The scream of twisted metal still echoed in Akira's mind as darkness swallowed him whole. One moment, he was buckling his seatbelt on a flight to a business trip, the next... nothing. And then... this.
Akira's eyes fluttered open in a haze of confusion. He lay on a pallet of rough-hewn wood in a dimly lit hut. The air was thick with the scent of hot metal and woodsmoke. The night was dead quiet. No sounds of hammering, no voices, no neighing horses. Just the faint creaks of old wood and the distant hoot of an owl outside.
He jerked upright, gasping. Where... where was he? The last thing he remembered... the plane crash. _CRUNCH_. Screams. Chaos. Death.
_Akira's breath came in ragged heaves_. He stared at his hands – calloused, strong hands of a... swordsmith? He glanced down at his clothes – coarse linen tunic and breeches, nothing like his business suit. Panic swirled like a storm. This wasn't... this couldn't be...
Sobbing sounds escaped his lips as reality crashed in. _He'd died_. In a plane crash. And been reincarnated. Like some fantasy novel crap. _Akira laughed hysterically_, the sound breaking into sobs. Tears streamed down his face. This was insane. He was a worker, a cog in a corporate machine. Not a swordsmith in... in _this_.
The darkness of the hut seemed to press in on him. Akira curled into himself on the pallet, overwhelmed. Sounds around him – just the creaks of the hut and the owl's distant hoot – were too much. _He wasn't meant to be here_. _He was meant to be... dead_.
Akira's mind spun. He didn't know anything about _this_ world. Just that he was here. A swordsmith. Alive. _But how? Why?_
Akira lay curled on the pallet, his breaths still ragged from the shock of reincarnation. In the dead quiet of the night, he forced himself to think. How did he die? He recalled the plane... the flight to a business trip... and then... _CRUNCH_. The impact. Screams. And then nothing.
He tried to piece together the fragments. A plane crash. He died. And... reincarnation? In this strange world as a swordsmith? _Akira's mind reeled_ trying to grasp the impossibility of it all.
As he strained to remember more, a sudden rush of memories hit him like a tidal wave. Images flashed in his mind – coworkers' faces, his apartment's layout, the smell of coffee in the office break room. Memories of his entire life before the crash poured in, overwhelming him. _WHOOSH_ like a storm of thoughts, making his head spin.
Akira's vision blurred. Dizziness swamped him. He tried to grab onto something but his hands flailed wildly. Sounds in the hut seemed to swirl – creaking wood, his own ragged breathing, a high-pitched _ringing_ in his ears.
With a cry he couldn't hold back, Akira stumbled off the pallet. He crashed onto a nearby wooden table, his body going limp. _THUD_. He lay there, unconscious, overwhelmed by the deluge of memories.
Akira slowly came to, groggily opening his eyes to find himself sprawled on a wooden table. A pounding headache throbbed at his temples like a blacksmith's hammer on hot metal – _THUD_ _THUD_ _THUD_. He winced, rubbing his temples, trying to ease the pain. Memories of both lives swirled in his mind like a storm that wouldn't settle.
As he struggled to sit up, emotions churned inside him like a turbulent sea. He was Akira, a worker from the modern world, reincarnated into the body of a young man in this medieval-like world. _Why did this happen?_ he thought, anguish twisting his insides.
Working himself up to a sitting position, Akira forced himself to breathe through the emotional instability. He recalled fragments of both lives now – his old life as Akira, and the life of the young man he'd reincarnated into. _The young man..._ Akira's thoughts stuttered as he pieced together memories of the young man's life.
The young man wasn't liked much in the village. After his parents passed away, nobody was left to take care of him. Because of that, he'd often gone hungry, starved... _Akira's gut twisted with remembered hunger pangs_. And it was... it was starvation that led to his – the young man's – death. And then... Akira's reincarnation into this body.
Akira recalled too that the young man was an apprentice blacksmith. But not a very talented one. The memories showed him struggling to master the craft, often getting scolded by the master blacksmith. _Useless_, they'd call him sometimes. _Akira's emotions swelled with sorrow_ for the young man's hard life.
As Akira sat there, staring blankly at the dim hut around him, he was about to push himself up from the table, intending to leave the hut, explore this strange world... when...
_A sudden BEEP sounded across the apartment_. Akira jolted, confused – _apartment_? He thought he was in a hut in a village? But a blue screen flickered to life in front of him like a ghostly apparition. _The screen glowed softly blue_, illuminating part of the hut in an eerie light.
Akira stared at the blue screen, bewildered. _What is this?_ No buttons, no interface – just a glowing blue screen in mid-air with... with words starting to form on it like mist coalescing into letters...
The chapter ends here, with Akira emotionally confused, dealing with memories of both lives, learning about the young man's hardships in the village, and a sudden mysterious beep and blue screen appearing in front of him.
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Welcome back my exams are finally over and will start to redo rhe chapters for igris blood hounds soon