The first time I underestimated Itou Kaiji, I didn’t have to bear the consequences. My employer was an affiliate of the Teiai organization who had signed about a hundred lowlifes away to a life-or-death gambling mission aboard the cruise ship Espoir. And we bore the understandable risk that a few participants would more-than-break even.

So Kaiji escaped, and I took no notice of it.

I met Kaiji again when, as part of a catered affair for Tokyo high society, our talent agent Yuuji Endoh referred him to me through our casting director. That event was successful and Kaiji’s strong performance on such short notice should have tipped me off that his success had been more than luck before. Unfortunately, it did not. Kaiji challenged me to a second gamble that evening in which he slipped away with twenty million yen from the Teiai account, and I was direly punished.

One hundred years later the technology arrived to knit the wounds Teiai had inflicted upon me. I was revived from cryogenic slumber on the top story of Teiai Tower Tokyo. Kaiji had died long before but a digital record of his consciousness still existed.

We uploaded the digital record to the virtual world known as Minecraft and it was there that I planned to exact my revenge.

This, the third time I underestimated Itou Kaiji, was my greatest mistake.

He escaped that virtual world largely intact after slipping three-hundred-and-eighteen million yen once again from the Teiai account. For every yen my employer sent a shock of synthetic pain through my mechanized frame.

A condition of Kaiji’s victory was that he would be released to the outside world. But given his existence as a computer simulacrum, we were not prepared to grant him this – nor, I admit, was it ever the case that we intended to do so. We release him, instead, to your world, with the hope that you will extract every ounce of pain from him that he extracted from us.