EX4 — I’ve got an interesting story that’s perfect for you.

"So what is it? You suddenly called me out here."

After taking a sip of the iced coffee poured into a glass and brought over by an unfriendly waiter, I asked the person sitting across from me.

"I figured you’d be free anyway. I’ll pay you properly, so I want you to help me out a bit. Sounds good, right? I heard you got fired from your job."

"I wasn’t fired. My contract just wasn’t renewed."

"Same thing."

"It’s not the same."

There’s a way to say things.

I deliberately put on a sour expression and took another sip of my coffee.

"Either way, I always thought it was a waste for you to be stuck doing a job like that. This is a good opportunity, so why don’t you come work with me full-time? The articles you write don’t have a bad reputation."

"No thanks. I don’t like busy jobs. I only did that work because it left me with free time."

"And that’s how you ended up fired."

"I told you, I wasn’t fired."

As he spoke, he scooped up the ice cream floating in his melon cream soda and violently mashed it with his spoon, forcibly dissolving it into the drink. He then sucked up the pale, milky-green liquid through a straw and let out a loud sigh.

That’s a disgusting way to drink it. It looks awful.

I’ve known him since my student days—well over ten years now—and just like back then, he’s still strangely childish in the most unexpected ways.

"I’ve got an interesting story that’s perfect for you."

He set his glass back on the table and flashed a knowing grin.

"I’m not going to do another psychiatric hospital interview."

"No, not that. This time it’s a much bigger story. Though, I guess you could say it’s similar to that interview in a way."

"...Don’t tell me it’s another ‘isekai transfer’?"

Isekai transfer.

In recent years, a series of strange incidents—missing persons cases occurring with increasing frequency, and mysterious illnesses in which otherwise healthy people suddenly fall unconscious—have collectively come to be known as “isekai transfers.”

At first, no one thought to connect these individual cases.

Then, a few years ago, one of the earliest patients—who had been in a coma for nearly twenty years—woke up. As the people around him celebrated his recovery, he said this:

"I came back from another world."

Of course, no one believed him. Even after undergoing exhaustive medical examinations, his story never changed, and he was eventually transferred to a psychiatric hospital far from his hometown for treatment.

That incident became the catalyst. From then on, unresolved disappearances of unknown cause and sudden coma cases gradually began to circulate as rumors of people being “taken to another world.”

The person sitting across from me is a senior from my student days who works as a freelance writer for an online media outlet—a job with a rather vague description. Back then, I was dragged along to help with his reporting, and the hospital we visited was that very psychiatric hospital. The man we interviewed was the one who claimed to have returned from another world.

At the time, my senior forced his way into an interview through sheer improvisation, trying to get the patient to talk about the other world. The man became delirious, and we were promptly thrown out of the hospital.

Apparently, it was a bad idea to make him remember the “other world” after he had finally convinced himself it was all just a dream and was on the path to recovery.

Both my senior and I were thoroughly chewed out by the doctor and the police officers who rushed over.

"We really screwed that one up, didn’t we?"

The man responsible for it all laughed without the slightest hint of remorse.

"That’s an understatement. I almost had my workplace contacted. If that got out, I really would’ve been fired."

"But you ended up fired over something else anyway."

"I wasn’t fired. Anyway, I’m not helping if it’s another story like that."

I put on a sour look again and took another sip of iced coffee.

"At least hear me out. It’s interesting."

My senior rummaged through his bag and placed a thick stack of photocopied papers on the table.

"This time, the number of people involved is huge. Just from a quick check, over four hundred people fell into comas at the same time and were taken to hospitals."

"Four hundred? That’s way too many. If that many people collapsed at once, it’d be all over the news. TV, online news—no one’s saying anything about it. When that school trip bus disappeared two years ago and an entire class vanished, it was nonstop coverage every day. That was only about forty people—this is ten times that."

"They collapsed all over the country, from Hokkaido in the north to Okinawa in the south. Different locations, mostly at home, and it happened late at night. At first, nobody noticed any connection. But in Tokyo, there was a hospital that took in more than ten patients in a single night. Someone involved looked into it, and it turns out they all lost consciousness at almost exactly the same time."

"Couldn’t that just be a coincidence?"

"Given the nature of it, the police are investigating under the table, and major newspapers and weekly magazines are moving too. And here’s what they found."

He thrust the stack of papers toward me, snorting through his nose.

"Every. Single. One of the patients was playing the same online MMORPG."

"...You’re kidding, right?"

I took the papers anyway and flipped through them.

The first few pages appeared to be an overview of the incident and various speculations. The rest were almost entirely lists of names.

"This is just what I could find on the surface. Guys who live alone and don’t interact with their neighbors might still be lying unconscious in their apartments without anyone knowing."

"Don’t say things like that... ‘Sword Blaze Online’?"

I spotted a familiar term in the documents and frowned.

"Yeah, that’s the game the victims were playing. Still, I’m surprised people were playing an MMO at this point. You ever try it?"

"I played it once when the service first started, but the user interface didn’t suit me, so I quit right away."

"Hah, lucky you. If you’d kept playing, you might’ve ended up ‘isekai’d’ yourself by now."

"That’s not something to laugh about... So you’re saying these players were sent to another world?"

My senior twisted his mouth into a grin, looking thoroughly satisfied.

"That’s exactly what I’m saying. My guess is the players got swallowed up by the game world. You’ve seen anime like that, right?"

"It started as light novels. But those are set in the future, with games you play while sleeping using helmet-like devices. The players get trapped in a virtual world due to the villain tampering with the system. That’s science fiction."

"Is it?"

"You can’t do that with an online game played on a normal PC. And the operator was a fairly big publisher, wasn’t it?"

"It says here that the actual operations were outsourced to a small subcontractor, and the service had already been scheduled to shut down. That night, only one person stayed behind to manage the system—and he’s one of the victims."

I followed the relevant section with my eyes.

Sure enough, the managing company had already dissolved under circumstances resembling a midnight disappearance, and the publisher was claiming complete ignorance.

The game, which had been running on rented servers, had its servers shut down according to the contract. “Sword Blaze Online” was no longer operational.

"Even for a dying, deserted game, this is a mess."

"I don’t know the details, so I figured someone like you, who knows games, would understand more."

"Even so, the game’s already shut down. It’s hard to believe that something like this could put over four hundred people into comas. Shouldn’t you be looking for other common factors?"

I finally understood why my senior had gone out of his way to call me, but there was no way I could make sense of a case this bizarre.

"Men and women, all ages, scattered across Japan. There aren’t any other common factors."

"Then you’re out of options."

"...Oh yeah, there was one guy who played the game and didn’t fall unconscious—he died. But that’s unrelated. He was stabbed in a lover’s quarrel."

"That’s a grim story."

Honestly, I didn’t care.

"The woman who stabbed him said he was flirting with another woman he met through the game. If it really is an isekai transfer, maybe he got freed from that crazy girlfriend and can meet the other girl in another world."

"I don’t know about that. ‘Isekai transfer’ is just an unfounded rumor to begin with."

"If you’re turning it into an article, that kind of melodramatic romance would sell."

"That kind of thing just gets you flamed these days."

I half-listened while lazily flipping through the roster of names, when a familiar-looking name suddenly caught my eye.

"Nekoma... Erika Eirika...?"

"Hm? What is it, got someone you know in there?"

"N-no... It’s not that. It just looks like a similar name... Ririka... And the address is Tochigi Prefecture... A relative...? No, but if she fell unconscious in this incident, that lines up with when she stopped coming to lectures..."

Seeing my confusion, my senior put the straw of his cream soda in his mouth and flashed a nasty grin.

"Now it’s getting interesting."

"It’s not interesting at all."

This wasn’t something to laugh about.

"The Kanto victims are split among four hospitals. That girl is... at a university hospital in Gunma. Want to go?"

"Let’s go."

After hearing my reply, my senior nodded exaggeratedly, gulped down the rest of his cream soda in one go, grabbed the bill, and stood up.

"All right! Let’s move, Kurata!"