones scattered all over, but none of them were big enough for me to hide behind. I figured I'd go climb a tree in the forest instead. Trees were a consistent asset. You could climb up one and hide yourself among the foliage so you couldn’t be seen from the ground.

However, I still had to be careful of things like bugs, snakes, and lizards. As a kid, I'd promised my older brother that I'd look out for scratches and other signs on tree trunks before I climbed them. The last thing anybody wants is to fight with some iguana-looking critter for real estate, you know?

And so I set out into the forest.

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