The conversation fell into silence.
After all, they were talking about a contest of wits against a civilization so advanced it treated the universe like its backyard garden. And this chat group thought it could win?
No matter how you looked at it, their odds of victory were effectively zero.
Unless every member's home world threw its full weight behind them, and even then it would only raise their chances by a hair.
Still… it wasn't completely hopeless.
Kouzuki Yuuko was quietly waiting to see whether that man would reach out a hand to help the magical girl. Because from what she'd seen, his world looked like humanity had already entered a true interstellar age.
A civilization like that had to have deeper foundations than her own era, broader knowledge, stronger systems.
She'd watched the entire Earth Elixir "crafting stream," and it had been absurdly idiot-proof—like the tech was so mature it made her imagination feel small.
If people from that level of civilization put their minds to it, maybe they could produce a truly "perfect" wish.
And that perfect wish didn't have to be anything grand like "save the universe" or "prevent heat death."
That kind of thing was too distant for humans. Earth could end long before the universe ever reached its final thermal death.
And humanity? Even more so. The traces of civilization might be gone long before that.
To a teenage girl with, at most, a century of life ahead of her, that was an unimaginably remote future. Not worth torturing yourself over.
With time spans that long, who knew what kinds of terrifyingly powerful species might appear, or what solutions might be found.
But then again… if Kuroneko's story was right, and Madoka really did become a "god" in the end—remaking the universe as a living law—then that was practically myth.
For someone with a scientific worldview, it was hard not to feel shaken by that.
Still, it didn't look like the gods of old stories.
It looked more like a kind of "scientific apotheosis," something forced into existence by the Incubators' technology.
Which raised an unsettling point: if technology advanced far enough, if it could bend universal laws and rewrite the rules of reality, then to people who couldn't understand it, that would be indistinguishable from divinity.
And that man's world clearly had "gods," too—at least, something like them.
In the earlier streams, hadn't he been slaughtering demons?
She'd even caught fragments of their whispers. They called him an Untouchable, something that made them physically uncomfortable.
At first she'd wondered if he was a psychic, using some power that repelled them.
And "psychics," from what little she could infer, were clearly another category of abnormal ability.
She could understand the demons' muttering at all only thanks to the Hyperdimensional Channel's translation.
But even that translation had limits.
Yuuko had noticed it by watching Kisara's streams: when Kisara ran into police officers speaking in heavy regional dialect, Kisara didn't understand them—and neither did Yuuko.
So the "translation" wasn't absolute. It seemed anchored to what the streamer could comprehend. If the streamer understood, the viewers understood. If the streamer didn't, the viewers didn't.
Now that the new member "Magical Girl Madoka" had been broadly figured out…
What about the other new member—"Asuna"?
What kind of world did she come from?
…
"Asuna" wasn't her real name. It was just a handle.
Her real name was Yuuki Asuna.
In her world, full virtual reality had finally been perfected, and it had been applied to VRMMORPGs.
And today was the official launch of Sword Art Online (SAO).
Asuna had used her brother's NerveGear headset to log in.
It was… unbelievably real.
She was still her age, and yet she was experiencing tech that, just a few years ago, should have belonged to a much more distant future.
Then, roughly three hours after entering the game, the Hyperdimensional Channel system appeared out of nowhere and pulled her in.
At first, she assumed it was some new SAO feature, some hidden system. She assumed the "members" were just other players.
But soon her friend felt something was off.
That girl with the ID "Fallen Angel Kuroneko" had started introducing "Magical Girl Madoka" as someone who came from an anime.
That was ridiculous.
And as Kuroneko kept talking, she leaked even more impossible-sounding information: the people in this channel might come from completely different "works," and those works might exist in other members' worlds as movies, anime, manga, or even games.
To Asuna, it still felt like a joke. Like some elaborate chuunibyou chat group roleplay.
But once she talked to other players—correction, once she talked to other players inside the virtual world she was currently trapped in—she discovered that only she seemed to have the Hyperdimensional Channel.
Even worse, the interface didn't appear as an external pop-up. It was projected directly into her mind.
So if Kuroneko was telling the truth…
Asuna started to panic.
Madoka's world was horrifyingly dark. If that was real, then could something similar happen to her?
And Kuroneko's earlier reaction made it obvious: just from the ID "Asuna," Kuroneko seemed to recognize her.
Meaning: in Kuroneko's world, there was a "work" that included Asuna.
Which meant Kuroneko might know what the future of Asuna's world looked like.
And that brought up the part that really bothered her.
Kuroneko had called her "Doujin Asuna."
Why?
Asuna took a slow breath. In the livestream chat, after Dr. Kouzuki's last line had left everyone in awkward silence, she forced herself to ask.
Asuna: Um, Kuroneko… could you tell me why you called me "Doujin Asuna"?
Strictly speaking, Kuroneko hadn't revealed her own gender. But the emotional texture of her messages, the tone, the way she reacted—it all felt unmistakably female, and probably around Asuna's age.
Fallen Angel Kuroneko: You're not… Yuuki Asuna, are you?
Asuna's stomach tightened.
So Kuroneko really did mean her.
Asuna: Yeah.
Then the channel went quiet.
That silence made Asuna even more anxious.
Asuna: So… why do you call me "Doujin Asuna"?
Fallen Angel Kuroneko: Uh… um… well… you'd probably be happier not knowing.
The hesitation—how conflicted Kuroneko sounded—only made Asuna more unsettled.
That nickname clearly had a story behind it.
And the key was the word "doujin."
What had happened?
What, exactly, had people done with her name… to make her earn a label like that?
(End of Chapter)
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