Chapter 4

We all have awkward memories that make us cringe. They’re the scars every adult carries from moments of foolishness. I have plenty. I’ve been foolish. I still cringe thinking about when I watched Truck-kun tear apart reality without realizing what was really happening.

We found Truck-kun tinkering with his magic circle. He sifted through a pile of glowing crystals, apparently irritated that there weren’t more red ones.

“You were right. I’m the first hero in two centuries capable of using every element of magic.” I said to Truck-kun as I returned.

“I saw.” He pointed to the dome visible from the patio. “Bean magic? What kind of foolish idea is ‘bean magic’?”

He laughed at this part and Nyarin’s ears cowed back in anger. “It’s an interesting element. What’s wrong with new ideas?”

I put my hands on my hips. “Now that you’ve seen my power, including bean magic, perhaps you understand why I want to stay in my wonderful Isekai.”

Truck-kun shook his head. “I need to leave. I explained it to you last night. The easiest way for me to leave is for this reality to dissolve. Hopefully you’ll get pulled into the next one and I’ll be ejected, free to return to the material plane.”

Truck-kun sneered in consternation and gave up looking for a red crystal. “There are at least three ways I can make this Isekai dissolve from the inside. First, I can destroy your purpose for being in this reality. Second, I could kill you. Third, I could take control of this reality from inside after months of work.“

“Wait, what was that second one?” I asked.

He made complicated gestures with his hands. A hole in space opened and a rainbow of glowing crystals clattered to the ground. He picked up a large red one with a satisfied nod.

“Don’t worry,” he said with a dismissive wave of the red crystal, “killing you would collapse this reality, but I’d almost certainly get pulled into the next. Your death would just open another Isekai. So I’m not going to kill you.”

“Oh, that’s good,” I contributed, “Wait, you said ‘another Isekai’? Are you coming with me to another Isekai?”

“Dammit, not another Isekai. I’ll try to slip out as this reality collapses.”

Truck-kun set the red crystal on a nexus of lines in the magic circle. It glowed. A rumbling similar to the last explosion made Nyarin shiver.

Truck-kun drew a series of runes in the air with a glowing finger. The runes flashed brightly and a king, crown and all, formed of eerie green mist.

“Who dares summon the patriarch of the ancient kingdom of…” Truck-kun interrupted the ghost king by shoving a copper disc in the king’s mouth.

“Hold this, will you?” Truck-kun asked.

The long-lost ghost king grabbed the copper disc, infuriated and seemingly surprised he could touch it. “Kingdom of… I’ve been waiting eleven thousand years to pull out that monologue and you made me lose my place. What is the meaning of this?”

“Exactly my question,” I said, “what are you trying to do, Truck-kun?”

“Don’t call me that!” Truck-kun snapped his fingers and the ghost king was sucked into the copper disc, screaming about his lost empire. The disc clattered on the ground, red hot.

“Aw, I was just getting to know that guy,” I said as the copper disc glowed an eerie green.

The rumbling of a pending explosion stopped. The green glowing copper disc had stabilized the circle.

“What I’m doing,” Truck-kun said while waving a stick of burning incense around the magic circle, “is destroying this reality’s purpose. I don’t have time to seize control of this reality, and it is too risky and unproductive to kill you.”

“Huh?” I asked, like any hero might.

As the incense spread, the spell circle lines ceased flashing randomly and glowed with a sullen purple light that darkened the world and sky.

“You’re going to destroy this reality?” Nyarin asked from where she cowered, half-hidden behind the patio doorway.

“Yeah,” I said, gallantly coming to Nyarin’s aid, “she’s probably got all her stuff here. It’s rude.”

“Technically, I’ll just destroy Seo’s reason to be invested in this dream realm. This Isekai reality will collapse and he’ll be pushed to the next while I hopefully slip out.” Truck-kun’s eyes glowed red, as if burning with a crimson flame.

“Hopefully?” Nyarin said, tail twitching nervously so that the rings of three different colors over her tail looked like a blur or orange, white, and black. She crept back toward the patio since dimensional dissolution made the adjoining room as unsafe as the patio.

“You’re scaring the catgirl.” I said, as if accusing Truck-kun of a felony. “That’s not how Isekai work. I came here because I was struck down by you while doing something noble. Me dying here doesn’t send me to another Isekai.”

“You think you know how Isekai works? Because you heard some escapee stories?” Truck-kun lifted his hands and the circle’s light grew painfully bright. “Human, you know nothing about Isekai, or the kitty cat over there either.”

Truck-kun chanted and the sky howled.

I found, to my delighted surprise, that Nyarin clung to me in terror.

You could be certain that she was clinging to me since I had my hands clenched around her waist while I trembled with my head buried in her bosom. At least I had the presence of mind to enjoy this despite my terror.

The sky itself rent open, noonday light giving way to a dark, bottomless abyss where blue sky should have been.

It was a gaping wound, a wrongness in space and time. All light dimmed. The fire warming our room no longer gave much light. The suns went from blazing yellow to dim gray. The world grew dark as Truck-kun chanted.

“Sycorax, ancient dragon, formed from the heart stones of this world. Sycorax, shaped by the eldest gods of hatred and darkness. Sycorax, unleashed after twelve millennia destroy all creation. Sycorax, I name three. Sycorax, I summon thee.”

Wow, Truck-kun really looked cool. His iridescent white hair fluttered, casting about subtle hints of various colors like a prism as lines of magic danced about him.

Gravity lightened. Dark lightning rent reality. I saw old, horrible things looking in from outside as each dark lightning struck.

Sycorax appeared.

It emerged from the dark maw in the sky like it was escaping a mass of tar. The dragon roared. It must have been kilometers up, but even at this distance the roar shook me half to death. I clutched Nyarin more tightly.

I mean, Nyarin clung to her brave hero ever more tightly.

Sycorax’s black scales echoed the endless void from which it had emerged.

Truck-kun smiled.

Before Sycorax could move, Truck-kun raised his hands above his head and made a motion with one hand sliding upward while the other slid downward.

The circle beneath Truck-kun flared bright again. “Dimensional Cleave,” he said.

And the world, nay the reality underlying the world split in twain. The ground under Truck-kun split, shattering the circle along a line fine enough to have been cut with a scalpel.

The cut cleaved stone, wood, or dirt. Truck-kun was spared, but the town wasn’t. One side of the town on Truck-kun’s right, where I was, seemed to stay still while everything to Truck-kun’s left shifted to the right by a few centimeters.

I looked up to see surprise on Sycorax’s face. The split in reality had severed the dragon’s neck clean from its body. The dragon and its severed head fell.

Truck-kun’s shoulders sagged and he sighed.

“Mortal. I’ve ruined your quest. There’s no meaningful adventure left in this world.” He closed his eyes, raising his palms in victory. “Now, it will all dissolve.”

Silence reigned except for the distant rumbling of a destabilized mountain that had been cut in half by a world split like a pane of glass.

Truck-kun opened one eye with a frown. “Any second now.”

“That,” I said, standing up on wobbly feet, “was so cool!”

“Cool?” Truck-kun asked.

“You’ve got all the cheat codes for this world!”

“Cheat. Codes.” Truck-kun fumbled the words. “There’s no intrigue or risk left. You should be disinterested. This dream should give way to the next Isekai delusion. Why do you still want to be here?”

“Oh, I talked with Nyarin. We’re gonna find young catgirls looking to meet a hero.”

“But…” Truck-kun stammered.

“Since you have all the cheat codes, could you maybe respawn one of those Sycorax things later, if I wanted to fight one? That fight didn’t last nearly long enough. I want to see what kind of dragon breath it has.”

Truck-kun’s eyes went wide. “You want me to just, what, whip up another ancient dragon, formed from the heart stones of this world by the eldest gods of hatred and.…”

“Yep,” I nodded, “but can it be an ice dragon next time? One of my favorite shows had one of those. It was so cool.”

Truck-kun collapsed to the ground, eyes staring at some point a kilometer below the floor. “I need to reconsider my career.”