Genkai Level 1 kara no Nariagari: Saijaku Level no Ore ga Isekai Saikyou ni Naru is a novel series written by Miraijin A, starting out as a Web Serial Novel in 2019 before being officially published the same year with illustrations by Esora Amaichi. A manga adaptation began serialization in 2020 in ComicWalker.
A wage-slave employee, Tetsuya Takahashi, ran to rescue a young girl being harassed by four teenage delinquents, and trying to warn said delinquents, from first hand experience, that their intended criminal acts would ruin their lives, just like playing MMORPG obsessively ruined his. The delinquents in question took it as an insult and started trying to beat him to death as a result. While this was going on, a magic circle appeared under all six of them, including the girl that was the intended target of sexual harassment, at best, rape and murder at worst. They all find themselves before a king and a self-proclaimed oracle that states the four delinquents were specifically chosen for a "hero" summoning ceremony, while Tetsuya and the girl were brought in by accident. The oracle reveals their status to find that Tetsuya's maximum level is 1/1 while the four delinquents have maximum levels from 93 to 125. The king angrily decries Tetsuya as a "failure" and has his knights throw him off a cliff into a monster filled ravine to die.
As Tetsuya is being chased by high-level goblins who want to kill him, he stumbles on the skeletal remains of an ancient earth dragon. He touches the corpse to learn he has the ability to absorb skills and stats from any corpse he touches. He later stumbles on a cat-girl and her cursed elf mentor and joins hands with them to try to escape the valley and survive.
Level 1 tropes:
- Adaptation Explanation Extrication: The prologue and most of the exposition has been removed from the manga. The manga story starts with Tetsuya being beaten down by the four delinquents after he managed to get the girl he was trying to rescue over a chain-link fence to safety, but she remained paralyzed with indecision, watching, rather than go get help, or simply run away, like he had planned.
- Deconstructor Fleet: The premise deconstructs several popular iseaki tropes.
- Godlike Gamer: Tetsuya becoming obsessed with video-games when he was a teen had him starting the story in a "Black Company" ie, an extremely toxic work environment, with no other viable options. When he gets to this new world, even though it has an RPG Mechanicsverse, his experiences with the MMO don't help, at all.
- Dulcinea Effect: Tetsuya rushes in to rescue a girl being harassed and threatened by delinquents, without calling the police first, and tries to talk things out. Naturally, since the delinquents don't care about law, order, or civility, they respond to his "white knighting" by beating him up.
- Summon Everyman Hero: The king and oracle weren't looking for people of sound moral fiber to protect their people from an existential threat. They specifically chose armed thugs with little in the way of a moral compass to be their enforcers and shock troops, to then use as weapons of mass-destruction in warfare. Since the thugs only care about immediate gratification, they are easily manipulated.
- Kidnapped by the Call: Since the king and oracle didn't care about informed consent, they don't care about the well-being of their intended "heroes" and rather than make an effort to send back the "extras", they dump the ones who they think have no merit over a cliff to die.
- Always Save the Girl: Every time Tetsuya rushes in to save a Damsel in Distress, he walks away with with disfiguring scars, physical, mental, and emotional.
- Fanservice: And Fan Disservice. The manga bends over backwards to find any excuse to show off women in various states of undress, whether it's innocent, played for drama, or played for laughs, it's all the same.
- Guilt-Free Extermination War: The Human Kingdom has, for centuries, been trying to exterminate all the non-humans on the planet out of pure Fantastic Racism, calling them all "Livestock" as demonstrated in chapter 16, with the hon-humans fighting a mostly defensive war, especially the elves, who managed to have their territory sacrosanct until "Hero" Takei managed to invade, with his level 91 power. When the summoning that brought these so-called heroes and Tetsuya to the world took place, the humans were brought to the brink of extinction, in self-defense, as noted by Tetsuya and crew when they went to sign up at the mercenary guild.
- Humans Are Bastards: The humans, especially the kingdom of Aberus, deserve extinction in this new world, save for Tetsuya, summoned from Earth, the unnamed girl summoned from Earth, and the human receptionist in the mercenary's guild, and the last is on thin ice. Not only is the human kingdom of Aberus objectively the aggressor in a genocidal war, and enslaving the souls of the corpses, marching them along as undead against their allies, but they have a long, sordid history of using a "Hero" summoning ritual to kidnap people en masse and forcing them to the front lines, but for those that don't measure up, they're just summarily dumped into the Valley of Death and mocked. Since these summoned souls are not native to the local cycle of reincarnation and can't be sent back to their native worlds, they're summarily dragged off to [Abyss] and put into eternal torment through no guilt of their own. Small wonder they reached out to Tatsuya and begged him to absorb them with his power.
- New Life in Another World Bonus: Everybody who got summoned to this new world gained something. The four delinquent "heroes" gained maximum levels that would make the strongest of them capable of destroying the world, single handed. Tetsuya gains the ability to enhance himself from absorbing corpses. The girl's abilities have yet to be fully disclosed, even as late as volume 2 of the web novel.
- Obstructive Code of Conduct: Tetsuya can, and probably should, absorb every corpse he comes across, but once he starts being mentored by the elf on the cover, she insists that he only absorb corpses he or his party has killed, as she loathes grave-robbing, even though he already absorbed the skeletal remains of a dragon before they met.
- Refused by the Call: Tetsuya is thrown over a cliff to die because the king didn't like the fact his max level was 1/1.
- Revenge: Even after rescuing the cat-girl and elf from the monster-filled valley, Tetsuya wants to get even with the four delinquent "heroes" and the trash king who tried to kill him, but he'd very much like to survive the encounter, so he'd rather not go after them until he's good and ready.
- RPG Mechanics 'Verse: The new world has a very RPG feel to it. Everyone in it has a maximum level, and both humans and monsters may develop special skills and abilities.
- Spoiler Cover: The elf on the cover? When she's introduced, she's cursed to be in the form of a walking, talking teddy-bear.
- Trapped in Another World: None of the characters summoned to the Aberus kingdom can return to Japan, even if they want to.
- What Happened to the Mouse?: The unnamed girl the four delinquent "heroes" and Tetsuya were fighting over before the summon took place was brought to this world too, but her fate after Tetsuya was literally thrown out of the castle and down a cliff remains unknown, as if the author forgot she even exists. Turns out she abandoned the human nation as soon as she could to become the guardian Saint of a mixed-race town in neutral territory.
