Fight for Your Life! Or Don't.

Context doesn't really help.

Yoshizawa Hitomu is just some office drone. Few defined goals, less motivation. While daydreaming about how he might be able to get out of work without getting in trouble or anyone getting hurt, he's swept away to a mysterious arena. The creators of all the various "spacetimes" have each gathered their most useless inhabitant to compete in a tournament to decide who is the most useless in all creation. Hence the title, Weakest Contestant of all Space and Time. His first opponent is one of those little pixellated spaceships from the old arcade games like Defender.

Yeah, that didn't go well. Neither do any of his subsequent matches, resulting in he and four others being put together for a final battle royale to determine who is the most useless of them all. Yoshizawa does have one skill: he's good at mapping out possibilities, probably from all that time spent daydreaming. KRSG, who's responsible for the art, represents this with a bunch of small circular panels against a dark background. They usually take the reader's eyes diagonally across the page, but can also meander, probably representing Yoshizawa's unfocused thought processes. 

But, Yoshizawa finds a lever that opens the bottom of the arena, allowing the five of them to escape. The two characters running the event, both apparently former gods, one with a blindfold and some sort of glowing circle hovering in front of his face, pivot neatly. New game! All the previous contestants must now hunt those five! And outside the arena, death will be permanent!

The rest of Volume 1 is Yoshizawa finding the other 4 contestants, and them fending off the initial attacks of the other poor suckers dumped in this. The slime absorbs some of Yoshizwa's blood that got on it and this somehow causes it to change form into a naked blue slime girl (see the top panel.) Weird enough, but the slime is now the spitting image of a girl Yoshizawa was smitten with in his younger days, so it's pretty creepy when he gives it the girl's name (Sayaka).

Yoshizawa's kind of a hard character to follow as the protagonist. Masato Hisa doesn't write Yoshizawa as a terrible person; when he and the slime (prior to her transformation) are confronted by a knife-wielding cartoon pig with no conception of pain or death, Yoshizawa tries to throw the slime to safety. He tries to keep K, a cleaning bot reprogrammed to act like a warbot, from fighting a tank, even though he could just run and let K get destroyed. He doesn't want to fight in part because the other fighters were brought here against their will to suffer and die like him.

But the constant second-guessing, the tendency to give up at the first bit of difficulty paint him as quite pathetic. I mean, if he wasn't he wouldn't be in this tournament. And Hisa makes it work. The former god with the blindfold has some larger plan, and as long as Yoshizawa keeps sparing the people trying to kill him, those people have more time to reflect upon the injustice of what's happening to them.

No bones are made about the fact the gods are dicks. The cartoon pig - Oinky - is defeated when Yoshizawa decides to enjoy a last cig before death and the cartoon has no resistance to the smoke and rolls off a cliff in a panic. Back in the arena, his god (who KRSG draws as Abe Lincoln crossed with Liberace) talks about how happy he is Oinky earned a lot of "useless" points with that move and tells him he has to keep playing and making them laugh. When Oinky asks what's the point, he gets his face ripped off.

Quite what Yoshizawa's going to be able to do about all this, I have no idea, but Blindfold Guy clearly wanted him in the tournament for a reason.