In the past, during job interviews at global big tech companies, they'd ask questions like this: "If you shrank down to the size of a 100-won coin and got trapped in a blender, how would you escape?"
If memory served, the answer was something like, "Just jump out."
Like how a flea can leap a hundred times its body height. If your size dropped to a tenth, your muscle strength would shrink to a hundredth. But your weight would plummet to a thousandth, reducing gravity's pull on you.
Just as a tiny squirrel can jump as high as a horse. Under the same conditions and proportions, smaller, lighter creatures jump farther.
Anyway, thanks to some formula like E=MZ or whatever, even if you shrank, a human could still jump the same height. So you could casually hop right out of the blender.
"...Well, sort of. The conditions are a bit different, though."
I cautiously extended my arm, touching the transparent barrier separating inside from out.
A cold, smooth sensation. The flawless glass wall towered at least twice my eye level.
Still, it was far shorter than the blender height assumed in that interview question. My reflection in the glass wasn't quite human anymore, but it hadn't strayed too far from the basic shape. So, tentatively, my body's specs were still human-like.
Which meant, per the "correct" answer, escaping this glass bottle shouldn't be too hard.
Unfortunately, there were two reasons I couldn't personally verify that theory right now.
First: Unlike the blender in the interview scenario, this bottle's mouth was tightly sealed with a cork stopper. Jump blindly without a plan, and I'd just smash into the ceiling and get flung to the floor.
Second: Just like creatures need the right timing to hatch from an egg...
"Grrr..."
"G-good girl...?"
"Yap—!"
"Eek?!"
It was too soon. Even if I could get out right now, the timing didn't feel right.
Scraaape. Scraaaape—.
Sharp teeth scraped the bottleneck, producing an irritating noise. If I ever met Fenrir, the beast that devours gods in Norse myth, would it feel like this?
The gray wolf gripped the bottle's side firmly with the black pads on its front paws, gnawing relentlessly at the mouth. It radiated unbreakable determination to pry me out of here.
I got the concern for a shut-in hermit glued to his room, but shouldn't the person's own wishes matter in a situation like this? I'd seriously told it I wasn't ready to leave the bottle yet, but this damn pup stubbornly scraped at the glass with its fangs, making that grating racket. What a nuisance.
"From the start..."
How did I go from lying in bed to suddenly trapped in this glass bottle? Where was this place? Where'd this wolf come from? And how the hell did I change like this? Nothing made sense from beginning to end.
But I didn't have the luxury for philosophical musing about who I was or where I was headed. At this rate, I'd be wolf chow soon enough.
To avoid that, I had to do something. Fast.
...But.
"Problem is, I have no idea what I can even do right now."
A shrunken me, small enough for this bottle, had limited options.
Yell at the top of my lungs, bang on the glass walls, or curl up hugging my knees with my head buried between my legs. None seemed likely to yield meaningful results.
"Still, I can't just sit here waiting to get eaten."
It ain't over till it's over. No way was I resigning myself to approaching death. I turned toward the wolf's throat side, seeking some new way out.
"Uh, um..."
Crunch. Craunch. Crraaunch.
The sight that unfolded there left me gaping like an idiot.
"Awoooo—!" "Yap yap!" "Grrr..."
Towering trees blanketed the sky, dense forest everywhere. Through broken branches like a punched hole, a steep cliff face flickered into view. Lowering my gaze slowly revealed a carriage that had tumbled sideways from the cliff.
A cargo wagon stuffed with goods. Its size dwarfed me by dozens, hundreds of times.
Feeling like Alice in Wonderland, I dazedly scanned around. At the front, a horse corpse with an arrow through its head. Next, piles of human bodies—each tens of times my size—knights in gambesons from some medieval flick, knees pierced by arrows, sprawled dead. Their fall-crushed bodies twisted in impossible ways.
Boxes spilling from the wagon. Merchants in period garb mixed in, necks snapped, flesh torn amid the loot.
Amid the carnage, a pack of massive wolves tore into the meat chunks around the wrecked carriage.
Glinting fangs. I averted my eyes from the blood-soaked floor and flesh scraps.
"Yap!"
Just then, the wolf paused gnawing my bottle, eyed its structure, and met my gaze.
Maybe annoyed that all its chewing only scratched the neck, irritation glinted in its eyes.
There were way easier "prey" scattered everywhere. No reason to fixate on some random bottle bounced from the carriage.
That was right. Ignore the hassle of me and go chow down on those corpses like the other wolves. Why won't you?
I wanted to yell it out, but conversation wasn't an option anyway.
Instead, I plastered myself flat to the bottle floor, playing dead to bore it into losing interest.
Please just leave the troublesome snack-me alone and rejoin your pack buddies. Did my desperate wish get through?
Unable to stand the sudden quiet, I cracked an eye. The wolf smirked mockingly, released the bottle from its paw, and stood.
Hope surged—maybe it'd give up on me now.
Craaaack—. Chomp.
But then it gaped wide and clamped onto the bottle's bottom.
"...This is insane."
Reading the imminent future, I hurriedly curled into a ball. Proving my foresight spot-on...
"Grrrrr..." Whoooosh— whiiiish—. "Gyaaaah!"
The wolf shook its head wildly up-down-left-right. I tumbled inside like laundry in a dryer, slamming the walls.
"Sto—p, let, go— you damn, dog, gyaaaaah?!"
Vision flipped madly. Rolling in saliva-soaked cork, I finally collided.
Pop!
The cork flew out. My body shot skyward on momentum.
Whiiish—! "Ekyaaaah!" "Yap—!"
A branch to grab would've been nice, but it'd flung me over the open clearing from the crashed carriage.
No solutions panned out, so I pinned hopes on different physics laws here.
Whish. ...Fwoooosh.
Sadly, gravity existed.
"KyaAAAAH—!"
My soaring body peaked, then plunged like a gutted altcoin.
The wolf chucked the empty bottle aside, positioned under my landing spot, and yawned its maw skyward.
Like a true pup. Pure dog behavior.
Keep falling, and I'd land right in its jaws.
Thrashing limbs desperately, but my tiny flailing didn't budge the trajectory.
Even dodging the hole-in-one, slamming ground at this speed wouldn't leave me intact.
"St-status window! Open stats! Fireball! Ice Arrow! Something! Anything!"
Spouting random game terms in panic, but the drop continued.
Made pointless by thrashing, I squeezed my eyes shut facing the nearing crimson maw.
.
....
...?
No pain came. Puzzled, I cautiously peeked.
"Grrrrr— yap! Yap!"
Against expectations, the wolf snarled viciously at me not entering its mouth obediently.
Ziiiiiing—.
A transparent membrane sprouting from my back—just now, absent in the bottle.
"...?"
And floating right before my face.
STATUSFairy lv.1
Skills
[Fly lv.1 (new!)]
A half-transparent screen filled my vision.
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
Read 28 more chapters ahead on NovelDex!
https://noveldex.io/series/reborn-as-a-fairy-obsessed-over-by-heroes
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━