Bernard’s POV: Day 5

We’d all been fucking idiots to think anything would come of actually reaching the town, we weren’t on earth any more.

Our world was called Redacle, and it was one of those “grimdark fantasy” settings for edgy arseholes who thought they were clever. Like us. All dark people doing dark things for dark reasons, rape and murder, starving orphans and big horrible monsters pulling people’s arms off. You know, the classics.

All well and good to write. Except settings like those are known for their egalitarianism in the same way that Adolf Hitler was known for his racial tolerance and compassion, so almost the moment we were within town bounds, a pair of bastards in big gambesons with big sticks marched over and started barking demands.

Vagrants. We were vagrants, now. That was fine by me, I’d been a vagrant before, but Kenny looked like he might well be sick.

“Names and intentions?!” One of the men asked. My brain was slowing down with the cold, and slowing more with my hunger, but I got there in the end. Eying his uniform, remembering where we were. A town guard. A Redacle town guard, which meant there was a very particular set of non-disastrous responses possible here.

“Solitaire and Shango.” I answered, resisting the urge to spit on him. “Our friend here is hurt, we need a healer for him.”

The guard eyed Cádo flatly, apparently unmoved by such trivialities as a man fucking dying right in front of him. I wondered whether he’d be equally unmoved if he took Cádo’s place.

“You’ll be here for Magus Corvan, then. Big hut on the far end of town, one road down from this one. He takes payment up-front.”

I caught his implication just fine, and eyed Kenny, waiting for him to reply. He’d be better in this situation, Kenny always got along with humans more than me.

“Much obliged, sir.” Kenny breathed, forcing a friendly smile that went unanswered. We were past the guard a moment later, and he shot a look at me.

“Solitaire?” He asked, incredulous. We’d agreed beforehand on using false names while we were here, for one major reason. We didn’t know for sure we were the only ones who’d been Isekai’d into the fucking place, and if someone else here recognised the setting, they’d almost definitely recognise its writers.

Neither of us wanted to get jumped by a bunch of idiots who’d decided that it must have been the authors’ fault when they ran into them in some mysterious fantasy land.

All discussed, all agreed on, all concluded. But we hadn’t shared our choice of name with each other yet, apparently mine had surprised him.

“What’s wrong with Solitaire?” I frowned, and Kenny- Shango- only snorted.

“What isn’t wrong with it? It’s like something out of a young adult novel.”

I couldn’t fight my chuckle. Having your testicles turned into icicles tended to squeeze the humour out, but finding the town and, more importantly, hearing it had a healer had reinstalled a bit of my old boyish whimsy. .

“At least I didn’t name myself after one of my people’s gods.” I shot back. “Isn’t Shango a damned dictator, anyway?”

Kenny- Shango, now, always while we were here- shrugged.

“Ancient king. It tends to happen.”

Any other time I might’ve thrown in a few choice words about modern kings, too, and modern governments for that matter, but we had more important things to worry about.

Perhaps surprisingly, the guard’s directions proved reliable. We were soon standing outside a squat, oddly well-maintained looking house distanced quite a bit farther from its neighbours than they were from each other.

We’d gotten a good look at the place on our walk over, though we hardly needed it. Redacle as a whole, and in particular our current location in the continent of Vorhazh, was a vaguely late-mediaeval setting. The buildings showed that that much hadn’t changed. All wood for the most part, with the occasional stretch of cobbled walls. They were small and numerous, and even with however many hundred dotted around the town there were probably no more than one or two thousand people living here.

Stolen story; please report.

Magi were rare, and magical healers were rarer still. The former was just a blanket term for people properly trained in the most common form of magic, and the latter, magically speaking, was almost always a magus who’d specialised in repairing the body. It was lucky to find even one of either in a town like this, usually they stuck to cities. Cities had more people, and wealthier people. Cities had more things that called for a person capable of blasting down trees and cutting through plate armour.

One foot inside and everything already smelled like smoke and salt. It was almost nostalgic, my mother’s homes always had that same scent whenever she was making explosives.

It was a dingy interior, lit by candles dotting the various walls, and every surface seemed covered with shelving units holding twice their weight in containers. Jars, vials, pots and bowls. Herbs hung in big racks, and an open flame crackled at one far corner of the room. There was a cauldron dangling over it. A fucking cauldron. Christ.

We were able to get maybe two paces in before the place’s owner appeared, stepping out in front of us and staring at me and Shango both as if we’d just kicked his mother and fucked his dog.

“I don’t do charity.” He said. “You’ll be looking for the temple.” He had a modern accent, one I’d expect from Yorkshire, maybe. Made sense, I usually wrote with modern accents in mind.

Shango answered, as we’d agreed, speaking with a calm I wasn’t sure I could’ve mustered myself with our friend leaning unconscious against me.

“Our friend is dying.” He explained. “He needs treatment.”

The healer glanced at Cádo, unmoved.

“Ten silvers for conventional treatment, three gold for arcane healing.”

It was an absurd price, even for Redacle, and he was asking it to make us go away. Shango must have known, because he changed tactics instantly.

“We can work the price off.” He began. “Look at our friend, he’s strong, really strong, and he can fight.”

I cut in at that to reinforce his point.

“And so are we, how often does the chance come along to get three workers of our size? We could guard your shop as well as any five normal men, hunt for you, even…Enforce.”

The more I spoke, the harder it seemed to find ways in which we could leverage our stature to actually benefit a healer of all people, but I was desperate not to let the advantage go unused. We’d noticed almost immediately how significant it was.

Childhood and adolescence on earth, in modern nations and wealthy families, had seen all of us fed on a protein-rich diet filled with vital nutrients that the people in this world were denied. Just as our own ancestors had been hundreds of years ago on earth. At six foot two, I was pretty tall back in England. In Redacle, though, I was a giant.

That had to mean something, it just had to.

“I don’t need assistants, definitely not a pair of meatheaded thugs.”

The man didn’t sound like he could be moved, but Shango was never one to give up on something he wanted.

“There must be something you need.” He tried, desperate now. “Anything, what do you lose by naming a price and keeping him alive until we fail to pay it?”

The healer paused, thought, then spoke slowly. Carefully.

“There…Might be something.” He began. “Jungua sap. You’ve heard of it?”

Neither of us had. Shango’s confusion was genuine, and mine was too. Mine, though, was eerie. I remembered everything, which meant this wasn’t something we’d added to the world. Were we not in Redacle after all?

“We haven’t.” Shango replied, hurriedly, “What is it?”

The healer’s scoff almost earned him a headbutt before I remembered our circumstance, and his magic, fortunately he was quick in answering.

“It’s a remedy for infection, and a damned good one. Cleans wounds out like nothing else, but I’m out of it, and the idiot merchant from Wolney didn’t bring my last shipment. If you can fetch some more for me, I’ll take the price out of your friend’s healing fee. That’d leave him alive, and the three of you in a mere two gold and fifteen silvers’ debt.”

Wolney, I committed the name to memory. Most likely it was a city, but there was no time to be checking that now. I turned to Shango as he replied.

“Deal.” He declared. “Where do we find it nearby?”

The healer gave us our directions, speaking about three times slower than I would’ve needed to carve them all into my mind. By the time he was finished, I’d started to feel the familiar twitches of adrenaline oozing back into my muscles. He was hiding something, I could tell, and whatever it was, I knew enough about this shithole of a world to be certain it might get us killed.

No surprise there, I was working class. Getting me killed was what people did.

We left Cádo with the bastard, not having much of a choice in the matter. Moments after setting foot outside the exhaustion hit us both.

It’d been days since we’d rested. Properly, actually rested. Since we got here it had all been marches, starvation and ice. And it looked like we had more ahead of us. I felt worn thin, enough that it was almost tempting to just leave my friend for dead.

Almost. Shango would have kept that from being an option, if it even had been in the first place.

“Right.” He breathed, speaking with a voice that told everything I needed to hear about his exhaustion. “Three things we need, yeah?”

I thought about it, and agreed. Food was the first, I was already weaker than I’d ever felt before, struggling just to move around. Cádo was a big guy, maybe a hundred and ninety pounds of lean muscle and springy fencer, but hauling his weight shouldn’t have been half as hard when split between me and Shango at once.

If something half as dangerous as that bear attacked us now, we’d die. Which meant a meal was highest on our list of priorities. I poked my ribs, felt them poking back from beneath the skin.

Maybe two meals. After that I could waste all the time I wanted wondering what the fuck a bear was doing awake and attacking me in winter anyway.

Second came weaponry, of course, and the third priority was one that defied instinct to consider. But there was no doubting its use.

The last few days had been too hectic for us to spare any time for introspection or experimentation, but we had room to breathe now, and we’d fought off a bear less than one week ago.

It was time to have Shango take a peek at our stats and see whether we really could level in this world.