Memories

The old man coughed a few ragged heaves as he shifted his weak body just slightly on the hospital bed. IV tubes stuck into his arm, and another damn wire connecting him to a machine that just wouldn't stop beeping. It was a wonder that his irritation didn't kill him off already.

Nevertheless, he weakly turned to look at the young boy sitting beside his deathbed in one of those hard plastic hospital chairs with one leg tucked over the other, his arms folded as his ever cold eyes gazed upon him in his last moments, his life slipping away with each breath.

The young boy was clothed in his school uniform, still scruffy from just having finished a school day, with his bag lazily dropped to a side. One would think that a child looking at their guardian passing away would show some form of upset, some sadness that the person who raised them would no longer be with them.

But not his boy. Oh no, he never expected any feeling or emotion out of that boy, even towards him in his dying moments. It was the reason he'd taken in this mysterious child in the first place. Still, he mustered up a weak, toothy grin. He supposed that that was a small win in the end, that he still had all his teeth as he lay dying.

"What?" The old man croaked. "Not a word of sympathy? Or even an attempt at making me feel better? You know I won't be here long right?"

"Oh shut up you old fart." The boy grumbled. "It's clear that you're not going anywhere from here. You're not going to be awake by the time the next hour swings by. What good will any tears from me do for you?"

"Not much...though I would expect that after having taken you into my care, and having left my entire estate and fortune to you after pulling a few strings to make sure you didn't suffer the inheritance tax bullsh*t. The wolves won't be knocking at your door anytime soon. Is it too much to ask for a heartful send off to heaven?"

"Heaven?" The boy snorted. "After the things you've done? Nah, its a one way ticket to hell for you and its already been punched. Nothing heartful or sweet from anybody, let alone me of all people, is going to lessen the weight of what's in store for you."

"Callous and heartless as ever." The old man chuckled. "I suppose you'll make a good leader for the Coven. At least I know they can't step all over you."

"The moment you die, I'm going to go and slaughter every last one of them." The boy turned up his nose. "Whatever glorious delusion you thought you made of it in your prime, it's nothing more than a bunch of straight, misogynistic, homophobic old men stroking each other off. I don't need a pack of fools like that slowing my life down."

"Huh." The old man smiled. "You're just going to destroy all my life's work into researching the occult...well I suppose it's your prerogative. I named you my heir after all."

"Damn you old man." The boy sighed. "Why did you have to go and pull this crap now? Couldn't you at least wait until after I graduated before dying?" 

"Too much dorayaki...guess I paid the price. Though part of it is your fault too. Your cooking was simply irresistable." The old man said as he examined the youth's stark white hair and blood-red eyes...those cold, lifeless eyes...he chuckled again, making the boy scrunch his brows again.

"What's got you laughing now you old skeleton? The angel of death doesn't have a red nose does he?"

"You know, when they brought you to me as nothing more than a babe in the cradle, a mysterious child with no lineage or record to be found, I thought of just passing you onto the next governor...until I saw those eyes." The old man's face turned grim. "Those eyes, full of awareness and intelligence...but also steeped in darkness and indifference. Eyes that did not see anything around it as worth anything, as if they all were something to be just extinguished if you bothered to feel like it...the eyes of a killer."

The boy shifted in his chair, suddenly seeming more interested in this conversation as his eyes narrowed. The old man continued.

"How could a baby, little more than a few days old, carry such eyes? How could holding it make one feel so cold, even though its blood was hot and its flesh was warm? And then of course, despite being raised in a Japanese home, you 'mastered' English, French, Dutch, German, Spanish, Mandarin, even Malayalam for heaven's sake, at just the mere age of 10. The first time I took you hunting, you knew exactly how to skin a deer. You even managed to fillet a salmon perfectly on your first try. Such things made me wonder..." The old man stared at the boy. "...for you to have eyes like that, and such an interesting skill set, you must be guilty of quite a lot of unspeakable things...I daresay they were worse than what I did in my own lifetime."

"...You would be correct." The boy said. "But what worth is that information to you now? You already have a foot in the grave. I just need to bury the other one tomorrow."

"I spent so long, so much of my life wasted on trying to get even a glimpse on what comes after death." The old man sighed. "It never occurred to me that the answer to that question was standing on a stool while making sushi on my counter at the age of 5. But I guess you're right. That information is all worthless now...still, I would like to know what comes after death."

"I don't know." The boy answered. "I never cared about that, not back then and not even now. All that matters is that I get to use my chances now and not miss out on them like I did before. My own experience was rather quick in all honesty and events just flew by after that. You're taking it nice and slow."

"It's called 'dying of old age'." The old man laughed before sighing deeply. "Come here."

The boy rolled his eyes and walked over to the edge of the bed before kneeling at the side, so his adoptive grandfather could talk with him more intimately. The old man put a hand to the boy's face and looked at him seriously.

"You've been blessed with an opportunity that I probably won't get. The way you carry yourself...it will destroy you. I know you never cared about me. I've only ever been a means to an end to you, that I understand...even respect really."

"I'm sure you'll make a point eventually." The boy said.

"I had a wife." The old man said. "I've been the sick bastard you've known all my life but if there was one thing I did good in this world, it was loving that woman. This sense of unfeeling you hold to, that cold indifference...whatever your ambitions, it will be your downfall. If not a romantic partner, then at least someone...find someone in your life worth loving and caring for."

"I'm not a stranger to love." The boy replied. "I will tell you now that love is useless. It is just a weakness easily exploited...and it restricts you."

"Perhaps you're right." The old man said. "You're the one excelling at history and philosophy after all. In any case, at least find someone whose safety you will prioritise, some sort of living incentive to keep doing what you're doing. Otherwise you'd just get bored."

"One such individual has already been laid out for me." The boy said as he stood up, making the old man's eyes widen in surprise.

"Really?"

"I've been charged with their safety and their well being. But I cannot meet them unless you die." The boy said casually. "As long as you're alive, I'll never be able to set foot on the path to find them. I've never liked responsibilities...so I procrastinated by enjoying watching you live...but I'll meet them sooner or later."

"If that is the case...I suppose I shouldn't keep you waiting." The old man gestured off to the side. "You can pull it now I guess...I'm just bored of it all at this point."

The boy's hand went for the plug without hesitation.

---

The boy woke up with a grunt as he stared out of the hole of his grave like bed. He squeezed the top of his nose and cringed as he dwelt on the memory he'd just relived through his dream.

"It's been three years since that lecherous crone died." He sighed to himself. "Why is he coming up again now?"

Almost 19 years now he'd spent in this new life of his and not once did he ever dream about someone close to him from his past life...probably because he'd never really had someone close in his past life. The line of work he was involved in at that time didn't have much room for human connection. It's primary aim was perhaps to extinguish any chance of human connection at all.

The old man had been good to him for sure while he was growing up in this new identity of his...but it was probably for the good of the Earth he was reincarnated in that the old bastard was gone.

"That reminds me...I forgot to take the trash out." The boy said as he'd remembered he was supposed to take out the bins for the trash collectors to take away before he embarked on this journey. He supposed he would have to do it when he went back to Earth.

Staring up and out of the whole, he judged by the light levels and the smell of the air that it was early morning and that dawn could not have been more than a couple of hours ago. He squared himself as he prepared yet another of his techniques.

"{Mui Tenpen}"

...

If anybody would have happened to be in the area at that time, they would have seen a snake come out of a hole in the ground. The snake was a milky white in colour with eyes redder than blood. A forked purple tongue flickered out of its mouth as it crawled away into the undergrowth.

...

He decided to travel like that on his belly, slithering around in the dirt. It was all for the best that he got as much refinement of his abilities as possible before he reached the Labyrinth City. It had taken almost 19 years for his different Cursed Techniques to synchronise so that he could use them all without having to turn one off to use another.

He'd unlocked the first at his 'birth' so to speak. Though he'd not been remade a human, the being that had been his kind patron had decided to give him a very much human like beginning in the fact that he'd been remade a baby in the Earth of this multiverse. And as a baby, he'd been spawned inside a box in an alleyway of one of the gutter streets of that Earth's Japan.

Not long after he'd gotten there, a man covered in tattoos had happened by the box and had picked up the child within. Now who would not be alarmed at the sight of the man that had picked him up? It was only natural that he was instantly on guard, and as per his experience in his past life, he had prepared to kill though he did not expect to do much given his tiny baby limbs.

He was proven wrong though when all of a sudden the tattooed man's head went flying off his shoulders, like he'd been decapitated by an invisible sword. Apparently that was all it had taken...a bit of killing intent and he'd performed an accidental bit of sorcery. But given his vast amounts of cursed energy and his inexperience with his powers, it could be understood.

His reserves were truly enormous. If the Disgraced One had possessed monstrous cursed energy...well he was quite certain that he had an even more ridiculous amount given he possessed more than just one Cursed Technique. One thing led to another and he'd been taken in by a suspiciously rich old man who lived in a house that was not by any means large but was furnished expensively and was situated in a neighbourhood where the houses were worth quite a lot.

His new guardian was involved in...not so honourable practices that brought him an income but the man had an astonishing obsession with ancient history and their alleged 'magical practices'. Their house had contained a lot of artifacts and art pieces brought over from other countries. Given that the boy learned his new grandfather had travelled the world in his youth as an archaeologist, he supposed it wasn't so surprising that the old man had maybe snuck a few things into his home.

Only at the end of his life did the old coot realise that the most concrete proof of all that he'd been searching for was who he'd been raising as a grandson. Perhaps in the throes of death, the old man simply didn't care about it anymore. After all, the energy with which he'd invested so much of his time digging through ancient legends was long gone by that point.

The boy liked to think he didn't care about the old man because after all, the old man was not the reason he'd chosen to be reborn. But it was odd that the man had surfaced into his dreams at the point where he'd finally managed to get around to beginning this journey.

...

It had been a week since he'd raided that drug dealer's caravan and he'd still not fully counted the the money. He was now very close to the city, only about a fortnight's walk away from Orario's gates...and he'd still not managed to come across his target. One of the conditions of the many favours granted to him was that he did not enter the Labyrinth City without his target and said target had still not shown his face.

The snake slithering across the ground, frightening away the rabbits and the deer let out a surprisingly loud sigh. He'd called back his shikigami now, the ones he'd subdued and had sent out searching. The creatures had come back empty handed with no information for him, so now he supposed that if he did reach the city before his charge did, he'd have to wait around for the boy to show himself.

The snake then began to distort as its body bubbled and became bigger to take on the shape of another animal. The scales disappeared as white fur pushed through while four legs formed, with a bushy tail and long snout filled with sharp teeth. A moment later, a white wolf with red eyes pounced on an unsuspecting doe and snapped her neck with its jaws.

---

"50 million Valis." The boy said as he flicked a gold coin in the air and caught it again between his thumb and his finger, staring at the face stamped into the coin. "The fat blob was carrying a lot it seems. Assuming that a singular Valis is the equivalent of a single Japanese Yen and the conversion rates have not changed much...I'm carrying on me almost 320,000 dollars. Not as much as I expected from all those drug bundles he had on him...maybe he was some lower level dealer. He didn't seem all that bright to be honest, so it's not surprising."

He then bit down on the coin before chuckling and tossing it into his Item Box.

"Of course its not pure gold. The gold coins on Earth were not pure and this world's extraction methods are probably even further behind." The boy sighed as he tossed another log into the campfire and leaned forwards on his stump that he'd procured again. His skillet was on the campfire, and just like last time, he was rendering some fat for eventual frying of even more meat.

The good thing about his plunder was that he now had funds to set up the establishment he wanted to build once he got to the city. After all, his talents could not be wasted, especially when they were something he enjoyed immensely. But he was still going to go into the Dungeon since that was where his sources would be coming from. And the only way into the Dungeon legally was to be an adventurer.

He'd already lived one life under the radar of the law...he didn't want to continue it exactly in this life. The problem was...he didn't find himself too keen on being an adventurer in a Familia. He didn't do so well with other people. In his former life, he had developed social skills because he'd needed them to blend in with the crowd when it was required of him.

But he didn't enjoy being around other people. He worked best when he was alone. And this was even more true with his current power set. If he needed teamwork to be done, then he had the necessary pawns. Everything else would be accomplishable on his own efforts. Especially now that he was discovering more and more hidden abilities of his.

He looked over at a large rock that was sticking out of the ground and pointed at it.

"{Stone Bullet}" He chanted and a small shard of rock materialised from nothingness in front of his finger before before blasting off at the larger rock and putting a clean hole right through it. He drew back his hand and shrugged.

"So I obtained Mukouda's affinities too." He said to himself. "Perhaps it was expected. I do have his template after all...but the flow of magic still feels weird."

Magic and Cursed Energy were both similar but different as he came to discover. Both were replenishable sources of supernatural energy but they...flowed differently within him. Cursed Energy seemed to be a plague or a blight to magical energy. Wherever he applied cursed energy, magic would recede from that area as he'd come to realize. Especially when he was firing off Dismantle at his targets. It made him a natural enemy to mages.

He'd experienced so when he'd stepped into a certain other world after leaving Earth...before he came to this world of course.

He seemed to have far better luck with magic though than the salaryman who originally possessed the magic he was using. He was much more proficient at it, a natural born some would say. Though that was due to his experience with cursed energy most probably. In any case, he preferred the Cursed Techniques more.

He sighed again as he felt a nudge at his feet and he looked down to see a white rabbit bump its head against his ankle. It looked up at him expectantly, as if it wanted him to tell it to do something. He had his hood up still, so the shikigami could only see its master's eyes staring down at it. The boy reached down and scratched it between the ears, making it nudge its whole face into its palm.

"How I wish I could eat you." The boy sighed, before his shadow swallowed the rabbit and sent it back where it belonged amongst its siblings.

He stretched his arms and leaned backwards, hearing the bones click as it became clear he was already getting rusty from all the travelling and no action. His sorcery was always being refined no matter what, as was his near impeccable control of his cursed energy. He'd spent almost nineteen years learning how to do so after all.

He'd had a few mishaps in his life...like the time he'd 'accidentally' cut off the heels from a woman wearing high heels that had knocked his ice cream out of his hands and didn't even apologise, instead chatting away into her phone as she yapped some incorrigible nonsense to someone on the phone while she attracted the eyes of many people with her revealing outfit.

So suddenly losing the support of her shoes had made her take a tumble backwards off of the pavement into oncoming traffic where her head went underneath a tyre...she'd attracted a whole lot more eyes then, only this time for quite a different reason. His babysitter had covered his eyes though, but it didn't matter since he'd eagerly watched it all happen in slow motion.

Then there was also the time he'd accidentally cut the screws holding a basketball hoop and its headboard. It was when the team opposing his in school had won the school tournament and the player who'd hooped the winning score was cheering underneath it, bare chested as he tried to show off his athletic body while swinging his shirt around in the air as his parents who'd been sitting in the stands cheered for him. The hoop and the headboard came off completely right on top of the golden boy's head.

The next time he had class, he was missing one less classmate and a new grave had been filled in the cemetery.

Then there was also that time when he'd snuck downstairs at the age of 4 for a midnight snack, just as a burglar had broken in to get his hands on the antiques and valuables his adoptive grandfather proudly displayed around his house. When the old man came downstairs the next morning, there was a perfectly circular hole where the burglar's heart was and a similarly sized hole in one of the statues that had been put on a display pedestal in the living room...

...as well as another hole that went right through the wall and into the lawn outside, where there was another hole in the fence and another in the neighbour's car...

...and another hole in that particular neighbour's dog.

All the targets of this mysterious, vanishing projectile had been perfectly aligned.

So yes, he'd had a few burps here and there but otherwise, he'd acclimated quite well to his powers. Of course, his insatiable sweet tooth that worried the old man was a slight annoyance on his part...but keeping his brain fresh all the time at such a young age required powerful sustenance. Thankfully, he did not suffer such a drawback much anymore, especially after he unlocked one of his latest skills.

"I'm feeling bored." He muttered to himself as he stood up and looked down at the fat being rendered in the skillet. "I'm going to need to brush up on my fighting skills. It's been a while since I had to fight anything." He looked around his surroundings.

Behind him was nothing but forest, and it was currently early evening. The sun had set but the sky was still light, not even properly dark blue yet, let alone black. Ahead of him was the trail that led directly to Orario. Following his map, he'd been stepping off one road onto another, until he'd finally come upon this road that took him through the outskirts of the Seolo forest and straight to Orario's doorstep. He was almost there.

It would be worth having a little fun. Now exactly what would entail his idea of fun? Of course, nothing but a good fight. And he had the perfect opponent in mind. He held up his arms in front of him, his left arm over the right one and drawn in closer to him more than the right as both hands clenched into fists. If he was going to subdue this opponent anyway at some point, it was better if he did it sooner rather than later. He could just restart the campfire later, or maybe he would take the battle away from his camping area. He took a deep breath as he bent his knees a little and crouched. The air around him became heavier as the trees swayed and ruffled their leaves off of their branches, while some of the grass around him withered and died.

 In his hood, beneath the glowing red eyes appeared another pair that instead of red glowed a bright blue.

"Furube...Yurayura..."

He began chanting the special chant to summon his opponent before the blue eyes in his hood swivelled and locked onto something approaching him from the distance. It was coming up the trail towards his campsite, and he was immediately forced to break away from the ritual as from behind the trees where the trail bent around a little, there appeared a young boy walking with a pack on his back.

A young boy with white hair and red eyes.

The sorcerer lowered his arms and the blue eyes inside his hood disappeared as he narrowed his red ones at the younger kid who also seemed to take notice of him. The kid paused for a moment as they made eye contact and held it for a short while. The sorcerer than sat back down on his stump in front of the fire, and the kid took it as a sign that it was safe to approach closer.

The sorcerer smiled a little. Perhaps he would not get a fight after all...but at last he'd found his target.

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