Chapter 38: This Is What Getting Isekai’d Does To People

“What’s wrong with him? Why is he not waking up?”

Reya’s anxious questions pulled him from the abyss of tar in which he felt his entire body succumbing. He fought to wake up. So like her, not to allow him a moment of peace. “Don’t you have better things to do? I thought goddesses always had something on their plates, building kingdoms and such.” He knew his attempt to joke would be overlooked. Reya didn’t know him to be capable of joking.

“Sebastian, thank heavens,” Reya cried out and pressed his head against her chest.

“You are suffocating me,” he protested, and his voice came out muffled. “Luna, help, if you’re around.”

“It looks like our boy is in pretty good spirits if he affords to jest in such a manner,” Luna said, but by the tone of her voice, she sounded relieved, too.

Reya finally released him, and Luna hurried with a cup of tea and a cookie. This time, he didn’t protest and grabbed both. He felt famished.

“You two should really stop hanging around my room. I’m twenty-two and perfectly capable of handling myself,” he said. Luna’s cookie, whether it was a charm or not, was sweet on his tongue, and the tea warmed his belly, giving him the much-needed warmth. “And I have a servant,” he said pointedly.

“You’ll be appointed someone else, as soon as you get better,” Reya retorted, her voice decisive and harsh.

“I am better, and I’ll have no one else but Pepin,” he insisted. “He’s the only one who knows how I like to take my bath. Also, he’s my betrothed.” It didn’t look like Reya had changed her mind during the few hours he must have been asleep. “How does it look not to have him by my side, especially now when I’m in this dire predicament?”

“You don’t worry about that. Your dire predicament is our worry,” Reya said.

“My dire predicament is having two women in my royal quarters day in, day out. Even as mothers, you are becoming a bit too overbearing. Have Pepin help me.” He hoped that it would eventually work if he insisted like it was his birthright to command Reya to do his bidding. And if it didn’t, which was much more likely to be the case, he would just get back on his feet and release Pepin by himself.

“When have you become so demanding? You’ve always been stubborn in your ways, but this--”

“Forget it.” Sebastian made an effort to get away from Reya and out of bed, struggling with keeping his balance once he was on his feet. “It looks like I have to do everything by myself.”

His throat was still parched, and there were so many things to do. First on the order of business was to find where Pepin was and let him go free. The kingdom had been without its prince for a while now, which meant that many people must be waiting for him to perform his duties as usual. Then, he would have to train the knights. Yes, plenty of things to do, and none of them was to think of Milo.

Or about the wound in his chest that didn’t want to give in. One would think that a goddess and a lady with charms would be at least capable of dressing a wound properly. Apparently, they were out of their depths, and he truly needed Pepin, who, among other things, was quite adept at dealing with such things.

“Your stubbornness will not convince me to release that traitor,” Reya warned him.

“Very well, then,” he said. “I will search for him on my own. But, now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a kingdom to run.”

“Are you sure you’re strong enough, Sebastian?” Reya asked.

The pain in his chest was coming and going. Sebastian put on a shirt while freezing his face into a mask. “You made me strong enough,” he said matter-of-factly while he adjusted the cuffs.

“Let’s allow him some time on his own,” Luna suggested.

Sebastian snorted. That would have been handy while growing up with a mother who only cared about his training, someone who would curb the goddess’s propensity for being overbearing and only in matters that interested her.

“We’ll visit later, Sebastian,” Reya warned.

He waved a perfunctory goodbye, and the women walked out of the room, leaving him alone with his thoughts.

And pain. Not the one affecting his flesh, but the one that ran deeper. To think that minstrels so often sang about the broken hearts he used to leave in his wake. Was there a song about his heart being split in two, impossible to mend?

“Guys, what are you going to do?” Tani whined as she grabbed both Milo and Kai by the hands and walked between them on their way back from school. “I mean, can you really just go back to studying, and by that I mean you, Milo, not Kai?”

“Look at her, acting all grownup,” Kai said and pulled at one of his sister’s pigtails to get her attention. “And I’m studying, too,” he added, a bit defensively. “If I’m to provide for Pepin and the baby, I need to land a better job once school’s over.”

“Maybe if your grades are good enough, you could think of college,” Milo suggested.

“I wouldn’t go that far,” Kai pointed out. “Let’s just focus on graduation.”

“How about we also focus on finding a way to travel to Ifigia?” Tani said.

“Come on, butthead, it’s not like we know how to even start to do that,” Kai retorted. “Wait, actually, we have like thousands of websites that must be talking about things like that. We should start our own research, especially since now, we’re kind of specialists. I mean, who else can say that they traveled to an isekai kingdom and came back?”

“Exactly,” Tani hurried to back him up. “I mean, you two should still study since you have your finals coming up, but you could leave it to me for a while.”

“No way I’m just going to study and let a pipsqueak like you handle all the heat,” Milo intervened, pulling at Tani’s other pigtails.

Tani let go of their hands and brushed her tails down. “Hello, you need to get good grades or you’ll be grounded forever.”

“By the way,” Kai said, “how long are you grounded, Milo? For me, it appears to be indefinitely.”

Milo shrugged. “My folks are usually cool, but this time, they really went bananas. It’s true that I’ve never given them any reason to worry, but still. I mean, they’re talking in this grave voice when they address me like I’m supposed to be put in my place and never forget it. Dad forces me to sit down and talk to him about understanding my responsibilities ever single evening. Mom just tiptoes around, eavesdropping. I wonder how long this will take.”

“Mom is a bit more forgiving,” Kai said. “And it’s only been a couple of days since we got back. They’ll go easy on us if we don’t give them any more reason to worry.”

“And how are we going to do that?” Milo retorted. “I mean, there’s not a single moment when I’m not thinking of Sebastian.”

“Ha!” Tani said all knowingly. “Did you finally realize that you’re in love with him?”

Milo stiffened and pulled his shoulders back. Kai examined him from the corner of one eye. Leave it to Tani to ask all the uncomfortable questions. “I’m not in love with the guy, but come on, he must have sacrificed himself for us to get back. How do you explain that while he lay there, dying or something, we got hurled back to our world?”

“Let’s not be so negative,” Tani intervened. “You cannot know that Sebastian is dead. He’s not dead,” she insisted. “We would have had some sign if that happened. Do you see any sign, anywhere?”

“And what’s that sign supposed to be?” Milo retorted. “A sudden black hole in the sky?”

“You’d feel it,” Tani pointed out, “because you love the guy.”

“Did I ever tell you, Kai, that your sister is an annoying piece of work?”

“At least a thousand times, all in different ways. The thing is that we want to know what happened there, in Ifigia, right?” Kai chose the middle ground. Milo was still figuring things out, which meant that he was in a not-so-good place. At least Kai knew how he felt about Pepin. That little certainty was enough to make his head clear enough to make the right decisions.

“Ugh, too bad we cannot talk on the phone and compare our notes,” Milo said. “I’ll start my research on isekai stuff as soon as I get home.”

“I’ll do that, too,” Kai added. “And I suppose that butthead here will do the same.”

“You can totally count on me,” Tani said with determination. “If there’s a way to get there ... I mean, of course there is. We just need to find it. We will find it.”

That was a good way to look at things, Kai decided as he exchanged one last look with Milo before saying goodbye. They had computers and the Internet and whatnot. Somewhere in the belly of that virtual beast had to be the answer to their burning question.

How does one travel to another world?

Sebastian sat stiffly on the throne, ignoring the throbbing pain in his chest, as nobles and peasants alike brought forward their grievances. As he had expected, the line of plaintiffs was quite long.

What he hadn’t expected was what was happening right now in front of his eyes. A young peasant girl placed a basket filled with mountain flowers at the foot of the throne. “We all wish you well, Your Majesty.”

She wasn’t the only one there with her arms full of get-well gifts. Sebastian accepted each one gracefully, wondering whether he had never noticed the people of Ifigia caring so deeply for him, or simply they hadn’t cared before.

Too bad none of them had a remedy for what was ailing him. The poison of Uxilan was still alive inside him, and he knew it. The only uncertainty was when it would finally do him in for good. That meant that he had to find a way, and quickly, to discover where Pepin was, as well as the unborn child destined to sit on the throne in his stead. Securing a future for Ifigia was among the most important priorities at the moment. Reya had her limitations, and she couldn’t use Luna to create another heir as far as he knew. Unless she could summon another Lelian out of thin air, the Shimmering Cavern was of no use to her for making another ice prince to satisfy her ambitions.

There had to be a reason why Reya hadn’t decided to simply order Pepin’s execution. Lelians were incredibly rare. On the one hand, his powers must have been depleted the moment he had offered himself to carry Kai Martin’s child. But on the other, he was still a Lelian. Reya had plans of her own, and Sebastian wondered what they could be.

Pepin no longer had the shard, or the goddess would have found it already. But could the shard survive without Pepin’s love and care? Sebastian remembered Reya’s lessons on how an heir to the kingdom was supposed to be cared for. While they were all the Lelian’s responsibilities, Sebastian hadn’t backed away from acquiring the knowledge involved in the process.

“Your Majesty, would you like to take a break?” One of the eldest councilmen approached him carefully.

He must have slumped in his throne, prey to complicated thoughts and the pain that lived inside him. With unrivaled effort, he straightened up again. “No,” he said abruptly. “Who is next?”

It had been a long and demanding day. Sebastian took off his coat and felt his chest. Through the fabric, he could feel the wound continuing to ooze that tar that it appeared to be made of.

“You’re far from healed.”

He jumped at the sound of that voice. “Conrad,” he said stiffly.

For some reason, his concubine was there, splayed on the bed in what looked like scanty clothes. He had wondered briefly where the captive prince could be, but he hadn’t expected to find him there, in his quarters, and worse, his bed.

Conrad moved out of the bed and came to him. He pushed Sebastian’s shirt away and examined the wound with a frown etched on his face.