1 Opening Your Eyes to a Battlefield

The first thing I started to sense...was the screaming. The shouting filled with rage and fear and desperation.

Then my eyes slammed wide open.

At first all I saw was darkness. Then I realized that it was mud. I scrambled upward, away from the ground, only to be pushed back down by a heavy foot. It crushed into my back, knocking the air from me. But just as soon as it landed on my back, it left.

This time I got up quicker, confused yet determined to find out what was happening around me. I saw more mud. But also bodies. And blood. And fire. And death. For as far as the eye could see, I saw...utter carnage.

Men in armor, screaming and yelling as they fought one another.

It was a battlefield. But they weren't like modern soldiers. No. They looked like...knights and medieval soldiers?

Overrun with confusion, I only noticed the unmanned horse charging toward me at the last second. I flinched and threw myself out of the way of the heavy cavalry horse as it barreled it's way passed me. I watched it go by with fear in my eyes - Where was I? What's happening? Before any of these questions could even come close to being answered, something hit my chest.

An arrow.

I hit the floor and looked dumbly at the arrow sticking out of my chest. Then came the pain and I joined the cacophony of noise present on the battlefield.

Blood continued to flood from my body...but the darkness I was expecting never came. The blood just kept flowing. And the pain kept coming. And coming. And coming.

All until some 'smart' brain cell in my head thought 'Huh, if it isn't killing us and we're not bleeding out, shouldn't we just pull it out?' to which my pain-addled brain and body instantly agreed to. I grabbed the shaft of the arrow before tugging on it.

More pain. So much that my vision went white.

But I kept on pulling. Inch by inch. Spurt of blood by spurt of blood. And despite the latter finally pushing my blood loss into what even I, an untrained civilian, could see was a fatal amount of blood loss. Easily 3 pints of blood had left me by now. Yet I kept pulling. At some point, funnily enough, the pain stopped seeming to affect me. It had become the norm for my body right now - the feeling of the hooked arrow head tearing through my flesh - and you don't exactly consciously feel normal, do you? You only ever feel when something brings a change to that equilibrium. Like pain or pleasure.

And the former had become my normalcy.

So when the arrow finally came from my chest, an unhealthy amount of flesh coming out with it, i watched in horrific surprise when the flesh on my body began to knit itself back together.

...What?

That single word echoed through my head, the pain still messing with my head. But, again, I didn't have any time to think as I saw some armored guy running at me with a massive sword raised. But even he didn't get near me, another volley of arrows coming in and hitting in from the side. This time, I was lucky and didn't get hit. But that didn't stop me from flinching and backing away from the arrows, thinking that pain was going to come back.

The man dropped to the ground, his claymore clattering to the ground before coming to a muddy splash a few steps from me.

With the chaos surrounding me, I knew that I needed to defend myself and...and with whatever mystical ability is healing me, I didn't think I'd die. But it'd be best to err on the side of caution, right? So defending myself while trying to escape would be the best course of action.

I scrambled toward the claymore before picking it up, feeling that it was surprisingly light for how big it looked. Despite how surprisingly light it felt, it still had some heft to it so I needed both hands to keep it upright.

I turned on the spot, looking for some kind of end to the fighting and killing surrounding me yet I found nothing but endless fighting.

Some of which was coming right toward me.

But this time a sort of calmness came over me, thinly veiling a sort of buzzing deep in my chest. When I saw the man running toward me, significantly less armored than the man who'd just died in front of me and 'given' his claymore to me, this time I saw...weaknesses.

The slight limp in his leg. The result of a broken bone that had healed incorrectly.

The subtle twitch of his shoulder and arm muscles, giving away the move he was about to commit. Knowing this, I pre-emptively stepped to the side, dragging the sword across the ground as I let it rest in the most comfortable position in my hand which also wasted the least energy.

Just like I'd somehow known, the man stumbled forward as he led with his bad leg, the lift of his sword being delayed as I moved out of the way. By the time the sword came downward, I was gone.

His eyes went wide as from his perspective I must have moved almost supernaturally fast. But it was just some kind of precognition.

Assaulted by confusion over what this ability was...I was assaulted by something else.

A deep, almost instinctive hatred for the man in front of me. Not because he tried to kill me. For some reason I didn't even care about that. It only made that buzzing deep in my chest go up in intensity. No, this hate was something on a deeper level. I didn't hate this man because he tried to kill me or because of who he was...but because of what he was. How he was different to me. Something below me.

It was like I was a completely different species to this man. He was human and I...was something different.

And this hate stemmed from that.

It confused me. It, quite frankly, scared the shit out of me. But it didn't stop me from swinging the claymore I was holding in an upward slash, catching the man right across the face.

It was at this point that I realized I was smaller than just about everyone else on the battlefield. I somehow knew I was younger than my 20-year-old self should have been. Like I had some sort of biological sensor in my head.

I caught a mostly undeveloped body when I turned my eyes down for a split second and realized I wasn't in the tall but overweight body I was used to but the average, slightly too skinny body I seemed to be inhabiting right now. I looked back to the man just in time to see his jaw and most of his lower face come off with the sword...and yet I felt nothing.

No confusion. No disgust. No hollow feelings after having taken a life. Nothing.

...No, that was a lie. I felt something. A sick, twisted elation from seeing an opponent I hated, for some reason, fall to the ground.

The buzzing burst in my chest...and that's when I realized it:

The buzzing was excitement and joy. Pure unbridled happiness at the fighting and killing in front of me and my part in it. A chaotic feeling that flushed throughout me and make me feel that deprived elation. A feeling that mirrored the carnage of the battlefield but inside my body.

And with a singe thing bursting through my body, I tilted my head up and gave out a tumultuous roar that sounded somewhat like an ear-splitting, eardrum bursting screech yet kept the throaty, visceral nature of a roar.

It blended with the sounds of the field I was on...and I made my way to more kills.

No...these people were prey.

That chaotic feeling I was feeling was eroding at my head and I...I didn't exactly dislike it. It let me feel a confidence I'd never had. Joy and excitement beyond what I thought possible.

It'd be okay if I relished in it a little further, right?

. . .

Sitting, I felt the open wounds all over my body begin to stitch themselves back together. My blood was buzzing with excitement as I scowered over the kills I'd racked up through the battle.

Dozens of men, strewn across in piles. Some missing limbs, others being bisected at the waist.

...I'd discovered that I didn't just heal. I was deceptively strong. Despite my skinny arms not looking like much, I packed more of a punch than the average man. I especially found this out when I punched a man's nose and crushed it completely into his face.

Sadly, however, the battle was over. The sun was setting and rain was beginning to pour down to make the mud even worse and to attempt to wash away the blood.

Well, it was washing the blood off of me, at least.

"...I can't help but feel like this is a novel," I mused to myself as I just sat there, the cold rain not even making me shiver - I felt perfectly fine - before continuing with a smile to my face, "Well, I have my cheats, so I'm not far off, am I? Status~" I gave a chime-like shout, finding some humor in my predicament and how it was exactly like so many other novels I'd read.

Why did that feel so long ago, anyway? It felt...well, it felt like those weren't my memories anymore, honestly.

...Seems there's more to my new body than I'd like.

But such thoughts were cut off when my own joke came back to bite me in the ass with a vengeance.

[Initializing System...22%...47%....61%...89%...99%...System Up and Running at 100%.]

[Loading System Interface to Host...Loading...Loading...System Interface Loaded.]

A whole bunch of shit flashed through my vision before a pretty basic screen appeared in front of me.

[Name: Gabriel]

[Age: 13]

[Race: ???]

[Power: 1.4]

[Physique: 11.3]

[Control: 1.6]

"...What the fuck?"