After all this time, I can finally can taste victory! Well, that and a lot of tree bark… but sweet, hard-earned VICTORY!

  All these long months of work have amounted to this moment of triumph. I can feel my heart pounding faster and faster with the anticipation. One more tree, I only have to chew through one more tree. With this st log dragged into pce, I will finish building my ultimate sanctuary, and then I’ll be set for life! I’m so close. One more, just one more—

  “BOBER, KURWA!”

  NOOO!

  A sudden booming sound from behind seemed to make the forest tremble around me. I abandoned my prized tree and took off, even before I looked back to see the giant stomping toward me.

  Oh no… it really is a giant?! Run, run, RUN!

  “Bober! Ey, kurwa, BOBER!”

  The noises grew louder as the giant thundered closer—two monstrous legs, each step shaking the ground, each shout a gust of wind. Twigs snapped and cracked, closer and closer.

  My paws kicked up dirt as I rushed for cover from one towering tree to the next. My heart pounded like the rapid drumming of a woodpecker. It was gaining on me, but if I could just make it a little further under those leaves…!

  I unched myself forward and dove into the bushes ahead of me. Somehow, I made it… but I couldn’t let myself rex until I made it all the way back home.

  The stomping came to a halt behind me. As I hurried out of my leafy refuge on the other side and continued my escape, the crazy giant noises came from farther and farther away. Before long, all I could hear was one st booming echo in the distance.

  I let out a sigh of relief when it finally came into view: the familiar waters of my own dammed creek, glowing with the warm colors of the setting sun. I dipped under the surface and swam toward the assembled mound of sticks and branches that I called home. Only when I was safely up through the underwater entrance and inside could I take a deep breath.

  I just wanted to finish building my home, take a nice nap and enjoy the sunset. That was close, way too close! I have only ever seen the giants stomping around from a distance before, carrying shiny rocks or dead creatures… Very dangerous. To think one of them had spotted me like that, and when I least expected it! If I hadn’t managed to lose it and the giant followed me all the way back, would I still be safe here? At this rate, I might have to continue building for more protection…

  After my eyes finished adjusting to the darkness inside, my heart skipped a beat. I suddenly realized I wasn’t alone. Beside me rested a long, furry creature that definitely didn’t belong there. It had shiny wet brown fur, whiskers, two tiny round ears, and a pair of pitch bck eyes awkwardly staring back at me—an otter?

  “What are you doing in here?” I finally asked my uninvited guest.

  The otter screamed. “Oh my god, it’s a talking beaver!”

  “Is that really the first thing you say after invading someone’s home?”

  She fell quiet for a long, awkward silence. “Uh… Y-you can really understand me? You can?! You can! Okay, you have got to help me!” The otter sat up and put her paws on my shoulders. “So I know I look like this now, but I used to be a girl, just a totally normal human girl! I promise! But then one day, I got into the craziest accident when I—oh, you wouldn’t know what a ‘truck’ is. Doesn’t matter. Anyways, the next thing I knew I woke up here as an otter! I got reincarnated from Earth like this, and I still have no idea what’s going on!”

  I sighed. “That’s the worst excuse I’ve ever heard in my life.”

  “Hey, I’m serious!” she cried. “You have to believe me! Or… maybe you don’t? But look, this world is crazy. It’s like pying nightmare mode with no respawn! I’ve seen goblins with horns, creepy wolves with glowing eyes, and a messed up deer wearing a skull like some undead monster!”

  “Yeah, you just jump in the water and stay away from those. What’s not to get?”

  “W-well, uh… When you put it like that… Forget it! Look, you have somewhere safe like this. You built this lodge, you’re a beaver, of course you did! You’re awesome! Let me stay with you. Please? There’s no way I’m going to make it out there on my own! I mean, what am I supposed to do? Are we going to hibernate in winter? I don’t know how to hibernate!”

  “Hold on. Give me a minute to think.”

  She stared back at me with big, pleading eyes while I mulled it over. What a day. Any other time, I would have never considered such a one-sided deal with an otter. For all I knew, she might have been trying to steal my home for herself. But I could tell there was something different about this otter. She definitely seemed troubled… in more ways than one. Then my mind wandered back to that harrowing encounter with the giant earlier, and an idea dawned on me.

  “Alright,” I said. “You can stay.”

  The otter defted. “Okay, I get it, I’ll just go and… Wait, I can? Really?! Beaver, I love you!” She ughed while trying to put her arms around me. “Do you accept hugs? You’re my hero! But not literally, because that’s why I’m here. Oh and by the way, I’m Frie! This is so exciting, it’s kind of like camping, isn’t it? I used to… really like camping…”

  As if running out of energy all at once, her eyes began to droop before she slowly curled up into a ball, passing out on the spot.

  The interior had suddenly gotten less spacious with the new arrival, but I began to feel a bit warmer with the ball of fluff snuggled beside me. Perhaps there were some upgrades that didn’t require building after all.

  ***

  The next morning, Frie the freeloading otter made herself at home swimming around the waters of my home.

  “Isekai, isekai!” Frie cheered, spshing and pying in the water. “I always knew this would be my destiny! I was practically born to become the main character of my own fantasy adventure! Don’t worry, Beaver—I promise you a nice spot in my hero party!”

  While Frie was having fun spouting nonsense, I got back to work chewing down my next tree. Before, I had wanted to leave some of the surrounding trees untouched around my home, just in case. Now that giants had started wandering so dangerously close, it might not matter if they discovered us anyway. And there was no telling what could happen then. The thought made me shiver. At any rate, my biggest priority was building for our protection.

  As I had expected, when she wasn’t diving to catch her next fishy snack, Frie naturally made lots of noise on her own. She would make the perfect distraction to draw the attention of anything big, mean and hungry that happened to be hunting in the area. And… hopefully she would be the faster swimmer. That way I could focus all my attention working in the other direction.

  Bite by woody bite, I sank my teeth further into my target. With the tree’s bark torn off, the wood cracked and splintered under my jaws. Once I had chewed out a sizeable hole, I slowed my pace, carefully checking for the st bite that would bring me to that fateful moment.

  When my teeth reached the critical point, the tree began to sway, creaking and groaning before it snapped. I stepped aside to admire my work and watch it all come crashing—

  “TIMBER!” Frie shouted.

  The whole world seemed to quake when the tree smashed down onto the earth, bsting away a cloud of dirt.

  “What was that?” I asked her.

  “I, er… I always wanted to do that!” Frie swam over to me and jumped out of the water. “Hey Beaver,” she said with a gnce at my fallen prize, “what are you cutting down more trees for? Your dam and everything looks finished to me. Right?”

  “Well, since you asked…”

  I brought her over to the riverbank beside my dam, resting in all its glory, right where it divided the creek above from the waters trickling below. My dam was a masterpiece of logs, mud, rocks and branches. What had once been a rushing stream now hardly allowed a single whisper of running water to escape it. It was a kind of dam like you’d imagine whenever you thought of what ‘perfection’ ought to look like.

  …Or at least, it should have been. I wouldn’t expect the otter to understand, and things were very different now.

  “Basically, this area might be far more dangerous than it was when I first arrived here,” I began. “I’m going to expand the dam to raise the water level for us. That should make it harder for anything bad to reach us inside. It’s for our protection, just in case of a problem.” Or a giant-sized problem.

  Frie seemed to scratch her chin with a paw while thinking it through until her eyes lit up. “Ohhh, I get it! It’s like the lodge you built in the water is our castle, and the dam helps keep water back so the castle has a moat! So if you build the dam higher, the castle can have a bigger moat! It’s a defense power-up!”

  “That is… I’m sure that makes sense to you.”

  “And more water means more room to swim! And more fish! You’re pretty awesome, did I tell you that? But Beaver, what is it you found that’s so dangerous here?” Her eyes suddenly went wide. “Don’t tell me—is it the demon lord?!”

  I blinked at her. “The what?”

  “You know… the demon lord,” she continued. “A big bad scary guy with a bunch of demons? Wicked horns, unique magic powers, enemies of humanity, dragons or witches or evil dudes trying to take over the world?”

  “I don’t think I’ve seen anything like that.”

  Frie’s mouth fell open. “N-nothing? Not even a little demon?”

  I shook my head.

  “No. No, that can’t be right!” Frie cried. “I must have been reincarnated here to be the hero! But what if… what if someone’s already killed the demon lord? Or what if this world doesn’t have one? What am I supposed to do with my life?!”

  “I mean, I can’t really answer that for you.”

  The otter fell silent, her eyes staring at nothing somewhere far in the distance. Frie stayed frozen in that position for a while even after I went back to work, chewing off branches from the fallen tree and dragging them onto the dam.

  If this ‘demon lord’ doesn’t exist, isn’t that a good thing? Who would want to be one of those?

  By the next morning, however, Frie managed to overcome her existential crisis. “Beaver, I got it!” She leapt out of the water with a fish flopping back and forth between her paws.

  I stopped chewing another branch for a moment. “I’m not interested.”

  “Well, I could really go for some sushi, but these are actually not bad… No, that’s not it!” Her eyes seemed to shine with a new determination. “Look Beaver, I know how this works: whenever a human is reincarnated from Earth, it’s almost always because they are needed as a hero somewhere else. But there doesn’t have to be a demon lord! It just means that we haven’t triggered the awakening for our powers yet!”

  By now, I was afraid that Frie had rocks fall on her head when she was little. I wasn’t going to hold it against her, though; she seemed to be having fun with… whatever she was trying to do.

  I put a paw on her shoulder. “Don’t give up, Frie. If you try hard enough, I’m sure you can do it. Probably.”

  “I know, right?!” She lit up with a smile. “I’m not sure I’m going to figure it out right now, though, so I have a different idea. Come with me!” She munched on her fish while leading me back to the spot near my dam I showed her before. “I noticed it while I was looking around out here yesterday. It was kind of cloudy then, but now I’m certain! Can you see? There’s fire!” She pointed down with a paw.

  A great forest spread itself wide across the valley below. Once a rolling sea of summer green, the trees had been set abze—not from any wildfire, but by the slow-burning fmes of autumn. It wouldn’t be long before every leaf ‘caught fire’ and turned from gold to deep red, carried away by the wind like dancing embers.

  “Yeah, the valley does look beautiful at this time of year,” I said.

  “You’re not wrong… but that’s not what I meant! Look along the river below your dam!”

  Now that she mentioned it, there was something unusual down there that I hadn’t seen before. In the distance, on either side of the river sat tiny wooden nests with little specks like ants moving around them. It was too far away to make out the details, yet something about the sight made my fur stand on end… It was definitely unnatural. “What is it?” I asked.

  “It looks like a vilge!” Frie said. “With people! I definitely see smoke coming out of a building down there. That means fire and people!”

  Suddenly, I had a very bad feeling about this. “What do you mean, ‘people?’”

  “You know… like humans! A lot taller than us, no fur, two arms, two legs?”

  Two legs? Oh, no… Oh, no! This can’t be happening! The situation instantly went from bad to worse. There is no use trying to hide anymore:

  The giants are already here!

  Malonymous

  [colpse]