“You are the creator behind all of this?” Kragathor asked, marveling at the tiny human. Then his voice hardened. “Then why did you insult my craftsmanship, calling my work lowly counterfeits and cutting off my access to the game?!” By the end of the question, he was snarling, and wisps of smoke were drifting from his mouth.

The human shrank back in fear. “I… I didn’t! The one who revoked your account access was Randell, and you already killed him! He acted against the rest of the board’s direction when he did that! We were trying to find a way to contact—”

“Oh. Well, he would have died anyways.” Kragathor responded with nonchalance, cutting him off before he could devolve into a blabbering mess. Kragathor’s temper had immediately cooled upon hearing that the one responsible had already died. He felt a little cheated, since the death had been entirely incidental, and hadn’t been sufficiently painful for the crime of trying to take his treasures, but he couldn’t really complain since he had been the one to rob himself of vengeance. He would verify this later, of course, to ensure that nobody else was involved, but he was satisfied for now. After all, there were treasures to inspect. Since he had the primary architect with him, he was now keener than ever to resume his analysis of the server crystals. “These server devices are fascinating. Where in all the lands did you come up with such an idea?”

The human seemed taken aback by the sudden change in the atmosphere. “Um, well, it was kind of a culmination of a lot of other ideas…” He stalled out after a few moments, seemingly unsure if he should continue speaking as Kragathor replicated a section of the enchantment formula in a glowing matrix before him.

“This part, the structural organization and grouping of connected devices. It’s like something I once made, but the architecture is so different. And this rune script, did you create these runes on your own? I’ve never seen their like in this world. They don’t even bear a mild resemblance to any of the runic languages I’ve seen.”

“Huh? No, those are kanji. I tried using English and then hiragana and katakana at first, but it only works with script where the individual symbols are invested with meaning instead of just representing sounds… It took me a while to figure out how to effectively recreate object-oriented programming like that, but it would have taken longer with the hodge-podge of different languages that is still standard.”

Kanji? English? Hiragana? Kragathor had no idea what those meant, but he would come back to those later. He drew up another section.

“And this? The method of connecting the devices? Where did this come from?”

“Oh, that? I was attempting to recreate quantum entanglement, based on my layman’s knowledge of it. Really, I probably shouldn’t have succeeded but the magic of this world made it work anyways.”

This world? Interesting, but that could wait. The human seemed to be gradually growing in confidence as Kragathor drew more information out of him about his work.

“And this part with the extra-dimensional connection?” He produced another, much more complex section of glowing rune script in the air.

“That actually came from my search for a way to go back home. That ended up being a bust, but the research was at least good for something.”

Hours later, Kenji felt oddly at ease with the being that had killed the man who had been his first friend in this world. Probably because this was his first chance to legitimately geek out about his work with someone who appreciated and understood it all at a level comparable to his own. He was still bitter about his friend’s death, but it’s rather amazing what bone-shaking fear combined with intellectual passion can do to mess with your perspective.

He still didn’t know much about this dragon, Kragathor Tenset Malevolous. In fact, he’d really only been answering questions since he’d been yanked out of the vault by its oppressively powerful magic. A tiny part of him knew he’d eventually feel incredibly guilty about acting so chummy with Randell’s killer, but he couldn’t help it. It was like presenting at a developer conference with a totally engaged audience, except the audience was a motherfucking dragon. A part of him even wondered what he might accomplish working together with the dragon.

That was another thing. He was geeking out with a dragon, and he hadn’t yet had a chance to nerdgasm over that fact. Screw all that otaku isekai harem overpowered bullshit, how could anything top this? It was like suddenly being granted a wish you never even knew you had. He was certain that his life had well and truly peaked at this moment. Even if the dragon had just murdered his friend.

The dragon himself was surprisingly amiable. Not long into the impromptu Q&A session, he had summoned a table, chairs, and a pot of steaming tea that was served in beautiful cups. One moment there had been empty floor, the next, furniture and a tea set that poured itself. Kenji’s chair was nice and plush, while the dragon’s seemed to be composed of solid gold worked to resemble intertwining serpents. However, aside from that momentary interruption, the discussion on the construction of the servers and the system governing the games continued unabated.

Eventually, the conversation shifted. “So, human, what is your name?”

“Ikeda Kenji. You can call me Kenji, or Ken if you want.”

“Kenji. Very well, I will remember your name.” Kragathor said this as if it was of vast significance, although Kenji didn’t understand the importance. “So, Kenji. Tell me of how you came to this world. I am curious now to hear your story.”

Kenji sighed, and leaned back a bit. “I don’t know that I’m much of a storyteller, but I’ll do my best.

“I grew up in a kind of odd situation. My mother was a Japanese-American, and my dad was a full-blooded Japanese. Wait, these terms probably won’t make any sense to you.”

The dragon shook his head. “Continue anyways. I will get clarification later.”

“Okay. Well, I was their only kid, and we moved back and forth between Japan and the US like eight or nine times during my childhood for my father’s work. So, I kind of grew up halfway between the two cultures but never really a part of either. I never really made any lasting friends because we kept relocating, so I spent most of my free time on video games, comics, manga, light novels, basically anything to keep me entertained.

“Then Dad’s company collapsed during a recession. I was sixteen, then. He’d been working there twenty years, and he took it real hard. We were living in the States at the time too, in Texas. He spent a long time looking for work, and it was really hard on him, I guess, being away from the rest of his family and watching his savings just draining away while he was unable to provide for us. But he would never talk about it, and I guess it just ate away at him until he couldn’t handle it and he killed himself. Mom came home one day and found him just hanging there.

“Things just got worse from there. We lost the house and the cars that we could no longer afford. Mom had dropped out of college to marry him and had been a housewife for the last eighteen years, so when she got a job, the best she could manage was minimum wage service industry crap. She tried to support me as best she could, but things were rough.

“Instead of going to some fancy university like I’d originally planned, I ended up in a community college, working to pay tuition alongside taking classes. Luckily, I didn’t have to pay too much due to financial aid stuff. Managed to get a computer science degree and got a job as an entry level programmer.” Kenji paused briefly.

“Then Mom died. Hit by a drunk driver when she was walking back to our apartment after a shift. So, I kind of just buried myself in my hobbies after her funeral. A lot easier than facing the real world where my parents were dead, and I was a mediocre, at best, programmer with no friends.

“Then one day, instead of waking up on my couch where I’d just collapsed the night before without even bothering to take off my shoes, I wake up in a forest. I freak out for a few minutes, but then I’m all like ‘Nah, this can’t be real, it has to be a dream.’ So, I start exploring. I’m totally fascinated by this forest which is so unlike anything I’d ever seen. It was like the redwoods or the sequoia forests, but the trees looked — I still can’t really explain it properly — they just looked different. So, I’m tromping around these strange woods without a care in the world, staring at all these weird and crazy birds and flying reptile things and other animals that made me wonder if I was actually just tripping balls…

“But it just keeps going. And I start to doubt it’s actually a dream. I get tired and hungry and thirsty, my feet are starting to get sore, and I start to fucking panic. I start to realize I’m in the middle of some crazy ass forest for real. I’d be lying if I claimed I didn’t just break down right there and bawl my eyes out.

“But then that nerdy part of me that loves to read trashy isekai mangas and light novels perks right up and is all like ‘Wait a fucking minute, bro! We’re in a goddamn isekai adventure! OP skills and harem, here we fucking come!’ Obviously, I was totally fucking wrong, but that bout of optimism carried me through the day, and even the first night when I slept under a bunch of fallen branches, curled up between the roots of one of the trees.

“Then I woke up, sore as shit, and all that bluster from the day before was gone. I was hungry. I was thirsty. And I was lost in the fucking woods. The closest I’d ever come to a forest was a road trip we went on once, when my mom drove us from San Francisco up to Oregon to stay at a neat villa on the coast for a weekend, and we passed through the Redwood Forest. Magnificent place, but you don’t learn much about forestry when you’re in a car going 70 miles an hour. I was a city boy with no survival skills to speak of, and no OP skills or menus or anything to show for my isekai adventure.

“Queue breakdown number two. Lucky for me, I am not a very manly crier. I sobbed and wailed and generally scared off the wildlife. And that’s how I got found by some woodsman dude with a beard to make Grizzly Adams proud. Crying like a little bitch.

“Dude got me calmed down, gave me some food and water, and led me to civilization, even though neither of us could speak a language the other understood. Two weeks he watched after me as he led me through those woods to a town. He was a real stand up kind of guy. He left me with some guardsmen at the closest town, and I never saw or heard from him again.

“Then the real shit-show started. Nobody could understand me when I spoke. I couldn’t understand them. Aside from being considered a curiosity for half a day by the guards, as they brought in some people to speak at me in a bunch of languages I didn’t understand, they just pushed me out onto the street and ignored me and probably decided I was crazy. The next few months sucked. I was basically a beggar. I occasionally managed to get work doing really simple labor, but I couldn’t speak the language and they ripped me off as often as not.

“I mean, I was starting to pick up really common words and phrases — it’s kind of hard not to when you’re fully immersed — but I could barely function. I had started to consider following in dear old Dad’s footsteps. I couldn’t even get excited about seeing dwarves and elves and gnomes and all kinds of crazy shit because I was fucking miserable and sleeping in an alleyway.

“Then I met Randell. That’s the guy you killed, which, by the way, I am really fucking upset about. Anyways, other than Mister Woodsman, he was the first person to really treat me with kindness. He gave me some coin to help him carry some of his purchases one day. When he noticed that I could barely speak the language, he tried speaking to me in half a dozen different languages. Obviously, I couldn’t understand anything he said, and told him so in English. Then again in Japanese for emphasis.

“He didn’t understand me either, but I guess I piqued his curiosity. He came back the next day and gave me some coins to carry his shopping for him. He could have easily done it himself. But the whole way he would point at things and say the word for them. Then he’d point at me until I repeated it.

“And he kept coming back, every day, without fail, slowly teaching me the language. Then, one day, he paid me to carry a cot back to his house and told me I could stay with him while I learned. Shit, I really didn’t do right by him in the end…”

Kenji stopped for a few minutes to wipe away tears.

“Shit. Anyway, once I’d learned enough to do so, I told him my story, as best as I could. He was fascinated. He didn’t doubt me for a moment. He had me tell him as much as I could about my home world in my broken Corrigan Trade. Then he told me about his life, becoming a songster and storyteller and occasional swindler. He could play and sing like a true pro and had this way of just grabbing the attention of everyone in the room.

“Then he showed me magic. He wasn’t a great mage by any counts, but he had studied enough to be able to do simple spells. Just the simple stuff that a stage entertainer uses to liven up their act. Then he offered to teach me. And for the first time in months, it hit me that I really was in a magical world. I hate to make it sound like a running theme here, but I broke down and cried again. This place had magic. And I was going to learn it.

“I’ll spare you the details, but it turns out I am absolutely shit at casting spells. Randell theorized that maybe it was because I came from another world, I don’t know. I could say the incantations perfectly and throw all my concentration into visualizing the effect and get jack shit.

“The only thing I did show aptitude for was enchanting. Randell, being the standup guy that he is… was. Ugh. Anyway, he got me an introduction to this old gnomish guy, Locktin Wizzlefidget. Anyways, this guy was a brilliant enchanter. He had just started teaching his daughter how it worked, and Randell sweet-talked him into letting me learn alongside her. Damn, those were the days. Randell could talk just about anyone into just about anything.

“Anyways, the old gnome, I always just called him Lock, he started teaching me enchanting. And that was a struggle in itself, since I couldn’t read. But old Lock was patient with me. I wasn’t a slow learner or anything. I was fluent in English and Japanese from my old world, and the written language here is a hell of a lot simpler than the mess that English can be. Except the runes were yet another mishmash of languages to add on top of that and no two enchanters would agree on which rune was best for a particular purpose. I was having moderate success, but it was a mess.

“So, I started experimenting. English letters and Japanese katakana and hiragana didn’t work, just like Corrigan Trade didn’t. The symbols have no inherent meaning, they’re just sounds. But kanji did. As I got used to the way the runes worked, I was able to recreate the same effects, mostly, with kanji instead of the original runes. Then I tried making up a symbol, and it worked a little bit. Which meant that as long as the symbol had a clear meaning to the enchanter, then it would retain that meaning as a rune.

“I shared my results with Lock, and he was kind of dismissive of the idea at first. Then his daughter, Levercog, she went and tried it herself, making an enchantment using scribbled doodles as her runes, totally proving me right.

“I was still missing the harem, but I was finally getting my OP magic skills, I thought. But nope. I could only produce relatively weak items in a reasonable amount of time. However, the kanji runes I was creating allowed for a much greater degree of flexibility in items.

“I did become a little famous among enchanters after that. They called my idea for a universal runic language Kenji’s Kanji.

“I continued working with Lock and Levy. Since I could only produce weak effects, I decided to try to make the effects more complex and focused. I had only been a mediocre programmer on Earth, but here? Here I was the best programmer in the world. I was able to create conditional operant runes. Then I figured out how to do procedural calls. I spent months upon months using my kanji rune script to recreate object-oriented programming, figuring out how to make variables work, all kinds of stuff.

“They thought I had lost it until I showed them my first piece of work. It was this flat copper tile with four lines etched into it, and I’d programmed it to play Tic-Tac-Toe against the user. It always used the most optimal move, and so it would either win or force a draw every time. They didn’t get it until I taught them the game, but once they got it, they really got it.

“Old Lock started getting in touch with some of his contacts. Randell, when he heard about it, started getting in touch with his. He stopped performing entirely to help us arrange things and spread word of the things we’d made. Soon, I had a bunch of enchanters wanting to work with me. I could still barely make a functioning light rune that was bright enough to read by, but I could design the shit out of some complex rune scripts. I would teach them the meanings of the individual runes, and present them with the scripts, and they would do the actual enchanting for me.

“Shit. Those were crazy days. We experimented with all kinds of unbelievable stuff. We even poked a bunch of holes in reality just to take a peek at the other side. Admittedly, I was hoping to find my way home with those experiments. I must have run that particular experiment ten thousand times. Every time, I saw something different. Never anything like my home. Ironically, the Ciro server was the closest one I ever found, well after I’d given up, but that place is a horror show compared to Earth.

“Anyways, we came up with all sorts of truly crazy stuff in those days. That was about the time I met Stefano and Talon.

“Talon is one of the Scaled Kin, but he’s not real close with his clan. He kind of traded on his semi-draconic nature to lead people into thinking he was good with money and making other people money. He was, but his sell was always ‘I’m part dragon, I can smell where the gold will be.’ Total bullshit. But they ate it up. He only ever acted like that with investors though. He came to us by way of Randell, and he started investing gold into our little group. Letting us buy the best supplies to make the coolest and craziest shit we could. And people would just buy it because there was literally nothing else like it.

“Stefano… he was an adequate enchanter, and had gotten mixed in with our group, but he was in way over his head with the enchanting stuff. These folks were some of the best, and he was just out of his league. So, he just started helping out and organizing things. Making things run smoother. Turns out, he had a real talent for it. Everyone started to rely on him to manage schedules, logistics, all sorts of things. Really made him stand out, you know? He was always very respectful, too. In a way, he kind of reminded me of my dad when he was still the big Japanese business man. Efficient, respectful, always humble. I don’t know, I suppose that’s why I liked the guy so much. Reminded me of something I’d lost and hadn’t let myself think about in a long time, you know?”

Kenji cleared his throat and blinked his eyes dry. “So anyways, there we are, this crazy think tank group of enchanters churning out crazy ass inventions, when I get an idea. Why not start up a corporation?”