I Became a Hive Mind in the Game

There’s a common setting that frequently appears in games, animations, or web novels.
At some point, mysterious monsters appear on Earth, and these monsters are incredibly difficult to deal with using modern weapons. To exterminate them, special ability users emerge who fight using equipment made from the corpses of these monsters.
While this setting might have been novel in the past, it’s now obvious and cliché. However, there’s a VR game that boldly adopted this overused material that has been milked dry.
Its name is Project Monster.
This mental dive-type VR game, which appeared like a comet in the early days of VR gaming, is praised for setting the direction that future VR games should follow, thanks to its excellent action, outstanding PVP/PVE content, and superb operational skills.
Even 20 years after its release, the first game is considered an immortal masterpiece. Following that, there were 2, 3, the disaster that shall not be named (4), and 5, which is generally considered decent.
Project Monster, which released no less than 5 series and had 4 or more considered masterpieces, was, as mentioned earlier, an open-world RPG game.
The protagonist is a superhuman who can hunt monsters, and uses materials obtained from hunting monsters to create equipment to challenge even stronger monsters.
In this process, players draw all kinds of tech trees and develop their own characters. This orthodox yet highly free-form interaction is what made it so popular.
Ah, but why am I explaining all this in such detail?

“—?!!! I won! I wooon!!!”
It’s because I won the beta test for the 6th installment of the series that was announced recently.

※ ※ ※

A week after the day I went crazy with joy at being able to play the game first, the game arrived via drone delivery.
I was so happy that my smile reached my cheekbones as I unwrapped the game package, unlocked the security of the secret box inside with biometric authentication, and then extracted the game chip embedded in its center.

‘Quickly, quickly, quicklyyy…’
After inserting the chip into the game chip slot of the dive device, I hurriedly put on the dedicated suit, immediately sat down on the device as if leaning on it, pressed the start button, and put on the helmet that covers the entire head with several tubes connected.
[XXPLA-99. Starting operation.]
As soon as the operational announcement was heard, safety liquid gel began to flow into the completely isolated interior of the device.
‘I bet they’ve nerfed the monsters as much as possible… but I can’t resist the legion.’
Thinking about how the monster play that all Project Monster fans have been waiting for will finally be unlocked from the 6th installment, I fell into thoughts about how to spend this short beta test period.
At the same time, I could feel the gel completely filling the inside of the device and slowly solidifying. The characteristic feeling of mental haziness when connecting to a dive device swirled in my head, and then—
“Ugh… Uhhh… Huh?”
When I opened my eyes after connecting to the dive device, what I saw was not the lobby of Zet (the VR game platform), but some deserted forest.