Magan to Dangan o Tsukatte Isekai o Buchinuku!

-+/-/

「This is…」 

Athal opened his eyes inside of a building filled with bookshelves as far as the eye could see.
He surveyed his surroundings for any indication of human presence, but calmed down finding it to be dead silent.
Charmed by his curiosity, he began to walk, his footsteps resounding throughout the vicinity.

「A library?」

That was the feeling the building gave off, but as far as he knew there wasn’t such a large library in all of Japan, or even overseas.
No matter where he looked, there were bookshelves all over, so he looked at the spine of some book he didn’t know of.

『Fumu, have you woken up?』

Hearing a voice from his rear, Athal looked behind himself in surprise.
Back when he had been checking his surroundings, he had thought that there was no one around.
However, the one who spoke was sitting comfortably in a chair right behind Athal, hands crossed atop a desk.

「Since when have you been there? Who are you?」

『Hohoho, sorry for suddenly calling out to you.
I am… a God, like existence.
It’s fine to think of me as such.』

The man who referred to himself as a god smiling calmly was an old person with long white hair and a white beard.
Wrapped comfortably around his body was a soft long robe.
If one were to proclaim himself a god to the usual Athal, he would surely reject them as a shady existence, however in that place with its wondrous atmosphere, and most of all with the old man carrying a mysterious atmosphere, he accepted that claim.

「God, huh.
I guess in this kind of place, with that appearance, it’s not weird for that to be the case.」

If someone were to stop him by the roadside and made that claim he would say they’re joking, but in that place the credibility was high.

『Umu umu, it’s helpful that you understood quickly.
I’d get right into the main question, but do you remember what you were doing before you came here?』

In response to the question God had asked while squinting his eyes, Athal did as requested and called to his mind what he had been doing before he came to that place.

「If I’m not mistaken… I should have been gaming at home.
That’s what I always did.」

Inside his memory, Athal was playing a VR first-person shooter, holding a controller shaped like a gun.
When he was in high school, Athal had done a homestay in America where he had gotten a chance to go to a shooting range and fire a gun.
Unable to forget that feeling, he had turned to games.
Once he came to know the pleasant feeling of precisely shooting enemies inside the game, he became absorbed in mastering it.

『I see, how about after that? Do you remember that?』

God continued to question Athal.
However, Athal creased his eyebrows as he found himself unable to remember beyond that point, as a haze came from somewhere and covered his memory. 

「… After the game… no, I can’t remember what happened.」

After being unable to recall it no matter how much he thought about it, Athal gave up thinking about it and responded as such.

『Fumu, is that right.
In that case, I’ll tell you.
You were playing your game, and then at the moment when you were removing the game equipment, you were stabbed from behind.
Because you were living alone and concentrating on the game, it seems you didn’t notice the intruder.』

Though God spoke in a light tone, as though he were only speaking of the day’s weather, to Athal being informed of his cause of death came as a great shock.

「I was stabbed!? So what, I’m dead!?」

To Athal’s frantic query, God silently nodded.
God’s atmosphere was telling him that the fact of his death was already determined. 

「Bu-but, I still had so many things I wanted to do…」

In his astonishment, Athal recalled inviting his coworkers from the company he worked at to experience their first survival game the following Sunday.
During his homestay, he had picked up an interest in guns, but he didn’t have any experience gathering people to fight against in real life, so he was really looking forward to Sunday’s activities.

God calle