The thing about running for your life is that nobody tells you how boring it actually is.
Left foot. Right foot. Branches slapping your face. Something wet under your boot that you really hope is mud. And behind you — always behind you — the sound of things that very much want to eat you.
I was running.
Not elegantly. Not heroically. Just… running. Arms flailing, lungs burning, absolutely zero dignity whatsoever.
There were seven of them. Big, ugly, four-legged creatures covered in dark scales with too many teeth and eyes that glowed a sickly yellow in the dim forest light. I had started calling them "Snappers" because that was exactly what they did — they snapped at everything within reach with jaws that could probably bite through solid iron.
I had learned that last part the hard way.
"Almost there," I muttered between desperate breaths. "Almost… there—"
My foot hit the edge of a shallow ditch hidden under a thick carpet of dead leaves and I threw myself forward, rolling hard into the concealed pit I had dug and covered three days ago. Behind me, the Snappers followed without hesitation — and crashed straight through the camouflaged top layer, tumbling into the trap in a chaotic pile of scales, claws, and very confused growling.
I was already standing on the other side.
I reached into the large sack strapped to my back and pulled out two objects that had absolutely no business existing in a medieval fantasy world.
Two rocket launchers.
Compact, sleek, loaded with what I had come to call "Crimson Burst rounds" — shells packed with compressed Go energy shaped into an explosive formation. My own design. Took me about a week to figure out the casing geometry. Very proud of them, honestly.
I rested one on each shoulder, aimed at the pit, and exhaled slowly.
"Nothing personal," I said.
I fired both at the same time.
The explosion was, in my professional opinion, excessive. A column of red and gold fire erupted from the pit, shaking the trees for fifty meters in every direction. Birds scattered. Leaves rained down like confetti. The ground trembled under my boots.
When the smoke cleared, the pit was a crater.
The Snappers were not.
I lowered the launchers, rolled my shoulders, and looked directly at you.
Yes. You. The one reading this right now.
I see you.
Hi. My name is Ren Takeda. I'm thirty-six years old — or I was, anyway, before all of this happened — and I'm aware that what you just witnessed raises several questions. A man with rocket launchers in a world of swords and sorcery. Explosions. A suspiciously well-placed trap. The general chaos of a Tuesday morning.
I'll explain. I promise it makes sense.
Well. Sort of.
My previous life was, to put it generously, unremarkable.
I was born in Osaka, raised in a small apartment above a noodle shop, and spent most of my adult years working as a mechanical engineer at a mid-sized manufacturing company that made industrial components nobody had ever heard of. Bearings. Casings. Precision-cut metal parts that ended up inside machines that ended up inside factories that ended up making things that people actually cared about.
I was, essentially, three levels of abstraction away from anything interesting.
I was good at my job. Genuinely good — the kind of good that earns you quiet respect from colleagues and absolutely zero recognition from management. I could look at a broken mechanism and understand intuitively what was wrong with it. I could design a component in my head before touching a pencil. My hands knew metal the way some people know music.
I never married. I had friends, a small apartment, a collection of model engines I built on weekends, and a cat named Bolt who tolerated my existence with magnificent indifference.
It was a quiet life. A decent life.
And then, at thirty-four, I was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.
Stage four.
I won't dwell on the details. You don't need them and, frankly, I'd rather not revisit them. What I will say is this: the last eight months of my life were spent in a hospital bed in a room that smelled of antiseptic and recycled air, watching the ceiling and trying very hard to be brave about something that was not, in any meaningful way, fair.
The pain was… significant.
I had good nurses. I had colleagues who visited more often than I expected. Bolt came once, carried in a bag by my neighbor Mrs. Fujimoto, and sat on my chest for twenty minutes without moving, which was the most emotionally devastating thing that happened during the entire experience.
I died on a Thursday. Early morning. The light through the window was the pale grey of a sky that hadn't decided yet whether it wanted to be cloudy or clear.
I remember thinking: that's it, then.
And then — nothing.
Except it wasn't nothing.
It was white.
Not the white of a hospital ceiling or a blank page. An absolute white, the kind that has weight and presence, the kind that makes you feel like you're standing inside light itself.
And in the middle of that white stood an old man.
He was ancient in a way that had nothing to do with wrinkles or grey hair, though he had plenty of both. He was ancient the way mountains are ancient — quietly, completely, without apology. He wore simple robes the color of river water and held a long wooden staff that seemed to hum faintly at a frequency just below hearing.
He looked at me for a long moment.
Then he bowed.
Deeply. Formally. The kind of bow you give to someone you have genuinely wronged.
"Ren Takeda," he said. His voice was calm, unhurried, and carried the particular weight of someone who had been doing very important things for a very long time. "I owe you an apology."
I stared at him.
"...Okay," I said, because what else do you say to that?
"Your death," he continued, straightening slowly, "was not meant to occur as it did. The illness, the suffering, the manner of your passing — none of it was part of any design or intention. It was an error. A convergence of unfortunate variables that should have been caught and corrected long before it reached you."
I processed this.
"So," I said carefully, "you're telling me I died eight months of suffering for… a clerical error."
He had the grace to look uncomfortable. "That is… an accurate summary, yes."
"Hm."
"I cannot return you to your previous life," he said. "The threads have already been cut. What has been cannot be undone. But I can offer you something else." He reached into his robes and withdrew a small vial of liquid that seemed to contain its own light — deep blue shifting to silver, moving slowly like something alive. "This water carries a gift. Unlimited Go — the energy that flows through all living things and all matter. With it, you will never be depleted. Never exhausted. Never empty."
He held it out to me.
I took it and drank it without hesitation, because at that point I had nothing left to lose and the liquid looked beautiful and I have always been mildly impulsive.
It tasted like cold mountain water and, faintly, like iron.
It felt like swallowing a star.
Something shifted inside me — deep, structural, permanent. I felt full in a way I hadn't felt in years. Not physically. Something underneath physical.
The old man watched me with quiet attention.
"There is one more thing," he said, and held out his staff.
I took it. It was smooth under my hands, warm, almost responsive — like it was aware of being held.
"That staff will serve you," he said simply. "It will be whatever you need it to be."
I looked at the staff. The staff seemed to look back.
"Any questions?" the old man asked.
"Several hundred," I said honestly. "But I get the impression you're not going to answer most of them."
Something moved in his eyes that might have been the beginning of a smile.
"You will be placed in a world that is not your own," he said. "It will be strange to you. Much of it will be difficult. But you carry within you something that world has never seen before." He paused. "I am sorry, Ren Takeda. Truly."
"It's fine," I said, which was not entirely true but felt like the right thing to say.
The white intensified.
And then it was gone.
I woke up on my back in a forest.
The sky above me was the wrong color — too deep a blue, with a sun that sat slightly too large on the horizon, casting light that was warm and gold in a way that felt richer than any sunrise I had seen before. The trees around me were enormous, ancient things with bark the color of charcoal and leaves that shifted between green and deep violet depending on the angle of the light.
Everything smelled like pine and rain and something sweet I couldn't identify.
The staff was lying next to my right hand.
I sat up slowly, checked that all my limbs were present and functional, and spent approximately three minutes simply breathing and accepting the situation with the quiet pragmatism of a man who had already survived cancer and death and was frankly running low on capacity for existential crisis.
"Alright," I said to no one in particular.
I picked up the staff.
The moment my hand closed around it I felt something — a current, a connection, a sense of potential running through the wood like electricity through a wire. I thought, almost without meaning to, about a wrench. The specific weight and shape of a good adjustable wrench, the kind I had used ten thousand times at work.
The staff shifted in my hand.
When I looked down, I was holding a wrench.
Perfect. Balanced. Exactly right.
I stared at it for a long moment.
"Okay," I said quietly. "Okay. I see."
I thought about the staff again. It became the staff.
I thought about a screwdriver. It became a screwdriver.
I set it down carefully, pressed both palms flat against the forest floor, and felt something enormous and patient moving through me — the Go, the energy the old man had described, sitting in my chest like a furnace that had no intention of going out.
I thought: I want to understand what this is.
And somewhere, very faintly, I felt the energy respond — like it had been waiting for exactly that question.
I sat in that forest for a long time. The strange sun moved across the too-blue sky. The violet-green leaves shifted in a wind that carried sounds I didn't recognize from very far away.
I was thirty-six years old. I was in a world I had never seen. I had a magic staff, unlimited energy, and the accumulated mechanical knowledge of a lifetime spent taking things apart and understanding how they worked.
Somewhere out there, this world had monsters, kingdoms, wars, and people who had never seen a firearm.
I picked up the staff, stood, and started walking.
And that — as I'm sure you've already guessed — is where things got interesting.
Stick around.
— End of Chapter 1 —
Next Chapter : The forest is bigger than it looks. Also something is following me. Also I think I just found a vein of what appears to be crystallized dragon bone, which according to everything I've observed so far should be basically impossible to find. Funny how that works.