The moment he entered the game, Matthew was inside of a rusty iron cage. It wasn’t the same arena from before. This one was concrete, with the appearance of an old Earth prison. There were only two cells however, one across from the other. With a massive area in between the cells.

He looked over and noticed that his opponent was a middle-aged woman, but she wasn’t unarmed. She had a simple wooden baseball bat in her hands. After a moment, Matt looked down at his body and realized he wasn’t in his seventies anymore.

“I still feel like shit, but at least I’m a little better off.” He was also middle-aged, in his late fifties or early sixties. Yet, he was still scrawny and weak. Not that his original design was particularly well-built though.

[Perhaps you should have chosen to give yourself a bit more muscle-mass? It will be possible to gain it later, but the process would have been far smoother if you would have designed a better physique in the first place.]

“I get it, okay? I’ll start working out when I recover from the gunshot wound to my face. For now though, I’m fine the way I am.” He sighed and pulled a card out of thin air.

[Creature: Iris Angelica Healy
ID Code: Anael-CC1
Type: Hero
Rarity: Rare
Mana Cost: 2
Description: Summon a human who died and was resurrected in Hell. Iris was once a young and naive girl on Earth, but when her sister was kidnapped, kept as a sex slave and eventually burned to death… Something inside of her snapped. She became obsessed with revenge and hunted down many of the people involved in her sister’s death, torturing and murdering them. Eventually, she was burned to death in a fire, along with many of the men who raped and tortured her sister Alicia. After dying, her Soul was captured and taken to Wrath, the sixth planet in the Asura System. Once she finally earned her freedom, she returned to Earth to continue the hunt… Iris has the Power to control the minds of those weaker than herself. She is also a vicious killer and can utilize many types of conventional weaponry. Although she can be Summoned with Equipment Cards, she does possess some basic leather clothing and a blank white mask. Be careful that you don’t fall under her Compulsion Power. Every time she uses her Compulsion, her body becomes weaker. Unless healed, she will die within 2 days of being played.]

When he threw it out onto the ground, he made sure to aim for the complete opposite side of his cell. In what seemed like an instant, a woman appeared. Just like the card indicated, she was wearing a mask to cover her face, a leather jacket with a hood, along with gloves, pants and even boots. There were no weapons, but she didn’t need any.

“Please don’t kill me! Or mind-control me!” Matt held his hands up and backed up against the metal bars. However, the green-eyed woman just glared at him and didn’t move.

Eventually, she grumbled “Fucking A, I finally got back home and now I’m in Hell again…” Then she asked “Wait, how did you know about my Power? Have I killed you before?”

Matt sighed in relief, then explained “Nah, it was on the card I used to summon you here. And you weren’t on Earth. I mean, maybe you were at some point, but I’m not the one that sealed you in a card in the first place. I know it sounds crazy, but-”

“No, that actually doesn’t sound that strange. All kinds of Powers and weird artifacts are out there. To be honest, I was planning to come back to Hell eventually anyway. Powers aren’t exactly for ‘free’ after all…” Iris slowly pulled down her mask and revealed a horribly scarred face, covered with deep, bleeding gashes and burns.

The middle-aged man winced, muttering “Ugh, I’m sorry…”

She smirked for a moment, though she stopped once her lips ripped open. Then she covered her face with the mask again and asked “What else can you tell me about the situation? What kinda match are we fighting? Two versus one seems odd.”

Matt told her “Unless things are different from last time, it’ll be against one person first… Then two, and well, the third one was a grizzly bear.”

“Fucking A~!” She complained, then took her left glove off and looked at her hand. When she saw that the tattoo didn’t show up, she murmured “No Souls… I’ll be dead for good if I actually die.”

“You can’t die. Er, no, you can die… But I mean that as long as I’m alive, I can always bring you back to life eventually. So you don’t need to worry about that. Even if I die though, it doesn’t really matter that much. I mean, it does matter, because I really don’t wanna die again. If it comes down to it, this is basically just a game for us. Winning is better than losing though, so good luck!” Matt gave her a thumbs up and smiled wryly.

“Oh really?” She walked closer to him and then he suddenly fell to his knees, with a blank expression on his face. Iris softly asked “What’s your name?”

“Matthew Leblanc.” He replied monotonously.

“Pft~! Sorry, uh, is what you said true? Are we immortal?” Iris whispered in his left ear, causing him to shiver unconsciously.

After a few moments, he answered “This is just a game, a virtual reality. No matter what happens, I can always return to my Private Server… Your personality and data are saved onto the Server too so… Maybe? I don’t really know for sure and…” Suddenly his eyes regained focus and he yelled “Don’t fucking mind control me again or I’ll get rid of your card the first chance I get!”

She snickered and lightly slapped his left cheek, before helping him up off the ground. Iris waved her hand and casually said “Relax old man, I just need to make sure you weren’t fucking with me. Oh, and if you try to molest or rape me, I’ll make you wish that you could die, hehehe~…”

“I have never molested or raped anyone in my entire life…” Matthew frowned, “Hey, I’m only twenty-five! I only look like this for now because I just started this game earlier.”

“Yeah, whatever, the fight’s starting now. Try not to get killed and fuck it up for me, okay?” Iris grumbled as the bars suddenly shot down into the floor, allowing both sides to enter the arena.

The middle-aged woman across from them walked slowly, clutching the baseball bat tightly in her relatively small hands. She was roughly the same height as Iris, five and a half feet. Coincidentally, the same height as Michael Cinagra.

Iris had her hands in her jacket pockets, as she briskly strolled to the middle of the wide and open space. She complained “Hurry the fuck up! I ain’t got all day bitch!”

That pale-skinned and white-haired woman started sprinting forward. As she was about to swing the baseball bat at that blank white mask, Iris moved to the side and kicked the woman’s left knee inwards. There was a loud ‘pop’, as she screamed in agony and then tumbled across the concrete floor. She had only been wearing a ragged grey dress, so she had no protection as she slid across the rough ground.

Iris pried the baseball bat out of the woman’s broken hands and then stomped down onto the base of her spine. The chubby woman spasmed for a bit, then defecated and urinated, before suffocating. Holding the wooden bat in her hands, Iris muttered “Now what?”

A wisp hovered out of the woman’s corpse, then flew across the room and went into Matthew’s left hand. The number went from ‘11’, to ‘13’. Then there was an announcement, “Congratulations Matthew Leblanc! You have been selected at random, to join a super-fun free for all!”

The high-pitched female voice continued “All participants will be Level-2 Rankless humans to ensure fairness!”

Without even giving him a chance to decline, both Matthew and Iris were instantly teleported back into a concrete cell. It appeared to be the exact same arena as before, except that there were ten different cages lined up. Five on each side.

 

Volume 1: Unranked

Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16