I write an Isekai about communist revolution until an anime is made out of it

A Warm Welcome

The next morning, I rose and left as unceremoniously as I had entered, with my butt still aching from having spent the past day mounted.

A few hours in, after the road I had started on merged into a wider one, I crested a hill and was faced with what was at least the biggest town I'd seen since that little fucky-wucky a couple days ago. It had a few dozen houses surrounded by fields and woods, and dominated by a central tower that I would have dismissed as a steeple if I wasn't mostly positive that they didn't have Christianity or anything like it.

It didn't seem like anyone was home, though. Normally, on the small villages I'd come across so far, there would be people out working the fields, but the fields extending from this one were deserted. It only got more concerning the closer I rode; all the buildings were completely intact; none of the decay I would've expected from a long-standing ghost town. It was only when I noticed the tools and baskets scattered on the ground that it occurred to me that the people here were avoiding something that could still be around. By the time my monkey brain could assemble a plea run for it, the deafening shockwave of an invisible explosion from behind buildings halfway across town slammed into me.

The force of the blast was enough to thrust me out of my stirrups and backwards in my saddle, and the ringing in my ears was loud enough that I didn't hear Honse when she reared me off.

If my back wasn't hunched forward from a youth of excessive video gaming, I may well have snapped my neck right there on some nondescript dirt street. Hell, if I had kept my feet in the stirrups I might have been dragged along with her and been beaten to death against the ground.

Yes, great, wonderful catch there brain, this was almost the end, and maybe if you keep pondering this shit it will be.

No think, grug should really not die now.

Cringing through the wave of pain in my back, I lunged forwards onto my ass and then onto my feet and was met with another surge of pain from all the muscles I'd just pulled as Honse clopped off behind me. Once I was back up, I was able to be struck by the realization that I had no idea what to do next. Really, where did that come from? what even was it? was that just how they did demolition here? ritual purposes? was it some freak natural phenomena? In hindsight, spending the next several seconds leaning in the middle of the street with my hands on my knees, pondering what that explosion was and breathing out the pain shock, was really a laughably terrible idea. By the time my 50-lane-Chinese-highway of thought finally converged on that realization, I had been standing there for long enough to figure that if there was something to hide from it probably would have killed me by now, and I started creeping towards the direction that explosion had come from.

In any case, Honse was far enough away that I investigated the explosion in order to procrastinate on getting her back, if nothing else. I forced my still-aching body down paths and through yards for a solid minute, homing in on the sounds of clashing metal and fighting until I reached the debris-littered plot of land where that explosion had come from. In the center of what was the floor of a house a few minutes ago, a woman in a plate armor dress propped herself up on a two-handed sword, facing another important-looking figure. This one had a masked face concealed under a cloak, and leather armor thin enough to make out the feminine form underneath (at least this looked like actual useful armor, anyway, but after that bitch with a plate mail bikini I could never really be sure). She (the greater-than-zero chance that it wasn't a she had crossed my mind in that brief moment of observation, but I wasn't willing to address it) held a sword and a dagger backwards in that style that looks even more ridiculous outside of the video games I'd expect to see it in.

They were talking to one-another, but I was too far away (and too unfamiliar with the language) to make out anything useful. At the very least, I could probably assume they weren't going to attack me, so I stepped closer. A few steps in, the cloaked one stopped, turned to me, and called out past her opponent in heavily-accented but otherwise fluent English:

"Mister Offworlder! What took you so long? I started sparring with madame yallubay (what is that, a name, a title, something that just doesn't translate?) since I though you'd take all day to get here."

Hearing my title in plain English drove home a stark reminder that I still had yet to tell anybody here my actual name, as if the author of my existence couldn't come up with anything good and wanted his self-insert to stay relatable. At least that greeting probably meant neither of them were after me, and I hadn't just gotten myself killed by wandering right up to them.

She exchanged what must have been partings with her opponent, and as ms. backwards swords strode towards me, "yallubay" stood up, and shouted something that made the general public start to poke out of their homes.

We were still far enough away that maintaining eye contact as she approached me would have been painful, so fortunately all the ordinary townsmen who started to crawl out of every nook and cranny were able to claim my attention. Mainly, they all just returned to whatever they must have been doing before the "sparring match" that obliterated a house. The only deviation to that was with a few who looked like servants rushing straight to "yallubay", and a group who brushed off the debris covering a door built into the floor of the newly-leveled house. Out that door, another handful of people, dazed but otherwise completely normal (by this world's standards, anyway), rose from a steep stairway.

Confusion quickly drowned out the physical pain I'd been wincing past, and I stood there for a while trying to unpack what I had just seen, until it occurred to me that the cloaked English speaker should be within talking distance by now. Cue another several seconds of gawking at the indifferent scene around me, after which I decided I should go back for Honse, if there was nothing decipherable to do here.