[Natsuka (Group Owner): “No wait — I’ll cop to losing, sure, but the guy across the net opening with Tenbu Hōrin right out of the gate?
Isn’t that a bit much?
I’m not a Saint of Athena!”]
[Unicorn: “I get that feeling.
It’s like every time I run into Kyogoku-senpai at a karate tournament — that pressure, it really does make your scalp tingle…”]
[Shadow: “Hmph.
That level of thing, in front of a nuclear bomb, is worth absolutely nothing.”]
The group members were, in their own way, trying to comfort him.
Natsuka looked at those messages, and the wad of gloom in his chest loosened a little, but he still couldn’t help letting out a sigh.
Even though he’d known for a long time that further down the line there was even tennis capable of whipping up a tsunami.
The current him still just thought it was ridiculous.
“Whatever.”
“It’s not like I picked up tennis to go win a championship in the first place…”
Natsuka closed his eyes for a moment, his tone lazy and listless.
This wasn’t a novel.
It wasn’t one of those convenient worlds where, for no reason at all, every character of the cast just happens to be concentrated at one and the same school, and their ages all conveniently line up.
Reality didn’t deal out that many coincidences.
For Natsuka to pull so many characters he’d known in his past life, one by one, into a chat group he’d built himself — there was no telling just how much effort had gone into it behind the scenes.
Of course, luck had played a pretty large part of it too.
Truth be told, of the hundred or so people in this group, at least eighty percent of them were people he was only on so-so terms with.
“For the sake of my ideals, I really have wrung out every last bit of effort I can wring out.”
He muttered it under his breath.
That’s right.
This so-called Myriad Heavens Chat Group was, at its core, nothing more than an ordinary chat group Natsuka had built himself.
It wasn’t some cheat handed down to him by a System.
Nor was it some mysterious golden finger that had dropped out of the sky.
It was just a group he had recruited people into with his own two hands, maintained with his own two hands, and dragged into existence with his own two hands.
As for why he had gone and set this up, and even started seriously throwing himself into sports on the side…
Natsuka idly tapped open the group member list, gazed at that string of names, and the look in his eyes immediately shifted.
[Brutal Hero] Satou Kazuma.
[Shadow] Minoru Kageno.
[ ] Blank.
[Grip Strength Fifty] Natsuki Subaru.
[Moe King] Mikami Satoru.
…
…
Good grief.
Every last one of them was a transmigrator, or a reincarnator-in-waiting.
Add to that the fact that Natsuka himself was a living, breathing case-in-point, ready and on hand.
With a lineup like this laid out in front of him, that heart of his — which had never been all that well-behaved to begin with — couldn’t possibly stay still.
“Seriously, though.”
“In a real world where the ‘wives’ aren’t even at the same school in the first place, going after a harem — isn’t that just a pure case of pointing yourself in the wrong direction?”
Natsuka pursed his lips, a look of distaste on his face.
“And on top of that, you’d get hatcheted way too easily.”
Back when he had first thought all this through, his whole world had opened up.
He still remembered how, at the time, he had clenched his fists and, blood rushing to his head, shouted in his heart.
But another world is different!!
That’s a place where strength does the talking!
That bit of ambition a man carries — once you toss it into another world, it’s stupidly easy to satisfy!
“Even someone like me, maybe, just maybe, could pull it off!”
Natsuka — meek and stammering in real life, but throwing heavy punches online — had always firmly believed in this whole line of reasoning.
“Not to mention — who could ever resist the temptation of churning out a nuclear bomb with their bare hands!”
So.
The young Natsuka had awakened.
He had begun fanatically obsessing over the mysterious, desperately hoping that one day he might pull off a second transmigration.
He had staked out spots on the back hill, waiting for some absurd development to unfold.
He had flipped through library materials on the legend of the Three Sacred Heroes.
He had read Das Kapital.
He had even, in all seriousness, filled out some sort of hero recruitment application form.
Even games on the verge of having their servers shut down, he had stubbornly stuck with right down to the very last second, just to see whether some hidden transmigration option might pop up.
Of course.
As chuunibyou as Natsuka was, he still wasn’t dumb enough to go take a dump truck to the face on his own initiative.
Nor was he so eager to die that he’d go poking at entities on the level of Haruhi Suzumiya or Evil God D.
These things, which even in a “slice of life” world could be called gods, were currently still stuck in a state somewhere between existing and not existing.
In short, they were Schrödinger’s gods.
And it was precisely because Natsuka spent every single day fussing over these strange things that, back in his second year of middle school, he’d already been slapped with the label of “weirdo.”
But to look at it from another angle, that whole crowd of people in the group really did, in a certain sense, share his interests.
As for whether all of Natsuka’s tinkering over the years had actually yielded any results?
It really had.
This thing called a “god” — he had, in fact, brushed a corner of it.
Namely, the one held up by the yokai, the so-called “One-Eyed, One-Legged” God of Wisdom.
The trouble was, Natsuka — of all people — couldn’t see yokai.
Which was extremely awkward.
After going round and round in a great big loop, the only thing that could even barely brush up against the mysterious turned out, of all things, to be sports.
Saying it out loud was enough to make a person want to laugh.
Casually punching out a black hole could be counted as the level of a normal athlete.
The competitive threshold of this world was a bit too high, wasn’t it?
If you couldn’t pull off a few superpowers, you weren’t even worthy of stepping onto the field, was that it?
Natsuka typed as he thought, his feet veering off as he walked in between the shelves.
With practiced ease, he pulled his future rations down off the rack.
A five-pack of instant noodles.