Xyrin Empire

Chapter 546: Chapter 546: Ah, you dead girl

When I was very young, the sky was still blue, the water was still clear, and when boys and girls spent time together it was innocent. Two girls chatting or drawing together weren’t automatically considered a yuri couple, and two boys romping around in the mud together weren’t labeled as gay buddies. In that wonderful era, we little kids wandered through a world full of loli without a clue, oblivious to our own ignorance. Too busy watching cartoons with female leads whose giant eyes took up a third of their face, we failed to notice the potential around us. Those were the days of pastoral simplicity and luxurious times in our lives. Looking back, it fills me with a melancholic sorrow… Wow, I’ve really gone off on a tangent.

Actually, I’m just reminiscing about those Saturdays and Sundays spent at home playing video games. The aforementioned sentiments were basically a bonus.

Ah, the video game console… I have to say, the Red and White Machine was already outdated during my elementary school days, but in a home barely held together by an under-fifteen girl’s determination, it’s a miracle I still had weekend time to play video games. Back then, I couldn’t appreciate what Big Sister had to go through to keep us afloat with the meager inheritance left by our (foster) parents. Now, however, I have a bittersweet understanding when I think back on those times.

And among those memories that have become an indelible part of me is the classic side-scrolling shooter game family—see, no matter how far off topic I go, I can always loop back.

Against the simplistic black backdrop of space in those games, you were a blocky 15×15-pixel craft, surrounded by oddly shaped alien monsters—spheres, cubes, triangles—all floating by. You needed to relentlessly pound the AB buttons, blasting those weird geometric shapes trying to indecently float past you, and imagine yourself heroically amidst splendorous space fireworks—the limited capabilities of the machine meant that we kids had to use our imaginations to fill in the pixelated gaps. Of course, the lack of H-games back then was also due to censorship so extreme that not even imagination could fill in the blanks…

I realized why Big Sister was so worried about me getting into trouble with no one to watch over me. She knew me too well, aware that given free rein, I could spiral off-topic in fifteen minutes flat to the point where I couldn’t even remember what I was originally pondering.

What I’m trying to say is that the scenes before me now involuntarily bring to mind those Red and White Machine games from my childhood.

The monotonous blackness of cosmic space—where even the most dazzling stars are merely a few pixels in your view—the crisscrossing flashes of gunfire… They’re the light from our own fleet illuminating this dead space. And, of course, there are the strangely shaped space enemies, countless black spheres.

Engaging with thoughtless Abyss Energy Bodies is tedious—it might be more powerful than most high-level civilization fleets, but these black spheres only know how to charge mindlessly forward. The exchange of fire between us is as uninteresting as a side-scrolling shooter from the Red and White Machine games. That’s why I can’t help but draw parallels with something else entirely: a next-gen, fully 3D sensory shooting game.

However, this ‘game’ is anything but enjoyable, especially when up against a growing Abyss Gate with only a few hundred militia ships that hardly compare to a regular army.

I really don’t know how I manage to go off on such tangents in dire situations like this.