Darkness was no longer consuming him, but it still clung to the edges of his mind like dried blood to torn flesh.
Yuuta's frog-like eyelids twitched. The first flickers of consciousness stirred like a dying ember, and his thoughts began to claw their way back from the abyss. His breath was shallow, ragged, each inhale like sucking air through a wound. His limbs felt distant, like they belonged to someone else—or something else—and he couldn't tell if that was better or worse than feeling nothing at all.
Then the sensation came.
It started as a tingle—a faint static crawling just beneath the skin of his mutated body. It slithered through his nerves like ants chewing their way out from the inside. It was maddening. It was itchy. It was burning.
"F…ck," Yuuta groaned, voice hoarse and broken through the unnatural frog vocal cords.
The pain was different now. It wasn't sharp or immediate like the arrows had been. No, this was deeper. It was cellular. Something inside him—something foreign yet familiar—was knitting his shattered body back together. A strange regenerative force was at work, crawling under his skin and forcing things to fix that probably shouldn't have been fixable.
He lay there for a while, slumped on the ground like a crushed toad, trembling in the aftermath of death and magic. The rocky earth beneath him was sticky with half-dried blood, some of it his own, some of it pigman. The scent of iron filled his lungs, and the breeze carried the copper tang of carnage across the broken field.
He blinked.
Then again.
Vision blurred… then cleared just enough for him to see the empty spot where one of the five blue orbs had once floated.
Yuuta exhaled, a haggard croak.
"So I really did it, huh…" he muttered. "I didn't die… not this time."
His breath fogged against the air despite the heat baking down from the cloudless sky. Time hadn't resumed its normal flow—not yet—but his awareness was returning, and with it came the reality of what he'd done. What he had become.
Green. Slimy. Weak. A frog.
A fucking frog.
And yet… still alive.
The itching in his muscles persisted, crawling with renewed vigor as the regeneration magic continued its course. The nerves in his limbs flared, like every cell was being reconnected with microscopic wires. His right arm, once a bloody mess of mangled flesh, twitched. His left leg spasmed.
"Damn it… why does healing feel worse than dying?" he hissed between clenched teeth, voice wet and gurgling in the throat of his new form.
The world seemed to mock him in silence.
It felt like hours passed before the sensation subsided into something he could at least endure. Eventually, Yuuta pushed himself upright with his left arm, knees trembling, toes clawing at the blood-drenched earth beneath him. His right arm still hung useless, but the bleeding had stopped, the wound sealed with a hard, ugly crust of regenerating tissue.
Slowly, with wobbling strength and uncoordinated limbs, Yuuta stood.
The wind greeted him with a gust that ruffled the slick skin on his back. Above him, the sky stretched out in a blinding shade of blue—radiant, cruel, and empty. No clouds. No mercy.
Just him and the aftermath of violence.
Yuuta's chest heaved as he let out a raspy laugh, one filled with both triumph and disbelief.
"I fucking survived… me. Against all odds. Take that, you filthy pork bastards."
His voice cracked into a broken croak at the end, like his frog throat couldn't contain the sheer spite boiling up inside him.
Then something shimmered in the corner of his vision.
A small translucent interface hovered just above the horizon of his sight, flickering faintly. It wasn't intrusive. It just… existed. Nestled at the top-right of his field of view, glowing faintly in yellow:
LV: 1
XP: [ █▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒ ] 20%
Yuuta's eyes widened.
"Oh hell yes…"
It wasn't much, but it was real. That single glowing bar confirmed it—he could grow stronger. He wasn't some helpless frog doomed to get eaten by a random monster the next day. No. This was a system. A game. And if there was one thing Yuuta understood from his trashy NEET life back on Earth, it was how to min-max the fuck out of systems.
Greed surged through him.
He turned, stumbling forward through the gore-soaked battlefield, toward the area where the other orbs had hovered before. The earth was painted with viscera. Entrails glistened under the sun like dead snakes. Charred bones stuck out from molten bits of armor. The pigmen had died violently, and the stench of roasted pork made his stomach churn in twisted hunger.
Then he saw them.
Four glowing blue orbs.
Floating like little moons above the broken terrain, each one the size of a bowling ball. Nearby, scattered like offerings from a cruel god, were small clusters of glimmering gold coins—old, worn, covered in bits of dried blood and flesh.
Yuuta's breath caught.
He limped toward them, each step forcing him to drag his numb right leg like a broken puppet. He was halfway there when the air shimmered.
And then—
The orbs moved.
In the span of a heartbeat, they shot toward him—four brilliant projectiles of glowing blue, trailing faint lines of data-light as they approached. Yuuta's eyes widened, frog limbs locking in panic.
"Shit!? I didn't ask for this—!"
He raised his good hand, preparing to hurl another magic ball in reflex, when the orbs made contact.
No pain. No force.
They passed through his skin like whispers.
Sunk deep into him.
And then—
[+50 Gold Coins]
[Congratulations: You have leveled up!
New Level: 2]
Another burst of light flashed before his eyes, and just like last time, the world came to a sudden, unnatural stop.
The wind froze mid-gust.
Blades of grass suspended in mid-air.
A leaf halted in the sky, motionless.
The color drained from the world, bleeding into a dead palette of gray. Time itself halted.
Yuuta blinked.
And then—
The air in front of him tore open.
No, not tore—unfolded. Like someone was peeling reality itself. From that gash in space emerged three floating objects—cards.
Unlike the brutal, biological sensations from before, this arrival was eerily elegant. The three cards spun slowly in the air before him, humming with potential. Each one was roughly the size of a tarot card, and each was etched with swirling, arcane patterns and strange symbols that danced along the surface like living ink.
Yuuta's breath caught.
"The fuck is this now…?"
They hovered closer, aligning themselves into a fan-like spread just inches from his face. His frog eyes narrowed. He could barely read anything on them, but the feeling they gave off—power, danger, choice—it was palpable.
The back of each card pulsed faintly, waiting. Beckoning.
Yuuta blinked slowly. His frog-like eyes were still adjusting to the strange shift in reality. He shifted on his webbed feet, his stubby limbs still twitching from the lingering burn of regeneration. The sensation of his cells knitting back together was gone now, leaving only a faint tingling across his green, wart-speckled skin. The memory of pain still haunted his nerves.
"This is just like that game," Yuuta muttered, his raspy, amphibious voice grating against the silence of the void. His throat was raw, like he'd swallowed gravel. "When you level up, you get to pick a damn card. Heh..."
Something about the familiarity cracked through the fear.
He grinned. A real, nasty grin that stretched the corners of his mucus-lined mouth. Then he let out a loud, wet croak that echoed in the empty, frozen expanse.
"FUCK yes!" he hollered with a hoarse wheeze. "Mage King arc starts now, baby!"
Yuuta jumped in place, his two frog legs springing him a few inches off the hard, dusty ground. It wasn't graceful. It wasn't even impressive. But it was victorious.
He raised both stubby arms toward the hovering cards and spread his three slimy fingers wide. "Gimme something good, you floating bastards. Daddy needs firepower."
The cards heard his call.
Without warning, a ripple spread across them—like a rock dropped into liquid glass. Symbols emerged from the surface, twisting and distorting into recognizable imagery. They flipped themselves, revealing full illustrations and text that pulsed with latent energy. Each card looked hand-painted in strokes of glowing light.
Yuuta's grin faded slightly as he sobered up and leaned closer, eyes narrowed.
Left Card A dark ball of searing energy hovered at its center. Jagged lines of red and orange flickered from it like unstable flames. The name scrawled across the top in eerie runes that translated themselves in his mind:
MAGIC MISSILE
He squinted.
"Explosive ball of magical energy. Upon impact, detonates in an 8-meter radius. Cooldown: 3 seconds. Current Upgrades: +Explosion Damage, +Burn Damage. Star Rank: ★----"
Yuuta let out a slow, appreciative whistle. "Okay. Okay. That's the one I used earlier, right? So it's already familiar... and it fucking WORKS. Damn, that burn damage too? Yeah, this thing is a damn pocket nuke."
His eyes darted to the second card.
Middle Card A black thundercloud loomed over a silhouetted figure on a battlefield, a jagged bolt of lightning striking down from above. The card crackled faintly with arcs of static.
LIGHTNING STRUCK
"Randomly strikes a single enemy with lightning every 10 seconds. Star Rank: ----- (Unupgraded)"
Yuuta clicked his tongue. "Eh... looks cool but too random. What if it zaps a fucking squirrel instead of the axe-wielding ogre about to gut me? Can't gamble like that. Not now."
He moved to the final card.
Right Card This one depicted six miniature orbs of light forming a halo-like orbit around a humanoid figure, like glowing electrons swirling around a nucleus. A faint humming emitted from it, soft and serene.
MAGIC ORBIT
"Summons one (1) rotating magic orb. Deals damage to enemies on contact. Defensive use. Star Rank: ----- (Unupgraded)"
Yuuta raised a webbed brow. "So it's like a froggy force field... not bad. Especially if I end up surrounded again. But only one orb right now? Hmph. Would need a few upgrades before it's viable."
He stepped back, letting his bulbous eyes flick from one card to the next, weighing each with a tactician's eye.
Magic Missile... proven, powerful, and already with a bonus effects. Lightning Struck... risky. Magic Orbit... potential defense, but too weak out the gate.
He scratched his slimy chin with a clawed finger. A slow grin returned.
"Fuck it. I want BOOM."
He thrust out his left hand, pointing at the Magic Missile card.
The moment his slimy digit made contact with the air beneath the card, it surged with golden light, brighter than before, as if responding with approval. The other two cards shattered in silence, their edges curling inward like burning parchment before vanishing entirely into wisps of dark mist.
The chosen card glowed hotter, its star markings pulsing one after another until the first of five stars blazed gold. The card launched itself toward Yuuta's face.
"Wait, WAIT! Don't hit me in the fu—"
BOOM.
The card struck his forehead like a hammer blow, though he felt no pain. Instead, it exploded into a thousand tiny fragments of radiant dust that seeped into his skin like glowing pollen. Yuuta staggered back as a sudden rush of power surged through his veins.
His frog heart skipped a beat. His vision glitched—colors strobing and snapping around him as the world seemed to pull itself back into motion.
The black and white landscape ignited with hue once more.
The wind howled. The leaves resumed their dance.
Yuuta stood there, dazed, his breath catching. Then he noticed the difference. The power.
He could feel it now. Coiled in his palm. Raw, humming energy waiting to be molded, fired, detonated. It tickled his nerves, teased the tips of his fingers.
"Oh... ohhh, hell yes."
He raised his hand, concentrating.
A swirling white ball began to form at his fingertips. Familiar. But now more stable, more potent. Its heat didn't burn him—it obeyed him.
Yuuta's wide mouth curled into a sharp smile.
"Let's see some pigs try me now. I'll blow their whole fucking families into bacon bits."
The magic orb hovered in front of him, humming with potential.
He admired it for a second before dismissing it. He didn't want to waste it yet.