Worlds' Strongest

by Simon Archer

  “You’re only making it harder on yourself by focusing on it!”

  “Well, what else am I supposed to focus on?”

  Elle sighed, pushing her hair back from her face. “I don’t know. You said you’d teach me more about your world. What about that?”

  “Alright.” I took a breath before standing straight and walking again. “What do you want to learn about?”

  “I don’t know.” She scratched her cheek thoughtfully. “What are things like? How are they different from here?”

  I laughed at that question. “In just about literally every way you could imagine. For one thing, there’s no magic.”

  “We don’t have magic here either,” she shrugged.

  “Oh, come on, weapons made of light and messing with time? Seeing with your eyes closed?” I shrugged. “That all sounds like magic to me.”

  “No, magic isn’t real,” Elle said as if it was the most elementary thing in the world. “Those things are real.”

  “See? That’s how my world is different.” I nodded. “We don’t have those things, so they’re all magic to me.”

  “So what do people do in…? What, what do you call it?”

  “Um, the world is Earth. I live in California, in the United States of America. People just have jobs. You learn and work and train and study, all that, and you get better, too. There’s just not a level system to it, and people cut their hair however they want.”

  “Hm.” Elle smiled. “What’s the strangest way people cut their hair in California?”

  “Oh, man,” I scoffed. “You wouldn’t believe it if you saw this stuff. I think the weirdest thing is when people get shapes and stuff dyed into their hair. They’ll shave an animal or something in the hair and then dye it, so it looks like a pink cat or a green lizard-”

  “Okay, fine,” she huffed in disbelief. “You don’t have to tell me!”

  “I swear on my life, Elle,” I, uh, swore, “I’m dead serious!”

  She tried to say something, but then she started laughing and couldn’t seem to get anything out.

  “I know,” I chuckled. “It’s pretty fun, actually, but those are sort of rare. People have been really into mullets lately. That’s been strange.”

  “I’m almost afraid to ask what that is?”

  “Um…” I tried my best to explain to her what a mullet was, followed by a mohawk, and at last, a toupee. Each description was followed by at least a minute long interlude where I then had to convince her that these were real hairstyles people wore.

  Finally, she finished laughing and managed to get a word out. “Does everyone wear their hair like that?”

  “Thankfully, no.” I smiled. “Most people leave their hair pretty normal. They just cut it.”

  Elle sighed. I sensed a slight shift in her previously amused expression and gave her a look.

  “I’m just trying to imagine what that’s like,” she said as she looked away. “Cutting your hair when you want to.”

  “What? You don’t like the class-based hair thing?” My curiosity was peaked now.

  “Honestly, no.” She looked around us like she was worried about being heard. “And my dad would kill me for saying that too.”

  “You aren’t allowed to have questions or thoughts?” Considering how good-natured her father had seemed, I found that statement hard to believe.

  “You are,” Elle began with a soft sigh, “but no one voices them. Things have worked pretty much the same in Solivann for most of recorded history. Why change what works? Even if everybody thought the same thing I do, no one wants to be the first one in hundreds of years to criticize the system. So I cut my hair when I’m told and only when I’m told.”

  My eyebrows lifted. To hear her speak the past few days, I just assumed everyone was content with this rigid system. “Well, what would you want to do? If you didn’t have to follow all the rules?”

  A smile spread across her face. It was obvious that she’d thought about this before, often enough that she already knew her answer.

  “I’d want to cut it off,” Elle said simply. “Even Copper Class children keep their hair about their ears. I’ve always hated it, though.”

  “Why?” I asked. “Does it get in the way when you fight?”

  “Absolutely!” She shook her head, and her tossing tresses made her point for her. “If I could cut it off, even just as short as yours, it would make everything so much easier. Instead, it’s just going to get longer for the rest of my life.”

  “You could always have an accident,” I chuckled.

  Elle looked at me with a furrowed brow. “What do you mean?”

  “Nothing.” I shrugged. “But if you were to go home with short hair and say that it accidentally got cut when you were training, what would happen?”

  Her eyes grew wide as she stared at me. Clearly, in all her daydreaming, that thought had never crossed her mind before. “Honestly, I don’t know.”

  “Either way, I admire sticking to your system so much.” I smiled and nodded. “Honestly, I think it would drive me crazy.”

  If I didn’t know any better, I’d think Elle was almost falling behind me as we walked. “Why do you say that?”

  “I dunno, it just seems a bit pointless to me. You said it yourself, it’s easier to fight in stuff like this rather than silk robes. Still, at some point, you’ll be expected to do that, just because, why?” I shook my head in disbelief. “It looks better? Doesn’t that sound silly to you?”

  “Well, it’s meant to be a reflection of skill,” she muttered, “since most people go their whole lives without needing to fight, anyway.”

  That made me laugh. “Right. That’s another thing. Why do people bother learning to fight for a living if there’s no use for it?”

  “Are you going to teach me anything or just insult me?” Elle said with deadly seriousness.

  I stopped walking and turned around to look at her standing a few feet behind me. She had a harsh look on her face.

  “Um,” I blinked, “what? I wasn’t trying to- I didn’t mean you, Elle.”

  She was silent for a moment before simply shaking her head and resuming walking. “Let’s go. We’re wasting time.”

  I nodded and followed her quickly. “So, how do you guys learn here? I mean, where do you study-?”

  “Apprenticeships, usually,” she answered with a short tone. Clearly, I’d fucked up. “That’s how most things work. You find a mentor, study on your own.”

  “Where I’m from, people go to school,” I offered in an attempt to get the conversation back to a less hostile place. “Until you’re about eighteen, you go to a school that teaches you the basics of everything, math, reading, history. After that, you go to a new school where you study one thing. And more basics, but mostly that one thing. Once you graduate, hopefully, you get a job in that field. Otherwise, you find something else to do for the rest of your life.”

  “Hm,” Elle muttered, seeming barely interested in the topic. “What did you study?”

  “I’m studying computer science!” And I missed it like crazy.

  There was a pause before she finally responded. “What’s that?”

  I smiled at her as I answered. I’d been thinking for the past couple of days about how to begin to explain the concept of computers to a world that didn’t seem to have them.

  “Does that make sense?” I asked as I finished about half an hour later.

  “I think so.” Elle looked understandably confused, but nodded. “It sounds more like magic to me.”

  “Well, now you know how I feel,” I chuckled.

  “Well, if your computer has already been invented, why is studying it any different from studying fighting here?” Elle pointed out, turning the tables on me.

  “Oh, I didn’t mean- Um, well, I’m focusing on cryptography,” I tried to explain. “Code is what makes up websites and programs, and cryptography is figuring out how to decipher codes.”

  “I don’t understand.” She
shook her head. “Why would you need to decipher it? Couldn’t you just ask the person who wrote it?”

  “Ideally, yes.” I smiled and held back a laugh. “But people like to hide things from each other, or sometimes you don’t know where a code came from. Like, right before I got here, for example, the minute that everything went fuzzy and I fell through the ground, I was working on one code that seemed to come from nowhere. It had been corrupting programs and websites that were supposed to be secure.”

  “Did you figure it out?” Elle asked, her head tilted curiously.

  “I…” I paused, trying to remember the moment before everything I knew about the universe and physics went up in flames. “I did, I think. I can’t be sure. I put the code through an algorithm I designed, and the second it popped up on the screen, that was when…”

  I’d been so busy trying to navigate this magical fantasy world without getting myself killed that I hadn’t spent much time actually thinking about the code, save for the regret that I hadn’t had a second longer to look it over before falling through the floor. Ever since I got here, I’d been viewing my arrival in Solivann as some kind of statistical anomaly, a completely random occurrence.

  What if it wasn’t?

  “Ren? Ren!” Elle shook my shoulder to get my attention, and I realized I’d stopped walking. I glanced around for a second before shaking my head to clear it.

  “I, um… I just thought of something to do with the code,” I explained. “That’s all.”

  “What is it?”

  I didn’t know how to explain this to her when she barely understood the concept of a computer in the first place, and I couldn’t help but be a little preemptively annoyed at trying to explain it when I didn’t completely understand myself.

  “Just… I’m wondering if the code had anything to do with my arrival here,” is what I decided on at last. “If I could just see the original, maybe I could work it out again. Maybe that would get me home.”

  “What? You can’t remember it?” I could tell that this wasn’t making much sense to Elle. To be fair, I probably wasn’t explaining it very well either.

  “It’s five hundred and eighty-eight digits long,” I sighed, raking a hand through my hair. Unless I could recall every number of the code and the mode of each variation, then use a complex series of algorithms to solve it, I was out of luck. I still had to find Draco, figure out how he got here, and try to recreate it.

  “I’m sorry,” Elle spoke softly.

  Clearly, I wasn’t hiding my frustration very well, but I wasn’t exactly in the mood to care.

  “Whatever.” I shook my head and sighed. “Let’s just keep going.”

  We walked in silence for a while. Elle was kind enough to leave me alone while I stewed in my frustration. Nothing was any different, but knowing what the solution was and not being able to use it to get out of here was almost overwhelming.

  “We should stop and eat,” she finally broke the silence.

  I slowed to a stop, suddenly realizing how exhausted my legs were. I half considered suggesting we press on because I wasn’t sure I could ever continue if I stopped moving, but the sudden desire to rest won out. We moved off to the side of the path, and I sat against a tree as I dug through my bag and pulled out bread and an apple.

  “I can’t wait to get back to real food again,” I muttered.

  “August makes some of the best seared salmon in Solivann,” she smiled.

  I glanced over at her and nodded. She seemed quite excited about that. I didn’t know how to tell her I was really craving a Big Mac and chicken nuggets. That salmon sounded good, though.

  “So,” I began, “I guess our plan is to find your friend, and then I’ll train to become Platinum. How long do you think that’s going to take?”

  Elle blinked. “My dad was forty. I started early, so I should be Platinum by the time I’m thirty, thirty-five.”

  “Dammit,” I hissed.

  I knew this would take a long time. Still, it was discouraging to think about. Not to mention, I hadn’t really considered what was happening back home. I was trying to avoid thinking about it, actually. If I found my way back home ten years from now, would I walk into a world where I’d been missing for a decade? When I didn’t show up for class, and they came to look for me, would they find the code on my computer? Would someone else take credit for my work because I wasn’t there to claim it, or worse, would it be erased completely?

  “I know it seems daunting, but anything less would be dangerous,” she said softly, “especially now that his soldiers are looking for you. If you tried to seek Draco out now, they’d kill you.”

  “Why? Because I seem like such a massive threat?” I rolled my eyes. “This whole thing is ridiculous.”

  “Where he came from, he was persecuted,” she said, recounting the tale I’d already been told. “He has a right to want to protect himself, Ren.”

  “By having innocent people killed? You think that’s right?”

  “Of course not!” Elle frowned. “But I understand why he’d want to be wary. Don’t you?”

  “Honestly, no, I don’t,” I said bluntly. “I don’t know how the hell he got here, but either he and I come from very different places, or he’s lying to you and just wants to take advantage of how ignorant everyone here is.”

  “Ren!” Elle gasped.

  “What?” I snapped.

  Looking over at her, it was immediately clear that I’d gone too far. “Shit. Elle, I didn’t-”

  “Stop,” she hissed, standing to her feet and grabbing her bag. “I should have known this was a bad idea.”

  “Whoa, whoa, wait.” I threw the bread and the apple back in my bag and stood, stepping in front of her. “What are you doing? What are you talking about?”

  “Get back!” she shouted. “Ever since you got here, you’ve been trying to pick away at the world I know. Was that your plan?”

  I stared at her, positively dumbfounded. “Wh- wait, what do-?”

  “I should have trusted when Kistro saw you as a threat that he knew what he was talking about.” Elle pushed me out of the way and walked past me, going back the way we came.

  I was frozen for a second in shock before I went to grab her arm. “Hold on. I’m not a threat!”

  She whirled around, throwing my arm off her as she grabbed her dagger from her belt. I jumped back, nearly tripping over my feet and falling to the ground.

  “Elle,” I said slowly, holding my hands up. “What are you doing?”

  She glared at me with rage in her eyes. Rage? No. That wasn’t it. It was something else.

  “You arrived in Eon, and I sought you out,” she sneered. “That was my fault. I was naïve. My family took you in, and I offered to walk you straight to Draco. That’s why you’ve been rushing, isn’t it?”

  I frowned, shaking my head in a mixture of disbelief and confusion.

  “What? No, no, this isn’t some plot to-” As I spoke, I took a step in toward her. That was a mistake.

  “Get the hell away from me!” Elle spun the dagger in her hand, so it was upside down and swiped it through the air at me. I only narrowly avoided getting sliced by it as I stepped back. My foot hit a bulbous rock on the ground, and I fell backward.

  She took a step toward me. With absolutely no idea what to do, I pulled the small sword from my belt to defend myself. I held it out to block like she taught me, which I immediately registered as a stupid move, given that she hadn’t even tried to strike at me yet.

  What I did instead was give her a clear shot.

  She grabbed my wrist with her free hand while her dagger knocked the sword out of my hand. I felt my breath and my pulse both begin to speed up as panic wracked my body. She had my dominant hand, so I struggled to reach for my own dagger with my left.

  “Elle, stop!” I shouted, trying to pull my wrist from her grasp. I fumbled with the hilt of the dagger, dropping it as soon as I wrestled it from the sheath.

  Her eyes darted o
ver to the weapon before returning to meet mine. It must have seemed like some kind of threat rather than a desperate attempt at self-defense, because the next moment, her dagger was coming through the air toward me.

  I felt again as though everything was moving in slow motion. With a burst of desperate energy, I managed to pull my wrist away just in time to hold it up directly in the line of trajectory for her weapon. A sliced hand had to be better than a chest, right?

  As soon as I felt the blade, I instinctively closed my hand around it, trying to push it as far from the rest of my body as I could before the weapon cut completely through me. My adrenaline was pumping so hard, I couldn’t even feel the sting of the blade as it cut me. I tried to strengthen my grip and use that to my advantage, when Elle and I both froze.

  The metal dagger in my hand shattered. I flinched as the pieces snapped and flew off, leaving her holding a mere hilt with a couple of inches of blunt metal sticking out. Elle stumbled backward, her eyes wide in shock. I could only imagine mine were the same.

  “Elle-” I stammered, almost more as a question than anything else, but she was uninterested.

  She shook her head quickly, stepping further back. I quickly stood to my feet.

  “Elle!” I said firmly. From the look on her face, it was obvious whatever she was thinking, it wasn’t good.

  Without a word, she turned and ran back down the path. I took a deep breath, holding my head in my hands. What the hell had just happened?

  10

  After calming down and narrowly saving myself from a panic attack, I grabbed my bag and set off down the path by myself, in the direction of Grave. The road through the forest was a footpath. It wasn’t very wide, but it had been well-defined where it had been walked before. If I followed it, I would be just fine with her.

  If what she said was true and it was going to take me over a decade before I could safely confront Draco, then I didn’t have time to waste trying to find someone who’d just come at me with a knife. I still hadn’t decided I believed her, anyway. Maybe once I got to Grave, I could just find someone to point me in the right direction, and I could find this guy myself. Surely someone in this damn place would listen to reason, even if she wouldn’t.