I was going to kill my boyfriend. Or dump him. Or kill him and dump the body.
The last thing I remembered was cleaning up all the energy drink cans and candy wrappers he’d left around his desk. I must have tripped and cracked my head on something. It hurt.
And seriously, I know James is a computer engineering student and that requires focus and hard work, blah, blah, blah, and I also know that he’d been going through a hard time since that student in his class died, but I also know he’d spent every night until 3am the last month working on a stupid fanfiction for that game he plays. Fantasy Dungeons. Or ‘F-Dungeons’ as they call it on Reddit.
I opened my eyes just to roll them in exasperation, but instead of the ceiling of our run-down apartment with the paint flaking in the corners, I found myself staring up into a canopy of trees.
“What the-?” I gasped and sat up quickly – or tried to but was stopped short by something pulling on my head.
I raised my hands tentatively towards my head but instead of my long hair which I had assumed had gotten tangled on something, I found a short bob style pixie cut and… horns? Were those horns?
No fricken way.
My fingers traced their length, and I found the place where they’d been caught on a tree root, right under the curve. Had I turned into some goat-creature? Devil? Deer? One of those weird creatures from Fantasy Dungeons? What was the difference between horns and antlers, anyway?
I failed to identify them, but with a little awkward twisting, managed to disentangle myself.
Reading on Amazon or a pirate site? This novel is from Royal Road. Support the author by reading it there.
Shaking my head once it was free, I decided I needed to focus on the important things… how I’d gotten here, and how the heck to get back.
I mean, it was possible that I’d somehow fallen through a magic portal into my boyfriend’s fanfic world or maybe – and infinitely more likely – I’d knocked my head a little too hard and needed to wake up from this weird delirium-coma. If I was just logical and took stock of my surroundings, I could make a plan and –
“WHOA!” I gasped, noticing my heaving chest. “Well, that’s certainly not mine!”
Maybe I was having a coma-dream whilst lying face-first on one of James’ dirty F-Dungeons fan-magazines. He’d bought an entire stack of them at a convention, claiming he was doing the Lord’s work and supporting artists. We’d resorted to eating instant noodles for a week afterwards, and now they were being left out on the floor.
Huffing in indignation, I got to my feet, noticing with an extra layer of annoyance that my cloth garment barely covered me at all and looked like it was about to fall apart at the seams. Heck, I could even see my nipples through the thin fabric. Weren’t these characters supposed to go on adventures or something? And they were supposedly expected to do that without so much as a bra?
I noticed a satchel with a swirl design embroidered on it and assumed it must be mine. No one else was lying around ready to claim it, and I seemed to have a swirl tattoo as well. Investigating it proved difficult as it was on an awkward part of my arm, and I couldn’t see where it disappeared to – is that a tail?
Of course it was a tail. A long, stupid, pointy devil tail.
Either I was deep in a coma-dream based on James’ fantasy porn or I had died and gone to hell. Maybe to answer for my sins of moving in out of wedlock with a guy who was into kinky anime and fantasy games. If I had to answer for my decisions in life, I didn’t know what else to say except “A girl’s gotta pay rent.”
Ignoring the unwanted appendage, which was flicking behind me in agitation, I shrugged the satchel over my shoulder and made my way to the path which lay just a little way on from where I had fallen. The trees were thick and forbidding, with very little light breaking through the canopy, but the path itself was visible enough.
A wooden road sign stood a short distance from me, and I approached it. It pointed in two directions: Isekai Village to the left, and Necromancer Heights to the right.
Without a moment’s hesitation, I walked towards Isekai Village. I wasn’t a total idiot.