“We’re going where?” demanded Kelima.

“Wyvern Peak,” said Terry as he continued putting up his tent in Nari’s yard.

“I heard you. I just assumed it was some kind of misguided attempt at humor.”

Terry stopped what he was doing to look at the girl.

“Really? Do I strike you as a funny man? Or the kind of man who aspires to be funny?”

“No,” said Kelima with a sigh. “Funny people tend to actually like other people.”

“I like other people just fine. At a distance of at least one hundred yards.”

“You know, I heard that you were traveling with some other adventurers.”

Terry made a noise that very intentionally conveyed nothing.

“Care to confirm or deny?” asked Kelima.

“I would not.”

“So, that’s a yes.”

Terry said nothing and continued putting up his tent.

“So, what made them good enough when you wouldn’t even give me the time of day?”

“They weren’t trying to get anything from me,” said Terry. “You should make note of that. Agendas are a great way to not make friends.”

“Well, I don’t have an agenda now,” said Kelima.

“Of course, you do. I just don’t have the patience to keep trying to elude you all day, every day, for the rest of time. It’s exhausting. Although, you’re exhausting now, so maybe it’d be worth it.”

“You don’t have to be mean to me all the time. It’s not like this was my idea.”

Terry made the last few knots to hold his tent up before his shoulders slumped. He shook his head a little. Deep breath, self, thought Terry. Don’t let her damage your calm any more than you need to. She’s not actually evil. Terry counted backward from twenty to regain a measure of self-control before he allowed himself to speak.

“Kelima,” he said.

“Yes?”

“Do you remember when I said that you talk a lot?”

There was a protracted pause before she said, “Yeah.”

“You’re still doing it.”

“You know, some people actually enjoy having conversations.”

Terry whirled on her, his eyes blazing, and she shrank back from him.

“Have I done a single thing to make you think that I am one of those people?”

There was another long beat before she said, “My mother always says that people who say they don’t want to talk are the ones who want to talk the most.”

Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

Terry reached up and rubbed his temples, hard, before he finally said, “I guess parents lie to their kids a lot in this world too. Santa Clause isn’t real either, just so you know.”

Kelima gave him a quizzical expression and asked, “What’s a Santa Clause?”

“A personification of corporate greed.”

“What’s a—” Kelima started to ask before Terry’s anguished cry cut her off.

“Oh my God! I’m going to bed.”

“I— I— Without eating any dinner?”

Without another word, Terry turned and crawled into his tent, carefully dragging his pack with him.

“But what am I supposed to do for the rest of the day?” Kelima shouted at him.

“Go pet the animals in the forest!” shouted Terry.

“You mean the monsters, don’t you?”

“I’m sure they’re very friendly. They’d probably kill for a conversation!”

“You’re not funny!”

Shaking his head, Terry opened the pack. Dusk, who had managed to sleep through everything, blinked her eyes at him owlishly before crawling out of the pack, looking around, stretching, and promptly flopping onto the ground. Terry pulled a blanket out of the pack. Spreading it out, he dropped onto the dubious padding. Even so, the relative silence was like a soothing balm for his ears and his soul. He idly scratched at Dusk’s ears while the kitten batted at his hand. When she grew bored of that, she crawled up onto his chest and curled up. He soon felt a gentle purr vibrating against his sternum.

“In case I haven’t mentioned it before, I really appreciate that you don’t talk at me all the time,” said Terry.

“I can hear you!” shouted Kelima from somewhere outside.

“You were meant to!” snapped Terry before he started petting the cat.

Her fur was soft beneath his hand and the purring intensified. As the annoyance and low-burning anger started to bleed away, Terry realized just how mentally tired he was from being forced to interact with people all day. Physically, he felt fine, but his mind felt sluggish. His emotions felt muted and distant, like things that belonged to someone else entirely. He recalled feeling the same way after work back on Earth most days. For all his complaining to Kelima, he’d enjoyed a lot more solitude after he’d been involuntarily isekai-ed than he’d ever gotten before his kiss of death from Truck-kun. Yet, the contrast was somehow worse in Chinese Period Drama Hell than it had been on his old world.

There, the emotional fatigue had been like a low-grade fever that never went away. He’d been aware of it but mostly in a subconscious way. He’d tuned it out the same way he’d tune out TV noise from another room. Why? Because survival demanded it. Constant awareness of how awful all that interacting left him feeling would have been too overwhelming. It was the same reason he didn’t watch the news. The constant drone of misery would have become crippling like a psychic black hole sucking away whatever slivers of joy he managed to cobble together. Except, now his psychic black hole of joy-sucking misery wasn’t something inside of him. It had a body and went by the name of Kelima.

Part of him considered that maybe he was being a teensy bit too hard on the girl. Terry told that part of himself to shut the hell up and stop wrecking his nice moment of assigning blame with its stupid reasonableness. Unfortunately, that intrusion of logic had ruined things for him. No matter how hard he tried to pin all the responsibility for his lousy mood on the girl, he just couldn’t bring himself to heap all of that on the head of a teenage girl. He believed her when she told him that it hadn’t been her idea. She’d just gone along with it, no doubt seeing it as a way to salvage some portion of whatever plan she’d had in mind when she’d first bothered him on the street.

He chose not to look too closely at how much blame might be rightly assigned to him. He had tried pretty hard to avoid getting sucked into whatever schemes all of those nobles were cooking up. At a certain point, though, it seemed like the tropes afflicting his life took on a kind of momentum that would not be stopped. He just needed to hope that this fetch quest for Nari would prove so unpleasant and uncomfortable that the girl would get fed up with it and leave of her own free will.

As he thought about that quest, though, he realized that he wasn’t really equipped for it. He had enough food to keep going for a few days, but it seemed like this quest might take a couple of weeks. That was enough to set his teeth on edge. A lot could happen if he was away from home for that long. On the other hand, it seemed aggravatingly probable that nothing would happen if he wasn’t there. No, the monster army would get distracted by a potato or something and not attack until he was almost but not quite too late to intervene. Still, if he was going to go find the damn metal rocks, he was going to need to visit the nearby city and supply up. The quiet dread that came with that idea filled him as Dusk’s purring lulled him into fitful sleep.