Welcome to Green Box. Think of what you want and press the button for the country you want to destory. You will be released if you win.
Green Box is a Psychological Thriller web novel by Dada Wada published on the "peep" app from July 27, 2022 till July 11, 2023, followed by a manga adaptation by Okazaki Kei since April 6th 2023 published in "peep Comics" by Taskey STUDIO.
Ryosuke Sena is trapped in a room that has nothing but a world map filled with buttons and the monitor with instructions. Sena can get one item for each country selected for destruction. He is released if he "wins", whatever that means (later implied picking one "correct" country). After confirming that the rules are true and utilize magic, he takes the world hostage in order to find a way out.
Green Box provides examples of the following tropes:
- Abusive Parents: Sena calls his mom for help as he's been kidnapped, but she instead yells at him for skipping school.
- Almost Out of Oxygen: Subverted. Sena considers if he needs more oxygen if the Green Box is airtight, but using magic to get the oxygen and the internet in appears to be one of the room's unwritten properties.
- All for Nothing: "Exit" is not a valid item according to Green Box's logic and Monaco was sacrificed for nothing. Liechtenstein similarly was used to learn that you can't transport humans in.
- Bizarrchitecture: Aside to the supernatural properties of the Green Box, it's also physically incomprehensible. The outer layer is Made of Indestructium, while the middle layer is allegedly Bigger on the Inside and has an entire planet inside.
- Blatant Lies: Numata from metropolitan police assures Sena that his rescue is going smoothly and takes priority. Sena can see from the news the government has used heavy explosives that would obliterate Green Box if not for its magical material and also failed.
- Cell Phones Are Useless: Subverted. Sena has his smartphone with full internet access, but Green Box somehow makes his location unknown. His phone eventually gets traced to a green structure in Ibaraki.
- CPR: Clean, Pretty, Reliable: Sari figures if the Green Box doesn't allow living objects, Sora can bring her corpse in and ressurect her. Apparently, cardiac arrest after strangling yourself counts as not being alive, and she turns out perfectly fine after Sora perform a quick CPR.
- Cruel and Unusual Death: As shown on the news, targeted people get their entire flesh twisted until it's compacted into a cube.
- Depopulation Bomb: The Green Box can in minutes shred every human in any country.
- Despair Event Horizon:
- Failing to convince Sena to not push buttons, Investigator Numata takes responsibility via gunshot to the head.
- Unable to deal with the guilt and the attention of social media, Sena's parents have hanged themselves. This in turn caused Sena to nominate three large countries out of spite.
- Honey Trap: Sari manages to get inside the Green Box by offering Sora sex just so she could kill him herself.
- It Gets Easier: Initially Sena picks the smallest countries because he's not comfortable with people dying. Gradually, he starts picking countries practically at random, quickly, and without a good reason.
- It's All About Me:
- Sena doesn't even argue that he's been forced to do it. He really thinks millions of lives lost by his hands aren't important if it helps him escape, and picks countries at random with just a brief prior warning instead of going by population order and letting people evacuate.
- He destroys "about 20" countries in quick succession, which is more than half of his total, just to get convenience objects for Sari after she gets inside. He even calls 2 billion victims "inconsequential".
- Jumping Off the Slippery Slope: Sena picks remote Oceania islands in exchange for basic necessaries and wonders if it's better if he dies here. However, rationalizing that his escape is more valuable, he livestreams himself killing the entire population of San Marino to get attention and promises to keep going, and it only escalates from here.
- Kick the Dog: Annoyed that Japanese government even bother negotiation with him while he's holding the world hostage, Sena destroys Chad just on random for the hell of it.
- Literal Genie: Sena notes that Green Box is giving him items as he imagines them, not what would technically count. Him wishing for a "futon" also gets extra pillows because to him, they often go together. And when he wishes for a phone or a bag, the specific ones he thinks of get teleported in instead of random ones.
- The Most Wanted: As the Green Box's effect is confirmed, everyone reminds Sena that even if he gets out, the entire world wants him dead.
- Police Are Useless:
- Sena manages to contact the police and report his kidnapping, but, since he doesn't know where he is, they bluntly dismiss him.
- The authorities do a lot better when Sena gets notoriety and track him down using his phone's radio signal, also assuring that he can't be prosecuted. But they can't do anything against the Green Box's magical structure.
- Potty Emergency: Sena wets himself after hesitating to select a second country to die. He summons a toilet next time he goes for it.
- Villain Protagonist: While any normal person would consider them vs innocent people a Sadistic Choice, it's not a dilemma for Sena, who embraces the properties of Green Box to destroy any country of choice and kills countless people for small things with limited use or just out of frustration.
- You Wake Up in a Room: The manga starts with Sena waking up in the titular green room.
- Zero-Approval Gambit: Sena was expecting that livestreaming the death of a country would get a lot of attention. While he got mainly death threats, some comments gave suggestions on what to wish for in order to escape the Green Box, and he got contacted by a journalist who knows a rumor about his situation, while the government has quickly worked out his whereabouts.
