[PREVIEW] Rise, Ye Tarnished Chapter 2

Issei stared at his hands, as though the whole world shattered like a fourth-wall screen break in a cartoon. Just to be sure, he stared at his computer screen, then back at his hands. With much hesitation, he slowly raised his left arm and ran it over his right, dragon-covered one. Scales rubbed against his fingers and the final lightbulb in his head fizzled out. 

He wasn’t imagining things. This wasn’t some sleep-deprived hallucination brought upon by hours of late-night gaming.

Somehow, the Grafted Dragon and the Godslayer Seal from Elden Ring ended up in his hands. 

Part of Issei wanted to scream. To run around and bang his head on the wall to make sense of the sheer insanity of the situation…but that would get his parents’ attention. And then he’d have to explain to them what happened earlier with the devil - and boy, that was still a revelation he was shocked about - and they’d asked how he even ended up with these, which he couldn’t answer because he didn’t have the slightest clue!

“Unreal…” he whispered, bringing the dragon arm closer. Everything about it looked absolutely real, even when it shouldn’t have been. The teeth and tongue inside the jaw, the membrane of the tiny wings, and even the patterns of the scales. Dragons weren’t real, but the arm looked as real as one could get!

Devils weren’t real either.

“...one mind-blowing event at a time, please,” he muttered to himself. He almost raised his arms to rub his forehead but he stopped himself. “Okay, how do I get these off? What did I do last time?” He bit his lip as he tried to recall how he’d made the items vanish. “Uh, you can go now? Disappear? Dispel? Release?"

To his dismay, nothing happened. “Come on, what was it?” he jumped from his seat and held his arms high. “I didn’t say anything last time, right? Maybe if I think of them disappearing, they’ll go away?”

Issei scrunched his eyes closed and imagined his arms. His regular, boring arms with no video game items on them. 

A breeze passed over his arms, and the ringing of windchimes tickled his ears. He opened his eyes, and to his relief, his arms were normal once again. He slumped over and exhaled, but his eyes soon flickered to the screen. The menu of Elden Ring stared back at him, and for once, the thought of stats and new equipment didn’t seem so exciting anymore.

“What do I even do with this…?”

Well, what he wouldn’t be doing was announcing this to the whole world; he’d watched enough anime to know that revealing magic powers to the public was generally a bad idea. Hell, the government would be knocking on their doors before dinner if he did! 

“I’ve gotta tell someone though. But who the hell could -” one face came to mind. He sighed again, though this time the first hints of a smile grew on his lips. “Motohama. I feel stupid for even asking.”

Calling Motohama an Elden Ring fanatic wasn’t an exaggeration. He’d followed every leak and rumor since the game’s announcement and was active in the internet forums, even serving as a moderator for one of them. When the first real trailers and gameplay reveals came out, not even peeping in the girls’ locker rooms could pull him away from his phone, an event that made Issei and Matsuda worry that aliens had brainwashed him. Or he’d found a girlfriend and left them in the dust, neither of them sounded appealing. Still, Motohama was the one who brought the game to their attention and always led their brotherhood in discussions about it.