Chapter 31

I pushed us into a new world in a hideous cave where Truck-kun had been reincarnated as a hatching spider amongst a bunch of his siblings that were hungry and already resorting to cannibalism.

Truck-kun was angry and painfully stuck into a miniscule spider body that left his real spirit body folded and compressed painfully. The pain would distract him for a moment. “You think you’ve beaten me? So I’m a Spider. So what?”

He fought the other spiders, but this left him with no time to extract himself from the spider body and fight me in earnest. If his spider body died, he’d be pushed out of this world entirely, waiting to be resurrected by some sort of magic. Being pushed outside the structure of this reality when his spider body died would be a problem for him, but one he could eventually overcome.

Thankfully fighting the other spiders distracted him enough that he didn’t have time to tear free of the spider form that contained him.

With an entirely unnecessary flick of my wrist, I moved myself, Nyarin, and the rock that held the hatching spider sac. We were all in the sky of another Isekai, falling. He was stuck inside the egg sac, and the other hatchlings took no note of the fall. They continued attacking him and he was forced to defend himself as he fell.

I had become a vending machine, and so had Nyarin. While we would be damaged by the landing, the worst that would happen was a vague discomfort and a loud noise before I moved us to the next world.

“Being a vending machine isn’t actually so bad,” I thought.

“I know, right?” Nyarin answered. Our thoughts somehow reached each other. “You would be surprised how many customers actually like this one.”

“This grows tiresome,” came Truck-kun’s voice to my ears. That was a neat trick that I didn’t know he could do. He seemed to be speaking by shaking the entirety of the reality of which we existed with his thoughts. “Cease now, and I’ll kill you quickly. Continue, and I’ll make it slow.”

“Counter offer,” I said, counting in my head. Ten. Eleven. Twelve. The ground came up and the nest of spiderlings, including the body that had trapped Truck-kun, slammed to the ground. He was getting faster. He had nearly torn out of that body.

We shifted to an odd land with a road of yellow bricks and a green city in the distance. “It somehow doesn’t sit right with me that the Wizard of Ounce is considered an Isekai. I guess it technically is,” I mused.

Truck-kun’s spider body had been crushed, killing him. The destroyed hatchling spider form sat underneath the rock, but it was dead. This meant that Truck-kun himself had been pushed out of the body, waiting in an unstructured area outside of reality.

Even an invisible prison made of reality itself wouldn’t hold him for long. It was all still dreams, and he ate dreams. Even dead, his spiderling body held a connection to him. He used that connection to begin burrowing his way back into this world.

“I’ll. Kill. You.” The sound Truck-kun made as he ate his way through the spiderling’s body and back into this reality was a burbling, grinding groan.

He was hurt, but his mind was working just fine. But that was his weakness. My strategy required that I break his body to give me just enough time to attack his mind. “I have a counter offer. You help me get out of here, and I do everything in my power to get you both square with your goddess, Kisshin.”

“What can you do, sad lonely mortal.” Truck-kun’s answer came back, more strong and clear than his last burbled threat. He was healing quickly. He began eating his way past the spider body and into the stone that had crushed him into the yellow bricks of the road.

His victory was inevitable unless I changed the game.

“I may be a sad, lonely, clever Isekai nerd, but I’m a sad, lonely, clever Isekai nerd with nothing to lose. I’m a level 80 mage, my Baku friend. You’re in the very center of my power. This is my domain.”

“I wouldn’t call you clever, but perhaps we can agree on you being a lonely nerd,” Truck-kun laughed.

But his mockery lacked his typical cool and easy confidence. He hadn’t expected me to put up a meaningful fight, much less damage him so badly. Deep down, a seed of doubt had been planted. Could the stupid mortal fight him to a draw? Could he, perhaps, even win?

I had felt underestimated for probably the last half decade of my life. When it came to being underestimated, I was an expert.

“You don’t have to trust me,” I continued as he slowly regained strength and chewed on the stone that had crushed him with more vigour. His body was broken and compressed into a fine slime, but he was already healing. “I’m going to show you why you should fear me. And then we can talk about how I’ll help you in exchange for letting me escape and go back to my old life.”

“Why don’t you just wake up, reject the Isekai spell like so many others do and leave yourself?” Nyarin asked. She looked adorable in a scarecrow costume supplied by this Isekai. “You’ve clearly figured out how to control this place.”

“Why don’t you tell her?” I asked Truck-kun.

Truck-kun paused his escape attempt to answer. “Well spotted, mortal man. The spell is malfunctioning worse than I had let on. The false heroism of tossing a stuffed animal into the street then pretending to rescue it warped the spell. The spell is broken beyond mending. The little Bakeneko was never going to be able to leave alive.”

Nyarin’s face paled, ears back and afraid. “So if Seo had learned to worship the goddess, you were going to escape and leave me here? Why would you have been able to escape and not me?

Truck-kun seemed to hear. “The regular mechanisms to escape the spell are broken. Any attempt to escape on your part would likely kill you. Fixing them would take too long, and wouldn’t be worth the time to save a Bakeneko. But for a Baku like me, I would have been able to slip out the moment he completed by Isekai spell by producing enough purple fire.”

“You were just going to leave me here?” Nyarin said, yelling angrily now.

Truck-kun began chewing hard at the hard stone that kept him crushed against the ground. How was doing that after being effectively turned into paste? I decided that I didn’t want to know.

“He’s telling the truth,” I told Nyarin, “but if he and I work together I think we can fix the spell. It will take time, and that’s Truck-kun’s problem with that plan. He wants to get out of here before Kisshin notices. He’s willing to sacrifice you to accomplish it.

“It’ll be faster to kill you,” Truck-kun said. He’d already eaten a fist-sized section from the rock and the hole was expanding quickly. “Just kill you and escape as your head explodes.”

“You can try and fail. I grow tired of this pointless battle too, Baku.”

Truck-kun snarled. “Don’t call me that. I can’t stand someone like you calling me that.”

“Truck-kun?”

“NOT THAT EITHER!”

There was silence. In his frustration, Truck-kun had stopped his endless campaign to free himself and come attack me. “I will rend you. I will break you in ways that will make your darkest nightmares seem like dreams.”

“Bring it, TRUCK-KUN.”

He was angry, throwing out the worst threats he could manage. His physical body was incapacitated momentarily. His mental fortitude was slipping. It was now or never. Time for the final step in the plan.

I reached out and implemented the final step in my strategy.

Nyarin saw what I was doing and her head fell back in frustration. She mumbled at the sky, “Dammit, not another Isekai.”