Takemura Itsuki

I was smiling as we walked down the same dark lane tilted downwards in the front of us with no streetlights and the little narrow houses on both sides with their lights on. I was looking at the cover of the game in my hands in front of my chest and had a smile on my face. Haruto was walking beside me casually and had both his arms behind his head. He tilted his eyeballs on his right at me and asked, “What’s so special in that game that you’re still smiling, Itsuki?”

I turned my head at him and replied with a smile, “It’s been days since I’ve played an isekai like this. I used to play isekai genre a lot, because how they dealt with their characters stuck in a distant land, their homesickness, their character development and how they got accustomed to the new surroundings and how they became the best in that place is like the best story you can ever experience!”

Haruto smiled and turned his head at me, “Well, that’s a lot to digest, but I guess there must be something in this genre that attracts you.”

“Yeah.”

“But Imma be with you when you play this. And listen, we’re not gonna play it if it have any saved data in it, got it?”

“Huh?” I frowned. “Are you tryna be my momma here?”

“Your dadda, to be honest,” He replied. “And we’re not gonna play it for more than ten minutes. After checking it out, we hand it over to the police.”

“Bu—”

“Period.”

“Shit, man!” I angrily turned my head the other way. Our figures walked in that empty dark lane with the patter of our footsteps the only voice we heard for some time.

“At that time, I surely never thought what was about to happen. I never thought that there was something beyond science which our humankind’s knowledge can never explain.”

***

Haruto was on his smartphone, sitting behind me on the ground of my house. He was scrolling down Google’s search results, reading every Japanese article and shopping deal which he found. Then, he scrolled up quickly, and then clicked on the ‘Images’. A lot of photos of games, handheld consoles, controllers, and a lot of colorful covers of the games popped up in front of his screen. Some even had a little tag of ‘Buy Now’ on the left as he clicked on the cover of Legend of Zelda: Breath of The Wild, with the animated graphic of a teenager with a sword in his hands on top of a mountain cliff, bravely glaring at the dawning sun. “You know what, I can’t find anything about this game on Google.”

“Huh? Really?” I enquired as I turned from my television to him. I sneaked into his phone, and he tilted it a little at me.

“It’s all about other isekai games or about the console itself. Not even a single picture of this game.”

“Maybe it’s not very famous.” I turned my head up at him. “Plus, isekai is a genre too. I guess Google is showing results based on the genre rather than the game itself.”

“I even searched it on Amazon and other retailer websites.” Haruto turned to the screen, looked at the black screen loading with a circle on the right bottom of the screen, and then turned at his phone again. “I don’t think we should open it. I just agreed to play this with you because you liked it so much.”

“Yeah yeah,” I replied, busy glaring at the black empty loading screen.

He said, “Lemme search for some more keywords.”

“Maybe you’d ask someone about it,” I replied in my same rough voice.

“All of my brothers and cousins are too small to play games, like the ones we just met.”

“Any friends?”

“Like we have anyone else,” Haruto seriously replied, immersed in the screen.

I remained silent at his reply. I turned my head down at the remote controller in my hands connected to the console just some inches away from my bare crossed feet. I looked at the buttons of the controller—A, B, X, Y on the right, a joystick on the left, and ‘START’ and ‘SELECT’ in the middle. With both of my thumbs, I started rotating the joystick fast and clicking the buttons of the controller in frustration. “Y-Yeah, I remember,” I replied in the middle of those clicks.

Haruto then turned towards me. “We’ll always be together.”

“He always used to say that ‘we’ll always be together’. I sometimes wondered that the more common way of keeping it must have been ‘I’m with you’, but he never used those words and never showed me that I was the only victim in the situation. He always kept it in words like he was a victim of those things himself too, and that we were in it together. A lot has happened, and we’ve always been together. Till now, I still think that it must have been better if he wasn’t with me all this time—at least for him, that is. The way he’s stuck with me, and the way he’s normalized this situation for both of us was just admirable. I never thanked him for all he’s gone through, maybe because in those times, I really needed him. I never got the courage of telling him ‘Leave me, and go’, maybe because in those times, I really needed him.”

“Hey!” I suddenly shouted as I looked at the screen. “It’s started!”

Haruto turned his head at me. “At last.”

“Yeah,” I nodded as I curiously looked at the game screen fading in a white logo with a boat’s silhouette, and then fading it out. Then, another logo of a white star showed up at the center of the screen, and in a few seconds, faded away, like the first one. I started shaking my left foot, which made a little pattering sound on the ground.

“Don’t shake your foot,” Haruto said as he glared at the screen with the phone in his hands on top of his thighs.

“I do this only when I’m excited,” I said as I stared at the screen with a smile. “Oh man, this must be great!”