With everything that had happened over the last few hours—my reincarnation, the System and my own over eagerness taking over—I hadn't stopped and asked the most important question.
Who, exactly was I.
Though, an even better question would be asking what I was.
In my first life, I had been Arthur. No last name, no middle name, nothing. By the time I had ended up on the streets it was too late to ever find out. My mother was dead, and my father—the stain of a man that he was—was in prison.
During that life, I had been a nobody, a simple statistic, and a ghost in a digital world.
In my second life, I was Artorias Regulus. But I didn't know anything beyond that. Really, I knew nothing of this current world…a world which was three hundred years in the future.
All I knew, was that I was a survivor.
No matter the lifetime, I had transcended beyond even death to survive. Yet, it still offered me nothing.
I was at a shore of a beach, surrounded by nothing but a turbulent ocean that had once taken my body, and a forest which my instincts were warning me of entering. On my body, was a simple set of clothes. A white button shirt, black jeans and simple black trainers, with no other accessories.
Once again, it offered me no clues on who or what I was.
Even the System, talkative as it was, only had three responses for me.
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|| [You are Arthur] ||
[-][===][-]
|| [You are Artorias Regulus] ||
[-][===][-]
|| [You are the User of The System of Alloys] ||
[-][===][-]
I didn't bother asking again after the seventh time it had presented me with the same three choices. It would simply be a waste of time.
By now, five hours had passed since my reincarnation, and with the time passing, so too had the sun began to fall in the distance. It was winter, after all, and as far as I could figure out, I had woken up at this beach at noon.
"Night will probably fall soon…" I muttered, looking over the darkening sky. Already, the winds were picking up, bringing with them a biting cold. Though, with [Daybreak] they weren't as bothersome as they should have been.
No matter who or what I may or may not be, the simple fact that I was a survivor, remained. No matter how much I didn't want to enter that forest, there was a reason my legs had been moving toward it for the past few minutes.
With nowhere else to go, my answers laid within the darkening forest.
My first step into the land of trees was hesitant, tinged with uncertainty and no small amount of trepidation. Fortunately, such emotions didn't linger for long, as [Omphalos Mind] smothered them out of existence.
After that, with a calm and steeled mind, it was a relatively smooth journey.
The remaining light of the day vanished behind me, as if they weren't granted access to the forest. Though really, it was only my mind overthinking it.
In reality, due to the unnatural size and shape of the trees around me—it sometimes took me entire minutes to walk past just one tree—they reached high into the sky, with countless branches that crossed and connected over each other to create an almost spider-web like pattern.
All it really did was stop any light from entering the forest from above, casting it in a perpetual darkness.
Which, whilst interesting, was also becoming a bit of a pain for me to deal with. My eyes weren't made for seeing through the dark, and with how large the trees of the forest were, their roots were even bigger.
Within an hour I had tripped and nearly fallen over at least three dozen times. I was just happy nobody was around to see me stumble around through the dark like a drunk.
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|| [I wouldn't say nobody user] ||
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'You don't count. There's nobody you can talk about this with; you're stuck in my head.' At least, that's where I thought it was. There were still many things I had to learn about the System after all.
If the perpetual darkness and the blasted, annoying, roots weren't enough to drive me insane, then it was the quiet.
Whilst I wasn't some master nature expert, I'd lived long enough on the streets to see how certain animals would go quiet and hide when a predator passed by them. It was the same sort of quiet that was so prominent in the forest too.
Really, it only made me more cautious and keener of my surroundings, no matter how limited my sight currently was, I could still hear and smell things. Unfortunately, all I could currently hear were my own curses and fumbling steps.
Either way, I was smart enough to see it as the first sign that something was wrong in this forest. It shouldn't be so silent, especially during the night when nocturnal animals should be out and about.
Maybe I was just being paranoid, it had been three hundred years after all, some things were bound to change. But my instincts had never done wrong by me, and I had learned to trust them more often than I did my mind.
Of course, as it always turned out to be, neither my instincts nor my paranoia had been wrong.
I had just passed another gargantuan tree, stepped over another stray root and kept forward on my journey, when I came across it.
For a short, almost desperate moment, I thought it was another human. But then, the darkness seemed to almost part before me, and I realised that no, this was as far from a human as you could get.
It had an unnaturally skinny, almost stick like figure which at first glance resembled that of a human. It was tall, towering over me by a few feet and wearing tattered clothes. Its arms were long, dangly things that reached to its knees and ended with three sharp, almost knife-like claws. Its legs and feet were nearly identical to its arms and hands.
But it was its head, or what sat upon it, that told me exactly what I was looking at.
A deer like skull sat in place of a head, with long branching horns that curved in some places and ended in serrated points on others.
Through my years of exploring and learning about anything to do with mythology, folklore, history and even religion, I had stumbled upon this…monster, many times before.
"Leshy…" My words were a whisper, though so startled and surprised I was, that a few tongues of fire seeped through my lips.
Maybe it was because I spoke, or maybe it had something to do with the sudden light, either way, the creature before me turned, and faced me with an almost otherworldly grace.
A deep, resounding groan rattled through the deer skull on its head, and I watched, as its wickedly sharp claws seemed to almost sharpen under my sight.
I only had a moment to consider everything, before the once mythological creature growled, and began to run at me.