3 Riwall Madec - Part 1

"Shit, she is in labor! Tim, go get Erika, she is scouting around, go, NOW!" The veteran hunter quickly ordered the newcomer to get the only hunter with them that could cast healing spells, he had watched two of his kids being born, and he knew something was off.

Tim ran out of the house, shouting for Erika, who heard him from a few dozen meters and rushed to see why Tim was calling for her from the top of his lungs.

"Shut your mouth, Tim! You could have attracted some monster with all that shouting!"

"Quickly, Erika! She is in labor, go help!"

"Wait. What?!" Before Erika could make any sense of Tim's words, she heard a cry from the hut and rushed inside.

Erika rushed to the woman`s side and began using some weak healing magic to ease her pain a little, but the woman`s womb was quickly absorbing all of her spells. She increased its potency little by little until hitting her limit. Erika felt her mana reserves emptying and was about to faint when the veteran hunter put a hand on her shoulder and started sharing his mana with her.

"I`m not good with mana transfer, but I think it will help."

"Thank you, Ed. Her womb is absorbing all the spell; I never saw something like that. Something must have gone wrong. Her body is showing signs of a |Petrify| spell, and if someone petrified her while she was going into labor, it will not be a smooth birth, that much I can tell."

"Do your best Erika. I have plenty of mana to spare."

She nodded and focused on her healing spell. After a few minutes even Edward, the veteran hunter, was getting winded by the depletion of his mana reserves, both were at their limits when the womb seemed to hit its limit, ceasing to absorb the spell. The woman felt immediate relief as Erika's spell began to ease her pain.

As soon as she stabilized, which took only a couple of seconds, Erika turned to Edward and hushed him out of the hut.

"I can take care of her now, go set a perimeter while I help the baby and the mother."

"You sure you can do it alone?"

"Please, you know I was a healer for almost a decade before becoming a hunter, I helped to deliver more than a dozen children, I can manage this one after she got stabilized."

Edward got the message and hurriedly left, there was a lot of blood that had to be cleaned out before it attracted monsters to their position.

"Ok sweetheart, the danger is past. Let's bring your baby into this world, shall we?" Erika put her best smile and tried to put a front of someone brimming with confidence and energy, but the truth was that she was almost fainting because of the excessive use of the healing spell.

"Geralt, have you seen my Geralt? He went outside to deal with the soldiers, please, find my Geralt" The woman was crying copiously while speaking, but the childbirth pains came back in full force, and she screamed.

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John woke up to complete darkness, a few minutes ago he felt a warm and soothing feeling spread through his body, he could hear Friday trying to talk to him, but he could not understand her words. He tried moving but did not have enough strength, and he felt as sluggish as someone who has just been awoken in the middle of his sleep.

After a few more minutes, he felt cold and took his first breath in this new world. His chest hurt so much because it was the first time he was using his new lungs; the pain was so intense that he could not keep himself from crying. John quickly controlled himself and looked around with his new eyes.

His vision was blurry, but he could see enough to know he was in a hut, he felt hands moving to check his body, but before he could take a look at the giant handling him, he was passed over to another giant.

This giant brought him closer, and he could see that it is not that they were giants, it`s just that he was a baby. He looked to the person holding him, and he felt something deep inside of his chest getting warm. The woman holding him was tired with bags on her eyes and her auburn hair stuck to a thin layer of sweat. She had a triangular face almost perfectly proportioned, with deep green eyes that made her even more beautiful. No words he knew could describe both her appearance or what he was feeling.

For him, it was just moments ago that he was in some kind of lab, and he did something that made it explode. He clearly remembered meeting a goddess named Temelth and something about reincarnation and losing his memory. What he immediately noticed was that he could not remember his past life's relationships, family, and social interactions. He knew he had a mother and a father, but that was about it. No face, no name, nothing.

Only one name came into his mind.

{Friday, you there?}

[Always.]

He felt relieved when he heard her answer, for some reason, all memories related to Friday were coming back to him. Friday`s voice that just barely had a hint of emotion always managed to calm him down.

{You know where we are? Or who are these people?}

[I had just come back online when you called me, but I think this woman is your mother.]

{My mother?! I really reincarnated?}

[It does seem like it, I am starting the self-diagnosis protocol, stand by.]

{Take your time, it's not like I can do much anyway. By the way, I can't remember my name.}

[Information relating to you were never stored in my database as I always had access to your memories.]

{That Temelth lady sure did a job on my memories. I think I will get a new name soon. I will not fret over my old name. Although I can`t remember my family, I don`t feel empty or missing something, in fact, it feels like the life that I remember belongs to someone else.}

[Self-diagnosis complete, no physical anomaly detected.]

[Attention! External force detected, attempting merge.]

{What the hell?}

[Successful merge. The System is now accessible anywhere, anytime.]

{The System? Is it the same one that Temelth told us about?}

[It does seem to be the case]

{So this system is like an RPG system or more like a subroutine running on the background?}

[For us, it's like an RPG system, by merging with it I can pull the raw data and translate it into a HUD (Heads Up Display), which will most definitely give us an edge in this world. For others, it will look like a subroutine in the background. I speculate that they treat the system as just another natural phenomenon, it's unlikely that they know about aether as profoundly as we do after Temelth's explanation.]

All this banter between Friday and the nameless boy barely took a second, a perk of instantaneous communication between him and his AI.

The mother smiled widely looking at her son, at this moment everything else became irrelevant, she looked in the baby`s deep green eyes and found his frown to be very cute, it felt like he already knew the situation he was in and what was happening, she always noticed how babies were usually reactive to stimulus, but her son was different, she knew something about him set him apart from others of his age.

Meanwhile, Edward had already sent Tim back to get a wagon from the village, the woman and the baby would need a safer and more comfortable mean of transportation to get there, and they could not carry all the pieces of equipment from the dead inside their bags.

Erika was shocked. The baby briefly cried when taking his first breath but soon stopped. His small and feeble head moved to the sides as if he was trying to understand where he was and who were these people around him. But what shocked her more is how the baby was leaking strong and pure mana, she never saw any being capable of refining its mana to such extent, not even the grandmasters she met at the capital were capable of that.

"Welcome to this world, my son. May Temelth bless you, who shall be known from this day until the end of the world as Riwall Madec."

Not a second after his mother finished saying his new name, a bright light covered Riwall.

[New name received! Panel unlocked! Want to access your personal panel now?]

{Hell yeah!}