Chouou Prefecture.
Sakura City.
The night had grown deep.
A coldly tinged silver moon hung in the sky, and the streetlights came on one after another along the road, washing the asphalt pale white.
A boy was walking slowly home.
His head was lowered, and the red tips of his hair hung down just far enough to cover his eyes.
Slung diagonally across his back was a tennis racket bag almost half his own height.
The white glow of his phone screen lit up his face, throwing into clear relief that lingering boyishness which had yet to entirely fade from him.
His fingers moved at blistering speed, as though he were caught up in some fierce back-and-forth with someone.
The whole row of shopfronts along the road had mostly gone dark.
Only one convenience store still kept its warm-toned signboard lit, standing all alone in the night.
It was the last shop still open along Natsuka’s route home.
He lifted his eyelids a little and, in passing, swept his gaze across the store’s outer wall.
Beside the glass, a new poster had been pasted up.
On the poster floated a magnificent castle, drawn in an exaggeratedly anime style.
[Brand-New Full-Dive Game — SAO Closed Beta Sign-up Now Open]
[November 6, 2022 — Grand Public Release!]
Natsuka stared at those two lines for several seconds, and the corner of his mouth twitched faintly.
“Today is…
March 21st.”
“Has it really been ten years since I came over…?”
His voice was very low — half talking to himself, half saying it for his own ears.
The next instant, he reached out and pushed open the convenience store’s glass door.
The bell above the door gave a crisp little ring.
“Welcome — Natsuka-kun.”
Behind the register, Aoyama Nanami — chestnut hair tied up in a ponytail — was quick to greet him with a smile.
Her familiar tone made it plain enough that this was hardly her first time seeing him.
Natsuka pulled his gaze from his phone screen and gave her a casual glance.
“Aoyama-senpai.”
“How many part-time jobs is this for you now?”
Aoyama Nanami’s hands paused, and a flicker of awkwardness immediately surfaced on her face.
“Ahaha…”
She raised a hand to scratch her cheek, her laugh a little sheepish.
“Caught me again, huh.”
Even now, it was only when he was actually face to face with these characters whose names had been so familiar to him in his past life that Natsuka would fully confirm one thing.
He really had transmigrated into a hodgepodge-anime style “slice of life” world.
The reason the words “slice of life” needed to be put in quotes was that the everyday life of this godforsaken place was, fundamentally, not normal at all.
“Natsuka-kun, I watched the match today, you know.”
“Such a shame, really — in the end you still lost to Yukimura-senshu.”
As Aoyama Nanami said this, her face really did carry a touch of genuine regret.
Her gaze drifted naturally to the racket bag slung across Natsuka’s back, and in her eyes lingered a hint of barely concealed envy.
In her view, someone as gifted as Natsuka was already extraordinary.
To beat so many strong opponents one after another and to force his way through into the finals — that alone was not something an ordinary person could pull off.
Natsuka, however, only let out a soft sigh.
He raised a hand and brushed back the bangs across his forehead, narrowed his eyes, and smiled with a touch of helplessness.
“It can’t be helped.”
“Losing is honestly pretty normal.”
Was that because he wasn’t strong enough?
No.
The problem was that his opponents had started busting out illusion techniques to play tennis.
An ordinary person — what was he supposed to win with, his head?
To this day he still couldn’t wrap his mind around how anyone could, with all five senses on the verge of being sealed off, still steadily swing a racket and send the ball back across the net.
That was a five-sense blockade we were talking about.
When a normal person ran into something like that, weren’t they supposed to just stand there blanking out on the spot?
Why didn’t you people just go be Saints, while you were at it?
And then there were the others.
Every single one of them, as if they’d all been issued Observation Haki at birth.
Was this remotely reasonable?
Natsuka was ranting wildly inside his head, but outwardly he didn’t say much.
When all was said and done, this was anime-land.
It wasn’t as though he hadn’t griped to people about this neither-scientific-nor-magical “everyday life.”
But honestly, at the end of the day, deep down he was actually rather looking forward to a bit more of this absurdity.
Like an angel or a demon suddenly transferring in as a classmate.
Or, say, going for a stroll on the back hill one day and happening to pick up a Dragon Maid along the way.
Compared with how, right after he’d first transmigrated, he had been thinking of becoming a “literary copycat,” or charging ahead toward the tackily clichéd goal of becoming a “harem king,” the current Natsuka was visibly far more infatuated with the supernatural.
He yearned for that sense of mystery — something you could just barely touch but could never quite see clearly.
Just then, his phone suddenly lit up.
Inside the chat window he had personally christened “Myriad Heavens Chat Group,” messages were scrolling past at top speed.
[Brutal Hero: “Lost is lost, what’s with all the whining?
If you’ve got time to complain, go train more.
Damn normie — just go explode already!”]
[Chiba’s Fallen Saint Kuroneko: “This is a fallacy.
GateMaster has already been trying so very hard — he must not only cross blades with the espers in the Beyond the Boundary, but must also face the Heroes and the Four Heavenly Kings of the Demon Realm upon the Final Battlefield.”]
[Phantom Sixth Man: “You mean…
the matter of Natsuka-kun joining both the Tennis Club and the Basketball Club at the same time?”]
[Kobayashi: “You sure get it.jpg”]
[Thunder Warhammer Wielder: “This is absolutely the Bureau cracking down on him death!
GateMaster is about to fall apart death!
What matters most right now is giving him more support dea~th!”]
[Dress-Up Doll: “That’s all well and good, but…
aren’t athletes supposed to specialize in just one thing?
With Natsuka-kun’s talent, if he focused on training in just one, he might end up even stronger.”]
[Guitar Hero: “Descender-sensei, has the song for the anime OP been finalized yet?”]
[Natsuka (Group Owner): “…”]
Seeing this, Natsuka felt his temple twitch.
He held it back for a good long while, but still couldn’t bear it — and right then and there, he lowered his head and started furiously clattering away at the keys.