Starvation

My thoughts were interrupted by the homeless man asking "Are you alright kid? You look like you're about to throw up!"

"I'm fine" I replied, as I stared into the sky and observed the floating city of Xyrus. It was one of the key cities on the continent of Dicathen. The place with the most famous academy on the entire continent.

Now, the question I have is at what point in the story am I at? If Alacrya has already taken over Dicathen then I might as well just give up and wait for Arthur to begin his takeover, but if not then what do I do?

My thought process was stopped by the rumbling noise that came from my stomach and the accompanying pain that came with it. The homeless man next to me looked at my burnt torso and said "You got caught by a mage while trying to steal some food eh. You remind me of myself when I was younger, I'll teach you a little something to make your life a little bit easier, follow me."

I saw no other choice but to follow him and hope he would give me something that would allow me to survive the week, no, the day. I tried to get to my feet but my legs gave in before I could even stand up.

"If you can't walk with just those injuries, kid, then you're never going to survive on these streets. Stand up." said the homeless man.

"what do you mean by that, you fucking bastard…" I muttered under my breath "I was just tortured for hours! What the hell do you mean 'just those injuries' I'm barely fucking alive!"

The old man looked at me with little care in his eyes and simply said three words "Look at me" and pulled back the greasy gray hair that covered his eyes.

He had a burn mark completely covering the top left part of his face, his eye was cauterized shut. His face was decrepit and full of scars but his one green eye glowed with determination to survive. My eyes trailed down his body and found faded scars of years past, he was missing multiple fingers and his calloused hands showed his years of hardship. His feet were missing a few toes and overall looked completely mangled.

"Am I dead, kid?"

"No," I responded.

"Then you can clearly survive, now follow me and if you speak in such a tone again I'll leave you to rot and die"

I stood up using a wall to help me up, I grabbed a stick from the ground and used it as a cane to keep my weak body from falling straight to the floor as I tried to walk.

I followed the old man with a hobble and he said "My name is Andreas, what's yours kid?"

I thought for a moment and responded with "Juno, that's my name"

"Hm, noble sounding for a peasant like you, heh, guess your parents had some hopes for you if they named you that. Clearly you aren't living up to that based on your lack of willpower… Wow, you didn't start yelling at this old man, I guess you're really tired this time. Well, you're going to need some energy because we're at our destination."

I looked out ahead of me and there was a path to a vibrant green forest that looked like it came from the jurassic age. The trees were massive and wide enough to probably contend for records in my previous world, the greenery was lush and there was no path to get into the forest.

"We'll be going in there and scavenging for berries, maybe if we're lucky we'll find a mana beast corpse and get some meat."

At Andreas' statement, I asked "How are we going to get through that dense shrubbery?"

Andreas pulled out a machete and smirked at me while saying "This thing was the most expensive thing I've stolen and gotten away with, ahahahah. Now let's head in, stay quiet so you don't attract any mana beast, if we encounter one, we're effectively as dead as a corpse and we both need to run, we can't deal with those. Only the mages can kill them without any risks."

With that, we began our trek into the unknown, we passed many berry bushes and Andreas would quietly explain that these were poisonous. He explained how to tell if the berries were poisonous. The jist of which was, simply don't eat anything that you don't know is safe to eat. Andres himself had learnt this knowledge through trial and error.

We scrounged through the edges of the forest in search of berries for about an hour before we eventually found a massive bush of berries that Andreas said were edible. For the first time in what felt like years I would be able to eat, I ran over to the bush and ate as many berries as my little stomach, shrunken from starvation, could eat.

After gorging ourselves for a few minutes, Andreas gave me a sack and told me to fit as many berries as I could in there. We spent twenty minutes filling the sacks that Andreas had brought, and decided to begin returning to the city before the sun started setting.

We walked for around 10 minutes before we saw it, it looked like a coyote from my previous life, yet, from Andreas' expression, I knew that this animal was actually a mana beast.

We would die.

The coyote looked at the two of us for a moment before setting me as its target. I could understand why, I was the weaker, smaller looking one, but what I hadn't noticed at the time was that Andreas had already begun to run away, leaving me to die. It makes sense really, and I should have been running away as well, but my body simply refused to move. I was scared shitless.

The coyote approached for a moment and then jumped towards my throat hoping to kill me in one fell swoop.

[AN: What do y'all think of the story so far? I've always disliked the way that main characters are born into effectively perfect circumstances and then claim that everything they have was from hard work when it was largely due to the circumstances of their birth. I'm not claiming that Juno has nothing given to him at the beginning of the story, but all of the things that will be boons to him later in the story are currently what will cause him issues. These issues that I speak of will be explored further in chapter 4 or 5. Thanks for reading!]