Chapter Text
I was a loser. Thirty four and unemployed, the kind of jerk who sat on their ass all day and banged on the wall for food. That's exactly how I lived my life for over a decade. I didn't see anything wrong with it, why change when everything was so much easier that way.
So that was my life, up until a few hours ago at least. My parents died, and I spent their funeral tending to myself, I didn't even offer a condolences. I didn't care enough to shed a tear.
But my siblings cared, they cared enough to break into my room and smash my computer, all before they tossed my out onto the street.
Damn it all.
Where the hell did it all go wrong?
"I don't deserve this," I told myself, "how could they be so heartless to kick me out onto the streets."
Thoughts like those raced through my mind, fueled by anger and bitter resentment. But once the fog had cleared, once the reality of my situation had settled, I stopped and looked down at myself.
Rain poured onto me, making my tracksuit cling to my fat, overweight form, hugging every roll. What the hell was I doing with my life? That thought hit me like a brick. I had years, decades, to change myself. Leave my room, get a job, I had souch time to do ANYTHING with my life, but I wasted it all away.
And now here I am.
A loser standing in the rain, so self absorbed he couldn't even attend his parents funeral.
The bitter feeling of regret began to bubble up in the pit of my stomach.
What now?
"If I could do it over," I muttered. "If I could restart, things could have been different, they could have gone my way."
My thoughts began to wander.
I hadn't always been like this. I'd been normal once. Decent grades. Friends. Nothing special, but nothing broken either.
Then I stopped trying, I stopped putting in the effort, and my grades reflected that
I ended up going to a bad high school. Picked a fight I couldn't win. Got humiliated in a way that stuck with me forever.
I tried standing up to some bullies and in the end they stripped me naked in front of the whole school.
After that, I stayed inside. Years passed and I filled the time with distractions, never committing to anything long enough to matter.
I told myself I had standards.
In reality, I was just afraid to fail.
Standing here now, soaked and bleeding, I tried to imagine going back. Doing it properly this time. Sticking with something long enough to make it meaningful.
But something like that was impossible.
A scowl formed on my face. I bet my life wouldn't have gone this way if I were a girl. They never seem to have any problems. They get to sit around looking pretty, never lifting a finger because guys will do everything for them. Dating jerks like my Bullies while never giving nice guys the time of day. They have it so easy while I struggle, I bet they spend their free time laughing at guys like me!
My bitter thoughts were interrupted by shouting nearby. I don't know why I followed the voices, I didn't want to get involved, but something pulled me towards them.
Three students. Two arguing, one stuck between them. None of them noticed the truck coming down the road, they didn't notice the driver was slumped over the wheel.
I tried to shout but years of muttering only to myself made my throat clamp up. My shout wouldn't come out.
So I ran.
My body wasn't built for it running, it wasn't even built for moving. Every step felt wrong, too slow, too heavy. Pain flared with each movement, but I kept going.
I grabbed the closest one and pushed him out of the way as panic flared in my chest.
Then I realized I'd put myself directly in front of the truck.
There was a flash of light.
An impact.
I hit the wall hard enough that everything went white, and for a second, I was still alive.
But the truck continued to barrel forward and with a sickening crunch, everything went black.
When I opened my eyes, the first thing I saw was light.
Not a soft, welcoming kind of light. Not the gentle glow of someone waking up with the sun. This was full-blast, assault-my-corneas kind of light, dumped directly into my face all at once. My head immediately started screaming. Great. Already off to a fantastic start.
Once my eyes decided to stop being useless, I slowly opened my eyelids, letting my vision settle as a blurry face came into focus.
A woman was looking down at me. Blonde. Pretty. The exact kind of woman I would scoff at while saying she'd never give someone like me the time of day. Despite that, it didn't change the fact that she was gorgeous, and her assets" were jiggling right in front of my face.
Heh heh, don't mind if I do!
I'm interrupted by a man shoving his way in front of me, damn it!
I immediately don't like the look of him him. He's got brown hair, an attractive face, a solid build, broad shoulders, the specific kind of physique that in my previous life would have immediately made me hate him on principle.
And yet.
There's nothing.
No gut-clench of bitterness. No reflexive desire to scowl. I just sort of... looked at him.
The woman said something in a warm, intimate tone. Complete gibberish.
Not Japanese. Not anything I knew, that's for sure. They look European or American, but that definitely isn't a language I recognize.
I scrunch up my face as I try to focus, to hear anything that sounds vaguely recognizable. Apparently they enjoy the look I'm making because they both laugh and the man reaches out to poke my cheek.
Then a third voice chimed in from somewhere behind me, higher-pitched. It was definitely a woman, but I couldn't turn around to verify. My neck, I was beginning to suspect, must be broken.
So I tried to do the reasonable thing. I tried to sit up, speak, ask literally one basic question. I'd spent years as a shut-in but I hadn't forgotten how talking worked. I knew how to talk. I still had the concept of talking in my head.
What came out was something along the lines of: "Ahh. Waah."
Stunning. Articulate. I was really a master of words.
Seriously, what the hell is going on!
My arms weren't doing anything useful either. My fingers could twitch. My limbs could flail around in an undignified way. My head felt like it had been packed with wet cement. None of this made any sense.
I was hit by a truck, I'd expect my body to be broken and battered. But it didn't feel broken, it just felt like it didn't want to work properly.
Then the man leaned over and picked me up.
With no effort.
I'm going to repeat that. He picked me up with no effort whatsoever. I weigh over a hundred kilograms. Even accounting for, I don't know, the accident, a coma, catastrophic muscle loss, I shouldn't have be able to be lifted this easily!
Unless I wasn't a hundred kilograms anymore.
Unless my life had just gotten a whole lot more complicated.
Jump forward a month.
By then I'd been forced to accept my situation with the dignity of someone who has absolutely no other options.
I was a baby.
I knew this because someone had finally tilted me at the right angle for me to look down at myself. Tiny hands. Soft useless arms. A body that barely responded to my instructions.
I spent a while denying it, trying to come up with a million different explanations.
This was a dream, I was simply in a coma and dreaming that I was reborn. Or maybe, I was in such a bad state that the hospital had me pumped full of so many painkillers that this was just one bug hallucination. Yeah, that's for to be in!
But in the end, even I had to accept the facts.
I was reborn, I was a useless infant who couldn't do anything on their own.
I couldn't feed myself, I couldn't bathe myself, I couldn't move anywhere, and I couldn't even go to the toilet on my own. I thought my dignity was already shattered in my last life, but it reached an all time low when a stranger literally needs to change my diaper.
And yet I had my full memories. Complete and intact. Thirty-four years of embarrassing, poorly-made decisions, all perfectly preserved in this small stupid head. I remembered my room. I remembered the internet. I remembered dying.
I thought the whole "reincarnation-with-memories" was something people made up when they were either delusional or writing a very specific kind of novel. The universe, apparently, had other plans for me.
The two people I'd seen when I first woke up were my parents. Early twenties, probably. Absurdly young by any metric I'd previously used. My old self would have written them off as children.
But they had already accomplished, at an age well below mine at death, something I had completely failed to do in thirty-four years.
They'd made another human being.
I felt an irrational stab of jealousy about this. Figures, it's probably because they're young and good looking. Good looking people have it so easy.
It also didn't take long to figure out I wasn't in Japan. The language was the first clue. The faces were another. Everyone looked like attractive Europeans, and they were all dressed like extras in a period drama.
Butbthe worst part. The absolute most horrible part that killed a part of my soul every time I thought about it.
There was no electricity.
No appliances. No television. No refrigerator. No computer. A woman in a maid outfit would walk around cleaning things with a rag and a bucket, like it was totally normal, like this was just how cleaning worked.
The furniture was wooden and rough. The utensils looked handmade. I stared at a spoon once for probably too long trying to figure out what century I was in.
My first theory was that my parents were just broke. Some poor rural family that couldn't pay the electricity bill. Honestly, very on-brand for me. Reborn into a new life, get the discount version. Of course.
Then I realized we had a maid.
Which could mean anything, fine. Could be a relative. An aunt, a cousin, someone who just liked cleaning other people's houses for fun. But her posture was too careful. Her tone too controlled. She was staff. She was definitely staff.
So my parents had money. And we were still living like this.
No electric lights anywhere. Just candles and oil lamps throwing shadows around. No switches. No outlets. No sound of any machine doing anything useful. Just fire, and wood, and the general vibe of a place that had never once heard of the industrial revolution.
Something was wrong. Something was very, very wrong.
I'd spent a lot of time in my old life wishing I could go back and start over. Make better choices. Be a less embarrassing version of myself. But I'd had a specific picture in mind, and it involved electricity at minimum.
Another half a year went by.
After six months of listening to my parents talk, I'd started actually understanding pieces of it. Which surprised me. My English grades in my previous life had been terrible, though in fairness that was mostly because I hadn't tried. Maybe my new brain was better wired for this. Maybe babies are just more absorbent. Either way, words started sticking, and I started memorizing them with the quiet satisfaction of someone who has nothing else to do.
I couldn't speak yet. But I understood more than I should have.
Around this point I also discovered out crawling, and I want to be clear about how significant this was. I'd never appreciated movement before. Never thought about it. In my past life I spent most of the day sitting on my ass. I was able to move but I chose to to. I didn't realize just how limiting it felt when you couldn't move at all, even if you wanted to.
And then suddenly I had it again, in a small and clumsy form, and it felt miraculous. I explored every inch of every room I could reach. Excitement that I haven't felt in years bubbled up inside of me
"As soon as you take your eyes off her, she slips off somewhere," my mother said one afternoon.
"So long as she's healthy," my father said, watching me crawl around. "She's got plenty of energy."
There was a word they kept using when they talked about me. "She" and "her." I didn't have a full grasp of the language yet, I didn't understand all aspects of the vocabulary. So in turn, I didn't think much of it. Some words will just take longer to understand.
"She never cries," my mother said, quieter. "Not like other babies."
She wasn't wrong. I didn't cry when I was hungry, or tired, or cold. I'd kept my suffering internalized for thirty-four years and I saw no reason to change the system now.
The only times I screamed were when I failed to stop myself from soiling my pants. That was partly because I wanted to be changed immediately, and party because I was ashamed and wanted to scream to the heavens.
Being mobile taught me two things.
One: this definitely had to be a wealthy household. Two stories. More than five rooms. One full-time, live in maid.
Two: we were deep in the countryside. Past the windows were wide fields, soft hills, wheat moving in the distance, a few houses scattered so far apart they barely counted as neighbors. No roads. No telephone poles. No wires. No lights. Nothing.
Not just rural. Pre-industrial.
This time period existed before modern society. Before everything I'd taken for granted as basic human infrastructure. I'd been reborn and I couldn't even have a computer. I wanted some small connection to the place I'd come from. Some proof it had existed. Instead I had candles and a bucket and a view of some wheat.
I was still sitting with that thought when everything changed one day.
One afternoon, bored and restless as usual, I hauled myself up onto a chair by the window the way I always did, which took considerable effort and zero grace, and looked outside.
And then I saw it.
My father was in the yard.
He was holding a sword.
Not a decorative one. Not a prop. A real live sword, and he was swinging it around like he knew exactly what he was doing, the blade cutting clean arcs through the air with practiced, controlled movements.
I stared.
My first thought was: is this a joke. My second thought was: is my father one of those guys. The fantasy roleplay type. The kind who joins a historical recreation club and takes it very seriously and makes everyone at family gatherings slightly uncomfortable.
I was so busy processing this that I forgot I was balancing on a chair.
My hands slipped.
The floor came up fast and introduced itself directly to my skull with a thud that I felt more than heard, the kind that bypasses your ears entirely and just rattles through the inside of your head. Then pain, sudden and bright, blooming behind my eyes. Everything went white for a second.
Someone screamed and arms found me before I'd even figured out what had happened, scooping me up and pulling me close. Something warm. Something soft. I was being held against someone's chest.
"Rudi! Are you all right?!"
My mother. She sounded like she was reporting a disaster.
She was checking my head with both hands, her fingers parting my hair, her breath coming in short uneven bursts. She was trembling. Actually trembling. The kind of trembling that made me feel like maybe I'd done something pretty serious just now.
"Rudi, sweetheart, look at me. Are you hurt?"
I wanted to tell her I was fine. That it was just a bump. That in my previous life I'd done significantly worse to myself with significantly less drama. What actually came out was a noise somewhere between a whimper and a groan that communicated none of that.
My head throbbed.
Looking at her face, I started to think maybe this had been a bad fall. I'd landed directly on my head. This body was made of soft dough. There was a real chance I'd just rattled something loose up there permanently.
Not that it would be a massive downgrade, honestly.
She looked me over with the tight, focused expression of someone doing damage assessment, then seemed to make a decision. She took a slow breath and placed her hand gently on top of my head.
"Just to be safe," she murmured. "Let this divine power be as satisfying nourishment, giving one who's lost their strength the strength to rise again. Healing."
I had about half a second to think that was a very strange thing to say.
Then her hand started glowing.
Soft at first. Warm. A light pulsing out from her palm against my skin like it was the most normal thing in the world.
And then the pain was gone.
Completely. Instantly. Not fading, not dulling. Just gone, like someone had reached in and taken it out of my body.
I stared up at her.
My brain, which had seen a lot in the last several months and thought it was handling things pretty well, came to a full stop.
That wasn't adrenaline. That wasn't a mother's touch working some psychological trick on me. That wasn't anything I had a reasonable explanation for.
"There we go," my mother said, visibly relaxing, like she'd just fixed a minor inconvenience. "All better."
I kept staring.
Magic. That was totally magic, right? My mother had just done actual magic on my actual head and was acting like this was normal.
I was going to need a minute. This was too much to process.
"You know," she added, with a small proud smile, "Mommy used to be a pretty famous adventurer."
My brain stopped working.
I just sat there in her arms and ran back through the evidence. Sword. Healing spell. Incantation spoken out loud like it was a normal sentence. The word "adventurer" said with complete sincerity by a grown woman.
This wasn't historical reenactment. This wasn't a rural cult. This was a world where all of that was just real.
My father's face appeared in the window.
"What happened?" Sweat on his forehead. He'd probably been out there swinging the sword around the whole time I was busy falling on my head.
"She climbed onto the chair," my mother said, her voice going sharp.
My father blinked. Then sighed. "Hey. Kids fall. She'll be fine."
"She's not even a year old yet." My mother's tone sharpened another notch. "Would it kill you to show some concern?"
"She's tougher than she looks," he said, completely unbothered. "Besides, if she gets hurt, you can just heal her, right?"
"That doesn't mean I want her getting hurt in the first place."
He laughed. "You were worried earlier because she never cried. Look at her now. She's got spirit."
Then he leaned through the window and kissed my mother on the cheek.
She went slightly pink and held me tighter, reflexively, like she needed something to do with her hands.
"All right," she muttered. "Just be more careful Rudi."
I stared straight ahead while they talked, not really seeing anything.
Magic was real.
Swords were real.
Adventurers were real, and my mother had been one, and she said it with the casual pride of someone mentioning they used to be pretty good at tennis.
This wasn't Earth.
That night, after my parents put me to bed and went upstairs, I lay there listening to the sounds of adult life continuing directly above me with no particular attempt at discretion. Creaking floorboards. Muffled voices. The general evidence of two people who had completely forgotten there was a baby in the house with functional hearing.
I closed my eyes.
A different world. Swords and magic and adventurers. Rules I didn't know yet, didn't understand yet.
And then, quietly, a thought crawled in that I hadn't expected.
If this world ran on different rules, then maybe I could too. Maybe whatever I'd been before didn't have to follow me here.
It was a dangerous thought, thinking I could maybe, possibly amount to something.
After that day I started paying attention differently. I listened harder when my parents talked, picking words apart by tone and repetition and context. Unfamiliar words kept surfacing over and over. Names of places. Regions. Countries. None of them matched anything I'd ever heard before, which at this point was barely even surprising.
I was somewhere completely new.
I might as well start learning the place.
I tried not to jump to conclusions. That had always been one of my worse habits, and I was attempting, in this life, to be slightly less of a disaster than the last one.
I felt tired, which honestly tracked. Being reborn had been exhausting enough without adding a whole parallel universe to the list.
But underneath the tiredness, something else was moving around.
I'd died with a lot of regret. The kind that comes from never actually attempting things, not from trying and failing, just from quietly deciding not to bother.
But here.
Here I had memory. I had context. I had the accumulated experience of a full human life, which admittedly hadn't been a very impressive one, but it was more than a newborn was supposed to have.
I was a baby in a world I didn't understand yet, in a body that still couldn't even hold a spoon. People kept using certain words around me that I hadn't quite placed yet.
But the world ran on different rules.
If I fell down, I could get up. If I failed at something, I could try it again. I could get stronger, get smarter, get better, not through the kind of vague optimism I'd dismissed my whole previous life, but through actual effort in a place where effort seemed to produce actual results.
Magic was real.
Power was real.
The possibility of becoming someone worthwhile was real.
I lay there staring up at the wooden ceiling and slowly, with great effort and limited motor control, clenched my tiny fist.
My previous life had ended badly, without anything I could point to and call an achievement. I didn't know what was waiting for me in this one. I didn't know what I'd become, what this world would ask of me, or whether I was capable of any of it.
But I knew one thing.
I wasn't going to waste this.
I was going to do it properly this time. Whatever that looked like. Whatever it cost.