The problem with an adult mind in a two-year-old's body isn't just the lack of strength. It's the sensory overload. Everything in this world was too loud, too bright, and too... emotional.
Elena, the woman I was supposed to call 'Mother,' was a constant source of irritation. She wasn't a bad person; she was just human. She operated on the logic of "Love"—a variable that didn't exist in my previous life. She would scoop me up, pressing my face against her shoulder, murmuring about how "special" her little Satan was.
I would lay there, stiff as a board, staring over her shoulder at the wall. I wasn't feeling warmth. I was counting the heartbeats of the woman holding me, wondering why her pulse spiked whenever I looked her directly in the eye.
"He's so quiet," I heard her whisper to Kael one night. "He doesn't cry. Even when he falls, he just... stands back up and looks at the ground like he's judging it."
"He's a man in a small skin," Kael grunted from the table. "He's got my blood, Elena. Mercenary blood. We don't waste breath on tears."
They were both wrong. I didn't cry because tears were a biological waste of salt and water. I looked at the ground because I was waiting for it to give me an answer.
One afternoon, Kael took me outside. He was practicing his forms with a wooden practice sword. I sat on a stump, my small legs dangling, watching the way his muscles moved.
To a normal child, this would be a spectacle. To me, it was a flaw.
He's open on the left, I thought. His center of gravity shifts too far forward when he lunges. If a Dragon were to strike now, he'd be halved before he could blink.
Kael stopped, sweating and breathing hard. He looked at me, then wiped his brow. "What do you think, Satan? Think you can do better?"
He held out the wooden stick. It was twice as long as my arm.
I stood up. My knees felt wobbly—a reminder of my physical limitations. I walked over and touched the wood. It was rough, unfinished. I didn't try to swing it. I couldn't. Instead, I just gripped it and leaned my weight against it.
I felt that hum again. The mana. It wasn't in the sword; it was in the air around the sword.
"He... vy," I muttered. My voice was still a struggle.
"Aye, it's heavy for a pup," Kael laughed.
I looked up at him. I wanted to tell him that his "logic" of strength was primitive. I wanted to tell him that in my world, we didn't need muscles to kill; we had machines. But here, the machine was the soul.
I let go of the stick and walked toward a puddle near the well. I knelt down and poked the surface of the water.
In my old world, the water would ripple. Simple physics.
Here, as I touched it, I tried to inject a tiny bit of that "static" I felt in my brain.
The water didn't ripple. It froze.
Not into ice, but into a jagged, black slush that smelled like burnt ozone. It only lasted for a second before melting back into muddy water, but the reflection I saw in that brief moment wasn't a two-year-old boy. It was a shadow with hollow eyes.
I pulled my hand back. My fingers felt numb, as if the blood had stopped flowing.
The flesh is too weak, I concluded. If I try to use the 'Logic' of the fall now, this body will simply come apart.
I turned back to Kael. He was watching me, his smile gone. He hadn't seen the water, but he had felt the shift in the wind.
"Go back inside to Elena, Satan," he said, his voice unusually quiet. "The sun is getting too low."
I nodded and walked back. I didn't need to be a warrior yet. I just needed to survive the fragility of being human long enough to stop being human entirely.