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The Isekai App
Tales of Brave Ulysses

Tales of Brave Ulysses

I lay on the raft face-down as the sun rose. I’d passed out with my nose in the scorch marks; the aroma of burnt beech had filled a fitful sleep.

My arms trailed in the water alongside the raft. The cool helped with the burns on my palms.

This wasn’t a situation where I woke up and was confused about being in a strange place. I’d had a rough night and was fully aware of being on a shoddy raft in the middle of nowhere.

Cold, miserable grief filled me over Cassie and Armand. I get what you’re saying, Reader: You barely knew them. True.

But I don’t make friends easily, not anymore, and they were cool and loyal to one another and cute together, and they hadn’t deserted me by stealing my own lame raft, which I suppose might have been quite easy for them if they’d tried it. I’m sure Harrigan would have gotten them somehow, but still.

And watching anyone burst into flame, anyone at all, right in front of you, is not something I recommend.

The pain of their loss was keenly felt. And finally, finally: so was hunger. I don’t know how many days I’d gone with no appetite, but it was back in a big way. I found myself grabbing at absurdly small fish as they cruised in the shade beneath my raft. Turns out you need skill to catch ‘em that way, skill I don’t have.

The rising sun was already starting to cook my skin. The skin that wasn’t already char-broiled from the previous night’s festivities, of course. I’d thoughtlessly neglected to pack sunscreen.

I sat up on and surveyed the world. I’d fought to get out here, and I’d done it. It had cost lives. I saw nothing on the horizon. No islands, no clouds. Just flat, clear water, turquoise seafloor and a lot of hangry.

Phase Two was rough. And we can rule out Phase Three; gloating service was unavailable at this time, please try again later.

The wind kicked up and the current moved me along; I could tell by watching the sandy sea floor roll by beneath the raft. The little fish had learned to stay away, possibly from pity. Just water and sand down there. I flopped off the raft into the cool. Hiding underneath the scorched logs bought some relief from the sun.

This plan had seemed a lot more feasible back on the beach. I wondered where the Green Radio was. Did I only get access to it in the dark? I’d met it in the cave. I’d seen it just before Harrigan’s nighttime classic rock rave. Since then, nothing. This superpower sucked.

Speaking of which: I was acquainted with a very charming water monster. Mandy had tried to help me. I wondered where she was. She’d been fighting with someone, as I recalled. Probably fighting for her life.

My problems were nothing compared with that.

Okay, let’s take inventory. Water. Raft. My filthy clothing: shirt and shorts, underwear, cheap running shoes. A thigh bone from a guy who thought of himself as me. I checked my pockets and brought out what had to be finger bones. Little inch-long bones. Proximal phalanges, Mom’s medical texts had said.

They were blackened and felt heavy, like rocks. I must have grabbed them last night, maybe found them on the raft after Armand and Cassie had…burned, and then pocketed them. I don’t remember why; give me a break, it had been a rough day. Tiny Quantum Tags hid in their centers, trying to tell me the names of the owners. Cassie and Armand. As if I’d forget.

That was all I had. Now to take that stuff and build a helicopter! A speedboat! An aircraft carrier!

The sand was getting a little bit more interesting down there. Rocks were sprinkled about, pale gray and round.

As the current took me past, I saw more of them. Not rocks. Bricks. Paving stones. More and more of them. Finally I could only see the stones, no sand.

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They formed a solid surface, one that seemed to stretch for miles. They were mechanically precise squares until they weren’t. A design broke the monotony: a huge sculpted curve made of many stones.

I recognized it as a spiral shell, a bas-relief, or frieze, or whatever you call it, a flat sulpture. It was a huge design, intricate and detailed. I floated over it for twenty minutes before I reached the punchline of the shell where the critter inside can pop out.

It was a carved tentacled mass, the coils curling and elegant. Two sculpted, stony eyestalks peered from within the shell. Each eye was represented by a smooth blue gem the size of a bowling ball. This carving, this construction, had been important. Someone had put a huge amount of effort into it, long ago.

I tried to remember the name of it, the creature that had been carved there. A Squid with a snail shell. Trilobite? No, Ammonite. Ammonite, that’s the thing.

I could swim down and try to grab the huge blue gems. They glowed with refracted sunlight. In this aquatic desert of emptiness, the gems were enticing beyond words. Swirls of sky blue and aquamarine.

Back on Earth they’d have allowed me to buy myself a city block. They were close enough for me to tap at them with my toes, if I wanted. The sea was just shallow enough.

What a rotten idea. As if I’d never played a video game. I left it all alone. It was impressive as hell, admirable, and incomprehensible to a dumb guy like me. How big was this design, was there more to it? Who had built it? Why make such an obvious trap in the middle of nowhere?

Dangerous, Sean had said. Things are dangerous out here. Maybe to someone like Sean, who would have grabbed those jewels like they were made of ham.

I watched them pass beneath my raft. I heard something, felt it: a shifting vibration in the water. A click of stone. Something was moving beneath the sea floor. Something that felt disappointed. It’s possible I was projecting.

But yeah. Disappointed. Sorry, obvious trap monster. Some other time. I had bigger things on my mind.

Such as: how to fix this. How to deal with what seemed to be a one-man genocide machine. Or a one man clone factory. Both? I wished the raft was more stable, so I could pace importantly, thinking deep thoughts.

Let’s break it down.

1. The Great Doctor Jeff Harrigan was doing something that was flatly impossible. He was making, then killing, the same batch of people over and over again.

2. He didn’t leave that island. In retrospect it was obvious: old equipment, overgrown tents. The place was a haunted house of the living-then-dead-then-living-again. Was that one location his place of power?

3. “Place of Power,” right. We’re talking about magic or game rules or sci-fi something-or-other, so I felt okay using melodramatic titles. Harrigan stayed on that island and so did everyone else, with the exception of Mandy, yours truly and my incinerated friends. The corpses, well, the “tags” I’d been able to detect with these new eyes (still nearsighted, by the way) were all in clumps around the one location.

So what did that mean for me? Dead friends notwithstanding, I’d gotten away. He didn’t have the capacity to burn me to ash, apparently. And I was too far away for him to use his paralysis zap on me.

I could just hit the high seas, never return. Find that anime girlfriend promised by the app. Just leave Harrigan alone. After all, I’d won, right? I’d escaped. I’d left him screaming on the beach in frustration, surrounded by his unwilling backup dancers. I had what I’d wanted: freedom. Solitude.

Solitude. Because my friends had burned up. They should be here, and I should be gloating to them. We should have been gloating collectively.

But he’d killed them. Had it been preventable? Sure, if they’d stayed away from me and my crazy. They’d still be on that island, holding hands and sneaking kisses.

That one stung.

I could just disappear. Maybe convince Mandy to let me hang out with her, we could fight evil and stuff, right? Well, she could. Between battles I’d rub her shoulders. Or, you know, rub whatever she felt like getting rubbed.

No. No.

I was disgusted with myself.

No.

Would someone like Mandy, who had tried to rescue me from a dungeon beneath the earth, who fought monsters, or whatever she fought, and who had faced off against Harrigan herself more times that I knew about, would she want to go anywhere near someone selfish enough to just leave? To just run away, when people needed help?

Mom always said: If you can help, do it. Or face the chancla. She’d never actually used the chancla on me, but the chancla was fearsome nonetheless.

I had to think. Also to get food and water; those things were rather important as well. I scanned the horizon. Nothing but pale, shallow ocean and blazing sun.

And I heard music.