A soft, cool breeze drifted through the green depths of a forest. Tall trees with sturdy trunks, their branches twisting in every direction. Here and there, moss grew on rocks at the base of the trees, small insects weaving between them on their way home.
Along the edges of a beautiful clearing with emerald grass, various bushes were scattered about—some heavy with berries, others bare. In the middle of this clearing, a white rectangle appeared in midair.
From this rectangle emerged a leg wearing a sneaker, feeling around for the ground—but it simply fell into nothing, taking the rest of the body with it, revealing the figure of a boy carrying a backpack and dressed in a hoodie and cargo pants.
After landing without any grace, yet somehow on his feet, the boy took off his backpack and sat down, bringing a hand to the back of his neck.
"That damn thing…"
His tone was resentful, of course—he'd just been played. The results of his choice had been rigged, and even if it had been left to chance, it was still annoying.
He looked around and took a deep breath. The air was damp, smelling of earth and wood.
The boy put on a mocking voice and spoke in a high-pitched whine:
"I'll leave you close to one of your friends." He let out an exasperated sigh. "My ass! This is the middle of nowhere!" he yelled, trying to get it out of his system.
He looked around again, confirmed there was no one nearby, and calmed down.
'Come on, cheer up Kai—this was your dream. You live in another world now.'
He stared at the ground for a few seconds.
"So… now what?" he asked himself.
Kai got back to his feet and rummaged through his backpack. He still had his clothes, gloves and mask—if that entity hadn't lied about anything else, everything else should be there too.
…
And indeed it was, fortunately.
He checked his phone battery—around sixty percent.
"Maybe I shouldn't have been playing games while I was waiting for Kanon…"
He could charge it with the portable charger, but if he forgot to unplug it afterwards he'd start draining the charger's battery for no reason.
He decided it would be fine for now and checked his remaining food and water. He had one chocolate-filled bun left and half a bottle of water.
He'd spotted a couple of bushes with blood-red berries nearby—there was a good chance they were poisonous or would make him sick somehow, but he grabbed a handful anyway and stuffed them into his pants pocket.
"Just in case, but for now the bun will do."
He really had no idea what to do next. He'd never been in a situation like this, and he knew how easy it was to get lost in a forest.
He looked up at the sky. The copper-colored vines crossing from tree to tree directly above him caught his eye — they wove an irregular canopy over the clearing, and no matter how hard he tried he couldn't make out where they began or ended. Past them, only vague shapes and the faint glow of early morning light.
"Looks like night ended just a few minutes ago…" he concluded, judging by the light filtering through and the position of the sun.
That left the whole day ahead of him.
He tried to look past the vines to see if there was the classic fantasy-world image of multiple moons in the sky, but at that moment he heard a sound somewhere between a screech and a roar that echoed through the entire forest, shaking the branches of the trees. Seconds later, an enormous shadow swept overhead at full speed.
Kai couldn't even make out what kind of creature it was—not that he was in any hurry to find out. Though to be fair, it would have been hard to identify anything from inside the bushes the way he'd thrown himself into them.
He'd considered the idea of setting up in that clearing for a while, but he wasn't sure whether staying put or moving to look for civilization would be more dangerous.
As he seriously thought it over, he shifted around in the bushes—something was digging into his back.
When he turned to see what it was, he found several piles of skeletons belonging to unknown creatures, scattered throughout the bushes. Nothing remained of them but bones, and curiously, the bones were immaculate—not a trace of flesh or tissue left on them.
Kai recognized beaks, claws and fangs of unconventional sizes, all half-buried, with a little disturbed earth scattered over them.
Whatever they had been, they'd met a grim fate.
"Right, then…"
He decided to get moving and picked a direction atHe decided to set off and chose a direction at random—it wasn't like he had any idea where he was anyway.
"First things first… how did it go again…? Uhh…" He brought his hands to his head, rubbing his temples.
His first goal was to find a river. Not only would it give him water, but following it would eventually lead him to some kind of civilization—or so he hoped. He had no idea how technologically advanced this world was, but as far as he knew, every civilization started near a body of water, or it was doomed from the start.
Kai pulled out the pocket knife he'd brought to his previous expedition. It probably wouldn't do much against any creature, but it was better than nothing.
"Wait a sec."
Kai turned around and went back to the clearing, spending a few more seconds looking at the vines as the wind swayed them, making them seem to move on their own.
A moment later he took off his backpack and walked toward one of the trees the vines connected to.
There wasn't any strong reason to do it, but Kai suspected a rope wouldn't go amiss—after all, what couldn't you do with a rope? A rope would make life easier: he could tie things together, anchor objects or himself, use it for traps, rig up a makeshift shelter…
The bark of the tree was rough and hard, worn by many years, old but still solid with just a few grooves and marks here and there. Getting a grip on it wasn't difficult.
When he reached the vines, he started cutting them with his pocket knife. They were thick—almost as wide as Kai's forearm—and their fibers were incredibly tough. As he began cutting, they seemed to pulse when the blade pushed through. With each slash, a reddish liquid oozed out that Kai decided not to touch—it looked viscous, almost like syrup.
Some of the liquid dripped onto his hoodie, but he managed to dodge most of it.
"Do all vines have this much liquid in them?"
The vines fell from one end, swinging in an arc until they came to rest hanging from another connection point on a different tree.
"Right, now I just have to cut them from the… other side…"
There was a problem. Kai was competent at climbing things—he'd even go so far as to say he was good at it, and he genuinely enjoyed it. But he didn't know how to come back down. Descending was much harder for him than going up, and he hated having to do it.
"Now what do I do…? I could just jump…"
Kai looked down.
His only option was to climb down slowly and carefully, and pray he didn't fall.
Roughly twice the time it had taken him to climb up, he finally made it back to the ground in one piece. He was a little out of breath.
He sighed.
"One more time."
He climbed the other tree to fully detach the vines and repeated the descent. This time it went slightly better—but not by much.
The blade of his pocket knife was coated in vine liquid and Kai wiped it on the back of his glove.
'Disgusting,' he thought, shaking his hand to get the liquid off once and for all.
Kai went to put his knife away, noticing that its shine was gone. It no longer reflected anything—just a dull, flat grey, like a stone.
He sat on the ground next to the vines. He now had several metres of vine at his disposal.
"Maybe I overdid it? I could make a swing with this… What was I even doing this for?"
One vine probably would have been enough, but he ended up cutting three.
He coiled two of them and used the third to tie them into a bundle. He attached it to the bottom of his backpack and set off again in the direction he'd chosen earlier.
The smell didn't change much, but the sounds did—the wind whistling through the leaves, branches creaking as they swayed, the crunch of leaves and twigs under Kai's feet. Something was off, though: he couldn't hear any creatures nearby, and somehow that worried him more.
***
After about five minutes of walking, Kai finally got out of the forest. The only problem was that about five meters from the trees, the land ended.
Ahead of him, a ravine opened up as far as the eye could see—he seemed to have reached the edge of a plateau. No matter which way he looked, there was no safe way down, as if the ground simply dropped away without warning.
It didn't matter much, though, because from up there he had a much better view of the surrounding forest—or he would have liked to say that, but the vegetation had no intention of letting him. At least he'd spotted a river with a decent current in the distance.
But did that matter when there was an entire island floating in the air? From there, for the first time, the sky opened up completely above him. What was even more incredible—it wasn't just one island. There was a floating archipelago in the distance.
Kai's jaw dropped.
"Someday I'll be up there. I don't care if floating islands are a fantasy world cliché."
His amazement vanished abruptly when he saw what lay behind the islands—suddenly he didn't even know what he was supposed to feel.
Up there, God knows how many hundreds of thousands of kilometers away, was a neighboring planet. No matter how you looked at it, it was too big—it looked massive, almost three times the size of the Moon. Somehow it seemed to be in...a waxing gibbous phase?
'This can't be… Is my adventure already over?'
At least the planet didn't seem to be approaching, and even if it were, there was nothing he could do about it.
'Oh, right. The Observer said I would have been born in a couple of centuries—so it's probably not going to fall. Though I don't know if I can trust that bastard…' Kai gritted his teeth.
Kai wasn't the type to go around taking photos, but this was an exception. Not taking a photo of this landscape would have been practically a crime.
'Would a selfie be too much?' he wondered.
Kai hated photos. He didn't like taking them and even less liked having them taken of him—but when would he ever have an opportunity like this again?
He sighed, flipped his phone camera around, and in the very next instant almost dropped it.
"What the hell is this?"
He didn't even try to sound dramatic. He froze, expressionless, as if what he saw on the screen had short-circuited him—despite everything he'd already witnessed in the sky.