Disclaimer: OVERLORD, all its characters and ideas, its plot, and its premise are the property of Kugane Maruyama. Fundamental Diogenes reserves copyright on all original ideas, characters, story arcs, and premises. Please submit any inquiries via PM. Thank you, and enjoy!
[23:59:37]
Momonga set his watch to count out the seconds.
[23:59:50]
Momonga closed his eyes.
[23:59:59]
The countdown finished. He waited for the curtains to fall on his fantasy world.
He waited for the automatic logout.
[00:00:00]
[00:00:01]
[00:00:02]
"Hm?"
kotae wa doko e? sagashite
where's my soul?
Momonga opened his eyes. Twin points of scarlet flared to life inside the void of his skull. He blinked rapidly, groggily surveying his surroundings. A column of NPCs knelt to his side - the only occupants of a staggeringly large hall.
Constructed from Relic-class materials and inlaid with prismatic ores worth their weight in gold one hundred times over, shaped with the power of the room editor console into beautifully masoned surfaces, and ornamented with chandeliers of various glowing gemstones that scattered a myriad of color-tinted light like godly radiance, the Throne Room of the Great Tomb of Nazarick was a work of art.
Forty-one banners descended from the impossibly high ceiling on the Throne Room's opposing walls, each one flawlessly crafted to represent a member of Momonga's guild, Ainz Ooal Gown. Mere moments ago, he'd nostalgically revisited each shimmering crest, evoking fond memories of his long-departed guildmates - his friends.
Thirty-seven of them had said their farewells, placed their equipment in the guild treasury, and logged out - permanently. Their abandonment was the unerring consequence of mandating guild members to engage in productive lives - they all eventually chose real life over the game. No matter how despicable "real life" turned out to be.
There was an unspoken rule in Ainz Ooal Gown: never discuss the hardships of one's working life. Everyone played Yggdrasil to escape the suffering that was existence, and none dared to break the silence. Herohero had forgone this taboo earlier; but, then again, the game was over. Yggdrasil would end at midnight, and Momonga would never see his friends again.
Well, Yggdrasil was supposed to end at midnight.
[00:00:04]
Momonga's mind gradually sharpened, focusing on reality - well, digital reality, really. Material reality was something to be avoided at all costs, unless one was born in an Arcology.
Momonga's Overlord avatar didn't flinch or shift as he instinctively felt the scene of his Dive transform. This was to be expected - Yggdrasil avatars couldn't display the finer emotives of humanity, like facial expressions or reflexive twitches.
Of course, the rules of Yggdrasil no longer applied - though Momonga didn't know it yet. The skeletal form resting on the Throne of Kings did not react to Momonga's instinctive desire to flinch because it wasn't human. It was the body of an Overlord, a being without reflex and immune to mental status effects like ｢Surprise｣ or ｢Confusion｣.
This mental adjustment was less akin to waking up, and more similar to the sensation he felt when removing his Dive helmet. It was as if he were a camera that suddenly readjusted its depth of field, bringing the entire scene into sharp focus. Momonga's mind hadn't been inactive, it had merely been poorly calibrated. It had been human.
[00:00:05]
I'm still here… But… Something is… different.
Momonga hadn't yet noticed the depth and regal magnificence of the voice that relayed his "Hm?" into reality. What he had noticed was that somebody had obviously redirected his Dive. Such things were theoretically possible, but very illegal. Only a Megacorporation's holding company had the immunity necessary to pull something like that off, something that Bellriver-san had discovered quite directly several years ago.
Ainz Ooal Gown had been saddened by Bellriver's loss. It had brought a piece of reality into their game, into the escape where they had been as gods. Even residents of an Arcology could simply disappear when the Megacorps deemed it helpful to their utter domination of society. Thankfully, the "paralegals" that had "investigated" Bellriver's "suicide" had underestimated the means of secret communication possible within Yggdrasil. Otherwise, all of Ainz Ooal Gown may have simply… not come home, one day.
Despite Yggdrasil's commercial success - or perhaps because of it - the company that developed Yggdrasil became a wholly-owned subsidiary of the main DMMORPG Megacorp, Flawless Lady Entertainment. FLE was very powerful, even for a Megacorp, as it controlled the many incarnations of escapism that the exploited population quite literally "Dived" into.
[00:00:06]
Momonga glanced about, the undead glint glowing brighter in his eye sockets as he surveyed every minute detail. The Throne Room of the Great Tomb of Nazarick remained the same as mere moments ago, the same as the way his friends had built it. Except…
There are differences. Subtle, yes, but differences nonetheless.
Momonga hadn't yet noticed the intense increase in his mental capacity. His linguistic proficiency had escalated tenfold, and even as he thought, his mind subvocalized words appropriate to the source cognition and actually simulated a clear auditory rendition of his voice, at a speed appropriate to the boosted velocity of his mind. It felt so natural, Momonga was already used to it.
[00:00:07]
He took stock of the situation.
Whatever Dive I'm in now, Momonga pondered, it possesses vastly superior computational resources to Yggdrasil.
Something he'd been almost startled to notice was that real-time ray tracing had been enabled. With the fiber-optic infrastructure of modern Earth, it was all too easy for FLE to run every CPU calculation server-side, and transport the resulting data sets across the network to client devices. It made hacking impossible, as each iGPU only received very specific data that was directly relevant to its rendering of the Dive. It also made things cheaper for the worker ants who consumed their products, as they wouldn't need to shell out for a state-of-the-art machine to play their games.
In the long term, this meant that the Megacorps could afford to pay the ants even less, while maintaining their access to mind-numbing substitutes for real life. It was an utterly diabolical configuration, though even a child could have thought of it. The rich didn't need to be smart - they could devise whatever solution they wanted, and the slaves serving them would make it work, praising them for their far-reaching insights all the while.
Regardless, running all those servers was expensive. The destroyed, polluted atmosphere precluded any form of renewable energy, so electricity had to be supplied via the ever-dwindling stockpile of fossil fuels. Nuclear energy was possible, but if there was one thing anybody learned from the Great War, it was to avoid nukes like the plague.
Well, the Great War killed far more people than any plague ever had - 9 billion casualties in the first year alone. That was the problem with strategic weapons. Momonga was no expert on waging war, but he knew enough from his meager education that the existence of strategic weapons was bad for everyone. That is, if the Megacorp in charge of education was telling the truth. Whatever.
The Arcologies, in their never-ending suspicion of one another, agreed to outlaw any development of reactors or absolutely anything that could lead to another functioning warhead. So, electricity was derived from the combustion of carbon-based molecules.
If there was one thing any Megacorp didn't tolerate, it was expense. One of FLE's executives had asked Yggdrasil's shitty devs to spare every compute resource possible in their development of the game. And when an executive asked, well…
Momonga had some sympathy for the shitty devs. Even though they lived in an Arcology, they were beholden to the Megacorps just like everyone else. They had set out to create the greatest game ever known to man, but had found their efforts hamstrung by the very men and women who led them. Most of Yggdrasil's "features" that everyone griped about were cost-saving measures, rules that would save resources for FLE, who operated the servers.
[00:00:08]
Yggdrasil had never implemented real-time ray tracing. It was all too easy to do, these days, but the computational load was taxing even by modern standards. Yet, before Momonga's very eyes, the light coming from the Throne Room's gemstone chandeliers was alive.
Real-time ray tracing is the accurate simulation of light, in the sense of particle physics. Rather than lighting being determined by the strength of the source, and the reflectivity - or albedo - of surfaces, with reflections merely dimmed overlays of the light source, real-time ray tracing treats every particle of light separately. Represented as a ray, or a vector with infinite magnitude, they emanate from the source in the millions. Each ray is traced until it lands on an object surface like a table or window, or even a particle in the air, like smoke or fog. Depending on the object's physical characteristics, some of the rays are absorbed, some are reflected, and some are refracted through the material. From there, they continue their diminished path onwards, illuminating everything within reach until they become so minute in number that the cluster is dropped.
The rays that enter a designated camera point - such as an avatar's eyes - are what is "seen." Thus, ray tracing is the most lifelike representation of light possible within a Dive. This was the godlike miracle Momonga beheld.
Imagine, for a moment, a chandelier. Not a dinky plastic or glass construct, but a true work of art, a platinum and gold masterpiece of fine craftsmanship detailed with scrollwork so fine it would feel as velvet if you were to touch it. These days, only machines could create something so intricate, but that is immaterial.
Now, imagine that, dangling from silver chains, were suspended hundreds of various gemstones, each the size of a robin's egg and cut into multifaceted beauties. A myriad of colors ranging from the clearest blue sky to the most sanguine claret to the deepest forested emerald were represented. Impossibly bright candles - Legacy-class instances of ｢Eternal Flame｣ summoned by ｢Triplet - Create Greater Item｣ - produced pure white flames, whose light flooded through the multitude of crystalline stones.
The pure, brilliant light, scattered and colored by ebullient gems, radiated down from above. The combined effect of the stones was to compose a generally white glow, but by the nature of refraction, some colors maintained dominance here and there. It was only on the inlaid prismatic ores that one could truly appreciate the abundance of color. Evident on the surface of their metallic sheen was a veritable rainbow of hues, cast by the angular cut stones into a mosaic of soft splendor.
Garnet-san really did her homework, Momonga observed with a note of nostalgia, as he considered the implications of her now-living handicraft.
A self-professed geologist, Garnet maintained a study of the Earth and its treasures, much in the same way as Blue Planet-san. That was how you knew they were both from Arcologies. Not only did they have time for hobbies, but they had relatively free access to information - to how the Earth was, before the Great War.
[00:00:09]
To Momonga, there were three possibilities. Firstly, the shitty devs may have grown living, beating hearts like the rest of humanity, and decided to throw a little celebration after the server shutdown, with all the bells and whistles of unfinished projects implemented into a private room. That would explain the shift of his Dive, as he would have felt odd being transferred to another server. Somebody may have accidentally moved him. It was the most likely scenario.
Secondly, somebody may have decided to screw with him. It was no secret that Ainz Ooal Gown had many enemies within Yggdrasil. Technically, it was difficult, and the consequences were severe, but somebody may have hacked his feed and transported his Dive themselves. With the state of the world, anybody living outside the Arcologies could feasibly grow hateful enough to sacrifice their meaningless lives in one last attempt at revenge.
Many development kits came with the option of ray tracing, and the unknown assailant may merely be pulling out all the stops - as it were - on their "revenge server." The other subtle differences he noticed could easily be explained as simple feature incongruencies between FLE's dedicated servers and the hackers'.
Thirdly, and most dangerously, his mind may have been abducted by Flawless Lady Entertainment for some Dive "experimentation." Momonga's job wasn't particularly important, and he lived outside an Arcology, so his disappearance would be seamless. He had the least amount of information on this possibility, and he needed to know more - quickly.
[00:00:10]
Momonga's HUD was hidden. There was a simple command to remove it in Yggdrasil, allowing screen-captures of its admittedly beautiful scenery without all the DMMORPG UI in the way. He assumed that whatever Dive transfer occurred had disabled his HUD. In all three of his identified possibilities, there would be no need for a UI anyways.
Still, it doesn't hurt to try.
Momonga lifted his skeletal arm - the one that wasn't grasping the ｢Staff of Ainz Ooal Gown｣ - and tapped the air three times with an outstretched bony finger.
Tap.
[00:00:11]
Tap.
[00:00:12]
Tap.
[00:00:13]
Nothing happened.
This was the command to reactivate a hidden HUD, and the specific gesture was unlikely to be performed by accident unless one was having a seizure - in which case, the Dive would have been disconnected long before, anyways.
Oh, well.
Momonga didn't expect anything to happen, but the lack of response was disheartening. Guess we're not in Kansas anymore, he thought, recalling the vintage one-liner Whitebrim-san had once uttered.
He hadn't acknowledged it as a possibility, but Momonga had secretly hoped that he was actually in a sequel to Yggdrasil, and that his character had been ported over. It was unlikely - FLE wasn't known for splurging on server resources, and there was no way that the shitty devs would have allowed anybody to keep their EXP and equipment, not to mention the illegality of directly assuming control of someone's Dive - but a hope was a hope. Maybe, he wondered, he desired, he hoped with all his soul, he could see his friends again. Maybe Suzuki Satoru wouldn't be suffering through life alone, but once again enjoying it with his comrades.
Regardless of what the manipulative Megacorps thought, there was true enjoyment, true friendship, and true life in Yggdrasil. Despite their best attempts to crush the souls out of their ants, DMMORPGs, the very means to the Megacorps' terrible ends, would handicap them. The shitty devs knew that, and probably had many a good laugh as they wrought the Megacorp's failure by building Yggdrasil into something beyond mere escapism.
[00:00:14]
No matter. Yggdrasil was over. What mattered now - Momonga was unsure. If he was stuck in some dev's lobby, as was likely, he would soon be discovered and booted. All Momonga could do was facilitate that, lest they think he was a spy from another company.
If somebody had hijacked his Dive, as was entirely possible, Momonga needed to use the emergency hardware limiter to back out quickly, before any damage could be done to his mind. Like with seizures, any medical emergency would automatically shut down Suzuki Satoru's dive, hypertension included. It was an excellent tactic among the heteromorphic races, like Ainz Ooal Gown's members, when they were caught unawares in a PK. All they had to do was rile the enemy up just enough - or, in some cases, scare them shitless - and they would be forcibly logged out.
The Great Tomb of Nazarick was designed with this in mind. The 7th Floor - the first layer created by Ainz Ooal Gown - was a labyrinth of terror. Those who lost themselves in it - as many had - lost not only their sense of direction, but their minds. That was the flavor text, at least.
Judging by the in-game message the shitty devs sent Ulbert Alain Odle-san, it had been quite effective. Summarizing a long chain of events that greatly entertained the goat demon, some of the content he implemented in Demiurge's domain had been reported as "R-18 content," which was forbidden in Yggdrasil. It wasn't raunchy, or anything like that - the 7th Floor was purely terrifying. In the end, the devs allowed Ulbert to keep most of his "toys," with the stipulation that the area had the "blood and gore" setting scaled to minimum.
In the end, the way "blood and gore" was implemented meant that the lack of it only made Demiurge's domain even more disturbing. Then again, no player ever made it to the 7th Floor again, so no further reports were filed. Ulbert got to keep his nightmare fuel.
As a matter of fact, Momonga mused, the 7th Floor is the best way to trigger that limiter. Even I have no idea of the depth of Ulbert-san's madness.
No matter. If I cannot access the UI, then I am not meant to. Somebody has actively sought to prevent me from logging out.
Momonga began to feel uncomfortable. It wasn't fear, not quite. He had no way of knowing it, but his new form possessed immunity to ｢Fear｣.
[00:00:15]
Uwah… This is problematic.
Momonga almost moved to cover his face with the outstretched hand he had tried to bring up the UI with, but decided against it, and returned it to the armrest.
If my mind is being held captive, then I must project strength, he reasoned, almost subconsciously. I cannot display any hint of having caught on to the assailant's plans.
It was a slim likelihood, but if options two or three were indeed reality, then Momonga would need to behave normally - puzzling out his situation all the while.
Umu… Best to assume that I am being watched, even if this is merely some mistake by the shitty devs. In that case… time to proceed with the most logical course of action.
｢GM Call｣, Momonga intoned, activating the skill all players learned by default in Yggdrasil.
[00:00:16]
He knew instantly that it failed. It didn't return any sort of message, or error, or alert. It simply failed. Being immune to mental status effects, he showed no outward sign of surprise - perhaps merely sitting up the slightest fraction of a degree straighter, as he grew tense.
For the ｢GM Call｣ skill to fail was… impossible. It was not declared globally, as most skills were, but rather hard-coded into each player's avatar, similarly to hidden skills. It would always target and link to an entity with the ability to modify the game world - in Yggdrasil's case, developers. This was so that even if somebody messed with the DEV tag attached to developer avatars, players caught in a bug would always be able to reach somebody who could help them.
The existence of ｢GM Call｣ was mandated by law, and was one of the few laws that was actually enforced. The horror stories of people caught in factory conveyor belts, screaming as their entrails were pulled from their stomachs, but with nobody to hear them, were quite similar to the early days of DMMORPGs. There were stories of people caught in glitches, endless loops that pulverized their minds over the course of days, or even weeks, but could never contact anyone due to the nature of their situation.
Of course, FLE couldn't allow such nightmares in it's flawless worlds, and so the executives wrote a memo about game safety and public relations. Naturally, being the word of the executives, it was quickly codified into company policy. And, honestly, what was really the difference between Megacorp policy and the law, anyways.
Regardless, it was impossible to tamper with ｢GM Call｣. In all three of his situations, the skill would have connected with somebody - anybody - who could answer to his situation - whether they were hostile or not. Which meant, quite literally, that whatever Dive he was in had no developers.
[00:00:17]
It hit Momonga like one of the Arcology's defensive water cannons. It hit him like ｢World Savior｣, the weapon that knew no limits. It hit him like the truck that killed Bellriver-san. In spite of it all, he remained logical. He considered. He tried to puzzle it out.
True AI had been outlawed decades ago, before the Great War, even. Even if the progenitor of his Dive was an AI, it would be required to maintain avatars of control in the worldspace, or it would be locked out entirely. And no functional AI would continue to allocate resources for a black box that it couldn't access.
[00:00:18]
[00:00:19]
[00:00:20]
Momonga continued to ponder. He continued to try and think through it. He continued to come across dead end after dead end. And, through it all, he gradually became aware of the speed with which he was coming to these conclusions. He gradually became aware that his mind was functioning faster than any human's ought to.
[00:00:21]
[00:00:22]
[00:00:23]
[00:00:24]
He became aware that, through the past twenty-four seconds - and yes, his internal clock was now accurate to the nanosecond - he had been doing things that were, by all means available to humanity, even the richest executives with the most expensive implants, impossible.
He had identified his circumstances - however incorrectly - and formulated solutions within the span of seconds. He had remembered how to raise the HUD - however useless - an action which he hadn't performed since going exploring with Nine's Own Goal over a decade ago. Momonga even recalled the exact wording - however meaningless - of some random quote Bellriver-san had drawn from an old movie.
And he hadn't felt a lick of fear throughout it all. In fact, his cold pragmatism bordered on the unfeeling. Yet, he did feel, just not fear, or surprise, or… anything that could be construed as a negative status effect.
Momonga possessed immunity to all mental statuses, except those he allowed to take effect. His Mana and Magic stats, which were, according to their flavor text, mental attributes, had been quite literally off the scale ever since he was Level 94.
It would seem that my Yggdrasil abilities have become… reality…
Momonga grinned. Granted, his face couldn't grin, not really. But any creature with the ability to sense auras would have felt his amusement. In Yggdrasil, ｢Sense Emotion｣ was a passive skill unlocked at Level 20 that granted access to emotes. The more advanced "aura-reading" skills and spells merely provided information about one's in-game Karma value, or allowed one to see emotes that were sent in party or guild chat rather than global chat.
Oh, how Wish III would have loved to be here… Momonga thought wistfully. Though, if any could read his mind, they would have likely perceived it as somewhat malevolent. He did so love Isekai…
Granted, Momonga didn't know for certain that he had been "Isekai'd," as it were. His newly-minted genius had come to that conclusion, but, then again, there were no certainties when it came to forces beyond mortal comprehension.
But, his mind challenged, why must the forces of planeswalking remain beyond comprehension? There was plenty of flavor text in Yggdrasil that would allow for such events…
If I allow for collapsible time, then a grandfather paradox will be possible… If somebody creative had held Ouroboros as the servers went down, been transported to… wherever I am now, and then used the now-real properties of the World Item to create the world itself, untold years in the past, and order the transport of all Yggdrasil players, everything is possible. And, if I'm in another world, who's to say that time follows the same laws as material reality? Well, material reality may well be different now…
The moment that he reached the conclusion that he may have been transported to another plane, Momonga became aware of his immense power. It was like a mental block had been removed with his acceptance of the situation; he suddenly had deep knowledge of his own capabilities, and all the intricacies of magic. Such as it would be if the flavor text of his Yggdrasil job classes had been transformed into reality.
He had never studied quantum theory, or anything related to spacetime at all. Apparently, however, some of the books of knowledge he had been required to acquire to gain job classes in Yggdrasil contained extensive knowledge on the rules of reality. In his new Overlord form, that knowledge was called swiftly to the forefront of his mind, interpreted, and the conclusions reported to his consciousness.
It was as if he possessed an entire Library of Ashurbanipal within his mind, complete with minders and researchers. This was actually quite likely to be true, Momonga decided with some satisfaction. He had once acquired the unique secret skill ｢Mind Palace｣ for being the first magic caster to complete the Study in Scarlet hidden quest chain.
Yes, I have indeed been Isekai'd. And, if I am here, who's to say that the rest of Ainz Ooal Gown isn't?
It was a thin hope, Momonga knew. Unless the wielder of whichever of the Twenty World Items that birthed this world had been quite specific in their instructions, it was likely that only those from a single point in time had been transported - the time of the shutdown. Regardless - it was possible. It was a maybe, it was an unsurety, but there was hope.
Momonga might see his friends once again.
He laughed.
Hello! Welcome to Fundamental Diogenes. It's been a while since I've posted here, but I hope you will all enjoy Ensouled Overlord.
At the moment, I don't have a beta reader for this work. If any of you are interesed, feel free to PM me! I am equally interested in minor critiques here and there, especially if you feel that I've missed anything. Please review my work, so that I know where I may improve. Thank you, and, as always, enjoy your stay!