The transition was violent in its silence.
One moment, Ren was enveloped by the scent of old wood, the damp humidity of a Japanese June, and the rhythmic, mesmerizing drumming of rain on the tin roof of the shrine. The next, those sensations were sheared away, replaced by a sensory assault of purity so sharp it felt like a physical blade in his lungs.
The air here didn't smell of exhaust fumes, of damp concrete, of convenience store fryers, or the omnipresent dust of Tokyo. It smelled of crushed pine needles and a rich, loamy earthiness that spoke of a forest untouched by machinery for a thousand years. It was an aggressive vitality, filling his lungs with oxygen so dense it made his head spin and his vision spotty.
"Okay," Ren exhaled.
The sound of his own voice startled him. It sounded small, fragile, swallowed instantly by the vast, indifferent acoustics of the trees. He pushed himself up from the mossy forest floor, his hands sinking into the damp, velvet-like green. It felt alien against his palms—too soft, too cold.
"Okay. Calm down. Panic is a poison. Fear can be managed. Just breathe."
He dusted off his school uniform. The navy blue blazer, once a symbol of his mundane high school existence and the suffocating expectations of society, was now damp and wrinkled. His loafers, designed for linoleum hallways and asphalt streets, were already caked in a thick, unfamiliar mud that clung like tar. He patted his face, his chest, his legs, frantically checking for physical changes.
No horns protruding from his forehead. No elongated elf ears. His skin hadn't turned green or blue. He checked his teeth with his tongue; no fangs.
He was still Ren Satou. Average height, average build, messy black hair that desperately needed a trim. He was still the nobody he hated.
He took a deep breath, steeling himself. He stepped into a patch of sunlight filtering through the canopy, the light searingly bright compared to the gloom of the rainy shrine. He struck a pose. He placed his left hand on his hip, thrust his right hand towards the towering giants of the forest, and channeled every ounce of his desperate imagination to mask the trembling of his fingers. It was a pose he had practiced in the bathroom mirror a thousand times, mimicking the heroes on the cover of Shonen Jump.
"Status Open!" he commanded, his voice ringing with desperate expectation.
Nothing happened.
A bird chirped in the distance, a sharp, mocking sound that seemed to laugh at him. A leaf drifted down lazily, landing on his outstretched finger.
Ren blinked, sweat beading on his forehead despite the chill. He wiggled his fingers. "Menu? Main Menu? Settings?"
Silence. The forest breathed around him, ancient and unbothered.
He tried again, desperation creeping into his tone, cracking the façade of the hero. "Inventory? System? Map? Log Out? Help? Guide? ...Escape?"
The wind rustled the leaves, whispering in a language he didn't understand.
Ren's arm dropped to his side, heavy as lead.
"Right. The curse. No guidance."
A cold flicker of anxiety gnawed at the pit of his stomach, twisting his gut into a knot. It was the feeling of realizing you had walked too far into the deep end of the ocean, amplified a million times. It was the realization that there was no safety rope. He shoved it down with the practiced ease of someone who used cold logic to organize a chaotic world.
'It's fine.' he reasoned, his internal monologue speeding up, becoming a frantic narration to drown out the oppressive silence. 'This is just extreme immersion. Hidden mechanics are common in stories. Life doesn't have a map either, and people survive. It adds to the challenge. I just need to find a settlement. An NPC. A quest giver. Once I get information, I can find a guild, register, and maybe the magic unlocks then. Or maybe I need a catalyst.'
He began to walk.
The forest was dense, a labyrinth of ancient oaks and towering pines that blocked out most of the sky. The roots were massive, twisting out of the ground like the spines of sleeping dragons, forcing Ren to climb over or duck under them. There was no path, only the suggestion of one—a deer trail, perhaps, leading downhill.
Every step was a calculation. Every shadow was a potential ambush.
'Possibility One,' he thought, forcing his brain to strategize. 'I walk into a town. My strange clothes attract attention. A local noble or wizard notices my otherworldly aura. They realize I have a unique mana signature. I get adopted into a magic academy. I'll be the eccentric transfer student.'
'Possibility Two: I save a merchant from bandits. I use my knowledge of compound interest or modern marketing to help him. I become a tycoon. I'll introduce them to the concept of franchising.'
"Maybe I have a hidden mana capacity," Ren muttered to himself, his voice trembling slightly as he stepped over a thick root covered in bioluminescent fungi. "Or maybe my 'modern knowledge' is the weapon. Gunpowder? No, I don't know the ratio... Charcoal, sulfur, saltpeter... but in what amounts? Penicillin? I just know it comes from mold, but which mold? Blue mold? Bread mold? If I eat the wrong mold, I die."
He paused, a wave of uselessness washing over him.
"Mayonnaise," he whispered, clutching his blazer. "I can make mayonnaise. Eggs and oil. I can revolutionize this world with condiments. I'll be the Mayonnaise Hero."
He walked for an hour. Then two. The shadows began to lengthen, stretching like claws across the forest floor. The temperature dropped, the crisp air turning biting cold, seeping through his thin cotton shirt. His optimism, once a sturdy shield, was beginning to crack under the weight of the creeping silence.
Then, he heard it.
The sound of wood creaking under stress. The distinct, wet snort of a horse.
Ren froze behind the trunk of a massive oak tree, wide enough to hide three men. His heart did a somersault, slamming against his ribs like a trapped bird.
'People. Finally. Interaction. The story begins.'
He peered around the rough bark, holding his breath until his lungs burned.
About fifty meters away, the dense forest opened up into a narrow dirt road. And there, lying on its side like a dead beetle, was the wreckage of a carriage.
It was a small transport wagon, modest and wooden. One wheel was shattered, the spokes scattered like toothpicks. Crates had spilled across the road, their contents—dried meats, bolts of rough fabric, vibrant red apples—scattered in the dirt.
But what caught Ren's eye wasn't the supplies. It was the girl.
She was sitting by the overturned cart, her back to him. She wore a simple peasant dress, the fabric torn at the shoulder and stained with mud. Her hair was long and matted. Her shoulders were shaking violently.
Sobs, quiet and terrified, drifted on the wind.
Around her lay three bodies. Men in leather armor, swords still clutched in their stiff hands. Mercenaries, probably. They weren't moving. Their limbs were twisted at unnatural angles. One man's head was turned completely backward.
Ren's breath hitched. A rush of adrenaline flooded his system, sharpening his vision.
'This is it.'
The realization hit him with the force of a truck. 'This is the classic opening event. The Damsel in Distress. The Bandit Ambush. It's fate.'
His brain instantly analyzed the situation, overlaying imaginary expectations on reality.
'Objective: Save the girl.'
'Danger: Low. The bandits seem to have left. Or maybe monsters did this? But there are no monsters in sight.'
'Reward: Trust, information, a guide to the nearest town, maybe even a companion. She could be a hidden princess.'
Ren looked around for a weapon. He found a sturdy branch, heavy and thick, lying near his feet. He picked it up, testing its weight. He wasn't a fighter. He was weak. His arms were thin, his stamina non-existent. But the men—the bandits—were gone. It was just a crying girl in a forest of corpses.
"Don't worry," Ren whispered to himself, adjusting his tie with a trembling hand. "This is my prologue. The hero always starts by saving someone. This is where the story begins."
He stepped out from behind the tree. He puffed out his chest, trying to look older, stronger, more heroic than a lost high schooler in dirty loafers.
"Hey!" Ren called out. His voice cracked on the first syllable, pitching high before he found his footing. He cleared his throat and tried again, deeper this time. "Hey! Are you okay? Did the bandits go away?"
The sobbing stopped instantly.
The silence that followed was heavy, pregnant with a wrongness Ren couldn't identify. The birds had stopped singing. The wind had died down.
The girl didn't turn around immediately. She seemed to freeze, her posture rigid.
Ren walked closer, stepping onto the dirt road. The gravel crunched loudly under his shoes.
The smell hit him then.
It wasn't just the smell of horse manure or the sweet scent of spilled apples. It was a metallic, coppery tang that coated the back of his throat, thick and cloying. It smelled like a butcher shop in the heat of summer.
Blood. A lot of it. Not just from the men. The ground around the girl was saturated with it.
Ren hesitated. He was ten meters away now. He gripped his stick tighter, his knuckles turning white.
"Miss? I can help you. I... I'm an adventurer."
The lie tasted like ash in his mouth.
The girl slowly stood up. Her movements were jerky, unnatural, like a marionette being pulled by an inexperienced puppeteer. Her joints seemed to click audibly.
"Help..."
Her voice was soft. Melodic. It sounded like wind chimes.
Ren smiled, a wave of relief washing over him so potent it almost made his knees buckle. 'She understands me. The language barrier isn't an issue. The God didn't screw me over completely.'
"Yes, help," Ren said, lowering his stick to show he wasn't a threat. He took a step forward, reaching out his right hand—his dominant hand, the hand that had held controllers, pens, and chopsticks his whole life. "Come here. It's not safe. We need to go."
The girl turned around.
Ren's smile froze on his face, cracking like dried plaster.
She was beautiful. In a porcelain, doll-like way. Pale skin, large, glistening eyes, delicate features that could have belonged to an idol.
But her mouth...
Her mouth was smiling, but her eyes were dead. Flat. Like glass marbles pushed into wet clay. There was no light behind them, no fear, no relief. Just a void. A chaotic, hungry void.
And the smile didn't stop at her cheeks. It stretched too wide, the skin tearing slightly at the corners, revealing teeth that were not human. They were serrated, triangular, and stained a bright, fresh pink.
"Help..." the thing mimicked. The voice didn't match the movement of its lips. It sounded like a recording played from inside its throat, bypassing the vocal cords entirely. "Help... me... eat... you."
Ren's brain stalled. The cognitive dissonance was paralyzing.
'Illusion? Trick? No. Monster.'
"Wh—"
The creature didn't lunge. It didn't roar. It simply vanished.
One second, it was standing five meters away. The next, Ren felt a gust of wind against his face, smelling of rot and lavender.
He blinked.
He looked at his outstretched right hand, the instinct to pull it back firing a millisecond too late.
But his hand wasn't there.
Where his wrist should have been, where his watch usually sat, there was only a fountain of red.
The pain didn't register instantly. The brain, in its mercy, severed the connection for a split second. Ren just stared at the stump of his right arm, fascinated by the bright crimson spraying onto the white cuff of his school shirt, painting abstract art on the dirt road.
'Oh.' he thought, detached, as if watching a movie. 'That's a lot of blood. That's arterial spray. I'm losing pressure.'
Then, the nerves fired.
"AAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHH!!!"
The scream tore out of his throat, raw and animalistic. It was a sound of pure, unadulterated shock that scraped his vocal cords raw. Ren stumbled backward, his legs giving way, and he fell hard onto his ass in the dirt.
He clutched his right forearm with his left hand, trying to hold the blood in, trying to squeeze the hand back into existence. But there was nothing to hold.
The girl—the Demon—stood exactly where Ren's hand had been. She was holding it. She was holding his severed hand by the thumb, inspecting it with mild curiosity.
With a sickening crunch, she bit off the index and middle fingers. She chewed them like carrot sticks, bone and gristle grinding audibly in the silence of the forest.
"Soft," the Demon said, tilting its head. A look of genuine distaste crossed its beautiful face. "Weak. No mana. Tastes like... mud."
She looked at Ren. Her eyes narrowed in disappointment.
"Not... a warrior. Just... meat."
Ren couldn't think. He couldn't plan. The "Protagonist" mindset shattered like glass under a hammer. There was no life bar dropping to critical. There was no warning screen flashing. There was just agony—searing, white-hot agony that blinded him, making the world spin in nauseating circles.
'I'm going to die. I'm going to be eaten. Mom. Dad.'
The Demon took a step forward. Her arm, the one she had used to slash him, rippled. The skin split open and a long, bone-white blade extended from her flesh, glistening with Ren's own blood.
"Run."
The instinct kicked in. The primal, lizard-brain command that predated all video games, all civilization.
Ren scrambled to his feet, slipping in his own blood. He threw his stick at her—a pathetic projectile that bounced harmlessly off her shoulder—and turned around.
He ran.
He didn't run like a hero. He ran like a prey animal. He ran with no dignity, snot and tears streaming down his face. He dove into the thicket, ignoring the path. Thorns tore at his face, branches whipped his eyes, but he didn't feel them. The pain in his arm eclipsed everything.
"Wait..." The Demon's voice drifted after him, playful, cruel, and terrifyingly close. "Don't... go... play... with... me..."
She was toying with him. She could have caught him in a heartbeat. She wanted the chase. She wanted the fear to marinate the meat.
Ren screamed again, a sob mixed with bile. He saw a steep drop ahead—a ravine hidden by ferns.
He didn't hesitate. He didn't check the depth. He threw himself down.
He tumbled, hitting rocks and roots. His injured arm smashed against a protruding stone, sending fresh waves of torture through his body that made him black out for a second. His ribs cracked against a tree trunk.
He hit the bottom of the ravine and rolled into a hollow beneath the roots of a massive dead tree, half-submerged in muddy water.
He curled into a ball, pressing his bleeding stump into the freezing mud to stanch the flow, praying that the filth would plug the arteries.
He held his breath. His heart sounded like a drum in his ears. Thump. Thump. Thump.
He waited for the finishing blow. He waited for the bone blade to pierce his back.
But the Demon didn't follow.
Perhaps the drop was too steep. Perhaps he was too small a meal to be worth the climb. Or perhaps, like a cat that had swiped a mouse and lost interest when it stopped moving, she was just bored.
Ren lay in the mud, shivering violently. He sobbed quietly into his knees, clutching the ruin of his arm.
"It hurts," he whimpered, his voice a broken whisper. "It hurts... Mom... Dad... It hurts..."
The dream died there, in the mud, along with his right hand.
***
Ren didn't die. Unfortunately.
He woke up to a fever that made the world spin and tilt. The sky above the ravine was a kaleidoscope of grey and bruised purple.
His right arm ended in a grotesque, cauterized mess. The mud had worked, combined with the body's shock response, to stop the bleeding. But the wound was angry, swollen, and pulsing with a heat that radiated up to his shoulder.
Thirst was the first enemy. It was a physical weight, a dry hand squeezing his throat.
Ren crawled out of his hole. His body felt like it belonged to someone else—heavy, unresponsive. He found a puddle of rainwater in a hoofprint nearby. It was brown, swimming with mosquito larvae.
In Tokyo, he wouldn't have washed his shoes in it. Here, he lowered his face and lapped it up like a dog.
It tasted of dirt and decay, but the liquid soothing his parched throat was the best thing he had ever tasted.
He needed food. His stomach cramped violently, reminding him that he hadn't eaten since the onigiri yesterday morning.
He remembered the carriage. The apples.
Terror seized him. 'Go back up there? To her?'
'If I don't, I die here. Starvation or Demon. Pick one.'
It took him three hours to crawl back up the ravine. He moved like a ghost, stopping every three seconds to listen. Every snapping twig sounded like a bone breaking. When he reached the road, the sun was setting.
The carriage was still there. The bodies were there too. The smell of rot had begun to set in, sweet and cloying.
The Demon was gone.
Ren scurried to the scattered crates, keeping low to the ground. Most of the apples were crushed or eaten by forest animals, but he found a few bruised ones rolling in the ditch. He grabbed them with his left hand, shoving them into his mouth dirt and all. He ate the core, the seeds, the stem. He nearly choked, coughing quietly, tears leaking from his eyes.
Then, he looked at the dead mercenaries.
One of them, a bearded man with his chest caved in, wore a thick wool cloak. Ren was shivering uncontrollably in his thin, torn school blazer. The nights here were freezing.
"I need it," Ren whispered. His voice was raspy, unrecognizable.
He approached the corpse. The man's eyes were open, staring at the sky.
Ren's hand shook. Stripping the dead was a taboo in every culture. It was disrespectful. It was wrong. It was something only monsters did.
'But if I don't, I freeze. If I freeze, I die.'
"I'm sorry," Ren sobbed, his tears dropping onto the dead man's face. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry."
He struggled to undo the metal clasp with his one hand. It was stuck. He used his teeth, tasting the cold metal and the dried blood on the man's collar.
The rigor mortis had set in. The body was stiff. Ren had to pull hard, lifting the heavy, cold torso to free the cloak. The sound of the dead man's air escaping his lungs—a low moan—made Ren scream and scramble back.
He hyperventilated for a minute, staring at the corpse, waiting for it to rise. It didn't.
Ren crawled back, snatched the bloodstained cloak, and wrapped it around himself. It smelled of sweat, unwashed body, and death. But it was warm.
He looked at the belt. There was a waterskin. And a small knife.
He took those too.
He stood up, catching his reflection in a puddle of blood.
A boy in a tattered, muddy school uniform, draped in a dead man's oversized cloak, one arm missing, face smeared with dirt and apple juice.
He looked like a monster.
He ran back to his hole in the ravine. He didn't dare stay on the road.
The descent into hell was slow. It wasn't a moment, but a series of eroding days where Ren Satou was peeled away, layer by layer.
The ravine became his world. A wet, claustrophobic prison of mud and rotting leaves.
For the first forty-eight hours after looting the corpse, Ren couldn't leave his hollow beneath the tree roots. The fever was a sledgehammer. It didn't just make him hot; it shattered his perception of reality. Shadows elongated into claws. A shifting branch became the Demon's bone blade. The wind howling through the canopy was her laughter, mocking him.
He lay in his own filth. The dysentery hit him on the second night, a violent result of the stagnant puddle water.
It was the ultimate humiliation. In Tokyo, Ren was the kind of boy who wouldn't use a public restroom without lining the seat with paper. Here, he curled into a ball, his stomach cramping so hard he thought his intestines were twisting into knots, while his body expelled bile and water uncontrollably.
'I'm a human being,' he thought, shivering violently under the stolen, blood-stiffened cloak. 'I go to school. I have a student ID. I shouldn't be... like this.'
But the forest didn't care about his student ID. The forest only cared about energy conservation and decomposition.
By the fourth day, the hunger was no longer a dull ache. It was a sharp, predatory madness that overrode his disgust.
Ren tried to hunt. He saw a frog near the water's edge. His brain, still clinging to old logic, calculated the trajectory. Grab it.
He lunged. But his body forgot it was asymmetrical now. Without the counterweight of his right arm, his balance was gone. He face-planted into the mud. The frog hopped away lazily.
Ren screamed into the dirt. A muffled, pathetic sound. He clawed at the mud with his left hand, grabbing a handful of sludge and throwing it at the retreating amphibian.
"Come back!" he rasped. "I'm hungry! Please!"
He didn't catch the frog. He caught a worm.
It was pink, wriggling, and covered in grit. Ren stared at it. His stomach roared.
'Protein,' his brain supplied coldly. 'It's just protein. French people eat snails. This is... basically the same. It's just meat without bones.'
He put it in his mouth. He didn't chew. He swallowed it whole, feeling it squirm all the way down his esophagus. He gagged, dry heaving until tears streamed down his face, but he forced it to stay down.
After the worm, the psychological barrier broke.
He ate beetles. He learned that the shiny black ones were bitter and hard to crack, but the brown grubs found under rotting logs were creamy. He fought a crow for the carcass of a field mouse that had been dead for days. The crow pecked at his head, drawing blood, but Ren swung his stolen knife wildly, his eyes manic, until the bird flew away.
He ate the mouse raw. He didn't have fire. He didn't know how to make one with one hand and damp wood. The meat was tough, stringy, and tasted of iron. He vomited it up an hour later, but he ate the vomit too.
He had to. Calories were life.
But the worst part wasn't the hunger. It was the arm that wasn't there.
Phantom limb pain was a concept he had read about. He thought it meant feeling an itch.
He was wrong. It felt like his right hand was clenched in a fist, squeezing so hard that his fingernails were digging into his palms, piercing the skin, breaking the bones. He could feel every nonexistent muscle cramping.
"Let go," he sobbed in the dark, clutching the stump. "Please, just let go."
But the ghost hand wouldn't unclench.
And then, the smell changed.
It started sweet. Sickly sweet, like overripe fruit left in the sun. Then it turned sharp.
Ren unwrapped the rag on day five. The sight broke him.
The stump wasn't healing. It was leaking. A thick, yellow discharge oozed from the cauterized scab. The skin around it was angry red, streaked with black veins that were creeping up his forearm toward his elbow.
'Necrosis.'
He knew that word. He knew what it meant. If the black lines reached his heart, it was Game Over.
He pulled out the stolen knife. It was dull and rusted.
"I have to..." Ren whimpered. "I have to clean it."
He didn't have anesthesia. He didn't have alcohol.
He dragged himself to a stream—a cleaner one he had found upstream. He washed the knife. It wasn't sterile. It would never be sterile.
He put the leather strap in his mouth.
He didn't cut quickly. He couldn't. He had to be precise with his non-dominant hand. He began to carve.
He sliced away the dead, blackened skin. He scraped at the yellow pockets of infection.
The pain was beyond screaming. It was a white noise that drowned out the universe. It was a red flash that blinded him. He passed out halfway through. When he woke up, flies were landing on the open wound.
He screamed at them, swinging his knife. "Get away! It's mine! It's my arm!"
He finished the job, sobbing, snot running into his mouth. He packed the wound with moss he hoped was medicinal (or at least absorbent) and wrapped it with a strip of cloth torn from his shirt.
'If I die, I die,' he thought, staring up at the canopy, his body trembling with shock. 'But I won't die because of some stupid bacteria. I won't let a germ kill the Main Character.'
By the end of the week, Ren Satou began to disappear.
He stopped walking upright. It was too tiring, and his balance was too poor. He moved in a crouch, or on all fours, scrambling over roots and rocks.
He stopped talking to himself. Language felt unnecessary. The forest didn't speak Japanese. He communicated in grunts, hisses, and growls.
When he heard a twig snap, he didn't think, 'Is someone there?' He thought, 'Threat.' He would freeze, blending into the shadows, his heartbeat slowing down.
He became a part of the ecosystem. Not a predator. Not exactly prey. He was a scavenger. A bottom-feeder.
He slept in short bursts, waking up at the slightest sound. He learned the schedule of the forest. When the owls hooted, he hid. When the sun was highest, he moved.
He forgot the names of his classmates. He forgot the quadratic formula. He almost forgot the face of the girl on the gacha banner.
All that remained was the core directive: Survive.
And beneath that, a cold, hard ember of hatred. Hatred for the Demon. Hatred for the God. Hatred for his own weakness.
'I will live,' he thought, gnawing on a tree root to trick his stomach. 'I will live just to spite you all.'
He moved further north. The instinct—a gut feeling he couldn't explain—told him that the Demon had gone south, so he went the opposite way.
The forest eventually gave way to a rocky ridge. Ren pulled himself up, his breath rasping in his chest. Below him lay a valley that looked like hell had touched it.
It was a battlefield. Not a fresh one, but one days old. The silence that hung over it was heavy.
Dozens of human soldiers lay scattered across the rocky terrain. They had fought something big here. There were scorch marks on the ground, craters that looked like they had been scooped out by a giant spoon. Trees were snapped like twigs.
Ren stood on the ridge, looking down.
A week ago, he would have seen tragedy. He would have seen lost lives, grieving families.
Now, he saw a buffet.
He scrambled down the rocks, his one arm helping him balance, moving with a disturbing agility.
He found a soldier clutching a bag of dried biscuits. Ren pried the rigor-mortised fingers open, snapping the soldier's thumb in the process. He didn't flinch.
The biscuits were moldy. Ren ate them.
He found a flask of cheap wine on a mage's corpse. He drank it to numb the phantom pain in his right hand, which still itched furiously.
He was rummaging through a knapsack when he saw his reflection in a pool of bloodied water gathering in a crater.
The boy looking back at him wasn't Ren Satou.
It was a ghoul. Sunken cheeks, yellow, jaundiced skin, eyes wild and bloodshot with dark circles that looked like bruises. His hair was matted with grease, dried blood, and leaves. His lips were chapped and bleeding.
"Is this..." Ren croaked. His voice was broken, unused for days. "Is this the Hero?"
He laughed. It was a wet, ugly sound, bubbling up from a chest filled with phlegm.
'Reality check. Charm: Zero. Luck: Negative. Fate: Cursed. Name: Trash Eater.'
He shoved a piece of tough, dried meat into his mouth and chewed mechanically. He didn't taste it. He just swallowed. He stripped a sturdier pair of boots from a dead squire, throwing his ruined loafers into the mud. He found a thicker cloak. He found a dagger that was sharper than his knife.
He was looting. Just like in the games. But there was no fanfare. No victory music. Just the buzzing of flies.
Then, the world shook.
It started as a vibration in the ground, subtle enough that Ren thought it was another fever tremor. But then the air pressure dropped, just like it had at the shrine.
Boom.
A sound like thunder rolled across the mountains, echoing off the valley walls. But there were no clouds. The sky was a painfully clear blue.
Ren looked up from the carcass of a wolf he had found near the edge of the battlefield. He was trying to skin it with his new dagger to make a wrap for his feet.
To the north. Far, far to the north.
Flashes of light illuminated the horizon.
Gold. Purple. White.
It wasn't a storm. It was Magic. Real Magic. Great magic that could reshape geography.
Ren felt a pull.
It wasn't the pull of heroism. It wasn't curiosity. It was the pull of a scavenger sensing a massive kill.
Where there was a battle that big, there would be bodies. Where there were bodies, there would be supplies. Swords. Armor. Rations. Potions.
Or maybe... maybe just death.
Ren stood up. His legs were weak, wrapped in rags he had scavenged from three different corpses. His stolen cloak fluttered in the wind.
Another boom. This time, a pillar of light pierced the clouds, dispersing them instantly. The shockwave reached him seconds later, rustling the trees and stirring the hair on his arms.
"The Heroes?" Ren whispered. The words felt foreign on his tongue.
In the stories, the Hero fights the Demon King. The Hero wins. The world is saved. The music swells.
But Ren wasn't the Hero. He was the mob character who got eaten in Chapter 1. He was the cautionary tale.
'If I go there...' Ren reasoned, his eyes narrowing as he calculated the risk. 'I might die. Collateral damage.'
He looked at his stump. It had finally scabbed over, an ugly knot of scar tissue that throbbed with every heartbeat.
'But if I stay here... I'll rot. I'll eat bugs until winter comes, and then I'll freeze.'
He tightened his grip on the stolen dagger.
Ren began to walk towards the explosions. He walked with a limp, hunched over like an old man. He wasn't walking to save the world. He wasn't walking to join the fight.
He was walking because the loud noises meant something was happening. And even a violent death was better than the silent, slow, dehumanizing fading away in the forest.
He walked towards the sound of the subjugation, and towards the destiny that the God had mocked him for desiring.