One moment, Luc was lying on his bedroom floor eating chips and watching the season finale of Realm of the Iron Throne. The next, he wasn't.
There was no flash of light. No dramatic thunderclap. No tunnel of spiraling colours like in the anime he'd spent the better part of his twenty-three years memorising. One blink he was there, and on the next he was somewhere else entirely.
The floor beneath him was made of something that was not quite glass and not quite light — a surface that hummed faintly under his bare feet as though the universe itself was vibrating at a frequency just below what ears could catch.
Around him, in every direction, the cosmos stretched without end. Galaxies spiralled in slow, ancient silence. Nebulae bloomed like bruises across the dark. Stars burned in clusters so dense and so impossibly far away that Luc's brain simply gave up trying to calculate the distance and filed the whole thing under too much.
He stood in the middle of it all, wearing a faded anime hoodie, one sock, and a half-eaten bag of chips still clutched in his right hand.
Then he saw her.
She sat across from him on a throne that seemed less like furniture and more like a suggestion — a shape that reality had arranged itself around out of respect. She was tall, draped in something that moved like starlight given texture, and her face was the kind of beautiful that made the word feel embarrassingly small. Her eyes were the colour of deep space: not black, but a dark so full it contained everything. She regarded him with the calm patience of someone who had been waiting for a very, very long time, and who had nothing more pressing to do with eternity.
Luc stared.
The goddess stared back.
Luc looked down at his chips. He looked back up at the goddess.
"...Am I dead?" he said.
Her lips curved — not quite a smile, more like the memory of one. "Not yet," she said, and her voice arrived in his chest before it reached his ears. "You have been chosen, Luc. Out of all the souls I have observed, you are the one I have selected for my experiment."
"Me."
"You."
He looked around at the infinite, indifferent splendour of the cosmos. He looked back at the goddess. He thought about his bedroom — the takeaway boxes, the figurine shelves, the seventeen browser tabs he'd left open. "You watched me," he said slowly, "and you chose me."
"Correct."
"Okay." He exhaled. "Okay. What kind of experiment?"
She rose from her throne, and the galaxies behind her shifted almost imperceptibly, as if tilting to frame her better. "You will be sent to another world," she said. "A world of monsters and magic, of dungeons and ancient power. You will be given a System — a gift from my hand that will guide and strengthen you. And in return, you will do one thing."
She raised one slender finger.
"You will find the Demon King. And you will end him."
The silence that followed was profound. Stars drifted past in the periphery. A galaxy the size of all human history rotated quietly to Luc's left.
He put a chip in his mouth. Chewed. Swallowed.
"Yes," he said.
The goddess blinked. It was, remarkably, the first time she had done so. "...You agree? Just like that?"
"I've been waiting for this my entire life," Luc said, with a sincerity so complete it was almost painful to witness.
"Isekai. System. Demon King. Goddess." He gestured at her with the chip bag. "I have rehearsed for this. Frankly, I'm a little insulted it took the universe this long."
Something passed across her face that, in a lesser being, might have been called amusement. "Then it is settled," she said. "Upon your arrival, you will find yourself in possession of a modest sum of coin — enough to begin. You will also possess an innate comprehension of the world's language. It will feel as though you have always known it."
She paused, and something shifted in her expression — a slight crease between her brows, the careful gathering of words that carried weight. "There is, however, one thing I must warn you about regarding the System. It is unlike anything you may have encountered in your stories. Its nature is—"
"Say no more," Luc said.
The goddess stopped.
"I mean it — not a word." He held up one hand, chip bag rustling with the motion, and he smiled the smile of a man who had watched too many opening monologues and felt fully prepared for all of them.
"You chose me. Out of every soul in however many worlds exist out there, you looked around and said — that one. The guy on the floor with the chips. Him." He pressed a hand to his chest. "Whatever the System is, whatever the quirks, the complications, the fine print — it doesn't matter. You have chosen me, and I will deliver. That's the deal. That's how this works."
He pointed at her with the quiet confidence of someone who had just said something he considered very cool.
"So don't worry about it."
A long, cosmic silence passed between them.
The goddess looked at him. Then she looked at the hand pointing at her. Then she looked back at him again, and for one fleeting, unguarded moment, something moved behind those depthless eyes that was not quite concern and not quite pity, but lived somewhere in the uncomfortable neighbourhood between the two.
She closed her mouth.
"...Very well," she said at last, quietly.
"And the System?" Luc asked. "When do I get—"
But the cosmos was already folding.
The throne dissolved. The galaxies collapsed inward like a breath being drawn. The goddess raised one hand in something that might have been farewell, and then the world went white, and then green, and then Luc landed face-first in a bush.
***
The jungle was loud.
That was the first thing he registered, peeling himself out of the undergrowth. Not loud in the comfortable way his apartment was loud — the hum of a PC fan, the tinny audio from his monitor, the downstairs neighbour having an argument with someone on the phone. This was loud in the way that reminded you, very directly, that human beings were not always at the top of the food chain.
Insects screamed.
Something distant and large moved through the canopy above, shaking leaves the size of dining tables. The air was thick and wet and smelled of soil and rot and something sweet underneath it all, like overripe fruit left in the dark.
Luc stood in a clearing barely wide enough to call itself one. Dense growth pressed in on every side. The light filtered through in weak, greenish columns that didn't so much illuminate the jungle floor as suggest it.
He still had one sock. The chips were gone. Presumably the cosmos had decided he didn't deserve them.
He straightened. Cleared his throat. Put on his best protagonist energy.
"System," he said.
Nothing.
He waited. A beetle the size of his fist crawled over his foot and kept going, utterly unimpressed.
"System," he said again, louder.
Still nothing. Not a ping. Not a notification. Not so much as a translucent blue box floating in his peripheral vision.
He frowned. He thought back to every novel he'd read, every manhwa he'd devoured at 3am, every protagonist who had stood in a new world and called upon their power. It always worked.
It always worked. That was basically the entire premise.
"...Was I scammed?" he said aloud, to no one in particular. "Did a goddess scam me?"
The jungle offered no opinion.
He tried one more time, really committed to it, voice raised, arms slightly out, the full performance. "SYSTEM!"
Do not shout. Are you incapable of basic manners, or did no one bother to teach you any?
Luc froze.
The words had not been spoken aloud. They had simply appeared — not visually, not as text floating in the air, but as a presence in his mind, precise and cold and carrying with it the distinct flavour of someone who found him deeply unimpressive.
"Oh," he breathed. "There you are."
Here I am, yes. And here you are — standing in a jungle, shouting into the void like a man who has never once considered that volume is not the same as intelligence. Congratulations on your arrival.
"Okay, first of all," Luc said, jabbing a finger at the air, "I called you three times and you didn't answer. That's on you."
I was assessing whether you were worth answering. The jury is still deliberating.
"Excuse me?! You're a system. You're supposed to help me. That's your whole thing. You're literally the tutorial feature—"
I am not a tutorial feature. I am an intelligence of considerable refinement that has been assigned to assist a host of, presumably, equal refinement. The goddess and I will be having words.
"Oh, that's — you know what, forget it." Luc pressed his fingers to the bridge of his nose. "Fine. Great. The system has a personality disorder. Wonderful. Can we just—"
Less talking.
"I'm not done—"
You are, in fact, done. And rather than continuing to bark into the air like an untrained dog, I would strongly suggest that you look up.
"Look up?" Luc said. "What does that—"
Now.
He looked up.
The snake was approximately the width of a city bus and approximately the length of everything Luc had ever feared. It hung from the canopy in a slow, patient coil — scales the colour of old jade and dried blood, each one the size of a shield. Its head, which was currently descending toward him with the unhurried confidence of something that had never once needed to hurry, was large enough to swallow him without any particularly dramatic effort. Its eyes were amber and ancient and completely, utterly empty of anything that could be called mercy.
Its jaws began to open.
The jungle went very quiet.
Luc looked at the snake.
The snake looked at Luc.
And somewhere in the back of his mind, in the small, calm, completely detached corner of his brain that had apparently decided to observe the situation from a scholarly distance
What the f*ck is this.