The earth gave a great heave, magic coursing through the ground under their feet and hurling Connor off his chair and onto the floor. Before he could respond, however, there was a second shock, and the roof of the basement collapsed.

At this point the reader might be justified in asking us to pause and explain what, exactly, is going on in the Kingdom of Yore. Of course we’ve confirmed, by process of elimination, that the Otome Game Villainess is all but certainly the witch; we are not, however, aware as to what she was attempting to affect by means of her ethereal fire, or even what her goals in the kingdom were.

“But wait,” I hear you cry, “was her goal not to marry the prince?”

Ah, but you see, Connor and Death had entirely jumped the gun in assuming that because the Otome Game Villainess had transmigrated into a fantasy romance novel, therefore she would be fulfilling her fantasy romance.

No one knew this as well as the Otome Game Villainess herself, as she stood in her witchy tower stirring her witchy cauldron and cackling witchily. It was several hours before the roof had collapsed atop Connor and Death, and moments after the witch had sent her loyal transmigrator guard - now deceased - to kill the individuals investigating her.

She still wasn’t sure who they were or what they were doing in the Kingdom of Yore. But then, she supposed their presence in the nation might be entirely merited - she had never paid attention to the wider world of Time to Seduce the Prince, only ever completing it on the prince’s quest line. For all she knew the two showed up in every plotline, with the various other potential romance targets whose identities she’d forgotten, and she’d simply run across them by chance.

This was not, so far as the witch was concerned, an excessively frivolous hypothesis. For there was one romance target she did remember from the game, whose piece was no longer (and never had been) in play - the saintess. Though she was a loyal crony of the witch in almost all of the plotlines, in one she and the witch enjoyed a more than friendly relationship. (At least, if the Breaddit posts the witch had read in her past life were accurate, and she saw no reason to believe otherwise.)

Neither the romance nor the friendship had occurred upon her transmigration; the saintess had, unaccountably, given her the cold shoulder, instead deciding to forge a firm relationship with the vile lady Irene Isabelle Isadora de Potencia, fiancée of the prince. If the two investigators presently pursuing the witch had shown up in the now abandoned saintess plotline, it was reasonable enough to think they may have shifted their attention to the prince.

The witch circled her cauldron, her Resting Witch Face fixed on its contents in thoughtful contemplation. When first she’d transmigrated into this game a month back (after an unfortunate encounter involving her ex-boyfriend’s new girlfriend and a wall) she had originally considered seducing the prince - he was hot, after all - and living out the plot of the novel as written.

And then it occurred to her… why aim so low? She was in a world of magic and mystery, far more magic and mystery than the feeble magic of her past life; why then settle for a lowly prince?

Better yet to conquer the kingdom, turn it into her tool, and return with its troops and resources to her, if not quite beloved, then certainly convenient, Hank.

“Heh,” she sneered, “I’ll show them. I’ll conquer this kingdom, harvest its resources for magic, and return to take hideous heinous revenge on my foolish knave of an ex-boyfriend, or my name isn’t-” but the rest was drowned out by a thunderclap.

Once more she paced about the cauldron, tossing in two handfuls of herbs and a pinch of ground crystal, paying no heed to the blue smoke pouring off of its surface and starting to manifest on the side of the metal itself.

Satisfied with the state of the summoning apparatus, she turned to examine the rest of her ritual layout. As the cauldron tragically could not serve as the locus of the summoning itself - something about being boiled alive - she had had to connect it, by means of a formation, to a second location where the summoned entities could appear.

This location was ringed by the objects composing the formation (of no consequence in and of themselves), and also by a series of red candles, placed at geometrically perfect intervals. Once more she checked to make sure that these intervals were precise - they had to be, for it would be these that made the summoned entities her loyal slaves- err, romantic interests.

It was all perfect. Of course it was - she’d made it herself.

With nothing more to do, it was time to proceed to the rite itself. She fingered her plastic wire choker, once, a bead of sweat pouring down her neck at the thought of what she was about to do. Then she grinned.

She spread her arms wide, athame in one hand, wand in the other, and began to dance about the fire. Her spell she canted in doggerel, as the wisest of the wizards commanded, in a lilting and irregular cadence halfway between a song and a screech.

“Double, bubble, dish, and dash,

Frilly, frelly, balderdash!

Give it up and give it last,

Choke within your iron mask.

If you choose not to be true,

Then thrice accursed it be for you.

Come now, bubble, burst on forth-

Come to me and show your worth!”

“That doesn’t rhyme,” said a voice from out of the blue fog, which had grown and grown and grown and grown over the course of her rite, first pouring off every surface of the cauldron, then emanating from the room itself, as she drew on ever greater amounts of the qi latent within the environment.

The witch sniffed, folding her arms under her shirt (an edgy black and red design with the lurid label of ‘Certified Witch’). “It doesn’t need to rhyme - rhythm’s for chumps.”

The voice tutted, and there were stirrings within the mist as several somethings moved. The witch continued her explanation, gesturing towards the shapes in the fog. “After all, the purpose wasn’t to sound nice or pretty or lovely or musical; it was to bring forth… you.”

The fog had cleared, the last wisps of ethereal blue flame drifting out of the tower window and down to the earth of the kingdom. The tower began to steady, and for the first time the witch realised that it had been shaking, the monumental nature of her undertaking causing the very earth to rumble and quake as reality shattered.

The transmigrators looked at her. There were six of them, all black haired and scrawny, with vague, dead looks in their eyes and bodies stretched taut with suspicion… and all of them, all of them, with beautiful, beautiful Cheat Skills. The witch grinned viciously as she thought of all the uses she could put those Cheat Skills towards, then spread her arms wide in greeting.

“Greetings, heroes! You have been summoned here because this kingdom is under threat… the threat of the Demon King…”

This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it

***

The rubble shifted, bits of crushed stone falling about, then gave way with an almighty (if slightly muffled) whump. There followed several minutes of silence, before there was another rumble, and then a human shape came into being.

Connor grunted as he pushed his way out of the rubble, the remaining bits and bobs of the outpost proving no match for his sheer will as he dug his way out with only his forehead (and a little help from his [Bark] skill).

He had escaped from the collapsing building only through this skill and a fortuitously unlocked [Rugby] skill, which allowed him to bear the brunt of the building and remain standing. The prince had been even more fortunate; he had escaped, not by the skin of his teeth, but by his skin in the teeth of Connor, as the latter sheltered the prince with his [Rugby] enhanced body, then dragged him, gently, through the shattered remnants of the guard post.

Death followed behind him, whistling innocently, completely heedless of the pain and struggle Connor was going through and only vaguely sympathetic to his plight. (He had incapacitated the prince all by his lonesome, after all, so it was only right that he saved the prince all by his lonesome, Death’s inability to help greatly withstanding.)

Escaping from the remains of the outpost, however, did not seriously improve their mood. The town was in a sorry state. Those buildings which had most depended upon, or been most productive of, qi were now no more than annihilated rubble, and the rest of the town had been shaken and shattered. Only the castle seemed unaffected, standing unperturbed in the midst of a kingdom of wrack and ruin.

Connor dropped the prince unceremoniously on the ground, the latter flopping about like a ragdoll, then slowly got back onto his feet.

“Of all the times to unlock a skill…”

“Hey, as you transmigrators say, ‘never look a gift horse in the mouth’… Actually, now that I think about it, why do you say that? Isn’t one of your most famous stories about how dangerous gift horses are?”

“Precisely,” said Connor, eyes narrowing. He glared at his Systems suspiciously.

The shaking had vanished, as had the ethereal blue fire, but that on its own terrified our pair of intrepid protagonists. If the flames and the earthquakes and the winds had ceased, then presumably the rite had ceased also - and if such a colossal rite had ceased, then it had either failed outright or succeeded horribly… and who knew what monsters now stalked the kingdom’s streets.

“So… what next?” Connor asked. Death rubbed her hands, eyes steely with determination.

“What’s next is we deal with the witch.”

“You mean I deal with the witch, unless you planned to suddenly gain the ability to fight people to the death.”

“Sorry bub. You have to fight the people, so they can go to Death. That was our deal.”

Connor sighed, but didn't argue the point, instead following Death as she led them to the witch's residence.

They had nearly reached the tower - towering (yuk yuk) ugly and grey in the sky - when they saw them. There were six of them. Connor could tell by their arrogant bearing, awkward appearance, and drab facial features that they must be transmigrators.

Connor and Death stopped moving, standing their ground, faces wary. The transmigrators, on the other hand, seemed entirely content with a cocky enthusiasm as they circled around the pair, waving their weapons, hooting, hollering, and yammering. They kept nattering away about "defeating the agents of the Demon King," an argument Connor found nonsensical - he had never even met the Demon King - but whose import was clear.

Connor bit his lip nervously. It would have been nearly impossible for him to deal with this many transmigrators if he were in the best of health, but in the best of health he was not. His arms were still little more than stubs, growing at a glacial pace that would take days to heal (the more fool was he for having taken the prince’s command at face value). Nor were any of his skills particularly well suited to combat, whereas he could tell by the way the transmigrators held their weapons that they were more than proficient in their use.

He looked at Death and cocked an eyebrow. “Planning to flee this time as well?”

She snorted. “Funny funny. No; I’ll stand by you.”

Connor nodded, his expression firm but his eyes grateful. If he couldn’t work his way out of this through fighting then he would have to do so through talking, and it was easier to do that with someone like Death by his side.

“Did the witch send you?” He asked one of the transmigrators. The transmigrator sneered.

“That she did. Wants us to kill you; even used a love spell to make us do it.”

Connor froze. He knew nothing about love spells, save what his owner had read in webnovels, but if they were under a charm then he wasn’t sure he could do anything. “Ah. I was going to appeal to your better natures, but if you’re under the influence of a spell…”

“Pfft. As if her ridiculous magic would work. No, we aren't under her spell, although I would save your words - we’re planning to kill you anyways. ‘All things for the xp and loot,’ as they say.”

(In fact, the “love spell” had worked - it simply hadn’t worked as intended. The witch was a woman of little esoteric knowhow, lacking Art’s knowledge of mystical correspondences, and had confused pink, the colour of love and beauty, with red, the colour of violence and obsession. Consequently, instead of summoning a cabal of individuals dedicated to her private service, she had summoned a cabal of individuals dedicated to the conquest of the kingdom and the enhancement (at all costs) of their own power - which was precisely what the Isekai Protagonists presumed to do. As they would have done this anyways, however, the spell was entirely unnecessary.)

Uncertainty seized Connor’s heart at these words, uncertainty and fear. He had heard words like these before, when his hometown had been destroyed, and knew not if the likes of those who uttered them could be reasoned with. Nor was Death all that hopeful; she simply looked at him sadly and shook her head, muttering that a person could not be reasoned with when once they had settled upon violence.

The situation seemed hopeless. The transmigrators were powering up their Cheat Skills, balls of fire and lightning floating above them, and were licking their lips as they imagined how much xp was going to be theirs for the taking.

And then a miracle occurred that changed everything: they heard another voice, a familiar voice, a delightfully oily voice.

“Well well well, if it isn’t Death and her friend. And I see you’re in a bit of a pickle, too.”

Yin Zhi stood there, face placid, arms tucked into his dingy black robe. He smiled beatifically at the xp-starved transmigrators. “Why hello there, my good young men. And how are we on this beautiful evening?”

The transmigrator who had assumed the lead licked his lips. “Oh boy. More xp.”

Yin Zhi sighed. “That was the expected response, really. Tell me, Death, Connor, would you appreciate some help from little old me? Normally I wouldn’t offer, but really, it hurts me so to see my fellows turned into xp…”

Death snorted. “You’re only willing to help because of your studies, old man.”

“I can’t help but notice that isn’t a ‘no,’” said Yin Zhi, still the very picture of calm.

“Of course it wasn’t. By all means, help.

Yin Zhi chuckled, cracking his knuckles. The transmigrators backed up, not nervously, but warily, watching the strange man in the dirty robes to see what he’d do.

And then Yin Zhi whipped off his skin.

Connor’s Stats:

Name: Connor Crinkle (formerly known as uPhone 12 model MX0169)

Age: 22

Race: Ghost of a Demon

Occupation: Exorcist

Physiological Stats:

[Leaves] 0 [Fruit] 0

[Xylem] 1 [Phloem] 1 (0)

[Bark] 2 (1) [Heartwood] 3 (2)

[Roots] 5

Physical Stats:

[Geocaching] 0 [Lacrosse] 1

[Pole Vaulting] 1 [Rugby] 0

Other sports to be unlocked later

Master of the Leifu Exorcistic Arts:

[Master of Exorcism] 1

[Master of the Storm] 0

[Yang Eyes] 0