Out of the Frying Pan and into the Fire

(Please read the author's note at the end.)

'God fucking damn it all!'

I was just about sick of losing consciousness and then waking up to unpleasant circumstances. This time it seemed I was in the clear. A young woman leaned over me when my eyes opened, blocking the bright light with her head. Her features were unclear and out of focus, hidden in the shadow her head cast.

"Oh, you poor child, you mustn't get up!" a soft hand firmly pressed against my shoulder when I shifted. "You are so lucky, Saint Bantra's slaves found you."

She cooed, "What family do you belong to?"

"I'm not from around these parts, and I have no family here."

"Of course not, scum like you can't be born on the Holy Land Marie Geoise," she seethed, "now tell me whose slave you are before I order you to be flogged!"

"I'm not a slave. I'm a free perso–" I stammer, realization dawning upon me. 'Oh, fuck.'

I spring up and, nauseous, roll off the bed from the pain in my gut. Chain links ring, and I can't breathe, the collar on my neck holds me up, and my ass can't even reach the floor. To top it all off, my face sears with pain; this dumb bitch just hit my face with a riding whip.

Men flood into the room, pull me up, and pin me to the bed. Knowing my position, I don't even struggle. All the while, she yapped indignantly like some shit-sized dog that won't shut the fuck up. "Scare me like that again, and I'll do more than chain and whip you like the dog you are!" She squealed.

Silence is my response; I'm simply at a loss of words. How can I convince her I'm not shit if to her I both smell and look like it. My thoughts are interrupted when she orders something to the lackeys holding me. They immediately flip me over and pull my shirt to the nape of my neck.

"Vermin like you couldn't have infiltrated the Holy Land, it seems you somehow escaped branding," as leaves the room, she continues, "fix it!"

To my embarrassment, I couldn't help but notice her shapely ass as she strutted from the room. That hot mistress vibe she had going on would explain why all the men packed into the room were misty-eyed and drooling for her. All these servants and slaves were having a severe case of the blue-balls. Once the local queen had left, everything returned to its normal state. Servants ordered the slaves to take to me to my branding, making sure to hit me and my soon to be comrades with short rods.

I was lead down a hall into an inconspicuous door for servants and out the back of the manor. It was a misty morning, and anything past 15 meters became a greyish silhouette. The cold, wet grass shocked my feet as I was pulled along a bedewed lawn. When we started approaching a shack hidden in the corner of the estate's property, cages cut through the fog, packed chockful of hunched figures. These people lived like animals in cages. Worst of all, they resigned themselves to such a fate, shivering but too afraid to make noise.

I'm not some unrelenting cliche main character with some sob story that is the source of their inner strength. I'm just a guy, a pretty smart one, but no more than that.

Absolute hysteria came over me when I saw what was waiting for me; to be broken mind and soul and then to be molded into an expendable, mindless, and submissive tool for some fat fuck's use. A Tenryuubito would probably shoot me in one of their tantrums before a month passed.

Flailing wildly to resist, the men on either of my sides lifted me. That was when I realized that I wasn't even in my own body. My thrashing hands were that of a teen's: wiry from strenuous activity and skinny from a lack of nutrition. I was lifted and carried the rest of the way to the shack. A wall of heat hit my face when we passed through the dark entrance, lit only by furiously glowing coals. Without pause, my cheek pressed into the table with only my feet hanging off the edge. I panicked again when I saw an old man with lifeless eyes shuffle the coals around before taking out a glowing brand. Most grotesque and ironic of all, there was a free demo of what the brand would look like on me. The dystrophic old man had a dark, cherry red burn scar on his bony back.

As the heat approached, I spasmed erratically, and then the heat seared my upper back just as a wave of black covered my body. I embodied cold, calculating fury, and – hunger? A giant scorpion-like tail exploded out from somewhere behind me, piercing the old slave's skull with crushing force and mashing it against the ceiling. Pitch black sickles whipped about wildly, leaving the two men who held me down in pieces and a somewhat appetizing smell came from the innards strewn about. The room somehow suddenly became a bit small; my body strong and light. I saw the world through what seemed like a kaleidoscope of shattered glass.

I slowly became less hungry as I stood over one of my captors' remains, my hands moving, but my mind elsewhere, the room no longer dim offered many details to examine. The most eye-catching were the tiny flakes of ash drifting away from the fire; I could see them all at the same time. I had a dual vision: I saw everything as always, but a pixelated overlay captured all motion. This world I was in now was slow, silent, and saturated with tiny movements.

A glimmering caught my attention, and in a fragment of dirty glass, I made eye contact with a pair of pale grey eyes that weren't mine. I shuddered, sounds came back into focus, and I fell onto my ass. When the matte black shell left my body, I suddenly felt the dusty packed earthen floor under my skin. I looked back at the torn-up bodies, then vomited red paste in disgust and horror.

I stumbled out of the branding shack, and the cold air sobered me up. The slaves in the cages all held onto the bars looking at me and wearing on my self-control.

'No!' I shouted internally, 'Don't look at me like that, please!'

I knew that if I freed them, they'd be like a flock of sheep following me, and if any of them were captured, these broken people would immediately rat me out. I knew that I couldn't leave them there, but I loved myself more than these poor saps. I ran back into the shack, spotted a ring with keys, grabbed a broom, and returned outside. I jogged to the nearest cage, threw that keys onto the ground a few feet from the bars, and then laid the broom just barely in reach.

I knew I was lying to myself but couldn't help it. "I don't need you useless people following me because I can't trust you, so I'm not saving you. You are going to save your selves." With those words, I ran into the rows of flower bushes.

'Woooow, how big is this maze!?' I was starting to feel pretty stupid. I managed to get lost in one of those bush mazes. Worse, I could already hear a commotion at the slave cages, which were still not that far away. I always wondered what it would be like being able to jump over buildings with ease.

With that genius question in my head, I focused on the new sensation in my body that I only noticed after fucked up and eaten my captors. I got a mouthful of dirt when my body started transforming. My feet and legs changed shape and elongated—another backward-facing join formed below my knees. Cursing under my breath, I got ready to jump. To be completely honest, I was in a weird shit-squat with my knees now at almost should height even with my back straight.

As guards of the Bantra Estate tried rounding up the escapees, the Head of Guard stopped screaming orders when he saw a humanoid silhouette doing flips uncontrollably while flying over the garden maze towards the forest hunting grounds. This phenomenal flight was accompanied by silence and lots of thrashing in the air.

I overshot really hard. Know what else was really hard? My goddamn landing! The jump was a catastrophe from its first moment to its last. When I jumped, pain tore through my abdomen and up my back as the force of the jump nearly dislocated my thighs at the hip. I refocused my vision when I was a good 30 meters in the air upside down, I think I even made eye contact with some fat dude who watched the guards round up slaves. I started to turn back upright past the peak of my arc of flight just in time to realize was I flying amongst the trees, a wooded area I didn't even realize was so close when I was in the maze. My adrenalin spiked to an incredible level, and a thick black armor covered me. As I rapidly approached a large branch, legs forward, I thought I would stick the landing, and I did, sort of. My smashing impact crushed the branch before I could even soften and compensate for my landing, causing me to fly through branches before crashing into the forest floor.

'Oh wow!' was my only thought when the landing didn't even hurt that much. I fled through the forest in a bouncy wobble walk as I tried to change my legs back. Though my legs did shorten nd even the extra joint dissolved, my muscles and feet were still springy, turning my run into ballet jumps. I soon got the hang of it, and kangaroo'd deeper into the woods.