Reborn as the OP Archmage (an Isekai adventure): Chapters 1-6

So, when I'm not working hard on other things, I've been writing this a few hundred words at a time to get it out of my brain. I think there's enough here now for people to get a feel for what I'm doing. Let me know what you think...or not...lol. Nobody is waiting for this. It's not under contract. It's just a fun thing. ~Eric

***

Chapter 1

“You’re lucky to even have this job, you perpetual screwup!”

Jack Smith did his best to keep on a contrite expression and said, “Yes, Mr. Parker.”

“I never should have hired you in the first place!”

Jack just kept his eyes down. These tirades used to be really hard on his self-esteem. It wasn’t until Larry, the big, burly, soft-spoken man who Jack ate lunch with most days, explained things that his self-esteem started to recover. Mr. Parker, the belligerent, gray-haired bastard, did this to everyone. Not because they did anything wrong, but so he could avoid giving a raise to anyone, ever. By inventing problems, the man could give them crappy performance reviews. Not crappy enough to get fired, just crappy enough to avoid a raise. That struck Jack as wildly unfair and, if there was any reason left in the world, probably illegal. Not that the higher-ups cared that one of their low-level supervisors was screwing over even lower-level maintenance staff. Hell, thought Jack, he probably gets a raise every year for keeping costs down.

While Parker continued his tirade, Jack considered his job title. Maintenance staff. It was one of those corporate phrases that was supposed to give people dignity or something. Jack didn’t understand it. He just cleaned things. Why not call those people cleaning staff? He was sure that there had to be a reason for the silly phrase, he just didn’t know what it was. He certainly wasn’t going to ask Mr. Parker about it. As lousy as the job was, and it was epically lousy on some days, he needed it. He heard that the economy was bad, but that was something for people with a lot more money and education than he had. For poor people rocking nothing but a high school diploma, the economy was always bad.

He'd been bitter about that high school thing for a long time. While everyone else was filling out college applications, he’d been working two jobs. One legal, and one that was completely under the table for a guy that, looking back, Jack thought might well have been in the mob. Neither job had paid well. Not that his current job paid much better, but it was full-time and didn’t require him to worry about unpaid taxes on illegal income. What those jobs had done was let him keep something like shelter over his head and the head of his father. His father had been sick all the time. They never knew with that. You need insurance to find those things out when a seemingly able-bodied, fifty-year-old man was sick. Jack had been very interested in eating occasionally, so there had been no insurance. As for his mother, who knew? She’d checked out of Hotel Family pretty early in his life.

Of course, his father couldn’t survive without Jack paying the bills. That had made the very idea of commuting to a college and attending classes laughable. Sure, there were student loans, but that only made sense if you were sure you were going to finish college. With his father seemingly coming up on the end of his life, Jack lacked that certainty. Instead, he’d taken the best job he could find right out of high school. He’d become a janitor because it paid a couple dollars more an hour than the jobs at the fast food joints and grocery stores. And that was how his life became set in dreary stone for four long years. He worked all day cleaning toilets, mopping hallways, or emptying trash cans. He let jackholes in suits talk at him like he was a toddler or brain damaged. He kept his head down and paid the bills, if only just barely.

Then, his father had finally died. Jack still had some residual guilt about how relieved he’d been. It didn’t seem like the sort of thing a son should feel when his father dies, but he’d fantasized about finally going to college or maybe just taking a vacation for the first goddamn time ever. Those fantasies had died beneath the crushing debt that came with arranging something even vaguely like a decent funeral. There had been so many bills between the plot, the casket, the gravestone, and the actual ceremony, which only he had attended. His father had family out there, somewhere, but they hadn’t cared enough to even show up for the funeral.

If he’d been thinking straight, Jack would have gone in for the cremation and called it a day. But even with years of preparation, his father’s death had still been a blow. He’d been feeling fragile, alone, and nostalgic. He’d justified the burial by thinking it was the last thing he’d ever do for his father. What he’d ended up doing was consigning himself to more years working as maintenance staff. He hadn’t dared to do anything that would endanger a budget that had become more, rather than less, precarious after his father’s death. The problem was that it had left him a twenty-seven year-old-man whose life looked nothing like the lives of the people he saw in magazines or the movies. A man who had to stand there and take it as his boss made shit up to ensure he didn’t get a measly 1% raise.

When the dressing down finally ended, Jack made his way to the small locker he’d been assigned in the maintenance room. He was hanging his coveralls in the locker when Larry walked over and loomed. It wasn’t evil looming, like some kind of vampire. Just the sort of looming that anyone who stood six-foot four and weighed the better part of three hundred couldn’t avoid.

“You okay?” asked Larry.

Jack shrugged and said, “Yeah. It’s not like it’s new. I stopped listening when he got to the part about how he shouldn’t have hired me.”

“I usually stop listening about there, too,” said Larry with a sage nod. “You want to come eat with Lisa and me?”

Jack hesitated. Larry and Lisa, which was possibly the most meet-cute name pairing he’d ever heard, invited him over for dinner on a regular basis. He wasn’t sure if they’d semi-adopted him as some kind of surrogate child or if they were just that nice. Either way, he usually turned down two offers in three. He knew what Larry made and doubted that Lisa made much more at her telemarking job. In short, they didn’t have money to be feeding an extra person on the regular. After thinking about his dad, Jack knew he wasn’t going to be good company for, well, anyone. He shook his head.

“Thanks, but I’ll pass this time. I’m in a mood. I don’t want to drag you guys down.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah. I appreciate the offer, though. Next time. I promise.”

Larry clapped Jack on the shoulder and said, “Alright. Drive safe. If you can in that deathtrap of yours.”

“I’ll do what I can,” said Jack with an expression he hoped was a smile.

He hung around for another twenty or thirty minutes to give the commuters some time to thin out. The traffic wasn’t usually terrible, but Larry had hit the nail on the head. Jack’s car was being held together almost entirely by duct tape, willpower, and what had to be the intervention of some benevolent deity. It really wasn’t safe. The wheels were almost bare. The engine made noises that sounded very expensive. It would jump out of gear if he didn’t physically hold the shifter in place. As the for the brakes, terrible would be the kindest word for them. Navigating in that mobile traffic hazard had made Jack a very defensive driver. He used his keycard to get out of the now-locked building with a wave to the overnight security guy. He hadn’t met this one, but the guy looked a lot like the last overnight security guy just a bit older and lazier.

He walked a few blocks to the slightly cheaper parking garage that he’d taken to using to save five bucks a week. That five bucks could get him a pound of pasta, a jar of sauce, and a loaf of Italian bread if he caught the right sale. He could stretch that into two or even three meals. Worth the walk, even it was miserable in January. That’s what coats, gloves, and positive thinking are for, Jack thought. He got to the intersection and, without much thought, stepped onto the crosswalk when he got the green signal. That lapse of attention meant that he never saw the truck that hit him. There was just a screech of tires, and a brief explosion of impossible, reality-shattering pain. As darkness closed in around him, Jack thought, I should have had dinner with Larry and Lisa.

Chapter 2

“Hey, wake up!” commanded an unfamiliar feminine voice.

Jack’s eyes snapped open. He felt strange. A second ago, he’d been in a world of pain. And now? Now, he was standing in what looked to be a library. A massive library. A library so goddamn huge that it couldn’t possibly be real. He let his gaze wander briefly before they landed on the…smoking hot librarian? The woman was tall, slender, and had dark hair that was put up in a messy bun. She wore a white button down, a black skirt, heels, and fishnet stockings. A small pair of glasses gave her a vaguely academic look. She had a hand on one cocked hip and used the other to snap in front of his face a few times.

“Are you with me?” she demanded.

“I…Yes?” ventured the very confused Jack.

“Finally. Okay, before I do my part, do you have any questions?”

“Where am I? And why do you look like a librarian?”

“The librarian thing? Again?” she complained while rolling her eyes. “Listen, kid, that’s got nothing to do with me. Your monkey consciousness came up with a scenario so that your soul didn’t explode the way it would if you saw me in my true glory. So, if you’re seeing a librarian, that’s down to you and your fetishes. Don’t blame me.”

“So, what do you actually look like?” asked Jack, since he wasn’t sure what to do with the rest of what she’d just said.

“What are you seeing?”

Jack told her. She thought about it about for a second or two before she shrugged.

“A lot like that, except filled with cosmic power and so extraordinarily beautiful that there are no words in your monkey language to express it. Perks of goddesshood.”

“Right,” said Jack, drawing out the word to buy himself a second to think.

“Any other questions? You lot usually have them.”

If this was all a dream, Jack thought it was a very strange and vivid dream. If it wasn’t a dream, he genuinely didn’t know what to think. Unless this was some kind of alien abduction, but he didn’t see anything that looked like a probe sitting around.

“It’s not an alien abduction,” said the librarian.

“Did you just read my mind?” asked a stunned Jack.

“Why would I do that? You just had that maybe this is an alien abduction look on your face.”

“That’s a look?”

“It is for you people. Okay, seriously, any other more relevant questions?”

“Where are we?”

“Oh, good. We’re skipping past most of the stupidity this time. Fantastic. This,” she said, sweeping an arm around her, “is what you might think of as a—”

She gave him a long, hard look, sighed, and then continued.

“It’s like a bus stop. There are two outgoing buses from this particular stop. Which one you get on depends on the answer to this question. Do you still want to live?”

“What kind of idiotic question is that. Do I still want to live? I—” Jack trailed off as the implications hit him. “Wait. You’re saying I’m dead.”

“Ish,” said the librarian. “Dead-ish. Is not quite as cut-and-dried as you monkeys think it is. So, answer the question. Do you still want to live?”

“Well, has anyone said no to that? I mean, like, ever?”

“You’d be surprised,” said the librarian with a thoughtful look. “So, that’s your answer? Yes?”

“Yeah. I mean, I don’t want to be dead.”

“Alright, listen closely and don’t interrupt because I’m not going to repeat myself. You’re dead back on your world. Forever dead. Not going back for at least a thousand years dead. However, unlike so many of your kind, you were not a complete crapsack. On top of that, what you consider to be life screwed you hard, and then you got killed without ever really getting a chance to do anything. Therefore, the vast, mighty, and enigmatic powers-that-be have decided to give you another chance. And they’ll do it without wiping away your consciousness and memories the way they do with reincarnated souls,” she said before adding one more thought in a dry tone. “Huzzah.”

“I—” started Jack.

“Don’t interrupt. I’m not finished yet. You will be transported to another world, where you will inherit the body of someone who has recently died. It’s a fresh start in a fresh place with lots of… Freshness. Okay, that’s the end of my spiel.”

“I have questions!” shouted Jack.

“Question time is over.”

“But what’s your name?” asked Jack desperately as he felt himself start to be dragged toward something.

“Sirana,” said the librarian in a tired voice, before her eyes went wide. “Oh crap! I forgot to tell you. The place where you’re going has ma—”

Jack never heard the rest of that sentence as cosmic power yanked him from the celestial bus stop and sent him hurtling toward a new, fresh life. Sirana stared at the spot where the monkey soul had been standing a moment ago and clicked her tongue.

“Well, magic won’t be a completely new concept for him. I’m sure it won’t be a big deal for him to figure it out. How much trouble can one monkey get into with magic? Oh, damn it. I forgot to tell him about the floating boxes! I hate this job so much.”

Sirana fumed for a few minutes about this terrible job she’d been saddled with as a punishment for a few, tiny, insignificant errors in judgment. So what if she’d caused a few unplanned apocalypses? The monkeys would have just done it to themselves if she didn’t. Probably. Eventually, a tiny little elfin goddess poked her head in and looked around.

“The librarian thing? Again?”

“Apparently,” said Sirana. “Hey, out of idle and completely hypothetical curiosity, have you ever forgotten to tell one of the monkeys that they’re going to a world with magic? Or, just maybe, neglected to mention the floating boxes?”

“Sirana,” said the elfin goddess in a chiding tone. “You have to tell them those things. They don’t adapt well to surprises like that.”

“I’m sure it’ll be fine,” said Sirana. “Probably.”

Meanwhile, Jack was screaming like an injured banshee as his consciousness or soul or whatever the hell survives death was dragged between universes. He saw things that his mind immediately made him forget in a frantic, last-ditch attempt to preserve some fragments of sanity. All he could recall after was an echo of terror so intense that it made his bladder want to let go. Not that he had a bladder anymore. Or did he? Did souls have bladders? How would that even work? Of course, those random thoughts were interspersed between a nearly constant stream of…

“Oh god, oh god, oh god!”

Abruptly, the sense of being dragged transitioned into a sense of falling. Falling fast. Falling very, very fast. That impression brought on another bout of frantic half-prayers before it felt like he slammed into the ground at about a million miles an hour. Darkness swallowed him whole again.

Chapter 3

It was a persistent tapping on his cheek that finally dragged Jack back from the depths of a dreamless sleep. He waved a hand near his face with a lackluster gesture, and the tapping stopped. Jack’s body felt very strange, which was only exacerbated by a deep fatigue made him very disinclined to open his eyes. After a brief respite, however, the tapping began again.

“Five more minutes,” mumbled Jack.

Tap. Tap. Tap.

“Ugh, I’m awake,” he said, finally opening his eyes.

He turned to look at whoever had been prodding his cheek and almost let out an involuntary shriek. A huge black bird was staring at him from mere inches away.

“Caw!”

“Go away!” shouted Jack.

He pushed himself away from the crow, or maybe it was a raven. He’d never had a firm grip on the difference. One black bird was pretty much the same as any other black bird in his book. The bird hopped a little closer to him, tilted its head back and forth, and then let out another bird cry.

“Caw!”

Seemingly satisfied that Jack wasn’t dead, or wasn’t going to be easy scavenging, the bird spread its wings and flew off. Jack watched it go with a gimlet eye. He’d been forced to clean enough bird droppings off his windshield over the years that he found the people who obsessed over the winged menaces baffling. While the fatigue still lingered over him like a fog, all the sleepiness had been driven away by the bird. He reached up to rub at his eyes with the palms of his hands.

“This is such a weird day,” he complained.

The conversation with the goddess was still fresh in his head, which didn’t make it seem any less surreal. He hadn’t been there long enough for anything to really sink in. She said I died, he thought. Part of him didn’t want to believe it…but he also remembered the sound of squealing tires, the sudden burst of soul-crushing agony, and everything going dark. That made the idea a lot more plausible. If he’d gotten hit by a car or truck, that was the kind of thing that killed people or left them in body casts. She also said something about sending me off to have a fresh life in some to her world, he mused. I guess that’s easy enough to check. He lowered his hands and looked around.

The place he found himself was partway up a mountain that looked to be covered with a thin pine forest. While he had seen pictures of places like that a few times, Jack was quite certain he’d never been to one. He’d never been farther than ten miles from where he’d grown up, which was the same apartment he’d been living in his entire life. Beyond that, the sky looked wrong. It was still blue-ish, but it had a green tinge that made it look more aqua than the sky blue he expected. All of that seemed to support the notion that this was another world. Then, there were the craters all around him, some of which still had a bit of smoke rising out of them. Those were alarming. If this really was another world, had he been dropped into the middle of war zone?

“I guess it doesn’t matter now,” he muttered.

Even if it was a war zone, it wasn’t exactly like he could just leave and try again for a different world. He doubted that this second chance, if it was a second chance and not some supremely bizarre coma dream, came with a third chance. Shaking his head, he looked down at himself and let out another shriek. He was covered in blood. It was dried blood, mostly, but still blood. Before he had time to process that, a translucent blue box appeared in his vision. At first, it just hung there, blank and lifeless. Jack jerked back from it. However, the determined box remained in the exact same position in his field of vision no matter how he moved his head. Then, something appeared in the box.

***

Initiating…

***

“Initiating?” asked Jack. “What does that mean?”

A pain that seemed to pierce his left eye and drive into the depths of his brain drew a scream of agony out of Jack. He collapsed back onto the ground and thrashed as the torturous feeling seemed to stretch time into an eternity of suffering. He pawed at his eye like he could find the knife that someone had just rammed directly through his optic nerve and jerk it free. As swiftly as it arrived, the pain vanished. Jack took a few heaving breaths and tried to calm down. His heart was pounding so hard he could hear it.

“What the actual fuck!” he shouted.

He just sprawled there for several seconds, angry about the unexpected assault on his nerve endings. When he finally opened his eyes, he saw that there was new text in the box.

***

Initiation complete!

Body diagnostic commencing…

Error…Body on record…

Celestial Override Command 4: Virtuous Soul Re-embodiment…

Recalibrating…

Diagnostic complete!

***

“Body diagnostic? Celestial override?” Jack mouthed as he tried to make sense of what he was looking at.

He had absolutely no frame of reference for anything like this. It was like he’d stepped into some kind of bizarre science fiction movie, except he’d arrived halfway through and nobody had given him any context. He thought back to the sort-of conversation he’d had with the supposed goddess. In hindsight, she hadn’t seemed particularly invested in her work.

“Sirana,” he growled. “Did you half-ass what was supposed to be my orientation?”

As soon as he thought it, he had the absolute certainty that it was true. She was supposed to tell him everything he’d need to know about this place. She just couldn’t be bothered to do it. He didn’t even know what kind of money they used here. Or if there were cars. Or what kind of government they had wherever it was that he landed. Would he get arrested on sight for walking into a town covered in blood. As panic started to overwhelm his better sense, new text appeared in the floating blue box, not that it helped much.

***

Name: Brandis Marshway

Rank: Count

Occupation: Arch-mage

HP: 114

MP: 3700

Int: Max

Wis: Max

Char: 2

Str: 4

Dex: 3

Con: 4

Spells: …

***

Jack’s eyes glazed over as he saw the absurdly extensive list of spells. The only thing he really took away from it was that they were organized by tier. Aside from that, all he really learned was his, apparently, new name, that he was a count, and that his job was arch-mage. Even that last thing had baffled him until he saw the list of spells.

“I guess that means magic is real in this world,” he told the nearby trees.

A little part of him was excited about that, but he was a lot more worried about all those other things the box was telling him. He got that they were statistics related to him, or this body at least, but he had no clue what was good, or bad, or even what half those things referred to. Intelligence and strength were easy enough to figure out, but the other things? Who the hell knew? Well, he reasoned, probably every single person in this world except me. God damn you, Sirana. Would it have killed you to try to do your job a little better? Deciding that he’d seen enough of the box for now, he tried to wave it away, but it obstinately refused to go anywhere.

“How do I make you go away, you stupid box? Is there a command I can use, like with an attack dog?”

Abruptly new text appeared.

***

Commands…

Summon: Status

Unsummon: Dismiss

***

There were more commands after that, but Jack really wasn’t interested in them at the moment.

“Dismiss,” he ordered.

The box vanished. Then, worried that he might need the box again someday, he issued a new command.

“Summon.”

The box appeared. Saying that stuff out loud is really embarrassing and kind of obvious, he thought. Do I need to say it out loud, or is enough to think it? He pondered that for a moment before he decided to try. Dismiss, he commanded mentally. The box obediently disappeared from sight.

“Well, that’s something, I guess.”

Now that he had that problem solved, he went back to examining himself. He was wearing what had probably been really expensive clothes, but were mostly blood-soaked rags at this point. There a hole in the shirt right over his heart. He unbuttoned the shirt and took a look. There was dried blood on his skin, but he could see a raised bit of skin that looked like a scar on the left side of his chest.

“Did somebody stab this poor bastard?” he wondered aloud. Looking around, he saw a dagger on the ground close to the pool of mostly dried blood on the ground. He picked it up and examined it. Then, he remembered he didn’t know jack or shit about weapons. He idly brushed a finger over a weird symbol at the base of the…what were those called? Hilt! The symbol showed an open hand, palm facing out, over a closed eye.

“What the hell is this?” he grumbled.

The box appeared in his vision again.

***

Appraise activated…

Assassin’s Guild Dagger

This dagger is used when carrying out assassinations. The blade is enchanted to bypass most magical defenses, making it a particularly useful tool against mages.

***

Jack felt a cold sweat break out on his back. Assassins, he thought. Someone hired assassins to kill this guy? Uh oh. If he’s supposed to be dead, and I’m him, does that mean that assassins are going to come after me? I don’t want to get assassinated! He shook a mental fist at the former Brandis Marshway and futilely demanded, What did you do to make people want to assassinate you? This time, the blue box did not provide additional information.

“Wait a minute,” he growled. “I thought this was supposed to be a ‘fresh start’ for me. It’s not a fresh start if people are taking out hits on me. Unless someone was halfassing their job when they sent me here.”

Jack glared up at the off putting, aqua-colored sky and shouted, “Damn you, Sirana!”

Something seemed to drain out of him in one enormous clump. Staggering, he dropped to his knees. A sudden exhaustion threatened to drag him back into unconsciousness.

***

Sirana sat a table and idly ate a bite of her salad. She was supposed to have been back on duty already, but she felt like a three-hour lunch was a perfectly reasonable. After all, back when she’d been a goddess on a world, she’d spent entire seasons feasting. This damn job, she thought. A million more years to go. A million more damn years! I’m never going to make it. She angrily stabbed a grape tomato and lifted it toward her mouth. When it was halfway there, an abrupt feeling of dread overcame her. She looked around the cafeteria wildly, searching for the threat, but nothing seemed out of place.

Then, a mere few inches in front of her face, reality cracked and shattered like a mirror. Before she had the wherewithal to dodge, a massive fist made of mortal mana blasted through that cracked dimensional plane and hit her square in the face. As the impact hurled her across the room, she heard a voice echoing through the hole.

“Damn you, Sirana!”

After crash-landing in the salad bar, she just lay there for a while and tried to get her bearings. Her supervisor, a bearded man with an eye-patch who claimed he wasn’t Odin, leaned over her. He wasn’t actually grinning, but she could feel the smug amusement just radiating off him.

“And this is why,” he said in a deep voice that rolled like thunder, “we do our jobs properly.”

Chapter 4

It took most of an hour before that overwhelming exhaustion faded and Jack’s brain started to behave normally again. Which mostly meant that thoughts started happening in order and weren’t randomly interrupted by memories of cartoons he’d watched as a kid. He had no idea what had just happened to him but was quite certain that he didn’t want it to happen again. Of course, avoiding it might prove challenging since he didn’t even know what it was. Even so, he had more immediate issues.

“Okay, Jack,” he said out loud, “first things first. What do you have that might help you survive?”

He went through the clothes he was wearing and made a pile. His current worldly possessions included one mage murder dagger, a monogrammed handkerchief, a gaudy ring with a ruby, and a small collection of coins. The sight of the ring and the coins struck him as odd. If they thought he was dead, why didn’t they take the valuable stuff. Then again, maybe they did take the really valuable stuff. This body belonged to an archmage, so maybe he had some super valuable magical stuff like a staff of doom or wand of infinite prosperity or something. An ugly ring and some loose coins might not mean anything to them. Either that or the assassin had some kind of professional ethics. Murder was okay, but they drew the line at corpse robbing.

Dismissing that thought as silly, he picked up the coins and studied them briefly. That scrutiny didn’t really tell him anything. They just had a picture of some guy he couldn’t possibly know on one side and what looked like a lizard on the back. All he really figured out was that he had three gold coins, half a dozen silver coins, and a few bronze or copper coins. He assumed the gold ones were the most valuable, but he’d have to get back to civilization to learn how valuable. Maybe they were super rare and he could buy a small town with them, or maybe a gold coin was only enough to get a room for the night.

“Seriously, Marshway?” he complained to the body’s former occupant. “Couldn’t you have carried a magical tent that was like a luxury hotel inside? I could really use something like that. You didn’t even carry a map, man! Why not?”

The blue box sprang to life with new text that actually made him happy.

***

Map activating…

***

The box suddenly shifted into a semi-topographical display. It had a little green pip that he assumed was him. There were a bunch of yellow pips sprinkling the map. He wasn’t sure how to interpret that. He supposed that if his pip was green, anything that wasn’t green was potentially hostile or possibly neutral. He decided to err on the side of caution with that one. The thing he studied the map for was something that might indicate a town. On the very edge of the map’s display, he saw a solid green square. When he focused on it, text appeared next to it.

***

Town (medium)

Name: Fair Hollow

***

Jack eagerly waited for more information to appear, but nothing did.

“That was less informative than I might have hoped,” he muttered. “But, hey, there is civilization nearby!”

At least, he hoped it was nearby. The map didn’t have anything like a legend or scale. That town might only be a few miles away, or it might be a hundred miles away. he considered the spot where he was on the map, looked around at the small mountain he was standing on, and thought it was probably somewhere in between those distances. That was not good. Unless this body was superhumanly fit and fast, there was no way he was going to cover that distance by nightfall. The other possibility was that he could use magic to get there. He’d seen that absurd list of spells. That idea was both very tempting and somewhat frightening. Just because the last guy in this body had known how to use those spells, it didn’t mean that Jack could do it.

Then, there were the names of a bunch of those spells. Some of them had looked benign, but just as many had been chilling. Jack didn’t need anyone to tell him that things with names like Calamity Fog and Hellfire Inferno weren’t going to make kittens and gummy bears appear from thin air. Then there were the names had just baffled him, like Celestial Apprehension and Compulsory Transfiguration. Those weren’t as overtly frightening, but were even more problematic because he didn’t know what they might do. Those ones might actually summon unicorns and cheeseburgers, but they might also create a rain of acid or open a portal to hell. Jack decided that any spell with a name he couldn’t interpret was best left alone entirely.

At least, it would be until he could find someone or something to explain all of this magic stuff to him. Maybe this archmage guy had a library that would offer more insights.  For the moment, though, anything that didn’t help him reach that town was useless. He was pretty sure he’d seen a spell with the word flight in it, but he knew nothing about flying. Jack had never even played a video game with flying. That profound lack of experience did not give him warm and fuzzy feelings about the idea of trying to land safely. Assuming he could even figure out how to land.

No, he thought, that is not something I want to play around with unless I’m truly desperate. I’ll just have to go old school and rely on the Shoe Leather Express. Making an annoyed noise, he reached down and grabbed the dagger and ring that were still sitting on the ground. He slid the ring back onto his finger. After fumbling with the knife for a while, he gingerly slid the blade between his belt and his pants at the hip. Despite his initial fears that it would just cut right through the leather, the blade just sat there. Checking the map again, he started walking in what he thought was the right direction.

It was hard to tell at first if he was going in the right direction because he was going down more than he was going forward. After about two hours, though, he neared the bottom on the mountain and the green pip had moved a tiny bit closer to the square representing the town. While he was happy that he was headed the right way, he was less thrilled by how slowly he was moving. At this pace, it might take days until he got to the town. He didn’t expect to make it that far with no food, water, or shelter. Even if he could find plants, he wouldn’t know if they were safe.

He walked about half a mile before he remembered that the box had showed some kind of appraise information about the dagger. If he stared at plants long enough, the same thing might happen. He paid closer attention to his surroundings until he spotted a bush with small, bright red berries on it. Jack stared as hard as he could at it for about five seconds before the map disappeared and new text appeared.

***

Appraise activated…

Mountain Bush

The mountain bush is…a bush. It produces highly dangerous berries that will kill you by slowly liquifying your internal organs. This will lead to a long, excruciating death that responsible adults will refuse to describe to children, the elderly, the faint of heart, and pets. Don’t eat the berries.

***

Jack frowned at the text because it was wildly vague, oddly specific, and kind of sarcastic. Still, it seemed like the plan would work. While he couldn’t eat these berries, that just meant he needed to find things that he could eat. As long as he could find some safe water in the next day or two, he should be okay. For the next few hours, Jack walked in the general direction of what he now realized was the far distant town. He also stared hard at everything that bore even a passing resemblance to food. It was nearly sunset before he found a spring that the floating box told him was safe to drink. While it didn’t do anything much about how hungry he was, it did sate the painful thirst he’d developed.

He also made the less than awesome discovery that the body he was in was, on balance, pathetically out of shape. Jack used to walk miles every day at his job without a problem. In this body, just getting down off the mountain and walking a few miles had left his legs trembling. That was when he wasn’t leaning against a tree to catch his breath. It was no wonder that this guy had died to a dagger. Even if he had tried to fight back, he wouldn’t have been strong enough to do anything to defend himself at close range. The thought of trying to get this body into shape was just one more reason to hate Sirana. If she’d been straight with him about all of this, he’d have chosen the afterlife.

It wasn’t until the box informed him that something was safe to eat that Jack realized he’d been standing there and staring at some truly hideous black things. It turned out that they were mushrooms and could be eaten raw. He stared at them for quite a while before looking at the darkening sky above. He wasn’t going to find anything else before he had to stop somewhere for the night. Plucking one of them up, he grimaced and threw it into his mouth. It tasted better than it looked, but it had looked like death. That made it a pretty low bar to exceed. It mostly tasted like dirt. Beggars can’t be choosers, he told himself. He ate several more and tried to be happy that his stomach had stopped hurting.

Looking around, he decided that this was probably as good a place as any to stop. The undergrowth wasn’t too thick. He used what little light was left to hastily gather up some wood. He didn’t know if it would be enough, but he had no idea how cold it might get. Having some fire would probably be a good idea. He tried to find a rock that he could hit with the knife to make some sparks, but that didn’t work out. Feeling very uncertain about it, he called up his status and went to very bottom of the list of spells. The names there were much simpler and sounded less likely to cause some terrible catastrophe. He saw one that sound like it would do what he wanted it to do. Ignite. Standing a little way back from the pile of wood, he spoke the word.

“Ignite.”

Nothing. He wondered if this was one of those things he needed to concentrate on. Like maybe he needed to imagine some sparks coming from his hand. He did his best to picture that.

“Ignite!” he said a little more forcefully.

There was a flash of light and a wall of scalding heat that left him mostly blind and reeling back. When his vision cleared, he stared in naked horror.

“Holy shit!”

There was fire as far as the eye could see.

Chapter 5

“What do I do? What do I do?!” shouted Jack as the fire tried to consume everything.

Even as panic overwhelmed him, the blue box appeared with new text.

***

Appraise activating…

Idiot’s Forest Fire

A conflagration ignited by a complete novice’s poorly-controlled spell. Likely to expand and cause widespread destruction if not extinguished promptly.

***

Jack stared in slack-jawed disbelief at the almost abusive text before the minor inferno in front of him reclaimed his attention.

“Status!” he shouted and began frantically looking for another spell that might help him.

He almost tried to use a spell called deluge before sanity seized him. If ignite caused this madness, deluge might literally flood half the country. He desperately looked for something, anything, farther down that had to do with water. Then, salvation appeared in the form of a single, glorious word. Douse. It was only a moment of inspiration that caused him to grab a thick piece of branch that was burning and hurl it behind him. Even if he managed to put out this forest fire, he would still want to be warm later. Gritting his teeth, Jack pointed both his palms toward the flames and screamed.

“Douse!”

A wall of water that had to reach a hundred feet into the air and stretched as far as he could see in either direction burst into existence. Without any input from Jack, it raced forward toward the burning forest. Jack watched in relief and dismay as the water put out the fire, but also ripped all the trees out of the ground and dislodged a foot of topsoil. He just had to hope that nobody lived in the direction the water was headed. Hopefully, it wouldn’t hurt anyone or cause damage to someone’s property. Not that there was much he could do about it. At least, the fire was out. He could take that as a good outcome. Well, it was good-ish. Better than letting a forest fire rage out of control and maybe destroy who knew how many towns and villages.

Speaking of fires, he ran over to the burning stick he’d thrown behind him. After he stamped out the embers that threatened to start another forest fire, he put a little distance between him and the destruction he’d caused. After clearing a spot on the ground, he managed to gather enough loose sticks to start a proper campfire. Then, mostly by the thin moonlight he got from the partially risen moon, he gathered a few heavier pieces of wood that, the gods willing, would provide him some heat through the night.

As he sat by the small blaze and tried not to think about hot dogs and marshmallows, he turned over the results of those spells in his mind. Judging by their positions way down at the bottom of the list, they were the weakest spells that Brandis Marshway had known. Jack was certain that they weren’t meant to work the way that they just had. Ignite had worked more like how he would expect something named Firestorm to work. Douse didn’t sound like the sort of spell to cause a land-based tsunami. He genuinely didn’t have the first idea about why things had happened that way, but Jack did know one thing. He couldn’t rely on those spells for anything. Even experimenting with the weakest spells looked like a recipe for disaster.

He shuddered at the very idea of trying out a flight spell. If it behaved like those other spells, he’d probably wind up in deep space and promptly crash into an asteroid. No thank you. For the foreseeable future, he would have to rely on his body to get him from point A to point B and beyond. It would be slower, but it almost had to be safer. He could afford to take his time. Well, he could if could find water and some more of those dirt-flavored mushrooms. As for the assassins…

“What can I do about assassins?” Jack asked the night.

The truth was simple, straightforward, and of zero comfort.

“Nothing,” he said, answering his own question. “If I come up against an assassin, I am screwed. So, best to keep a low profile until I can figure out why people are trying to kill me. Or him, I guess. Not that it’ll make a difference to anyone.”

He supposed everyone would just assume he was still Brandis Marshway regardless of anything he said. He was squatting in the guy’s body. The idea of telling everyone the truth came and went almost immediately. Even in a world with magic, the argument that a lazy goddess put him in Marshway’s body would sound too convenient. Nobody with a murderous grudge would just take his word for it. Hell, he wouldn’t take his word for it if he didn’t know, for fact, that it had gone down that way. It just sounded so absurd. He’d need to keep a really low profile until he figured out where this Marshway guy lived and got back there. Hopefully, nobody there wanted him dead badly enough to hire assassins.

He might even be able to get some information out of them. Asking a bunch of questions about his own life was a non-starter. They’d think he’d suffered some kind of brain damage or that some magical creature had taken over Marshway’s body. But he could probably ask a few questions around his recent activities. Saying he’d been injured might be enough of an excuse to explain a few gaps in his recent memory. Leaning his head back against a tree trunk, he squeezed his eyes shut. This was so fucking complicated that he was getting a headache.

That very long walk to the next town was starting to look like a blessing in disguise. It would give him some time to think up a story about who he was and where he was going. One that wouldn’t get him killed if he was lucky. He dropped a big piece of wood on the fire that had mostly burned down to a bed of coals. He called up the map and looked it over. His unintentional natural disaster had managed to scare off all of those yellow pips. Satisfied that he probably wasn’t going to get eaten, he wrapped up as well as he could in his badly damaged cloak. The crackling of piece of log soon lulled him to sleep.

“Caw!”

Jack shot up from the ground into a sitting position. He looked around wildly and reeled back at the sight of a big, stupid black bird that stared at him with its creepy bird eyes. When that shock started to wear off, he registered that he was shivering. The fire had gone out, or burned down enough that it wasn’t really shedding heat anymore. Jack rubbed at his arms to try to get some blood moving. Feeling the spindly twigs under the shirt made him shake his head. It was one thing to get limited exercise, but this Marshway guy had clearly gone out of his way to get no exercise. It was the only way he could have this little muscle mass.

Huffing out an aggravated breath, Jack tried to stand up. He didn’t make it halfway to his feet before agony shot from his toes to his hips. It was so abrupt, so intense, that Jack locked up and fell down. That delightful experience was followed by outrageous muscle cramps that threatened to make him shed tears. What followed was an hour of very careful stretching and barely helpful muscle massage for the his legs. An experience made even more wonderful by the bird sitting out just out of reach.

As if to mock him, it occasionally opened its beak and let out a mighty, “Caw!”

He wished he had some peanuts or a piece of bread so he could distract the bird. It was downright creepy the way it looked at him. Jack felt like the thing was studying him the way he might have studied a particularly weird insect during middle school. Glaring at the bird, he asked a question.

“Don’t you have anything better to do?”

“Caw?”

The bird tilted its head back and forth a few times like it was waiting for an answer.

“I don’t even have food for me. So, if that’s what you’re waiting for, just shoo,” he said, waving a hand at the bird in the utterly pointless go away gesture human beings routinely direct at animals.

The bird, unmoved by this gesture, sat there for another ten minutes. It didn’t leave until Jack, with many groans and winces, staggered to his feet. He watched the bird fly away and scowled at it. Lucky bird, he thought. It can fly without worrying about launching itself into the sun.

“Map,” he commanded the air.

The floating blue box appeared with the same semi-topographical map. The yellow pips were still keeping their distance. Maybe his little experiment in accidental arson the evening before had been scarier than he’d thought. He did stop long enough to kick some loose soil over the ashes of his campfire. He was almost positive it had burned itself out, but why take stupid chances. Part of him wished he take some coals along to start another fire later, but he didn’t even have a sheath for the dagger. Part of him was convinced that ancient people used to carry coals around with them. He couldn’t remember how they did it, though. Nor did he feel optimistic about reinventing the method on the spot.

“It wouldn’t matter if I could find some flint. Why don’t you show me that on the map?” he demanded of whoever was in charge of the floating box.

No sooner had the words left his mouth than the map changed. It zoomed way in and a green box like the one that showed the village appeared. Except, unless he missed his guess, this box was no more than fifty feet away.

“It can’t be that easy,” he thought, even as he walked until his green pip was overlapping with the box.

Groaning like a man who was being asked to donate a lung, Jack crouched down and started brushing away the plant detritus on the ground. He soon found a dark gray rock. He took out the dagger and experimented with hitting the knife on the rock and the rock on the knife. Nothing. He tried hitting them together harder. Nothing.

“Seriously?” he complained.

He didn’t know why it wasn’t working, but it wasn’t. In a desperate move, he looked at the map again.

“Is there something around here that will spark when I hit it against this rock?”

The map zoomed out and a few things that looked to be a long hike away lit up.

“I guess I’ll aim for one of those places,” he muttered, before inspiration struck. “Where can I find something safe to eat?”

The map zoomed back in and green dots lit up all over the place. He just stared at it.

“Are you telling me I was staring at things and going hungry for no reason!” he shouted.

Getting a grip on his frustration, he forced himself back up to feet. Letting out a pained groan, he staggered toward the nearest source of food.

“Please don’t be dirt mushrooms,” he whispered in something very close to a prayer.

Chapter 6

“Caw!”

“Jesus Christ!” shouted Jack as he shot up into a sitting position.

He shot the bird a death glare.

“Does everyone in this world get a bird alarm clock?”

“Caw?”

“Never mind,” muttered Jake. “At least, I’m not shivering today.”

It had taken some trial and error, but he’d finally figured out about how much wood he needed to put on the fire so the coals would still be giving off some heat in the morning. He wasn’t toasty by any stretch of the imagination, but even tiny comforts had become huge things in his world recently. He rubbed the sleep out of his eyes and winced. Now, it wasn’t just his legs that hurt, his arms ached and his fingers were screaming. It turned out that there were a lot of useful things scattered across this semi-mountainous area…if you thought to ask your floating box map to point them out to you.

It also helped if you weren’t too squeamish. Realizing that there was even chance of running into something dangerous, hungry, or both, he’d asked for something that could defend himself with. That had taken him a bit off course to a cabin. Finding a skeleton in the cabin had been a bad shock, but had also left him far more prepared. The person who had been living there had pretty obviously known they were dying, because they’d packed everything away. He’d found a bow and an intact string for it wrapped up in canvas that had been treated with something.

There had also been some arrows in a quiver and a few other useful things, like the sack he reached for. Opening it up, he pulled out a handful of berries that looked like currants but tasted like kiwi. It was a very strange eating experience, but food was food. Giving the bird another baleful look, he tossed a few of the berries over to it. The bird hopped over and started eating them. Jack chewed on a handful while, wincing, he flexed his hands. He’d never handled a bow in old life, so there was nothing to do but practice with it. Unfortunately, this body he was in was so unused to any kind of labor that even that daily practice session left him in serious pain.

Still feeling the ache of hunger, he looked in the sack. Sighing, he pulled out the few mushrooms that were sitting at the bottom. They weren’t the dirt mushrooms that looked like death, but they still didn’t taste great raw. Ignoring thoughts of sugary breakfast cereals, he swiftly chewed on the mushrooms and thought about what to do next. Not that it took a lot of thinking. The cabin had been a godsend in many ways. He’d found a knife that did make sparks off the flint, which took care of his daily fire needs. There was even a blanket and big piece of that treated canvas that he’d been putting under him at night.

He'd found a primitive canteen that didn’t leak if you only filled it halfway. There was even a pot and a couple spoons. In addition to the sack, he’d found a pack that didn’t have too many holes in it. That let him consolidate the useful items without having to carry them in his arms. What there hadn’t been, was food. So, he spent an hour or three each morning going from spot to spot on his map and collecting things to eat. The pot and the canteen had been game changers for him. It wasn’t like he was cooking French cuisine, but there were some root vegetables to be found here and there. Vaguely potato-like things that had distinctly blue color. Carrots, which just looked like carrots, and something in the same family as onions and garlic, but with a somewhat different flavor profile. It was bit more savory and less sharp.

Throwing potatoes, carrots, mushrooms, and the garlic-esque stuff into some water and cooking it produced a passable vegetable broth. After days of surviving on berries and mushrooms, eating anything hot was such a pleasure that he almost didn’t care about the taste. Still, wanting to eat something hot at night meant finding things that he could cook. It added time to his food gathering and forced him to camp near a water source. All of that took more strategizing than he thought it would, and slowed down his progress toward the town. It was a price he was happy to pay in exchange for hot meals at least every other night.

He wished he could have some meat to add into the broth. In theory, he could shoot something with the bow, but he didn’t know anything about dressing an animal. Nor was he a good enough shot to trust that he wouldn’t puncture something in the animal that would make him sick. Jack would just have dream about meat until he got to that town. Surely, they’d have some kind of meat on a stick or a stew or a steak or a…He shook his head to stop himself from losing an hour to fantasizing about things he didn’t have.

Instead, he got up, ignored the pain in his hands and arms, and practiced shooting the bow. Even giving himself a lot of slack for being a first timer, the results were pitiful. He only managed to hit the tree he was aiming at about one time in ten. The tree being a mere twenty feet away just made it sadder in his eyes. Adding to difficulty, there had only been seven intact arrows at the cabin. That meant he had to go and collect them after every seventh shot. He spent more time walking back and forth than he did shooting the bow, but there was no other choice. He had to practice. The bird always hung around and watched him. Jack was certain the thing was judging him, which felt like adding insult to injury. How a bird could look judgy, he didn’t know, but it definitely had a judgy look in its eyes.

Once he wrapped up his practice, he disassembled his primitive camp. Extra care was always taken to bury the remains of the fire. He’d gotten lucky the last time he’d accidentally started a forest fire. There were no guarantees that he’d be standing uphill from the fire next time. It would be both awful and embarrassing if he drowned himself in a bid to avoid burning to death. Man, I really wish I’d spent some time watching survival videos online, thought Jack. There are probably a million things I could be doing to make my life easier right now, and I just don’t know about them. A glance at the wrong-colored sky made him reassess that notion.

The world he was on was earth-like, but also had magic. In other circumstances, he might have even been excited about that. What kid didn’t dream about casting spells? However, the presence of magic and an unfamiliar environment might mean a lot of those survival things wouldn’t hold true hold true. Jack decided that he was better off using the tools he had, rather than wishing for knowledge he didn’t have.

“Alright,” he said, “let’s get things moving here.”

Jack decided that he was talking to the bird, rather than himself, because talking to a bird was just odd. Talking to himself might be a sign that he was crazy. He frowned. Would it only be crazy if he was getting answers? He wasn’t sure. Shrugging it off, he checked the map and started walking toward the nearest food source. That became his daily routine for the next few weeks as he inched ever closer to that town. He had asked the map to show him where Brandis Marshway lived, but it seemed the map had limits. It zoomed out a bit, but just inserted an arrow at the edge that pointed farther away in the same direction as the town.

Unfortunately, Jack discovered that routine breeds inattention. One morning, while he was out gathering food, he got the distinct impression that something or someone was watching him. From the sense of dread that washed over him, he could only assume that they didn’t intend good things for him. This is not good, he thought as he looked around. Damn it. Damn it. Damn it! While he was standing in a fairly large clearing, there was plenty of forest nearby where anything could be observing him. Deciding to favor caution, he dropped the sack. A few precious bits of food spilled onto the ground, but Jack ignored that as he pulled the bow off his back.

He swiftly drew an arrow from the quiver hanging at his hip and fitted it to the bowstring. Half drawing the bow, he did a slow turn and watched for any sign of movement. With daily practice, he had gotten more accurate. Something told him that shooting at a tree was going to be very different from shooting at an animal or, even worse, a person. He’d never even gotten into a fistfight. Between school, work, and his father, he was too tired and withdrawn to pay attention to other people. Even if someone had wanted to pick a fight with him, they would have had to throw the first punch to even get his attention. As for words? The only words he listened to were the ones he had to listen to. Everything else just blew past him like a breeze.

Now, though, having zero experience with violence in a world that had fucking assassins was probably going to work against him. He didn’t even know how common violence between normal people was in this world. For that matter, he didn’t even know if there were normal people in this world. Did they all have magic? Did the animals all have magic? If so, what would that magic even do? These were all questions for which he needed answers and had no good way of getting them. Jack understood that he was trying to distract himself from the mounting fear, but he was doing a terrible job of it. Instead of keeping him calm, it was just making him more scared about what was going to happen to him. He could feel his heart pounding like a snare drum in his chest.

There was an explosion of movement off to his right as some thing burst out of the trees. Jack could only stare at it for a moment. It looked like some kind of mad scientist had crossed a bear and a wolf. The thing was bulky like a bear, but moved on all fours and seemed too nimble for anything that size. It had covered half the distance between them before Jack remembered he was holding the bow. He hastily drew the string to his ear, but his hands were shaking. The arrow head was wavering around like it was drunk. Jack tried to steady his hands even as the truth that an arrow wasn’t going to kill this thing hit home.

It has to work, he thought desperately. It has to! Then, there was no more time. If he didn’t shoot, the thing was just going to open those huge jaws and bite him in half. Please work, he begged the universe. Jack felt something inside him stir at the same time he released the arrow. Another intense wave of exhaustion drove him to a knee. It took most of minute of gasping breaths before he remembered to look up. The corpse of the hybrid animal was less than three feet from him. Jack stared at it. Not because of the proximity, which was frightening, but because the animals head was just…It was gone.

Looking up, Jack could see a pathway of utter destruction cutting through the forest. Trees were toppled, their trunks having been severed or punched through by something. Even the ground was torn up, creating a shallow trench that stretched beyond his sight. There was no way the arrow could have done that. It couldn’t have just been the arrow. Was that magic? Had he cast a spell on the arrow unintentionally? If he had? An entirely new kind of dread crashed down on Jack.

“I’m a menace,” he said.

Chapter 7