Vol 1 Chapter 4 – The Type Who Gets Bored During the Tutorial

That would be me, obviously. (The subtitle — I’m talking about the subtitle.)

I play games, but I’m the type who loses interest during the tutorial. I read long novels, but I’m the type who quits after the prologue. I knew perfectly well this wasn’t the time for that particular character flaw to kick in.

“We’ve had way too many otherworlders lately!”

“We’re at capacity! The population balance is completely off!”

“Director— the immigration request to Tostria was rejected—!“

“…Seems like they’re a bit busy.”

“Yeah.”

Apparently, there was such a thing as an Otherworlder Registration and Affairs Bureau.

In short, in a country where isekai arrivals were a daily occurrence, this was the department tasked with managing people who came from other worlds. Naturally, it answered to the Crown.

“Management” didn’t mean imprisonment — since these were ordinary people, not criminals, the policy was to register their names, assign management numbers, let them choose an occupation, and allow them to live freely in whichever district they preferred. It was basically a fantasy version of a national ID system, except here, the government was literally managing you.

There was no known way back, apparently. Though now and then, someone would simply vanish without warning. This world had its share of monster attacks and disappearances, but when a management number dropped off the system entirely — as in, ceased to exist in the logs — it meant the person was no longer present in this world. At least, that was how it was explained.

I keep saying “apparently” — I really didn’t follow all of it.

“Oh — Elena-san! You don’t come here often. New arrival?”

“Rito! Thank goodness, a familiar face. Yes, this is Utaki.”

A young man with what looked like a cat-fox hybrid creature on his shoulder happened to walk by and call out to Elena.

He looked about high school age. Slightly shorter than me — but his face. How do I describe his face? Even from my perspective, as another guy, the man was unreasonably handsome. His speech pattern was the one area where he fell slightly short of the total package.

“Ooh, it’s a guy for once~ It’s been nothing but women lately…”

“Mostly women? Is that a pattern?”

“Pretty much, yeah. Not sure why, honestly.”

He answered easily, his expression open and friendly. Silver-white hair, with what looked like tattoo-like markings across his face — otherwise perfectly normal. I noticed with quiet relief that neither he nor Elena had pointed ears. I was still curious about elves and the like, but in my current state — unarmed, clueless, completely at sea — regular-looking humans were an enormous comfort. I mean it sincerely. The fact that modern reality only has one humanoid species is something I had never properly appreciated until this moment.

“So — Utaki-san, let me — oh, I haven’t introduced myself. I’m Ritros. Everyone calls me Rito, and my affinity is Light!”

The young man — Rito, officially — scratched his shoulder creature behind the ear. “This here’s my partner, Pakira.”

“Elena-san, mind sticking around? We’ll need to do an intake questionnaire first.”

“Intake questionnaire.”

Like a hospital.

Between the management requirements and the obvious bureaucratic volume in this office, the whole process was making more and more sense. Rito had a job to do. I was vaguely reminded of the waiting room at the orthopedic clinic near my house, which had become a de facto senior citizens’ lounge.

“Okay, I’ll need your name, sex, age, and nationality.”

“Nationality?”

“Yep. Otherworlders come in with all kinds of hair — black, blond, red that’s not fantasy-red. None of it’s a color that exists naturally here. Seems like everyone who shows up has some prior affiliation somewhere — if not a country, then some kind of community.”

So it was just another worldly phenomenon that happened to be widespread. Not just a Japanese thing. Somehow, that was mildly disappointing.

“Name’s Mizugaki Utaki. Male, twenty-one. Nationality is Japanese.”

“Another Nihon person! There sure are a lot of you.”

Apparently, though honestly, I kind of got it — a lot of this subculture originated in Japan. I didn’t want to think too hard about the mechanics of it, but knowing there were probably other people out there who’d ended up here by the same chain of idiotic decisions I’d made was oddly comforting.

“Your management code is 4675299623. You don’t need to memorize it, though.”

“It’s just for the Bureau’s internal records,” Elena added.

“Yeah, just know that you’ve got a number, basically.”

Japan has that too. My Individual Number notification letter — I’d lost the envelope and never gotten the card made. The envelope, by the way, was the long cardstock kind, greenish or bluish, you know the one.

Maybe the usefulness of numerical record-keeping was a universal constant across worlds.

“Oh.”

“Oh?!“

Rito let out a single syllable—just the one. I needed him not to do that — I was a civilian, that kind of foreboding “oh” was not something my heart was prepared for. Springing that without warning felt genuinely inconsiderate.

Rito was now frowning at whatever he was entering data into. Which, come to think of it, wasn’t a computer at all — it was a large, cubic, brownish object that looked remarkably like a giant Rubik’s Cube.

What it was, and how it worked — those were questions I had officially decided to stop asking.