Time had no meaning in the sky above Valhalla.
Was it an hour? A day? Darlington didn't know. He stood on the shimmering, insubstantial walkway, a speck of dust suspended in the colossal, roaring cathedral of war. The sensory overload was constant, a physical pressure against his skin: the metallic shriek of clashing swords the size of oak trees, the basso profundo roars of titans, the sizzle-crack of unraveling spells that stained the air with ozone and blood-smell.
But inside, he was trapped in a silent, grey room. The room of his memories, playing the same scenes on a loop.
The laughter. The pop. The dust.
His fists were clenched so tight his knuckles were bone-white, pressed against the seams of his stupid school trousers. Grief was a cold stone in his stomach. Rage was a hot wire behind his eyes. They warred inside him, leaving him paralyzed, a statue of a boy in a blazer above Armageddon.
Why am I here?
It should have been me.
I'm going to be sick.
A particularly earth-shattering BOOM echoed from below as a giant made of living magma slammed a fiery fist into a glacier wielded by a frost giant. The shockwave rippled the air, making Darlington's walkway tremble. He didn't flinch. The real explosion was happening behind his eyes.
The smell of old paper and plastic. The colorful, overwhelming clutter of the comic book store, "The Infinite Panel." It was a Thursday after school.
"ISSEKAI FUN TIME!"
Hyacinth's bellow shook the shelves. Every head in the cramped store turned—a few serious collectors, some younger kids—and stared at the large, beaming boy who had just burst through the door. Darlington shuffled in behind him, shoulders hunched, wishing he could melt into the X-Men display.
"What a drag," Darlington muttered, his voice flat. "Are you serious? What the hell do you even find in isekai? It's boring."
Hyacinth was already beelining for the "New Arrivals: Manga" section, his eyes sparkling. "Boring? You have no vision, Darlington! No poetry!"
"If you want something interesting, read proper adventure. Or sci-fi. It has actual rules. Internal logic. Depth." Darlington followed, gesturing vaguely at the rows of graphic novels. "Most isekai is just trash. 'Oh, I died in a truck accident and now I'm an overpowered wizard in a world with video game menus.' It's lazy."
Hyacinth pulled a bright light novel volume with a spiky-haired hero on the cover. "Yeah, some are trash. But that's not the point!" He turned, his expression suddenly serious. He flipped a pair of fake, thick-rimmed glasses from his pocket and put them on with a dramatic flourish.
"The point of isekai," he intoned, his voice taking on a lecturing quality, "is the blank slate. It's a story where anything is possible. To become a god. To kill a god." He leaned in, tapping Darlington's chest with the book. "Even… to find a way back to your old world."
He pushed his glasses up, his eyes wide behind the lenses. "It's clay, Darlington. The whole world is clay for the protagonist to shape. That's what I enjoy. Not just the story… the imagination it sparks."
He pointed a finger directly at Darlington's nose. "So listen. If you ever get isekai'd—and with your luck, you probably will—I want you to ditch that stupid, limiting mentality of yours. Even if you're weak. Even if you're scared. You have to adopt the mindset of a god. Only when you start thinking like a god… can you ever hope to become one."
He held the pose for a second, then broke into his familiar, rumbling laugh, taking the glasses off.
Darlington just stared at him, a mix of affection and profound embarrassment on his face. "You know," he sighed, "this is exactly why I hate walking with you in public. You're the smartest idiot I know. It's a terrible combination."
He was acutely aware of the whispers rustling through the store.
"Isn't that… the top two? Darlington and Hyacinth?"
"Yeah, from the radio. The genius and the… the plump one."
"Why is he yelling about cartoons? So weird."
"Gross."
Hyacinth heard it too. His smile didn't falter, but a flicker of something—resignation?—passed behind his eyes before he buried it under more enthusiasm. "Come on, clay-brain! Help me find volume seven!"
POP.
The memory shattered into the sound of a king's war horn, blasting from the battlefield below.
Darlington gasped, jolted back to the present. The cold stone of grief was still there. The hot wire of rage still burned. But now, something else was threading through them. A spark. A stupid, impossible, Hyacinth-shaped spark.
He looked down. Not with the numb, horrified gaze of the last few hours, but with a fierce, desperate intensity. His eyes, red-rimmed and raw, scanned the apocalypse.
"Yeah… that's right," he whispered to the roaring wind. The words were stolen by the din, but he felt them. "I'm alive. Even here. Even in this… other world." The term felt absurd in his mouth. Isekai. "I'm still alive. I'm still human."
The spark caught flame.
"As long as I'm human… I can fight."
It wasn't a logical thought. It was pure, defiant instinct. A survival reflex of a mind too brilliant to accept passive annihilation. The despair tried to smother it. Fight? With what? You're a ghost! A witness! But Hyacinth's voice in his memory was louder. The mindset of a god.
He wasn't a god. He was a boy with a 270 IQ and a heart full of shattered glass. But his mind… his mind was his tool. His weapon. It had solved unsolvable equations, deconstructed complex systems, predicted outcomes. What was this, if not the most complex system imaginable?
Observe. The Herald's command.
Watch. His punishment.
See everything. His mind latched onto the order with a terrifying, razor-sharp focus. Not as a passive sentence, but as an objective.
"There has to be something," he growled, his voice gaining strength. "Data. Pattern. A flaw. A rule. Something."
He leaned forward over the edge of the walkway, no longer a slumped statue but a hunter poised. He willed his perception to sharpen, to push past the overwhelming spectacle and into the details. He didn't just want to see the war; he needed to understand it.
A pressure built behind his eyes. A familiar strain, the one he felt when pushing through a final, brutal exam question after 12 hours of focus. But this was magnified a thousandfold. The chaotic data stream of the battle—the movement of armies, the arc of spells, the ebb and flow of power—was a tsunami of information.
Process it.
A sharp, sudden pain lanced through his temples. He cried out, clutching his head. But within the pain, his vision… changed.
The world didn't just magnify. It simplified. And complexified, all at once. It was like a filter snapping into place. The roaring mess of color and sound began to separate into distinct layers. He could follow the trajectory of a single arrow in a volley of thousands. He could see the minute cracks forming in a hero's shield before it shattered. He could almost trace the flow of the strange, luminous energy—mana? spirit?—that gathered around a chanting sorcerer.
His gaze, supernaturally acute, swept across the colossal hall like a searchlight. It skipped over individual, skirmish-level fights—the lion-skin wrestler, the dragon knight—and was drawn to a larger, more organized confrontation. A point where two vast, coherent forces were about to collide.
It was a desert, a vast expanse of golden sand somehow contained within Valhalla. It was cleaved into two halves by a natural, towering ridge of rock that resembled a giant's fallen arm.
On the right side, an army glittered under the artificial sun. A thousand men, their armor not the dull grey of history books, but brilliant, polished steel that shone with an inner, righteous light. They stood in perfect, silent ranks. At their forefront, mounted on horses that were more than beasts—creatures of muscle and spirit with intelligent, fierce eyes—were eight figures. Each radiated a unique aura of power: one of pure strength, one of peerless speed, one of unwavering loyalty, one of tragic grace.
The Knights of the Round Table.
And before them, a step ahead, was their king.
Arthur Pendragon.
His armor was silver and gold, etched with intricate dragons. A royal crimson cloak flowed from his shoulders, untouched by the desert wind. Upon his head sat a simple, starkly beautiful golden crown. His hair was white as snow, but his beard was a vibrant, fierce red. On his back, an empty sheath. In his right hand, held aloft so it caught the light and blazed like a piece of the sun itself, was the holy sword.
Excalibur.
His face was not that of a young hero, but of a weary, determined sovereign. He looked upon the enemy force with the calm of a man who has faced doom a hundred times.
He turned slightly, his voice carrying across the silent ranks not as a shout, but as a clear, resonant command that somehow reached Darlington high above.
"Men of Britain! Warriors of legend!" Arthur's voice was like tempered steel. "Today, we do not fight for land, or for gold, or for a throne! We fight for a freedom beyond any we have known! The freedom from this eternal hall! The chance to write a new fate!"
He swept Excalibur in an arc, pointing it at the shadowed army across the divide. "They are the echo of every darkness we ever faced! The coalesced doubt of mankind! Show them the strength of our light! Show them the resolve of Camelot! Not for glory, but for tomorrow! ATTACK!"
The effect was instantaneous. A roar, not of mindless fury, but of fierce, focused agreement, erupted from a thousand throats. The golden light around their armor flared. The Knights of the Round Table kicked their mighty steeds forward, each breaking off to lead a wedge of troops, their own legendary weapons appearing in hand—a spear, a great axe, a mighty sword.
Darlington's enhanced vision tracked it all. He saw the precise, coordinated movement. He saw the way the very sand seemed to harden under the charge of Arthur's faithful. He saw the strategic genius in their formation, a masterpiece of medieval warfare made mythic.
His gaze snapped to the other side of the rocky divide.
This army did not glitter. It swallowed light. A swirling, living shadow clung to them, a fog that obscured numbers and details. It was less an army and more a single, sprawling entity of gloom. Within the darkness, pinpricks of malevolent red light shone—eyes, or perhaps cursed gems. There were no war cries. Only a deep, chilling silence that was more terrifying than any shout. They did not march. They flowed forward, the shadowy tide seeping around the rocks.
Arthur's golden cavalry met the black tide.
The collision was silent for a fraction of a second. Then sound and light exploded. Golden blades met shadowy claws. Holy light flared, burning away darkness, only for the darkness to reform, thicker and hungrier. A knight was pulled from his horse, consumed by the shadows without a scream. A pulse of light from Excalibur vaporized a dozen shadowy forms, creating a brief, blazing clearing.
Darlington watched, but he was no longer just seeing. He was analyzing.
Arthur's power is central, a beacon. It strengthens those nearby. The shadow seeks to envelop and isolate. The Knights are force multipliers, but they're being drawn apart. The shadow is adapting. It learns. It's not mindless. It has a strategy: attrition, isolation, then overwhelm the king.
He wasn't just observing a battle. He was comprehending its grammar. The pain in his head was a constant thrum now, the price of this forced, god-like perspective. But he embraced it. This was his clay. This war, these legends—they were variables in a monstrous equation.
And he, Darlington, the witness, was the only one seeing the whole board.
A slow, fierce smile touched his lips. It held no joy, only a terrifying, crystalline resolve. The cold grief and the hot rage had finally fused, tempered in the furnace of his intellect, into a single, unbreakable purpose.
He looked down at King Arthur, a legend fighting for a future, and at the consuming shadow, the legend of endless night. He looked at the thousands of other battles raging across the hall, a symphony of carnage for a prize he now found grotesque.
His friends were gone. His world was gone. He was trapped in a story written by cruel, bored gods.
But he had his mind. And he had a promise to a stupid, brilliant friend in a comic book store.
The whisper was lost to the winds of war, but it was the most important vow he would ever make.
"Thanks, Hyacinth."
The smile remained, sharp as Excalibur's blade.
"I will become a god."