Ash ☆ Clueless Isekai'd Demon

In hindsight, he should have asked more questions.

But, really, what would he have asked? He’d fallen asleep on his lumpy bed, dreaming of student loans and his paltry income, and woken up on a feather mattress. His fraying boxers were gone in place of a silken robe. The uneven creaking floor of his studio apartment found itself replaced by smooth stone and plush rugs. His noisy neighbor’s 7 AM workout routine disappeared in favor of bowing, horned servants.

So.

Really.

What would he have asked? “Good morning, can you please explain the peculiar protuberances from your skull”? “Hey there, is this a cosplay cult that kidnapped me despite my crippling poverty”? Even if he’d thought to ask, sheer bewilderment and panic paralyzed his tongue, leaving him without a reply that is dumbly nodding along to anything told to him.

As he’s come to realize over the last few weeks, it boils down to this:

There is no Asher Tran, college dropout eking by his monthly student loan payments with two minimum-wage jobs. He has no brother and no mother letting him mooch and raid their fridges before dragging himself back to his apartment. He has no coworkers, no awkward stepping around his ex-boyfriend who got him one job or the girl he possibly lied about having a car to pick her up with for a date at his other job.

Instead, there is Prince Seere Marchosias Cimejes vi Sielera, the Ash-Strewn Lord, the Flame Blessed of the Golden Sun, and heir to the Onyx Throne of the Greater Kingdom of Salomonis.

And that is a long name and a long list of responsibilities.

Honestly, he’s still piecing it all together.

He’s 99% sure he didn’t hallucinate his life on Earth. Asher Tran did exist, and he is (was?) Asher Tran. By Earth standards, this would be a particularly dedicated hallucination: a fantasy world full of things like elves and demons and magic. Except he knows it exists as he has been actively living it for weeks now.

Proclamations of “Prince Seere McLongName” haunt him wherever he goes, and the multisyllabic sound of his apparent new name turns to sludge in his head. Staff whisper the prince grows arrogant, deigning to answer only those daring enough to demand his attention via touch. Truly, he simply can’t recognize “Prince Seere McLongName” or his other titles as being him. The situation degrades to such an extent that his king father--a father, a fact that keeps throwing him off like nothing else--intervenes and pries a confused, stuttering explanation from his son that does little to allay concerns.

So, he makes his first move as a powerful demon prince: pleading with everyone around him to call him Ash. He’s terribly attached to that title, that Ash-Strewn Lord one, and desires to embody it. Yes. Definitely. No resemblance to any former identity he may have held in another dimension or world or whatever this is. (And if this causes him to think more of home, of his mother and his brother, of even his shitty jobs and copious debt for an education he flunked out of, then that is a depression he must bear for the privilege of realizing when someone is talking to him.)

Only for this clever trick to explode in his face.

Because that Ash-Strewn Lord title? Yeah, he earned it for how his once-in-ten-generations powerful fire magic burnt invading human forces to literal ash. Multiple times. His father is pleased to hear him aligning so closely with that role after weeks of his son’s bizarre behavior for it surely is a sign Ash yearns yet again for the battlefield. In fact, the human kingdoms have set forward a hero blessed by their gods to vanquish the demon blight from the land. What excellent timing!

Ash can read between the lines without having it painstakingly spelled out for him. He’s supposed to kill this human hero. Somehow. As he’s done this before. Apparently.

“My son, you will set forth and crush this threat to our kind,” his father declares in the throne room to a kneeling Ash. “The halo of the Golden Sun shall silhouette you for us to witness.”

Fuck.

Big fuck.

Bigger fuck than maybe when his GPA dropped too low.

Theoretically, Ash should be a skilled swordsman with precise control over the intensely powerful golden flames he wields. That is, at least, what Ash gathers when the knights look on oddly when he flails around with a blade and the utter bafflement by his father when he burns another family heirloom in a surge of panic. Of all the things Ash inherits in this life, the skills he requires to succeed at it are not included, only the responsibilities.

The capital sees him off with a tremendous celebration. Women sob in the streets, men belt out encouragement, and children weave between the crowds to glimpse the prince. From horseback, Ash waves and sweats, only able to think on how this sort of fanfare will broadcast his location and make him an easy target.

Perhaps someone who had gone full throttle into demanding answers regardless of how delusional it might have made them look would have a travel strategy that isn’t scrutinizing a map, tossing it aside in confusion, and then plowing ahead in a straight line. Ash is decidedly not that someone and lacks any and all context except that fellow demons treat him kindly and humans chase after him in mobs. If theory mattered for more than giving him a falsely fearsome reputation, then he would have the skill to incinerate all these pesky humans. Not that he wants to do that, but targeted almost attacks might ward them off better than the sporadic explosions of flame incited by his panic and fright.

Since entering into what has to be uncontested human territory, each day begins and ends with a mob of some sort pursuing him. It wears on Ash mentally and physically, and he falls back on self-flagellation.

Only an idiot like him would end up in another world, in another life, in another reality and then ask zero questions. What did he spend his days doing? Oh, right, barely understanding his name.

“This is how I fucking die,” Ash mutters, leaned forward against his horse’s head with his arms dangling loosely. A tug on his braid tells him that his horse has begun to chew on its end, the poor beast as exhausted and hungry as Ash himself is. “Sorry I doomed you too, Mikky.”

He tried to learn the horse’s name, but it eluded him, another long assemblage of syllables, so he’d taken to using a nickname. The horse didn’t seem to care either way, content to follow Ash’s directions of just go straight.

The sun, his alleged patron, burns irritatingly bright in the sky, and Ash welcomes its descent behind the canopy of trees. They’d lost a mob two hours back, but sometimes they could persist and catch up, so no making camp for Ash and Mikky anytime soon. Night crushes any warmth from the heavens and spills out in inky black. They contain onward. and Ash drifts off atop Mikky.

Perhaps it is revenge for yet another instance of Ash’s slothfulness. Perhaps Mikky is simply tired enough to nod enough while upright like her master. Perhaps the exhausted prince and his steed wander into a clever trap.

Either way, Mikky trips on a stone, and Ash, ever brilliant, does not have its reins in hand, so when she staggers and rears back, Ash goes tumbling off into the brush and down a hill and--

He stares blearily up at the rise of smoke and begins to roll toward the warmth of the campfire in the chilly night, fine clothes now streaked with dirt and littered with twigs and leaves. Fresh bruises make him flinch from the movement and then worse as he tries to sit up.

He isn’t alone. The owner of this campsite watches him from nearby. A human, obviously, and that alone should be sufficient for Ash to panic, but in their hands is something far worse.

The Moonlit Blade. Still in its scabbard, but even a fool like Ash who learned scarce few facts about his new world managed to learn the certain signifer of the gods’ chosen, the hero sent forth by the humans, the one his father decreed should be killed. A sword only the blessed one can draw from its sheath.

Well.

This is awkward.