Chapter 11

The sun was starting to set, the temperature was dropping and Ben was completely naked. When he looked at himself he was glad to see that, aside from the loss of much of his body hair, he still looked completely human. If anything, his muscles seemed more substantial than they'd been before. There was nothing ethereal or magical about his new form though, he was just an extremely tiny human with pretty six-year old girl designed wings on his back.

He shivered. He'd been floating, because flying implied some sort of Newtonian physics were involved, and as it stood he fluttered his wings every two or three seconds and remained at a stable altitude. His wings were neither large enough nor generating enough force to keep him airborne, so magic was the only conclusion that made sense.

Floating drained his mana, true, but his new racial trait of being [Magical] seemed to offset the cost quite perfectly. It felt less like the strain of holding a string of numbers in his mind, and more like the mental strain of driving in light traffic. An hour? Easy, refreshing even. Four hours? Very doable. Eight Hours? Doable, with a couple pit stops, but also not as much fun anymore.

A wind blew and Ben huddled in on himself, the ocean chilled air cutting right through his [Extremely Tiny] body.

“Just need to know one thing,” Ben said, “before I decide if I want to live, or if it's just not worth it at all.”

With a sense of dread, Ben lifted a hand up the side of his face, feeling his facial hair was still there, then kept it going until he was delicately probing his ears. They were still round, and more importantly, they weren't pointed.

“Oh, thank God,” Ben said, relaxing by a crucial fraction.

Ben had been, and would be again God willing, an avid reader of sci-fi and fantasy. He couldn't remember when he started reading, but books and stories had been a part of his routine for as far back as his memory allowed him to recall. Rather than individual books, he tended to read entire sub-genres within fiction. He read most all of the 'magic teenager in the magic school' books, even the really shitty ones; all of the good 'transported to another world' stories, first the American ones, then the Japanese ones when he'd discovered they were 'a thing'; a huge swath of stories set in space; and as many ten-to-twenty thousand page grand fantasy series as he could find.

Ben was a fast reader, he could chew through a three hundred page novel in a night, so he considered them a bad investment. He enjoyed reading the same way some people enjoyed drinking, and he wasn't going to cut it out of his life, no matter what.

Yes, he was even familiar with the newfangled LitRPG, which he still wasn't sure was a real thing, or just bad fantasy/sci-fi with menu screens. Still, they tended to be entertaining, and more importantly, there were a lot of them. So he had happily spent six months reading basically all of them. Including the really shitty ones.

All of this was a long way of saying that in the course of his consumption of all things fiction, he had, as many other people had, developed certain strong opinions about things one way or another. Some people didn't like dragons, other people did. Some people liked isekai, some people hated it.

Some people liked elves, and there was something wrong with them, at least as far as Ben was concerned. They always came across as snooty, superior, and perfect, and he just didn't like them. Having pointy ears would be intolerable. He'd have had to find a way to cut them off, or dock them like some people did to dogs. The pointy ears, to Ben, symbolized everything wrong with elves, which was;

Nobody has enough time to hear Ben rant about elves, he could go on forever about them.

Yes, Ben was a life-long expert in fiction and conspiracy theories, which were just a form of advanced semi-fiction.

So, Ben thought to himself, he should feel way more prepared for this than he actually did. He should, for instance, know that he needed to go down into the forest, find a safe place to sleep, find something sharp, and try and kill a bunch of monsters that were way out of his weight class, because that typically gave over the top, over-powered rewards.

Ben cleared his throat, his tiny face and ears turning red when he remembered trying to confront a gremlin, which looked to be the weakest of all monsters, when he still had an almost three-foot height advantage over it.

The wind blew again and Ben scanned the area for one last time. The coastline was unnaturally quiet, because everything that lived on it was dead, wiped out by a tidal wave. He could possibly find shelter on the beach, but he doubted he would. Ben looked out to the ocean and his head started to shake from side to side without him telling it to. No way, his body said, purple skies are that way, and purple skies are death.

The forest stretched as far as he could see and never ended. The canopy was unnaturally thick, and it would doubtlessly be dark.

It also might be warm, Ben thought as he shivered. If he had a mirror, he was sure he'd see parts of him were turning blue. Canopy that thick? It's got to keep the forest at least somewhat warm, like a big blanket.

Ben spat, and with a depressing feeling, realized his spit was now a fraction of the size of a raindrop.

He didn't know why it bummed him out, but it did.

“Ok, new rules,” Ben said to himself, “Rule one: fuck grays forever, they’re the worst, period. Rule two: pay closer attention when The System seems smug and annoying in an announcement, the dude likes wordplay. Rule three: don't die. Rule four: you do not talk about fight club,” Ben said, then cracked a smile.

“I'm gonna go crazy out here,” he said, still smiling, angling down and heading towards the trees, “just absolutely loony-toons, full-on talking to myself, make a pony Tulpa and lose my god-dang mind,” Ben continued.

“Wish I had a book to read,” he continued, knowing that soothing his nerves with the sound of his own voice was a sure-fire way to go insane, but accepting that his sanity might be an acceptable loss compared to his life. “Or a volleyball, maybe having my own Wilson will lessen the effects of madness.” The trees were closer now, and Ben pushed himself to his max speed.

It wasn't that fast.

“I mean, people come back from being crazy, right?” Ben asked himself, “like, homeless people, they can get their acts together if they put some effort into it, right? This just isn't going to work,” Ben said, noticing that while he could maneuver very nimbly, his top speed left something to be desired.

“Ok, new plan,” Ben said, then formed the same design of utility pocket he'd used underwater, blasting air, instead of water, out from behind him to increase his speed. He sped up, and felt his flight path immediately become unstable, air rushing against him as it was pulled along with the blast of his utility pocket. Ben stopped and hovered in midair thinking about the problem.

Ben scrunched his face one way, then scrunched it the other way, smacked his lips a couple of times and thought about it.

“I'll figure it out,” Ben said, waving a hand and committing it to 'the future', “just gotta. . . think about air-planes and stuff for a while. Yeah, like jet engines.”

The closer Ben got to the treeline, the less and less he was thinking about anything at all. Instead, his eyes were focused, scanning the area for anything either useful, or threatening.

So far, nothing on either front.

He took a deep breath, then silently wished he wasn't so brightly colored, and accelerated towards the green. The approach was surreal, the canopy going from an indistinct viridian blur, to detailed leaves and branches.

Oh, they looked so enormous. The foliage, a single leaf, was larger than Ben's entire body. Even with his tiny form, he still had to be careful as he navigated deeper into the canopy, which was almost like a maze separating the sky from the ground below. It wasn't a hard maze however, and no demonic guardian patrolled it, so Ben was able to break through without much fuss.

What he saw with his tiny little perspective made him land on the nearest stable surface, sit and just take it all in.

Twigs, or what had been twigs, became decently sized branches, and what used to be branches now looked like strange, horizontal trees growing from the trunk of round, wooden skyscrapers. At Ben's size, skyscraper didn't do the sheer size of the trees justice.

They were like pillars that reached all the way to space, each one of them a Tower of Babel fully built. He suddenly had a better understanding of the world tree, Yggdrasill, from Norse Mythology.

The air was warm, or at least warmer.

Some of the trees were normal, with rough brown bark, or brown-red bark. Some of the bark looked like what could be found on a cedar, some looked like oak, some like that tree that shed its bark that looked like strips of paper.

But some of the trees were green, with smooth bark like broccoli, and they were giving off a soft light. Those were the rarest type of tree, at least by number in this part of the forest, but they made Ben glad. He'd been worried about how dark it was going to be, but the glowing broccoli trees gave everything a soft, dim ambient light to navigate by.

Ben would have whistled, but he was an intelligent person, and he recognized that the beautiful, magical forest was pretty quiet, and that there was probably a good reason for that.

Instead, he settled for looking around, indulging his eyes in their desire to see something other than an endless ocean, a bland and poorly decorated town, or carnage and destruction.

'This is nice,' Ben thought, resting his elbows on his knees and his cheekbones on his knuckles. It was the perfect posture for sitting on a tree branch while contemplating how little one wants to be on a tree branch.

He was supposed to be in Hawaii! Now that he really had a chance to sit down and think, now that it was safe enough, his negative emotions about this whole scenario surfaced and demanded to be indulged in or dealt with.

Short Bus. . . man, that sucked so bad. Objectively, he'd only known the shark for what, two days? Who cares! Short Bus had been bro-for-life material! Now he was gone, and the world wasn't as much fun as it had been when he was around. Ben put his hands together and said a silent prayer for his dead friend, promising to bully dolphins and orcas every chance he got.

His parents were dead, and he'd watched them die. It had been beautiful but it had also been horrible. The best and the worst kind of death. Ben felt terrible guilt that they had died for him, specifically him, to give him a better shot in the world.

Was that the only reason he was still alive right now? The Ring of Sacrifice?

He felt the vivid memory of reaching for that terrible temptation of martyrdom, of committing himself to it, and of having it denied because there were already too many martyrs! Humanity had gleefully, psychotically, sacrificed itself to the maximum degree; to the point that The System had needed to make a new rule about it.

For some reason, it made Ben chuckle.

Of course his dad would tell him to have a damn adventure with his last words. The old man always knew how to light a fire under his ass, how to get him to stop smoking so much pot and apply for a real job for once. How to get him to actually live his life, rather than just pretend to.

The worst part was Ben couldn't even cry about it. It was like they weren't even dead, just transformed into. . . Ben shook his head. English wasn't a language well suited for encapsulating the concepts of the divine, a guardian angel, luck, and humanity all at once.

“Fuck,” Ben whispered, drawing further into himself. He was feeling it now, or at least, he was fully aware of just how scared he was. He'd always benefited, and suffered, from an unusually strong separation between his emotions and his mind. He could be angry for weeks before he realized he was mad, or be sad and not even realize it. Privately, he always thought it was a male thing, but he'd always kept that opinion to himself because he didn't know if it was true, or just sexist.

His heart felt like it was quivering, and he didn't want to look at anything. He didn't want to even exist anymore. Fear gripped him and clenched his jaw, his teeth hurt from the force. Back in the old world if he felt like this, he would have grinned and bore it till he got back to his apartment, then he would have gotten on his computer and listened to music; would have let the songs of his world turn his feelings to sound and let the sound carry them away.

“Took that for granted,” Ben whispered, desperately trying to catch a melody in his mind, trying to get some kind of relief, but the music wouldn't come.

“Took clothes for granted too,” Ben said, noticing how rough the bark was on his bare ass.

He knew what his Dad would have told him if he'd called him up on the phone right now. They would have talked about it all, and he would have been worried, but Ben knew the advice he would have given.

He would have told Ben, like he'd told him many times before, that it was going to be all-right. Then, he would have told him to think of a way to say 'Good', about the whole situation. He was a big fan of looking for some gag-worthy way to see a positive angle in any situation, no matter how stupid it sounded.

He'd say, 'Well Ben, you know what to do. Find the positive, even if it's something that would make other people look at you like you were stupid. Even if you don't really believe it, it's still better to find at least one good thing to focus on than a dozen bad things.'

So, Ben sat there, and it didn't take him long.

“Well, this is good,” he said, without much conviction, “because this is about as bad of a situation as I could think of, and I'm still alive. Actually,” he said, gaining a bit of energy, “good. Now I've only got straight-forward problems in my life. All I need are clothes, a weapon, and a safe place to sleep. That's easy, I don't even have to worry about paying rent anymore. Shit, good! I don't ever have to pay rent again! Good! According to The System, I'm royalty, so people should be paying rent to me!”

Ben snorted to himself, pushing the fear back.

“This is easy. I've just got to stay quiet for a while and figure out the rules out here. So I'm [Extremely Tiny], good, now the food and water I've got will last me forever. Good, I can eat sushi every day till I'm sick of it. I always wanted to try that, and now I don't have to wait till I get promoted to a supervisor to do it.”

Ben knew how stupid it was that doing this made him feel better, but he also knew that was pretty much the point. It was funny to focus on the positive in such a clearly bad scenario, and if he could still laugh about it, how bad was it, really?

Objectively, really bad.

Ben got up and grabbed a piece of alien tuna from his utility pouch and started to munch on it just to make good on his last thought. One of his basic needs was checked, good! He looked around a bit to make sure he was in the clear, and started to fly towards one of the glowing, green broccoli trees. Why? It was glowing, where else was he going to go?

'Flying is pretty cool,' Ben thought to himself, wondering if the forest was always this quiet, or if the tidal wave had just killed everything that normally lived this close to the edge. He would have put his money on 'tidal wave', if he'd had any money, or anyone to gamble with.

'Wish I had a really nice gun,' Ben thought, still flying to the tree and again running against the problem of being slow. Ben needed to be able to move fast. Fast and small, the two words were practically married, and yet Ben was small and. . . well, not slow, but not fast either.

On a lark, Ben mentally asked the utility pocket if it had any ideas and waited with anticipation, listening for anything like a voice. Nothing, dammit.

Frustrated, wanting to move faster, and not really paying attention, Ben created a wire thin circle of a utility pocket around his body and used it to shoot a powerful blast of air forward.

Mr. Dyson would have been proud of Ben copying his bladeless fan design, which shot a solid column of air with incredible force, forming a hurricane gale effect, without expending a huge amount of energy. Inducement and Entrainment, quite a hell of a combo. Seriously, look it up, it’s awesome.

Ben, for his part, suddenly felt himself caught up in a wind, accelerating forward in a way which was undisputedly fast. The best part of it was, even after the sudden gust went away, Ben was still moving much faster than he normally could, only gradually slowing down.

He did not want to go slow, he wanted to fly fast. Very fast. Ben felt the effects of being [Extremely Tiny] in a very pronounced way, which is to say, he found he was highly excitable and that his impulse control wasn't what it used to be.

“OH MY GOD!” Ben screamed, making speed ring after speed ring, ripping forward at velocities which made his eyes water, and made navigating less of a skill and more of a risky gamble. The speed rings were cheap, easy and effective.

He was such a genius for thinking of them all on his own, without any help at all from his utility pocket.

“OHMYGODOHMYGODOHMYGOD,” Ben, at this point, realized he had far overshot his destination, and had literally been screaming as loud as he could for about. . . well, for too long. Screaming as loudly as he could for any amount of time was a bad idea in this situation.

Ben oriented himself in space, found another glowing green tree in the distance, and discretely accelerated himself forward, the blasts of air that propelled him were surprisingly quiet, which was good. He was so embarrassed he could die, but first he had to find a nice safe place, so he could then lay down and die.

Up close, Ben saw that the broccoli trees were covered in a semi-transparent green bark, and that the luminescence came from the darker green wood he could see behind it. He pressed his hand against it, and found it was firm, but soft, and very smooth.

“Hmmmm,” Ben said, feeling good feelings towards the tree. The light from it seemed to soak into him and ease his fatigue, soothing muscles and reducing his general sense of pain.

“This tree?” Ben asked himself, then answered himself, “This is my tree now, I have seized it with my royal authority, and I live here now.”

He'd said it like a joke, and it made him laugh.

Ben felt a wave of something pass through him, and suddenly he realized three things, three utterly, life-endingly important things; First, this really was his fucking tree, and there were creatures living in it that needed to go, now; Second, he needed to go to sleep as soon as possible; Third, he had no crown, and that made him feel more naked than being actually naked.

Some part of Ben knew, immediately, that he was no longer himself. It didn't feel bad, and it wasn't frightening, but without a doubt, his mind was being actively altered, and all Ben could do was watch the show.

He scowled, his hands probing around his head and indeed finding there was no crown at all. Unacceptable, he needed a crown if he was going to start evicting creatures from his property. He glanced around, and unbeknownst to him, a new skill assisted his sight. Ben flitted to a tree that was seeping a sticky, liquid sap and stole as much of it as he could with his utility pouch. Then, he rushed over to a little green twig and snapped it off its branch, stowing that away too. He repeated the process several more times, getting a couple of extras.

Down on the ground, a slightly shiny pebble of just the right size was also snatched up. Then, a bunch of moss as well. Ben landed on a nearby root and sat cross legged, his entire being focused on the critical task of making a crown.

Ben knew something was wrong with him, mentally, but an insane situation required an insane mindset, and his [Extremely Tiny] fairy body seemed to thrive in insanity.

Ben pulled a green, flexible twig from his utility pocket with a smooth, fluid motion, then pinched at it and scraped with his fingernails until he had a crude hole near the end of one side. He quickly pushed the other end through the hole and formed a circlet.

Then, without thinking about it at all, Ben formed a tiny utility pocket on the pad of an index finger and used it to smear a thin layer of resin on the outer edge of the circlet. His finger had become the most advanced hot-glue gun in the universe, and Ben hardly even noticed. He stuck moss to 'the crown', then affixed the slightly shiny rock to it as well. The rock was sort of blue, with black specks in it.

Ben put his new crown on his head and immediately felt more lucid and confident in himself, the strange feeling that had taken over vanishing. He laughed, remembering the frantic frenzy he'd just been in, and wondered what that had been about. He thought about taking the crown off as an experiment-

Ben did not take the crown off and scowled, because why would he ever take it off, he'd just put it on?

“I think my mind is being influenced by an outside force,” Ben said out loud, nodded to himself, then shrugged, and the sudden agitation abated. Wearing the crown felt great, and he'd never felt so focused in his life.

“I'll deal with this later,” Ben said to himself, “because honestly this is the least crazy thing that's happened to me in the last seventy-two hours.”

Ben felt another itch in his brain, then pulled out the extra sticks he'd stashed away and made two backup crowns. Just in case.

Ben took a deep breath and looked over at the green tree, at his tree, and once again felt the sensation in his mind that there were hostile creatures living in it, and that if he wanted the tree to really be his, he needed to remove them.

He yawned. There was some nagging feeling in his brain that told him he needed to sleep, or close his eyes, or meditate or something, but he couldn't focus while his tree was occupied.

“No weapon,” Ben said, looking down at his empty hands and naked body, “No armor either,” he spat, “but I can at least go see what I'm dealing with.”