Yukitaka picked his way along the floor of the valley. Surviving had been the easy part, but he could not sit in one spot forever, so he kept moving.
"Um... if only there were some place I could climb up out of this..."
He held up his smartphone and swept the beam across the rocks around him. "Still, that light is seriously bright. Hold on, the battery display is frozen!"
He had been so busy staring at everything around him that he had only ever looked at the screen for the light itself, so it took him a second to notice what was wrong with it.
"Wait, even if I did have a phone here, all it would do for me is the camera and the flashlight, so I should save what is left of the charge while I still can..."
He went through the bag for the spare battery pack, which should have been in his business backpack. He had been on his way home from a work trip when he was summoned, and he had packed for a few normal days away: spare white shirts and underwear, an electric shaver, a toothbrush, a small medicine kit, a water bottle. The spare battery pack, the one thing that actually mattered, was not in any of them.
"For the whole month of travel I was worried about the guards watching me, so I tried not to take anything out of the bag more than I had to. I did not notice it going missing at the time, but maybe it was taken while they were moving me here."
He searched the ground by the light of the phone and came up with nothing. "I have no idea how much charge is left, so I will turn it off now... I will need it later, when it gets dark."
It was the right call, since the sun was still high overhead and there were cracks down here where a thin amount of daylight reached the ground.
"Please let nothing come out here..."
He turned the phone off and stood in the dim underground, and then he went on walking with the umbrella held up in his right hand. After a while, a raw, fishy smell reached him.
"Smells like an animal. Maybe I should not go any farther this way..."
Something else was alive down here, and it was not him.
He thought about turning around on the spot, then reconsidered, because if he checked what was ahead now, he might be able to step around the danger later. His throat clicked as he swallowed. "I will go as far as that corner, look, and then turn back..," he told himself, and he made himself keep going.
When he reached the corner of the slope he leaned out and looked around it. A large cave opened in the wall on the other side, and it was too dim inside to make out anything clearly. Bones and rotted meat lay scattered across the ground, and the raw smell was coming from them, so whatever had been here had been torn apart and eaten. "Okay, so there really is something living here. Man, that smell is strong. Oh, if I put a mask on I might be able to take it."
He remembered the mask and went looking for it in the bag. Before the Summoning, the bag had held his work documents, but those had been taken away and were gone. What was left was the mask, a fountain pen his parents had given him for his college graduation, his house key, and a business card holder. He put the mask on, and the raw smell disappeared completely. "I paid a lot for this mask, and it blocks the smell this well. That is what a top-end Japanese mask does," He moved closer to the cave.
The umbrella in his right hand was ready to open at any moment, because he had heard that opening an umbrella around animals can startle them or make you look bigger, and either one might keep him from being attacked. In another world it might be a useless comfort, but it was better than nothing, and he was inching his way along the side of the cave when a magic beast far bigger than he expected came out of it. At a glance it was a bear, but the legs coming out of its body were six in total.
He had been made to take a class on monsters during the time he spent in the dungeon in the Royal Capital, and he remembered exactly what he had been taught about something with those features. If he recalled correctly, it was called the 'Gray Six-Legged Demon Bear,' an A-rank monster, the highest grade there was, and the class had warned him that if he ever ran into one, the only move was to run and not fight back. The memory flashed through his mind.
The moment he realized he had run straight into a 'Gray Six-Legged Demon Bear,' his knees nearly gave out under him. "It is over..."
His legs stopped working. The 'Gray Six-Legged Demon Bear' looked at him and blinked for a moment, then seemed to decide he was prey, and it reared up and roared, a sound like a tree splitting in half.
That was when Yukitaka finally opened the umbrella he had been holding, and you could call it his last resistance. The open canopy blocked the bear's view of him, and the sound of the collision landed flat against Yukitaka's stomach.
"Huh?"
He slid the umbrella to the side and looked fearfully at where the monster had been, and there was nothing there anymore. "It ran off...?"
He closed the umbrella, took the phone out of his pocket, and pointed the light toward the back of the cave. What the light showed him was the 'Gray Six-Legged Demon Bear' in a different shape than before, dead at the back of the cave with its neck twisted into an angle that did not look right at all.
"Wha... what does this mean?"
He could not make sense of it. All he had done was open his umbrella and startle it. "Could it be that I set off some Skill again? But I am not supposed to have any Skills at all, which means this thing is the opposite of what I expected. Which means..."
He stared hard at the umbrella in his hand. "This thing... Ah, right. If I use my glasses to run an Object Appraisal on it, maybe I will find something out."
He took the glasses case out of his pocket and tried to pull the glasses out. They were not there, because the assassins who had tried to kill him had gathered them off the top of the cliff and taken them back as proof that they had finished him off. "They are gone? Those were the one thing that made up for me having no Skills..."
The glasses had been his one backup plan, and now they were gone. He stood there looking down at the umbrella that had just done the work his glasses were supposed to do, and he thought, "Does this thing mean I can use some kind of Skill too?"
At a glance it was only an umbrella. If there was anything different about it, maybe it was that he had splurged a little when he bought it. The handle was shaped to be easy to grip and gave off a metallic shine, so it felt high-class, the frame was silver, and the rest of the umbrella was black. "Could it be that because I lost the glasses, the power settled into the umbrella this time? Maybe there is some kind of condition to it..."
Yukitaka was thinking hard about all of this, and he had not noticed one important thing. Nothing he was wearing had a single scratch on it. Anyone who fell from a cliff too deep to even guess the height of should have had something damaged, and Yukitaka himself should not have survived the fall at all. But at this point, Yukitaka was not thinking about any of that.
Trivia:
- The umbrella opening killed the A+ rank beast instantly, but Yukitaka does not realize his items are indestructible and his survival from the cliff fall is impossible, pointing to a hidden defensive power.
- The missing mobile battery and the confiscated work documents hint that the Summoning process stripped him of normal-world items, leaving only his personal commuter gear which has become divine artifacts.
- The glasses being taken by assassins means Yukitaka lost his only Object Appraisal tool, but the umbrella activating on its own suggests the power transfers to whatever item he relies on.
Notes:
• Yukitaka - First given name of Yukitaka Goto. He is a twenty-five-year-old salaryman summoned to another world without receiving a skill, who maxed out his level at 99 in half a day without gaining meaningful power, spent about three months at the royal palace before being pushed toward the frontier, and discovered that his black-rimmed glasses let him appraise objects.