Chapter 1: Isekai

Owen awoke slowly. Though he wasn’t in any pain, he felt strangely tired, like waking up after a long nap. The brightness of his surroundings was overwhelming, so he reached up and shielded his eyes as they adjusted to the ambient light. He appeared to be on a dirt road, sitting on his rump and propped against something hard.

The road cut through a large thicket of bamboo trees, the ends of which he couldn’t see. Their depths were lit by shafts of warm sunlight, which cascaded down between the thin, elongated leaves. The forest floor was a littering of detritus from the trees, with a small handful of squirrels skittering and chittering along the ground. Overhead, Owen heard the soft, repeating chirps of birds, though he did not recognize the calls. The forest had that soft, earthy smell that he’d come to remember from trips to the mountains when he was a child.

How had he gotten here? Owen’s head tingled as he tried to remember. He’d been dreaming about some kind of bank robbery before this. But what about before he’d gone to sleep the night before? How had he ended up in the middle of nowhere?

He turned his head slightly to get a look at what he was resting on, and sure enough, it was his 1986 Bevrolet Custom Van. Its red and white finish glimmered in the sunlight from a fresh coat of paint.

He jolted in place, doing a double-take. His van wasn’t supposed to look so fresh. It wasn’t that he didn’t take care of his car’s paint job, but his van’s rustic look was an intentional decision. This, however, looked like he just bought it off the lot in 2020. Except for, well, the striped white and red ambulance pattern, but even that was a beautiful sunset sheen and pearly white in the sunlight.

What the hell? He squinted at the van, not believing his eyes. When… when did I do this? Just how toasted was I last night that I don’t remember getting a new paint job and driving out to the middle of bupkis nowhere.

He tousled his hair with his hand, trying really damn hard to remember where he’d been yesterday, but all he could think of was his strange dream with Dale and the bank robbery. Something about that dream had felt so real to him, and yet…

As he pulled his hand away from his head, he saw something gleaming on the inside of his forearm, just below the wrist. His throat tightened as he examined a brown, rhombus-shaped stone embedded into his skin, glimmering in the sunlight. With his other hand, he touched a finger to it.

A translucent, near-black screen popped into existence in front of his open hand. In a shock, Owen clenched his hand shut and jerked backward, banging his head against the rim of the van. The screen disappeared.

What the hell, what the hell, what the hell? Owen squeezed his eyes shut against the sharp pain in the back of his head, trying to keep his breathing under control. Don’t panic. Whatever you do, don’t panic.

Sadly, he was panicking.

Taking a deep breath, Owen forced his eyes open and stared down at the little brown gem once more. Its depths were opaque, and the skin around it was unmarred. It almost seemed like if he stuck his nail under it, he could pluck it right out of his forearm. Not that he would try that. Yet.

Glancing around and seeing nobody, Owen gingerly reached out with his index finger once more and tapped on the little brown gem.

Again, a translucent, dark screen popped into existence, about as wide as a smart tablet. On the surface of this screen, there was bright golden text arranged in a menu.

It read:

Owen Westward

Level 1

XP: 0

MP: 0

Class: None

Stats

Skills

Owen furrowed his brow. Nothing about this made sense. His name, sure. But his level? His MP? Or his Class?

A seed of suspicion sprouted inside him. Tentatively, he pressed his finger against the screen where it said Stats. Doing so, he felt just the slightest hint of a tingling sensation on his finger, but the screen moved just how he suspected it would. A second menu popped up, overlapping the first, reading:

Stat Name:

Rating

Physical

14

Psyche

15

Magic

4

Magic? Magic? Next to each stat, he noticed a small little plus mark. His mind working at a mile a minute, he clicked the plus mark next to Magic. The menu expanded, revealing a small list nested under the Magic stat, which read:

Mana Capacity

0

Mana Conversion Rate

1

Mana Charge Rate

0.5/1

Magic Learning Rate

16

Mana Control

14

There it was.The Magic stat had a breakdown of its assigned value by showing more stats beneath it. Which meant… which meant…

Which meant way too damn much for Owen right now. He closed his fist, and the menus disappeared once more. Clenching his eyes shut, he took in several deep breaths, leaned against the van, and tried to make sense of whatever the hell was going on.

He recalled his dream of the bank robbery. Had it not been a dream after all?

In which case… in which case…

Owen couldn’t finish the thought, instead touching his hand to his chest, where the robber had shot him. That was real, he realized, choking. And I’m... Where the hell am I?

All this new information still hadn’t answered his question. But, it told him something he hadn’t even considered up until this point. “I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore,” he whispered.

His van was here though. Looking brand-new, at that. If he understood his situation correctly (and he thought he did), then why was the van here? Owen stood and approached the driver door. It looked like his van from the outside, but something felt… off. It was too clean.

He opened the door to find the upholstery on the seats in perfect condition. Which was wrong. Very wrong. He was a car mechanic. And he did construction. His seats always had grease and dirt on them. So he found it more than perturbing that his car seats, his van floor, and his dashboard were completely clean. There weren’t even any spare screws jangling around the cupholder.

But the back of his van outright horrified him.

He pulled the side door open with a slam, to see only a skeleton of what used to be his vehicle. Its carpet flooring had no seats, no tools, and no amenities but for a small cot adjoined to the inside of the van.

“No, no, no, no!” he gasped. “My tools. What happened to my tools? And my TV? Where’s all my stuff?!”

In his previous life (seeming that was actually what it was at this point, he deemed it appropriate to call it such), his van had been the center of his life. Sad? Perhaps. But after his dad died and he dropped out of high school, Owen used his van as his base of operations for all his work and life. He kept his tools, supplies, food, and clothes all in his van. And it was all gone.

Actually, that made him wonder. He glanced down at himself, and noticed that he was wearing his construction attire-- a dark tan denim hoodie and black work trousers, along with his steel-toed boots. So, he was still in his “normal” clothes at least. But where was the rest of his stuff?

Sighing with dissatisfaction, Owen closed his van’s side door. He pressed his forehead against the hot metal, groaning. What was he supposed to do? Why was he even here? Where was here?

Before he could begin to answer his own questions, a strange, high-pitched shriek broke the quiet around him. He froze, his blood chilling as the cry lasted for several long, excruciating moments, sounding like nails on a chalkboard.

When it at last subsided, there was silence. No birds chirping. No squirrels chittering. Just the rustling of a light wind through the trees.

And, faintly heard, there were harsh cracking sounds, like those of axes on wood. And the grunts and cries of men and women.

Owen whipped his head about, training his ears on the source of the noise. Nineteen years growing up in a poorer section of town had instilled in him life-saving instincts, and those instincts were telling him to get in the van and drive the hell out of there.

And if he were back home, he would have done just that. But something in him said that he needed to see the source of that terrible cry. That if he saw it with his own eyes, and it were truly something otherworldly, it would confirm everything that he’d gathered up until this point.

He got into the van, looking for the keyhole but finding none. Of course, checking his pockets, he didn't have his keys anyway. Instead, for the first time, he noticed a small brown gemstone identical to the one in his wrist embedded in the center of the steering wheel, where the horn would have been.

A part of him knew what would happen when he touched the stone before he even did it. A little black menu popped up, with the same golden text as before. Except, this time, it read:

1986 Bevrolet Custom Van

Open Vehicle Management Menu

Well, it was obvious what the big power button in the center did. Owen briefly noted the Vehicle Management Menu option, but if what he thought was going down was actually going down, he could look at menus later. For now, he jabbed his finger into the power button UI, which glowed red when he did so.

The vehicle hummed to life. But… it was too quiet. Owen expected the usual low growl of his combustion engine to start vibrating the car, but it never came. The gas gauge shot up to full, but now that he was looking, Owen noticed there wasn’t an engine heat gauge. Just the gas, the speed, and the RPM clock. It looked like driving an electric, but with a manual.

Still, a car was a car was a car, and Owen didn’t want to doddle around wondering about the internal mechanics of his strangely upgraded van. He put the car into first gear and started off in the direction where he thought he’d heard the shriek come from.

He followed the dirt road. It led along a shelf in the terrain, with the land on his left rising gently and that on his right falling rather steeply away. He could still drive on both terrains, but the latter direction would certainly be quite terrifying.

As he was pulling forward, dirt spraying out beneath his tires, the shriek came again. It felt almost vorpal in nature, like it could cut through him if but only a little sharper. The hairs on his arms stood up as he drove. Once the sharp screech subsided, he rolled down the window and listened intently for the grunts and cries of the men and women. With how quiet the engine was, he could actually still hear them in the distance, somewhere further down the road, it sounded like.

He picked up speed, pulling along the narrow road with the bamboo stalks streaming past him in a sea of green.The sound of battle-- or at least, he assumed it was battle-- grew closer, until the road curved around a bend, and the commotion came into view.

Further down the right side, a great clearing had formed in the bamboo, where the ground had flattened out in a small valley. Within that clearing of broken bamboo stalks and torn leaves, there was what could only be described as a monster.

It was a long, violet, sinuous, reptilian monster with wings like a dragon. Its maw was elongated, with a serpentine tongue flicking out from between razor sharp fangs. Its eyes were blackened, with no visible irises or pupils. It was prowling within a short circle on thin back legs, using its wings as makeshift front legs.

Surrounding it were five people, three of which lay unmoving in the broken bamboo. The two others stood several yards away from the monster, placing the monster on Owen’s left, and the people on Owen’s right. Of those still standing, one was a man in gleaming metal armor, wielding a sword between his hands. Behind him stood a woman in a fitted tan tunic and brown trousers, with a long dagger in one hand. Her hair was a radiant golden color with flecks of blue scattered throughout her locks. It was tied up in a loose, low ponytail that trailed down her back, with loose bangs scattered in front of her face.

But most importantly, her free hand was glowing.

Before Owen could take stock of the situation any more than he had, the knight in armor charged straight for the monster with a battlecry, his sword raised and ready to swing. The monster did not move to meet him partway, but once he was close enough, it lashed out, blindingly quick. A tail that Owen hadn’t noticed before flicked out from behind it, cutting through the metal armor like butter, and sending a great geyser of blood spraying into the air.

For a moment, the knight stood still. Then, he crumpled to the ground in a bloody heap.

Oh, that’s not good.

Owen knew what he had to do. With the knight gone, nothing stood between the monster and the woman. Again, he’d never considered himself a hero. But sometimes, you just had to act because it was right.

He turned the van and took it off the road as the monster began to creep toward the golden-haired woman. As it picked up speed, so did he. His van crashed through at least a dozen bamboo stalks as it barreled down the hill. Owen clenched his teeth with each impact, his bones shaking in their frame with each bump and dip as he went, his stomach rising in his throat with each lurch of the van.

The monster broke into a gallop as it came closer to the woman, its maw open wide to attack, its fangs gleaming and dripping with venom.

Owen wasn’t going to make it in time. The monster would reach the woman before he could reach it.

Then, a bright, glowing white light erupted from the woman’s hand. It was stronger than any firework Owen had ever seen, blinding him as he careened forward. The monster shrieked, and then--

Owen’s van hit the monster dead on.

Even through watering eyes, he could see its form pressed up against the hood of his van. Remembering keenly that its tail could cut through metal, Owen didn’t bother stopping. With the monster in tow, he crashed through several more bamboo trees, one after the other, only to come to a violent stop by slamming into a large boulder sticking up out of the dirt.

There were no airbags this time. Owen jerked forward, caught only by his seatbelt, the breath knocked out of him. He would have screamed if he could, as his car crumpled around the stone, the monster crushed between the two of them.

Silence took the forest once more. Owen tasted iron in his mouth. Definitely blood. He was pretty sure he’d bit his cheek during the crash. The monster’s thick neck and maw lay lifeless across the hood of his van. Or, at least, he hoped it was lifeless. He wasn’t exactly a biologist. But if he’d done this to a person? They’d be waking up in a new world filled with magic right now.

Too bad he’d wrecked his van… again.

Groaning, he unlatched his seat-belt and pulled himself out of the open window. The crash had been enough to warp the metal frame, but it was still large enough for him to get out. Still, everything hurt. And he found himself using his choicest swear words as he cut himself on broken glass and metal.

He dropped to the dirt and stood up quickly despite his body protesting. He wasn’t going to die again. Rather than inspect the monster, though, he simply scrambled away as fast as possible, until he was absolutely sure he was out of reach of that thing’s tail.

It was then that he noticed that the young woman was staring at him. He hadn’t seen it before, but a trickle of blood went down one side of her face, where she’d received a cut on the temple. Despite that, at this close of a distance, he could easily tell that she was the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen.

Her features were slender, with a button nose, full, pink lips, and large, ice-blue eyes. However, her most distinctive features were the bright shades of red just below each eye. Even this close, he couldn’t quite tell, but they seemed to be… scales? And now that he looked closer, he saw that her pupils were long and narrow, like a serpent’s.

Realizing that he was staring, Owen scratched his head and bashfully said, “Hi.”