Chapter 1: Germany Has Entered The Chat..
His name was Werner Stein.
Twenty six years old. Born and raised in Cologne, Germany. Six foot one, built like someone who took their job seriously, because his job was fighting people and he did take it seriously.
He had been fighting since he was sixteen. Started with boxing at a local gym because he had too much energy and his mother was tired of him breaking things around the apartment.
Then wrestling. Then Muay Thai because a friend dragged him to a class and he embarrassed himself badly enough that he came back the next day and the day after that until he stopped being embarrassing. By twenty he was competing.
By twenty three he was the regional MMAchampion of a circuit that wasn't famous but was real and was hard and that was enough for him.
Werner was not a complicated person. He trained. He fought. He ate well and slept early and had no grand plans beyond getting better at the only thing he was genuinely good at.
He died on a Wednesday.
Gas leak in his apartment. He went to sleep and didn't wake up. No pain. No drama. Just Werner Stein, regional champion, stopping in the middle of an ordinary week without anyone asking his opinion on the matter.
---
He opened his eyes in a dark room.
Small. Black walls that gave off just enough faint light to see by. Smooth floor, smooth ceiling, no windows, no door that he could find.
The air tasted like nothing — like someone had made air using a recipe but forgotten to add the part that made it feel real.
Werner sat up. Checked his hands. Same hands. Same scar on his left knuckle from a fight three years ago where his opponent had very inconveniently solid teeth. Same everything.
He stood up. Looked around the room once. Looked around it again more carefully. Found nothing new.
"Hello," he said in German.
A slot in the wall he hadn't noticed slid open. A microphone on a small metal arm extended out of it and stopped at head height. Just the microphone. Nothing else.
Then the microphone spoke.
It spoke in perfect German, which somehow made the whole thing worse. The voice was dry and flat and had the energy of someone reading the same document for the four thousandth time this week.
*"Candidate 7,714,882.
Werner Stein.
Human. Earth designation 114.
Deceased as of this morning.
Cause of death: gas inhalation.
You have been selected as a Player Candidate from among inhabited worlds surveyed in the current cycle."*
Werner looked at the microphone.
"Am I dead," he said. Not a question. He already knew.
*"Correct."*
"And selected for what."
The microphone arm adjusted its angle slightly. Werner got the impression this was the alien equivalent of clearing your throat before an important part.
*"Every cycle, candidates are drawn from worlds across the multiverse and given the opportunity to compete for the status of Player.
A Player is granted the right to reincarnation in an assigned world with an assigned power system, with full retention of self and memory. The position is limited.
The selection method is direct combat. One fight. Victory by knockout or submission. The winner receives Player status and proceeds to reincarnation. The loser is returned to standard death processing."*
"Standard death processing," Werner repeated.
*"Current estimated wait time is four hundred and twelve years."*
Silence.
"Right," Werner said. "What are the rules of the fight."
*"Physical combat only. No magical enhancement of any kind. No cursed energy, no qi, no cultivation technique, no divine blessing, no supernatural ability of any metaphysical nature whatsoever.
Pure physical. The arena is neutral ground. Higher dimensional observers will be present."*
Werner rolled his shoulders. Cracked his neck left then right. Looked at his hands one more time — the same hands that had built themselves up over ten years of early mornings and split skin and ice baths and every other unglamorous thing that went into being good at hitting people.
He thought about four hundred and twelve years in a waiting queue.
"Alright," he said. "Let's go."
---
The arena was nothing like he expected.
He had imagined something Roman — stone and sand and torchlight. What he got was a structure so enormous his brain simply gave up trying to measure it.
Tier upon tier of beings filled the space around the arena floor — some vaguely human shaped, some that looked like living geometry, some that existed in colors that didn't have names in any human language.
The noise they made together wasn't really sound so much as pressure against his eardrums that his body translated as crowd energy because he had nothing else to call it.
The floor of the arena was flat and white and smooth.
Werner stood on his side of it and felt small in a way that had nothing to do with weakness and everything to do with scale.
The screen above the arena — the size of a building, maybe larger — was showing his opponent.
The young man on the other side was maybe twenty years old. Long robes, probably expensive. Perfect posture.
The kind of face that had grown up being told it was exceptional and had never been given a reason to think otherwise.
Text appeared beneath his image on the screen, translating itself into what Werner assumed were several hundred languages at once.
**LONG TIANYU. FIRST YOUNG MASTER. AZURE DRAGON SECT. CULTIVATION REALM: PEAK MORTAL ASCENSION.**
Long Tianyu walked to the center of the arena with his hands clasped behind his back and his chin at an angle that was specifically engineered to look down at things.
Then he stopped, turned to face the crowd, and projected his voice like a man who believed the universe had been waiting to hear it.
"Beings of the higher realms! Lend me your attention! I am Long Tianyu,
First Young Master of the Azure DragonSect, ranked third among all outer realm candidates in the current selection cycle, heir to a legacy spanning twelve thousand years and forty three generations of—"
Nothing.
The crowd gave him absolutely nothing. Not hostility. Not amusement. Just the flat indifferent silence of thousands of beings who had heard this exact speech in ten thousand different versions and had stopped processing it somewhere around the eight thousandth time.
A single geometric entity in the upper tiers made a sound that Werner was fairly sure was a yawn.
Long Tianyu's composure wobbled. He pushed through it. "The Azure Dragon Sect's contribution to the outer realm alone should—"
Still nothing.
The microphone announcer filled the silence with the tone of someone who had somewhere else to be.
*"Opposing candidate. State your designation for the record."*
Werner walked to the center line. Looked at the crowd. Looked at the screen.
"Werner Stein," he said. "Germany."
One second of silence.
Then the screen changed.
The cultivation stats disappeared. The screen went black. Then a title card appeared in text that somehow every being in the arena could read regardless of what language meant to them:
**HIGH PLAYER CHAMPION — 3 TIME WINNER — EXHIBITION HIGHLIGHTS — FOR FIRST TIME ATTENDEES.**
The footage began.
The figure on screen was small. Side parted hair. Small mustache.
He was standing in the center of an arena not unlike this one, facing an opponent who was nearly twice his size and carrying an actual sword — a proper longsword held in a two handed trained grip.
Hitler was holding a shoe.
Just one shoe. Removed from his own foot. He held it at his side with the patient calm of a man who had been in this situation before and found it uncomplicated.
The opponent charged.
What happened next lasted eleven seconds. Werner watched it. The crowd that had been silent for Long Tianyu's entire speech was already beginning to vibrate.
Second clip :- Different opponent, different arena, same shoe. Eight seconds.
Third clip :- Six seconds. The shoe didn't even come off cleanly — Hitler had to pause mid approach to properly remove it and still won inside the time it took his opponent to close the distance and realize something had gone wrong with his plan.
The crowd in the exhibition footage screamed loud enough that it distorted the recording.
The announcer's voice returned. Slightly warmer than before.
*"Three time High Player Champion. Retired. Undefeated across all registered bouts.
Primary method: footwear. Germany."*
The colosseum lost its mind.
The sound hit Werner like a wall — not noise exactly, more like every entity in the arena making whatever sound their form of existence allowed them to make and all of it pointing in the same direction at the same volume.
The geometric beings were vibrating at frequencies he felt through the floor. The section of entities that existed in unnameable colors had shifted into something his brain processed as electric red.
Something in the upper tiers that might have been a sentient cloud formation was doing something that registered in his sternum as pure unhinged enthusiasm.
**"GERMANY! GERMANY! GERMANY!"**
The screen switched from the exhibition to Werner's face. His name appeared below it in every language simultaneously. The crowd got louder. He hadn't thought that was possible.
Then from the upper tiers the chant began shifting. He could hear it building and spreading downward with the momentum of something that had clearly happened before:
**"HAIL GERMANY — HAIL GERMANY — HAIL HITL—"**
*"THAT IS ENOUGH."*
The announcer's voice came down on the chant like a hammer. Loud, immediate, final.
*"We are not receiving another strike on this venue. Exhibition is concluded. Please be seated. All of you. Now."*
The crowd subsided. Still buzzing, still electric, but contained.
*"We will now begin the candidate match. Physical combat only. No supernatural enhancement of any nature. This is for Player status. Not regional pride."*
A pause.
*"Germany included. Begin."*
---
Long Tianyu turned back to Werner.
To his credit the young master had recovered well. The wounded dignity from being completely ignored was gone — replaced with something colder and more focused.
He settled into his stance. Weight slightly back, right shoulder high, eyes sharp. Whatever else he was, he wasn't soft.
"I don't understand why they cheer for you," Long Tianyu said quietly. "But you're going to lose."
Werner looked at him.
He read the stance in about two seconds. Weight back meant he'd initiate with his lead hand. Right shoulder high meant his power hand was right.
The whole structure was built around someone who normally used technique to do the heavy work — which meant his pure physical combinations would have gaps in the rhythm.
He wasn't used to fighting someone who would never do anything supernatural. He'd never had to be.
Werner had spent ten years specifically fighting people who would never do anything supernatural.
He didn't respond. He just closed the distance.
No setup. No feint. Straight across in the time it took Long Tianyu's eyes to register movement, and Werner's first punch landed before the young master had finished processing the fact that the approach had happened —
knuckles across the teeth at an angle Werner had used enough times to know exactly what it did on impact.
He felt the crack travel up his hand.
Long Tianyu's head snapped back.
Werner was already throwing the second.
Nose this time. Cartilage giving with a flat wet sound that the arena's acoustics carried clearly outward. Blood in both directions immediately. Long Tianyu's knees buckled without his brain having caught up to what was happening to his face yet.
Werner grabbed the collar. Controlled the fall. Didn't let him go down yet.
Third punch. Fourth. Fifth. He wasn't swinging wild — every one was placed and deliberate, the kind of violence that comes from knowing exactly how much force a situation requires and applying precisely that amount without wasting anything extra.
Long Tianyu stopped trying to defend after the sixth. His hands came up wrong, too slow, completely disconnected from a brain that was no longer firing in the right sequence.
Werner put him on the floor.
Stood over him for two full seconds confirming he wasn't getting up.
He wasn't getting up.
The arena was louder than it had been for the exhibition footage.
Werner straightened. Rolled his shoulder. Noticed his right shoe had come loose somewhere during the last exchange. He crouched down and retied it with the calm unhurried efficiency of someone who had a process for this and saw no reason to rush it.
Long Tianyu looked up at him from the floor through the one eye still working correctly.
"Your shoe," the young master said. His voice was thick and broken around the consonants. "You stopped to fix your *shoe.*"
"It was loose," Werner said simply, standing back up. "Bad for footwork."
---
*"CANDIDATE WERNER STEIN. VICTOR BY KNOCKOUT. PLAYER STATUS CONFIRMED."*
The crowd was doing something that had gone beyond the concept of cheering and become something closer to a weather event.
Werner looked up at the screen one last time. His face. His name. Germany.
He exhaled through his nose.
The white came and took everything — the crowd, the arena, Long Tianyu still on the floor, the screen, all of it dissolving at once.
---
He was back in the dark cell.
The microphone arm extended through its slot and stopped at head height.
*"Congratulations Candidate. Player status confirmed. Reincarnation parameters are as follows."*
"Which world," Werner said.
*"World assignment: Jujutsu Kaisen."*
Werner was quiet for a moment. He knew the name. He knew what it meant. Cursed spirits. Hidden sorcerers.
A world running a quiet war underneath the surface of ordinary life, propped up by clans and inherited power and the understanding that most humans would never know how close to the edge they lived every day.
He also knew the major players. The events. The shape of how things would go.
"Power assignment," he said.
The microphone paused. Just briefly. Like it was reading something that had surprised it slightly.
*"Power assignment: Uchiha Development System. The system will activate at age four. It has a personality. We are not responsible for this."*
Werner processed that.
"Clan assignment," he said.
*"You will be reborn as the eldest son of the Zenin clan. One year senior to a sibling later designated Zenin Toji. Branch adjacent position. Full memory retention confirmed."*
Zenin clan. He knew that name too. One of the three great sorcerer families. Brutal internally. Obsessed with cursed technique and bloodline. The kind of place that weighed your worth in what you could do and felt nothing about discarding the rest.
Werner thought about that for exactly three seconds.
Then he thought about what he had just done to a peak mortal cultivator using ten years of training and properly tied shoes.
"And Last, legecy assignment " : you will given then legecy of the legend sir adolf hitler that is his signature Primary method: footwear. Germany."*
"Send me in," he said.
*"One final note,"* the microphone said, and in its flat alien bureaucratic voice there was something that in a human would have been called amusement. *"The crowd sends their regards. Particularly section G."*
Werner didn't ask what section G was.
He already knew.
*"Initiating reincarnation. Good luck Candidate."*
The dark dissolved.
---
*— End of Chapter 1 —*
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