Chapter 33

There had been more than just a belltower building in my inventory when I had returned. You see, if one fails to complete a quest in video games, the designers are supposed to program in a way to restart that quest. I had left a quest unfinished in this world.

When I reached the empty lot that used to contain the building with the bell tower, it didn’t take long to find the young and top-heavy maiden. She was repeating the same dialog I had heard before about her missing dog. She didn’t remember our previous interactions.

When I handed her the missing dog, the vacant NPC dutifully repeated her dialog, “Oh, however shall I thank you?”

I rushed through the menu items. Truck-kun was moving around in the bag more. He wasn’t dazed any more. “How about something HOT back at your place?”

She winked. “Follow me home. It’s the least I can do after such brave heroics.”

I picked up the woman and dashed to the site of her demolished and missing home. If I really had to I could use a building to squash Truck-kun again, but that could get risky. He would eventually find some way around that attack too.

The woman stopped at a point on the street and pointed to a completely missing house. “Well, this is my home. How about you wait on the couch while I slip into something more comfortable.”

In the instant before she walked into a non-existent door and disappeared, I attached the bag that contained Truck-kun to the little dog’s collar.

And then the woman, the dog, and the bag all completely disappeared.

“You complete…” Truck-kun’s voice rattled reality itself.

“Save yourself the effort. I don’t care about your threats,” I said to the air, “you’ve been moved outside of the structure of this Isekai. It’s going to be much harder to reform a body if you have nothing to start with.”

“This is like when you were stuck in the gacha ball. You can’t use True Vision from outside the structure of this Isekai world. You’re mighty, but you’re mostly bound by the rules. I figure it will be a minimum of a few hours. More likely days.”

Apparently Truck-kun heard me, because he went silent.

“What are you doing here?” came the damage announcer’s voice, booming from the sky.

Truck-kun’s voice boomed in the same fashion. “You’ve got to be kidding me, I’m stuck with the damage announcer?”

The top-heavy maiden’s voice was next, “Where are we?”

“Uh, welcome to my workplace. Would you like a drink?”

“Really? I’d be ever so inexplicably grateful. How can I make it up to you?”.

I chuckled, using True Vision to see how frustrated Truck-kun was, stuck in the tiny sound studio outside of the true structure of this reality.

“What about you, uh, nightmarish coagulation of the animal kingdom?” the damage announcer asked, clearly nervous. “Should I call you Truck-kun?”

Truck-kun stared daggers at the damage announcer who made a desperate squeaking noise.

“Uh, maybe not that name then. Would you, uh, like a drink?” the damage announcer asked, trembling.

There was a pause as Truck-kun considered this. “What do you have?”

Apparently the damage announcer had ramune soda and crackers.

Truck-kun sat with the top-heavy maiden and drank soda.

The damage announcer opened his mouth to ask a question.

Truck-kun answered before the announcer could speak, “If either of you talk even once I’ll eat you and enjoy the silence.”

The two of them sipped their sodas as quietly as humanly possible.

I had no doubt that Truck-kun had the ability to remake his body, but not instantly. Now I had time. There was one more thing to do to complete this final step in my master strategy. I started by sitting down and focusing.

Eventually Nyarin found me. I sat, eyes closed, focused. Red flame roiled from my eyes high enough to occasionally lick up over my eyebrows.

She waited, sitting nearby.

After a few minutes I had a bit of attention to spare and nodded to her, keeping my eyes closed lest I slip up and have to start over. “He’s coming back soon,” I said.

“Soon?” she said, softly and slowly so as to not break my evident concentration.

“Well, I’m not very good at this part, so it will take a while, but I figure many in ten minutes?”

“And what do we do then?”

I smiled and took a moment to open my eyes and enjoy the look on her face when I said, “We’ll just have to accept his surrender.”

It was more like twenty minutes later, but my job was done. Nyarin asked me a few questions, ears forward and content, since twenty minutes is a rather long time and she understandably grew impatient.

When it was done I stood, very glad that this game world was missing details like low back pain and ‘tired butt from sitting too long’. Sometimes the bugs in a game can be quite useful.

“Did it work?” she asked.

“What do you take me for, some kinda idiot?” I responded with my best rogue’s smile.

She laughed. “I saw you eating a rose about an hour ago.”

“I offered you some. Don’t be mad just because you missed your chance.” I closed my eyes even as I joked with her.

I could feel Truck-kun out there, displaced from this reality but no less real himself. He was alive, but he was no longer frantically trying to scramble back into reality as a nightmare slime meat monster and claw my face off.

“Should we resurrect him?” she pointed to a dialog menu that floated in the air nearby. It would take a negligible amount of game currency to bring him back, fully healed, with a body.”

“I’m going to make him wait,” I said, stretching out the words as I considered. “After everything I just saw, I need a bath in the worst way.”

Nyarin gave me her own crooked roguish smile. “I know just the place.”

I smiled as she told me which Isekai to look for in the spell. “Dammit,” I said with happy sarcasm, “not another Isekai.”