"Man, we actually did it."
I sighed.
"Messed it, to be precise," Daniel corrected me.
I waved my pale, rotted hand dismissively in response to his correction.
"The same, no different."
Daniel gave me a look of 'you sure about that?', and I couldn't help but sigh once more, not that we zombies even needed to breathe.
"It's different, right..." I relented.
"Yeah," He replied.
"We're so fucked... Right?" I said, my expression slowly turned bitter.
"Yeah..." He nodded, looked as bitter as I did.
I slammed my fist to the ground frustatedly, regret filled my mind. That slam alone had cracked my fragile bone, no pain though.
"I won't do any strange rumours or shitty challenges anymore!"
"Not that we could even do that again now..." Daniel commented.
To explain why we were here and why we had become zombies, we should look back to about 30 minutes ago.
After absent-mindedly and without any hope of actually succeeding in performing the instruction about the rumour of the otherworld gate from the web, a dark hole, which seemingly was bottomless, suddenly opened up beneath our feet and sucked us inside its maw.
I felt like falling from a very high place when I was inside the hole. The surroundings were dark, and the further I fell, the darker it became. It continued until it became absolutely pitch black there.
I then lose consciousness. The moment I opened my eyes again, I was already standing in this forest, with a zombie who looked so similar to Daniel standing close to me, who I found out was actually Daniel himself. He then told me that I am actually a zombie like him.
In short—
This is chaos.
This is bizarre.
Just what had happened to us!?
I wanted to scream out all my thoughts, all my confusion, but I restrained myself. It is pointless to do so.
"I am still a virgin, dammit! Argggghhhhh!!"
Daniel had done it before me, anyway. There's no need to add more noise.
But his words remind me of the fact that we were indeed, haven't tasted any women in our past lives... Hm, past lives? I don't even sure whether we had died or not. Was being a zombie even considered dead? We're perfectly conscious, though? Yes, we didn't need to breathe anymore. We also didn't have any heartbeat now. But, well, you got my point.
We're still moving okay. Cracking every excessive move, but still fine.
Despite our scarred and horrific appearance, there's also no problem with our eyesight and other senses.
Undoubtedly, our situation is too strange. We couldn't even find the right words to describe it.
So, we set it aside for now after a moment of lamenting.
"So, what do we do now?" Daniel asked with a sigh.
"Hmm, how about—"
*Kruukkk~*
I am just about to suggest something when a starving sound comes out of our stomachs.
"Wait, we still feel hunger even as a zombie?" I exclaimed.
"I guess so. Zombies in movies like Brains, aren't they?" Daniel replied.
"Well... You made a point there."
I was doubting his logic for a moment, thinking that movies and real life are different, but I agreed nevertheless after another rumble came out of my stomach.
"Could we eat fruit?" I pondering.
Since eating a living being's brain or flesh sounds so gory and disgusting, I'd rather avoid that if I could.
"A zombie... Eating fruit?" Daniel asked back, his hairless head seeming to ridicule my idea.
So I began explaining.
"It can't be helped, bro. Movies were movies, real lives were real lives. That's different. Do you really want to eat brains?"
"Well..."
Daniel began wavering after I pointed that out.
"I know, right?" I said, "We never even had killed any animals before, so how could we have managed to kill someone?"
Daniel could only chuckle in response to that.
With that settled, we nodded at each other and began looking for anything that looked edible in this forest.
While wandering through the forest, moving my stiff and crackling body, I suddenly remembered Dina.
Dina Rosa, the girl I liked.
Didn't she once say that she's into isekai stories or something? Kind of stories where the protagonist was somehow transferred into another world, a novel's world, a game's world, and many kinds of other worlds.
"Hey, Daniel," I halted my step and called my best friend after I remembered about that.
"Hmm?" Daniel stopped and turned around, tilting his head questioningly.
"I think we had been isekai'd, man," I said.
"Isekai'd? What's that?" He asked back.
"Isekai was a popular Japanese term, meaning 'otherworld' or 'another world' in English. Well, what I'm talking about is isekai stories, where the protagonists in the stories would, in one way or another, end up being transferred into another world. Dina told me about it, by the way."
After I explained all of that to him, Daniel finally began getting the hang of what I was talking about.
"That's kinda... Similar to our situation?" Daniel exclaimed, pointing at me and himself.
I nodded to him in response.
"Isekai stories have become so popular that it had spread across the world. Dina told me that most of the novel readers in this era had at least once or twice read an isekai story in their lives."
"Okay..." Daniel slowly nodded his head to my words.
He understands what I am talking about, but he seemingly is confused, like he is wondering what the point is in talking about this for us now.
So I added, "There's a common shared trait for those isekai stories called 'cheat' or 'gift' or whatever, which mostly was a special power exclusively for the protagonist who had been isekai'd."
What if we also had this kind of 'cheat'? I didn't have to point that out to him for Daniel to get what I mean.
"That would certainly be useful if we had something like that!" He exclaimed, looking excited at the prospect of getting special power or ability.
Well, I couldn't say not for myself, though. Who could reject a special ability?
With that mindset, we began trying any move or spell that we had in mind, thinking that one of them might be able to trigger something to happen.
"Fireball!"
"Shazam!"
"Abakadabra!"
"O mulojos!"
"Arise!"
...