Just as Genichi was about to speak and work out the concrete follow-up training plan for the Boosted Gear with Rias, a familiar dizziness slammed into him without warning, the kind that made his soul shudder.
"Again?"
Every alarm bell in his head went off. He did not even have time to react before an irresistible force tore his consciousness away.
The world spun. Space twisted. Time lost its shape.
When his senses stabilized, the familiar pressure of the scenery crashed down on him: ring-shaped, ancient, ice-cold stone stands; the dark red sand beneath his feet, as if it had been steeped in endless blood; and the towering stair-step bleachers all around, rising into a bottomless black void, utterly empty.
The Soul Coliseum.
Genichi's heart pounded as an icy chill shot up from his tailbone to his scalp. Every hair on his body stood on end.
"How is this possible?"
He bared his teeth and forced down the shock, his mind racing.
"It has only been a few days since the last time. If my earlier guess was right, there should have been a fixed interval between forced matches. So it is random? Or did it accelerate because I devoured Ddraig and my strength jumped?"
The unknown bred fear.
Being unable to control it, being dragged into life-or-death slaughter at any moment, pressed down on him like a weight.
He forced himself to calm down and snapped his gaze to the opposite side of the arena.
His second opponent was about to appear.
The teleportation light came as expected, a white flare blooming on the sand across from him.
The glow shrank, and a figure took shape.
But the instant Genichi saw the opponent's condition, all his guarded tension was replaced by sheer disbelief.
That person, no, that Genichi did not appear standing.
He appeared face-down, collapsed in the dark red sand in an utterly unnatural pose.
His body twitched faintly, but he could not manage a single meaningful movement.
The most striking part was his neck.
It was bent sideways at an impossible angle, almost a right angle, clearly snapped clean through.
With an injury like that, fighting was not merely impossible; breathing itself was a luxury.
He was like a fish tossed onto shore, his lips opening and closing uselessly. No sound came out, only a wet, leaking rasp from his throat as his life drained away at a visible pace.
Another dying "me"?
Genichi's pupils tightened, an absurd feeling rising in his chest.
Was his luck insanely good, or insanely wrong?
The first time, it had been Hyoudou Genichi, teleported over while waiting to be reincarnated.
This time, it was a poor bastard whose neck was already broken, hanging onto his final breath.
Before the thought could fully settle, the twisted-neck Genichi across the arena suddenly went rigid, then slackened completely.
Dead.
No struggle. No fight. Just gone.
Then the exact same scene as last time replayed.
The corpse began to glow from within, breaking apart into countless pure particles of light. They gathered into a brilliant river, crossed the distance of the arena, and surged into Genichi, wrapping him gently, seeping into him, merging with him.
A tidal wave of memories and information smashed into his mind like a broken dam.
He saw a completely different life.
Different, yet still driven by desire, and still ending in bleak failure.
This Genichi had transmigrated into a massive labyrinth city called Orario.
A colossal tower, Babel, stabbed up toward the sky. Beneath the city, the Dungeon slept, endless, birthing monsters and treasure without end.
The gods had descended to the mortal world, formed Familias, bestowed blessings, and guided people to explore the Dungeon, to write their own heroic epics.
This was the world of Is It Wrong to Try to Pick Up Girls in a Dungeon?
This Danmachi Genichi had carried the same transmigrator dreams and ambition.
He wanted to carve out a future in a fantasy world of swords and magic, gain power, have beautiful encounters, and become a hero admired by all.
He stepped into Orario full of hope, watching adventurers stride through the streets with terrifying presence, watching the banners of different gods' Familias flutter overhead, his heart burning with longing.
Reality hit him with a club.
Not one club.
A hundred.
He began a long, brutal search for a Familia.
From famous powerhouses like the Loki Familia, the Freya Familia, and the Hephaistos Familia, to mid-tier groups, to tiny, nameless Familias with only a handful of members.
Every single one rejected him.
The reason was simple, and cruel.
His base qualities were too poor.
Not ordinary, but below even the average resident of Orario.
Weak body. Slow reactions. Almost no sense for magic. No remarkable talent, no useful specialty.
In the eyes of the gods, he was a worthless vessel. Giving him a Falna would be a waste of divine blood.
Even when he was earnest, even when he offered to start from the bottom, not a single deity or captain wanted to spend a precious slot on him.
Again and again he knocked with hope.
Again and again he was turned away with coldness or perfunctory excuses.
His flame of hope was drowned. His confidence was ground to dust.
Danmachi Genichi sank into despair, and his money ran out.
Just as he was truly cornered, almost starving to death on Orario's streets, an "opportunity" found him.
A seemingly kind senior told him there was a special Familia that did not care about background or talent, that would give anyone with a dream a chance, and that paid well.
Desperate, he clung to it like a lifeline, following the man away from the bright main avenues into the filth-caked shadows beneath Orario's shining surface.
He soon learned the truth.
There was no proper Familia here.
This was the Dark Faction, the kind the Guild and righteous Familias hunted down relentlessly.
Even so, he still could not join.
The Dark Faction looked at him and decided he was too useless even for them.
The "opportunity" had been a lie from the start.
He had been brought there for one purpose.
To be a human punching bag.
To survive, to get even a little food and a place to sleep, Danmachi Genichi bent the knee.
He became the dedicated sandbag at that Dark Faction hideout, beaten as practice by low-level members who had just received Falna and needed to train and vent their violence.
Day after day, blows, insults, pain, and despair scraped away his last shred of dignity, his last bit of transmigrator pride.
He became a walking corpse.
There was no light ahead.
Then, one day, during routine "training," a newcomer who had recently received Falna lost control of his strength.
A heavy strike did not land on an arm or a torso the way Genichi had learned to brace for.
It landed precisely, brutally, on the side of his neck.
Crack.
The crisp snap of bone became the final sound etched into his awareness.
Pain. Suffocation. Darkness.
As his life bled out, as his soul approached dissolution, that familiar forced-dragging sensation returned.
He arrived here.
He saw, across the arena, another "him," whole and unbroken.
In his last trace of consciousness, was there relief?
Was there resentment?
Or only endless mockery for the short, gray life he had lived?
No one could know.
The flood of information gradually calmed.
Genichi stood still, then slowly opened his eyes, his expression complicated.
"This…"
After digesting all of Danmachi Genichi's memories, the look on his face turned strange, a mix of sympathy, absurdity, and a faint sense of relief.
"That is impressively unlucky."
He murmured it, the words heavy with an emotion he could not quite name.
He truly had not expected the first two "selves" he matched with to have fates so tragically theatrical.
The first, a devil Genichi, starting with a Longinus, yet dying on the eve of a plot-kill and delivering a Red Dragon Emperor gift package to his doorstep.
The second, a Danmachi Genichi, arriving with grand dreams, only to never even get a ticket into power, reduced to a Dark Faction punching bag, killed by accident, a pure experience-and-world-coordinate delivery package.
Compared to them, Genichi's own start was miserable too, but at least he had this poisonous cheat called the Soul Coliseum, and he had now met two "couriers" in a row, picking up a Longinus and a high-resource world coordinate for free.
Luck was a strange thing.
"But…"
Genichi's eyes sharpened, the fleeting sentiment replaced by cold, practical calculation.
"For me right now, the Dungeon world might be a timely rain."
He knew his biggest shortcoming with brutal clarity: a lack of real combat experience and systematic close-quarters technique.
Against that Stray Devil, if the Balance Breaker had not saved him at the end, he would have died from inexperience and bad reads.
And Orario's Dungeon was exactly the kind of place that could feed him endless monsters and endless combat reps.
More importantly, by devouring Danmachi Genichi, he now held the coordinate for that world.
That meant he could go to Orario whenever he wanted.
"That me never got a Falna, but he at least learned the basics of Orario. He learned about some outer Dark Faction hideouts. Most importantly, the Dungeon can give me a massive amount of combat experience."
Genichi's thoughts moved quickly.
He already had devil power and the Boosted Gear. His foundation was leagues above Danmachi Genichi.
If he could find a reliable way to obtain a Falna in Orario, his growth rate might jump to an entirely different tier.
This was not just about patching weaknesses.
It was about stacking chips for the next slaughter in the Soul Coliseum.
The teleportation light bloomed under his feet again, signaling the end of this brief arena trip, one where he had not shed a single drop of blood.
Genichi took one last look at the ancient ground that kept steering his fate, his gaze firm.
"Orario. The Dungeon. That's my next target."
White light swallowed him.
His awareness snapped back into the guest room apartment in the D×D world.
Rias was looking at him with faint confusion, as if she had caught the brief blankness on his face.
"Genichi? What's wrong? You looked like you spaced out just now," she asked.
Genichi reeled his mind in at once. His face returned to calm, and he shook his head.
"It's nothing."
He looked at Rias, a new plan already taking shape at speed.
Training here could not stop. Mastering his devil power and the Longinus could not be put on hold.
(End of Chapter)
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