Two Souls: A Dark Isekai Novel

By Kenneth Guthrie

One soul that squandered its time on Earth is split in two on reaching its demise, but, luckily, is provided a second chance at something better. One born among demons and one among humans, each seeks the other through torment and hardship and adventure in a new world where heroes and demons, magic and axe come together to create a backdrop of darkness and light that can only have one conclusion.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lunatic Ink Publishing
• Release date: Oct 10, 2021
• ISBN: 9781005821012

Kenneth Guthrie

Kenneth Guthrie is a writer of sci-fi, fantasy and crime novels.Profile image credit: Vincent Gerbouin at Pexels.com

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TWO SOULS: A DARK ISEKAI NOVEL

Kenneth Guthrie

Copyright 2021 Lunatic Ink Publishing

Find more stories at Kenneth Guthrie’s Book List.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Prologue: Truck-Kun

Chapter 1: Born Again - Twice

Chapter 2: A Meeting And A Death

Chapter 3: Sold And Educated

Chapter 4: A Skirmish Between Races

Chapter 5: Burying The Dead And An Offering

Chapter 6: Mawl The Slaver

Chapter 7: The Cunning Of A King

Chapter 8: Word Of A Meeting

Chapter 9: Gathering Forces

Chapter 10: To Battle

Chapter 11: Intermission?

Chapter 12: Conclusion

Author’s Note

PROLOGUE: TRUCK-KUN

On Tuesday the 14th of March of the year just before the computers were supposed to stop and the world implode - if the newspapers and that fangly-dangly new thing called the Internet were to be believed at the time - Genghis Khan got into a certain special truck with a little white paper cup in hand of half-and-half coffee spiced with four blocks of white sugar. Genghis, as his name implies, is a product of Mongolian. The oddity that is his birth name, amusing to all that have ever met him I assure you, was an unfortunate joke that his parents thought was hilarious on that sunny day after little soon-to-be-Genghis was born when they - still drunk on last night’s celebratory Airag and some more illicit chemicals frowned upon by law enforcement worldwide, although, admittedly, the Airag had probably been enough - filled out his new name in the local area registry of the capital city of his home country of Mongolia, Ulaanbaatar, with a smile and a very unsober cackle that surprised the aging female clerk who was frowning as they wrote the characters that spelled out the baby’s new name. Right now Genghis is getting into Vehicle 2A of the Yaratomo Industries’ logistics fleet. Vehicle 2A is a little dinky truck that most days whirs into life when Genghis turns the key in the ignition with the energy of a newborn fawn and which, also most days, handles like one too - which is to say slovenly and unbalanced despite the designers at Hoyota doing their damnedest to make it not so.

Now, as coincidence might have it, there are two things about the uniformly white fleet truck - a one tonner with legendarily poor braking ability - that you might find amusing in the aftermath of what comes next. First, on the right rear bumper just under the spec description of the vehicle, which is written in kanji because this all happened in Japan, is a bumper sticker. That sticker was placed by one who enjoys manga and light novels and who found all the events soon to be outlined generally rather amusing in a very ironic fashion when he recognized the truck on TV while he was eating a convenience store bought lunchbox and drinking his o-cha - green tea for those uninitiated - in the cafeteria of the Osaka corporate branch of Yaratomo Industries with the very same man who took the delivery requests responsible for the turmoil about to take place at the branch of Yaratomo that Genghis joined a week after entering Japan as an offshore hire (supposedly as an intern but eventually as nothing more than a corporate slave). The sticker says in red slightly faded letters, because it has been there a LONG while, Truck-Kun in all caps and printed on a white background. The second thing is that Genghis Khan’s former name was Elric The Destroyer - another comedic naming and given under the same slothful drunkenness as the current one was inscribed by his then demonkind parents.

About 29 years before when the only Isekai literature we had was the legend of Urashima Taro - the forerunner of all ‘alternative world’ tales - and the bulk of what was to be written had not yet been channeled into being, Elric met a member of the god race One. It had only taken a single embarrassing blow from The Hammer Of Fate to have him sitting in front of a goddess named Magma, who laughed and jeered before cursing him to Earth because that’s the best place for amusingly easy to kill super baddies. His never ceasing misfortune continues today with a turning of the truck’s key in the ignition and is followed by a fastidiously check in his side mirrors before he pulls out into Horanuchi Avenue like an 85 year old grandmother of four who thinks that anyone going a single kilometer per hour above the speed limit is going too fast. As always Genghis checks left then right on the corner of Horanuchi and Gekitaro Street where the kids that attend Setagaya High tend to run across without warning and have in the past forced him to test Truck-Kun’s brakes to their pitiful limits. As luck - although actually just more misfortune - would have it, his GPS is telling him that his first delivery is pleasingly close and after 20 meters it informs him in its crisp female voice that he needs to turn left.

Outside the day is warm and wonderful. The breeze flows lovingly around the curves of Truck-Kun driven by Genghis Khan on this wondrous Tuesday. The river is dotted with blooming pink petaled cherry blossom trees that remind Geng, which is what his friends called him before the whole negligent driving thing and imprisonment and deportation to his home country, of the Burning Woods of East Ranka on the Surefire Continent. It’s like all is right with the world, but actually it’s really, really not.

One whole long kilometer down the road protagonist-kun is walking in his gray sweatsuit after slowing from a reasonable jog that was inspired by a recent desire to not be a shut-in. In fact, as it may be, this is his first time out of the family home since forever and if he hadn’t been out in the sun right now then he would have been safely tucked away in his stinky, filthy room while reading manga or playing games and thinking very in-character depressing thoughts. Now, one might think by the somewhat jovial tone taken so far that this is a pleasant story: You know, protag-kun goes to another world, gets a harem of gorgeous big booty lolicon females, et cetera, et cetera. Well, that is a misunderstanding between us. You see, and I should have been more forthright as your occasional rather unreliable narrator, this story is f***ing brutal. Right now, protag-kun, let’s call him Yamazaki because that’s his real name, is about to find out exactly why ‘outside’ is way more scary than his imaginings conjured up on deciding it was time to make a change as he put it.

By the time his phone starts beeping and Yamazaki removes the blocky flip-top from his pocket, events have already gotten out of hand. Ramamoto Denki, an electronics store in Akihabara, will be having a special time sale on ES4 games between 6pm and 9pm tonight the message displayed on the low pixel screen told him. The way his heart skipped a beat in excitement and then suddenly became oddly erratic should have been his first warning sign.

Crossing the road moments later, he still hasn’t realized what is about to happen. It is then that the vice-like clutching begins in his chest. Let’s see how that feels...

*****

Yamazaki looked down to where it felt like someone had pressed a burning coal into his upper-chest underneath his sagging sweatsuit. His brown bloodshot eyes crinkled around the sides as the mysterious sensation overcame him and his nostrils drew inwards as a gush of air was sucked in and a grunt of ouch emitted from his lips unbidden. Around his shoulder and vibrating down his left arm came a sensation: A weird tingling that ended in his hand and spread down through his fingers to their tips like carpal tunnel occasionally did when he played too long with a controller on his ES4. The realization that something was wrong came when his knees gave way and his dominant hand came to his chest with the fingers digging in as if to pull the pain directly from it

What is this?

He held his chest and stared straight ahead with blank eyes. The feeling of being drawn inward was like an abyss opening up in him. He couldn’t breathe, no air would come in, none whatsoever, and his heart, oh-my-god, did that hurt. It was the worst pain he’d ever experienced in his entire life and he had, to his great concern, no idea what was causing it.

Reaching out with the hand that tingled, Yamazaki realized he was on his side now and something massive, white and blurry was coming straight for him...

*****

I’m back. Nice to see you are still with us. Let’s talk about heart failure.

Heart failure is damn uncomfortable. Ask anyone who has had a stroke or a heart attack without any warning at all and they’ll tell you it was like being in a quick draw competition with God and he or she or it, through the power of their mysterious invisible hand, had shot the victim right through the ticker with no mercy given as to how surprising that might be. Fortunately, most times healthy people are luckier than that when it comes to a cardiovascular event. When an arm starts tingling and their heart rate gets erratic then most know that its time to go to the emergency room. Survival rates in these cases are pretty decent. If it hits you fast, though, well, the rate of survival goes way-way-way down very quickly.

Ten liters - just trust me - daily is about the amount of a certain famous cola flavored beverage, which has the same name as the slang word for cocaine, that a person can drink year-in-year-out before things go wrong. A pack of Boritas a day won’t kill you either, except if it’s your favorite tortilla chip and you have five mega packs a day. Nor, admittedly, will plain sugar added to the aforementioned cola beverage (because why not?) to make it more flavorsome if it is taken responsibly.

Unfortunately, whatever you are imagining right now multiplied by 10 is the amount Yamazaki - also, a fledgling 29 - has consumed on a daily basis since the tender age of 10 due to his workaholic parents neither caring or paying attention to his intake and being little more than providers of money to the then young and pre-damaged (mentally and physically) soon-to-be junk food connoisseur.

With that covered, let’s see how Genghis is doing.

*****

Genghis heard the email come to his phone from his employer and being the corporate drone he was and out of the range of any young children to squash decided he’d take a look at it.

The company had recently given him what amounted to a ‘smart phone’ in 1999 and to one used to magic as a form of communication - back when he was Elric The Destroyer and not Khan-san the driver of Truck-Kun - it seemed fairly unsmart.

Flipping it open, he flicked to the email icon with his finger but couldn’t open it because he had large thumbs. His eyes travelled lazily back to the road and then down. There was some thin-as-they-come shabby looking youth stumbling sluggishly along the road ogling his less modern flip-top phone. Both were engaged when the latter crossed in front of Truck-Kun and crumpled over.

Genghis, we need you to do a drop off at... was read just before the fall began and an upward then downward shifting sensation like passing over a low set speed bump was felt by the driver.

Eh?

Genghis put the phone down on the passenger seat. Right now he was feeling odd. There was an instinctive knowledge of something having gone wrong, but what that wrong thing was, he yet did not know.

The truck slowed with a squealing grind as if in protest of the need to see what had transpired 13 meters back. Something red was on the windscreen - just a speck near the side. Elric, killer of hundreds, knew exactly what the red speck was.

OH NO!

The road under his feet once he’d torn the door open and leaped out was unsteady. It had been such a pleasant day... so warm, so comfortable. The Setagaya River was running by slack and lazy without a care in the world. It should have been fine, but it was not fine. It would never, ever, ever be fine at that moment: One that he’d dream about with equal amounts of arousal because he was a bad mofo in the day and regret because he was also quite human now.

Under him his feet churned on the road. It seemed like he was in a snow globe and some giant beast was shaking it wildly. When he came to the young man, he was struck by their similar ages. The kid had a dirty 1000 yen tracksuit combo on and shoes that looked 5 years too ragged to be worn for exercise. His one remaining eye was staring upwards and was blood red because the exhaust pipe passing over it had branded the globe with hot iron. Coming from what could now only be described as ‘the body’, due to the kid being quite clearly dead, was a smell that was metallic, refined, and oddly gorgeous to the demon that inhabited the man desperately trying to figure out what to do. It came from the blood that was seeping from the wounds of the corpse. Most of it was from the neck, groin and left leg - all of which had been torn mightily by the front bumper, undercarriage and rear left wheel as the kid exited out from his trip under Truck-Kun to the road behind to become the half churned and burned mass of dead flesh that lay at the driver’s feet.

Genghis cried out, Why? It was cliche and long and he even felt like a fool doing it. Yet, he still had to ask.

People came. Genghis knelt until pushed away by a well-doer who thought CPR might help a clearly very dead young heart attack victim come back to life.

Setagaya along the river had been nice that day. It wasn’t nice anymore.

*****

Reporters, pictures, police, questioning, deportation and then marriage to a Chinese citizen who spawns four babies and ends up being a bad choice until the next one comes - oddly, a reincarnated ex-member of the god race One that witnessed the fall of Elric to The Hammer Of Fate with her own eyes - and fulfills every single hope for life that Genghis wished for - all of that is of no consequence to what happens next. What now matters is the soul. We are now about to witness both the start and end of our story in one.

*****

So I’m sorry to keep you waiting. This, here, is Yamazaki. I know you can’t see him, but I assure you that it is most certainly him. This invisible mucky goo right in my hands is what we are talking about.

Now, normally (not abnormally like this time around), the exiting of a soul from a body is a fairly mundane affair. The Christians have their process and the Buddhists theirs and Allah’s Faithful theirs. Unfortunately, each and every one of them is wrong about the process, but that is neither here nor there as we are going to watch as the true process is undertaken right before our eyes.

Fly, little Yamazaki, fly, I would tell him if I could.

He goes upwards and the big black angel of death floats down. As we don’t want to tempt fate, any description of him shall be avoided. However, what he does is worth noting. That scythe of his comes down and slashes the soul. Usually a pop can be heard, but this time there is a crack of thunder.

Death does a little one-two and then floats away. I’m not going to say he/she was surprised, but I did also say that I didn’t want to tempt fate, so you read between the lines on that one.

Continuing upward would have been great, right? We all know what’s up there. The Holy Land, The Good Place, There Where God Waits, you know, that kind of thing. Conversely, downwards is a little less pleasant. Everything you think you know is about right. Hell, and all its other names, is very unpleasant and not in the I just hit my toe against the dresser kind of fashion.

The soul should have split in two then released a whitish fog normally. However, it didn’t. Through the same process that creates twins when the angel of birth does her/his thing with their scythe to a still misty unborn soul, two souls have been born in death from one. They drift downwards and upwards lazily - like little clouds of dandelion fur blown from a freshly pulled stalk by a blond haired white child in a European foothills sometime long ago. Each seems unconcerned where they are going until they start to fade.

For most the experience of being chosen for reincarnation is fairly pleasant, but these two sense, with appropriate concern, that something truly odd is happening. What could half a soul reincarnate into? It’s quite reasonable to imagine they are wondering this at this moment. Everything has an equal amount of soul. None has too little or too much. That is the way of things and a truth that has, up until now, never been violated.

As they fade so too must we. I will be here, fellow travelers, to guide the way forward, but mostly we will see how it turns out for these two. One half of a soul sent to hell; the other sent to heaven. Both were chosen for reincarnation. What comes now will not be for the faint of heart.

CHAPTER 1: BORN AGAIN - TWICE

The first thing he noted was the whomp, whomp, whomp of the heartbeat that sent shivering waves through the place he occupied. That place was moving, he realized, and it wanted him out. Even though some part of him wanted to stay, that was not to be. There was still the memory of that sensation in his chest as he crossed the road in Setagaya and he figured that this must be a dream because reality had never been this nice to him.

An odd cold - so unwelcome that he tried to curl his toes away from it - came upon his lower limbs up to the knees. This chill was more unpleasant to his senses than the persistent squeezing and urging of the space that wanted him out and so he kicked and kicked and tried to say, No, no, I don’t want to wake up to the dream world he must be in. Unfortunately, no recognizable sounds reached to his ears and the place wanted him to go and, honestly, was starting to get fairly forceful about it.

There was a wave of something and then he felt hands on his legs - giant ones.

Look, he has come, my love.

That was what he would have heard if he had understood what the white, big jawed, blond haired male in his 30s wearing a white gown covered in blood and most certainly not a doctor had just said in the language he was yet to learn.

For some reason that man was very big. He tried to comment on that, but his voice came out as coos and mumbles and not words due to the fact that, unbeknown to him, his jaw, vocal cords and throat had not developed yet to the point where speech was possible.

A wave of sensory input overwhelmed him as he was spun in the air. There was heat, lots of it, and the scent of wood and some kind of incense. His eyes closed as they were overwhelmed by the brightness of the many candles burning inside what appeared to be a cabin made of massive lengths of cut wood that had been arranged into the form of a one room space through a great act of carpentry and hard labor. Something soft was laid against him. He inhaled. The rich smell was unmistakable to one that had lived twice. This was something instinctively known; something all forgot but when they came into contact with it, knew it immediately for what it was: This was ‘mother’.

He forced his eyes open to see her. A blond haired, blue eyed, very tired looking woman was looking at him like he was the greatest thing she’d ever seen in her entire life. The love in those blue orbs was such that he started to cry. His whole life his mother had always been at work. The times they saw each other were few and each time felt distant and gray in his memory. This, right here, was the opposite. It was in rich full color like nothing he had ever seen. He felt every shade of it intimately and was moved as only a mix of hormones, evolution and pure joy could create.

He is a strong looking one, Harold.

A man in a white gown with a red sash that ran down to his knees who held a cross of gold in one hand and a book in the other came into view. He smiled but smelt of sweat and the incense coming from the little burner he had been holding up until a moment ago.

Look at those hands.

A finger was presented. No little hand took it, even though they were prodded in the hopes of a touch.

He will be a great farmer like yourself.

In that moment the reality that he was no longer in Japan sunk in. Three white faces and the skin of his hands and feet told him that this dream was not the regular ones he had: Most of animated women that he touched himself to more days than not.

The priest took the cross - a famous relic of The Church Of Right in this small but well known farming community - and pressed it to the baby’s head. That metal was cold and he cried out in protest.

Let this child see the Right as his father and father before him. Let all that is to be for him be and let his days be long and peaceful.

The baby tried to push the cross away and ended up getting a finger to hold from the one he assumed was his father.

A peaceful life. Some things even The One God couldn’t help with.

*****

He dreamed of love and kindness and a warm breast under his weary body, but instead he got freezing cold hands on his buttocks and a harsh pull.

Curse you, child. You are killing her!

Out was a proposition that he would gladly have taken if the meat cavern he was inside would oblige.

His troubles had started right after the dream ended. Having not survived the heart attack, something he assumed had been the cause of his death from his limited knowledge of the subject, he had reborn - the dreams told him that much - and now he was stuck. Not having actually had intercourse with a woman before, he wasn’t particularly familiar with their anatomy beyond the videos he’d seen, but right now he was making the correct assumption that his legs were out but his upper body not and the vessel of his delivery wasn’t having an easy time of it.

Angry, hot pain came as they - because their was definitely more than one given the number of hands - yanked and yanked and screamed and swore and welcomed him earnestly to the unpeaceful land he was about to become a part of.

When he was free, the baby was thrown aside to a grotty dirty floor that stank of blood and there he was left uncared for. No warmth, peace or feminine scent for him. Rolling over on ungainly limbs that did not know coordination nor control was more annoying than he would have thought. The room was overwhelmingly dark with only a fire in a metal brazer that spewed stank smoke made from man-fat into the room. On a table lay a woman with her head twisted to the side and a very unpeaceful look on her face and her naked body covered in finger lines of blood where she’d clawed at her own skin with her birthing mess.

Throw the devil out with the hounds. If it lives tomorrow then we’ll welcome it to the family.

Those were the parting words of the father because he would never see him again. The child was taken by the leg by a sibling and biffed unceremoniously through the shack’s window to lie flat in the freezing mud under a sky filled with stars blotted out somewhat by the stinky smoke pouring from the structure.

Around him the sounds of animals came to him. A beast that was without a doubt some kindred of a wolf but around twice as large came into view. It drew its jaws down and droll, hot and stinking of flesh, rolled down the baby’s cheek as it opened them and prepared to bite.

What happened next was a blur.

Through the window came the woman. Her pace was unbelievable to him at that moment, but in reality was the stumbling, drunken shuffle of one that had just forcefully given birth to Kosak of Merling Point’s next slave child and decided she cared enough to stab that beastly rapist in the eye, piercing the brain in that one move, with the end of a metal candle holder looted from some nobles that passed through 12 months back when she was taken. The wolves, perhaps sensing the death of their master within, ignored her because the scent of fresh meat coming from inside was more appealing than the oddly darkly tainted stuff the woman was made of.

Running got them about a kilometer into the nowhere that was the forest in which Kosak had lived. The woman knew she was dying and the baby suspected as much as well. In her last moments she drew a symbol in her own birth blood on the baby’s stomach and chanted some words that sounded like they were straight from hell and then she was gone: A puff of ashes expended in the one last decent thing anyone would ever do for the soul inhabiting the child.

As he lay there on the ground, shivering and alone, he heard them coming. Out of darkness the two strolled. Things that the devil spawned; things that ate of flesh and rejoiced in hurt, hate and agony. These, he would learn, were hobgoblins and the only thing keeping them from chewing on his baby size bones was the blood drawn, burned in symbol his mother had given him.

It was a terrible start to what would be a very interesting existence.

CHAPTER 2: A MEETING AND A DEATH

Did you miss me? I missed you. So, time passes and the two boys learn that the world isn’t what it was for them. Japan was a place where our soul named Yamazaki whiled away his years from the end of high school - heck, even before that - languishing in a haze created by cola based beverages, with added sugar, and enhanced by a tortilla chip high. There was buying the latest manga, light novels and games online - major high points for a shut-in - and considering what cup ramen noodle flavor would go best with the trashy sugar rich deserts he used to buy in bulk from BigRiverInSouthAmerica.com.

His old life was one spent in idle pleasure and his new one is anything but. The food is different and the language new. There are things in this world - strange and wonderful things - that whisper of knowledge yet unknown, but that beg him when he is at rest or when the fields or the forest is still to listen and hear and know that anything is possible, or nothing if one only looks to the darker side of the soul.

Either way, he is in a new world, this man of two parts, and he dreams and knows his other with envious or repulsed eyes. ‘Witnessing the dark traveller’ is what they call this kind of thing in our world. To one the light of the other’s life is so scorchingly bright that it brings forth a bubbling hate like lava from an erupting volcano and which he brings to bear, childishly at this point because he is not yet grown, into a churning, stomach-aching drive to live at all costs. To his brighter half the deep dark terror of that one’s existence is fuel for nightmares that he half believes are somehow the fruits of a poisoned mind that might have been damaged in the act of reincarnating to this world.

These two have not forgotten each other - not even for a moment - and, furthermore, both firmly believe that they and only they are the one true self. Neither is willing to bend and admit that they might be a clone or a copy or something worse: