Silver Wolf returned to that fast-food restaurant, to that basement. She opened the door, and everything was as it had always been. The proprietress had kept every arrangement for her. Pink light fell across the screens like the city's neon, reminding her of the starry sky that night... Standing on a chair, she wiped the arcade screens over and over, as if she wanted to wipe away every speck of dust.
Watching the brightly colored animations loop across the arcade screens, she seemed to remember many things: the snowy plains of the Great Wilderness, the convoy, the church and fast-food restaurant in Oasis District, as well as the gangs and street fights of Scrap Mountain. She seemed to have experienced so much along the way, yet she could not remember why she had returned here, or why she needed to return here.
Fortunately, Silver Wolf still remembered the life she had once lived here. She switched on the old game machines one by one, but only three of the eight could still be powered up. She remembered her favorite games: the "Battle Wheel" series, "Geometry Wars," "Interstellar Cheetah"... So she found the cartridges for those games.
Yet when she logged into the games through the arcade machines and played several rounds, she discovered that her clear scores could never compare to the astronomical number left behind by [ ].
[ ]? Why was the record holder's name blank? Who was he? Had he once been a player here?
She thought about it for a long time, but in the end, she merely shook her head silently... Until the sunlight filtering through the blinds gradually dimmed, she had no idea how many times she had ended the game, but the score she achieved still remained separated from that astronomical number by