Death March Vol. 1: what actually happens

He falls asleep at work

Suzuki is a game programmer in the middle of a death march, which is industry slang for a doomed crunch period. He naps under his desk. He wakes in a desert wasteland with a game interface in his field of vision and is entirely unbothered, because this has happened before:

He recognizes the HUD. “It was the interface from WW, the game I had been working on not long ago.” The menu items are a mix of two of his projects, FFL and WW. He can open the menu by thinking at it, though a bug stops him touching it with his hand.

His character is level 1 and named Satou, which is what he always calls his test characters because people misread his real name that way. His inventory is what was in his pockets: a protein bar, a wallet, a cell phone.

He concludes: “Typical half-assed dream logic.”

Three hundred lizardmen, and a bug report

He explores to a cliff edge, sees a map label reading Valley of Dragons, and then an army comes out of the shadows “like a cavalry charge in a fantasy film.”

Elite Lizardmen. About three hundred of them, most around level 50, mounted on “some kind of velociraptor-like dinosaur.” The map’s upper half floods red.

One rider aims a longbow at him and fires. The arrow grazes his cheek. He touches it, tastes iron, and the dream stops being a dream:

Arrows come down in a wall. He tumbles into a hollow in the rock. He has three Meteor Shower icons, described as “the emergency skills for beginners that I’d come up with after the meeting with Mr. Tubs.” He fires one. Nothing. He fires the other two. Nothing.

Then the sky fills with meteorites and the army stops existing.

The best joke in the book

He checks his log afterward. It opens with the message WELCOME TO OUR WORLD.

The universe formally announces his isekai and he scrolls past, because his own game boots with the same line.

The log also reports “Source: Conquered the Valley of Dragons,” and the defeat of dragons who had apparently been the valley’s former rulers. He had not noticed the dragons.

The corpses are itemized as loot, which he finds unsettling: “Am I supposed to become a necromancer now, or what?” His solution is the most Satou thing in the volume:

He then casts Meteor Shower a second time, deliberately, as a test, on an empty patch of map. It costs about a third of his MP and produces boulders “almost a hundred times the size” of the first ones. He runs.

He watches an army fight a wyvern and does not help

From a hiding place, he observes soldiers, knights and sorcerers bring down a wyvern. He plans to throw rocks if it goes badly. It does not go badly.

The scene exists to deliver the magic system, which is the best worldbuilding in the volume. Chants are heard in stereo:

Spells named: Air Hammer, trigger word Turbulence!, and Lightning Bolt, Inazuma! The chant itself is not language: “It was almost like if you used music software to generate a series of notes on a PC.”

His Keen Hearing and Long-Distance Vision skills are shown to have a cost when the thunderclap leaves his ears ringing.

The Gatefront Inn, and the exchange rate

He is dragged into an inn by Martha, a young waitress, and greeted by her mother the landlady. An AR display pops up beside her face when he looks at her.

The important reveal, delivered as an aside while filling in a register:

Martha: “Whoa, you’re older than me?! I figured we were around the same age!”

He pays ten days in advance specifically to derive the currency: “if I want to figure out the exchange rate between large coppers and silvers, I should try paying for ten days in advance.” Two silvers for ten days works out to five large coppers to one silver.

Dinner is a premade quiche, which disappoints him: “Considering the town’s European-fantasy setting, I’d been expecting something more like rye bread or salty soup, but I guess I’d assumed too much.”

Socks, latrines, and a wild boar steak

This page is the book’s actual subject matter.

He realizes he forgot to buy socks. The inn has one common bathroom. The toilet is “the old-fashioned pit-latrine variety,” which he has never seen in person. There is no paper.

His verdict: “This had certainly been a baptism by fire in the ways of this new culture, but all things considered, it was really clean, so I’d be all right using it again.”

Downstairs, Martha talks him into the wild boar steak. The drunks endorse it unprompted.

Zena’s tour, and the floor under the setting

Zena, a soldier and sorcerer, takes him up onto the city walls, where civilians are not normally allowed.

She mentions, casually, that “the war with the beastfolk ended ten years ago.” Satou does the arithmetic immediately and privately:

The book plants that and leaves it.

The rest of the tour is engineering, which he enjoys. A flour mill converts into a gun battery during wyvern attacks, firing nets or blanks to drive the animal toward a field where the knights can finish it. Satou, immediately: “Wouldn’t that destroy the field, too?”

At Parion Temple he notices the gods all seem to end in “-on”: Parion, Zaicuon, Garleon. A wall painting shows the first hero fighting the demon lord, identifiable as a hero because Holy Swords glow blue and Magic Swords glow red. Satou notes, privately, that his own Holy Swords glowed blue when he first drew them, “but it lasted for only a second.”

Pochi, Tama and Liza

Three demi-human girls in sack dresses tied with hemp cord. Pochi, bobbed brown hair. Tama, short white choppy hair. Liza, waist-length red hair, a tail, and orange scales running from her neck to her shoulders and her elbows to her fingertips.

He gives them honey pastries he had bought as souvenirs. Then the moment the whole volume turns on:

He says “No need to hold back. Just go ahead and eat them.” Pochi starts choking; he hands her the Well Bag and says “Take your time, okay? I won’t ask for them back or anything.” His own summary: “This was weirdly like being a babysitter.”

Liza, over a handful of pastries: “Baked pastries made with honey… I…” and cannot finish. Satou, drily and to himself: “That seems like a bit of an overreaction for a handful of pastries.”

Also here: the Demon’s Labyrinth, revealed entirely by one cast of Search Entire Map. He switches the display to 3-D because “in war games like WW, the land’s height variations could become a major factor.” Rotating it, the place looks “less like a labyrinth than an ant farm.” His verdict on his own abilities: “What is this, easy mode?”

And, because he counts things: about 159 people inside, 7 demi-humans and 152 humans, roughly a quarter of them slaves, against about 50 troops sent to suppress the riot.

Out of the labyrinth

An Oracle priestess casts Area Heal and a cone of soft light spreads over the injured. Satou reaches out and touches it out of curiosity, and gets:

“Whoa, I gained the skill just by touching it. Once again, this seems a little too easy…”

Pochi and Tama introduce themselves to Zena in about four words each and hide behind Satou’s legs. Liza remembers her manners and bows deeply: “We’re immensely grateful that you protected us from those stones on the surface. Without your sorcery, I doubt these children and I would have survived for long.” Prompted by that, Pochi and Tama come out and bow too. Then they immediately use Zena as a shield again.

The guesthouse tour

Housed at a viscount’s guesthouse by his butler, Mr. Deschamps, with a maid assigned. Satou measures everything: the entrance hall “at least 130 square feet,” the guesthouse “about 7,000 square feet,” a “350-square-foot parlor.” A hearth heated by fire stones, and a Light Shower Chandelier identified by AR pop-up.

The maid’s uniform gets a joke: “Despite being a maid, she wasn’t wearing the kind of uniform you’d see in Akiba or classic Victorian England.”

And then, without comment or emphasis:

The latrine gag gets a progression: here the paper substitute is straw paper rather than a straw bundle, “so I guess that was an improvement.” There is still no bath.

He is told he owns three children

Delivered flatly by a civil official, as a point of routine law:

His private reaction: I mean, I was planning to buy them and set them free, anyway, but still…

The official continues: “Unless they killed their master themselves, any slaves whose master dies in a dungeon are the same as objects found there. So both legally and customarily speaking, you are now their master.”

He is handed “a temporary certificate to officially declare your ownership” and told to go to the town hall or a slavery firm to have the permanent contract drawn up. His comment on the bureaucracy: “I guess bureaucracy was complicated even in a parallel world.”

The last thing the book is about is grief admin

He hands over the names, locks of hair, and belongings of the dead from the labyrinth so the families can be told. The locks of hair are delivered. Families ask to buy back some of the other belongings, and the money comes to him.

It is taxed.

He tries to refuse it. The official will not let him:

Satou: I see. It’s a pretty tough world out there. She suggests, since accepting it pains him, that he donate it to an orphanage or a temple. He decides to ask Zena where.

Under house arrest for several days afterward, drinking “the ludicrously named ‘blue-green tea,'” he learns the town is managing the story: minstrels are being paid to restrict what they say about the labyrinth. He is delighted rather than cynical about it. “In games, they usually provided valuable support magic, so this new take was sort of refreshing.”

The volume closes with the men who had been held in the prison thanking him at the gate, because he had quietly sent them warm food and cushions. “It was even better than the food in the west quarter!”