1 Steve
A new story! And a Danmachi one too!
I mean it's not like I write much else is it, hahahaha... (cries in the corner)
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(??? POV)
Let me begin by saying that first, I am an idiot.
Second, I am a shameless cheater who doesn't like playing by the rules because what was wrong with taking the backstreets? If you don't live for fun, your head just gets dumb.
Third, I am a massive anime weeb and I am bloody PROUD of it.
Fourth, I've been transmigrated into an anime I am quite fond of with the powers of my favourite sandbox game, with my Operator leisures allowing me to manipulate reality on a small scale thereby making me impervious and invincible to any sort of harm while I get to enforce my will upon all that exists in this fascinating world full of weeb fantasies.
So you ask me;
Stephen?
How the hell are you enjoying your life if everything is so easy for you?
Well my friend, to enjoy a life like this...don't make your objectives complicated.
Be like me, my friend. Be like water. Encompass and swallow that which seeks to impede you by getting in your way, using the power so easily handed to you on a plate. Be a cheater, taken for granted or not, and just enjoy yourself while taking enjoyment from the infuriation and confusion of those around you.
But first, let me start from the beginning...
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I don't know why I was talking like Bruce Lee there but the way I died was extraordinarily ridiculous even amongst everything that happens in novels and manga in isekai type situations. And frankly it didn't even make any freaking sense. I've had to come up with a few theories and the most plausible one sounds like utter nonsense yet here I am.
Not that I'm complaining or anything. I'm loving this new life. The only real bummer is that I no longer have access to internet but that's okay. It's a fair trade off for the kind of power I possess now.
My name is Stephen Hewer.
And I'm a fervent Minecrafter who absolutely loves dabbling in mods and plugins as well as cheat commands. I've always had thing for sandbox games and games for immersive fun as opposed to games that had a set goal to accomplish. I began playing Minecraft when I was twelve and I got sucked into it by the small group of friends that I had.
Ever since then I never tired of the game. And all the new updates that came along just served to open more possibilities in my world. New biomes, new ores, new armour, new items, new mobs. 'Bring it all' I said because the more that came, the more obsessed I got with the game and my daily existence became filled with the desire to farm even more levels and complete every achievement that came along with the new updates.
Of course, there were updates that disappointed me beyond a doubt. Such as when they brought in the Allay when I voted for the Copper Golem. Of course it was easily fixable just by adding another mod to my extremely large mod pack I'd built up over the years, drinking in the memory from my devices. But the ingenuity still got to me.
But yeah, I loved Minecraft. Simple is, simple as.
Which was why I found myself at 18 years of age stuck in a boxroom in one of my dad's several flats across Egypt, simultaneously playing Minecraft while also trying to get access to my streaming account through which I would watch anime. Certain services were not available in the Middle East, only until you bypassed it with VPN. But it came at the extra cost of sucking in even more memory.
Now you may be asking, what the hell was a person with a name like mine doing in Egypt of all places?
Hold your horses, I was coming to that. My father's name was Hewer (not literally, it's his family name but I'm parodying off Robinson Crusoe's introduction) and he was a dignified English businessman.
And my mom's family name was along the lines of 'Fann'aan' which is an Arabic word that had different meanings depending on the context in which it was spoken. It could mean artist, it could mean crafter but I liked to go with the latter for obvious reasons. And she was an Egyptian Coptic, who possessed fairly lighter skin than most of her darker relatives.
Didn't mean nothing for me however when it came to inheriting their genetics. My father a white man, my mother a fair skinned African but me? A Type 4 moderately dark-skinned Half-English-Half-Egyptian teen that felt out of place in both crowds for possessing European features yet had the 'wrong' skin tone.
Life sucked for mixed race kids, no matter who tells you what.
Anyway, my dad ran a business in Egypt involving marble and granite work which took him back and forth between Europe and Africa. Basically furniture units made out of extremely compressed pretty rock and Dad dealt with it right from the quarry to the customer's house in some sort of quarrying and mining company. I never really understood the nature of the job but it made our three member family quite wealthy. And as a perk of being the only child, I got to indulge in quite a lot of that money too.
The downside to this was I had to be home-schooled as our family was constantly moving around and I couldn't really stick to one place. What friends I did have would be neighbours of the few estates in both England and Egypt that both mom and dad owned because of what my father earned, and Mom also came from a well-off family so she had inherited a few properties as well.
I couldn't really tell you which country I liked better. One was too cold and the other was too hot. The upside was that it gave me a lot of time to myself since Mom and Dad were always running around, which meant I would play video games. And it was during one of these very common moments in my life that I found the wonder that was Minecraft which hooked my attention ever since.
Now I chalk my obsession with the game up to my name because of the irony and the coincidence. The short name for Stephen is Steve which is the name of the iconic Minecraft default character. And my father's name Hewer was just another word for 'miner', and my mother's name was 'crafter'.
Like I said, ironic.
But also as a consequence of the introverted life in this day and age, I found myself falling into the moshpit known as the Otaku culture. Well I wasn't a hardcore introvert and Otaku as I still went out to touch grass (or sand), but I still found it and I have never regretted it. It was there I learned an appreciation for the 'culture' (wink, wink), and for how versatile it could be. How many genres it could cover provided a never ending stream of shows to watch.
And because I spent half my life in Egypt where I was always privy to mythology and ancient legends of gods and magic, I found myself with quite a liking for the fantasy genre of anime. Magic was always a sole part of the shows I watched and I couldn't imagine a single one I'd missed.
If I enjoyed the particular anime well enough, I'd go out to search for a mod that had the abilities of the anime characters encoded and add it to my modpack where I would then start playing in my world with those powers.
Such as when I added the One Punch Man suit mod that gave me Saitama's strength when I collected all the pieces. And it was the one where the effects were permanent even if I took it off and was only removed if I did so manually or just drank a bucket of milk.
Or when I added the JJK mod to the server and began blasting my friends' builds away with Hollow Purples then laugh and gloat as they tried to attack me but could not make it pass the Infinity between us. The pleasure of the experience was increased tenfold when I played in VR.
As you can see, I lived a sad life but I did not regret it nor have I ever been ashamed of it. Respect a man's passions.
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Mom and dad were seeing to the opening of a new quarry that had been uncovered somewhere north of Egypt and they had dragged me along to one of the crappy little villages for a few days while they tried to finalise some business contracts.
(Did I mention that Mom is also part of the business Dad is in which is how they met and got married?)
So they left me in one of the tiny little flats with my console and my laptop that only just about had sufficient running water but barely enough electrical power. The circuits here were really bad, so much so that Dad often warned me about which appliances I plugged in as it could cause short circuit.
Of course as a kid who rarely ever saw his parents outside of meal times, I was rebellious and didn't listen.
There were not many sockets where I could plugin my stuff to begin with. There was only a few in the kitchen, the main bedroom and one of the boxrooms that had a convenient shelf built into the wall. So that was where I put my gaming laptop and put it on charge. I had brought an extension with me so I could plug in multiple things in the same socket, so I also plugged in my VR Oculus and my phone where I was trying to download anime so I could watch them offline since the Wi-Fi was so bad.
It was only just enough for me to play Minecraft without the game being too choppy, but not enough bandwidth could be shared to also stream anime apparently.
Take note that all of these were plugged in the same extension, in the same socket (which was bad and realistically unsafe, even by Egyptian standards and their sockets were terrible in terms of safety). It's important as this was part of what contributed to everything that happened that day.
I finally managed to download the anime I wanted to watch, 'Danjon ni Deai o Motomeru no wa Machigatteiru Darō ka'. Abbreviated to 'Danmachi' only to the be ridiculously lengthened again in English as 'Is It Wrong to Try to Pick Up Girls in a Dungeon?'. Ridiculous, and frankly the anime was full of fan-service up until the fourth season where things really became interesting.
Now I wasn't solely focused on Minecraft when it came to games. I had played Memoria Freese some time back and I also watched the spin-off 'Sword Oratoria' as well so I was knowledgeable of the franchise beyond the anime. I'd even read some of the light novels and fanfictions based off of it all. Like I said, I was a proud weeb.
Now I don't need to explain why I was downloading it, only that it was my choice of anime to watch in the few days I'd be stuck here while my parents were on business. In the village I lived in, there were no big-brand fast food joints, so I had to resort to a local restaurant to provide me my meals as I didn't want to cook.
Yes, I can cook. Men do know how to cook ladies. I'm not a 'Sigma' that demands women to do the cooking for me. I was well capable of producing delicious meals. All the time I had at home meant lots of opportunity to learn new things including cooking. I'd also learnt a little programming so I could mess around with my Java Edition whenever my friends and I jumped on our SMP together. You know, just to troll the daylights out of them.
I ordered some mashed up fava beans along with Koshari and Aish along with some tea they offered for free. My English blood gave me an appreciation for good tea so I accepted. After having consumed my meal, to my delight I found that my phone had managed to download the whole anime so I could now watch offline.
I took it off the internet to turn on my Vivecraft but forgot to turn the screen off. I had a habit of leaving my phone settings on it not turning off when not in use. The screen would stay on until the battery ran out.
I turned my laptop on and signed into my server. As I was the veteran in the group of friends I now had, I was server owner and so usually I'd be first online as I had all the privileges needed to sabotage my friends when they eventually joined using the numerous plugins and mods I added to the server. I had added so many mods to the server that world generation had become cursed and terrain was at time misplaced or out of shape. Entire chunks would be placed in locations they did not belong in. In my opinion, it made the experience that much more funny.
Anyway, I went over to my modpack as was routine of me everytime I logged on to see which mods I would be using that day. Some mods were perpetually kept on, like gun mods and furniture mods. There was even a mod for spears that Minecraft never seemed to want to officially add to the game. There was also the Enderite mod which made me unhappy that it was not a real thing. The floating bits of ore were quite unique like they had a perpetual levitation effect on it.
There was also the option for whether or not I would add shaders to the server so I could play with everything looking realistic. There was also a mod that made all the items look super realistic, which made it great for aesthetics as the armour and weapons would look absolutely insane. I didn't want to risk turning something like that on as I didn't want to risk my laptop in a place like that.
Now as I was playing in virtual reality, I'd forgotten that I had placed the tea I'd ordered on the same shelf as the laptop. And it had been placed near the edge right above where I had kicked the extension underneath to give me footspace to move around. The extension itself was beginning to heat up real badly as my three devices continuously sucked power from the crappy socket in the wall.
My laptop, my phone connected to the charger and my headset was also on charge even though it was connected to my head. I forget to mention that this extension was not my usual one as I had forgotten to pack it before the flight here so I had bought it from a local store. The same crappy quality as the power line in this house and the socket in the wall.
While I was messing around trying to fight the Warden, one of my Oculus Touch controllers knocked the styrofoam cup half full of tea right on top of the fizzing extension.
And what followed would be the first and the very last time I ever experienced such physical agony in my life. Fatal electrocution is a pain that cannot be described even by the dead. It's a pain you cannot put into words. But safe to say, that is what happened.
Arcs of electric currents ran from the extension up to my devices. It first reached my phone which still had the screen on, a play button hovering over the Danmachi anime waiting to be pressed. It then reached my laptop which then began bugging out my screen. Then it reached my headset where it washed my skull in treatment I could only akin to the electric chair in America. I fell over in my jolt, scrabbling for anything as I dropped my Touch controllers and grabbed on to the cord connecting to my laptop.
The laptop was pulled over the shelf into my left hand right as my fingers seized up from the currents. Simultaneously, my hand had grabbed onto my phone which also had arcs of mini lightning covering it. And there some sort of loop connection was formed as I held both devices in hand, frying alive as I could not even scream in the pain I was feeling.
I later surmised that it would be this point where the unbelievable had happened to me. My theory is that somehow the electrical currents had hooked up my frying brain with the devices and had converted my consciousness into some sort of digital data. When the laptop had fallen into my hand, I'd smashed it on the floor quite hard when I fell so I surmised that it was out before I was. And as I burned to death, it left the only device, my phone still sitting on the floor clasped in my grip.
It had to have been the last device that still had an active supercurrent tearing it apart because I physically felt my consciousness, my identity being siphoned off somewhere. I was only fully on board when the last breath left my lips and I clinically died on the spot.
My soul, my consciousness or my brain or whatever it was. The data that translated to my entire person must have somehow meshed with the data of the game running on my laptop and since we were both out for the count, there was only one other device still running that was pulling us both towards it.
My phone, that had started to play the Danmachi anime. How I know this, even I don't know. But it's just a theory at the end of the day. Did my phone really suck up my being and my game's data into itself? I don't know.
All I know is that one moment I felt like I was floating along some sort of intangible plane of existence where crude matter could not hope to enter, and then the next, I'd opened my eyes to see a sky above me that was such a bright blue, it was more beautiful than any sky you found on Earth.
And the pain all felt like nothing but a dream as I sat up on the edge of a mountain, with a Minecraft hotbar at the bottom of my vision, a chat log to the left of it, an experience bar underneath it that displayed my 71,955 levels in proud display (all of which I TOTALLY obtained legitimately). These were the first things I noticed.
The second was that I was on a mountain top sitting upon the snow and looking out over a beautiful scenery, a land so breathtakingly beautiful, I stared dumbfounded for a whole minute for focusing what was right in the middle of that view. A medieval, Dark Age looking city that had one prominent feature; an impossibly tall stone tower that looked like it stretched into the heavens itself. I immediately recognised it but my mind refused to believe it as it went through (at a surprisingly fast pace) all the similar scenarios to this I'd read of.
Before I could make any visible reaction, something popped up in my hotbar. I only noticed now that as opposed to how it was before I came here, it was completely empty save for a written book that had just popped into the first slot. Above it read;
To Stephen Hewer.
Instinctively I touched the air where that specific hotbar was meant to be and all of a sudden a heavy, glowing purple book dropped right out of my hand onto the soft part of my thigh. With how hyperalert I was to any possible pain because of what I had just experienced prior, I feared the pain that would come with the corner of the heavy book hitting me. But to my surprise, I felt nothing. No sensation whatsoever.
The book bounced off my thigh and landed in the snow, the title still hovering over it like a name tag. What crossed my mind in that moment was how ultra-realistic the book was and the fact that the physics still looked to be working Minecraft-wise as it instantly started floating above ground on that same corner that hit me.
It then hit me that items like this should not have nametags over them, and yet this did. Moreover, it had my name on it, clearly signed by someone other than me as I would definitely remember writing something like this.
With no other option but to daftly go along with the only possible thing I could do that wouldn't make me hysterical with the disbelief of my current situation. I reached for the book and this time unlike Minecraft physics, I was able to grab it with both hands.
Gingerly, I thumbed open the cover for me to fall on the first page made of a crispy yellow-cream paper. On it was not the digital writing I expected to see but a very elegant yet authoritative cursive English.
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Dear Stephen...
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