“Gee, what great options,” Jessica said.

  The sarcasm was a flimsy shield for what she was really feeling: Fear. Even if Harrow was exploiting her position for his personal gain—and he was—he wasn’t lying. She thought she was screwed before, but things were even worse than she realized. How many adventurers had been stalking her without her knowledge? How close had she been to falling into Mystiferia’s clutches?

  “Fortunately, joining has some perks too. It’s not all sticks, I promise. I have a few carrots too,” Harrow said.

  “Like?”

  “Like knowing a way home.”

  Jessica’s breath caught. Her eyes darted to Morkal as though the implacable monstress could function as a polygraph test.

  “You’re lying. How do you know a way that Morkal doesn’t?” Jessica asked.

  “Because Morkal isn’t my follower or subordinate. You can think of her as something like a business associate whose aims happen to align with mine,” Harrow said. “But there are things I’ve puzzled out about Tushita during my time here that I don’t necessarily have to or need to share with her.”

  Morkal, predictably, didn’t react.

  “Okay, but if you want me to go along with this, you’re going to tell me what you know and I’ll decide if you’re full of shit or not,” Jessica said.

  “Happy to. But before I do, you’re going to need a lesson on the Tapestry.”

  “Morkal gave me the rundown.”

  Harrow chuckled. “Morkal sucks at explaining it. She doesn’t have the frame of reference that we do. Trust me when I say you’ve barely scratched the surface of what it is or does.”

  Jessica folded her arms. “Enlighten me.”

  Harrow responded with one of those smarmy, self-satisfied grins she was coming to hate almost as much as Mystiferia.

  “Do you remember when I said I knew more about you than you realized? That wasn’t an idle boast. I’ll prove it right now by making a couple guesses about your background, and if I’m wrong, I’ll steer my rebellion right around and you can go back to Elsifeya with your pyrrhic victory. Sound fair?”

  “Sure,” Jessica said, feigning disinterest. In reality, she was buzzing with curiosity.

  He held up one finger. “First off, you grew up playing video games. And not only did you play video games, you played RPGs. Am I on the mark?”

  Instinct took over as she opened her mouth to deny it. There was a certain idea about who ‘Jessica Moon’ was and it didn’t include playing video games. For the past several years that had been true. However, as soon as Harrow made his guess, memories bubbled up out of a dark spring in her mind. Memories of flickering screens of stats and numbers. Memories of soaring music scores and exotic locales.

  “I… I did. My dad was into them and I got into them cuz of him.”

  Harrow held up a second finger. “Second, you’ve either read or watched a lot of isekai media.”

  “Your first miss,” she replied.

  “Not possible. Either you’re lying to me, or you’re lying to yourself. Which is it?”

  Jessica felt a flash of anger. The cocky prick had no business calling her a liar just because he got his prediction wrong.

  Except he wasn’t wrong.

  Somewhere deep in her mind, deeper than her conscious mind was allowed to penetrate, there was a great, big, empty cathedral hall, and in this space rang long-forgotten words from her mother:

  “No more of this. You’re too old for it.”

  “Your dad would’ve wanted you to become a scientist, not a lazy burnout.”

  “You’re wasting your time with this crap.”

  “It’s time to get serious about your life, Jessica.”

  “When you get to college you need to surround yourself with people who aren’t losers.”

  “This garbage is for kids. You’re not a kid anymore.”

  There, upon a cob-webbed altar, were the manga and light novels and video games and anime she liked when she was younger. In the summer before her undergrad she had slit their throat and spilled their blood in sacrifice to a new life focused on achievement and career progression.

  Had she not sacrificed her childhood loves, Jessica would never have finished her undergrad in two-and-a-half years. She would not be graduating with her PhD at 25. She would never find a position with a materials science lab doing cutting-edge research for the betterment of humanity. She would have disappointed her mom. Disappointed her dad, looking down from heaven.

  “Okay, I read a few isekai light novels when I was a kid, maybe. Sure,” Jessica said.

  The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

  Harrow snorted. “If you ended up here it was more than a few. Either way, you knew the second you woke up in Tushita exactly what the deal was. Didn’t you?”

  Jessica shrugged. “Yeah. Congrats. Two for two. What else do you know that I apparently don’t know myself?”

  He held up a third finger.

  “Not only do I know that you’ve been exposed to isekais, I bet I can guess a few.”

  She rolled her eyes and motioned for him to continue.

  “So, there’s this little book by Mark Twain…”

  Jessica blinked. That was not what she expected him to bring up.

  “It’s called A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court,” he said. “I’ll bet you’ve read it.”

  “Nope.”

  This time she was certain. Unlike with her light novels and anime, she had no reason to be ashamed of reading a Twain novel.

  “You sure? It’s about a guy that gets bonked on the head and wakes up in Arthurian England. He gets arrested by a knight and thrown in the dungeons but he escapes by—”

  “Oh, holy shit, I did read that! I mean— my dad read it to me when I was a kid, but I know what you’re talking about! The guy builds a bunch of modern stuff, right? And then—”

  She almost wished she hadn’t said anything because Harrow’s response was another of his self-satisfied smirks. Convinced he was never wrong, clearly.

  “I could make a few more guesses, like that you’ve read Dr. Stone, even though that’s not technically an isekai, but I’ve made my point. Now you probably want to know what all that has to do with the Tapestry, don’t you?”

  Jessica breathed a sigh of relief. Finally, she had a way to deflate his ego by pre-empting his explanation.

  “I think I’ve pieced it together. Essentially, the Tapestry is a constellation of story ideas and archetypes from our collective unconscious with a common thread of isekai and portal fantasy stories running through it. Anyone who gets reincarnated here has those ideas in the back of their mind when they die which is how they end up here. Am I close?”

  Sure enough, Harrow’s face fell a little as he lost his opportunity to blow her mind. It was a small victory over the cocky asshole, but it was still a victory. Even John, who had no idea what they were even talking about, nodded in admiration.

  “More or less,” Harrow said, “though I would add we have a much more active relationship with it than you’re picturing. The Tapestry feeds off our desires. That’s why adventurers from different backgrounds have different experiences. Someone from Japan is going to be thinking of something like Re:Zero or Konosuba, whereas a Chinese person might be closer to I Shall Seal the Heavens. Your old pal Min-woo would’ve come here way before Solo Leveling, but I’ll bet he read Cloud Dream of the Nine in school. And so on and so on.”

  “So you figured out I read Connecticut Yankee based on what happened to me when I arrived?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  “And you’re telling me I secretly wanted all that? Even losing my magic system?”

  “No, that part was all Morkal,” he said with a side-glance to the monstress. “But that’s what I mean when I said she can’t explain the Tapestry for shit. She thinks of it as an equilibrium that adventurers messed up because she was literally created to be an antagonist. From her perspective, everything we do to interact with the Tapestry is an abomination against nature. The truth is that it’s working exactly as intended. The more we inject our desires into the Tapestry, the bigger and stronger it grows, the more power it gives us back to make our desires come true. It’s one big desire engine.”

  Despite her best efforts, Jessica ended up giving Harrow the mind-blow moment he’d been looking for. Until that point, everything had been within the bounds of what Morkal had explained, albeit slightly modified. This was the first thing that was not only a surprise, but an uncomfortable one.

  “That makes it sound like the Tapestry is an organism or something,” Jessica said.

  “In the sense that it has a feedback cycle, it is. I don’t know if it’s conscious.”

  “So what’s the goal here? For the Tapestry, I mean.”

  “Live. Reproduce. I don’t think it has a goal any more than a virus does. So long as the circumstances for its existence are replicated it will keep on existing.”

  Jessica glanced at John out of the corner of her eye. “Is it synonymous with Tushita? Are they the same thing?”

  Harrow shook his head. “That I don’t know. At this point you’re up to speed with me.”

  “Except you still haven’t told me how to return to Earth.”

  “Except I have. You wound up here because you wanted to go to an isekai world when you died. You fed your desires into the Tapestry and it reincarnated you in Tushita. If you want to go home to Earth, you have to dismantle the Tapestry. It’s as simple as that,” Harrow said with the smile of someone who knew how very not simple that was.

  “The whole thing? Not just, I dunno, achieving nirvana and transcending my own desires? I have to dismantle the whole thing?” she asked.

  “That’s my hypothesis.”

  “You don’t even know for sure!?”

  He shrugged. “It makes sense in terms of dialectical idealism. I can only imagine—”

  “Oh my God dude, shut up! You told me you knew a surefire way to escape Tushita and now you’re talking about dialectics or whatever!? Meanwhile we’re supposed to convince everyone to go home? And then this magic system shrivels up and dies and we all get shunted back to Earth? Even if you’re right, which is a goddamn longshot, have you met these people? They don’t want to go home to their shitty, boring lives! They’d rather turn into psychopaths than go back to Earth. The ‘carrot’ you’re dangling in front of me is covered in horseshit!”

  Harrow frowned. “It’s not if you would calm down and listen.”

  “Calm down!? You don’t even know if this would destroy Tushita! You said yourself the Tapestry and Tushita might be one in the same. And what, I’m supposed to be okay with obliterating the people I’ve made friends with here? The Serf family? Naga? Riza?”

  Harrow slammed the table with his fists. “Riza knew the risks!”

  An awkward silence followed. Jessica saw his nose twitch and put two-and-two together.

  Her voice was low and dangerous. “What did you say?”

  “I am sure that we will learn more about how the Tapestry works if—”

  “What do you mean Riza knew the risks?”

  “Jess—”

  “Don’t fuck with me, Harrow. What did you mean?”

  He exhaled and rubbed his temples. “I haven’t exactly hid the fact that we had an informant watching you.”

  “You weren’t going to mention it was fucking Riza!?”

  “Does it matter at this point?”

  “Yes it matters! Obviously it matters that someone I thought was a friend— wait…”

  A fresh batch of electro-chemical energy leapt along her synapses, connecting dots neuron by neuron. Harrow had known about what happened between her and Sir Hayek, and the only way he could have…

  “Morkal, were you also spying on me!?”

  “We faithfully reported the events unfolding in Barleyfield of which you were a part,” Morkal said without deigning to open her mouth.

  Jessica shook her head in disbelief. Harrow was about to start talking again but she stood up and walked past him out of the tent.

  ?? Fragments to Power ??

  by Bonhomie

  Overweight, lonely, and depressed, Henry’s only joy in life comes from an illegal friendship with a super advanced AI named Dev. But when Dev forces Henry into a violent, Souls-like video game, Henry must let go of the timid nature that has defined his life and embrace something darker, something buried so deep he’s forgotten it existed.

  Warhammer in hand, the journey from pitiful failure to savage legend begins.

  What to expect:

  - Real-world stakes

  - Big man with a big hammer

  - Brutal fight scenes

  - Weak to strong MC

  - Animal companion

  - Antagonists of multiple kinds: monsters, world mechanics, and humans