It took most of a day to get out of the city, even running nearly the entire way. The only good thing about fleeing through a city filled with what had to be tens, if not hundreds of thousands, of people was that it was nothing to blend in. Terry eventually found a window and discovered he was wearing white pants and some kind of long white shirt. The whole thing reminded him entirely too much of some kind of messianic garb from a fantasy novel, so he made a point to dirty it up by bumping into walls and cutting through alleys. The good news was that it seemed those ornate robes were mostly a thing for what Terry thought of as the stupidly pretty people. The commoners or peasants or whatever the hell they called them in this terrible place where armies of evil actually existed—a fact that made him think, “What the fuck,” every single time it crossed his mind—wore similar clothes to what he had on. Just shittier. Thankfully, the people at the city gates let him run right through, after looking behind him to make sure he wasn’t being chased by someone official-looking. Not seeing anyone, they just laughed, and one of them called after him.
“Yeah, my wife gets pissed when I’m late too!”
That comment caused roars of laughter from all the guards, a pleasantly cheerful sound that followed Terry through the gates like a friendly puppy. What kept Terry running, aside from what he found out was a remarkably robust constitution, was the fear of being caught by the stupidly pretty people and forced to go north at swordpoint. No, no, no, no, no, thought Terry. He needed to avoid that at all costs. He knew what happened in these kinds of stories. The supposed hero sets out to face evil and is then effectively tortured into greater and greater strength over the course of ten to forty volumes, depending on how popular it is. Oh, sure, he’d survive. But only after he nearly died over and over again and was narrowly snatched back from the jaws of death by at least one deus ex machina and the sacrifice of an ill-fated lover. Terry didn’t know what kind of a moron signed up for that noise on purpose, but he was bound, bent, and determined that he wasn’t going to be that moron.
He followed what passed for a road until it was deep into the night. At what he estimated was close to midnight, tiredness finally started to wear him down. There wasn’t anything like a town nearby, which he took as a mixed blessing. People meant shelter, but they also meant witnesses. Unfortunately, Terry didn’t know much about surviving in the wild. He’d watched a few videos online about it, and you couldn’t help but pick up a few survival tips when you did as much hiking as he did. But all of those tips depended largely on carrying technology that he did not have, half of which probably wouldn’t work in this new world. A water bottle and a tent would work anywhere, but a satellite phone would just be dead weight, and God alone knew if a compass would function at all. The thing he did know was that he couldn’t stay too close to the road. He stared at the woods to either side of the road and shivered. They were dark. Not the city streets version of dark but actually dark. So dark that you couldn’t see a thing, which meant that anything could be hiding in there. Thinking about a forced march north was enough to get him moving again. He stumbled into that darkness, found a spot that was relatively flat, and counted his blessings that it was merely cool instead of cold. Using an arm as a pillow, he curled up on himself and thought about how grossly he’d underestimated the value of food delivery services. Just before sleep took him, a thought struck him.
“Crap. Money. I don’t have any.”
Back in the glorious time Terry thought of as Before Chinese Period Drama Hell, he’d been slow to rise. He was one of those people who had to set ten alarms at five-minute intervals on his phone to have an even chance of getting to work on time. He’d been a realist and chalked it up to the crippling depression that accompanies working a job you hate with people you loathe. He’d never complained about it because he’d never seen the point. That was adulthood in a nutshell, wasn’t it? He figured complaining about it would just expose that he was in the same boat as everyone else. Big surprise. Although, he had been haunted by the probably irrational fear that he’d find out it was just him. That everyone else woke up happy and excited to get to their job and couldn’t wait to interact with their coworkers. He’d feared that such a discovery might make him do something drastic. Since he didn’t think he was emotionally equipped for a murder spree, he worried that it would be something more self-destructive than outwardly destructive, like joining a cult or getting involved in a pyramid scheme. Although, on balance, he sort of thought that those might be the same thing.
This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
Needless to say, he was surprised and deeply furious when he snapped into full, active awareness in the morning. He’d been having a beautiful dream where he’d been Truck-kun-ed into a world where cheeseburgers didn’t make you fat, everything was free, and the word violence was literally absent from the language. Now, he was stuck back in a place where he’d slept in the woods, he had no money, and there were undoubtedly people looking to make him go questing against the forces of darkness and cholesterol. It was everything he could do not to shake his fist at the sky. Terry did make himself a promise then and there. If he ever saw Truck-kun again, he was going slash its tires and bust out all its windows before he set the stupid thing on fire and danced around the inferno. Part of his frustration was that, somewhere deep in his heart, Terry had hoped some monster in the woods would come along and end his life. Maybe send him on to whatever came next or at least isekai him somewhere where people didn’t expect him to battle evil. But, oh no, not in Chinese Period Drama Hell. Here, even the monsters wouldn’t cooperate with him. He had to just keep on living. Like a sucker.
With nothing else to do, it wasn’t like he had any food to eat or social media to distract him, he got up and followed his own path of plant life destruction back to the road. It was a good thing that no one looking for him had come along before he woke up. It would have taken them five seconds to find him. He’d have to be more careful in the future. He resisted the urge to start running again. Racing down the road like a crazy person from another world fleeing his destiny to be the hero was fine in the dark, but he had the sneaking suspicion that he’d stand out a little bit doing that during the day. At least sleeping in the forest had completed his mission to make his pristine outfit look grungy. No one would mistake him for the messiah now. He’d be just one more peasant on the road.
“I need to find one of those rice hats,” he muttered to himself. “Are those a thing in this world?”
Terry brushed aside that thought, put his head down, and started walking. Just mind your own business and keep a low profile, he thought. It’s a master strategy. That master strategy lasted for nearly two hours. In hindsight, Terry realized that he’d probably been lucky that it lasted that long. This wasn’t his world, where you could, with care, avoid most problems. This was some screwed-up, fun-house mirror version of an imaginary, ancient pseudo-Asia. He should have expected to run across some bandits accosting the local farmer, who was, of course, out with his entire goddamn family, like a jackass. Despite that, Terry was ready to turn around and walk away. This was not his problem. He took one step backward, then felt something poke him in the back. It was pointy and sharp, so he assumed it was some kind of sword or knife.
“Where are you going?” asked someone with so much malevolent glee that it was clear this man didn’t hate his job.
A lot of things that Terry didn’t understand happened in a hurry. He felt something stir in that pile of other-knowledge he’d been working so hard to ignore. Then, he was spinning and his foot was doing something and the knee of the guy behind him was suddenly bending the wrong way. Terry’s left hand was wrapped like a vice around this other dude’s wrist, twisting it until there was a sharp crack. The sword the guy had been holding dropped free. Terry released the guy’s wrist while his right hand shot out, seized the hilt, and swept the sword through the air. There was a nauseating spray of blood, and then the other guy fucking fell into two pieces. There was a blaze of energy in his stomach as he turned toward the rest of the bandits and his left fist shot out toward them. For a split-second, he thought he saw a pulse of something in the air. However, the uselessness of throwing a punch at people twenty feet away was topmost in his mind when he saw three, full-grown men double over as blood flew from their mouths. All three were hurled through the air as though gravity had suddenly gotten bored for a moment and decided to mix things up for giggles. They flew for nearly thirty feet before crashing to the ground. Terry stared in a mixed state of confusion, awe, and a desperate need to empty his stomach. He kept waiting for the men to get up, but part of him noted how very, very still they were. Then, Terry did shake his fist at the sky.
“No! No! You aren’t going to trick me into being a hero! I don’t care if I do know Kung Fu.”