"Can you hear me? Can you see me?"
That face was practically pressed to Genichi's nose. What it exhaled wasn't breath, but a cold, rotten dampness—like something seeping up from the silt at the bottom of the sea.
If the two bottomless black hollows buried in that writhing, tangled mass of tentacles could be called eyes, then it was staring straight at him from only a few centimeters away.
It had no vocal organs—at least none a human could understand—yet the voice poured directly into his mind with a warped echo, like a whisper carried through deep water.
It repeated itself with a sick, obsessive insistence… or maybe it was simply the cruel rule of a game.
"Can you see me? You can see me, right?"
Genichi felt his stomach seize. His throat tightened. Adrenaline flooded his veins hard enough that it felt like his heart might punch through his ribs.
But the muscles in his face were frozen, locked into a blank, hollow confusion.
His gaze slid right through the unnameable shape in front of him and fixed on the convenience store sign glowing white in the distance, as if it were some masterpiece worth studying with complete devotion.
He even controlled his eyes so they wouldn't tremble. Wouldn't let his pupils constrict from fear.
He forced his breathing slow and even, long and steady, even while his lungs screamed for air.
He raised a hand and, perfectly naturally, rubbed at an itch on his nose. Smooth. Unhurried. As if there were nothing there at all.
Then he stepped forward, continuing down the sidewalk with the slightly tired, absentminded pace he used when walking home after school.
He could feel that cold, insubstantial stare clinging to his back.
He could hear the question—relentless, soul-freezing—following him like background noise for several steps.
"Can you see me… can you see me…"
About ten seconds later, that malicious attention finally lifted.
Out of the corner of his eye, he caught the blurred, twisted shadow—like black oil smeared across the air—sliding away in a drifting, lawless motion that didn't obey physics. It glided toward a pedestrian nearby, someone wearing headphones and staring down at their phone.
It leaned that unnameable face close again and started a new round of questioning.
Only then did the tension in Genichi's nerves loosen by the tiniest margin—just enough for the aftershock to hit.
A tidal wave of fear and absurdity surged up so hard his legs nearly went soft.
He'd been transmigrated into this seemingly peaceful, slice-of-life crossover anime world for sixteen years now. From the first confusion and excitement, to slowly adapting to a life stitched together from countless "normal" school and daily-life series.
Genichi had honestly thought he'd gotten lucky—like he'd pulled some easy, comfy isekai lottery ticket.
No wars. No superpowers. No system forcing him to complete missions under threat of deletion.
Just youth, school, cute girls, and ordinary days.
Until two weeks ago.
That was when he started "seeing."
At first, it was vague shadows—distorted human shapes flickering at street corners, a pallid face flashing past the window late at night. He'd assumed it was a side effect of staying up too late reading manga.
But the more often it happened, the clearer they became.
Sharper. More specific.
More malicious.
He finally had to face the terrifying truth: he'd gained a truly awful "talent." He could see things ordinary people couldn't—vengeful spirits, or maybe something even closer to Lovecraftian horrors, entities that violated human aesthetics and understanding at a fundamental level.
They wandered through the city's corners, stubbornly asking the living the same question.
"Can you see me?"
Genichi immediately thought of something he'd watched in his previous life.
He knew the rule: if you pretend you can't see them, they usually lose interest and leave. But if they confirm you can see them…
You get hit with a kind of terror you can't even begin to imagine.
It was hide-and-seek between life and death, and he'd been shoved onto the stage without any warning.
No exorcism ability. No way to fight back.
He was just an ordinary high schooler—at best, an adult mind stuffed into a teenager's body.
This "seeing" wasn't a gift. It was a curse. A guillotine hanging above his head, ready to drop at any moment.
"Damn it…"
He snarled silently, nails biting deep into his palm. The pain helped him hold his expression steady.
And then came the resentment—thick and toxic in his blood.
A transmigrator.
He was supposed to be a transmigrator.
Even if he wasn't some chosen-one protagonist, shouldn't he at least get some kind of perk?
Instead he'd landed in a world that looked like a chill daily-life crossover on the surface, but was actually a supernatural horror set—and the only thing he'd been "given" was a see-ghosts skill that offered zero benefits and nothing but risk.
What was this supposed to be?
The transmigrator's humiliation arc?
He forced his clenched fist to loosen. Several crescent-shaped red marks remained in his palm.
Deep breath. Another. Don't panic. Don't slip.
At least he had a little more mental preparation than Miko Yotsuya… and an adult's willpower.
That was what he told himself, even if it barely helped.
Keeping up the act, he continued toward the apartment he rented.
The sunset stretched building shadows long across the ground. People hurried along the street. Everything was wrapped in the soft glow of ordinary life.
Only Genichi knew how many hateful eyes were hidden beneath that calm picture.
When he returned to the small but tidy one-room apartment, the familiar air—slightly dusty, slightly stale—finally loosened something in his chest.
He shut the door.
The deadbolt clicked into place, as if it had sealed the strangeness outside.
He leaned his back against the door and let out a long, silent breath, like all the strength had drained out of him.
The relief lasted less than three seconds.
Without warning, a violent wave of dizziness seized him.
The scene in front of him twisted like a reflection disturbed by a thrown stone, shattered into fragments—and then everything was swallowed by blinding light.
"What—"
The sound died in his throat.
The next instant, the spinning stopped. Solid ground pressed under his feet.
Genichi found himself standing on a ring of spectator seats.
Around him were steep, towering stone steps, row after row climbing upward and disappearing into an endless black void above.
There were no other spectators.
It was empty in a way that made his skin crawl.
And in the center, surrounded by the seats, was an enormous circular arena.
The structure instantly reminded him of the Roman Colosseum.
Where the hell was this?
His heart hammered harder than it had when that Lovecraftian thing had been breathing rot into his face.
The unknown was worse than anything he could name.
Then a chunk of information branded itself into his mind.
After absorbing it, Genichi's expression went through shock, confusion, disbelief, a surge of wild joy—and then froze into a deathly, iron-gray pallor.
Good news: his cheat had finally arrived.
Bad news: the cheat was poison.
Before transmigrating, Genichi had had a "chance encounter" on the highway—an unavoidable collision with a freight truck. He'd fought with everything he had and still couldn't win.
In the end, under that truck's "strike," he'd shattered into countless pieces and scattered across the myriad worlds.
For the first few seconds, joy almost blew the top of his head off.
Gather the worlds. Become the one true self.
Wasn't that the kind of thing only some legendary transcendent being could do?
But the bubble popped instantly under cold reality.
He realized the fatal problem.
"I'm just a normal person!"
To unify all those worlds into one, he would have to slaughter—kill the versions of himself in other worlds and devour them.
But he'd been reborn into a daily-life crossover world. Sure, it had vengeful spirits and other bullshit, but he had no supernatural power at all.
His physical ability was just an ordinary high schooler's.
His combat experience was zero.
And his opponents?
Those other versions of him…
What if one of them had been reborn into a battle shonen and trained into something superhuman?
What if one had gone to a magic world and become a mage?
What if one had landed in a sci-fi era and was piloting a mech—or had been modified into a super-soldier?
What if one had ended up in Dragon Ball world and became a full-on Saiyan?
Compared to those possibilities, Genichi—the powerless daily-life version who could only see spirits and had to pretend he couldn't—was basically a rabbit thrown into a cage of predators.
This wasn't a cheat.
It was a death warrant.
A notice that he'd been sentenced.
"You've got to be kidding…"
His teeth chattered—not from cold, but from fear and despair that sank into his bones.
He'd only just been agonizing over how to survive in a daily-life world infested with monsters nobody else could see. And now he'd been tossed into a slaughter game billions of times more brutal, where his starting point might be the very lowest.
He wanted to protest. To curse fate. To search for an exit from this nightmare colosseum.
But the rules branded into his mind were clear:
No refusal.
No escape.
The stone floor beneath his feet suddenly lit up in a harsh white glare.
Intricate patterns—like rotating sigils made of pure light—spread out under him, expanding in an instant and swallowing his entire body.
A teleportation force he couldn't resist yanked at him.
"No, wait! At least let me—"
The words didn't finish.
His vision twisted again.
The spectator view vanished.
He was standing alone at the center of the arena now, unarmed, his chest filled with a terror of the unknown opponent so intense it bordered on paralysis.
A matching white glow flared on the opposite side of the arena.
Another figure was being teleported in.
Genichi's heart almost stopped. He stared at the dissolving light with eyes gone needle-thin.
His first opponent had arrived.
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