Chapter 36

I explained my plan to escape the warped and malfunctioning Isekai spell. Truck-kun listened with a minimum amount of rolling his eyes at the parts where I was hopelessly ignorant of how the Isekai spell actually worked.

I’ll give the Baku Truck-kun credit. He had lived long enough that he didn’t see much point in keeping grudges. He’d rather kill me, but his promise made him a team player. He was eager to keep his end of the bargain and get free.

He listened to my plan, nodding, and correcting bits where I got the theory wrong. I might have pulled one over on him, but he still knew lifetimes more than me.

“It will take time,” I said with a sigh as I finished explaining the plan, “but after that we’ll be free. Your boss will be mad that you’ve been gone for years, but we’ll handle that later.”

Truck-kun smiled. “We’ve been working on accelerated time, idiot. Only a few hours have passed since you fell under the spell.”

“What?” I said, feeling a smile creep over my face. To me, I had assumed that many years had passed. I figured my body was sitting in a coma ward somewhere.

Truck-kun shook his head. “If we’d been gone for more than a day Kisshin would have reacted. This operation is top secret. There are other gods eager to figure out how she’s gotten so much power recently. She would have investigated.”

“Investigated?”

Truck-kun clarified. “Found us, killed everyone involved, and tried to find a replacement for the kiti kyatto here.”

Suddenly it made sense why Truck-kun was so eager to get out fast. “So Nyarin wouldn’t have died if Kisshin…” I struggled with the words.

“She would have burned you to ash, probably. The Bakeneko could never survive something like that. I would have found the process mildly uncomfortable. The worst part would have been handling an angry goddess.”

I nodded, completely terrified.

I had expected to no longer have an apartment or life to which I could return. The Truck-kun Isekai Fan forums had that kind of reverse life insurance where their stuff was collected by the beneficiaries if someone was successfully Isekai’d.

That was how I’d gotten half of my figurine collection.

I had assumed that my figures, and my games, and everything had already been taken. I had assumed that a forum thread had been started in my honor, recognizing me for the accomplishment of getting run over by a truck and sent some place better.

For the better part of a year, my goal had been to be the star of one of those forum threads. My goals had involved catgirls, heroism, and inexplicably grateful maidens.

Now I had different goals. If it had only been a few hours, my life would be waiting for me, intact. And now I was actually interested in living that life.

“Only a few hours,” I said, letting that sink in.

“We make time move quickly inside new customer heads,” Nyarin explained. “It saves on labor costs for hires like me. I work a week but only get paid for a day. It’s a ripoff.”

“It also keeps the spell more stable, kitty cat,” Truck-kun said, saying the last two words in English instead of Japanese like ‘kiti kyatto’.

Nyarin tensed when he said it. I wouldn’t have noticed it before we had lived together in Cafe Isekai, but there was a subtle crack in her usually fake perfect perkiness. I made a mental note to figure out what that was about.

Truck-kun continued with his detailed, nerdy mastery of the details of magic. “A new customer is more likely to require the Isekai to be reset. We’d rather do that when the spell is fresh, within a day or two. Resets can crash an older spell. You nearly crashed yours with all of those resets.”

Nyarin nodded. “After the customer settles in, I leave their head, let the spell run on autopilot, and crank the speed back down as low as the customer can tolerate. The goddess measures worship in real time. The slower time moves, the more energy she gets.”

“Oh,” I said, “that kinda solves a mystery the Truck-kun Isekai Fans have been puzzling over. Some Isekai stories happened in real time. A year in Isekai equaled a year in real life. For others, they had lifetimes pass in an instant.”

“Yeah,” Truck-kun admitted, “between the time dilation and fake memories people under the spell might have a very different subjective experience.

I nodded. We had fully discussed my plan. All that was left was to implement it and go home.

Home. The idea had a warmth to it that I had nearly forgotten could exist. “So,” I turned to Truck-kun, “are you ready to be our heroic villainess?”

Truck-kun made an unladylike gesture at me. “Let’s get this over with. If I’m going to have to defeat every Isekai we’ve fallen through, I want to get started immediately.”

The Isekai spell had been badly warped by my fake heroism. The only way out was to go through the current story, let that Isekai dissolve after it was completed, and then move backward to the previous one.

We’d fallen down a long path of about a dozen Isekai. We’d dig our way up one by one, defeating and completing each one. In my head was the nearly constant pressure of all of the previously created realities. No wonder the spell eventually failed for so many victims.

I had asked Truck-kun if it might work to load up so many Isekai that either the spell or I collapsed under the weight of them.

“No,” he had said emphatically, “with the way the spell has been damaged, you’d almost certainly die, since humans don’t survive their head’s exploding.”

So we didn’t try that plan. Truck-kun was likely right about me not surviving a head explosion. The three of us ventured forth to enjoy an Isekai story. Just me, Nyarin, and the villainess of the story, Truck-kun.

“******,” the villainess cursed, “not another Isekai.”