Cyrn stares at his foot, flexing it. He'd regrown a whole limb.
What the hell is going on right now? He thinks to himself. However, before questions can be answered, he smells something. Not the nauseating scent of rot that assaulted him earlier.
No, this was pleasant, it stirred something in his stomach, in his soul. An urge awakens in him as his mind goes hazy.
God, what is that smell? He asks, entranced by its intoxicating effect on him.
He followed the scent, stepping over corpses he had been panicking over earlier, now unfazed by the gruesome sight around him. Then he hears it before he sees it.
Lub-dub, lub-dup, lubdup
Is that a heartbeat? He wonders. He soon finds the source of the beat. A knight, still bleeding, barely conscious, yet alive. Cyrn stares at him; the knight doesn't recognize Cyrn, doesn't even acknowledge him.
Cyrn, however, doesn't call out for help, doesn't try to help or console the knight in his final moments. He just stares, trying to explore this deep urge that is metastasizing inside of him.
His mouth goes dry, and he feels a deep emptiness permeate his body, physically and spiritually. He wonders why I am staring at him. What am I doing?
He found his answer in the next moment. Cyrn falls to his knees, a splash against the mud and blood echoing in his mind. He leans over the dying knight, moving purely on instinct rather than anything else.
His mouth hovers over the knight's neck, and soon, he bites hard. He draws blood from the man's dying body, and the emptiness fades.
The blood wasn't sweet. It scratched an itch. Filled the emptiness clawing at him.
Memories, a wife, two daughters, a battle prophesied to be won, a cocky general, a platoon he loved, a kingdom he believed in, the Cindral Dominion. Then a tragic loss, blindsided by fate itself, He regrets being there, he longs for his family, he didn't want to die today, in a puddle of mud, piss, and blood. Yet here he is.
The memory cuts there, and Cyrn whispers to himself, "Gregory…my wife was Alexandra, my daughters Alice and Mina". Cyrn begins to cry, not a tragic wail, but a silent tear. He feels like he is Gregory; his sense of identity blurs for a moment, then another, then it snaps back. His headache persists, less so than when he first finished feeding, but still there.
"What…what was that?" He asks himself. He was Gregory for a moment; he felt that memory was truly his, but it disappeared. Then, it hits him.
"I-I just killed a man, didn't I? What the fuck have I turned into?" He asks himself as he stares at his hands, hands that are far paler than they ever should have been.
Regret pools in his stomach, then spreads to his chest. He'd never done anything this violent before. Never been in a fight, and the only blood he's seen is from medical dramas he watches on TV.
From a life like that to immediately killing a man, a man he now knows far too intimately to feel no remorse or regret, is nearly too much for Cyrn.
His mind shuts down for a moment. Fails to process what he just did, replaying the scene in his mind over and over and over again.
Cyrn continues to weep in silence, afraid that if he hears himself, he'll truly break down right then and there. His confused and disoriented mind is hanging by a single frayed thread, taut and ready to snap.
Before he can spiral any further, he hears something. A growl, something feral and unhinged.
His head snaps around and is met with another shocking sight to add to the list.
A humanoid creature, pale and hunched over. Shorter than Cyrn by a foot. Its skin stretched against its bones, its eyes grey with what looks to be cataracts. It has no hair, its teeth sharpened to a disturbing point, and it's looking right at Cyrn.
What the hell is this thing? A ghoul? A wight? A demon?
It looks at him like he's competition.
Cyrn freezes in shock, unable to process everything that's been happening on top of this new creature looking ready to kill him.
Before Cyrn can react, the creature lunges at his hesitation.
Cyrn dodges frantically, tripping over a corpse in the process and falling to the ground. The creature turns and leaps again.
Cyrn is panicking, yet before the creature lands, his body moves on instinct, but not his own instinct. The movements are unfamiliar, not his own. They are disciplined, restrained, and efficient.
He rolls to the side and hops onto his feet. The creature misses and turns to look at Cyrn, preparing to attack again.
During his roll, Cyrn caught a glimpse of something, the sun reflecting off metal.
His eyes snap to the target, a longsword, basic, modest, yet efficient in its design. Cyrn darts for the sword, moving with instinct more than conscious action. He grabs the sword and takes a stance.
His feet are planted and stable, his center of gravity low, and he holds the sword with no obvious or blatant openings. There's no flourish, yet also no unnecessary movement. He is stable.
The creature lunges again. This time, however, Cyrn is ready. He side steps the creature's lunge and brings his sword down with the inevitability of a guillotine.
The creature's head rolls, Cyrn huffs a breath, and looks down at his hands.
"How the hell did I just do that?" He ponders. Cyrn had never held a sword before, never swung it, let alone struck at a living, breathing target. Yet he just used the sword with a practiced efficiency held only by…trained knights.
"Did I take Gregory's sword instincts?" Cyrn wasn't sure of the answer, but from what he could tell right now, that's his best bet.
As Cyrn was thinking about where his sudden sword skill came from, he heard a howl in the distance. Similar to the feral growl he heard from the strange creature.
"Fuck, they probably travel in packs, maybe scavengers, I need to get out of here." He says, prioritizing his survival before diving into where he is and what he is.
He starts to run in the opposite direction of the howl, trying to create as much distance as possible.
As he's running, he notices something. His body is light, lighter than it had any right to be. Cyrn wasn't out of shape before, but he was a pretty sedentary person, working out every few days just so he doesn't feel bad.
But this, he felt, he could run for hours, days, even without getting tired. His body was full of strength and stamina.
So he does, to cope with the most jarring 20 minutes of his entire life, he stops thinking about it, and just runs. Hours pass by as dusk settles, and it's by now that Cyrn starts to look for shelter. Somewhere to spend the night, anywhere.
Trees have been blurring past him for hours now, yet not a single cave or outcrop has crossed his path.
God fucking dammit, am I going to have to sleep in a tree tonight? He thinks to himself.
Hours continue to pass, and night falls onto the forest he's in, yet strangely, his vision is just as good as it was in the morning.
Evidence is piling up against him, and Cyrn is smart enough to acknowledge what all the changes in his body are pointing to.
"Regeneration, enhanced constitution, stamina and strength, night vision, pale skin, and that overwhelming desire for blood. I'm a vampire, aren't I?" It's a shocking revelation. He's somehow turned into an entirely new and previously fictional species.
He sits in a high and thick tree branch, deciding that this is the best place he's gonna get until morning.
Finally, with nothing left but his thoughts, he starts to think about everything that's happened.
"Just where am I? I have no clue where I am, how I got here, or how I turned into a god damn vampire. Not only that, but…the blood, Gregory's blood". Cyrn pauses, trying to bury the feeling of regret and shame for killing a man in cold blood, excusing it over things like necessity or that he was already dying, but none of it made him feel that much better.
"I gained his memories, I gained his identity. Is this a product of drinking blood? Not only that, I could use what I can only assume are his sword techniques. Nothing insane, but infinitely better than whatever I could do before. God, what the fuck is going on?" He drags his hand down his face in exhaustion.
This was truly the last thing he'd ever expect to happen to him, yet here he was, a vampire in some foreign land. Wait…Am I even on Earth? Cyrn thinks.
The thought crosses his mind, and it could make sense. Where on earth would he find a pile of knight corpses and a fiendish ghoul scavenging the same corpses?
The thought crosses his mind, then solidifies as the most probable truth. He's been transmigrated, somehow, someway, into a foreign world as a vampire.
"I just killed a man, fought a monster, grew a new foot, and drank someone's memories… and I'm worried about falling out of a tree."
"Please… just let me wake up again."
"Tomorrow. Tomorrow I'll make sense of this. Tonight, I just need to be nothing."