-Rat-tat-tat!
The sudden noise caused his closed eyelids to flutter open. It wasn't a particularly loud sound, but for some reason, the noise caught his ear. It was similar to the gunfire he had heard in the military.
Did I fall asleep with a video playing...?
"Ugh..."
Suzuki Kenji forced his stiff body to sit up, rubbing his dry eyes.
He certainly remembered watching some YouTube after getting off work before sleeping.
It seemed he hadn't turned off his computer properly.
There was no reason to leave it on, especially after he'd finished rerolling on an emulator. Kenji sighed out of habit and reached to his side to put on his glasses.
But his hand grasped nothing. No, it did grab something.
A newspaper.
"...?"
Kenji narrowed his eyes, staring at the newspaper in his hand.
He was sure he didn't have any newspaper subscriptions, so why was this in his house? Puzzled, he began to read the headlines.
[Gehenna Academy Student Causes Riot in Trinity General School Cafeteria. The Sisterhood: "We Will Ensure Retribution."]
[Portion of Abydos High School District Submerged by Desert. All Students Considering Transfer? Student Council President Denies Rumors.]
[Delinquents Riot Near Sanctum Tower, General Student Council President Handles It Personally. "This is nothing to worry about."]
"What the fuck."
Gehenna. Trinity. Abydos.
They were all names he remembered.
How could he forget? They were the names he'd been seeing just hours ago while rerolling in 'Blue Archive'.
The problem was why those names were written in a newspaper. It felt too strange to be a promotional article for the game.
It was all far too serious and detailed.
"...Wait a minute."
Kenji looked around as a sudden gust of wind blew past him.
Instead of his white-painted walls, the cracked and broken bricks of a ruined building entered his vision.
Droplets of water dripped from a drainpipe connected to the building, and insects skittered across the puddles on the ground.
No matter how he looked at it, this was not the place where he had fallen asleep.
A working adult with a respectable job wouldn't be sleeping outdoors.
Especially not in a secluded alley like this, rather than a subway station or under a bridge.
"...Ah."
The realization came quickly.
With trembling pupils, Kenji looked down at his shaking hands.
They were the delicate hands of someone who could hardly be called an adult man.
Not only were they small, but they also looked slightly chubby, as if they still had baby fat.
Like... a preschooler's.
"Fuck..."
The voice that came out was also terribly childish.
A high-pitched voice that hadn't yet gone through puberty.
It was the voice of his childhood, one he could no longer even remember. Kenji covered his face with his trembling hands and collapsed to the ground.
-Bzzzz!
A fly buzzed near his ear, but Kenji had no capacity to care about such things.
"Fucking hell."
He understood his reality.
He had been dropped into the world of Blue Archive.
And in the body of a little kid.
...The reroll had failed.