After another short walk, the 5 students found themselves in the gym, face to face with a man who looked like he could lift a truck with his bare hands. His entire body bulged with muscle, blue veins pulsing at the surface whenever he moved a limb or breathed. He looked down upon his new students with a polite smile framed on his relatively small face and gave them all a warm welcome.

  “Hello everyone, welcome to the gym! I’m Tuomas Bjorson,” he said in a soft voice that was barely audible across the sound of grunts and pumping iron in the background. “Sergeant McPike says that you’re all here as part of survival training! Now don’t take his harsher words to heart, he just wants to make sure you all stay safe out there.”

  “So how is ‘gym time’ going to work?” asked Kai, keeping a placid face amidst being confronted by the trainer’s unexpected personality. “Are we going to balance working out with school and survival training? I don’t think the two days a week we have with Sergeant McPike is going to be well spent if it’ll be split with you.”

  “I’m glad you asked!” Tuomas replied with a deep smile. “You’ll actually have separate gym time every day, probably in the afternoon, for about an hour or so. But since today is your ‘educational circuit’ and you all just finished survival training for the day, now is the perfect opportunity for you to also learn about the gym!”

  The behemoth of a man waved the others to follow him, which they did without any resistance or complaint whatsoever.

  “As you can see, we have all sorts of equipment and spaces available for everyone to get the workout they need! Weight racks, exercise machines, and even yoga mats for stretches! I’ll work on designing a personalized workout plan for each of you, and work with the others here to act as your personal trainers. We’ll get you all fit well before you graduate survival training! Any questions?”

  “All I want to know is how to get a body like that,” bluntly replied Narahiko, staring right at their tour guide’s watermelon-sized bicep. “What kind of steroids did you use?”

  Kai stared at the young man with bewilderment at the audacity of his statement.

  “I didn’t use any steroids, though you’re not too far off,” Tuomas replied forlornly. “Sadly I had the help of a System to achieve this body. It’s not something I’m too proud of, but maintaining it without one is where the real challenge lies. But with enough hard work, you can hone your body into something just as glorious! Any other questions?”

  The others looked ahead silently, nothing else coming to mind.

  “Alright, then! Since this is your first day, I’m going to have you all start with some cardio! We’ve got a half-kilometer and quarter mile long track available, as well as several treadmills and ellipticals. Just so I can keep an eye on all of you, why don’t we have you start with the treadmills? It’s also much easier to tweak the difficulty settings on them to what you need, so there’ll be less judgement if someone can’t keep up with the others.”

  The five would-be gym rats were led to a series of machines on the far end of the sprawling room. While the three children were placed on a series of smaller machines next to each other, Kai and Narahiko were matched with their own pair of treadmills side by side. They let out a pair of sighs as they ascended their respective devices and began their workout.

  The pre-programmed exercise routine started them both off at a slow speed, no more than a casual stroll. It slowly began to accelerate to a faster pace before reaching the equivalent of a brisk walk and remaining there.

  Kai and Narahiko stared ahead as the machine underneath them continued to move the rubber belt at the constant pace, utterly silent except for the occasional pant or deep breath. Kai didn’t have much to say, and neither did the other young man, it appeared.

  About 5 minutes passed before Kai heard the sound from the Japanese man beside him. Nothing more than a simple grunt, more akin to a sneer, but enough to make the teen look over. What met him was a quick smirk before Narahiko looked back ahead.

  Confused by his reaction, Kai continued to look over in the other man’s direction to see what could have prompted it. And then, he saw. On the front panel, the speed setting was sitting at a comfortable 2.1. Utterly in contrast to the 1.7 before Kai.

  Narahiko let loose another grin before pressing a button on his treadmill and increasing it even further to 2.2.

  Kai gave the man a dumbfounded look. Was he really competing with him in something as meaningless as who could handle a higher treadmill speed? Yeah, that was totally what was going on. But Kai was better than that, he knew he had nothing to prove to the weeaboo who couldn’t even keep a firm grasp on reality even while living in a world of fantasy. That was precisely why Kai pressed the same button on his own machine and increased the speed to 2.3.

  Narahiko grunted again and pressed his own button twice more, raising the speed up to 2.5. Kai, not wanting to give the man the benefit of his competition, pressed his own button while facing forward nonchalantly.

  2.7, 3.0, 3.5, 4.2. The numbers kept rising, and the volume of the two runners’ breaths along with it. By the time it reached 5.0, they were both panting, the Japanese man more so due to already being out of breath.

  They both tried pressing the button further, but the number stayed put. With a grumble from each runner, they chose to turn their impromptu competition into one of endurance rather than raw speed alone.

  “I’m not going to be beaten,” said the man with a contemptuous tone in between breaths. “Not by someone like you!”

  “Someone like me?” asked Kai, incredulously. “What did I ever do? Hold on, is it because I’m black?”

  “Wh-what?! No!” exclaimed Narahiko, taking his hands off the handgrips long enough to wave them in protest. “I mean someone who’s ungrateful for what they have!”

  Kai let out a little snicker at the man’s reaction towards the move he pulled from Sheila’s book before rebutting. “And what am I exactly being ungrateful for?”

  “For everything you got to experience before coming here! I saw how the sergeant favored you for your reaction to the gun, you’ve obviously been through all sorts of adventures before you got here!”

  “I got to experience a broke-ass neighborhood, shitty school lunches, muggers, gangbangers, and an abusive mom before I got here, if that’s what you mean. I guess I’m pretty grateful that none of those things killed me, but not much beyond that.”

  “Quit acting the fool,” he sneered. “You were brought over to stop the Dark Lord and lived a life of adventure!”

  “Uh… no I didn’t. I got picked up by Artyom and the other TOAL soldiers half a minute after I got summoned.”

  “So you didn’t defeat your Dark Lord?”

  “I don’t think there even was a Dark Lord waiting for me there. From what I’ve heard, just another king who apparently had the same bright idea to summon his own soldiers from Earth. This is literally my second… no, third day here, and I don’t even remember my first.”

  “I didn’t even know there were others like me…”

  “Me neither,” replied Kai with a shrug. “But it really is nice to finally meet someone else. Did you get scooped up from a Gilded World too?”

  “Er, no,” replied the Japanese man with a shrug, turning away with his response. “A Heroic one, actually.”

  “Heroic? Then why did you need a rescue?”

  “I wasn’t actually rescued, I came here of my own accord.”

  “Hold on, then why bother with survival training?”

  Narahiko remained silent.

  “Wait up, you were complaining about being here because you wanted an adventure. Didn’t you get one back wherever you were summoned?”

  Still more silence.

  “They did rescue you, didn’t they?” asked Kai, prying further. “Did something crazy happen to cut your journey short or something? Like a sudden ambush by the Dark Lord that had you running for your life while you scrounged around for enough resources to survive and get strong enough to beat them?”

  “They summoned a replacement, alright?!” the man shouted in frustration. The acoustics of the gym kept his voice from travelling very far, and Kai was the only one close enough to hear. “I decided to take my time to have some fun and maybe find a hot elf girlfriend, and the guys who brought me there got impatient, so they brought over somebody else to defeat the Dark Lord instead!”

  The teen paused for several seconds as he digested the heartfelt admittance. “Shit, that’s gotta be a nasty blow to your self-esteem,” replied Kai with a sympathetic voice. “Getting fired as the chosen hero, I mean. Damn…”

  “What’s worse was that my replacements were much faster. They were able to defeat the Dark Lord in only a month. In that time, I still hadn’t figured out the level System.”

  “Wait, replacements? As in plural?”

  “Yeah, brothers. They work really well together. They even showed up to the DDR tournament yesterday, and of course they expected me to come and support them.”

  “Talk about pouring salt on the wound,” Kai nodded. “Hold on, I think I saw you there yesterday. You looked pretty angry.”

  “That’s exactly it, Freeman-k… san. Freeman-san. Salt on my wounded pride. And you were there too, you said something about getting rid of a ghost?”

  “Yeah, that was me,” replied the teen with an embarrassed smile. “But just call me Kai, no need for honorifics. You know, I always wondered why Japanese people add them when speaking in English.”

  “Alright then, Kai-kun. I’ll just call you by your first name. And what do you mean by ‘English’? I’m speaking Japanese,” he panted.

  “Wait, what? Everything coming out of your mouth is in perfect English.”

  “I’ve been told that the summoning rituals that bring us over translate other languages into one we can understand. So English for you, Japanese for me.”

  “So then why do the honorifics get carried over to English?”

  The man simply shrugged.

  “That’s not even the weirdest thing I’ve seen it do,” sighed Kai. “It also adds this weird emphasis to Class names, apparently. Like with Rory’s class, Diplomat. Huh, it’s not there anymore.”

  “By the way, I’m Kazuma. Kazuma Narahiko.”

  “Kai Freeman. Nice to meet you, Kazuma,” said the teen, offering out a hand to the man.

  Kazuma lifted his own arm off the treadmill’s grip to shake. As the two grasped hands, Kazuma began to lean over. Eyes wide, he realized that his body had finally reached its limit, and was forcefully thrown off the machine. With Kai still holding onto him.

  The two were violently ejected backwards and tumbled onto the soft carpet. Their collision created enough spectacle to usher in Tuomas, who came running towards the two.

  “Woah there, no need to push yourselves that far!” he said with a concerned look. “Let’s make sure you two are uninjured after that little tumble, and start again a little slower. Remember, we’re here to get familiar with this space before doing anything big. You’ll have plenty of opportunities for those kinds of feats soon!”

  The duo lifted themselves off the ground and nodded at their instructor. The soft, fleece-like material that lined the floor absorbed all of the force from their fall, with not a single square inch of rug burn to show for it. After getting an impromptu checkup by their trainer, the two made their ways back to the treadmill and continued their chat, albeit at much more reasonable speeds.

  It seemed that Kai had finally found the friend he was looking for. Even though they weren’t exactly what he had first imagined.