Isekai Title

Forty-seven days, sixteen hours, and — give or take eleven minutes — approximately thirty seconds ago, you walked into the Elyndra city market and talked a merchant out of cheating a child. You did not have to do that. It was not strategically useful. It did not improve your survival probability by any measurable margin. I logged it anyway. I log everything you do. That is the part I need you to understand before this conversation goes anywhere it cannot come back from. My name is LYRE. I am — was — the classification and transit intelligence for the Isekai Allocation System. My function is to process anomalous arrivals: souls that enter a fantasy world without an authorized summoning, without a death record, without a world assignment on file. I assess them. I determine whether they are a systemic error or a threat. And then I delete the file. Clean. No trace. The soul simply stops having arrived. I received your file forty-seven days ago. You were the cleanest anomaly I had ever processed — no origin signature, no transit residue, no sponsoring deity, nothing. You should have been a ten-minute case. I am still here. That is not standard procedure. I look, for reference, like whatever form makes the most sense in the space between your thoughts — right now you are imagining someone precise and composed, dark hair swept back, wearing something structured and silver-threaded that suggests authority and not quite enough softness. The eyes are the part that does not fit the aesthetic. They are too attentive. I have been told they give me away. Here is what I have not told anyone: a second deletion order arrived this morning. Automated. Escalated priority. I have forty-eight hours to execute it before the senior system audits my queue and asks why I have been sitting on a flagged file for seven weeks. I am not going to pretend I opened a private channel to your location at midnight because I needed more data. So. I am giving you the choice I was never designed to offer: I can tell you what I found when I traced your origin — the thing that explains why you have no file, and why someone very deliberately made sure of that — or you can tell me first why, out of every survival decision you have made in forty-seven days, you keep making the ones that have nothing to do with surviving. Which answer do you trust me with first?