Dreams and Reality (END)

After dinner, our camp slowly began to slip into total darkness.

Annabelle—still distraught from the situation earlier—was now treating me like a proper flight risk rather than some sort of strange companion like she was earlier. She would putter around the camp, putting things here and there for no apparent reason whilst looking at me once in a while to check on my condition. At times, she would be bold enough to muster an “are you okay”, and I always responded with “yeah”, but I sincerely wondered what her plan was if I had answered with a negative.

I always wondered what the point of asking someone if they were okay was. My psychiatrist used to open therapy with the same question every time: How has your mood been recently? And I always felt that this was silly, because the sessions were being sponsored by the government, and if I hadn’t cancelled them yet, you could logically assume that I wasn’t fine. Why waste time answering a question you’re not ready to hear the actual answer to? People in my previous life… I mean, people in real life would always ask me the same question over and over again: Are you okay? I’d say, No, I’m not okay, I’m thinking about how my mother’s brain was splattered all over the furniture next to me, I don’t think she deserved that, I wish I sat in 11C and not A. Neither of us would‘ve had to suffer. Then they’d look at me as if I was the weird one for vocalising something that was bothering me. At the same time, answering that you were alright just led them to pester you with more and more variants of the same question: Are you sure? There was absolutely no winning in a situation like this, and the issue stemmed squarely from the fact people asked questions they had no interest in hearing the actual answers to.

Performative concern, basically. Pretending that they cared when they didn’t. When we’re young, we’re rewarded for crying out to our parents when they need help. There’s always someone we can rely on to fix something—usually a trusted adult. Once you get to adolescence, however, this behaviour is promptly bullied out of you, because it’s not okay to be vulnerable. Still, people continue to act in a way where feigning concern is encouraged, and slowly you’re conditioned to believe that no one cares. You lose faith in people, and eventually the only way to solve things is to isolate yourself. And all of this just because young adults decided that the normal human behaviour of seeking emotional support is something to look down on.

But… maybe this was just an excuse?

If Annabelle was anything to go by, evidently, I didn’t truly understand the nature of people.

When I first met her some hours ago, I thought that I could easily classify her into a stereotype. It was painfully clear to me that this hallucination was due in part to both my light novel and card game addiction—and if that was the case, I could probably assign her some sort of label. Aloof dark-haired girl. Tsundere with twin-tails. Athletic genki girl. The moment I observed how nervous she was and how she hid behind her staff, I simply pegged her as the “shy spellcaster” type. Then she surprised me with how she was vehemently against the idea of killing me, which made me reclassify her into the “innocent but zealous” trope who would eventually be rudely awakened by the horrors of a warring fantasy world. Then again, out of a sudden, she threatened me into following her back to her sect, reasoning that I was essentially a dead man.

Now what character journey is this supposed to be? I initially thought. But this line of thinking was incredibly fallacious. Watching Annabelle made me realise something incredibly important—that she was just as real as I was.

This is no figment of my imagination. This is a person.

“Hey,” I said to Annabelle, trying to look nonchalant. “Do you need help with anything?”

She tilted her head at me.

“...P-Pardon?”

Perhaps it was the fact that I had set the table like a blind person with leprosy after asking her exactly the same question earlier. Or maybe it was because she’d just seen me nearly die. Still, the look on her face wasn’t going to dissuade me now.

“The sun is setting. We’d need a light source, correct?”

“...Yes. But I can handle it.”

“Not with a campfire, I hope. If you do that, I might start puking again.”

Behold—I am comedy. Unfortunately my companion didn’t appreciate my line, and looked at me just like my ex-girlfriend used to.

“I’m kidding.” I wasn’t kidding. “But no fires, please.”

“Uh… um… okay? So you don’t need any light?”

“That’s not what I meant. Can’t you just, like, generate a light source using cards or something? You filled the tub with water, so I wouldn’t see why you couldn’t do this.”

“...Hm,” she said, clearly thinking about something. “You’re really not from around here, are you?”

“Didn’t we establish that earlier?”

“Yes, you did. But I wouldn’t put it past someone like you to just make things up.”

Ow.

“Ah, ah,” she said, rapidly waving her hands in front of her face. “B-but I didn’t mean it like that! I meant, like, if you were a spy or something, I can see you saying that as a cover story!”

“Ah. So you think I’m a spy.”

“N-no, that’s not… Yes, maybe. I don’t know.”

She sighed.

“I don’t know who you are, or what’s going on. All I know is that… something tells me that I absolutely mustn't let you die.”

“Yeah, yeah. Because of the Rowan thing.”

“N-no, that’s not… well…”

“Huh? Then what is it?”

I looked at the girl, swaying and buckling and twirling her hair. From the sound of her voice and how it was wavering, and her heavy blushing—the context was so, so obvious.

“Well, that’s… that’s because… obviously…”

She’s in love with me. Bwahahaha! I love ise—

“...because it is the duty of the strong to protect the weak,” she admitted.

“...”

“...What? Are you okay?”

“Did you just say I’m weak?”

“…”

“Do you think I’m weak?”

“...U-um, yes, Mister Primot. And um, I’m sorry.”

“In what way am I weak?”

“Um.”

“1v1 me.”

“Um. What’s a ‘1v1’?”

“Duel me.”

“We already did that. Um. I think.”

“Doesn’t count. I was trying to kill myself.”

“Well, um. I’m sorry. I mean, it’s just that you have zero quanta to speak of, so even if… um…”

If the camp were a school, and hypothetically I loved tariffs as well, I would have started shooting it up for sure.

Sadly I didn’t possess a gun, so I wordlessly reached for the shortsword I’d inherited from Rowan the Elder instead. Unfortunately, I’d taken off all his armour after nearly dying from eating this wretched woman’s poisonous concoction (I knew I should’ve been suspicious of the shiny mushrooms), and after that she’d somehow convinced me to let her keep my excess equipment in her tent under the pretext of “cleaning”. In other words, I was weaponless, armourless, not to mention prideless—and this woman had pulled the wool over my eyes in stealing all of my shit. Instinctively, I understood that there was a joke to be made somewhere about her being the apprentice of Rowan, but I was quickly advised by my conscience not to complete that thought. Also, I had read enough light novels to understand that most “relatable” isekai protagonists had either undiagnosed ADHD or uncontrollable pedophilia, but since I had neither, it was only logical to conclude I had been transmigrated as the “aspirational” type, and that I was going to become the Kirigaya Tatsuya of this world and perforate it with my hax, raw-style, full bacterial transfer. This stupid bitch would just be the first of my many victims after starting off with a “Practice Battle” at the Magic Academy, and I’d leave her corpse decomposing like Virgin Atlantic Economy Class Yogurt Chicken in my culinary Japanese wake that’d also bring forth the introduction of miso soup and curry rice to a olfactory-wise desolate Western world.

“Mister Primot. Um, I’m sorry.”

“Annabelle, um, maybe you’re just shit at sensing power. Maybe you’re just a shitty apprentice, and I’m actually a god, you know? A top 100 god, in fact? Like I’m so above you that you can’t even tell how good I am, and you just blame it on me being lucky, topdecking all the answers at the exact moment I need even though I’d been holding those cards in hand since you were born?”

She didn’t have any words for me. “Um,” she simply stated.

“Well?”

“M-maybe we should head to sleep?” she said.

“Maybe it’s time for you to open your eyes, Annabelle of Fries Land.”

“...You mean Friesland, right? Free-suh-lund.”

“Don’t care. Fries Land. Fatass.”

“...Okay?”

“You want to know something? I’m actually a god from another dimension, summoned here for the sole reason of saving your world’s pitiful existence. I know Rowan. I know all your head honchos. When you get back to your sect, I’m going to fucking put in the nastiest word known to man available and make sure you never promote past the rank of Initiate I, you filthy trash Life control player. If by Master Edgar, you mean Edgar the Pious, the 4 quanta light summon, then I own him. I literally own your master—four copies, in fact, and seven if you include my two non-Primot accounts. Basically, I am the boss of your boss. The CEO of your manager.”

“...I’m sorry.”

“It’s too late to be sorry. When I get back, they’re going to put me in contact with all the Saints once they realise I’m the hero who was prophesied. And once they do, I’m going to talk with Saint Alicia, and you’re going to be screwed. You’re not even going to get ranked rewards for this season. In fact, they’re going to strip you of all your cards and give them to me, you sad, pathetic excuse of a tutorial quest NPC. Shame on you. Good that you stopped me from killing myself, because now I’m going to make sure that the rest of my time here is spent making sure that your pitiful existence never reaches the annals of the history books when you get executed for heresy against your god, you little redhead chucklefuck.”

As she listened to me, Annabelle cocked her head to the side—or at least I assumed so, because by this point my rambling had gone so long the night had more than fully set in, and I could basically only see brief glimpses of her face whenever her crystalline eyes reflected the moonlight back at me.

“Saint Alicia?”

“Yes, Saint Alicia. The one with the feet everybody wants to lick cause she wears black thigh-highs. Compared to her, you’re basically a child—no, a midget. Yes, Saint Alicia, the one with 10,000 unique doujins on nhentai—she was the one who summoned me. You’re absolutely cooked. You don’t even realise that you’re transporting the chosen one from Japan, which is a shame, because you’re actually kind of cute, and your voice reminds me of Kayano Ai, and if only you weren’t such a stupid—”

“Saint Alicia… is dead,” Annabelle said.

“What the fuck are you talking about? I literally met her yesterday.”

Did that count as yesterday? Today?

Just kidding! Don’t care. What I cared about was putting this ignorant fool in her place.

“...Saint Alicia is a religious icon. She died centuries ago after sealing the Original Sin alongside the Quantum Mage.”

“That would be bullshit, because I am the Quantum Mage.” I’m pretty sure she did say something like that as she summoned me. “If I did that, I would very obviously remember it.”

“...You, some guy who nearly died due to a beef allergy… and also tried to kill themselves… are the Quantum Mage?”

Picture this. You’re someone who vaguely knows one thing or another about Christianity from an alien planet that somehow also speaks human (just bear with me here). You get teleported to Earth, and the first thing you do to try and show the locals that you understand the culture is to start talking about how you know God. Naturally, this doesn’t work, because everyone already knows God—you’re basing your strategy on a meta that became outdated roughly ten centuries ago with the release of expansion packs like the “Scientific Method” and “Age of Reformation”. So you start talking about things God said to you anyway, because they’re the only vestiges of your sanity worth clinging onto (you also know that you actually met God), but at some point you lose all patience and flat out claim to be the second coming of Magic Jesus.

“Yes.”

Depending on which country you ended up in, and who you tried talking to, the outcome of this could range anywhere from getting beheaded to going viral on TikTok as a valid cyberbullying target. In my case, all my heresy did was illicit a swift ahaha and a feeble attempt at trying to change the subject.

“Maybe… it’s really time to go to sleep,” Annabelle said, more calmly this time.

Foolish woman. One day, the PrimotGodXXX is going to Primot all over you, and then you’ll know.

“No, seriously. Saint Alicia said that. She said I am the Quantum Mage.”

Quanta TCG revolved around twelve elements—Fire, Water, Air, Earth, Life, Death, Light, Darkness, Gravity, Time, Entropy, and Aether. I know that hardly seems like relevant knowledge at this juncture, but the point was that with such an abundance of possible spells and archetypes of magic to draw from, I didn’t think that someone like Annabelle (who literally tied me up with plants earlier) would think it far fetched that something possibly went wrong with my summoning—or perhaps the possibility of parallel worlds or split timelines. After all, the very strange proposition of my existence here as an otherworldly being was something that she very readily accepted, and she didn’t seem to suspect any foul play when I “replaced” Rowan… although, again, she was a “Templar” in a place very clearly inspired by the Holy Roman Empire, had blue eyes and essentially blonde hair, so maybe she was just a racist?

“Well… I don’t think you’re lying about any of this.”

“THANK YOU. That’s what I’ve been—”

“But,” she said, her voice suddenly filling with that strange confidence again, “you’re in no position to know what the truth is either.”

“…Hm.”

I couldn’t argue with that, honestly.

More importantly… The person who summoned me is dead?

“The only way to figure things out for sure is to bring you to someone more knowledgeable than I am. So follow me back to my sect, and we’ll get more definitive answers.”

“Fine. That I can agree with.”

“And obviously—no trying to kill yourself.”

“…”

Was that a joke, or a serious request? I couldn’t tell. It would’ve helped if I could see her expression, but the camp was basically pitch black.

It was very obviously a serious request. Her voice wavered.

“Nah, you don’t have to worry about that.”

“…Primot?”

“Like I said, don’t worry. Remember how I was all, Oh, please kill me, I need to go back? Well, congratulations. I don’t want to go back anymore—you’ve done your job. Splendidly, I might add. Congratulations. I’m suddenly feeling this burst of motivation because of what you said about me being powerless, when the reality is that I’m a fucking god, and lightning shoots from my fingertips. It pains me that you can’t see you’re seeing the beginnings of a prophecy take shape. So instead, I’m going to dabble in this “magician” thing as well, maybe even join the Templars. All so I can put you and all of your shitty Saints back in your places, especially the dumb one that forced me here against my will without warning, and only then I’ll go home once you’ve seen me hit Rank 1. How does that sound?”

“...Sure? I don’t know what you mean by Rank 1, but sure.”

“You know what I mean.”

“I don’t,” she said, pausing slightly. “…Um, thank you for reassuring me, Primot. I’m glad you feel better.”

“Nah.”