Ready Player Zero

Chapter 9: Mystique

Toshiro placed his headset on the table, quickly grabbed a jacket, and started heading outside, now a rather familiar process. Recently in these past few weeks, he'd made these walks into a regular routine, as integrated into his life as eating or sleeping.

He'd found that there was something calming about these minutes, albeit only a few, of being outdoors looking at scenery not computer-generated, but real. Even though there hadn't been anything nearly as exciting or dramatic as what had occurred on the first day. But that, in fact, was what was nice about it, the short break from his usual hectic, hurried life.

There was also usually something or the other interesting to see that he hadn't noticed before. Yesterday he'd gone outside in the late afternoon, just as the sun was setting, and found the sky spilled over with the vibrant pink and orange. Marveling at the beauty of it, he had wondered whether that was what the usual sunset looked like, or if it was just particularly remarkable that day. But it'd been too long since he had last seen a sunset, so he was left unsure...

He also often spent this time lost in thought, contemplating over the day's events. Especially lately these past few days, with all the occurrences that had happened in the Oasis.

All the gossip and rumors these days were filled with the mysterious Sho, who had so suddenly shown up in the ranks. Although Toshiro usually prided himself on not being one to listen to all the useless chatter, none of which was likely to be true, there really was an aura of mystique that made even him curious.

Sho getting onto the leaderboard in the first place was already a rarity, but what inspired more awe was that despite having started on the leaderboard as the 17th player only a few weeks ago, he had already gone up to the 15th.

The leaderboard's scoring was determined by a combination of the best score a player had in a single challenge and the overall total XP points collected for participating in events and the such. No one was entirely sure how much weight each of the two factors held when the algorithm was calculating the scores, but it seemed that getting a new high score was worth more than earning more XP points.

That meant that for a dramatic increase in the score, beating an old high score was necessary, not just extensively playing for a slow increase through XP. And once a player got into the higher ranks, reaching a new high score was hard.

Of course, practice was obviously helpful, but the really high scores were usually due to some chance of luck at getting a helpful power-up. So it would usually take a few months for a player to move up a single spot in the leaderboards, while Sho had achieved that in only around half the time.

He really was remarked as a legendary player. Some of the big digital news companies had even written articles about him, although there was a bit of a problem they faced when attempting to do so.

The issue being that they had almost absolutely no information about Sho. And it wasn't from lack of effort, either.

Obviously, being in a virtual world meant that protecting privacy was important, a lesson that the world had quickly learned after the headsets had first been released and a few stories went viral about people who had made a few unwise decisions and gotten hacked. The rule of thumb was: if you didn't want the whole world to know about it, you didn't tell anyone.

However, Sho had taken the level of paranoia to a whole new level. Once players got to the international level, they would usually tell curious fans a little information about themselves, at the very least stating which country they were from so that its flag could be displayed next to their username on the leaderboard. The right side of Sho's name, though, remained blank.

But the less that was known about him, the more the public could fantasize about his true identity. There were rumors that he was a retired military general, or a famous author, or a spy on an espionage mission who had become so enamored with the Oasis's world that he had neglected his job, resulting in his exile from his country which then allowed him to dedicate more time to playing. Toshiro hardly thought any of them were true, but then again, you never knew.