Hitomu Yoshizawa is an office drone, remarkable only in how little he can actually accomplish. He doesn't want to go to work, but doesn't want to get in trouble for not going to work. So he lays on a park bench and daydreams about how that could happen. Maybe a truck could crash into the building! Oh, but he doesn't want the driver to get hurt. Maybe the truck is hijacked! By terrorists! But the hijacker has a heart attack and dies painlessly. Oh, and the security guard is patrolling elsewhere in the building so he doesn't get hurt. And on and on, an endless stream of pointless hypotheticals.
So the god of his reality deems him the most useless person in the entire universe, and dumps him into a death battle tournament against dozens of other realities' candidates. Hitomu dies, again and again. He doesn't even try to fight back, the fear of doing anything, even to defend himself, too overwhelming. Finally, it comes down to him and 4 other contestants who also lost all their matches. Hitomu basically has a breakdown, but in the process, deduces the arena floor is not one solid piece and there's a lever that will open it, dumping all five of them into another world. Unfazed, the former god who arranged the contest says this was a planned alteration. Those five will now be hunted by all the other contestants, and this time, death will be permanent.
At the end of the first volume, Masato Hisa says this is the first time after 16 years as an artist they're writing a story. Rather, it's the first time the draft was actually accepted, because apparently the editors wanted Hisa to also draw the story, and I guess Hisa didn't figure they had the time? For whatever reason, having KRSG draw this one was acceptable, although it seems to have ended/been canceled after just 2 volumes.
The basic formula is, Hitomu is repeatedly presented with moments to try and fight or kill his opponents. He rejects them, choosing to flee instead. On the rare occasion he considers fighting, he fully expects to die. Fighting is just a way for him to give up without necessarily looking like he's giving up. All the time he spends pondering hypotheticals apparently makes him good at noticing little details and putting them together into plans. So he leverages the skills the other 4 have to make their escapes.
You have K, from a reality where war has grown so pervasive everything has been conscripted, including cleaning robots. He talks big at first to disguise the fact he has no actual ability to fight. (Hitomu calls him a "war virgin" and draws uncomfortable parallels to his own behavior when he invited a girl he liked in school back to his room.) Tofu Brat is some mythological figure that obsesses about his hat and his plate with tofu on it, always muttering snide remarks, then denying he said anything. Godden is some sort of Pokemon caterpillar-thing that passes out at the drop of a hat, spewing a strong, flammable silk in the process.
The slime girl was originally just a basic slime, like you'd see in a DragonQuest game, but some of Hitomu's blood got on it and it changed shape. To resemble a naked slime girl version of the girl Hitomu demonstrated no game with back in high school. Yeah, I don't know. It wasn't like Hitomu was thinking of her at the time he was bleeding. And he gives the slime girl the same name as that girl, Sayaka.
The gods are presented as capricious and cruel. While there's some talk of contestants being awarded "useless points" for fucking up particularly badly, the gods don't care about the outcome. They just want to be entertained by how pathetic the contestants are. Like one of those obstacle course competition shows, except everybody's really out of shape.
When one god gets happy his representative showed ingenuity and looks ready to actually make a kill, the others are embarrassed by his enthusiasm. When he tries to subtly interfere, causing his scarecrow to fall into a river, his entire reality is erased. This all seems to be part of some plan by the former god who arranged the tournament, to show how petty the gods are and make people disgusted with them, but I can't see the point.
If they can erase an entire reality just like that, what was Hitomu going to accomplish? He certainly isn't going to kill the gods, that would go against his whole nature by involving doing something. But even if he convinced every other contestant to refuse to fight, so what? When a cartoon pig questioned the point of the contest, his god - who I would describe as Liberace Abe Lincoln - rips the pig's face off and screams at it not to question him. I don't think Hitomu could Rube Goldberg his way out of something like that.
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