And there I was. Tied to a mast with enough rope that my muscular body couldn’t even wiggle it an inch. Being looked down on from the captain’s chair next to the rudder. Surrounded by one-year-isekai-wannabes pleading for their lives or shouting angrily at our captors. The ones who were rude quickly found out it was a bad proposition: two of them were thrown overboard by the bulging brute someone had called Magda. They would respawn somewhere else in the Endless Isles, poorer and closer to their almost inevitable demise. The Captain didn’t flinch at anything. She just sat there with her legs crossed, neither bored nor amused. Mildly annoyed, that was the expression she had. She barely even glanced at the wannabes, but for some reason her gaze crossed mine and she stopped there. I held her gaze, and that intrigued her, I think. Wannabes were a dime a dozen. Their stories were all the same. Poor losers that had nothing in the ‘realworld’ and had sold or stolen or begged their way into a one year upload, with a so-expensive-it-would-take-a-miracle subscription that, if unpaid, would mean their consciousness would be deleted from the Isekai Corp. Metaverse, no backup, no exceptions.
‘But what about you?’ the Captain seemed to ask me with her emerald gaze. Mine was another story altogether, one she would come to know intimately.
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I wasn’t your typical candidate for heroic stardom. I wasn’t much of a candidate for anything, really. My life was empty, like that of the wannabes, but for a completely different reason: I had already spent a lot of it and had almost nothing to give, or so I thought when I decided to sign a thirty-year contract with Isekai Corp so I could spend my retirement in a cozy farm sim world.
Yes, you read that right. I’m sixty-five, not twenty-two like the average Isekai character. I just happened to be on the wrong end of a bureaucratic snafu, a hiccup in the code, a colossal fuckup for me but barely a rounding error for the Corp, who didn’t even notice. Somehow the process got mixed up and instead of me landing in the nice farmhouse I had painstakingly designed for months before the upload, I ended up adrift on a boat with a bunch of wannabes, at the mercy of the first pirate ship to pass us by.
That’s kind of it. I won’t bore you with a biographical account of my past life. I’ll give you the Cliff Notes version, or wiki or whatever you youngsters call an abbreviated form of something: I got married when I was twenty-five to my adored Jessica, remained loyal and loving until she died when we were both sixty, then spent a few lonely years depressed until I heard of Isekai and decided to leave my body behind and upload my consciousness to spend the rest of my life in a gentler, homely world where I wouldn’t miss my wife so much and keep running into things she loved or hated everyday. It was either that or retiring to Florida, and I hate the heat and the humidity.
So, back to the ship, then.
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The Captain held my gaze for what seemed like an eternity to me. An eternity spent looking at her didn’t seem that bad. She was —still is— gorgeous, in a -I-can’t-believe-she’s-real kind of way, whatever ‘real’ meant in this world I had landed —or rather, plunged— into. If any woman that looked like her had locked eyes with me back when I was married, god bless my dear Jessica’s soul, I don’t know what would have happened.
‘Who are you?’ she asked finally, her voice projecting above the noise of the wannabes protests and her crew’s hollering. The noise died down a bit and a lot of faces turned toward me, noticing me for the first time. There was nothing notorious about me, except that whatever screw-up had happened that sent me to this world except to my farmhouse, my body was the one I had ordered, a toned version of my body when I was twenty-five or so, or rather, an idealized version of my young body, with a bit more muscles in place, not for show, but for the farm work, you know. I intended to work my farm everyday and do things myself, so I needed an able body. I hadn’t thought of any other benefits, though having a young, supple, muscular body ended up being a great asset for my predicament.
You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.
‘My name’s Hank,’ I said, with the finality of a man that’s about to hung up on a telemarketer.
‘You’re not one of them,’ said, or maybe asked, the Captain. I didn’t quite get that.
‘No, I guess not,’ I said, attempting a shrug but not being able to move my shoulders even half an inch. ‘I’m an old fashioned fella. I’m not particularly fond of being tied up. Would you care to let me go? We can have a nice chat by the fire.’
That seemed to amuse her a bit, as she raised her left eyebrow slowly, about a hundredth of an inch.
‘We don’t have a hearth in the Lightwind. And you’re closer to being shark feed than sitting with me.’
‘That’s a shame. But I bet you have a kitchen. I make a mean risotto.’
She seemed to contain a smirk and apparently decided she had already shown me too much attention, so she stood up, unfurling her long sumptuous legs to their full height and raising her voice so all could hear her clearly.
‘You wannabes have ported to an unmapped quadrant. We’re the first ship to reach it, and we’ll be the first to map it. The Lightwind is an Advanced Scouting Ship, and she’s the fastest and best pirate mapping ship in the world.’
The wannabes seemed curious about it. A few talked among them, trying to understand why they hadn’t appeared at one of the big ports, as was customary for people joining the world. You landed in a nice tutorial area, learned the ropes, then got slung into a ship to be blown to smithereens daily with the hopes of making enough tokens to extend your life in this world. But all of that is stuff I learned or heard later. At the time, those kids didn’t seem much different than me.
‘So, considering your situation and that leaving you stranded here waiting for days for the next ship would be considered abandonment and a breach of maritime cordiality, which is meant to be kept even by pirates, I will grant you a quick death so you can respawn somewhere else. That’s the nicest you’ll ever see me being.’
Suffice it to say, the wannabes started shouting and thrashing about even more than before. The Captain ignored them, gestured with her head toward Magda the Brute, and walked away.
The rest of the crew just looked, some in amusement and some with no expression on their faces, as Magda picked up each wannabe and threw them overboard, just like she would have done to a piece of ballast or an anchor. She just made a little ‘huff’ noise when she picked them up and a kinda funny ‘rock-the-baby’ swing when she threw them. It seems funny now, in hindsight obviously. I didn’t know what would happen if I died in this simulation. My farming sim wasn’t supposed to have a ‘dying’ option, you just became very hungry if you didn’t eat, or something like that. I had read all the manuals for THAT sim, not this one I found myself in.
When Magda came to pick me up, she had to fight the ropes she herself had tied me with. That gave me time to talk to her. Up close, she wasn’t deserving of the ‘Brute’ moniker. She was just burly and seven-foot-tall. But she was fine-looking, even attractive if you liked your women on the bigger side of the spectrum.
‘Hey, Mags,’ I said, using my most world-weary voice, ‘I don’t think she meant you should toss me too. She certainly addressed me separately from them. I think she meant to talk to me later. She knows I’m not like the rest, you know. Could you be a dear and help me off this rope?’
She looked at me like a shepherd would if one of his sheep dared talk to him.
‘You sound different, all right,’ she said in a sweet voice, with an intelligent glint in her eyes that didn’t make her look like a brute at all, up close and personal. She even grinned at me. ‘I guess you’ll do,’ she said, lowering her voice.
I didn’t quite catch that part, or I would have suspected something was afoot before she untied me, picked me up on her shoulders and carried me towards the upper deck. As she dropped me like a sack on a lavish bed on a secluded cabin and locked me inside, I remembered her mumbled words.
I’ll do… what? Or rather, who?