Hiroshi Yuuki quit his school's track team after one humiliating meet and has been hiding inside full-dive VRMMORPGs ever since. Reona Kisaragi, the clerk at his local game store, talks him into buying Kiwame Quest, a ten-year-old title sold as more real than reality. It turns out to be a near-abandoned ghost town: quests demand the same physical fitness as the real world, slash wounds take days to heal, and the map hides over ten quadrillion flags. Hiro keeps diving anyway, hunting for any way to make progress at all.