There was loud buzzing coming from the top floor of the two-storey building that had been abandoned for almost a decade.
A nine-year-old boy with dark hair stood facing the door, with a blank expression. He held a gun-shaped tree branch he had found earlier.
He had been here before. Here, in this house.
What happened in there? He couldn't recall.
When he tried to grasp that memory, it always escaped him.
Maybe he never was here. Maybe it was all in the nightmares he kept having.
Which was in character for him. He was a kid who liked fantasies.
Of course, most kids his age always liked fantasy stories, but he had stumbled upon a new sub-genre. Horror fantasy.
He had hit the jackpot with his dead uncle Joe's stash of 'The Tag Demon series'.
One time, while he was on the roof of his house, he was reading about the house of Null, where the demon resided, when his eyes caught an abandoned building with weeds and tree roots surrounding its walls.
How did a house so creepy looking exist in a suburban neighbourhood?
Strangely, the house felt familiar—as if he had been there.
So, he decided to go there.
Walking down the attic stairs to the house and trying to bolt out the door.
An arm stopped him instead. Picking him up and setting him down in the living room.
"Jack Hall, how many times have I told you to clear out your comic books?" his mother, Mary, said in a demanding tone.
She was quite young for her age. Small too. Marshall had "educated" him, amongst other stuff, that it was a perk of her race.
Jack looked like her a lot, too. That was the bully's point, anyway.
He hated being human. Age nine, no single happy thought…
So, he didn't speak unless asked a question, which didn't really bother his parents. All they did was fight, work and drink anyway.
"Off to bed, you've got school in the morning," She said, taking out a pack of Iced peas from the fridge.
At least, the fight was over.
The next day was just like any other day.
He woke up and made a sandwich himself. Left for the bus. Got into the bus.
A girl with blonde hair and blue eyes named Andrea Myers looked at him with her cute smile and waved.
"Welcome aboard."
***
"Urgh! My whole body hurts," Jack said as he shielded his eyes from the sun.
He groaned as he tried to sit up. Then tried looking straight, but his eyes were blurry, and his ears were ringing.
Faintly, he could make out sounds of human cries and swords being swung in the air.
"Hey kid, if you're still alive. I'm going to need you to move your butt because I don't really have a strong constitution," a female voice said beside him.
When his eyesight cleared a second later, he could see a lady dressed in light black armour with only her vital parts covered. Underneath was a white cloth covered with chainmail. Her head was free so he could see her pale skin, long braided blond hair and glowing ice blue eyes.
"An angel… Am I dead?" he said, staring at her.
It was no surprise he would think this due to her hands, glowing blue like her eyes.
"You will be if you don't move right now," she shouted, staring him down.
Her fingers were moving rapidly in a calculated motion. Floating in the air in front of them were strange runes that, for some reason, he could understand.
Because he could understand it, he knew why she had asked him to move.
He didn't know how he could muster his strength, but he did quickly pull himself up and move to the side.
Just then, blue flames shot out from the runes and hit something behind him.
Jack turned around and saw a tentacle frozen in the black sand.
Another strange person, in full red armour, swung their blade down on the part of the tentacle that wasn't frozen, still connected to the hole. Only this time, there were three more wriggling about.
Jack noticed four other people in the distance.
One large man was taking on two tentacles at once—gripping one tentacle with one of his gloved hands and severing it by slamming the edge of his large shield on it. His other hand glowed red, and it looked like he drew the other tentacle to himself.
The red knight who had severed the tentacle next to him appeared far away, right in front of the large man, in an instant. He sliced off the tentacle like a knife through butter.
The last two were standing over what seemed to be the bird creature that he had seen from afar.
'They had already killed it. How long was I out?' he thought.
He was wary of these people but still grateful they had been here to save him before he had become the meal of whatever that sand octopus creature was.
"Hey there," the lady said, now with a smile. "What is a kid like you doing so far in a Death zone?"
As he stood there gawking at the unbelievable scene in front of him, one word only came to his mind. Not necessarily directed at the lady in front of him.
"Beautiful."
When Jack came out of the door to the simulated world, he remembered the previous simulations before that, back to the first one, even.
In all those lives, he had lived sort of normally, with few obstacles at each turn. If he grew up to become a musician, he would be targeted by a rival musician who was after his life, and he would die early in his 20s.
Safe to say, ten lives could be less than 200 years in total for him.
"Still, in all those lives, there was some form of media I watched or read that had vaguely mentioned a planet called Visha with two suns, beasts, devourers, humans and..."
***
Later on, Jack woke up on a small bed.
Noticing the surrounding metal walls were moving, he remembered he was currently on a large vehicle belonging to the people he met in the desert.
Sun Hunters.
That was what the lady had called her group. He didn't know what that fully meant, but he deduced that they hunted creatures like those he encountered for a living.
The Sand Octopus had even retreated totally, with the black sand closing up above it.
Such power. Jack had fallen in love with everything he witnessed.
Something else was on his mind, though.
He remembered when the large man who had introduced himself as Klein Gardner asked him where he was from. The red knight followed up by pointing their sword at him without saying anything.
Jack had pointed toward the large door that led into the Black Sand, but he noticed it wasn't there anymore. Just black sand across the terrain.
"Huh?" Klein Gardner asked. "Where are you pointing at? There's nothing there, but the shores of the Ash domain and you do not seem like a Lava Beast."
"He's human, Klein. Stiles, sheath your blade. It's okay," the lady from earlier said, walking away from them. "I checked his soul."
Jack wrapped his arms around himself like he was naked.
The red knight, Stiles, spoke up behind the helmet, "He's wearing a Guardian robe, so maybe he's a demi-human?"
"Demi- what?" Jack finally spoke up.
"Oh, so you speak. Well, that's great. For now, you will come with us back to Murica and identify yourself. Then we will know what to do with you," Klein said with a smirk.
Jack paled, and his mind was racing about how to get out of this situation. Could he even escape this group of people?
"Don't worry, Kid," the lady spoke tossing him a canteen filled with water, which Jack caught awkwardly. "He's just teasing. You are not a danger, just parched. I can tell…"
Jack eased up, getting slightly less wary of the nice lady and drank water from the canteen.
He removed it from his lips and said, "Thank you."
"You are welcome. I do have to know how you were able to slice off one of the Ground Slummer's tentacles and kept dodging its attack before we got to you," her expression became serious as she said that. "I noticed how fast you were moving from the camera before you collapsed. Luckily, we got here on time."
Jack didn't remember this, and it didn't even sound like him, so he just shrugged his shoulders and said, "I don't know."
He could see Klein's eye twitch a little.
She just smiled and introduced herself as Selene Psycone. Then she suggested what Klein said earlier, but in friendlier terms. Following them as a hitchhiker, not a prisoner.
They still had to confirm his identity, though.
Back in the large transport vehicle, Jack stared at the ceiling of the room he was in.
How large can a vehicle be to have a bed space?
No one was here, so he could finally look at the blue glowing circle that was hovering at the corner of his vision.
"Did the Doctors do this to me? Or is this another simulation?" he muttered.
Everything felt real and unreal at the same time. The fact that he remembered the 100 simulations proved that.
"Why can I remember all those lifetimes though?" he wondered.
Just as he thought this, the Interface moved right in front of his field of vision.
[STATUS
Name: Jack Hall
Race: Human (Variant: Proto-Devourer)
Level: 1 Fledgling Experience: 10
Class: (LOCKED) Requires Level 10
Title: Matricide (Attribute: LOW mental resistance)]
Another tab showed:
[BIOMETRICS:
STRENGTH: 7 AGILITY: 6
CONSTITUTION: 15 INTELLECT: 8
WILLPOWER: 45 MANA LEVEL: 0/10 ]
Jack's eyes widened, and he exclaimed, "Matricide?! What the…"
He could understand why he had this title, but it still made him feel uneasy.
This was like a game.
The Biometrics window was better, though. As he checked his stats, a description tab popped up next to them.
[(The Strength of your body was enhanced. Level up!)
(Agility is average. Level up!)
(Constitution is abnormally high. A requirement to survive the System implantation.)
(Intellect. Your processing power is slightly above average. Level up!)
(Willpower is abnormally high. A result of 100 lifetimes of mental stress)
(Mana is inexistent. Channels temporarily blocked).]
"Wow, so this system knows about my previous lives."
The other window Jack noticed was the Variant.
Proto-Devourer.