As I walked across the field, I kept thinking about how strange this whole place was. Twenty or so hours ago I’d been slogging through what felt like a North American forest, temperate and familiar. After that, I’d climbed a cliff that looked like someone had dropped a giant pile of polished river stones straight from the garden section of a hardware store. Now, standing here, it was like I had stumbled into the natural US Midwest. Rolling plains stretched out in every direction, soft hills and tall grass swaying in the wind.

  That kind of shift shouldn’t happen. Not this fast. Even accounting for the walk uphill with the stream and scaling that ridiculous cliff, I couldn’t make sense of it. Biomes don’t just smash together like badly cut puzzle pieces. Normally, ecosystems bleed into each other gradually. You’ll see desert scrub give way to grassland, then patches of forest, just blending into the next over dozens of miles. Here? Forest one minute, endless plain the next. Abrupt.

  The grass hissed against my legs with every step, swish-swish, steady as a metronome. Insects darted and buzzed above the stalks—things that resembled dragonflies but were thicker, with stubby tails and oversized wings. A couple of small birds zipped low over the grass, diving after the bugs with sharp little cries. Off in the distance something made a sound almost like cicadas, though the rhythm was uneven and too deep.

  It all felt familiar, and that was the problem. I’d hiked in places like this before. Oklahoma. Kansas. Long weekends stuck in the middle of nowhere when work had sent me on trips and I didn’t want to waste the weekends sitting in some hotel room. I’d grown to like the emptiness of it. There was a strange beauty to the wide-open sky, the constant motion of grass and wind.

  The longer I walked though, the more I realized what was missing.

  The dragonfly things were there, sure, but the rest of the usual cast was gone. No flies buzzing my ears, no mosquitoes swarming my arms, no gnats clouding the air. Normally, those little parasites would be everywhere in an environment like this. It was one of those things they never show on television or movies because it’s just not glamorous.

  The bigger absence gnawed at me more. There were no animals. No scurrying movement in the grass. No herds in the distance. Back home, plains like these would be alive. Rodents popping out of burrows, birds on the ground darting between stalks, maybe a deer or bison lumbering by if you were lucky.

  I told myself maybe it was just a matter of timing. Maybe the local wildlife was asleep, hiding, or out of sight. But deep down, I didn’t buy it; this wasn’t natural silence. It was the same kind of emptiness I’d felt in the forest after everything had rushed to the lake and died. But I didn’t think that it was caused by my lake sound, I suspected that I was way outside the range of the sound I made and there would be no way animals would have made it down that cliff alive – and if they didn’t make it down alive I should have seen some sign at the bottom of the cliff or even on the rocks themselves.

  The weirdest part was the signs of life, I definitely saw evidence of larger creatures out here. Burrows dotted the ground in patches, little mounds of dirt collapsed in on themselves, holes that looked exactly like prairie dog towns back home. Only these were abandoned – no sharp whistles, no heads popping up to bark alarms at me. Prairie dogs aren’t subtle animals. You hear them long before you see them, and they usually leave plenty of fresh dirt scattered around. These holes looked old and collapsing, like no one had used them for a while.

  It wasn’t just the burrows. Every so often I spotted tracks that screamed deer or elk. Hoof marks pressed into the soil, though thinner than what I remembered from hiking in North America, and spaced wider, like whatever made them had a longer stride. But the tracks were faint, weathered. Bits of grass grew inside the impressions, and thin layers of dust had settled on top. I’m no expert tracker, but even I could tell they weren’t recent.

  I kept walking for hours, up and down the rolling hills, but always with the sense that I was going slightly downhill. I kept my eyes locked on the distant forest, using it as my landmark. At first I thought it was just a few miles away, but the more I walked the more I realized how massive it must be. The trees were towering, far taller than anything I’d seen in the first forest. The closer I got, the more I understood just how far away it really was.

  The sun dipped lower, painting the plains in gold and then in shadow. By my rough guess I’d walked eight or nine miles, my legs aching with every step. Eventually, I admitted that I wasn’t going to make the forest before nightfall. I needed shelter. I found a low swale where the grass grew thicker and the land curved like a shallow sideways bowl, giving me some cover from the wind and anything else

  I sat down and unstrapped both bags. My own hiking pack from home and the leather one I’d scavenged from the warrior. Carrying both had been miserable as they sat wrong on my back, one digging into my shoulder blades, the other bouncing awkwardly against my side.

  Dinner was another ration brick. Same ritual as before: dribble water on it, wait until it softens just enough to chew, then choke it down. I kept telling myself to slow down, to ration what I had. The problem was, there wasn’t much left. Only two of the travel rations remained in the warrior’s bag. Two meals, maybe three if I stretched them out. I had a little extra weight and could afford to ration out my food, at least for a bit. After that…well, I’d have to get creative.

  I leaned back against the grass and watched the sky darken, trying not to think too hard about how empty the plains were. Just me, two bags, and silence.

  After choking down the last of my ration, I had packed everything back into the bags. I dug out my phone, pressed the power button, and no signal. Not that I expected any, but a part of me still hoped. The screen lit up, half a battery bar left. That was more than I figured, and I powered it back down immediately. Right now it was basically just a flashlight, and I wasn’t going to waste it. Tomorrow morning, first thing, I’d try the solar charger. If it actually worked here, I’d top the phone off.

  I tucked it back into my pack and set myself up to sleep. The warrior’s bag went under my head again. Still uncomfortable, still stiff, but a lot better than bare rock. I had also been careful when I picked this little swale. I’d crept into it from the side, bending tall grass over gently so it looked like no one had forced their way in. From above, or even from a distance, it would just look like an untouched field. My line of sight was split, half hidden by the curve of earth, the other half staring up at the wide-open sky.

  The sun bled out behind the hills, streaks of orange fading to purple, then to black. One by one, stars pricked through.

  This was the first real chance I’d had to just look. My first night here had been chaos, I was panicking, not stopping long enough to take in the heavens. Now that I wasn’t actively trying to figure things out, I had the time. The thought that I might’ve avoided it before on purpose crossed my mind too, like maybe my brain just needed to not process one more thing back then.

  I lay there, eyes fixed on the sky and what seemed like a moonless night. Even though I knew better, I still found myself searching for blinking lights, the trails of planes cruising overhead. Of course there weren’t any, just raw night.

  And man, it was bright. First the big stars, then the smaller ones, then clusters until the whole sky lit up like someone had spilled a box of glitter across black velvet. I’d never really done the whole stargazer thing back home. Sure, I’d gone camping maybe a dozen times, gone on day hikes, played around with a star-tracker app on my phone. People had pointed out the main constellations over the years: Orion, the Dippers, and Cassiopeia. But I’d never cared enough to really remember any of the others.

  The author's narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

  And yet here I was, lying in alien grass, and I could pick them out. Big Dipper. Little Dipper. Even a glowing spot I thought might be Mars. Familiar shapes, familiar points of light.

  Which made zero sense. If this were a different world, then the night sky should be different, right? New constellations. Strange alignments. Extra moons. Something. Anything.

  Instead, I was staring at the same stars I’d seen outside my apartment balcony. Which meant what? That I was still on Earth somehow? That this was some weird layered reality, a pocket universe painted over the real one?

  The questions buzzed in my head, but I couldn’t even muster the energy to panic. I was too tired, too worn down. For once, the mystery didn’t excite me. It was just another problem for another day.

  Taking that into account, I just lay there staring at the night sky, half zoning out, half keeping my ears open for danger. My body wanted to sleep, but my brain wasn’t ready to hand over the keys just yet. So I compromised. I’d watch the stars, relax, but keep one ear tuned for anything creeping through the grass.

  And honestly, I felt pretty safe. As I’d walked through the fields earlier, I’d noticed the insect calls cut off whenever I got close—classic sign of something big moving, something that makes the little guys shut up before they get eaten. But after I’d been sitting in my swale for a while, they started up again. Tentative at first, a few rasping calls, then louder, steadier, until it was like I wasn’t even there. If they thought I wasn’t a predator, that was a good sign. The soundscape wrapped around me, and for the first time since arriving in this world, I felt like maybe I wasn’t in immediate danger.

  It was…nice.

  More than nice. Just lying there, watching the stars, listening to the hum of life around me. I’d done a handful of overnight hikes back home, but I always told myself I’d do more “someday.” Someday never came. There was always work, or errands, or just plain laziness.

  And now here I was, in the middle of a magical death world, finally living the thing I used to daydream about. Not the monsters or the panic or the corpse looting, obviously, but the part where I could lie in the grass, stare at the sky, and just exist for a while. It was peaceful.

  That peace cracked about two hours in, when I realized something was wrong.

  Nothing in the sky had moved.

  For anyone who is an astronomer, here’s the deal: on Earth, the stars move. As the planet spins, the constellations crawl across the sky. Planets drift in the opposite direction. That’s how our ancestors figured out that Mars and Venus weren’t just stars, they moved independently and were something different. Stay out long enough and you’ll catch a few meteor streaking by too.

  But I had seen nothing. The stars came out, lit up bright and sharp, and then froze in place. I tried to convince myself maybe I was at a bad angle. My head rested against the ledge of the swale, maybe I wasn’t getting the best perspective. But I kept checking, comparing where certain stars lined up against the curve of grass or the edge of rock above me. Same. Every time. Even the reddish “planet” I thought might be Mars hadn’t shifted a hair.

  I forced myself to watch longer. An hour passed. Still nothing. No meteors. No subtle drift. The sky might as well have been painted on glass.

  This wasn’t a sky, it was a screen. A backdrop. Something projected to look like a sky, pinned in place.

  Yet, during the day I’d watched shadows move. I’d felt the warmth of the sun on my back, seen the light crawl across the plains as the hours passed. That had been real. So how the hell did this make sense? A real sun in the day, a fake sky at night?

  Yeah, okay. Whatever. Just another dose of weirdness for this place. Another thing to shove into the “do not poke” box in my brain, because if I think too long on it I’ll end up spiraling. I had this mental image of myself waking up in a padded cell, wrapped in a straitjacket, mumbling about painted skies.

  Even with that crazy realization hanging over me, my body won out. My eyelids drooped, and before I knew it I was out cold.

  When I woke, the world was gray and cool with morning light. My clothes were damp with dew, my hair stuck to my forehead, but nothing had disturbed me in the night. That alone felt like a victory. I stretched long and slow, joints popping, the soreness of climbing the cliff almost gone. I took a minute just to breathe, to look around at the empty plains and the rising sun.

  Breakfast was another ration brick. The second-to-last one. I unwrapped it carefully, told myself to savor it, and then hated every chew. My stomach grumbled for more, but I promised myself only one today. The rest had to last.

  Once I’d cleaned up, I wandered a bit from the swale, relieved myself, then came back to set up the solar charger. I’d bought it on Amazon one random night a year ago, a total impulse buy. I think I’d used it maybe three times since. The thing unfolded like some kind of flimsy black book, thin panels catching the light. Realistically a power bank would have been smarter, faster, more reliable—but this felt cooler when I had clicked "buy".

  I plugged in my phone and watched the bar start to creep upward. While it trickled power into the phone, I busied myself with the bags. I didn’t want to keep juggling two packs, one digging into my spine and the other swinging like dead weight. So I emptied the warrior’s bag, sorted through her things. The bundle of herbs had wilted and dried, smelling sharp and bitter when I crushed a leaf between my fingers. No clue if they were useful or poison, so I set them aside. Her water container was nearly empty, and with the rations shrinking, I finally managed to cram most of my own stuff into the larger leather pack. The straps weren’t adjustable, it rode awkwardly on my shoulders, but at least I wasn’t chafing myself raw with two bags banging around.

  After about an hour and a half my phone dinged up to ninety-five percent. Good enough. I shut everything down, packed the charger away, and slung the leather bag onto my back.

  The day stretched out like the one before. Hours of walking, grass hissing against my legs, the sun overhead. The only movement came from the same oversized bugs and tiny darting birds. No deer. No rodents. Not even the rustle of something bigger in the distance.

  It was about midday when I found an old lone tree big enough to give me a patch of shade. I dropped my bags, leaned against the trunk, and let myself breathe for a bit. I finished off the warrior’s weird leather canteen and realized I only had about a third of my own water bottle left. That hit me harder than I expected. I hadn’t come across a single stream or puddle since climbing up here, and if I didn’t find water soon, things were going to get ugly. My brain started rummaging through old YouTube camping hacks—stuff like digging a dew trap or stretching out plastic to collect condensation. Maybe I’d have to figure out one of those.

  While I was chewing on that problem, I heard something.

  Singing.

  It was strange—subtle and loud at the same time. Like when you catch the thump of a concert half a city away but can still pick out the tune. It carried on the wind, faint and clear, and it was coming from the direction of the forest.

  I froze, every nerve lit up, and tried to push my hearing in that direction. The sound focus trick worked, sort of. I could hear bugs and the swish of grass, but the singing didn’t get louder. It was like the rest of the world turned up around it, while the song just stayed the same, steady and unreal. No words, just a drawn-out hum, repeating every thirty seconds or so.

  Yeah, alarm bells went off in my head immediately. Singing in a magical world? That’s textbook siren-luring-you-to-your-death material. Should I even be listening? But I already was, and I didn’t feel like my brain was melting or like I wanted to jump off a cliff, so…probably okay.

  It was in the direction I was already heading, which made things worse because there was no way I was going to continue that direction. My options were limited: climb back down the cliff with no clear path to water, wander left or right through endless plains with no sign of food or shelter, or keep walking toward the creepy disembodied voice. If this were a horror movie, the audience would be screaming at me to turn around.

  Backtracking was out. Paralleling the forest was technically possible, but I was already low on food and water, and even if my boosted stats were keeping me from frying in the sun, it wasn’t going to last forever. If I went straight there was no way in hell I was counting on friendly locals waiting to greet me.

  So I split the difference. I’d keep moving toward the forest, but at an angle—forty-five degrees off from where I thought the singing was coming from. With luck, I’d still reach cover and maybe avoid whatever was making the noise.

  I rubbed my temples and let out a long sigh. Did this ever get easier? I used to think my life back home was boring—temporary cubicles, auditing books, sipping burnt coffee while getting side-eye from the local overworked employees. But right now I’d trade every “adventure” I’ve had here just to be back in that place. I’d been content there, damn it.

  Shaking the thought off, I shouldered the pack, estimated my angle to the forest, and started walking again.

  Jeez, who would’ve thought getting isekai’d meant walking this much? Thank God I’d been wearing hiking boots when this all went down.