That Old Black Magic

	The one thing the isekai stories don't tell you is just how much getting TRUCK'D into another world fucks with you.  Sure, I didn't have friends, and my life was a little directionless, but I was having a good time with what I had, and my family gave me all the love I needed.  And then, like that, it all gets ripped away from me.  One second, I'm staring into this semi's grill; the next, I'm waking up in some forest.

	I had the small grace of getting blessed to carry out my autistic /k/ fantasies by being bestowed a nice rifle with a seemingly endless supply of ammo, a sidearm, a bayonet, and a nice aesthetic uniform.  But that only added to my confusion.  I staggered around those woods for what must have been an hour or two, before I finally found a road.  I promptly got jumped by a fuckheug wolf-looking thing, and very nearly got killed right there.  I finally killed the damn thing when it lunged at me and I stabbed it through the heart by sheer luck.  I drug my bleeding hide down the road, in search of a town, which I found about noon.  Once I got there, I promptly passed out.  When I woke up, I met her.

	Her name was something impossible to pronounce in English, but I heard something that sounded roughly like "Tanya," so that's what I called her from there.  She was dressed like a mage from a fantasy game, and it turned out that she had, in fact, just become a practicing mage.  She'd come to this little frontier village to find a party to join and go adventuring with, and the townsfolk had brought me to her, so she could heal me.  When she invited me to join her, I said "sure."  It wasn't like I had anywhere else to go.  When she asked me where I was from, I stumbled around for a little bit before she asked if I was an "outworlder."  Apparently, I wasn't the first poor bastard to get TRUCK'D to this land.  In fact, they were common enough that the intellectuals here had a name for us.  She'd learned about us in what I can only describe as mage school, and so that's what she figured I was by my strange garb, strange weapons, and strange way of speaking.

	Two days later, I was good to go, and she'd found us a party to join.  Although Tanya had been nice enough to me, I still kept to myself.  The more distance I put between myself and my past, the worse my depression got.  I knew nothing about this world, it's people, or even her.  I didn't really want to know.  The rest of the party tolerated me because I drove off a bunch of bandits we ran into early on, and the paladin leading this thing recognized my value as a warrior.  They thought I was weird, which I was, and gave me the distance I so desperately wanted.  The only one in our little rabble that refused to respect my misery was Tanya.  Despite my reserved nature, and despite my best attempts to deflect every personal question, she slowly worked me out of my funk.  Fitting, that a dog lady would have such dogged determination.

	Her stubborn kindness awoke feelings in me that her looks didn't quiet, and as the weeks turned to months and we went on other journeys, I got closer to her.  She and I first had sex three months after we first met, after a particularly harrowing dungeon expedition.  I started to seriously consider whether I wanted to marry this girl.  My parents had often cautioned me about trying out lots of women to find the one that truly works for you, but Tanya had me too enraptured to seriously consider leaving her side.  She was indisputably the brains of our outfit, and if it weren't for the fact that she liked me even more than I liked her, she probably would have kicked me to the curb.

	It was roughly fourteen months after we first met that we found that forsaken tome.  A great big book of ancient magic.  She was smitten as soon as she saw it, and we'd made off with it without much trouble from the orcs that were currently in possession of it.  She and I spent the next few days holed up in an inn, while she studied it in detail.  Deep in the back of this thing was a laundry list of so-called black magic spells.  The stuff wasn't outright forbidden, but it's use was usually frowned on, and some cities had banned it completely.  Apparently, the stuff was more like souped-up versions of regular spells.  The problem lay within its source, from this world's version of the devil himself.  Of course, she didn't tell me this exactly, instead assuring me that it was just kinda dangerous because it was so powerful.  Since I trusted her fully on these matters, the most I did as she studied more of it was offer the occasional limp-wristed "are you sure you should study this stuff?"  She'd poo-poo my worries, and I'd drop it.  Besides, I had finally worked up the courage to propose to her, and my mind was more preoccupied with happy visions of our future as husband and wife.

	It took a few weeks before she felt ready to try one, and by then the forest outside the village was blanketed with snow.  Tanya offered to leave me at the inn where it was nice and warm, but I couldn't shake my misgivings, so I insisted I come with her.  We went far enough into the woods that the villagers wouldn't know what we were up to, and then she wound up her spell.  At first, it looked good.  These wisps of energy that looked almost like flames started to swirl around her lazily, and she was smiling like a kid.  But then her look shifted to more concentration, and it looked like she was straining harder by the second.  Little did I know that her mind was fighting the invasion of evil thoughts brought on by the magic itself, and she was losing.  When she let out a scream, I knew something was wrong.  She sank to her knees, tears streaming from her eyes and kept screaming, as her mind started to break.  Like an impotent oaf, I rushed to her aid.  The wisps of energy turned out to be some sort of active protection, to make sure know one interfered with what was happening to her, and it swatted me aside like a giant would've.  I flew back a good twenty-five feet and slid through the snow.  The last thing I saw was Tanya, still kneeling, still crying, still screaming in pain.

	It's been six months since then.  I've been comatose the whole time, because apparently black magic inflicts internal and psychological wounds that are much harder to heal, even with magic.  Since then, she's apparently gone on a proper villainous rampage, killing indiscriminately.  I want to believe that Tanya's still in there, somewhere, and that I can save her.  Frankly, I don't know.  All I know how to do is kill people.  I know a little about this world's history, and a little about its cultures, and none of that tells me if this has ever happened before, and if there's any saving someone who's gone down this path.  But I failed her when I let her keep studying this shit when I suspected it was bad all along.  I've got to stop her, one way or the other.  Even if I can't save her, I owe it to her for everything she's done for me.