Worlds' Strongest

by Simon Archer

  The man’s gaze narrowed, examining me. “Where is Berkeley?” The word sounded strange in his mouth, like he’d never heard it before.

  “Um, in San Francisco Bay.” I paused for a moment and then quickly added, “In California. West Coast?”

  “West?” Uh-oh. Something about that seemed to make him angry. “There is nothing to the west. Barbarian traitors of the Silk Swamp that hunt men for sport. You’re one of them?”

  “No! No, I swear, I-I don’t know anything about that!” I stumbled back a few steps as his hand wrapped around the hilt of his sword. Luckily he didn’t actually draw it. “I go to the University of California, i-it’s one of the top colleges in the country! I’m studying Computer Science, I swear! If you could just point me in the right direction--”

  “Stop talking!” the man shouted. “We don’t need any trouble here. Leave us alone, or you’ll wish you had!”

  Fiery frustration flared within me. I wanted nothing more than to leave these people alone, but I couldn’t do that when no one would answer any of my questions. I took a step forward as the man turned away from me.

  “Sir, if you would just tell--”

  The second I stepped onto the mosaic, light seeped through the spaces between the pebbles. Everything that followed happened so fast, I could only guess at what I’d seen, but it looked like the man turned back to me, pulling out his sword at the same time. The light almost seemed to float toward his sword. The flower beneath my feet was almost seven feet across, so the man wasn’t close enough to me to do any damage while standing on the other side of the mosaic. At least that was what I thought.

  He slashed the sword through the air. There was at least five feet between me and the edge of the blade. I should have been fine. Before I had a chance to even realize what was happening, I fell back out of the mosaic and onto my back when an intense pain across my right arm just below my shoulder.

  I couldn’t help but shout in pain while my left hand flew to my other arm. The pain didn’t subside. I gritted my teeth and pulled my hand back. My jaw nearly dropped when I saw blood.

  The nauseous feeling in my stomach grew as I realized there was a chance I wasn’t hallucinating.

  I flinched when I saw the sword-wielding man move toward me and held my hand up defensively, but I relaxed when I heard his sword slide into its sheath. When I looked up, he was standing right before me, the glare still in his eyes.

  “I said we don’t want any trouble. Leave us alone.”

  Without another word, he turned and walked back toward the crowd of people, which had grown to somewhere upwards of fifty people when I wasn’t paying attention. All eyes were either on him or me.

  I returned my hand to the wound on my arm, breathing through gritted teeth. I’d never experienced anything like this before, so I had no idea how bad the cut was. My shirts were both soaked in blood, so it certainly wasn’t that shallow.

  When the swordsman reached the nearest two-story building, I saw him start to turn over his shoulder to check on me. I quickly scrambled to my feet and whipped my head around, looking for the nearest out. I wasn’t sure which roads led deeper into their village and which led out entirely, but I needed to find the right one fast. Holding my arm, I headed in the opposite direction that I came from toward the long dirt road that eventually led to the mountain.

  If it weren’t for my sudden fear of being murdered at sword’s point, I probably would have passed out from the combination of disbelief, shock, and nausea. My head was reeling as it tried to process the fact that whatever I was seeing was real. Nothing was a hallucination. That meant that after sitting in my apartment in California, cracking a numerical code I’d been studying for months, I had somehow fallen into this strange village?

  The sheer insanity that was bouncing through my brain finally overwhelmed me. My stomach lurched, and at the same time, a wave of dizziness hit me. I stopped walking for a second, half expecting to be run through by a blade as soon as I did. I could see the edge of the village, just past a few more buildings, but I wasn’t sure I could make it there.

  When I turned around, I could still see people in the distance, but it looked like nearly everyone had gone inside. The important thing was that I couldn’t see the swordsman anymore. I took the chance to sit down on the grass at the edge of the road and leaned forward on my left hand. It took all of twenty seconds before my stomach couldn’t take the stress anymore, and I threw up.

  As soon as I could stand, I pulled myself to my feet and continued walking. I wanted to get out of this little village before I relaxed, not that I anticipated much of that happening. After a moment, I passed the last white building. I wasn’t safe, but the slightest weight felt lifted from my shoulders.

  Glancing back behind me, I didn’t see anyone within eyesight. I was just about to sit down and try to figure out what to do next when something caught my eye. A few yards down the road from the village was a small building, different from all the ones I’d just seen. Those were all made of wooden frames with white, solid walls, but this one looked like it was made completely out of hay. It was hardly even a building; it was about as big as a garden shed. Even so, it didn’t look occupied.

  I made my way over to the hay shed, the door of which was just a rectangular hole in the structure, and peeked in. There was a thin layer of dirty cotton muslin serving as a floor with a few spare pieces of trash, a couple of broken boards, what looked like a torn blanket with some other fabric scraps, and a small crate in the corner that looked like it had dishes in it. Everything was coated in a layer of dust. It was probably someone’s old storage shed that they hadn’t been to in a while.

  I looked around me, and when I saw no one, I ducked through the short hay door. The walls themselves were probably only six and a half feet high, and the pointed roof didn’t add much more room, so I sat down and pulled my shirts off. For the first time, I looked at the wound on my arm. Blood had soaked through the cloth and coated most of my bicep, but nothing was gushing. That was probably a good sign, right?

  It was still bleeding lightly, but it didn’t look deep. I managed to take the long-sleeved white shirt and use the rip from where the sword sliced through it to tear the whole arm off. It was long enough to use as a makeshift bandage, though putting it on with one hand was more difficult than I anticipated.

  When that was taken care of, I slid the blue shirt back on and balled up the rest of the white one to use as a pillow. I laid down and stared at the line running along the center of the roof. Everything around me was hay, and it all smelled like a farm or dirt. I couldn’t decide which was less appealing.

  I tried to come up with a plan, an idea, an inkling of what to do next, but for the first time, I was drawing a blank. The only other time I’d felt this off-balance and dizzy, I’d had somewhere upwards of four shots and two beers in one night. Every second, there was a new question or worry swirling around my brain.

  Where the hell was I? How would I get home? What was I going to do for food? What were the odds someone would kill me if they found me here?

  Those questions and many more overwhelmed my thoughts until a combination of confusion and pain finally knocked me out.

  3

  As soon as I awoke, the memory of the day before hit me like a wall of bricks. I couldn’t even hope it had all been a dream because I’d been woken up by the searing pain in my arm. Several times throughout the night, I’d drifted into a state of half-consciousness because of how uncomfortable I was, either due to the sword wound, sleeping on the ground, or the chill in the air. Well, maybe the weather wasn’t that bad, but I’d spent most of my life in southern California, so I wasn’t used to any kind of cold weather.

  I finally felt like there was no use trying to sleep anymore. The pain was too sharp, the light was too bright, and I was starting to get more nervous about being found by another big guy with a sword. I used one hand to push myself up to sit and ran my hand through my hair before finally opening my eyes.<
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  “You slept here last night?”

  I jumped at the sound of a voice and scrambled to my feet, instinctively backing up against a wall. The sun was shining directly in my eyes so that all I could see was the shadowy silhouette of someone in the hole functioning as a doorway. I pressed further into the corner of the hay shed, holding my hand up to block as much sun as possible. Any second I expected another blade to pierce my skin, and the worst part was that I couldn’t even see it coming.

  “You’re shaking.” Whoever stood in the doorway moved closer as they spoke. This time, it hit me that the voice was soft. Whoever spoke had an absence of the malice I’d been met with yesterday.

  She grabbed the hand that was covering my face and lowered it. It wasn’t until then that I realized how hard my hand was trembling. Finally, my eyes adjusted to the light, and I could make out the features of the person before me. She was at least a couple of inches shorter than I was, but I was pretty sure we were close to the same age. Her hair was almond brown and fell straight just past her shoulders. If I thought her voice was non-threatening, her entire demeanor matched that. She had a graceful looking frame despite looking like she’d fare well on a volleyball team or running a fitness blog. I was only able to tell because her outfit was so different from the ornate robes and tunics I’d seen the day before.

  She wore a shirt cut like a muscle tank. It was pretty loose, thickly woven burnt orange fabric but cut off at the shoulder. Her arms were wrapped in something that looked like gauze. It made me think of the way fighters wrapped their hands. Still, it made it obvious that the muscles on her arm had been sculpted through significant exercise. Even the pants she wore, while still loose, were more fitted than most of the pants I’d seen people wearing the day before. She looked like some kind of ancient MMA fighter. Even so, nothing about her posture, her tone, or her expression seemed remotely hostile.

  She glanced down at my hand before letting it go and looking back up at me. I swallowed hard and dropped my hand before raising it again to clutch the wound on my other arm. I tried to think of something to say, but my mind felt too crowded to draw out a single thought.

  One side of her mouth pulled upward into some kind of smile. “I’m not going to attack you again if that’s what you’re worried about. I’m Elle.”

  Despite her bright demeanor, I couldn’t help but worry that the ground was going to glow again, or I was going to come out of this with another insane wound. The sheer absurdity of my situation was by no means lost on me. What twenty-two-year-old from California had to deal with sword wounds of all things?

  “Your name was Rena, right? Liversoul?”

  I was fully taken aback by that, and if I weren’t so wholly terrified, I would have laughed. As it was, I blinked with wide eyes and felt myself instinctively shake my head. “No. Ren, just Ren. I mean, Ren So.”

  “Ren So.” She nodded, oblivious to how ridiculous her suggestion had been. “What class are you?”

  “Uh… Senior? Computer Science, UC Berkeley.”

  It was her turn to be surprised, apparently. She looked as though I’d begun speaking a different language.

  “Um,” Elle’s head ticked to the side, “alright. Why are you here?”

  My heart began to pound, either from fear or sheer frustration, and my hands slowly curled into fists. I’d been trying to tell everyone that ever since I got here. Of course, it wasn’t her fault that no one had listened, but that didn’t stop me from feeling as though I was beginning to unravel at the seams. I gritted my teeth before forcing out an answer.

  “I have no idea. I was just home, then everything went fuzzy, and I was here. I just want to leave, but no one will tell me the way out of this damn place!”

  Truthfully, I was overreacting to her simple question because I’d begun to fear something since the moment the ground beneath my feet began to glow and I’d been cut by light. There was a chance no one knew how I could get home. There was a chance there was no way out.

  Elle watched me like I was an animal in a zoo, roaring behind a wall of glass. After a moment of that infuriating consideration, she nodded.

  “Yes,” she agreed. “I heard about what Kistro did yesterday. Can I see the cut?”

  I immediately frowned. I would have withdrawn if I weren’t already pressed as close to the wall of hay as I could be. Apparently, my discomfort was easy to read because she gave what I think was supposed to be a reassuring smile.

  I told myself that it had nothing to do with her and more to do with the fact that I wanted to see how it looked myself. I reached up to untie the makeshift bandage which was grossly stiff and all but completely red at this point.

  Most of my right arm was covered in dried blood. The sleeve was painful to pull off where the blood on the fabric had stuck against my skin. Aside from the fact that it had stopped bleeding, it didn’t look any better than it had the day before. It was probably about half an inch deep and spanned horizontally across the front half of my arm just below my shoulder. In terms of the wound itself, I’d never seen anything like it. Then again, when in my twenty-two years in Japan and America, had I seen anyone actually cut with a sword?

  “Oh, that’s good,” Elle smiled, reaching up and taking my bicep in her hands. I cringed when she lifted my arm to get a closer look.

  “Good?” I glared. “There’s a fucking gash on my arm from a damn sword!”

  Her smile stuck until she looked up and saw the rage on my face, at which point her expression shifted completely. Her face softened, and I assumed she was trying to appear more sympathetic as she looked back down at the wound.

  “Well, yes, but you’ll heal well,” she explained. “Cuts across the muscle are worse than along it, but it’s so high up your arm, it’s not likely to do any damage. It’s a little deep, but I don’t think it permanently harmed anything.”

  My anger turned more to confusion. “How do you know all of that? Are you a nurse or something?”

  “A what?” Elle blinked and looked up at me. “I’m a warrior. I’ve had these injuries since I was old enough to hold a blade.”

  My eyes grew wide, and I stared at the girl before me in pure shock.

  She tilted her head upon seeing my expression. “What?”

  “What the hell do you mean?” I snapped.

  “Mean by what?” She laughed at my surprise.

  “Being a warrior, what does that mean? Who uses blades? You’re just… I-I don’t understand.” I tore my arm away from her, forcing myself not to react to the pain. “What the fuck is going on here? Where am I?”

  Elle blinked and stepped back to give me some space. “Ren So, you’re in Eon. Eon is the village in the heart of Solivann.”

  “What the hell does that mean?”

  “Ren So,” she spoke softly in an attempt to comfort me. It wasn’t working. “Eon is a mid-sized settlement in the middle of Solivann. It’s not extremely large, but almost every trade route stops through here, so despite its size, it’s one of the more developed villages in the country. I know, yes, our architecture seems a bit rudimentary, but that’s mostly because--”

  “I don’t care!” My chest felt like it was caving in with every unnecessary word. I fled from the corner where I was feeling like a caged bird and rushed out the hole of a door, my hand holding my head.

  Elle followed me and laid her hand on my back, but I shook it off. She hardly hesitated before returning it, gently rubbing my left shoulder. “I’m sorry, Ren So. I must have misunderstood your question.”

  I shook my head, bending over to brace myself against my knee. Honestly, I didn’t know what to say. The world seemed to be spinning and shrinking all at once.

  “Where are you from?”

  I took a deep breath, trying to quell the feeling of nausea. “Um… California. In America, the United States. I was born in Japan.”

  My answers were as vague and general as possible in the hopes that something I said would strike her so that she couldn’t say
she’d never heard of those places, because I was sure as hell had never heard of Solivann.

  I was immediately disappointed.

  “Where is that?”

  I heard the confusion in her voice. I recognized it. Something about it seemed to confirm everything I’d been fearing: some way, somehow, I’d ended up in a place where America, Japan, California, none of those things existed. I had no idea how I got here and even less of an idea of how to get back.

  I straightened up, rubbing my hand against my eyes as they began to sting with tears. “It’s, um… It’s not here. It-it’s— Elle? That’s your name, right? Elle?”

  She nodded as I turned to face her.

  “Elle, do you have any idea how to leave Solivann?”

  “Leave Solivann?” Her copper-colored eyes narrowed with confusion. “No. Solivann is the whole world. At least, I mean, it’s supposed to be. But if you didn’t come from— Ren So? Do you know Draco?”

  I frowned and couldn’t help but roll my eyes. “So is my surname. Just call me Ren. And no, not unless you’re talking about a fictional character I don’t think exists here.”

  “Ren.” Elle’s brows pulled together. “I don’t know what things are like in California, but I would suggest patience when dealing with a person trying to help you rather than condescension and aggression.”

  After a second, I sighed and looked down. Something told me Elle and Jackie would get along pretty well if they ever had a chance to meet. “I… I’m sorry. No. I don’t know anyone named Draco. I don’t know anyone in Solivann.”

  “Draco isn’t from Solivann.” She shook her head, returning to a calm demeanor.

  “What?”

  “Draco is revered, but he isn’t from here. I don’t know where he’s from, but aside from him, there was only ever one person to arrive in Solivann like you did.”

  “Really? Where is he?” Maybe Draco or this other person would at least know how we got here, and from there, I would be able to figure out how to get home. I couldn’t believe I hadn’t thought of it before. If I had somehow fallen into some other universe or dimension or reality, then I couldn’t have been the only one.