Chapter 1: The Wrong Kind of Reincarnation
I died.
Not heroically.
Not tragically.
Not even in a remotely interesting way.
I died because a helicopter crashed through the wall of my dorm room while I was jerking off.
To this day, I maintain that none of it was my fault.
The pilot was clearly having a worse evening than I was.
One moment, I was enjoying a perfectly normal night in the privacy of my own room. The next, a helicopter introduced itself to my bedroom wall at approximately two hundred kilometers per hour.
Then everything exploded.
Literally.
There wasn't even enough time to panic. No dramatic realization, no final regrets, and certainly no opportunity to put my pants back on.
One second, I was alive.
The next, I wasn't.
Honestly, the transition was far too abrupt.
Two out of ten. Would not recommend.
After that came darkness.
Not a tunnel leading toward a warm light. Not the fiery pits of hell. Not even one of those endless white spaces where a suspiciously handsome god apologized for a clerical error.
There was no heaven.
No hell.
No goddess.
No elderly man with a magnificent white beard.
Not even a customer service representative willing to explain what had happened to me.
There was nothing.
Just an endless darkness in which I had no body, no sense of time, and no idea what I was supposed to do next.
Looking back, that probably should have worried me.
Not because I had expected to enter heaven. I wasn't exactly placing any bets on that outcome.
Still, every isekai protagonist received something after dying.
A tutorial.
A system.
A magical blessing.
A mysterious old master.
A suspiciously attractive woman claiming to be a goddess.
Anything would have been acceptable.
I received absolutely nothing.
Honestly, it was a little rude.
Then I woke up.
The first thing I saw was a white ceiling.
The second was my hand.
That was when the problems began.
Because it wasn't my hand.
"..."
I raised it in front of my face and stared.
The fingers were slimmer than I remembered. The skin looked smoother, and there wasn't a single familiar scar or callus anywhere on it.
I turned it over.
Then turned it back.
Still not my hand.
Interesting.
Slowly, I pushed myself upright.
The room around me was completely unfamiliar. White walls, white sheets, white curtains—everything was sterile, spotless, and suspiciously devoid of personality.
A hospital room, probably.
At least, it looked like one.
Though whoever had designed the place clearly possessed an unhealthy devotion to the color white.
I was still examining the room when my gaze drifted toward the nearby window.
Then I froze.
A face I had never seen before stared back at me from the darkened glass.
"..."
I leaned to the left.
The reflection copied me.
I leaned to the right.
It followed again.
At that point, there were only two possible explanations.
Either death had somehow made me hallucinate...
Or—
"Holy shit."
A grin slowly spread across my unfamiliar face.
"I got isekai'd."
Now, under normal circumstances, waking up in someone else's body should have been deeply concerning.
A normal person would have panicked. They might have screamed for help, questioned their sanity, or at the very least wondered why an unfamiliar face had replaced their own.
I did none of those things.
Because I was not a normal person.
I was a weeb.
As far as I was concerned, this was the single greatest thing that could have happened to someone like me.
I had been isekai'd.
Actually isekai'd.
This wasn't a dream, a game, or a badly written fanfiction I had discovered at three in the morning.
It was real.
Well...
Second-life real.
Whatever.
The important part was that it had finally happened.
For years, I had consumed nearly every variation of the genre known to mankind. Anime, manga, light novels, webnovels, fanfiction—if someone had been struck by a vehicle and awakened in another world, chances were I had already read about it.
Truck-kun might have been the traditional method, but apparently his aviation department had recently expanded.
And now it was my turn.
This was amazing.
Possibly dangerous, yes, but mostly amazing.
Naturally, I began waiting for the next step.
There was always a next step.
A glowing interface would appear in front of me. A disembodied voice would announce the activation of my unique skill. A beautiful goddess would materialize beside the bed and explain that I had been chosen to save the world.
I wasn't picky.
A system, a cheat ability, an overpowered blessing, a mysterious guide—I would have accepted any of them.
So I waited.
And waited.
And continued waiting.
Nothing happened.
"..."
That was fine.
Not every protagonist received their abilities immediately. Some had to fulfill a hidden condition first. Others discovered their powers in a moment of danger.
I could be patient.
An hour later, I was considerably less patient.
Three days later, I was personally offended.
Excuse me?
I had died.
The least the universe could have done was provide a basic instruction manual.
Instead, I received no explanation, no supernatural abilities, and no clue where the hell I had been sent.
All I had was a different body and an unexpected second chance at life.
Which was still a fairly generous deal, admittedly.
But that wasn't the point.
Fortunately, the previous owner of this body had left behind enough information for me to piece together a basic identity.
We shared the same name.
Hiro.
He was a student, lived alone, and came from a thoroughly average financial background. Not rich enough to solve every problem with money, but not poor enough to turn daily life into a survival challenge.
Basically, he was the human definition of ordinary.
I also appeared to be a little younger than I had been before the helicopter incident.
That part, at least, was difficult to complain about.
If the universe was offering free age regression, I wasn't going to reject it on principle.
Once I had recovered enough to function normally, I began investigating.
Unlike certain protagonists, I had no intention of wandering around blindly until the plot eventually found me.
If I had been reincarnated into a fictional world, I wanted to know exactly which one.
Preferably before it tried to kill me.
That seemed like a reasonable precaution.
Six months later...
I still had no clue.
Absolutely none.
Do you have any idea how many fictional worlds exist?
Too many.
That is the answer.
Far too many.
At first, I had assumed identifying this world would be simple. I only needed one recognizable clue—a famous school, a distinctive city, a familiar character walking down the street with naturally blue hair.
Something obvious.
Unfortunately, reality refused to cooperate.
The geography was different from what I remembered. So was the history. None of the celebrities, politicians, companies, films, or television programs were familiar.
Everything was foreign enough to prove that this wasn't my original Earth, but ordinary enough to reveal absolutely nothing useful.
That particular combination became increasingly irritating.
The first few months were the worst.
I investigated everything I could find.
News reports, historical records, television programs, movies, manga, anime, urban legends, and even conspiracy theories posted by people who clearly hadn't slept in several days.
If information existed, I searched through it.
The local anime industry was especially disappointing.
That was the day I truly understood that something had gone terribly wrong.
Eventually, my investigation slowed.
Not because I had lost interest, but because I was running out of meaningful leads. There were only so many hours a man could spend wandering through conspiracy forums before he began questioning every decision that had led him there.
Though, in fairness, I had already died while masturbating.
Questioning my life choices felt a little overdue.
At the moment, I was sitting inside a classroom and staring through the window beside my desk.
More specifically, I was sitting in the protagonist's seat.
You know the one.
The back corner of the classroom, directly beside the window—the sacred position occupied by nearly every important student in anime history.
Naturally, I had claimed it for myself.
Not because I was delusional.
I simply respected tradition.
Resting my cheek against one hand, I gazed outside and attempted to look cool, mysterious, and deeply contemplative.
The result probably resembled a bored student staring blankly into space.
Nobody paid attention to me.
Not a single person.
Life remained cruel.
"Kyaa!"
"No way!"
"Seriously?!"
A sudden burst of excitement pulled my attention toward a group of girls gathered nearby.
I glanced over.
Then immediately understood why anime protagonists were always distracted during class.
One thing I had quickly learned after arriving in this world was that the girls here were ridiculous.
Even the supposed background characters looked as though they should have possessed their own fan clubs, character songs, and dedicated merchandise.
The universe had clearly invested most of its character-design budget into women.
Not that I was complaining.
I was a simple man.
I appreciated beauty.
That was all.
Unfortunately, appreciating the scenery had done nothing to help my investigation.
Neither had my most recent experiment.
A few weeks earlier, I had developed a theory.
A brilliant theory.
One that future generations would surely recognize as an important contribution to interdimensional science.
If this happened to be a romantic-comedy world, then protagonist privileges should exist.
The logic was flawless.
Therefore, I decided to test it.
I confessed to a girl.
She rejected me.
I confessed to another.
She rejected me too.
The third followed the same pattern, while the fourth somehow turned me down before I had even finished introducing myself.
Honestly, that one was impressive.
By the seventh rejection, I had begun to suspect there might be a flaw in my methodology.
By the tenth, I was forced to consider a far more disturbing possibility.
Perhaps I wasn't the protagonist.
Still, science demanded sacrifice.
And if that sacrifice happened to be my dignity, then so be it.
The lunch bell rang before I could contemplate the horrifying implications any further.
Students began pouring out of the classroom, and I followed them without hesitation.
Food first.
Existential crises later.
That was the correct order.
Halfway through lunch, a fragment of conversation from a nearby table caught my attention.
"...another person disappeared."
My hand paused halfway toward my mouth.
I didn't turn around immediately. Instead, I listened while pretending to remain interested in my food.
Apparently, someone else had gone missing.
Again.
Stories like that had become increasingly common over the past several weeks. People vanished without warning, leaving behind no witnesses, no explanations, and almost no useful evidence.
They were simply gone.
Most people treated the disappearances as distant tragedies—unfortunate, certainly, but irrelevant to their own lives.
I couldn't afford to dismiss them so easily.
Strange events had a habit of becoming extremely important in fictional worlds, especially when they occurred repeatedly.
A series of unexplained disappearances could be nothing.
It could also be the first sign of a supernatural incident, a government conspiracy, an alien invasion, or some elaborate death game waiting to drag me into its plot.
My experience with fiction had not encouraged optimism.
I quietly filed the information away and resumed eating.
For now, it wasn't enough.
One vague conversation couldn't tell me where I was or what kind of danger I might eventually face.
And information was everything.
After all, the difference between a protagonist and a victim often came down to one simple thing:
Knowing what kind of story you were trapped in.
Unfortunately for me...
I still had absolutely no clue.
And had I known what was coming next, I would have appreciated that ignorance a lot more.