Chapter 16

“That’s a gacha ball,” I said, lifting Truck-kun the platypus so he could see the ancient fresco carving in a stone cliff.

“Careful,” Truck-kun moaned, “I’m still not feeling good after that last meal.”

“Mysterious,” said Nyarin. She’d done a poor job of hiding the red flames in her eyes whenever she altered the Isekai to fix my antics. She had formed this carving using those eye-flames in her latest attempt to un-ruin my adventure.

Her recent attempts to fix my ruined Isekai included an angelic messenger guiding me to the proper path, a literal donut tree growing fresh donuts after I ignored that path and we were lost and without food, and an overly friendly caravan of merchants fascinated by my attempts to sell fresh donut-tree wood for pennies.

None of my Isekai sabotage had made me miserable enough to escape the spell. I needed to be more miserable here because a part of me wanted to be here listening to Truck-kun whine about what donuts did to the platypus digestive tract. A platypus shouldn’t eat donuts.

We were deep into the nomadic badlands. We’d nearly been caught and skinned alive by the local cannibals twice. Nyarin barely kept me alive as I bumbled about with my plastic ball and no sense of self-preservation.

I suspected that along with creating the gacha ball carvings, she had also used her control of the Isekai to imbue my gacha ball with some special ability.

“Look at what the gacha ball in the carving is doing!” Nyarin said, desperate to get me excited about the adventure. “It’s capturing a demon on the left, and on the right the demon is being released to fight bad guys.”

I examined the gacha ball carving. “No, this drawing is different, it has two plastic snaps. My gacha ball has only one. Let’s keep going.”

Nearly two weeks of cold, starvation, foot blisters, walking, exposure, and the company of me and a vehicular-assault platypus, Nyarin snapped. She went crazy. Totally bonkers.

She honestly wasn’t much of an actress. She had chosen to play a lonely and vulnerable waif with a touch of magical talent and loyalty to me, the chosen hero. And she was done pretending.

“THAT’S IT!” she yelled, eyes burning with a red fire flickering from her eye sockets. She usually tried to hide her ability to warp the Isekai reality using those red flaming eyes. She didn’t bother now.

“Mimi!” Truck-kun tried to stop her, remembering to use her current fake name, but the squeaks of protest from his tiny platypus body only managed to be adorable.

This is exactly what I wanted. I needed to see how Nyarin summoned those flaming red eyes.

I had realized these red flaming eyes she and Truck-kun could summon controlled the Isekai spell, like when Nyarin summoned the donut tree or Truck-kun stabilized the last Isekai for us to trade questions.

If I couldn’t escape by learning to love home, maybe I could control the Isekai itself. It seemed possible, since Truck-kun had temporarily transferred that fire into my eyes to make me see the first Isekai for what it was.

Nyarin paused before summoning the red flame, needing concentration. Was she rehearsing an incantation in her mind? After the flame appeared she focused for ten or fifteen seconds, then lifted a hand above her head.

Truck-kun squeak-warbled a final desperate warning. Given Truck-kun’s duck bill I expected some quacking, but panicked squeak-warbling meant to dissuade from the misuse of magic is about as well as I can describe that adorable sound.

It was too late. Nyarin had used the red flaming eyes to gain a new magical ability. Her hand lit with dancing magical flames which she sent into the evening sky. Given the barren landscape, I was sure the flare could be seen for miles.

“Oh,” Truck-kun said, calm enough to speak instead of doing that weird platypus chittering. Then he said some inventive vulgarities that just didn’t sound right coming out of a platypus.

In under a minute, I heard the battle cries of the local cannibal nomads coming to investigate the light.

Nyarin giggled madly. “We’ll just have to try again. Die here and see if the next world works better.”

“Dammit,” said the adorable squeaky semi-aquatic mammal in my arms, “not ANOTHER Isekai!”

The nomads came.

In that moment I realized something. As much as I wanted to hate this place enough to break the spell, I really didn’t want to be skinned alive.

“Run!” chirped Truck-kun. So we did. For now, Nyarin’s insanity and my sabotage were willing to pause to avoid a horrible, lingering death.

We ran over sand dunes and then down and back up a dry riverbed. The cannibals were catching up. We couldn’t keep running. A spear flew past my head and suddenly I could climb faster as we ascended the dry riverbed.

“Hold them off for a moment,” Nyarin said, and she began focusing.

She tried to summon the red flame, but it would take too much time to summon and use.

Could Nyarin fix the situation fast enough? No. She’d be stabbed and lose focus.

I considered my options. I had to hold them off. I had a platypus and a gacha ball. I considered throwing either or both.

Truck-kun watched me consider my options. “What are you thinking?” he asked in a cautious voice about two octaves higher than usual.

The cannibals were coming and Nyarin struggled to summon the red flames. Was it because she had summoned them too recently?

Truck-kun seemed to make a decision. I mean, he puffed out his fur and huffed out a breath, but I’m no expert on platypus body language. I think that meant he had made a decision to act.

Truck-kun changed, like he was bursting out of his body, like something was fading into existence as his fake platypus body faded away. There had been something inside Truck-kun’s false Isekai body that was a mismatched set of various animal parts.

Another spear flew past us, missing by centimeters.

I panicked.

Nyarin panicked. She mumbled to herself over and over, “it’s not real. It’s not real.”

I had to do something. Remembering the cliff carvings and Nyarin’s unannounced plan, I guessed.

So then I smacked Truck-kun in the head with the gacha ball as hard as I could. The blow stunned him, preventing him from hulking out of the platypus body as his true form. The resulting string of squeaking vulgarity was drowned out by the gacha ball.

It opened. In a flash of light Truck-kun was pulled inside. The ball snapped closed and shook. “Why am I inside the ball, Mimi?” Truck-kun asked Nyarin from inside.

“You put the platypus in the ball? That’s for demons or monsters.” Nyarin said, distracted from her attempts to summon the red flames.

“That show isn’t even an Isekai!” Truck-kun complained. “And stop shaking the ball. The donut I ate is going to come back up!”

I considered the cannibals. The first was reaching the opposite side of the riverbed.

“Truck-kun platypus, I CHOOSE YOU!” I said, hucking the gacha ball.

The ball struck, and in a flash of light a platypus emerged. The other cannibals cowered from the unexpected counter attack except the one I had hit tumbled down the dry river bed, knocking himself unconscious on a rock.

The cannibals only saw a flash of light and a bizarre hybrid monster that had replaced one of their warriors. So they came to the most natural conclusion. “The great wizard turned him into a hideous monster!”

“Truck-kun platypus,” I roared triumphantly, “attack!”

And that was when Truck-kun made a queasy little noise I could barely hear from across the riverbed before he projectile vomited on the nearest cannibals.