
by Iro_Buang
What happens when five competent, accomplished, and terminally online professionals get isekai'd with basically every cheat the genre promised them? Divine marks. Magical affinities. Modern technology. Phones. AI. Guns. They should have been unstoppable in any fantasy world. Unfortunately, every fiction they read lied. Because people in a fantasy world can also have functional brain cells, governments, laws, churches, cultures, and centuries of their own knowledge. The Setup Five longtime friends went camping. A cybersecurity engineer who brought his laptop into the forest and was still working at 2 AM on a Sunday. A finance analyst and project management professional who has never encountered a problem he couldn't turn into a meeting. An accountant studying law who somehow balances spreadsheets, case law, and spending his weekends in clubs. A surgical resident who is usually the first person checking whether everyone else is still alive. And an electrical engineer who had read way too much about the genre to take the whole premise seriously. Then a magic circle appears around their campsite, swallows them along with their gears, and before any of them can make sense of what is happening, they are standing in another world with magic tattoos on their left forearms. Four of the marks on their arms are recognized almost immediately. Light. Life. Magic. War. Then the fifth mark refuses to be recognized at all. Unfortunately, dozens of people saw the whole thing. Including a princess who, apparently, had just "summoned" them by performing something called the Crown Covenant. What to Expect Most of them spend their first weeks doing something far less glamorous than conquering a fantasy world: figuring out how the place actually works. Navigating politics they barely understand. Asking merchants what things cost and why. Learning how people measure time, distance, money, and mana. Talking to priests, mages, soldiers, bureaucrats, craftsmen, merchants, and anyone else who knows something they don't. Avoid being used as a pawn by everybody else. Comparing modern medicine with magical healing. Sometimes their Earth knowledge is genuinely useful. Sometimes an accountant who understands corporate finance has to admit he has absolutely no idea how much soap you can get out of a cow. Meanwhile, Kevin is having the absolute time of his life in the Labyrinth, by trying not to starve to death, or become somebody else's solution to not starving to death. Between giant spiders, centipedes, cockroaches, ants, questionable food, experimental magic, and getting increasingly lost underground with one very irritated mage, his contribution to humanity's understanding of another world mostly consists of figuring out what is trying to eat them, what it can smell, and whether they can trick it before it gets close enough to find out.
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