Chapter 2
The club swung at Alsen’s face.
He tried to move, but his body didn’t respond. The new flesh he occupied felt alien, sluggish, like wearing a suit of meat that wasn’t quite his just yet. Which, technically, it kind of wasn’t.
But his mind worked.
Alsen reached for all the mana he could, within and without. The power nearly blinded him. So much mana, floating everywhere, thicker than air. He nearly lost his concentration from the sheer abundance of it. This place couldn’t have been more different from his home world.
He pulled at it through instinct alone. Shield. A semi-translucent barrier materialized in front of him, barely in time.
The club struck. The impact bounced off the shield without even a ripple. The ogre, a hulking, ashen-skinned brute with tusks jutting from its lower jaw, grunted in surprise as its weapon bounced back.
Alsen managed to control his body just enough to smirk.
He twisted the mana in the shield, inverting its structure. What had been a wall of protective force collapsed inward, condensing, concentrating. It worked in his old life, and magic was universal.
It had no reason to not work now.
He willed shape to the energy, making it burst forth.
Lance of Annihilation.
The energy speared forward. It tore through the ogre’s chest, the mountainside, the air, the mountainside across the valley, the clouds, and the sky.
The ogre didn’t even have time to look surprised. Most of his torso vanished. Blood flooded out, the monster collapsing.
Alsen stared at his own hand.
He’d refined that spell for decades. He had perfected its theoretical framework and honed it to be the perfect lossless attack spell. He had simply never possessed enough mana to cast it properly.
Until now.
And it had worked. It had worked.
No matter the body, no matter the world, no matter if there was a system or not. His art was his own.
A grunt and a feminine-voiced curse snapped him back to the present.
He turned to see the second ogre, about the same size as the first one and no less ugly, swinging its club in wild arcs. As if trying to swat an annoying mosquito, it kept swinging the club, trying to hit a young woman. She dodged the strikes, seeking an opening to get close.
She looked like an adventurer in a loose blouse, leather pants, and high boots. She moved with a natural fluidity. Sweat glued her chestnut hair to her head, and she kept trying to get to the ogre’s hind leg.
Alsen focused on what was so special about that leg. He spotted a dagger stuck into the thigh.
With a faint smile, he focused, pulling power to him. He compressed the energy, molded the shape he planned to will into existence, and unleashed the spell.
Lance of Annihilation.
His body failed him. The energies he worked with overflowed, cold shooting through him. The spell collapsed at completion. Instead of the lance, it produced a few measly sparks.
The embarrassing blast still hit the ogre in the face.
The ogre turned, swiping with his arm to protect his face.
The woman seized the opportunity, bolting toward the ogre. She reached the hind leg, pulled out the dagger, jumped, kicked herself off the ogre’s knee, and pounced on its back. Before it even noticed, she climbed on its back, wrapping her legs around it.
She grabbed its brow with her left hand and started stabbing it with the dagger. In a nearly instant flurry, she drove the dagger three times into its throat, one stab above the other.
Blood flooded out.
The ogre roared, letting go of the club, trying to grab her with both hands. It couldn’t get a hold of her, unable to peel her off.
Too much blood had flooded out of him. The ogre collapsed, the girl letting go just in time to avoid being crushed under its weight.
A ding passed through Alsen’s head. A notification in floating white text appeared in front of him.
[SYSTEM ANNOUNCEMENT: NEW USER DETECTED]
[SYSTEM MESSAGE: WELCOME TO THE ELTHYS SYSTEM]
[SYSTEM MESSAGE: YOU ARE NOW LEVEL 1]
[SYSTEM MESSAGE: TO ACCESS YOUR CHARACTER SHEET, THINK *]
“There you go!” she shouted, completely interrupting Alsen.
He tore his gaze from the System notifications.
“Stupid piece of shit!” She kicked the ogre’s corpse, yelping in pain the second her shin made contact. “Ow! Why are my legs so soft?”
Alsen stared at her, not sure what this was about. The notifications vanished. Great. He barely managed to read them.
She kicked it again, this time with a lot less passion and with greater care to hit the softer parts.
“Damn it. Even this hurts. What’s wrong with me?
” She looked at herself. “Why am I so short? No wonder I couldn’t hit anything with these stumps of arms.” She stretched her arms in front of herself.
They looked normal to Alsen. She did too.
Her torso and legs had standard proportions, though her legs were perhaps slightly long.
She had a face with no visible flaws, rich hair, narrow shoulders, a thin waist, hips considerably broader than her waist, and strong but lean legs.
No visible injuries, scars, deformities, or anything else that looked out of place. “Um, sorry, but you seem normal.”
“Exactly!” She turned towards him, a weird mixture of excitement, sadness, and things he couldn’t identify plastered all over her face. “I’m six feet nine inches tall. Or well… was. Because I’m short as shit now, apparently.”
“You’re probably like five feet six, maybe close to seven.
That’s…” his words trailed off. He didn’t have the faintest idea what normal was in this world.
He had been here for a split second. Then again, so was she, obviously.
The complaints about her body likely came from her having just possessed it.
With an overwhelming probability, she was the soul that got shoved into his transference tunnel with him.
The thoughts dissipated from his mind as he realized what he was looking at. Transfixed, he walked past the dead ogres and the girl. He crossed the rocky mountain path, stepped over the crushed corpse of a knight, and walked to the edge.
In front of him spread a valley, stretching from one mountain to another. Mountains spread across the horizon, the snow on their tops glistening in the sun. Trees covered the valleys, an azure river visible in the valley below the mountain on which he stood.
The view stole his breath, his eyes watering.
The sky above had a shade of blue so pure he had never seen it outside a screen. No signs of any buildings anywhere, no industry, no neon billboards, no roads.
Alsen had never even been to any mountains before.
His home world had them, sure, but they were few that weren’t being mined, and they were so far away, overrun by tourists, and expensive to visit.
He had spent his entire life in massive, sprawling cities, filled with concrete and steel and holographic billboards, where a patch of five trees counted for a park.
He’d only ever seen nature in videos and movies.
Never in person.
He stood there, transfixed, as the wind carried the scents of nature he couldn’t even identify, tears rolling down his face.
It worked.
His spell actually worked.
He was in another world, in a new body, in a new life.
A loud clang thundered from behind him, throwing him out of the moment.
What was she doing this time?
Alsen didn’t want to turn.
Another clang sounded from behind him.
With a very sharp inhale, he turned, glaring at the woman.
She tossed a piece of armor onto a pile of weapons and armor. The crushed knight Alsen had stepped over now lay without his helmet, gauntlets, or boots.
He shook his head. “What are you doing?”
“Piling up loot, so I can decide what’s worth carrying, and what I’ll leave behind.” She looked up from the pile with a beaming smile. “Do you have a spell to carry a lot of heavy stuff?”
He looked over the pile. Partial pieces of armor, whatever else she took from the knight, and from that half-naked body that he only now noticed beyond the dead ogres.
Two open pouches from the ogres, one ogre maul, and a bunch of medieval weapons.
“I’m Alsen,” he said, as he decided he wanted to know her name, so he could curse her with silence later.
“I’m Luna.” She clicked her tongue. “This might sound weird, but I’m not the woman who died in this body ten minutes ago. I probably shouldn’t tell you, but I’m not pretending to be someone I’ve never seen.”
Oh, so she didn’t know he came with her. She thought he was local. That meant it wasn’t her spell, but entirely the doing of that shape that shoved her in. “How did that happen?”
Her gaze dropped to the ground, emerald eyes glistening.
“Right, so I may have made a tiny mistake and fallen into a collapsing rift. That threw me really far from my world and into the Void. I thought I was a goner, only the wolf keeping me alive. But Dreamwalker found me, used the wolf to repair my soul, and threw me to this world, as it was the only place close enough for me to survive. I’m sorry about your friends.
I only got here after they died. Sorry.”
Something in the low voice hit him. Sadness, regret, and a whole lot of well-concealed pain. That made it strange to question her further. But it also made her likely to answer unguardedly. “Who’s Dreamwalker?”
“A mage from my world.” She drew in a sob. “The type that makes other mages realize they know nothing about magic. Why?” She looked up, eyes narrowed into slits, all pain hidden beneath the suspicion. “That’s a really weird thing to ask first.”