Young Lucas was a little tired after his first hunting trip into the Great Western Forest. He was still quite young and had not yet started cultivating, so his strength wasn't really that impressive. The only advantage he had was that Anna, his mother, had given him some basic Martial Arts training, so he was confident he could at least hold out until they reached town.
Happy and content, though still a bit embarrassed about blurting out his budding feelings for his Big Sister Eris, Lucas was eager to get back home and wash off the dirt and sweat he had accumulated over the past few hours. However, just as they were setting off, he heard a loud rumbling above his head and instinctually looked up to see if a storm was brewing.
Oddly enough, through the canopy of the forest, all Lucas could see was a blue, cloudless sky, much unlike how it would look if a shower was about to begin.
Shrugging it off, the young boy turned his gaze back to his mother, or at least, he tried to.
All of sudden, for some reason, Lucas felt as if he had become stuck in a mire, where moving his arms, legs, and even head had become much harder.
Trying his best to lower his gaze, Lucas managed to shift his eyes towards the front, only to be met with an odd sight. There, ahead of him, where he expected to see his mom, all Lucas saw was a distorted image of the forest, with all the trees, bushes, and even the ground around him seemingly stretched out and bent in impossible ways.
His mother, who should have been just a couple steps ahead of him, now looked like she was several hundred paces away. She, too, was staring at him, but because of the distance, Lucas could barely even make out her face.
It was a terribly frightening scenario, the scariest he had ever experienced in his short life, and things only got worse from there.
The moment Lucas felt he made eye contact with his mother, no more than five steps in front of him, the world seemed to split open and a brilliant flash of white and black light, accompanied by a thunderous cracking sound, blinded and deafened him.
Before he could even cry out, Lucas felt as if his entire body was smashed into by something.
The sensation was unlike anything he had ever felt before. The closest comparison he could make was from that one time he was playing with his friends near the stream which ran just outside of town and he tripped and face-planted into the water. However, this was much, much more violent.
Lucas had his fair share of bumps and scrapes in life; he knew what it felt like to take a punch of punishment from his mother on his head, or a hit from a wooden sword from his Big Sister Eris, so in his own childish way, he thought he knew what it was like to feel pain and considered himself to be quite tough. But, in the moment he was struck by that invisible force, Lucas realized for the first time what real pain was.
The small body of the young boy was sent hurtling through the air almost a dozen paces before he smashed into a tree, coughing up a mouthful of blood upon impact.
Everything happened so fast and hurt so much that Lucas even forgot to scream, instead he just slumped to the ground and stared forward blankly as he felt a hot, sticky liquid roll down his face.
Before the shock of his current, injured state hit him, Lucas' eyes caught sight of what looked like bolts of black and white lightning flashing towards him. He wanted to get up and dodge, but his battered body wouldn't listen to him. It was almost as if his mind had simply been disconnected due to the overwhelming pain he was feeling.
In the end, little Lucas was powerless to do anything and the inevitable happened. The bolt of strange, white, black light struck his head, and in that instant, everything went blank.
…..
Trevor Ashford had, by now, lost practically all his emotions and sense of self, but his rationality and beliefs still allowed him to understand that killing a child who looked no older than 10 was wrong.
Unfortunately for him and the young boy, Trevor was powerless to do anything as he had no control over what he now presumed was the remnants of his consciousness; his 'Soul' for lack of better descriptors.
When his disembodied self crashed into the young boy's body, Trevor felt a strong impact, but not in the way he had anticipated. Instead of the feeling of one body hitting another, like throwing a punch and tackling an opponent, Trevor Ashford felt a strange combination of being thrown into a lake of water, and through a pane of glass all at once.
While he naturally found the situation odd, he had recently experienced much stranger phenomena, so Trevor quickly accepted it and began checking his situation.
A moment later, Lt. Ashford realized that it wasn't just whatever he crashed into that had fragmented, even his own 'body' had begun to break down. It had taken him a moment to realize his current state because he had already grown completely numb to most physical sensations.
Glancing around, the dying Terran Alliance lieutenant once more found himself in a black space, but instead of being filled with rivers of multi-coloured light, he now saw a large number of pure-white wisps floating all around him.
Almost unconsciously, Trevor Ashford 'reached out' to grab one of these wisps of light, and astonishingly, his 'body', which had so far been quite cumbersome to control, now moved smoothly, easily allowing him to catch his target.
The moment his 'hand' grabbed the wisp of light, a stream of information seemed to flood into his mind; images of an unfamiliar man, and a slightly recognizable woman appeared before his eyes.
Trevor even felt, for some reason, that these two were 'his' parents. Of course, he quickly dismissed this notion and reasoned that the two people were the parents of the young boy he had just hit.
Reaching out to grab another of the nearby white wisps, this time he saw a scene where 'he' was running through a grassy field with a bunch of other children, laughing and playing under the warm summer sun. There was even one little girl who seemed to stand out from the crowd and drew his eye more than the others.
It didn't take Lt. Ashford long to understand that what he was seeing were the memories of the young boy he had collided with a moment ago. Looking around and seeing thousands, if not tens of thousands of these white wisps scattered about, Trevor figured that just like his current self, these points of light were what made up the 'Soul' of the boy he struck.
While the whole experience was curious to say the least, something that caught Trevor's attention was that the wisps of light around him were starting to grow dimmer, like they would soon be extinguished.
Lt. Ashford didn't know what would happen if all these lights went out, but judging by how he felt his sense of self fading away as his own ethereal form broke down, the little boy he assumed he was now sharing a body with would probably die.
A choice had now appeared before Trevor Ashford.
First, he could sit back and do nothing, in which case it was likely both he and the little boy would simply fade from existence.
Second, he could try to take over this new body he coincidentally found himself inside of, though he had no clue about how to go about doing that.
Or third, he could attempt to piece back together the broken bits of the young boy's Soul, an act he also had no idea about how to accomplish.
Given his emotionless and apathetic state, the first option seemed the most reasonable. None of this was his fault and he had no obligation to do anything about it.
Still, the idea of just giving up didn't sit right with Trevor Ashford. Even when faced with great adversity, he loathed the idea of quitting, so while he still had the power to act, quitting seemed wrong.
As for the second option, besides being morally wrong, it also seemed impossible.
Unlike the little boy's Soul, which appeared to simply be broken, his Soul had already been worn down and ground away, leaving barely anything of his former self behind. Even if he did manage to assume control of this new body and somehow stop the collapse of his Soul, Trevor Ashford knew he would no longer be himself.
At best, he would become an empty husk that could not feel joy or love ever again; at worst, he would become a brain-dead living corpse, incapable of independent action or even exerting his own will.
A life like that would probably be worse than just dying.
It seemed the only choice he had from the start was the third option, and somehow it was the one that resonated most with what little was left of Trevor Ashford's being.
He had 'died' once before to save hundreds of lives, including that of the woman he loved, so what did it matter if he made one more sacrifice now? He was going to die no matter what he did, so he might as well make his final moments meaningful by saving this poor child's life.
Still, Trevor had no idea how to do this.
With time running out, the lieutenant took the simplest and most straightforward action he could. He began reaching out and collected as many of the floating wisps of light as he could, thinking, Maybe if I stick them all together, they'll fix themselves.
It was a desperate attempt with no real reasoning to back it up, but it was better than doing nothing, so Trevor Ashford hurriedly got to work.
Fortunately, it wasn't long before he finally received the first good news of his day.
While initially the white wisps he gathered didn't merge, causing him to doubt whether this method would be effective, by some coincidence, two out of the couple dozen wisps he had gathered stuck together all of a sudden.
Pausing for a moment, Trevor Ashford tried to analyze this newly joined fragment and soon understood.
The individual pieces of the boy's Soul couldn't just be jammed together at random, it was more like a puzzle that had to be re-assembled in a specific pattern to form a complete picture.
Now, normally this would be impossible because the individual wisps all looked quite similar. Some where bigger and some where smaller, but, essentially, they were all just points of light. Thankfully, it seemed as though the pieces of the boy's Soul had a certain attraction to one another, so if Lt. Ashford could gather them all in one place and shuffle them around, they would probably merge together on their own.
Encouraged by this discovery, Trevor began collecting the wisps even quicker than before, no longer just using his 'hands' to grab at them, but taking advantage of his seemingly amorphous form to stretch his Soul in various directions, sweeping up large swaths of the light all at once.
However, it wasn't long before Lt. Ashford noticed a problem.
While it wasn't obvious at first, he quickly discovered that exerting himself to collect the pieces of the boy's Soul, and even holding the pieces together in one place, was causing his own Soul to dissolve faster. In other words, he wasn't just in a race against time to complete the last act of his life, he was also facing the possibility of running out of strength to complete said task.
If he could still feel frustrated, Trevor Ashford would certainly be grinding his teeth and pulling his hair out after noticing this harsh reality, but in his current indifferent state, he simply carried on, as if he was oblivious to the chances of failure before him.
At this point, all he could do was give his all, so that was what he did.