Chapter 32

Truck-kun ate his way through the stone at an alarming rate. The larger the space under the stone became, the more room he could reform his body into something more substantial than ground cat food. Claws and teeth and bones began to form.

I closed my eyes, focusing. At the rate he was eating I had at most a minute. I had to learn a new skill quickly and I’d have only one chance to get it right. This was perhaps the riskiest part of my plan. I closed my eyes and used True Vision to look inward.

Every jump we had made between Isekai had been forward, into new worlds. But what about going back to a previous Isekai?

During my years wandering the garden and trying to appreciate trees or eat flowers, why so many managed to escape the Isekai spells. Why not just keep wiping their minds and starting over, even every few minutes if need be?

I had gambled my life that the Isekai spell couldn’t endlessly create new Isekai hallucinations. Somehow the burden of one reality after another after another started to add up.

I also guessed that going backward to previous worlds was much harder than moving into a new one. Each Isekai had to be new because going back was rather hard, and each new Isekai made the spell less stable.

I reached out to one of the previous Isekai that we’d visited. I sighed with relief to finally confirm that my theory was correct. My strategy could work. Until that moment I had not been entirely sure, and boy would I have been embarrassed.

The chewing against the bottom side of the stone was clearly audible now. I had seconds before Truck-kun emerged. With a grunt of effort I reached out to that previous Isekai, willing it to accept us back.

It was really, really hard and I was no good at this. It was like the difference between memorizing a paper already full of detailed writing, and memorizing a blank page. The previous Isekai world had recorded so much data. The sheer metaphysical mass of the thing was hard to comprehend, much less manipulate.

But I had no other choice. And besides, I’m a data guy.

The burden of traveling to more and more new Isekai to crush Truck-kun was building. I could summon up three, maybe four new worlds and then the weight would be too much. People escaped the Isekai spell because it was impossible to endlessly reset a person. There was a limit to the number of times one could make new worlds before the spell became too burdened with information and effort to continue functioning.

The chewing, grinding sound of Truck-kun eating the rock suddenly grew louder. Truck-kun had tunneled his way out of the rock. I confess that I panicked at that point. “There’s no place like home,” I found myself muttering.

I made the mistake of opening my eyes. A bloody, disgusting mass of crushed Baku squirmed like a snake made of grinder meat out of the rock and onto the road of yellow bricks. Nyarin took a step back. She looked like she wanted to run. But there was nowhere to run from this thing.

“There’s no place like home,” I said again. I focused, willing the previous Isekai to let us return. It had to be that Isekai. It was the only one that I knew had what I needed.

The pile of Baku pâté wormed toward me, eating the dream substance of the ground in a furrow at least ten centimeters deep as it charged. Running would only distract me. Truck-kun moved faster and faster, bones and spindly spider legs forming to drive him forward faster.

His speed and the rate of his healing increased as he advanced.

It all came down to this.

Truck-kun howled, a sound nothing in nature could ever have made. I don’t have words to describe it, and it haunts my dreams to this day. I wake up, some nights, covered in sweat and hearing that howl echo in my ears.

I willed myself not to imagine what getting caught in that writhing collection of bones and teeth and fangs would feel like.

I screamed back, my own battle roar sounding small compared to his.

With a final mental shove I felt the Isekai open. With a flash of light the world around us changed. A pile of rubble as tall as a mountain appeared. Then a city that had been half destroyed by a sexy manifestation of warfare appeared around us.

Truck-kun came for me. I could smell him, a stomach turning mix of crushed mammal, insect, reptile, and fish. He was so close and large I could even feel the heat radiating from the fleshy mass that lacked skin or scale to keep the heat in.

I accessed my inventory.

And an entire building, bell tower and all, materialized above Truck-kun and mashed him flat.

“By the goddess herself,” Narin said under her breath.

“Over one hundred thousand damage! You’re incredible,” the damage announcer voice said overhead. A red damage number appeared to float inside the building over the spot where Truck-kun had been, less than a meter from me.

I stepped back, and put the building back in my inventory. Then I materialized it again, a meter or so above the ground.

“Again, over one hundred thousand damage! Merciless.”

I did it again.

“Wowee, more than one hundred thousand damage! You’re something else.”

Again.

“Yep. You got him. Do I really need to repeat the number?”

Again and again and again.

“Okay, you’ve got him.”

“This is impressive, but perhaps a bit excessive?”

“Oh, he’s leaking everywhere. I think I’m going to be sick.”

“What is the point?”

“Oh yeah, I’m definitely going to be sick.”

It went on like that. A depression had formed in the ground, and thankfully the building didn’t collapse. Among the many bugs in this game, I had noticed that no one had bothered to consider that buildings might need to calculate falling damage.

I couldn’t control all of my Isekai powers, but this place had plenty of bugs ready for me to abuse. Truck-kun had shown me that.

Eventually the poor sap they had reading out the excited damage announcements was just babbling and crying.

“Why would you do this?”

“What kind of monster are you?”

“Stop! Stop! He’s already dead!”

But he wasn’t dead. The ground had soaked up the blood, and what remained had been so thoroughly ground into the mud that Truck-kun couldn’t control his body at the moment..

I found a fleshy substance, about the size of a pillbug, squirming in the center of a gory patch of ground. I carefully put the remnant of Truck-kun in a bag and ran. There was little time left, and thankfully my SPECs here made me super fast.

For the next part of my plan I would need every single bit of speed I could get.