Suddenly, I gasped for air, and my first thought was, 'Oh, for fuck's sake, not again.'
Then the cold hit me. You know that specific, life-draining cold you first experienced as a kid camping in the backyard? That moment you realise your one thin blanket isn't nearly enough, but it's still a damn sight better than waiting in your room for your drunk old man to visit his favourite punching bag. It was the unforgiving chill of the ground itself, sucking the warmth straight out of your bones.
Another breath later, the hunger gut-punched me with all the subtlety of that one friend who communicates exclusively through shoulder punches and noogies. It wasn't a polite rumble; it was an aggressive, gut-twisting cramp that rattled my ribs from the inside, screaming that I was only a few missed meals away from becoming a very unattractive skeleton.
A sharp pain radiated from my lower back, as if I'd been sleeping on a pile of sharp-edged rocks. Five-star accommodations, as usual. The air was a rich bouquet of stale piss and rotting garbage—the signature perfume of 'Rock Bottom.'
It was all kind of nostalgic, really. I kept my eyes closed as I ran my tongue over my teeth and felt a thick, gritty film of plaque. Definitely missing a few teeth. All in all, a pretty standard reincarnation. I'd say it ranks in my top 300. Preliminary observations put it at... mmmm... #245 maybe? Though it might be a bit early for a rank, there's still time for a little torture. The ranking would need an adjustment in that case.
Then a subtle, yet enticing idea slowly crept into my mind. What if I just… gave up?
I'll just keep my eyes closed this time and refuse to participate. I'd probably die in a day or two. Starvation wasn't so bad. It doesn't even rank in the top fifty, in fact. Would the curse let me just lie here? Would it leave me alone if I simply stopped getting back up?
Ah... but the rats. You lie still enough for long enough, the rats will find you, and they will eat you. That, however, does rank up there as one of the most uncomfortable ways you can die. I decided I would get up if rats started eating me, but that was it. Nothing else. The simple intrusive thought slowly turned into a full-on conviction. You might want to judge me for simply giving up, but honestly, I was just so tired. So incredibly tired. People are not supposed to live for a thousand years.
I gave the idea another once-over and made my decision. 'Right! I'm doing it. I'm giving up. I AM DONE! The puppet is cutting its own strings. The lab rat is staying in the corner this time. The universe, and whoever's watching this cosmic shitshow, can shove it right up their collective fucking arseholes!'
And with that final, silent tirade, the rage guttered and died, leaving only the quiet ash of exhaustion. I let the last bit of tension go, settled deeper onto my bed of rocks and garbage, embraced the patient cold, and waited.
After a minute of lying there, a deep sigh echoed in my head, the mental equivalent of a disappointed parent. 'Are you quite done feeling sorry for yourself?'
'There he is!'
My roommate for the last ten years. My own personal, overly optimistic hallucination. It was an incredible relief to hear his voice, and in that moment, I realised I may have taken his presence for granted. The years when I was alone were... well, truly dark. What would I do if he were just gone?
Suddenly, a visceral fear I didn't realise I had squeezed my chest from every direction. Nope! Swallow it! Push it down, deep, deeeep inside where it can never hurt me again.
'Nah,' I shot back, with all the maturity of a toddler. 'I'm giving up. It's my new thing now.'
'Ahh... absolutely brilliant. Let me just pull up a mental seat so I can watch you die of boredom, because there is no way you have the patience to lie here for another five minutes, never mind the rest of the day.'
I knew he was right; he was my better half made manifest after all, or that was my best guess anyway. Ronan. He just... appeared one day. The number one-ranked worst day. One minute, I was eighteen years old on a football field, frozen, catatonic, watching a stadium full of people burn and scream as they died. All because of me. Suddenly, a voice that wasn't mine was screaming in my head, shouting about honour and light and what is this sorcery?!
From his perspective, it was pretty crazy too. One second, he was some paladin—his words, not mine—on the verge of saving his world. Next, he was a ghost trapped in my skull, watching a stadium full of people go up in flames, powerless. It was his shouting that finally broke me out of my trance. My first thought wasn't relief. It was: 'Great. I've finally, completely, lost my fucking mind.'
For the last ten years, I've had him rationalised, tucked away in a neat little box: he was a coping mechanism. He had to be. That relentless, heroic optimism was a personality my mind cobbled together just to survive. And sure, I entertained his stories about being a paladin from another world—you have to, don't you? Imagine the madness if we all stopped lying to ourselves. Now that would truly be crazy! So I never believed a word of it, but I played along anyway. As a person who reincarnates through history, who the hell was I to tell a magical paladin he wasn't real?
'HA! You underestimate how truly petty I can be, Ronan!'
'Pffft, you're hating every second of this. I can always tell. Also this...'
Damn, he's good. "Baby Shark" started playing in my head. Loud and on repeat. And to make it a full multimedia torture experience, he was flashing grainy images from the music video along with it. A poorly animated yellow shark. The creepy, dancing kids. It was like trying to ignore the world's worst pop-up ad after it had been surgically implanted behind my eyeballs.
It was one of the rare gifts our shared mental space allowed... in this case, he was using both sound and images to annoy the living shit out of me, and it was working.
'Hey, Murph, open our eyes. I want to see where we are,' Ronan urged.
'I certainly will not,' I added flippantly.
But now there was a new temptation, a nagging little itch in my brain. Just a peek. One little look.
'No,' I told myself firmly. 'Champions of giving up don't peek. Eyes shut. That's the whole point.'
'But it's just research,' the other part of my brain argued, the part that was a weaselly little bastard. 'You need to know what you're giving up on. For context. Just one eye. A squint. It doesn't even count if it's a squint.'
'Just take a peek, the suspense is killing me,' Ronan added, his voice dry as a bone.
….
'I'll stop the music...'
….
"Oh, screw it."
The small, dignified part of my brain, which had been valiantly championing the noble cause of 'Not Peeking,' suddenly threw up its tiny hands. It announced it was going on strike for better working conditions—and frankly, a less annoying co-worker—and left the much larger, weaselly bastard part of my brain in complete control of my optic nerves.
I cracked one eye open and my brain short-circuited.
The sky wasn't blue. Not Earth-blue. It was a shade of impossible indigo, and it was full of stars, glittering like chips of ice, even though my gut told me it was maybe nine in the morning. The clouds here didn't have purple edges; they were bruised pink.
A wave of stomach-churning familiarity washed over me. Why did I know this sky?
I'd seen it before… In the stories Ronan would tell during those long, quiet nights in the desert. The pink clouds, the twin moons I suddenly knew were just out of sight...
Oh my god, it's real. It's all real. I can feel the cold stone digging into my back, I can smell the rot in the air, and that means the sky—if the sky is real, then the stories were real, and if the stories were real, then he's—
'WAIT. WAIT, WAIT, WAIT... JUST SHUT UP!' I screamed in my own head, my thoughts tripping over each other in a panicked stampede. 'JUST LET ME THINK FOR ONE GODDAMN SECOND!'
The hero I told myself I invented to keep me sane. The beautiful lie. The coping mechanism. The crazy, impossibly optimistic son of a bitch in my head...
He's a real person.
The thought didn't just land; it hit me like a freight train, a physical blow that knocked the air from my lungs. No, no, no, it can't be... My mind scrambled for an escape hatch. Maybe I'm just dead? Is this the afterlife?
I tried to lift a hand to wipe the grit from my eyes, but the signal from my brain hit a dead end. I looked down. The first thing I noticed wasn't the pain, but the conspicuous absence of my left hand. Just a gnarly, puckered stump. Fresh, too, by the looks of the pink scar tissue.
Errr, yeah... Definitely not heaven. Hell, maybe!?… Nah. After the last thousand years, Hell would probably be a step up.
I do have a right hand, at least. It was disgusting, though. It looked like it had spent the day mining coal or working in the sewers. Oh, god. I gave the fingers a tentative sniff. Immediate regret. A wave of nausea hit me so hard I nearly gagged on my own tongue. Wait, what was I thinking about?
'I know what you're thinking, Murph.'
'Nuh-uh,' I shot back mentally, trying to remember what I was supposed to be thinking of.
'Yes, huh,' he insisted, his tone earnest and a little too patient. 'You're thinking this is it, just another one of those awful, pointless lives you incarnated into. Another broken body, another miserable beginning with a guaranteed miserable end.'
'Okay, you're half right,' I admitted. 'But I'm also thinking my right hand smells like it's been finger-painting with a dead hobo's arsehole.'
'Right. Well, about the first part...' Ronan's mental voice swelled with an earnest optimism. 'This time is different! I promise!'
'Okay, sure, different universe, I'll give you that. But let's run the old misery checklist, shall we? Starving to death? Check. Lying in a piss-soaked alley? Check. Missing a hand? Check. Probably some teeth? Let's go with check. No roof, no prospects, nothing but a filthy rag for a shirt? It's a big, ragged, fucking check.'
I punctuated it by sending him a mental image of Michael Scott holding his "World's Best Boss" mug to the camera and saying, "I think that pretty much sums it up."
'The scenery may have changed, Ronan, but the story feels exactly the same.'
'That's merely a temporary setback!' he boomed, with the kind of infuriating optimism only a hallucination... or, apparently, a real-life paladin... could muster. 'This time, we can forge our own destiny! Because this, Murph... this is my world!'
And there it was. The confirmation. So all those stories he'd told me over ten years in the desert... the epic battles, the gleaming cities, the magic Cores, everything... the stuff I'd written off as the fever dreams of a heroic personality my broken brain had cooked up... it was all real.
Holy shit.
'Hang on,' I shot back, my mind grasping for any sane, non-magical explanation it could find. 'You only see what I see. How can you be so sure this is your five-star fantasy resort and not, I don't know, future Earth after they finally invented a cosmic air filter or something?'
'Let's just say,' Ronan replied, his mental voice laced with smug satisfaction, 'while you were busy contemplating the sweet release of death, I was negotiating our new employment contract with a god. He's the one who brought us here.'
'A god. A god reincarnated us into a cripple dying in a back alley. Forgive me if I don't break out into a little dance just yet.'
'He called us his "champions"!' Ronan projected, his tone laced with heroic conviction. 'He offered "glory eternal"!'
'"Champions"... Oh my god, you're not just real, you're delusional. Did the "glory eternal" also come with a dental plan?'
'HA HA, joke all you want. I assure you, this is real.'
'You're serious... Then why the hell wasn't I at this meeting? Last I checked, my name is on the lease for this consciousness!'
'That was the strange part,' Ronan said, his mental voice turning serious. 'I kept trying to reach you, but you were just... gone. What did you see after we died at the Gas and Gulp?'
A wave of profound irritation washed over me, completely derailing the panic. 'You know I hate that name. God, even now, it bothers me. All I can picture is someone gulping down another person's... well, you get it. It's disgusting.'
'For fuck's sake, Murph, did you have to share the mental image?' Ronan groaned.
'Hey! Don't you lecture me, Mr Baby Shark-on-a-loop!'
'...Fair enough. Now, focus. What did you see?'
'Nothing. The flash from the explosion, and then... here. Cold and missing a hand. You?'
'I was floating in a black void. For hours, maybe. I kept calling for you, but there was nothing. Then suddenly, I was in front of our new patron... Ludo.'
'Ludo? His name is Ludo?' My Spidey Sense tingled as soon as I heard the name.
'Yeah, that's not the point. He made me an offer.'
My internal alarms started screaming. 'Wait, wait. Tell me you didn't sign anything.'
'Well... I had to. The alternative was being cast back into that void for all eternity.'
'Oh my god. The fine print, Ronan! Did you ask about the fucking fine print?! How about compensation? Or were you too busy being dazzled by his shiny words to discuss our salary?'
I scrambled to my feet and stumbled out of the alley toward a large stone fountain. The city hit me properly then, a fever dream of architecture. I needed the cold. I plunged my hand and stump into the water and splashed the freezing liquid onto my face, the shock a welcome jolt, a hard reset to stop my brain from buzzing right out of my skull. It's a ritual. A way to wash off the phantom feeling of the last death. Something I realised I hadn't done for a long time.
There was a pause in our frantic conversation.
'Okay, you have a point... But there is something else,' Ronan said, his voice getting intense. 'Look around you. Haven't you noticed something didn't follow us here?'
I froze. And then I felt it. Or rather, what I didn't feel.
The silence. The curse—that relentless, grinding weight—was gone.
It couldn't be... but it was. The thought was so overwhelming that tears streamed down my face, hidden by the water. I immediately threw up my mental shields. He couldn't see this. This raw, breaking part of me.
I took a second to let it sink in. A thousand years of torture at the hands of a relentless curse ended. Just like that. It had caught me so off guard that I was speechless. Then I realised this was the greatest gift anyone had ever given me. In that moment, I carved a vow deep into my soul and dedicated it to Ronan. A promise that I would repay him for this.
Someday.
'We are free, Murphy,' he said softly.
Free. No more collateral damage. No more watching the curse punish the ones I got close to. The real kicker of my curse wasn't just that the universe was trying to kill me 24/7; it was what happened when I got good at avoiding it. I'd developed a sense for it, a Danger Sense for cosmic bullshit that felt less like a 'tingle' and more like a full-body dry heave. But every time I sidestepped the falling piano, it didn't just vanish. The curse still had to get paid. The piano would bounce and clip some poor bastard on the sidewalk instead. It always started small... their sprained ankle for my crushed skull... but the universe kept raising the stakes, like a cosmic loan shark, until my life was paid for with someone else's. Remember that stadium going up in flames? I had avoided the curse for about three years, and in return, it took the lives of thousands of innocent people.
'The curse is broken,' I whispered, the words tasting strange. 'Holy fuckin' shit, Ronan...'
'I know.'
Then music, loud and joyous, blasted through my head. Ronan was playing our song. Daryl Hall & John Oates. A real smile, maybe the first in years, spread across my face.
'You Make My Dreams Come True, wooo hoo, hoo, hoo..'
'Did we just become best friends?'
'Yup!'
We did a quick mental high-five.
'Wait, did you touch my drum set?' Ronan projected.
'Nope!' I shot back.
We took a moment to soak it in and just relaxed until the song finished playing.
'Ok, you convinced me. Let's get strong. Let's get really fucking strong... and then... then we find the piece of shit that put that curse on me and we repay the favour.'
'I will admit that it sounds like a good place to start,' Ronan added.
'Right! Step one, take inventory.'
I checked my pockets. Lint and bad luck. I spotted the filthy cloak in the alley. I didn't know where the memories came from, but they were there, sitting in my mind like a downloaded file. I knew I had a magical Inventory, and I knew exactly how to use it. It felt like a phantom limb, a muscle I'd never flexed but knew perfectly how to move. The whole infinite inventory thing was something I had read about in fantasy books in my most recent incarnation, growing up in a small town in Texas. Back before we stepped in front of the curse to save that family. Before our shared ten years at that lonely gas station, the old man left me. Back before I'd inadvertently killed half the town. Before Ronan.
I focused, and a shimmering distortion appeared over my palm. I touched the cloak and thought, IN. It vanished.
'Hey, there's a cloak in here,' Ronan said, surprised.
'You can sense it?'
'Perfectly. Holy shit, that thing is disgusting. Smells like a wet dog died on a pile of mouldy cheese.'
'Beggars can't be choosers, your highness,' I shot back.
I focused on the cloak and mentally moved it around in our mindspace.
"I wonder if this thing comes with a filter?" I mused to myself aloud.
Then I focused on everything on the cloak. I could see dirt and grime. All manner of disgusting filth. I could zoom in on the individual fibres.
"Are we supposed to be able to sense Inventory items with this kind of detail?" I asked Ronan.
'I don't know. Perhaps it's an extension of our unique mindscape that's allowing us to peer into the extra-dimensional space?'
"The utility is… amazing!"
I mentally focused on all of the grime, dirt, and loose materials on the cloak and shifted them to one side, and instantly, a pile of gunk was created next to the cloak.
"No way!" I exclaimed as the tattered cloak was suddenly clean.
'Amazing. The utility of such an ability… well, it is endless!' Ronan said with glee.
My mind started racing with possibilities when Ronan interrupted me.
'Right. Well, enough playing with our magic Inventory, I am dying to see where we are,' he said, his mental voice shifting direction. 'C'mon, let's get a real view of the city. From up there!'
I followed his mental nudge and saw a steep switchback path carved into a cliff face nearby, leading up past buildings built right into the rock. It looked exhausting, but I knew what it meant to Ronan. To finally be home after all these years.
So I dragged my weak-arse body up the path. "Holy shit, this guy is unfit," I gasped, my lungs burning. "Ludo couldn't have sprung for a body with better cardio?"
A few agonising minutes later, we were on a high cliff, looking down. A sign read: 'Bank of Lastlight, Unofficial Bank of the Sovereign Empire'.
'How... how can I read this? Wait, this is English?' I asked Ronan, stunned.
'Well, yes and no. The Empire uses a Common language which is understood by all. It's an ability imprinted onto our souls. It is the language of the gods used to communicate with us. It is also called English, where you come from. Obviously, there are more languages, but all humanoid beings with Mana Cores can understand it. It's also why we could understand each other the day we met.'
My Spidey Sense tingled again. "Interesting. Let me just make a note to ask you more about that later."
Regardless, the view was breathtaking. It looked like Roman and Greek architecture had a baby, which then went through a rebellious phase, had a wild affair with Venetian Gothic, and came back with onion domes and a few questionable tattoos just to piss off its parents.
A profound silence filled my head as Ronan took in the sight. When he finally spoke, his voice was deep with a profound, almost reverent sense of homecoming, the original paladin persona bleeding through for the first time in years.
'By the sacred anvil of Celestia... it is good to be home.'
'Brilliant! So, Mr Celestia of Sacred Anvils, where are we?'
A long, long-suffering sigh echoed in my head. 'That. Right there. That is why I have spent the last ten years learning how to sound like an uncultured Westerner.'
'Good,' I said, wearing a smug grin. 'The "noble talk" was annoying as hell. You sounded like a lord with a stick up his arse. And that's coming from someone who has experienced every dialect in human history—and the literal stick.'
'...Still,' Ronan said, his voice now completely stripped of all formality and just filled with raw awe. 'It's good to be home.'
"I was a Zulu warrior for about two days. Then some guy from another tribe beat us in a skirmish, saw a stick, and decided my arsehole needed an intimate introduction."
Ronan went silent. He always stopped listening when I made the dark jokes.
"So... are you from this city? Have a castle here? Secret stash of gold?"
'...No,' he replied, his voice a mix of awe and confusion. 'My spirit knows this land, Murphy. The air itself hums with a familiar energy. But this city... "Lastlight"... this place was nothing more than a small town for adventurers who went in and out of the wilds. I wonder how much time has actually passed...'
From our vantage point on a high plateau within the city itself, the strategic layout of Lastlight was laid bare. Below us, a great silver river carved a wide channel through the heart of the metropolis. To our left, the city gave way to sprawling, orderly farmlands that stretched for miles, all safely contained inside the Empire.
But to our right, it was another story entirely. Here, the city ended abruptly at the Wall. Capital W. Rising to a colossal six stories and running at a stark ninety-degree angle away from the river, this was the true bulwark. It made the Great Wall of China look like a suggestion for a fence, a rune-etched barrier of granite separating the civilised Empire from the dark, untamed jungles that pressed against it from the other side.
'The Great Ward Wall,' Ronan said, as reverence crept into his voice. 'It radiates ancient power... a real shield against whatever dark shit is hiding out there.'
'Let me get this straight,' I projected. 'Big, fancy wall means big, ugly things with lots of teeth on the other side of it.'
A wave of heroic excitement radiated from him. 'Exactly! A proving ground, Murphy! Where there's huge risk, there's huge reward!'
'Right. And "reward" is the nice word they carve on your tombstone,' I shot back. 'Let's talk about something that might actually keep us alive. This magic you mentioned. Quick and dirty version. How does it work?'
'Right,' he said, settling in. 'Aether is basically the energy of all life. It flows from your Core, which is like an inner power source.'
'Magic juice, magic battery. How do we charge it?'
'Two ways, basically,' he explained. 'The patient way is to meditate and draw it in from the world around you.'
'Boring. What's the other one?'
'The hunter's way,' he added, a hint of steel in his voice. 'You kill. Beasts, monsters, even people. Their Core crystallises upon death. You consume the Core, and you take a part of their power for yourself.'
The division of labour was becoming clear. We were that classic, anxiety-fueled couple on The Amazing Race—he would be the one in the passenger seat frantically yelling about a turn we supposedly missed three blocks ago, and I was going to be the one white-knuckling the steering wheel, while considering driving us both off a cliff just to make the noise stop.
We began our descent down a wide, winding stone path into the city proper. The sensory overload was staggering. As we navigated the throng, a commotion from a nearby bakery caught my attention. A portly baker, red-faced and dusted with flour, was standing in his doorway, holding a simple straw broom. He placed it firmly on the cobblestones and began to address it with the strained patience of a man talking to a malfunctioning appliance.
"Alright, you. Listen to me. And listen carefully this time," he huffed. "Yesterday, I said, 'sweep the leaves and the dirt.' You swept the leaves and the dirt. You left the sticks, the manure, and the dead insects. Because apparently, that wasn't scabbing 'leaves' or 'dirt'."
The broom, to its credit, did not move.
The baker took a deep breath. "So today, we will be very specific. You will sweep everything on the flagstones that is not a part of the stone itself or a customer's foot. This includes, but is not limited to: leaves, insects, dirt, dust, pebbles, animal droppings, and miscellaneous refuse. You will sweep it into a neat pile by the wall. Do not sweep it into the gutter. Do not sweep it into my shop. A pile. By. The. Wall. Do you understand?"
The broom's bristles gave a single, stiff twitch.
"Skabbing piece of shit," the baker grumbled, though he grunted in satisfaction and went back inside. I just stared, a slow grin spreading across my face. This place was weird. I liked it.
'Skabbing?' I thought. 'That's a new one.'
'It's a curse word, Murphy,' Ronan replied, his mental tone a bit prim. 'The local F-word, basically. Not for polite company.'
'Funny,' I shot back. 'Never heard you use it.'
'That's because I'm not a commoner.'
'What do you mean, you're not a commoner?'
'I'm from a noble family, Murphy,' he stated, matter-of-factly. Ah. So 'common' didn't just mean ordinary. It meant 'common folk.' Good to know. Before I could dig into that little classist gem, I needed to know how that broom worked.
"Okay, so how does that thing work?" I pointed at the broom that was frantically trying to figure out which wall the baker meant. "Don't skip the details this time."
'It's all about transference and resonance!' he began confidently. 'You take a Mana Core, set it to the right effect... merge its essence with the item...' He paused, and I felt his certainty waver before he ploughed ahead, his voice somehow even grander. '...and then... You engrave runes to harmonise its, uh, foundational principles with the cosmic song of creation!'
I stopped walking. 'Cosmic song of creation'...? "You have absolutely no idea what you're talking about, do you?"
The grand persona vanished, replaced by a sheepish mental chuckle. 'No. Not a clue. The specifics weren't exactly common knowledge back in my day. You'd need to go to an Academy to learn how rune inscription works.'
"Speaking of needing things," I shot back, my frustration returning. "If our new boss wanted a champion, why start us at the absolute bottom? Why stuff us into the body of some half-starved street urchin instead of a duke's son with a trust fund? Seems really scabbing stupid, if you ask me."
Ronan's mental presence went quiet. When he finally spoke, his heroic posture had fallen away, replaced by a deeply unsettling seriousness.
'That...' he began, his tone heavy, '...is a question I've been asking myself too, Murphy.'
He paused, as if carefully choosing his words. 'The only thing I can figure is that there's a price for everything. That Inventory Ludo gave us... I think it's far more powerful than just a simple storage space. A gift like that, from a god like him, doesn't come for free.'
The weight of the implication settled in our shared mind before he finished.
'And this... our state when we arrived, the missing hand... I believe that was the price we had to pay for it.'