That unwanted rush of falling uncontrollably in a dream is always a horrible thing. The same couldn’t be said for James, who was curled up like a napping cat on the side of a very worn, but well-kept road. Around his body, leaves tossed and turned in the air currents. The gentle and shallow rising and falling of his chest matched a leaf, as it swung in the air, spiralled for a few seconds then came to rest on his cheek.
As he came to, he squinted groggily, then reached up and gently flicked the leaf off his cheek with a flick of his wrist. Slowly opening his eyes, he was expecting to find himself back in a hospital and all that had been a dream. However, picking up the leaf he’d touched, he realised that it was all too real.
He was in another world.
< # # # >
It hadn’t even been a few minutes when he’d found himself pacing around aimlessly beside an oak tree larger than one he’d ever seen before. It felt as wide as a bus and whenever he dared to look up every few seconds, it gave him vertigo. His hair, now sunset ginger instead of dark brown, was scrunched up in his hands as he gritted his teeth.
‘What way do I go?! What if I stumble across some cliché event? What do I -’
His thoughts pretty much followed a familiar character’s inner monologue, but he was so deep in thought that he almost missed the vehicle coming up the worn-down, underdeveloped road; a carriage pulled by a four-armed, four-legged creature he’d never seen before. The creature's legs protruded at weird but seemingly natural angles as it sped towards him.
Without thinking, he tried to run but in the process of turning, it only took a few steps before he tripped up over a large, fallen branch. In the process of tripping, he stains his clothing with a few patches and smears of mud and grass as he uncontrollably rolled under a thick bush. Staying still, his heart started beating quickly, beads of sweat slowly moving down his face as his body temperature started raising, yet he felt an increasing gust of cold washing over his skin.
It got even worse when he heard two gravelly, almost bass-boosted voices reverberating around him.
‘Hey, kid where’d you come from?!’
‘Who you talking to Rapheus? I don’t see any lowly scum out here.’
‘I swears I saw someone, Freuk. They must be in this hawth bush.’
A bead of sweat dripped from his chin, creating a quiet but audible “ploip” into a small puddle under him. Hoping it wasn’t loud enough, he let out a breath of air he didn’t know he’d been holding. Unfortunately, letting his guard down was a mistake. Within less than two seconds, the bush above him was yanked to the side and a bag was placed over his head.
‘GOTCHA you son of a b- OOFOWW! You broke by bose!’
Reiki had instinctively thrown his head backwards, and in the process managed to break his capturer's nose. However, this only encouraged the other man to get down from his seat on their carriage and grabbed him by the arms, his grip like a vice. He couldn’t see anything, but he felt the slam of his body against a hard surface followed by the sound of metallic clinks and clanks.
‘...are you okay?’
A gentle voice called out to him. It felt out of place to him, but the alluring voice calmed him down. Just a little, but enough to stop him from panicking. The bag that had been covering his head was removed, and a young face was looking down at him, her eyebrows furrowed and covered in a few splatters of mud. and dressed in a torn dress.
Flecks of pink and white tried to show through the ragged seams near the bottom of the dress, yet most of the dress was torn and ripped. Ragged and mud-stained hair hung from her head, clumped haphazardly together. A few scars and scratches were mostly visible on her exposed arms.
‘I’m okay. Thank you for removing the bag.’
‘It’s no problem. I just hope that we don’t travel too far. We're all pretty much kidnapped you see.’
Flags went off in the boy's head, the ride getting bouncier now and then, shaking him around as he struggled to sit normally. Whilst in the back of the old carriage, the time passed quickly, as the sky had done two full cycles and the driver and his assistant had managed to snatch up two more young children. Two males to be exact.
After a while, the road, or what could almost be called a road, suddenly turned away from the increasingly backed-up main road and the barely awakened Reiki began to watch as the road turned into a small track with two lines of dirt surrounded by dense trees and bushes.
‘Where are we going?’
A bead of sweat rolled down his cold cheek, his mind jolting awake from the sudden rocking and banging the carriage was experiencing off the main road.
‘I don’t know. I’ve never been this way before. I know roughly where we are, but I’d remember if this was a route I’ve been on before or not.’
It was the same girl from earlier. A few groans and grunts of pain from around him suggested that some of the people in the back with him required medical help. One child suddenly fell onto the cold, wooden floor of the carriage. The sickening thud of his head bouncing now and then caused an older girl to gasp over the sound of the struggling children.
As he looked up at the rest of the children, all dressed in poorly maintained clothing and some even with patches of red in places, he finally saw the girl who stopped his head from banging on the floor.
‘No, Callam! Not now! No! Please! Please wake up!’
She wailed, tears flowing profusely down her cheeks as she cradled his head and body close to her chest, her hair draped over her shoulder on one side and the other with a short and badly made pigtail holding her hair up. The boy had gone from groaning to shallow breathing.
‘OI! What’s all the ruckus back there?’
‘It’s nothing.’
The young girl who’d taken the bag off his head replied almost instantly. The carriage came to a stop and the girl shifted and shuffled her butt to make her way over beside him. But Reiki wasn’t having any of it. He immediately got up, his back no longer awkwardly leaning against his bound hands. Unbeknownst to Reiki, his hands appeared to blur rapidly and randomly as he got up shakily to his feet and crawled towards the unconscious boy.
‘Here, let me take care of that for you.’
‘But your ha— HEH?!’
Without even realising it, Reiki had forgotten his hands were tied up and instead they were both checking over the young boy's head, carefully sliding to check for a bump. Rope free. Two muffled gasps came from behind him, but he paid no attention as he started to gently press the boy's chest. A repetition of a few pumps of pressure followed by him leaning down, mouth to ear, went on as the cart slowed to a crawl.
The sound of slurping and squelching echoed into the back of the carriage, the two kidnappers shovelling around the carriage as the patter on the roofing started to increase in volume when the boy's pale blue skin erubesced.
‘Phew… Close one.’
‘...’
‘... What?’
The sudden silence, not an awkward one, left him feeling embarrassed. A soft glow on his cheeks and a skittish movement to his eyes, combined with a hug of his knees, caused the eyes of the young beauty who spoke to sparkle through her crusty mud-covered face.
Without any thought, she grasped him from behind and rested her chin on his shoulder. A gentle sigh of relief escaped her lips as the corners turned up. The carriage started moving again once the pattering of rain started to ease. In the following twenty minutes, Reiki had started to open up to the rest of the boys and girls in the carriage, finding out they range from thirteen to seventeen years of age.
‘I hope my father is putting a search out for me.’
‘I’m just glad nobody else has had any issues besides a few bumps and bruises.’
He flicked a piece of wood towards the tarp roof, where a small puddle rippled, then eventually slid off when they hit a bump again.
‘Curse that sudden downpour. It messed up our schedule. We’re already ten minutes late!’
‘Don’t have to tell me twice. We had to dig out the parts that sunk into thick mud too.’
The two kidnappers grumbled their hatred for their job but still kept quiet as they trudged towards the city’s secret gateway. Reiki had allowed the girl who’d been compassionate to fall asleep on his shoulder as they trundled onto a badly built stone-brick road. The inside rumbled from the surface change, but they didn’t rock and bounce like earlier. The rain had stopped and the inside briefly dimmed as they made their way under the thick walls.
This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it
A muffled conversation started at the carriage slowed to a stop, and then the carriage shifted shoddily as the two men stepped off. The view out the back, through some metal bars, showed the gate get a faint, deep green glow before it mysteriously shifted and dissolved. As if it was never there in the first place.
As Reiki shifted his focus on the muffled voices, their conversation appeared to have introduced a third, and maybe a fourth voice. Out of nowhere, a face with a smile that almost reached from ear to ear and a scar from forehead to under their chin peered in from the top of the tarp covering everyone.
‘Ooh! Lookie what we have here! More slaves for us to sell!’ A jarring laugh came from his throat as a glint appeared in his eyes.
Without warning, the metal door swung open and the man quickly swung into the carriage. Everyone that was still awake from the trip backed away in fear at his stance, his broad shoulders and straight back tied with his devilish grin. His eyes darted around, looking between the kids as they huddled in groups of two or three. Some scrambled backwards, some burst into silent tears. The reactions were varied, but expelled one clear emotion; fear.
'Who... Who the hell i—?!’
A voice rang out from beyond the gently wafting tarp.
‘Oi, Bruckel, get outta there! You’ll ruin the merchandise!’
The gruff voice made everyone flinch and leave the back in a similar way to how he entered. Reiki wanted to sucker punch him so badly, but after seeing the wall return to normal and hearing the number of voices around them. He didn’t want to risk his chances until he got an open window. After all, how was he to know he’d be caught up in an illegal slave trade ring, along with seventeen other teenagers?
‘I need to find a way out of here fast, but what should I do with this girl who’s grown attached to me? I bet they weren’t expecting me to ’ He thought as he found himself sitting with his hands hugged around his legs, and his chin positioned on top of his knees.
A gentle breath of air slowly washed over the left side of his neck, coming from the direction of her head resting carelessly. They shared a cloth so thin, that he could barely keep enough warmth to himself. Especially with the girl sharing it with him. After waiting in the foul-smelling carriage, with the torn-up wood covering, it wasn’t even less than an hour later when the carriage ground to a halt, and bags made from a strange material to stop any light from entering them were harshly placed on all their heads.
Someone had shoved him, but he couldn’t hear a thing. As he focused on his surroundings through his other senses, he instantly got a strange feeling tingling across his entire body that washed from his head and hands down to his feet and almost as if it flowed into the floor. Almost like his sense of touch briefly expanding from his immediate surroundings.
But the moment didn’t last. As soon as he’d even sensed his surroundings in such clear detail, that feeling vanished.
‘Oi, move it. We’re not being paid for those that stand around doing something fishy!’
‘Ironic much?’ Reiki thought, then proceeded to mentally scheme a way out of the place whilst considering taking the girl with him.
Upon being shoved onto a floor, the cover over his head was yoinked free from his head. Finally looking around the room, he initially noticed smears of dirt across the unevenly tiled floor and numerous patches of mould between the bricks on the badly built walls. The room had lots of space, but that’s when he noticed four of the kids on the ride with him.
‘Hey, mister.’
He turned his head in the rough direction the reverberating whisper carried from. There were three young girls and two young boys all huddled in a corner. The voice was very young and was higher pitched than any of the boys in the room. It was a hard time for him to realise it was the same sick boy from the carriage ride that was clinging to the older girl, the one who’d spoken.
‘Thank you for saving my younger brother earlier. He has Blue Skin Syndrome. Not many people know how to reduce it the way you did.’
‘Don’t mention it. Anyway, where are we?’
‘We’re either in Hibel or Froesé. At least one of their minor areas, I think.’
His eyes expanded a little, glinting slightly from the brightly lit torch on the wall outside the cell. His eyes shifted to the left slightly. The voice carried a yawn and a soft, yearning calmness to it that he recognised from the ride into he can now confirm was a city of some sort.
‘Hee-bell? Froze? What types of city names are those? Anyway, wait, is she—?’
His thoughts were interrupted as his gaze rested on the girl who’d been resting against him earlier that day. He immediately forgot about the city names, and after getting a good look at her, his heart felt like it was beating loudly in his ears. Not the odd illness kind, but the kind that left him with erubescent cheeks and a slightly fluttery feeling in his chest.
‘Oh, okay then. Well, if it helps, I’ve kinda been orphaned just before I was captured. My parents kinda died after a dog-like monster attacked and I got away strangely unscathed. I’d been walking for ages before I was kidnapped.’
He had pretty much lied to everyone in the room, not even a bead of sweat appearing as he lied about his situation. Having said his part, something in his vision blipped up. For a few seconds, he just stared at the floating, green menu before him.
‘… wait, I’ve heard of this trope. Is this an RPG hud?!’
The menu before him displayed a fuzzy window, angled down by his left side. A glitchy outline started to shift, the symbols and shapes within it shifting around until it resembled something startlingly similar to English. A quick raise of his gaze to check the room confirmed to him that the menu was only visible to him before he return his gaze to a better-focused message box.
[ Congratulations! You’ve created your backstory! ]
[ Would you like to view your stats? (Y/N) ]
He didn’t know how magic worked in this world and he could hear footsteps coming closer to the cell. He quickly flicked two fingers hidden behind his legs, as if swiping at something that was there, and the menu slid to the other side of him. When he snuck out his index finger to tap the yes button, it vanished in a puff of digital, glitch-filtered glass shards, then reformed into a bigger panel that displayed his personal statistics.
His eyes grew a gentle glint of appreciation at the stats he could see. Despite them mainly being blank, some displayed interesting base statistics for his current condition.
[ PROFILE ]
[ NAME - Reiki Honoka ]
[ ALIAS - N/A ]
[ AGE - 17 ]
[ PROFESSION - N/A, N/A ]
[ STATUS - Kidnapped ]
[ LEVEL - 1 ]
[ SKILLS ]
[ Active Skills ]
Unknown - Lv. 1 | N/A - Lv. 0
[//ERROR//]
[//ERROR//]
[ Passive Skills ]
N/A - Lv. 0 | Translation - Lv. 1
Analysis - Lv. 1
Leveller - Lv. ∞
He tapped the air, closing the panel, as he pondered what most of it meant. Right as it closed, a high-pitched yell came from a girl who’d just been grabbed by a guy with muscles that were pulsating strongly as they moved and flexed.
‘I don’t want to get on his bad side.’
Just as he started to look away from the helpless struggle, his mind did a double take on the image of the girl's face. His eyes widened as he watched her being dragged away, a soft thumping increased in volume in his ears yet the sound of her struggling breath, albeit muffled and the ragged huffing of the guy who dragged her off was crystal clear whenever he closed his eyes.
He closed the stats window as he began to formulate a plan. Running out of time became a real risk now. He wished he could run away from this place. The start of his new reality couldn’t have been made any worse than an immediate kidnapping. A quiet cacophony of young voices flittered around the cell.
‘I wanna go back to mommy.’
‘Shush, they’ll hear you!’
‘I don’t feel safe here.’
‘I hope that girl they took is okay. Something felt a little off with her today.’
Some of the kids in the room started to worry about being in a room that started to stink similar to that of a body that hasn’t been washed in weeks. Some were holding their noses as they tried to avoid throwing up at the stench surrounding them. Making up his mind, Reiki noticed a small patch of loose dirt in the centre of the room.
‘I have a plan to get out, but this is my first attempt at escaping from a place like this so I won’t be able to bring any of you along. So if you want to be able to see your families or friends again, please let me know you’re ready to wait for the rescue.’
Some of the older kids nodded their heads as he started to describe his plan, using his pinkie finger to roughly sketch out an idea. The eldest girl in the room to him, a wolf-girl, was on the lookout in case they were to overhear his plan to escape. Turns out her race had an exceptional hearing ability and she desperately wanted to do anything to help out.
A few times they almost got caught because she hadn’t been paying attention, but Reiki managed to pull out lines from an Action-RPG or two that an online friend of his loved to play. Turns out that in this world, some seemed to work as distraction techniques. Waiting for the right moment to escape was going to take time and luckily, they all had nothing else to do.
He hadn’t told any of them about his RPG ability, which he desperately wanted to keep hidden. Without realising it this had unlocked his passive Hide Profile ability and after his initial surprise, levelled it up by two in the thought of hiding it from everyone in the room. In case someone could see his stats differently.
‘Okay, it’s time. Their schedule seems to have relaxed a little. I hope you can save that girl.’
‘I sure hope so. Promise me you’ll keep the kids safe whilst I’m gone.’
‘I shall. Don’t forget us once we’re free either, y’got that?’
‘Yes, I’ll make sure to find a way to keep in touch.’