"...Hey.......you...!"
（What the…? It feels like someone is talking to me.）
In my faint, barely existing consciousness, I had the sensation that someone was calling out to me.
But since I was supposed to be asleep, the voice didn't reach me clearly. It came in broken fragments, like a radio with bad reception.
"Hey! Are you alive or what!?"
"Wah!?"
When the volume of that choppy, hard-to-hear radio suddenly increased, the frequency must have aligned, because the voice came through loud and clear. It instantly yanked my brain out of its pre-awakening state and into full consciousness.
Reacting to the voice calling me, I let out a startled yelp, slightly raised my upper body, and opened my closed eyelids. Through my vision, I took in the scene before me.
"…Where the hell am I…?"
What I saw when I opened my eyes was a white-haired old man staring at me, along with a Western-style townscape I had never seen before. There were also people with animal ears on their heads and tails on their waists—beastmen, the kind I had only seen in fiction. Not only that, there were bipedal pigs and lizard-like creatures walking around. Of course, there were humans like me too, but I couldn't tell the ratio just from these few seconds.
In any case, an unreal world was spreading out right in front of me.
"Hey, young man. It's fine to take a nap, but don't sleep like you're dead."
The white-haired old man in front of me looked completely human. The only difference was that he was holding a skewer in his hand, the kind used for stabbing something.
"You're the one who shouldn't be holding something that dangerous in front of someone who just woke up."
"Oh? Ah, sorry, sorry. That must've been scary. Forgive me."
The white-haired old man quickly placed the skewer on the stall-like stand behind him and turned back toward me.
"It's fine to sleep here, but… where are you from, kid?"
"Uhh… Well… I'm from a faraway country in the east, I guess."
This was probably the standard answer when someone in another world asks about your origin.
But if I had been Russian, what was I supposed to say? "The biggest country in the world"? Or "a place colder than here"?
Well, minor details like that didn't matter right now. I decided to just immerse myself in this dream, whose end I couldn't predict.
"Hey, old man—"
"Old man, old man… I've got a name, you know. It's Tong. And I'm only fifty-five."
"That's plenty old enough to be called an old man."
"You idiot. Compared to you I'm older, sure, but the going rate says 'old man' starts at sixty."
"I see. So… Tong?"
I couldn't help but chuckle at the strange sense of realism. It was probably just his own personal standard, but even a fantasy world like this had that kind of mindset.
"Add '-san' when you say it, kid. So, what's your name, kid?"
"Takuma Takahashi."
"That's a weirdly long name."
"Uh, just so you know, my given name is Takuma, and Takahashi is my family name."
"So you've got a name besides your actual name?"
"Yeah. But I'm not nobility or anything."
"Huh? Why are you bringing up nobility?"
"Huh? Isn't that usually something only people from good families have?"
"Well, you're not entirely wrong, but it's not always the case. The guy running the shop two stalls over from mine, Derek, isn't from any special family, but he has a name besides his given name too."
"I see…"
My knowledge was nothing more than what I'd picked up from light novels and games. If the old man said so, then that must be how it is here. Still… why wasn't this dream going the way I wanted it to?
"Hey, Takuma. There's something I've been wondering about for a while. Can I ask?"
"Is it about my clothes?"
"Yeah! How'd you know!?"
"Well… it's a classic trope… I mean, I've been feeling for a while now that my outfit is really different from everyone else's."
The old man in front of me was at least trying to be considerate of the atmosphere. In that case, I should probably refrain from making meta comments.
Besides, this was the first exciting dream I'd had in a long time. I wanted to enjoy this feeling a little longer.
"What kind of clothes are those?"
"They're called sweatpants… well, a sweatshirt and sweatpants. I use them as pajamas."
"Why are you walking around in pajamas?"
"Ah… That's because this is my dream."
"What are you talking about…?"
No matter how much I didn't want to break the dream, those words had come out way too bluntly.
But what else was I supposed to say? "I was wearing this when I went to sleep, so it can't be helped"? Or "My brain doesn't have enough capacity to redesign my clothes to fit the isekai setting"?
Well, this dream would probably end in another two or three developments anyway. I should wrap up the conversation with the old man and go look for some beautiful isekai girls.
"This is reality, you know?"
"Yeah, sure. It's reality inside your head, old man."
"No, it's reality for you too. Are you okay…?"
"Don't worry, I'll wake up soon. So just leave me alone. I'm going to go find some beautiful women from another world—"
The moment I suddenly stood up from my seated position, I lost my sense of balance and fell forward, slamming hard into the ground.
"Hey, are you really okay!?"
From behind me, I heard Tong's genuinely worried voice.
But I couldn't respond to him right now.
I had instinctively put my hands out, but my athletic reflexes—honed only by part-time jobs—were nonexistent. Because I put my hands down right before hitting the ground, my forehead still collided with the hard surface.
The impact gave me something like a mild concussion, but there was a far more concerning symptom attacking my body.
"It… hurts…?"
I was definitely feeling pain in my forehead.
Pain that I shouldn't be able to feel in a dream.