"Are you an idiot?" That was all Arai Fuuko could muster when her brother Hiroshi tried to convince her to do erotic roleplaying in-game.

  "What? Why?" He had the gall to wonder, causing his sister's mouth to drop in real life.

  "You really are an idiot." Shaking her head, the motion was transferred to AFKat, the little heterochromatic catgirl she was playing in the game. This caused her brother's avatar, Hero4, to tilt his blond head in response.

  Arai Hiroshi was her older brother, who sat in the next room over. He was the very picture of an otaku, but his avatar had a paid skin that made him look like the stereotypical hero of a fantasy manga. It only exacerbated the lack of creativity in his naming sense - Hero4 could be pronounced Hiroshi in Japanese.

  That lack of imagination was why AFKat could believe he genuinely thought that inside the game, she would think of him as a man rather than her brother. She was so exasperated at the depth of his perversion and the breadth of his idiocy that she didn't even think about slapping him, though it wouldn't have done much damage considering her build.

  "Hmm? Why is PVP music playing?" Hero4's brow furrowed as he rolled his eyes in wonder. In the VRMMORPG Prison of Eternity Online, one could set to auto-accept PVP requests. As a level 100 [Duelist] build focused on stomping other players to make himself feel better in real life, her brother obviously had it on.

  But there was a person in their guild who had a build that could easily stand up to his, and as one of its only four female players, she had every reason to do so. "Onepunch" MANhera loomed over that of AFKat's brother and cracked her knuckles with a terrifying glare. Although her voice was that of a girl in her early twenties, her half-giant avatar looked intimidating when seen in VR. "This is what I'll do when I meet you offline, Hiroshi."

  The moment Hero4 turned around, she threw a right hook to his face. The damage that was several times his maximum HP caused him to hit the wall of the guildhall due to the knockback. But at that point, he was already dead.

  Aside from big muscles and bigger punches, MANhera loved the knockback mechanic. The unique gauntlets [Realmshaper], which only dropped from the final boss, had the effect of increasing knockback distance based on the damage of the hit. Coupled with the damage-on-hitting-environment effect that her unique amulet [Earthshaker] gave her, it made for a devastating combo against anything not fully immune to knockback.

  Of course, with them being in a game, Hero4 returned moments later. He raged in voice chat about having lost a lot of money to that meaningless death, definitely missing the message behind the attack from MANhera. In other words, he wasn't in the least apologetic about being an absolute creep toward his blood-related sister inside a game that didn't even have any R-18 content.

  "I can't believe what scum you are," MANhera cracked her knuckles again.

  "Hey, stop fighting. Hero4 didn't do anything wrong, really," one of the male guild members argued, causing the girls to stare at him, flabbergasted.

  Then, all hell broke loose. The guild's opinions were split in two, although in reality, the women were on their own. Those who took their side were very obviously hoping to earn some brownie points with them since they were the same kind of losers as Hiroshi in real life. Such was the world of online gaming, and it was enough to make AFKat want to throw up.

  When some people parroted her brother's argument that it was only a game, so it should have been fine for her to play along, she logged out and put down the VR headset to take a breather.

  Fuuko had joined this game because she wanted to give her brother a chance. He had shut himself in his room for the past three years, only leaving to go to the nearby convenience store once in a while. He had not been this bad before, but his time as a shut-in living on the Internet had made him a human failure. She was an idiot for believing she could bring him back from the other side by reconnecting with him through this game.

  She had been happy to receive such a warm welcome from Heroic Age, the guild she and her brother belonged to. He had mobilized everybody to pull her along and helped her reach level 100 within a week. In that time, he had been a nice big brother. Everybody, even the other male members, had been welcoming to her, too. But it all came crumbling down today, when the truth was revealed.

  Since she wasn't mechanically gifted, she made a tank build with little damage output that worked only in party play. But after this incident, it would be too awkward to stay in the guild. She did have fun with the other three female members of Heroic Age, who treated her like their little sister. Still, she could not stand being around her brother or the male members who defended him.

  And she didn't have enough interest and motivation to find a new guild at this point. Maybe it was best that she quit entirely.

  When she motioned to delete the game, she remembered that the items on her avatar were all borrowed from the guild, and several of them were incredibly rare unique pieces that cost much work or a fortune to obtain. Even if she left, some of the others would surely continue to play, so taking those with her would be unfair to them.

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  Thus, she put the VR headset back on and logged in one last time so that she could return the items to the guild stash. She decided to do it in Bluevale, a remote winter town with barely any players around due to its lackluster and completely optional content, rather than go back into the guild hall where the others were most likely still arguing. If she was leaving, she didn't want to do it in front of everybody else.

  It was a testament to her brother's otaku-ness that he hadn't come to her room to talk to her directly even now, and merely messaged her in the game when he saw her come back online. In fact, a flood of direct messages popped up in her chatbox, sent by many members of the guild who were online at the moment. Putting everybody except for the three female players who had genuinely stood up for her on ignore, she proceeded to explain to them that she had decided to quit.

  "I'm sorry that it turned out so unpleasant for you, Arai-san. I'm at work, so I can only write in chat." KuroYasha messaged her with an apologetic but cute emote, which belied her thirty-five years of age in real life. She was the oldest member of Heroic Age and the last remaining one of the founding group. Her office job had taken away most of her time to play, but she had forced herself online ever since AFKat had joined, even if it was only letting it run in the background at work. She would most likely quit the game soon after, now that her last motivation was leaving.

  "Let me stay with you until the very end, Afu-chan!" TripleBatsuDance, real name Sasahara Chiyo, teleported to the snowy town square of Bluevale and called out to her in her cutest anime voice. She was an up-and-coming voice actress, and her roles included various characters from mainstream anime as well as erotic games. When Hero4 discovered that she was playing Prison of Eternity Online, he used everything in his power to find her in-game name and invited her to the guild.

  It was a stroke of luck that she had just left her last one due to several guys trying to make her do erotic voices for them. Of course, she would have left Heroic Age moments later since Hero4 confessed that he was a fan of her adult game works and used the sections with her voice for things nobody wanted to know. If not for KuroYasha's convincing to put that idiot on ignore, she wouldn't have stuck around the three days before AFKat joined. Chiyo instantly fell in love with Fuuko and had been given a reason to stay for good - although she continued to ignore Hero4.

  "I'm punching this piece of trash out until he finally rubs his two brain cells together to switch off auto-accept PVP, so if you're still there until then, I'll come to see you off as well." MANhera wrote in sentence fragments, most likely because she had to perform the skills and buffs combination to smack around Hero4 whenever he respawned. She promised to message her on LINE later, though.

  "Are you really sure you want to leave?" TripleBatsuDance hugged AFKat from behind. Despite her slender and rather short avatar, Chiyo quite obviously had fun with the sliders. If it were a fully immersive VRMMO, Fuuko would have been able to feel her breasts pressed against the back of her head. "We're still here for you."

  "Muu..." AFKat made. It was her quirk and one of the reasons she was so well-received when using voice chat. While Chiyo had the vocal range that allowed her to sound like a little girl in one minute and speak like a sultry lady in the next, Fuuko was a natural. "Maybe in some other game where my brother isn't."

  While talking, she started to take off her equipment and put it in one of the tabs at the very back of the shared guild stash. Seeing the sheer amount of other things she had in her designated tabs, she felt tempted to write out a snarky message to her brother by arranging single-slot items into words, but ultimately decided against it. He wasn't worth the effort.

  Once her little catgirl character model was stripped down to her underwear, she realized that they were barely more than strings. The panties were even of the low-leg, side-tie, t-string variant - a term she learned of when her brother left an erotic book of his lying around in the toilet.

  Her brother was the one who created that avatar for her in the first place, and she had never undressed her in the game thus far. Seeing this now, she was seething with anger and embarrassment, and decided that Hiroshi needed to be taught a lesson; she would later go to his room and kick him in the groin. Of course, she would put on her steel-capped high-heeled boots to make it really hurt.

  "A-Afu-chan?!" Stumbling back in surprise at the incredibly skimpy and unexpectedly mature underwear, TripleBatsuDance held her nose as if suppressing a nosebleed. Of course, the in-game avatar couldn't get one, but the fact that Chiyo felt it necessary to perform that movement with the VR controllers in her hands was telling.

  In truth, TripleBatsuDance's regular outfit wasn't much better. She wore the incredibly flamboyant and skimpy [Dancer of the Crimson Peak] dress from the cash shop. It was a set of skins that overrode her actual equipment, which looked plain and covered more than she deemed necessary. She said that without looking the part, she wouldn't be in the right mindset to play her role.

  But wearing what was basically a belly dancer outfit was a million times better than AFKat's string underwear, given the difference in their physical appearances.

  "Idiot brother..." She muttered under her breath and suppressed the urge to throw her VR controllers away in exasperation. But instead of giving in to her emotions, she put them down on the table and heaved a long-suffering sigh. In either case, she was done with returning the equipment, so all she had to do was log out of the game for the last time. "I'll be going then. We can talk on LINE later."

  With these words, Fuuko extended her hand to pick up the VR controllers to wave TripleBatsuDance goodbye as AFKat. But she somehow couldn't find them where she left them only moments ago. Bringing her other hand up to her face in real life, she tried to pull off her headset so that she could see what had happened.

  That was when she realized that rather than touch the relatively large headset on her head, she brought a hand to her face inside the game instead. That should not be possible without the controllers, though that was the last thing on her mind now.

  She was freezing all of a sudden. Her feet were stinging as if she really stood barefoot in the snow. And when a breeze picked up, her skin prickled all over.

  "Huh?" Fuuko made when she realized that rather than sitting in her chair at home, she was in the body of AFKat, standing in Bluevale while wearing nothing but the string underwear her brother had put on her avatar.

  "Kushun!" Chiyo, now in the body of TripleBatsuDance, sneezed cutely beside her, then hugged herself and rubbed her bare arms. "Huh, w-why is it so cold?"

  They had been transported into the game.

  Some notes on the names:

  Hiroshi -> Hero4: In Japanese, hero is read hiiro, and 4 can be read as shi, making the brother's ingame name a play on his real name.

  MANhera: Menhera is a Japanese contraction of mental health, and refers to girls and women who have psychological issues. MANhera turned it into MAN health instead.

  TripleBatsuDance: Batsu is the Japanese word for X, so her name is essentially XXXDance. If you've been on the Internet long enough, you know what that is.

  Enjoy the story and let me know if you have any questions~