"Haah… haa… hah…"Azalea panted, eyes blinking open into suffocating darkness.
"Fuck… haha… fuck," he wheezed, a laugh torn from cracked lips. The first thing to greet him, yet again, was pain—so mind-breaking it seemed to devour him from the inside out.
No.
This was worse than before.
His face.
It burned—it screamed. Something was terribly wrong.
"Aaahh!" he cried out, the agony spiking as realization dawned.
His face… it had been cooked.
He couldn't see it. But he felt it—in the stiff twitch of ruined skin, in the raw nerve endings screaming with every shallow breath.
It was charred. Blackened. Crisped.
"Again… yet again…" he groaned and let his eyes drift shut.
But something was off. Very off.
Why can't I move? he thought, heart beating faster.
This wasn't like the last time—when he woke up outside the academy, bones shattered, body limp and broken. That had been raw physical trauma. This…
This was something else entirely.
"My legs…" he whispered, eyes snapping open.
He wasn't lying down.
No.
He was… standing?
No. Suspended.
He strained, tilted his head painstakingly to the right—and saw it.
Chains. Heavy and cold. Wrapped around his wrists.
His vision sharpened in a jolt of panic. He turned the other way.
More chains. Holding him aloft.
A room. Stone walls. Damp, empty, cruel.
He looked down.
And his mind stopped.
It simply… refused.
His brain couldn't process it. Couldn't accept what his eyes were showing him.
His legs—Gone.
Chopped off at the thighs.
Gone.
"Hehehe… HeheheHEHEHEHAHAHAHAHA!"
He laughed. Dear gods, he laughed.
He laughed until his ribs ached, until his lungs threatened to burst, until madness clung to his every breath.
So… this was it, huh?
No escape. No salvation. No mercy.
Even now, even after everything, he still wasn't spared.
Still dying a stupid, meaningless death.
Hah…
How hilarious.
How fucking hilarious!
He laughed.
And laughed.
And laughed.
But then—Sobs.
Tears welled up, sliding down blistered skin.
Even through the madness… even through the laughter… grief crawled in like rot.
His legs were gone. Gone.
And now the pain made sense. Of course it did. The screaming, searing agony since the moment he woke—of course it did.
But another question slithered in.
How was he still alive?
No one should survive this kind of mutilation. No one.
A potion, maybe? Some twisted alchemy keeping him from death?
Whatever it was, it meant only one thing:Whoever did this wasn't done.
They wanted to break him. Fully. Utterly.
To shatter him until even he forgot who he was.
Sobs.
Pathetic.
He hated the tears.
Hated being weak.
But weakness… had always been a part of him.
Since that life. The first one.The trauma. The past.
His stepmother's sneer. The way his siblings looked past him like he wasn't there.
The favoritism. The inequality.
Every damn day, shoved in his face.
He remembered the day he walked out. Quiet. Alone. Unnoticed.
No one stopped him.
No one looked for him.
And so the loneliness grew.
He juggled three part-time jobs while in college, scraping by, clawing his way toward some semblance of independence. He saved enough for a tiny apartment—better than that one-room hole he'd once slept in after pawning off everything he owned.
He bought a second-hand TV. A console. A few things that made him feel… human again.
That's when he found it—Arcane Resonance.
Seven parts. One sequel.
A game so vast, so immersive, it swallowed his loneliness whole.
A world of magic. Of freedom. Of infinite possibility.
It started small—just humans.
But each part deepened, expanded, evolved.
More races. Greater threats.
By part three, Arcane Legacy, it became clear:Humans were the weakest race of all.
Still, he loved it. Lost himself in it.
But not all memories from that time were welcome.
No.
One more crept in now.
The real reason he died.
His first, and greatest mistake.
Meeting her.