Prologue - This Can't Be Right
It was a lazy day like any other.
Same as always, I booted up the computer and zoned out surfing the web, only to snap back to myself after who-knew-how-long. All this screen time was making my brain feel like it was turning to mush.
I thought about playing a game, but I'd already played so much that I wasn't even in the mood. So, same as always, I logged onto a community board and typed out a meaningless post.
My favorite game, Danganronpa, was a mystery series built around the premise of high school students locked somewhere and forced to play a killing game — and it was a pretty popular franchise.
Popular enough to get an anime, even. But it had been four years without a new installment, and the fans were losing their minds.
How bad had it gotten? People had started making and distributing their own fangames just to fill the void. I was the kind of person who normally couldn't stand derivative games, but I loved this series so much that I'd gotten sick of waiting and ended up playing those doujin titles for fun. That should tell you everything.
"Fuck... why won't they just drop a new one... If they released a sequel, the fans would print them money. So why the hell won't they..."
The lack of a new game was genuinely infuriating — the kind of thing that made you want to grab someone by the collar. But I was a shut-in bum living off my parents' money. No amount of ranting from someone like me was going to change a thing.
I gave up almost immediately and was about to go hunting for some other game to kill time with when a comment notification from the anonymous board chimed on my phone. Had I even turned notifications on...?
The confusion lasted only a second. The instant I read that comment, a chill ran straight down my spine. Nicknames on this board were locked to Anonymous plus a number — no exceptions. So how did someone have a unique handle like that?
And that wasn't even the worst of it. The comment itself reeked of something deeply, profoundly wrong. Every last detail of it had the hair on the back of my neck standing on end.
"This is one of those situations you only ever see in web novels, isn't it...?"
Leaving a scathing comment on a novel site after a writer went on hiatus or wrecked their own ending. Ripping into a game on a community board. And then — immediately after — some bizarre reply or popup window appears, and you get yeeted into another world. That was a cliché, wasn't it?
Not the kind of thing a normal person would even think about. But I had spent more than a decade tempering myself on anime and web novels, and I understood the gravity of this situation more clearly than anyone alive. And of course, I had already prepared a countermeasure for exactly this kind of scenario.
"Fuck! Don't you dare!!!"
I slammed my phone off and dove under the covers. The second you reacted to a comment like that, the isekai express departed without delay. In other words, if I met it with total, unwavering indifference, the odds of getting dumped into another world dropped dramatically.
Besides, the safest zone in my entire room was underneath my blanket. Ghosts, monsters, villains — it didn't matter. As long as I stayed under here, nobody could touch me.
Safety secured, a sudden wave of exhaustion rolled over me, and I let my eyes slip shut... ah. That was a cliché too...
"Fuck."
And when I opened my eyes, I had fallen into the world of Danganronpa.
"Fucking hell."