Let me be upfront about something.
I didn't die heroically. There was no truck. No last act of selfless courage. No beautiful woman whose life I saved with my final breath. I died the way a lot of Japanese men in their thirties die: sitting at my desk, at 11:52 PM on a Thursday, in the middle of typing an email I didn't care about to people who wouldn't read it until morning anyway.
My name was Tanaka Kenji. Thirty-four years old. Senior project manager at a mid-sized logistics firm in Shinjuku. Blood type A. Favorite food: convenience store onigiri, the salmon kind, because I hadn't had time to eat a real meal since sometime in early September. My hobbies, listed on a company profile sheet from three years ago, included "reading" and "hiking," both of which I had stopped doing around the time I got promoted.
My heart stopped at 11:52 PM. My forehead hit the keyboard at 11:52 and fourteen seconds. The resulting email — "RE: RE: RE: FWD: Q3 Deliverable Deadline Extension Request (URGENT)" — was sent at 11:52 and thirty-one seconds, its entire content consisting of the letter 'g' repeated four hundred and twelve times.
My manager, when he found me the next morning, reportedly said: "Was this intentional? Because it's not very professional."
I didn't hear that part. I was already somewhere else.
◆ ◆ ◆
The first thing I noticed was the smell.
Not the antiseptic blank-nothing of an office building, or the particular combination of instant noodles and quiet desperation that characterized my apartment. This was green and wet and deep — the smell of a forest that had been a forest for a very long time and intended to keep being one regardless of anyone's opinion on the matter.
I opened my eyes.
Trees. Enormous ones, their roots bigger than anything I'd ever stood next to, their canopy so far above me that the morning light came through in thin pale shafts like something out of a painting. Birds I couldn't name were singing things I couldn't understand. A light mist hung between the trunks.
It was, objectively, beautiful.
I noticed this the same way you notice the weather when you're already late for work — distantly, without it changing anything.
What I was more immediately focused on was the fact that my hands were wrong.
I held one up. Green. Small. Four fingers, each ending in a short, dark nail that was somewhere between a fingernail and a claw. The skin was rough and faintly warty, stretched over a frame that was, I determined after some investigation, approximately ninety-five centimeters tall.
Whaaaaaaaaaaattttt??!!!!!!!!!
I was, in the parlance of fantasy literature that I had read approximately zero of, a goblin.
I sat in the dirt and conducted a full physical inventory. Short legs. Disproportionately large feet. Ears like a bat, pointed and mobile — they actually moved when I heard something, which was disconcerting. Eyes that, when I caught my reflection in a nearby puddle, were enormous and yellow with slit pupils. Nose like a potato. Mouth full of small, sharp teeth.
Also, I was wearing a loincloth.
I want to be clear that I noted all of this with complete calm. Twelve years of project management will do that to you. When your database migration goes catastrophically wrong at 9 PM the day before a major client presentation, you don't panic. You assess. You prioritize. You fix what you can and document what you can't.
So: I was dead. I was reincarnated. I was a goblin. These were fixed variables. They went in the "cannot change" column.
What could I change? That was the question.
✦ SYSTEM INITIALIZING ✦
A unique gift has been granted to you.
Name : Tanaka Kenji
Race : Goblin (Common)
Level : 1
Titles : [The Reborn] [Irregular]
The Dashboard awaits.
Please review your status.
The panel materialized in front of me like a spreadsheet from God. Translucent, blue-tinted, floating at exactly eye level with the quiet confidence of something that had been there all along and was merely waiting for me to notice.
I reached up to tap it. My finger passed through.
"Voice commands?" I tried. Nothing. Mental commands? I concentrated, and the panel responded — pages folding open, stats arranging themselves in neat columns. I spent the next ten minutes reading everything.
Strength: 4. Vitality: 6. Agility: 8. Magic: 3. Intelligence: 22. Wisdom: 18. Charisma: 14.
The physical stats were, charitably, terrible. The goblin body I'd inherited was built for scavenging and fleeing, not fighting. But Intelligence 22 was — I checked — apparently extraordinary. The system helpfully noted that the average adult human had an Intelligence stat between 8 and 12(I don't know how I know that). My Wisdom was similarly high. My Charisma was, inexplicably, 14, which was the highest social stat I had ever possessed (though I never possessed any).
There was also a function labeled [ANALYZE], which, when I pointed my attention at a nearby tree, immediately told me its species, age, structural integrity, and three practical uses for its bark. I stared at this for a moment.
A system that gives me information. And a brain that can use it. Alright. That's the starting capital. Let's see what we can build.
I pulled up a blank note function — the system had one, tucked in a corner menu like a modest feature that didn't want to brag — and started writing.
The list began: Step 1 — Water. Step 2 — Food. Step 3 — Shelter or find existing community. Step 4 — Assess long-term situation.
Twelve items by the time I was done. I looked at it for a moment.
Then I got up, dusted off my loincloth with what dignity I could manage, and went to find some water.
◆ ◆ ◆
The forest was called the Verdant Expanse. I learned this later. At the time I just called it "the forest" and focused on not getting eaten.
Finding water took forty minutes — I followed the sound east until I found a clear stream, cold and fast over smooth stones. The Analyze function confirmed it was safe to drink. I drank, and then I sat on a rock and watched the water move and thought about my situation with the focused calm of a man who has run out of feelings and is operating on pure process.
I was in a fantasy world. I was a goblin. I had a system. I had an abnormally good brain.
I had been, I realized, given exactly the tools that suited me. Not a hero's sword or a warrior's body. A spreadsheet that killed things, and a mind built to read it.
I heard movement in the brush to the north. I went still. Three shapes emerged from the undergrowth — small, green, yellow-eyed. Goblins. They froze when they saw me.
I raised one hand in what I hoped was a universal gesture of non-aggression.
They stared.
I stared back.
One of them threw a pinecone at me and ran.
The other two followed.
I picked up the pinecone and Analyzed it. Edible, mildly nutritious, no magical properties. I ate it while walking in the direction they'd come from.
If there were wild goblins, there was a tribe. If there was a tribe, there was shelter and, more importantly, a social structure I could work with.
I had started from zero before. The merger of 2019 had left my entire department dissolved and restructured in six weeks. I had rebuilt a functional team out of strangers who didn't trust each other, with half the original budget and twice the workload.
A goblin tribe couldn't be harder than that.
Probably?