死亡遊戯で飯を食う。6

Playing Death Games to Put Food on the Table Light Novel #6

by Yushi Ukai, 鵜飼 有志, Nekometaru (Illustrator)

「思い出せ。お前が本来、どういう人間だったのかを」

私・幽鬼の前に現れたもう一人の私。
それは、常人離れした私の感覚が作り出した幻影だった。
彼女の言葉に導かれ、私は一回目のゲーム〈メイデンレース〉を思い出す。
今より単純だった当時の私は、ややこしい感情を抱くことなど、なかった。
あのときの自分に還れ――と幻影は私に迫り、襲いかかってくる。
幻ゆえにその攻撃を防ぐことはできず、反撃もすり抜けてしまう彼女への対抗策――それは〈ルール〉に従った〈ゲーム〉以外にありえないと考えた私は、全盲のプレイヤー・鈴々に連絡を取った……。
あるときはアスレチック場で。
またあるときは白い部屋で。
私と私は、死亡遊戯で飯を食う。

264 pages, Paperback

First published April 25, 2024

Reviews

[Nayuki]

Important things happened for the series world-building in general, but I had some problems with the pacing.

[Nick]

This volume ended up being much more than another death-game installment. It digs heavily into Yuki’s past while also dealing with the consequences of Game 62, and I really liked how the two sides eventually come together, though the stakes feel lower when by now you expect twists and for Yuki to somehow survive so the author is focusing on fleshing out her world and its mechanics.

The volume opens with Yuki confronting a strange double of herself, before jumping back to her first game, Maiden Race, from Setsuna’s perspective. Yuki originally entered the games without even realizing they were death games, thinking she’d simply accepted a strange work opportunity after quitting her previous job. That makes her apparent fearlessness especially funny and disturbing in retrospect. Out of 50 players, only 13 survived, despite this supposedly being a beginner game, and Setsuna is inspired by Yuki’s bizarre confidence to survive herself. The twist that Setsuna is now Yuki’s agent, despite Yuki not knowing this, was one I genuinely didn’t see coming.

The volume also fills in more of Yuki’s personal history. Her parents simply abandoned her after she completed middle school, with no dramatic falling-out or explanation, and the only people she really became close to were her mentor Hakushi and her eventual protégé Tamamo. That makes Game 62, where Yuki kills Tamamo in the sword-fencing match, hit harder and helps explain the trauma behind what follows.

After Game 62, Yuki develops an unusual form of perception where her mind fills in visual gaps, eventually producing a specter of herself. What’s particularly interesting is that the specter resembles an earlier, more confident Yuki—the same Yuki Setsuna encountered in Maiden Race. It feels like Yuki is being confronted by a version of herself that existed before everything that happened to her.

Game 62.5, Snow Room, takes this even further. Yuki is unknowingly playing against Hakushi in another building, while Rinrin coordinates Hakushi’s movements with Yuki’s specter to make the apparition seem real. The specter eventually grabs Yuki’s hair to keep her from leaving, only for the entrance guns to shoot her hair free. Setsuna even witnesses the hair being pulled taut, leaving the nature of Yuki’s specter deliberately ambiguous. Is this an extreme form of extrasensory perception, or is there genuinely something supernatural happening? I like that the book doesn’t give an easy answer.

The emotional payoff is probably my favorite part. Yuki realizes during the game that she isn’t alone anymore. She now has Setsuna, Rinrin, and Hakushi behind her. After spending so much of her life essentially on her own, that’s a pretty major development for her.

And now Volume 7 appears to be shifting away from the games and toward Yuki’s life outside them. After six volumes of increasingly elaborate death games, I’m very curious to see what happens when Yuki has to deal with something as mundane as a local gang or a kidnapped neighbor. Somehow I suspect the outside world is going to have a hard time handling her.