Salazar grabbed his shirt and speed ran out of the bar.
"Tchau!"
He shouted to his colleagues, as a minimal courtesy. He didn't want to be fired again. But there was no way he would linger there even a minute past his shift. Night had fallen already, young and happy people were piling up to drink and have fun. Disgusting. Thank god he wasn't in a night shift.
But he had to pass through them to escape. Wasn't hard though, he was tall, and quite strong. As much as these crowds irritated him, he found comfort shoving some pretty boys with his shoulders.
In no time he was in the outskirts of Sao Paulo. Streets were empty but we still heard the faint thrum of far-off parties. Salazar slipped on his earphones and blasted his depressive suicidal black metal playlist at full volume. It started slowly with chill guitar strums.
He then checked his notifications. He had 4. Mama wrote to him fourteen minutes ago.
« Send me a message when you are home. »
He swiped. He would forget and she would call in a hour anyway. His mother started the helicopter parenting since his arrival in Brazil, fleeing England and law enforcement. Her idea. She was feeling guilty maybe, he thought often. Time to time, he believed she actually was, she should have cared for him earlier. But he was the one who beat up his father-in-law for pretty much no reason… And deep down, he knew it was his flaws that brought him here.
Another message was from his younger brother, Julian.
« I'll come home late bro ! I might be with my girlfriend btw, can I have the room ? »
Julian stayed in England with their mother, but he came to Sao Paulo for summer holydays, and was already pushing his success in Salazar's face. Julian was younger but already more successful in every aspect. Studies first of all. He didn't drop at high school like Salazar, and was in a college in London.
In sport too. They both trained in combat sports, Muay Thai for Salazar, Mixed Martial Arts for Julian. It was probably the worst for Salazar's pride. He used to toy with Julian, in wrestling and in boxing when they were younger. Now the little brother dominated him in every aspects. He even felt like he wasn't going all out on him. Which obviously made it worse.
But most of all, Salazar envied his social skills. Julian had real friends while he only had debate mates on internet. And the girls of course…
"Fuck you man…" he muttered in frustration.
What was he to answer anyway ? He couldn't refuse, he would look like a loser… Salazar sighed, and figured he would stay awake geeking in the living room. Actually, he didn't even want to return home. He simply put a thumbs up to his brother's message as an answer and took a detour to get home as late as possible.
Next, there was a message from his grandpa:
« Dar comida pro cachorro. ».
Feed the dog. This old man would die refusing to call the dog by its name thought Salazar. Caoutchouc, a caramelo dog, or better called a vira-lata in Brazil. His grand father held a grudge since Caoutchouc acted friendly with homejackers few years ago.
Still he kept the dog. So he should behave more kindly with it.
Caoutchouc was Salazar's only friend. He felt they were alike, somehow. Unwanted, ugly, but still around for some reasons. They had a difference though: Caoutchouc would go and mate with some bitches from time to time.
Silly and making fun of himself, Salazar would say to the dog he was a source of inspiration for losers like himself.
Last notification was from SpaceBattles.com. It was about the VS Battle thread between Spider Man and Doflamingo from One Piece. A moron was saying spidey could easily beat Doflamingo. Salazar fumed at the stupidity. There was an urge to answer, but as for all his notifications, he skipped it too.
Actually, Salazar was waiting for something else, a more important message. Few days ago, he had found a new obsession: a role-playing forum called The Watchers : Dying Sun.
Written role play was his favorite hobby. Words and imagination gave the freedom and immersion that no video game can ever offer. At least not with the current technology.
With writing and his mind, he could explore an infinity of realms, faery lands, cyber skies and dark hells. He could play a cruel warlord in a medieval world, a spaceship commander in a Star Wars role play. A tragic hero or a scoundrel, a brave knight or a damsel in distress. He could play a god, deciding the fate of mortals. He could even embody beasts, a legendary dragon or a whole colony of rats.
Basically, he could become anyone and do anything he wanted. Or nearly anything. A good role play should have a well defined setting and its limits.
Here, it was a medieval fantasy universe where players started as apprentices in a guild of mutated monster hunters…
The resemblance with The Witcher was obvious. He didn't like the half-assed plagiarism but still adored the concept. Different children from different backgrounds for different reasons were recruited by The Watch to be raised as monster hunters. They would first be tried by the deadly "Mutations". Then the survivors would learn to fight, to cast magic spells, to survive, the wild beasts, the monsters of the night, and so much more.
The forum's announcement on Reddit promised deep lore, unique magic systems, epic fights and political plots too. Salazar had checked their site and scrolled through most of the public lore and systems. It looked clean, way better than any other forums he has ever been in. Plus, The Watchers was already some months old, they mustered a lot of players and Salazar learned he was arriving for the golden age, just before all the important plots begin and unfold !
He was so thrilled that he beat his ADHD and quickly sent his character sheet to the Game Masters.
He would be playing Salazar D. Stormcloak. A boy with a tragic background, enrolling in The Watch to seek vengeance. He kept his first name, it was pretty much the only thing he liked about himself. The "D" was for the aura and the "Stormcloak" for his Skyrim era.
He was now waiting for validation… It was starting tomorrow, and he didn't get an answer yet for his sheet.
Salazar sighed, and looked away from the screen to check his surroundings. His little detour brought him in a gloomy alley. Streetlights washed the cracked pavement in uneven flickering pools of orange. It left deep pockets of shadow where anything could hide. A feeling of unease started to crawl on his spine.
In his ears, the peaceful guitar strums let place to deep horrifying shrieks. The depressive black metal resonated with the darkness around. Gave life to it. Nah… I'm out, he thought, ready to turn back. But at this moment he saw figures standing there across the street. And he believed they saw him too.
Therefore, it was now out of question to go away. They would think he was fleeing the alley because he was scared of them. Salazar's twisted sense of ego couldn't allow that humiliation. He walked straight forward and past the group of… young boys.
Their eyes met, their lips moved, but the only sound he heard was the suicidal frenzy from his earphones. It howled in a voice understandable only to aficionados.
From both sides, all I feel is forgotten memories…
Wary in the inside, eyes on the corners, but chest high in pride, Salazar went by, and… nothing happened.
Ten meters later, he already felt the catharsis. Like a victory after an intense battle. He smirked in elation. They didn't dare to assault him he thought, excessively proud.
As he kept fantasizing about this little achievement, a toodoop ! woke him up from it. The music volume went down with the notification. Griff has sent you a message.
Yes ! Salazar promptly opened discord. The main Game Master had at last answered him.
"Hi Tryharder, Salazar Stormcloak is validated ! We'll still have to discuss some stuff about his background. The way his uncle in law tortures him seems a bit irrealistic to be honest, but it's just details, don't worry we will see it later. So now you can join our discord server if you want. The Watchers players are nice, they will answer your questions if gms aren't there, and yeah it will be fun, chatting and stuff until the beginning tomorrow, anyway here's the link !"
Irrealistic ? What the fuck ? Who the fuck he thinks he is ? And it's UNrealistic, dumbie. Salazar frantically started to type.
"Okok thank you for the invite ! I can't wait for tomorrow !"
Salazar was hot-headed and headstrong. Even mild criticism was received as an insult. He would retaliate harshly in normal circumstances, but here he was wise enough to not get banned before even joining.
Salazar aka "Tryharder", joined their server, and quickly got a warm welcoming. "Hello Tryharder !"; "Welcome Tryharder !"; "Hi Tryharder ! If you have any questions, don't hesitate !" With a lot of cute emojis too. They actually were a nice community, too nice wondered Salazar. It gave him the impression of these annoying "safe places". He wondered if he would fit in there, he would rather jump straight in the game and the action than lose time with the social antics.
At this instant, he heard a piercing metallic wail, barely muffled by his earphones. He spun around to see a young boy, maybe twelve, straddled on a beat-up bike, skidding to a halt in a shower of dust. The boy's thin arm lifted up a gun, too big for his hand. It was pointed right at Salazar's oblivious face.
The boy shouted something with unconfident rage.
Salazar remained stuned for a second, his eyes locked on the pistol. He slowly took out one of his earbud.
"Da o celular !" shouted the boy, again, his gun gesturing towards Salazar's phone.
Salazar's eyes turned from the gun to the boy's face. The rascal's eyes were wide open, his dilated pupils made them so black, he looked more animal than human.
An eternal gaze to infinity's immensity, cried the song in the other ear.
Salazar then looked to the precious phone in his hands.
This pathetic skinny whelp was threatening his life and trying to rob him ? To take away his phone, his gate out of all this misery ?
Distance that tear us apart… from an endless world…
The thought did not spark fear. It lit a fuse of pure, undiluted indignation. Salazar quickly looked back, the boys he went by earlier were still standing there.
His lips moved in a nervous giggle.
In the end, his phone didn't mean much.
His pride, was all.
His weirdly narcissical mind skipped past the immediate danger to map out the social fallout. He saw it unfold like a disease. If he gave in… this little rat would scurry back to his hole and brag. The other boys there would be witnesses too.
The story would twist and warp as it passed from one mouth to another through the favela, and soon to the whole neighborhood. There were not a lot of tall white boys around. It would reach the bar where he worked and even his boxing club. He could already hear the mockeries behind his back. The boys he could manage with his punches but what about the girls chuckling. The little social standing he possessed would crumble into dust.
No. He would not allow it.
The boy screamed again, his voice cracking.
"Da o celular, porra !"
Salazar's focus sharpened. The boy's thin arm was trembling from the weapon's weight. The barrel traced lazy, shaky circles in the air. The bullet was just a very fast punch after all, and this idiot wouldn't be able to throw it if he broke his arm first.
He had seen countless videos of self-defense. It was easy.
He would explode forward, and slice upward to hit his wrist. In the next instant, his right fist would connect with the boy's jaw. He would knock this tween in one punch.
The child would fold and fall, drop the gun and drop on the floor.
Salazar wouldn't stop there. He would have to teach him a lesson for life. He imagined the satisfying impacts of his sneakers hitting his ribs, shattering them. Another kick in his face. He pictured the kid's eyes rolling back into his head... Then, he would calmly stoop, retrieve the pistol from the limp fingers, and stand over the crumpled form. And… Nah, too much, just a punch and the gun as a trophy.
He saw the kid's finger twitch on the trigger, the final, committed tightening of the knuckle. His eyes widened.
This was the moment.
One last breath, one last whisper.
His weight shifted to the balls of his feet. His head tilted to the right, his torso twisted like a spring, and his left hand sliced diagonnaly upwards. His muscles fired. He lunged following his smooth motion, with the right fist already armed and ready to land on the fragile bones of the boy. His wrist hit the boy's. He felt it. The corner of his eyes caught a blinding burst of light. And his ears caught a deafening detonation. He blinked in reflex, but his right fist was already flying.
His eyes opened, but phosphenes obstructed his vision, and a lingering tinnitus kept him confused. A far away, vanishing shriek still resonated in his head.
My universe shuts up facing the bridge…
After a few blinking, he could see again, albeit difficulty. His arm was stretched before him, his fist clenched. But the greasy orange glow of the streetlight was gone, replaced by the darkness of a closed room. The humid air, thick with exhaust and cooking oil, vanished. A chill, damp scent of wet straw and unwashed bodies filled his nostrils. As the echo of the detonation faded in his ears, he realised that the drone of the city too was gone. The distant traffic, the thumping bass from a far-off party. All was replaced by a rhythmic, jarring creak of wood and the low rumble of wheels on uneven earth.
He was no longer lunging. He was sitting.
His body, which had been a coiled spring of violence, was now slumped on a hard, splintered bench. A jolt shot up his spine. Not the feedback from a landed strike, but the rough shock of a primitive wheel hitting a large rock. Light bled through thin cracks between rough-hewn wooden planks. And he heard the faint but audible sound of hooves hitting the ground. A wagon.
He was in a fucking wagon.
Panic, cold and sharp, tried to claw its way up his throat, but it was drowned by a tidal wave of sheer, uncomprehending confusion. Across from him, in the gloom, sat three other boys. They were young, their faces pale and smudged with grime. Their clothes were not the bright synthetics of his world, but coarse, earth-coloured tunics and ragged breeches. One of them was curled up in the corner of this small… crate, too small to be a wagon. Another was sitting in front of him, timidly looking at him. The third one, was a bit bigger, but a boy still, eyes closed, arms crossed.
"What the hell?" The words were a dry rasp in his own throat.
Did the kid shoot him? Was this a dream, a coma-induced hallucination? He ran a hand over his skull. No pain. No blood. Just long thick untamed hair, unlike his usual simple undercut. He looked down at himself. His jeans and t-shirt had vanished. In their place, he wore too a ragged, scratchy tunic like the other boys. It felt abrasive and alien against his skin. But worse was his arms: skinny, small. Like his whole body. He was like them. He became a child.
He looked around. There was apparently no door, no window. He looked through the cracks, and saw the red glimmer of twilight, the trees, and the rocks from the cliff, the steep mountain path.
He sat down. A strange feeling whirred in his guts. Was he to meet Charon soon ? He gasped. The strange feeling bloomed into a terrifying thought.
"Am I dead ?" he whispered.
The question hung in the air, unanswered. It echoed back at him, morphing from a question into a statement of fact. His throat tightened.
"I am dead ?!"
The scream ripped out of his new, smaller lungs, raw and full of disbelief. A dam of composure broke.
"No !!! Noooooooooo !!!"
He howled while stretching his face with his hands, trying to find a grasp in reality. He then tried to strech a finger, that was a known test of reality, his finger would elongate like rubber and he would enter a lucid dream ! To no avail. It wasn't a dream. He scrambled off the bench, a feral thing now, and threw his weak body against the wagon's wall. The wood groaned but held fast. He beat on it with his fists, the impacts dull and unsatisfying.
"Let me out!"
His voice was a high, thin shriek, a child's voice he did not recognise. He hit again and again against the already cracked wood, and managed to open a breach wide enough to dug his fingers into it. Fingers and lips in, he shouted again.
"Let me out! Let me out!"
But suddenly, a hand clamped down hard on his shoulder, and threw him back on his seat. It was the taller one next to him. His eyes now opened, didn't bear the childish fear the others had.
"Shut the fuck up, or I'll make you."
The boy's voice was a low growl, devoid of the cracking panic in Salazar's own.
"You chose to be here. Don't cry like a bitch now."
Salazar's panic dissolved, instantly replaced by a surge of pure, white-hot fury. To be manhandled and lectured by this filthy, snot-nosed brat. The reality of his shrunken form, his lost strength, had not yet sunk in. In his mind, he was still the man who could shatter a knee with a kick, or a jaw with a punch.
He didn't think much, his frustration needed to get out. This one attacked him first, and insulted him too. He deserved what was coming. He stood up and balled his hand into a fist and swung, this time it would land. He poured all his rage and confusion into the motion. The world should have blurred with the speed of the attack.
Instead, it froze.
The jolting of the wagon ceased. The boy in front of him, his expression a perfect snapshot of contemptuous surprise, was a statue. Everything hung suspended in an impossible, silent tableau. A strange, rattling sound echoed in the sudden stillness, a sound Salazar knew intimately from long nights spent with plastic polyhedrons. The clatter of rolling dice.
Then, a voice. It was not in the wagon; it was inside his head, a resonant, abyssal tone that vibrated through all his soul.
"Critical Failure."
What the… fuck.
Time snapped back into place. His fist, which should have connected with flesh and bone, sailed past the boy's head as he ducked with an unnerving, fluid ease. His knuckles met the rough-hewn planking of the wagon wall with a sickening crack. A spiderweb of agony shot up his arm. He cried out, a sharp yelp of pain, stumbling back and cradling his hand.
Before he could even process the failure of his attack, the other boy exploded upward. His knee drove deep into Salazar's side. The impact landed just under his ribs with surgical precision. The air blasted out of his lungs in a choked gasp. The world tilted, his vision swam in black spots, and he folded like a cheap suit. He collapsed to his knees, his upper body slumping against the edge of the bench as he fought to draw a breath that would not come. He coughed, a dry, rattling hack that sent fresh waves of fire through his bruised torso.
The boy stood over him, looking down with utter disdain.
"This lil' bitch gone crazy already, he won't pass the Mutations."
The word hit him harder than the knee. Mutations.
It was a key turning a lock in his mind. The forum. The Watchers. The character sheet he had written. The lore he had devoured, the world he had planned to enter, flooded his consciousness. It wasn't a memory; it was a download. A sudden, jarring infusion of a life he had never lived, superimposed over the one he had just lost.
He was Salazar D. Stormcloak. Bastard of the high-born Damocles clan. Shipped off to an aunt after his birth. His childhood was a litany of torment at the hands of her husband, a cruel man who found pleasure in creative abuses. He had escaped that life, fleeing with nothing but scars and a burning need for vengeance. He volunteered for the Dusk's Watch, a guild of monster hunters working for the empire, submitting himself to their brutal training and alchemical transformations. All for the power to one day return and settle his debts.
He was in the game. As he fully realised it, text appeared in front of his eyes.
Salazar D. Stormcloak
Bio:
Age: 12 years
Race: Human
Origin: Empire of Nosgard, Region of Galtupor
Height: 1m49
Weight: 37kg
Stats:
Strength: 12
Agility: 14
Magical Power: 0
???
???
???
Skills:
Brawler I
Sword Mastery I
Knowledge:
Langage known: Nosgardian
Style:
None
Inventory:
Ragged tunic
What… The screen disappeared.
He pushed himself up slowly, his ribs ached, his right hand a throbbing lump of useless flesh, hanged by his side, the other pressed against the wall to steady him.
His eyes on his hand made another screen briefly appear:
Injured right hand : high physical malus
Hurting ribs : low physical malus
To that extent ? Damn…
The other boys watched him now, he felt like they had more pity towards him than for themselves. It didn't matter so much anymore though.
This realisation was strange. The foreboding sense of emptiness and loss, met a pulsating thrill. If it was, what it appeared to be… He needn't to mourn his previous pitiful dreary life.
He wasn't just dead. He was reborn.
Nonetheless, guilt refrained, a little bit, his enthusiasm and excitement. His thoughts went to his mother and her grief for his death. To his little brother for whom he has never been a great older brother. To his grandpa who still actually needed him… To them, he was really just dead… But would they cry for the loser he was ? Or would they be happy he wasn't a dead weight for them anymore ? And Caoutchouc, his dumb dog…
Salazar wiped nascent tears with his forearm, and sniffed.
A lot of questions remained, but one thing was certain: he had no choice but to embrace this new life. And not waste it.
As he was about to silently sit down, a heavy, metallic thud echoed from the other side of the door. It was the sound of an armoured fist rapping against the wood.
"Quiet in there you damned rats", a gruff voice called from outside, muffled by the timber. "We have arrived to the fortress."