He Who Fights with Monsters 5: A LitRPG Adventure
Shirtaloon & Travis Deverell
1
A BETTER PANTS SOLUTION
Jason Asano regained consciousness surrounded by a fiery, transcendent energy. It burned without heat; he could feel its otherworldly power, but it left him wholly unharmed. It vanished and he dropped to the cold, hard floor. The feel of chilly tiles under his body told him that he was naked. For some reason, he was surprised it wasn’t grass, and his mind went back to the last time he had woken up disoriented and naked. He had just been thrown between worlds, his body feeling strange, having just been remade out of magic. He had the same sensation now.
Memories came in flashes. Falling from a tower. Pain, anger, triumph. Death. He’d been fighting the Builder, a futile endeavour, as his powers had no effect. The Builder caught him. Chained him to parade in front of his team. The god-like being was akin to the deities of Greek myth: prideful, petty, and vain. Lording over mortals. It had given Jason a critical chance.
He’d launched them both out of the Builder’s tower in a desperate attempt to buy his team time. He didn’t know if it had worked, if they had put an end to the Builder’s plan and, hopefully, gotten out alive. The last thing he remembered was falling, stone spikes of the Builder’s rage spearing into his body. The mad whirl as he plunged through the air, darkness taking him before he hit the ground.
Then he woke up wherever he was now. His brain told him it had only been moments since he fell from the tower, but his soul told him otherwise. It carried an echo of some encounter that his brain had no memory of.
It was not the first time Jason had experienced that dissonance. The fight with the Builder for the fate of his soul, when Jason’s body had already been claimed by a star seed, was the same. Like waking from a dream, he felt the memories that should be there yet were outside of his reach.
The closest he had to recollection was a sense of travelling, and not travelling alone. His eyes were still closed as he lay on the cold, damp floor, but his magical senses told him that there was no one else in the building, let alone the room. His aura senses picked out rats and insects, quite a lot of them, but no people.
He opened his eyes and pushed himself into a sitting position. There were a bunch of system windows open in front of him, but he shoved them out of the way. They shrank into the periphery of his vision, and he looked himself over, confirming that he was naked. The impaling wounds on his chest were gone, although scars had been left in their place. One was at the base of his throat where a high-necked shirt would just cover it, if he’d been wearing one.
The marks seemed long-healed and were far from his first permanent reminders of battles past. Most had come courtesy of the Builder. His whole torso was pocked with scars from where fragments of star seed had been pushed from his body. They were added to by new marks from where the Builder impaled him multiple times, although the largest one was still his first. The wide scar running up from his right hip, across his abdomen, and around his left side was one the Builder had nothing to do with. At least it fit the theme of enemies no sane person would fight.
As he checked his torso, he realised his chest hair was also gone. He ran his hands over his bald head, groaning as he discovered that all of his hair had callously abandoned him once more.
“Again?” he complained to the empty room. “It’s my best feature.”
Jason turned his attention to the room around him. There was no window to let in light, but his very first magic power had been to see through darkness. The room was large and empty, the tiled floor and plastered wall both heavily cracked. The air was stale and clammy, with a taste of unhealthy growth on the air, like fungus or mould.
It was clearly an abandoned building. There was a broken fluorescent light on the ceiling and a pair of double doors that made him think of a school or maybe hospital. He jolted as he realised it was the architecture of his own Earth, not the magical alternate version into which he’d been thrown into.
He pushed his senses past the lingering remnants of the potent magic that had dumped him wherever he was. Beyond it, the magic was weaker than anything he’d felt even in low-magic Greenstone. It was at a level one would expect from a world where true magic was unknown. He sensed nothing but non-magical auras from the animals scurrying through the abandoned facility.
Jason was trying to collect his thoughts when he felt something building inside him. It was something he’d experienced before: a transfiguration of one of his outworlder gifts. They were usually triggered by extreme events and coming back from the dead had to be fairly high on that scale. Light started shining from within his body, an amber light that lit up from under his skin. He felt the change inside himself as the magic that made up his very self underwent a transformation.
Outworlder racial ability [Inventory] has evolved to [Spirit Vault].
Any other time, the event would have been of immense importance. After coming back from the dead and returning home, though, it was only a distraction. Jason only glanced at the notice before minimising it with the other system windows. He had too much to deal with as it was. His mind was crowded and reeling with everything. His team, his death and revival. The discord between the memories of his mind and his soul. His apparent return to his own world. He needed time to spread everything out into manageable chunks that he could process.
He had no idea of what fate had befallen his team. Trapped in an astral space, they had been racing to stop the Builder from awakening his giant golems and using them to invade the other world. He’d resolved to throw his life away to buy them enough time, but had he?
“Okay,” he told himself, shaking his head to try and throw off the many strange sensations he was going through. “Take stock, formulate a plan of action. What do I need and how do I get it? I need pants. Again. I need hair. Well, I want hair. I need to know what happened and where I am.”
Fortunately, Jason had a better pants solution than the last time he’d arrived in another world, naked and bald. With a thought, dark mist engulfed him, vanishing moments later to reveal Jason garbed in one of his prepared outfits. He went with a smart suit in the Vitesse style. It was akin to a casual designer suit from his own world with a little fantasy cosplay flair. The kind of thing an elf stockbroker would wear on his day off.