Chapter 1

  Dalex’s armor dented as the enormous beast galloped through the forest with his torso clenched between its teeth. The razor-sharp teeth threatened to pierce the thin material protecting his waist and chest and trisect him. He felt the creature’s tongue slathering at his back, trying to get purchase.

  This was a hard way to learn that {Wall of Force} wouldn’t stop melee attacks.

  “Whoa, boy,” Dalex grunted, contorting his body in an attempt to twist and grab the edges of the creature’s mandibles. Despite being vaguely dog shaped, it did not take orders, and it certainly did not like its prey wiggling around.

  The hound set its feet and slid to a stop, digging great furrows in the forest floor several meters long. It thrashed its head back and forth and then threw Dalex down. The ground exploded with his impact, creating a crater several times his size. His armor dampened the blow, but he couldn’t recover fast enough before the beast clenched its jaws around his head and slammed a paw on his chest.

  It crossed Dalex’s mind that this must be what a well-done steak feels like.

  Dalex pounded his gauntleted fist into the side of the hound’s mouth as hard as he could. He smashed straight through skin and bone to blow a hole clean into the hound’s mouth cavity. The beast let out a muted whimper but kept its prey firmly fixed between its jaws. Still, Dalex’s hand inside its mouth gave him great leverage to start pushing.

  He flattened his palm and pressed up on the slimy roof of the hard palate. With his other hand, he grabbed hold of a thick bottom tooth and forced the jaw in the opposite direction. The hound wailed and thrashed but refused to let go.

  “Not my fault if you never eat again,” Dalex said. He opened the beast’s mouth just wide enough to plant a foot on its tongue and then extended his body. The weak bone and tissue where he had jabbed the animal snapped. The top of its snout flapped free. Dalex sprung out of its grip, rolling away into the trunk of a felled tree.

  He watched the hound howl and writhe, stamping its paws as if they were elephant feet and making the forest floor tremble. Blood poured from its mouth, coating the ground in gooey crimson globs. Dalex almost felt bad for the big cuddly pup. But he wasn’t about to be its chew toy. He had seen the inside of its mouth, and he certainly didn’t want to see the inside of its stomach.

  And then the flesh around the creature’s wounded muzzle began to churn. The muscle and tendons appeared to knit back together of their own accord. Pearly white bone filled in to replace the broken chunks. New teeth erupted from raw pink gums. And the hound’s mouth popped back into place with a spine-tingling SCHLUMP.

  Dalex wrinkled his nose in disgust. “Ohhh… nooo…”

  But the hound took one look at him and scampered away in the opposite direction. Dalex sat still for half a second, then got to his feet, staring at the beast’s hind legs as they pumped up and down, getting smaller and smaller into the distance. He brushed away the pine needles that had settled on his armor and inspected its new teeth marks.

  “{Status}.”

  “Wow, that actually did a bit of damage. What was that thing?”

  Then he froze, suddenly alert. Where was the hound going?

  “{Fly},” he shouted, and jumped into the air to rocket after it, floating a few meters off the ground. But the beast moved incredibly fast for its size, and Dalex hadn’t quite gotten the hang of flying. He kept hitting trees. They broke in half without hurting him, but he couldn’t pick up speed.

  If he didn’t catch up in time…

  “What can I cast right now?” he asked the air, voice serious. He wasn’t sure if any of his summoned weapons would reliably stop the hound.

  A monotone female voice answered immediately, echoing through his brain, “You could try the [Torch].”

  “You mean {Prismatic Strike}?”

  The voice let out a deep, long-suffering sigh. He could hear her eyes rolling. “Fine, {Prismatic Strike}.”

  Dalex’s lips parted into a wicked smile. That sounded good.

  Now, he was right behind the hound. Another few seconds and he could grab it by the leg. But then it burst into a clearing just ahead of him, bearing down on a small withdrawn shape huddled alone in the middle of a dirt road.

  The little bald woman with long pointy ears looked up at the beast’s arrival but did not move a muscle. She watched it bound toward her, jaws wide and spittle flying. Her eyes were sunken and gray. She didn’t blink.

  Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

  “Do it,” Dalex said.

  “Firing orbital laser,” the voice in his head said, and a beam of yellow light shot out of the sky, vaporizing the beast’s midsection and blasting it in two.

  A few days earlier

  Owen Little died as he had lived: Bedridden, surrounded by family and precious friends, being ravaged from the inside out by a disease the doctors named after him. The symptoms started when he was five years old. Within a year, he couldn’t get out of bed without help. As he aged, his body only grew weaker. Twelve years after getting sick, his small heart gave out.

  The doctors cut him open to take final tissue samples for future study and then put him in a freezer. Later, they put him in a box. His family covered the box in tears and then buried it under rich black soil.

  That should have been the end of it, but somebody dug up the box, pulled Owen out, and woke him up.

  His eyes opened in a spacious room filled with bright light. The entire ceiling glowed as if it might catch fire. Flat stone tiles covered the floor. Owen sat in a rigid wooden chair, naked as the day of his autopsy, but a lot pinker and full of blood.

  His body didn’t look quite like he remembered. His arms and legs were thicker, though when he felt his face, the structure didn’t surprise him. His cheeks just seemed a little fuller.

  A big black office chair occupied the space in front of him, turned away so he couldn’t see who sat in it. Otherwise, the room was empty.

  “This doesn’t seem nice enough to be heaven,” Owen said, putting two fingers to his lips in thought. “But also, not scary enough to be hell. And purgatory was always a little too confusing for me. I’m going to guess I’m being summoned to a fantasy world.”

  He crossed his fingers and hoped to whatever goddess was about to send him on his journey that he was right.

  The office chair swiveled around, revealing a man in a well-tailored business suit and sharp glasses. “Wrong, idiot. You’ve been abducted.”

  “Abducted?”

  “Abducted.”

  Owen paused. “By aliens?”

  “By aliens. What were you just saying?”

  Owen sat back in his chair and crossed his legs. Somehow, they felt strong and limber. He looked away down at the floor and pursed his lips. “Just a trope I really like, nothing serious. I guess aliens are pretty cool too.”

  “Don’t pout,” the businessman said, pushing up his glasses and exposing a pricey analog wristwatch. His eyes ran down the screen of a tablet computer. “It’s either this or death.”

  “How am I not dead?”

  “Aliens, remember?”

  Owen rolled his eyes. “Sure, that explains it. Why didn’t they help me before I died?”

  “Because they didn’t want to.” The businessman looked up from the table. “Owen Little? Aged seventeen? Died of—” he paused to check his tablet again. “Owen Little’s Disease? That can’t be right.”

  Owen nodded and said, “No, that’s me.”

  The businessman dropped his cold exterior for a moment in what appeared to be genuine sympathy. “Jesus Christ, they named it after you while you were still alive?”

  “I asked them to.” Owen looked the man opposite him up and down. “You’re not very alien.”

  The businessman’s original frostiness returned. “I’m Jeremy. I just work here. They don’t like interfacing directly with new humans, so I do it for them.”

  Owen’s mouth dropped open. He couldn’t believe it. “Are you telling me I won’t even get to meet them?”

  “Nope.”

  “Can I go home then?”

  “Again, nope,” Jeremy said. “You’re dead.”

  He hit the power button on his tablet and stood up, putting the device on the seat behind him. He walked forward to stand directly in front of Owen. For his part, Owen uncrossed his legs and sat up expectantly. This seemed important.

  But Jeremy only stood there for a moment as if he was waiting for something.

  Cocking his head to the side, Owen asked, “What is it?”

  “You’re pretty comfortable with nudity, aren’t you?”

  Owen leaned back into his chair, covering his bare chest with his arms. “What are you insinuating?”

  It took a moment for Owen’s meaning to dawn on Jeremy. His eyes went wide, and he stepped back, waving his hands back and forth saying, “No, no, no, not like that. It’s just, most of the people that come through here are shy about that kind of thing. People generally ask for clothes right away.”

  Owen relaxed, clasping his hands together in his lap. “I spent about half my life naked getting probed and prodded by doctors. But do you have any clothes? It’s a bit chilly.”

  Recovered from his embarrassment, Jeremy said, “There will be clothes where you’re going, which–” He glanced at his wristwatch. “Shoot, we’re running out of time. Here’s the deal. The aliens are going to send you roughly two thousand light years away to an empty starship in the Gaia-BH1 system. They want you to look for a particular kind of metal, which they say is present there.”

  Owen took a breath, “Okaaay. How do I do that?”

  Jeremy looked at his watch again. He started backing away. “The ship will have everything you need. Just ask the assistant when you get there.”

  “The assistant? Hold on wait. Where are you going?”

  Jeremy turned around midstride and started speed walking to the edge of the room. A door opened automatically to accept him. Owen tried to stand up to follow, but his chair didn’t let him go. He looked down and saw the wood seeping up his thighs. The chair was growing, morphing into something else and consuming him as it got larger.

  “This isn’t fu–” he started, and then the head rest of the chair wrapped around his mouth and cut off his voice. He mumbled against the gag for a moment and then started breathing deeply, preparing to hold his breath when the oxygen ran out. But the oxygen didn’t run out. He felt a cool fan of air against his face, and when he breathed out, the carbon dioxide didn’t linger to be sucked right back in.

  Aliens, he thought. Why didn’t they go mining for their own darn metal?

  As the chair finished encasing him, to what purpose he could not really know, his mind mostly pondered the realization that Jeremy hadn’t been a very nice guy. Owen didn’t hold it against him. He probably had troubles of his own. Being the middleman for aliens could only cause a lot of stress. That didn’t give him the right to shoot people off into space without so much as a pamphlet, but really, Owen couldn’t complain. He was alive, and, as long as Jeremy wasn’t lying, he was off on an adventure he never dreamed possible.

  He liked fantasy better, but science fiction was alright.

  The wooden chair that was no longer a wooden chair stopped moving. All was darkness. Owen couldn’t shift around, but there was room enough in this human mold to wiggle his fingers and blink. He decided to take full advantage of this turning point in his life. Whenever he got where he was going, he would start with a new name.

  And then he saw the universe wrapped around him like a hamster ball. Moons and planets and stars and nebulae and galaxies. Parsecs and parsecs of black empty space. It swirled around him in a kaleidoscopic bath of light and colors, and then the most beautiful woman he had ever seen splashed him with a bucket of water and slapped him across the face.