I was your run-of-the-mill, bog-standard British bloke.
I was forty-seven, dropped out of Middlesex, laboured as a Tesco bagger, and lived out of my aunt and uncle’s flat. I know what you’re thinking: blimey. But I was gainfully employed, even if the gains were low. Anime girl posters on my bedroom walls: nine. All theoretically legal under UK consent laws, of course. I’m not that kind of otaku. Actual girlfriends? Negative one. I had a fling with a delightful young woman composed of anti-matter but it didn’t last long due to the logistics.
On a run-of-the-mill, bog-standard Saturday afternoon, my aunt returned from a trip out.
Love! She let loose a wendigo shriek. I went to Flake ‘n’ Bake and brought you some scones! Come put the kettle on and have some!
I sighed and shuffled into the kitchen in my Akatsuki onesie pajamas and started brewing some good Fortnum & Mason Queen Anne.
But be careful, love, my aunt warned. Don’t eat them all in a single sitting. If you eat too many scones in a single sitting, you go to the Scone Zone. And if you die in the Scone Zone, you die in real life. Okay, you be safe, love, I’m going to watch the new Ricky Gervais Netflix special.
She was always saying stuff like this, and I figured it came with the territory of being old. Everybody gets dementia or schizophrenia or whatever in their eighties. I mean, Ricky Gervais hasn’t been funny since Extras. I opened the frilly pastel-coloured Flake ‘n’ Bake box as though it were a rare loot chest and inside were seventeen bonny raspberry orange scones. Their sweet, fruity smell wafting through the air, their flaky texture, their curvy triangular shape, the way the white frosting was artfully drizzled upon their bodies. It was sexual. I devoured all seventeen raspberry orange scones in a single sitting.
I was subsequently transported to a world where there was an active three-pronged war between armies of sentient baked goods. I spawned in the Scone Kingdom, or “Scone Zone,” as my aunt put it. I remembered I blacked out before I took the kettle off the stove and wondered if my gluttony had doomed my aunt and uncle to a fiery death, but the thought didn’t last as I was interrupted by The System. The System informed me that I was The Protagonist and proceeded to explain my new abilities. Most of them involved dispensing various sugary substances from my fingertips: seven types of jam, honey, frosting, and manchineel sap. I could also use an oven-like function by hugging an enemy. The System called it “Overbake” and all I had to do was shout Overbake! to activate it. I also had resistance to high temperatures. Overbake wouldn’t make sense otherwise.
The System told me to visit Scone Castle, a seventeen-layer scone cake over the horizon. After the longest, most arduous walk of my life, through fields of candy cane trees and cotton candy bushes, through quaint gingerbread villages filled with frolicking scone-shaped children, I arrived. The guards attempted to shoo me away when I requested an audience with their king, but relented when I spewed manchineel sap from my right thumb, which ate through the bottom of their bottom floor.
I introduced myself to the Scone King with a display of my miraculous powers, and he explained that the Scone Kingdom was locked in a complicated struggle with both the Muffin Kingdom and the Éclair Kingdom. The Scone King absolutely despised the Muffin King, while maintaining a tenuous, uneasy alliance with the Éclair King, who appeared to be playing both sides. This seemed eerily similar to Romance of the Three Kingdoms, or at least I assumed it was. I’d never read it as it was very long and I didn’t much care about real people, but I’d played Fire Emblem: Three Houses and I once read a Reddit thread which implied the two were analogous. I was obviously Byleth, or Zhuge Liang, apparently. The Muffin King sounded like Edelgard, or Cao Cao. The Éclair King seemed like Claude, or Sun Quan. And since The System – the manifestation of destiny – brought me to the Scone King, he of course was Dimitri, or Liu Bei.
After aiding in the defeat and subjugation of the Muffin Kingdom army across multiple brutal, hard-fought battles, I earned the full trust of the Scone King and was acknowledged as a respected warrior-strategist for the Scone Kingdom. But we were losing too many good scones. Frontal assaults were too costly, I grew weary of seeing my comrades fall. The Scone King suggested we annihilate a village. Just one civilian area and the Muffin Kingdom would be scared into surrender. This felt like a war crime, but I told myself that the Scone Kingdom never signed the Geneva Conventions.
I took a small team with me and we infiltrated a muffin village along the border. There was a brief scuffle with the village watch – I was caught off guard and a soldier named Liam lost his left hand protecting me. Then we went to work. It was horrible. I can still smell the burnt starch, my throat raw from screaming Overbake! again and again. We spared no one. There was a child, still fresh, couldn’t have been more than a few days old. His agonized cries as I hugged him haunted me. I stuck my right thumb in his mouth to quiet him and imagined the manchineel sap melting his insides. You couldn’t even see their charred corpses in the black of night.
I had picked the wrong lord. There was no way to atone. I thought if I killed myself, maybe, just maybe, The System would send me back to before my terrible mistake. I was The Protagonist, right? I could just end it and that Re:Zero respawn uuueeehuuuuuuh! sound would play and I could do it all over. Right?