Chương 48: Chapter 47: Pizza Run

I parked across from the hole at 10: 14 PM with two hot pizza in their box on the passenger seat, my NAS in the trunk, a duffel bag of my ex-girlfriend's old clothes, a bag of Sumatra grounds I'd grabbed from the kitchen, and Susanoo asleep on the back seat. Arcene had texted me forty-five minutes ago. Hey. Still alive. Long story. Meet me at the lot. Bring a couple pizza. Also your NAS and some clothes. women's sizes. M/L. don't ask. thirty minutes? Ah! Yes, also Coffee! Don't forget the coffee please. The lot.

His lot. 1428 Saint-Exupéry. Where his house had been until the day before yesterday. I'd texted him many times since my mom sent the article. And then at 9: 22 PM he'd sent one message, it was that pizza text. I called the only pizza place open at 10 PM on a Thursday — shoutout to Antonio's on Rue Lamartine, you are the real MVP of this story — threw everything in the car, and drove to his lot with a dog, a bunch of miss-matched hard drive and my ex's workout clothes. My best friend asked me to.

What else was I supposed to do? I got out of the car. The lot was now fenced off. That bright orange plastic mesh, the kind the city puts up when they don't want to deal with something. A roadworks sign stuck in the dirt at an angle. The hole was there but the water was gone. The utility company had come through, capped the pipes, laid a tarp over the broken ends. Two-by-fours and caution tape.

The kind of cleanup that screams we don't know what happened and we're going to pretend it's a construction site until we figure it out. No house. No walls. No roof. Just the hole, the fence, and the streetlight across the road doing its best. A light appeared next to the hole. The light was — okay. Okay. So... Imagine if a glowing circle of light was just flying there, through the air, over the lot, at the height where Arcene's kitchen window used to be.

Like someone had sliced a chunk out of the air and forgotten to close it. It rippled. Slow. Like the surface of water. That is of course, if water was vertical and didn't care about gravity. And also of course, if you could see another fucking world with your best friend casually standing on the other side through water when you looked at it.

I stood there with the two pizza box in one hand, the duffel on my shoulder, the coffee under my arm, the NAS at my feet, and Susanoo's leash wrapped around my wrist, and I said:"WHAT THE FUCK." Susanoo barked at the light. He was still in the parking lot. I was already inside the fence. And he was pulling but I was not moving. The light rippled again.

"WHAT. THE. FUCK." This is — okay. Okay. So I'm going to level with you. This is the exact moment I've been waiting for since I was twelve years old. This is Sword Art Online. This is Re: Zero. This is every single isekai I have ever watched, and I'm standing in it, holding pizza, and Arcene is soon going to walk out of that light and explain that he's the chosen one or something. Arcene stepped out of the ripple the way you'd step out through a curtain, right onto the demolished lot of 1428 Saint-Exupéry.

He looked like absolute shit. Tired in a way I'd never seen even after a 72h gaming marathon. The kind of tired that sits in the bones, not just the face. He was wearing torn clothes. His shoes were trashed. His eyes were wrong — older, or maybe just emptier. The clearest sign was his hairs, they were longer, now almost reaching his nose. He didn't say hello. He took the two pizza box out of my hand. Took the coffee from under my arm.

Looked at the NAS on the ground, looked at the duffel, looked at me, looked at the light behind him.

"Bill. Thank you for coming."

"I — yeah, I — what is that — ""Follow me."

"Dude. Dude. Arcene. Is this — are we — am I in —" He took my hand. The one with the leash. The leash that was connected to Susanoo, who was still barking at the portal from the parking lot. Arcene pulled. Not gently. Not carefully. The way you'd pull in an emergency. I grabbed the NAS with my free hand. I grabbed the duffel strap with my teeth right as it was about to fall. Susanoo's paws skidded on asphalt, then on dirt, then on something that wasn't asphalt or dirt. And the parking lot was gone.

You know there's that thing that always happens with your brain when you walk through a magic door at 10 PM holding pizza, a leash and a bag of women's clothes between your teeth. Who am I kidding, of course you'd have no idea... So let me tell you what happens to your brain in that situation. It shuts off. It simply goes offline. Not in a bad way. Not a void. More like — the part of your brain that processes context just gets unplugged.

The lights were on, the data was coming in, but the module that sorts it all into things that make sense had given up and gone home. I was now standing on stone. Warm stone. The light from the portal was behind us. We were in a massive court. Channels in the floor pulsed with a soft blue light, swirling from four directions into a tight spiral beneath our feet. Right beside where we landed, a flight of ancient stone steps rose up and ended abruptly in midair, missing its top step entirely.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere. Finally, standing in front of a waist-high stone panel beside those steps was a woman. One hand flat on the stone. I have no idea of what she was doing, but just like Arcene, she looked tired. Susanoo was completely silent.

Susanoo, who barked at mailmen, squirrels, and his own reflection in every puddle of water he could find, was pressed against my leg so hard I could feel his ribs vibrating against my shin. The pizzas in Arcene's hand were still warm. That was the thing my brain grabbed onto. The boxes were intact. The cheese was melting. Antonio's had done me right, even here in another dimension the smell was incredible. Then she spoke to Arcene. It was fast, fluid, and sharp.

The sounds were guttural yet melodic, shifting between strange vowels and hard consonants. I froze. I knew that language. Or rather, I recognized the shape of it. It was the weird language Arcene and his mom used to murmur to each other when we were kids — the one he swore wasn't real whenever I teased him about it, the one no translation app on Earth could ever identify. I had spent fifteen years thinking it was some private family dialect they made up.

But here there was a woman in a fantasy dress, speaking it like a native and she wasn't arcene's mother. Arcene answered her in the same tongue. Fast. Clipped. Familiar. He dropped my name in the middle of a sentence, and her dark eyes immediately flicked toward me. She looked at me the way a magistrate looks at an unverified piece of evidence. Not hostile. Not friendly. Just measuring every millimeter of my existence. And holy shit. I want to be clear: I have dated adult women.

I have watched an ungodly amount of anime. I know my tastes. I have a very specific, undisputed type, and that type is mature, regal, and could crush your skull with one finger. So when I took in the blond hair, the sharp jawline, and the posture of absolute imperial authority, my internal monologue screamed: Arcene, you magnificent, lucky bastard. Quiet Arcene. Work-from-home Arcene. Sad-gacha-pulls-at-3-AM Arcene. Was hanging out with what seemed like an actual high fantasy empress. I looked at him.

I looked at her. I looked back at him. Arcene stared aggressively at the floor. Ella's eyes dropped to the cardboard boxes in Arcene's hands. She spoke two sentences to Arcene. Her tone wasn't confusion — it was pure, unmistakable recognition. Like someone seeing a legendary artifact from a storybook manifest in the flesh. Arcene whispered back. She gave a single, decisive nod.

"She says it's from TV" Arcene translated quietly, not looking at me.

"Wait, she's knows about pizza?" I whispered.

"Yes."

"Bro. This is officially the greatest timeline." Ella reached out, flipped the lid open with one hand, and inspected the pie. The steam rose into the cold air of the court. One beat. Two. She closed the box. She said something else to Arcene, rolled her wrist to reset her grip on the panel, and looked toward the archway.

"It seems we'll eat at home," Arcene said.

"Let's move."

"Are we going back to my car for the other stuff or—""No time, if we do so, the pizza will get cold, and Ella will get hungry, probably both." We left the court and entered the corridors. Now I got to see the infrastructure up close. Glowing channels ran through the floor and walls, branching and merging like a circuit board carved by giants.

"It looks like fiber optics," I muttered, Susanoo trotting close to my heel.

"Mana channels," Arcene replied without slowing down.

"Mana channels. Right. Obviously..."

"Is there an adventurer's guild? Can I register as a support class? Like a white mage or an alchemist?"

"You're a lawyer, Bill, not a magician""Lawyers are support classes! We cast Cease and Desist and drain enemy mana, mental strength and sanity!"

"Haha, good one Bill. But keep walking." We broke through an outer archway into open air. The warmth hit me first. The stone beneath our boots radiated heat like a summer patio. Then I looked up. Two suns sat low over a horizon that dropped off into an endless sea of clouds. Below us stretched an ocean of green canopy, and above, a jagged mountain peak pierced the sky. Parked right on the dark stone road was a wooden carriage. No horses. No engine.

Just polished dark wood, brass trim, and wheels resting on warm rock. I suppose technically this is a bow with wheels. Susanoo whined, overwhelmed by the sheer sensory overload. I hoisted the sixty-pound hound into my arms, hauling the NAS and duffel with whatever grip strength I had left.

"I am definitely calling in sick on Monday," I announced to the open sky.

"Don't worry about that, Monday is about a month away right now." What is that supposed to mean? Are we in the hyperbolic time chamber or something? The carriage moved without a sound. I sat with Susanoo sprawled across my lap, staring out the window as miles of impossible scenery rolled by. we quickly reached a neat little cobblestone village. With cute little golems cleaning everywhere. And sitting squarely between two carved stone cottages, complete with its white siding, pitched roof, and familiar porch lamp...

was Arcene's suburban house.

"No way," I breathed.

"You brought the whole house."

"I woke up here one morning. I have yet to figure out why."

"Dude... Locals speaks your mom's language, I think that's a big clue." Arcene looked at the ground.

"Yes..." Inside, it was surreal. We dropped the gear in the entryway. I carried the NAS into his office, setting it right on top of his existing tower. Plugged in the ethernet and power cables. The drives spun up with a familiar, creaking noise, RAID array syncing across the local network.

"Anime archive is live," I called out. Meanwhile, Ella had already claimed the kitchen table. She opened the pizza box. She didn't use a fork. She picked up a slice, folded it down the center with practiced precision — the classic New York fold she had apparently observed across dozens of downloaded episodes — and took a bite. Her eyes closed. For five full seconds, all I could see on her face was unadulterated bliss of melted raclette cheese, potato, cream, garlic, and bacon.

She finished the slice in five clean bites and immediately reached for a second.

"She likes it," I whispered from the doorway.

"She hasn't had real grease in three months," Arcene murmured back, watching her with a softened expression he definitely didn't use on me. I went to wash the road dust off my hands in the kitchen sink. Soon, I leaned against the wall and crossed my arms.

"Alright, man. Spill it."

"Spill what?"

"I through about it on the way, you've been gone for a while longer than I realise. You're living in a magical world. And there is a gorgeous girl with the allure of a queen eating pizza in your kitchen who looks at you like you're her personal knight."

"She doesn't look at me like that."

"Arcene. Dude. I've been your best friend since forever. Are you two... a thing?" Arcene froze. His mouth opened. His brain visibly short-circuited. Before he could stammer out an evasion, a quiet voice spoke from the hallway right behind me. Ella was standing there, wiping her hands on a napkin. She delivered a single, dry sentence in Hadran. Her face was completely deadpan, but there was a sharp glint of amusement in her dark eyes.

Arcene's face cycled through red, pale white, deep crimson, and back to stunned mortification in under two seconds. He sputtered something back in Hadran. She countered with another sentence, eyebrows raised, perfectly calm.

"What did she say?" I demanded, looking between the two of them.

"Does she understand French?"

"She's been watching TV! She understands context mostly." Arcene hissed, his ears burning red.

"So what did she say?!" Arcene took a deep breath, staring at the ceiling as if begging the two suns to strike him down.

"She said you're asking the wrong question."

"The wrong question? What's the right question?!"

"She didn't elaborate."

"Arcene—""Take the blanket, Bill. Couch is yours." I was just settling onto the sofa when the house decided to introduce its final resident. I had seen him offline in the corner of the kitchen previously, but I was struggling to keep up with every strange things I was seeing. A faint scuffing sound came down the hallway. Into the living room trotted a knee-high construct carved out of solid grey stone, eyes glowing amber, pushing a miniature broom with mechanical rhythm.

Susanoo, who had been dozing near the coffee table, instantly snapped to full battle alert. His hackles raised. A deep, guttural growl vibrated through his chest. The golem didn't even slow down. It swept a crescent of floor, pivoted ninety degrees, and marched straight toward the rug. Susanoo barked — a deafening, echoing BOOF that shook the picture frames. The golem calmly swept right past his front paws, nudging his left toe aside with the bristles.

Susanoo dropped into a play-bow, tail wagging with frantic confusion, then lunged forward to bark directly into the golem's crystal eye. Tap. Sweep. The stone golem ignored his existential challenge, turned smoothly on its axis, and swept around his hind legs. Susanoo backed up, utterly scandalized that an inanimate rock refused to recognize his apex predator status.

"Bro," I wheezed from the couch, tears in my eyes.

"You're getting styled on by municipal landscaping." On the arm of the sofa, Yato sat with his paws tucked neatly under his chest. The old black cat watched Susanoo's frantic war against the cleaning construct, gave a single, slow flick of his tail, and closed his eyes in pure feline condescension. From upstairs, I could hear Ella's voice through the ceiling. And Freiren on the TV as a poor attempt to cover the creaking noise of the bed. And by midnight, the house had finally gone still.

The dual NAS setup was quietly mirroring files below the desk. Susanoo was passed out on the rug, exhausted from his prolonged defeat against his new friend. I had a court appearance scheduled for next Tuesday, three unread briefs on my work laptop, and I finally realised that I had forgotten to lock my car earlier. There's nothing to do about it for now. Besides... I looked at my phone. I only left it five minutes ago. I pulled the blanket over my shoulders and sank into the couch.