What awaits a person after death?
When faced with a question no one could answer, people came up with all sorts of assumptions.
Some said they would face God’s judgment, while others said another life would be waiting for them.
Until now, I had dismissed all such assumptions as useless bullshit.
I was already busy enough just keeping myself alive; I didn’t want to go out of my way to worry about what came after death too.
Was the afterlife going to put food on my table?
And now, I bitterly regretted every arrogant thought I had ever harbored.
Anyone would be forced to look back on their life at least once if they found themselves facing a car barreling straight toward them.
‘Goddammit! Why do I have to die?! That bastard’s the one who did something wrong!’
Whether it was because of my life flashing before my eyes or not, I watched the vehicle approaching in slow motion and was seized by terror.
Even when I desperately tried to move my legs and dodge, the car was far faster than my body could move.
‘I crossed on the signal! He’s the one who ignored the light and came speeding through!’
Watching an inescapable death slowly draw near was agony in itself.
Overwhelmed by injustice and fear, I panicked, screaming in terror and despair inside my head since my mouth refused to open.
And because of that, it took me a while to notice.
‘……Huh?’
Even if my life was flashing before my eyes, it was taking far too long for the car to hit me.
The moment I realized that, my vision was suddenly swallowed by pitch-black darkness.
And when my vision brightened again, what filled my eyes was a vast plain covered entirely in green grass.
“Wh-what the hell! Where am I?”
Flustered, I looked around in every direction.
Leaving aside the fact that I was suddenly standing all alone in a place I had never seen in my life, it had clearly been night just a moment ago.
But now, the sky was a cloudless blue, and the sun was blazing down without mercy.
And that wasn’t the end of it.
Ding!
[Tutorial 1: Open the menu.]
A message suddenly appeared in midair, cluttering my vision.
At that point, my brain gave up trying to understand.
“What the hell is this…… Tutorial? No, more importantly, where the hell am I?”
I had been in the middle of an ordinary modern city, only to suddenly be dropped in the middle of a plain that was nature itself.
Even the time had changed, as if I had been flung to the other side of the Earth.
And when even a phenomenon that could never be reproduced by the level of human civilization occurred on top of that, my disbelief shot straight past its limits.
“Ha, whatever. Open menu.”
So, in a let’s-see-what-happens mood, I followed the message and spoke a single phrase.
Then, unexpectedly, messages far too familiar to me cluttered my vision.
Ding!
[Divine Name: Undecided
Rank: Tribal God
Race: Human Race
Population: 0/0]
[Resource Status] [Unit Production]
[Tutorial 1: You have cleared the quest!]
[Linked quest in progress.]
[Tutorial 2: Choose your Divine Name.]
A game where the user became the god in charge of a single race and nurtured that race.
A strategy simulation game where you competed against the races of other gods with the race you had raised.
“……ROG?”
Race of God.
ROG for short.
The messages were the system menu of that very ROG I used to enjoy playing.
“Has ROG become reality? No, did I enter ROG?”
I thought I was going to die, and the next moment, I opened my eyes to find myself inside a game.
Even if I simply listed exactly what I had experienced without exaggeration, it was impossible to believe this was reality.
And unfortunately, the situation wasn’t the only thing that was unbelievable.
“W-wait. Why is this already decided?”
The familiar ROG system menu had suddenly popped up, leaving me dumbfounded for a moment.
Then I saw one item on the system menu and grew flustered.
The race, which could only be selected after finishing the tutorial, had already been chosen.
There were a total of twelve races playable in ROG.
These races could broadly be divided into three alignments and four traits.
Good, evil, and neutral; and transcendent species, heroic spirit species, fairy species, and living species. In general, the closer one got from the latter to the former, the higher the basic stats of the units were.
Then here was the question.
What alignment and trait did the human race have in ROG?
The answer was neutral alignment and living species trait.
In other words, among all the races in ROG, human units were the weakest.
“N-no way I can’t change it when the game hasn’t even started yet, right?”
I hurriedly scanned the system menu.
But as expected, no matter how hard I looked, there was no function to change the chosen race.
Just as I was about to sink into despair, something strange caught my eye.
“A chat window?”
It wasn’t an empty chat window, either. There were even a few lines of announcements displayed in it.
The existence of a chat window meant that there were players other than me.
I quickly read through the announcement in the chat window.
■■■(GM): Greetings. I am ■■■, the creator of this game and its game master. First of all, I sincerely apologize for bringing all of you here without notice.
‘Found the culprit.’
Absurdly enough, he had just openly written that he was the one who had thrown me here.
Holding back my rising anger, I continued reading the next sentence.
There would be plenty of time to get angry after I understood the full circumstances.
■■■(GM): Your last memory should be of your life being in danger in your original world. To state the conclusion first, you died at that moment.
But the next sentence sent my disbelief flying past the Milky Way.
What, I died?
Who did? Me?
■■■(GM): As the memory of the moment of death could have a profound negative effect on your mind and soul, I erased it at my own discretion. I ask for your understanding on this point once again.
‘……Riiight, I guess that could happen.’
For a moment, the instinctive urge to deny my own death surged up inside me, but I barely succeeded in cooling my head.
That was because the being calling himself the GM clearly possessed transcendent abilities that could never be understood by the human mind.
■■■(GM): Now then, what I must tell you is why I brought you, the dead, to this place. I pitied all of you who passed away due to unfortunate accidents. And so, I intend to give you one more chance.
‘A chance?’
■■■(GM): As per the original purpose of this world, which all of you should already be familiar with, fight the gods of other races and win. Only the final remaining individual may return to the original world.
“What the fuck?”
In that instant, the GM’s words were so absurd that I cursed out loud without realizing it.
But the GM was not finished.
■■■(GM): The victor will be granted the opportunity to return to the original world while retaining the authorities and divine power obtained in this world. You will maintain your appearance, time period, and mind from just before death, while only avoiding the fate of death. However, those who die again here will have all their authorities stripped away and will face a mortal’s death once more.
In other words, the GM was saying that, just like ROG’s original story, he would revive only the one person who seized the seat of the God-King.
And with all the authorities gained as a god in this place intact, at that.
But in my eyes, only the penalty for losing was being projected hugely onto my retinas.
■■■(GM): Then, please do your best until you become the God-King. I wish you good fortune.
The announcement ended there.
I clutched my dizzy head and organized the new facts I had learned from the GM’s notice.
‘So, first. This place is ROG, and judging by the circumstances, it’s not story mode but versus mode. Second, the other players are people who died once, like me. Third, if I want to come back to life, I have to win the game. Fourth and finally, if I die here one more time, that’s when I really die……’
At that moment, I was seized by the feeling that I was truly going insane.
Even though the situation wasn’t funny at all, laughter escaped me on its own.
“Heh, hehe, hehehe……”
They said there were five stages to the way people accepted death, didn’t they?
As if to prove I was a dead man, my mind was following those stages precisely.
I had gone through denial before seeing the GM’s message, and now I was at the stage of anger.
“Hehe! Hahaha! Haaahaha!”
However, when people got angry for an utterly bizarre reason, they could also laugh out of sheer disbelief.
My laughter, as if I had lost my mind, quickly turned into a shout of violently burning rage.
“I’ll kill you! I’m going to fucking kill you!”
What kind of twisted mindset was it to deliberately drag a dead person out of the afterlife just to kill them again?
I didn’t care whether the GM was a god or a devil.
“If you were going to do this, then just leave me dead! Who said I wanted to be some god?!”
Maybe I looked foolish, cursing at the GM instead of being grateful to him for giving me another chance.
After all, one could say the possibility of coming back to life had opened up.
I was certain of one thing: anyone who said that had never played ROG even once.
“Just say you don’t want to revive me, you fucker!”
What comes after a person dies?
At least based on my experience, the dead meet a god and become a god.
But either way, they probably won’t be a sane god.