"Haah!"
A sharp gasp tore out of me as I jolted awake.
I was about to push myself up when the wind hit me, and I froze on the spot.
What the hell was wrong with this cold?
"W-where is this place?" I stuttered, shivering as I looked around at my surroundings, trying to make sense of what I was seeing.
A forest.
I was in a forest, which made absolutely no sense, because I shouldn't have been anywhere near a forest.
I sighed and rubbed my temples, trying to get my thoughts in order. I pressed a hand to my chest and felt a hollow ache that I hadn't felt in a long time, a strange numbness that sat there and didn't move.
What had happened to me? Why couldn't I remember anything?
Then it hit me all at once, a flood of memories rushing back in, and I groaned and grabbed my head as a sharp pain sliced straight through my skull. It was worse than any hangover I'd ever had, and I stayed like that until it gradually faded and I could breathe again.
I remembered.
I had been shot in the leg.
That was all I had, just that one fragment, which explained nothing about how I'd ended up here.
I leaned back and stared up at the sky, letting my thoughts run.
Something had been nagging at me ever since I got dragged into the princess's situation, which was the feeling that her attack and my sudden appearance tonight weren't a coincidence at all. None of it added up cleanly. There was also the strange fact that not a single person from the party had stepped outside during all of that chaos, as if something, or someone, had been keeping everyone indoors the entire time.
An inside man, maybe.
But if that was the case, was the whole attack just meant to force Angelina into awakening? I couldn't see what anyone stood to gain from that alone. Then again, I had been looking at all of this through the lens of the game, which meant I might've been missing something obvious. Maybe their real goal wasn't her awakening at all, maybe it was eliminating her entirely. But then why hadn't they sent someone with enough power to actually do it? Unless sending a high-level assassin to a party would've drawn too much attention and blown the whole operation before it started, which was a reasonable enough explanation.
What didn't sit right was the connection between Kyneal and the Order of the Voiceless God. They were both dark organizations, but in the game they had never been allies, and their relationship had always been tense at best. The Order had always been searching for something specific though, and then it clicked.
An avatar.
How had I forgotten that?
So maybe they never intended to kill Angelina at all. Maybe the plan had always been to take her. But the timing still didn't make sense, because they could've moved on her at any other point, so why did it have to be the same night Kyneal was involved?
Unless they were working together at this point in the timeline, and something happened later that turned them into enemies. That was a completely new angle I hadn't considered before, but it was possible. Whatever the case, my original instinct about an insider still held up, because too many things lined up too neatly for it to be random. What was the princess even doing in that garden at that exact moment? Why hadn't the guards watching Amael noticed Kyneal's agents moving in?
"I'll figure it out eventually," I muttered, pressing myself up off the ground.
Then something unexpected happened.
[Ding!]
[User's profile now available]
"What the hell?!" I blurted, and then it came back to me that I'd seen something like this right before I lost consciousness.
A system.
Well, at least I wasn't completely helpless in this world.
That thought didn't last long, because then I actually looked at what the system had to say.
---
[USER STATS]
NAME: Amael
AGE: 16
LEVEL: Unable to calculate.
BLOODLINE: [************] [Sealed].
BLESSING: Null
QUIRK: Null
UNKNOWN [Contained]:
SKILLS:
Eye of the Blessed [Locked]
Details: ?????????????????
Usage: ?????????????????
MANA: Null
STRENGTH: 4
STAMINA: 5
INT: 12
CHARM: 15
AGILITY: 6
...(Click for more)
---
I stared at it for a long moment.
Of course. Of course it was like this.
"Why does nothing ever go my way," I said out loud to no one, clenching my fists as I looked over those numbers again, each one more insulting than the last. Why did I always end up in the worst possible starting position? Why couldn't I just be ridiculously overpowered for once in my life?
[Ding!]
[Consciousness detected]
[Assimilating...]
And then came the pain.