The realization that I had reaped, directly or indirectly, over ten souls did something to me. A shudder passed through my own soul, and the insistent compulsion towards more murder lost most of its strength. It was still there, just intense enough to make me slightly uncomfortable, no longer overwhelming. The voice that was urging me to get to the tower door and rip down the barricade dropped to a whisper. My limbs stopped twitching.
With a shaky breath, I sank to my knees and let my exhaustion take over.
I had been holding myself together through sheer obsession and the need to survive, bulldozing past one event after another. The silent, mindless wait before we were sent into battle was the closest thing I’d gotten to rest, and that had been spent in a daze of fear and doubt — fear that I would slip back into the essence-slurping void at any moment, and doubt that the world around me was actually real.
Now that I had a moment to think, to process, I felt like my entire being was on the verge of unraveling. Through all the anxiety now bubbling up to the surface, only one question seemed to matter.
Who was I?
I reached for memories.
Instantly, my mind slammed right into the void that I somehow managed to escape. The darkness was ubiquitous, and the only thing that ever broke it was the slurping presence. I shuddered just remembering it.
I shuddered again, more violently, because I could now sense a fragment of that presence burning in my chest.
My breath was nothing but short gasps, forced through clenched teeth. Even the faded pounding on the tower’s door was not enough to distract me from the downward spiral of my own turmoil.
It was there, in the very depths of anguish, that I caught a glimpse of something different.
A life. My life.
Slowly, faces rose from the darkness, belonging to people whose names I no longer knew. Some I felt a burning fondness for. Others elicited distaste. But the appearance of each and every one filled the gaping hole within me.
More and more memories resurfaced, the details surprisingly vivid. Hobbies. Favorite foods. My collection of books and games. The evenings I spent with my friends, chatting or playing a board game. A wild night out on the town after we downed more drinks than was healthy.
There were still gaps in the life I was remembering, but the memories I did have proved one thing: I was a real person. I wasn’t just a fragment of someone long dead, haunting the husk of a mindless demonic soldier.
But I still couldn’t remember my name.
The realization burned, especially when I knew that I’d likely never get that detail back. It was gone, along with other fragments of myself, nibbled away by that overwhelming presence. And then my world stuttered and then shattered once again. That life wasn’t the only thing lurking in the back of my head.
With the force of an exploding cork, other memories flooded into me.
The memories of Hayden Hall.
They were even more fragmented than my own. I caught only snatches of them, ones that defined Hayden’s identity.
Hayden Hall was raised in a demonic camp. His world had fallen to demons when he was very young, too young to remember a different regime, and so demons were all that he knew. He wasn’t sure what made him special enough to be set on the warrior track, but he was grateful for it.
Because the alternative was slavery.
No one wanted to be a slave. To be a slave was to be a toy, readily available for labor, amusement, or whatever else the higher classes of humans saw fit to demand. They were a shared resource, brought in to serve the whims of the warrior recruits and camp staff. Their presence was a constant visible reminder that things could be much worse.
As such, no one needed encouragement to work hard, and Hayden Hall worked harder than anyone. He produced top results in all his tests. He was marked down as one of the few mana-sensitive humans, even getting special lessons on how to leverage that in small ways.
And all throughout his life, he was aware of the demons: watching, waiting, evaluating. They were always simply there, the invincible overlords.
Did I want to follow his example?
More importantly, what was the alternative?
The demons would just keep throwing me into the charnel house of invasions. I was willing to bet on that. Without gear, without advanced info, without more power, I would eventually get unlucky. A single strike would be enough to take me out and hurl me back into that void.
In the end, it all came down to one simple question: was I willing to kill in order to stay alive?
As I gripped the handle of my sword, my determination crystallized.
Suddenly I laughed, loudly and shrilly. My new resolve made it painfully obvious that I definitely belonged here. There was no avoiding that truth anymore.
When I died in my first life, I ended up in hell.
That’s what it was, nibbling away at my soul. Hayden had heard the ’Will of Hell’ mentioned enough times by demons and instructors to know it was a thing, even before a fragment of it was shoved into his chest.
And I was willing to do whatever it took never to meet it face to face again. Anything. Even something that condemned me to hell.
Before I could follow through on my newfound determination and storm out of the tower in search for victims, the sound of a drum shook the very foundations of the city.
A slow, steady beat at first, it was soon joined by a host of others. Venturing higher, I reached the top of the tower and stepped out onto the wall. The gust of frigid wind that hit me did nothing to douse the murderous flames now licking through my veins.
The demons were massing outside the city, back where they set up camp on our arrival into this world. They were led by a line of brutes almost half as tall as the city walls themselves, each with an enormous drum hanging from their necks. These drummers were crafting a heady melody out of that single instrument, and I could feel something deep within me responding to their orchestra. It was magic, it had to be, especially considering the new strength surging through me with every beat.
I felt like I could fly, like a single punch could obliterate the tower behind me. My wounds flared up in mind-blistering pain, then dulled and faded away entirely. I clumsily ripped away one of my bandages, watching in wonder as the wound beneath healed in seconds.
Then the hulking brutes started chanting.
Their voices ripped through the air, the alien words forcing themselves into the ears of every living thing inside the city. To my shock, I could understand them.
This wasn’t like a mortal language. Each word was more of an impression, evoking images and feelings that blended together to convey meaning.
The demons spoke of anger, of slaughter, of business left undone. They spoke of the cold hatred that the dead harbored for the living. They spoke of vengeance taken on those who got to live another day, while the dead were left behind to rot.
The dead were listening.
I didn’t notice anything at first. But when I glanced back towards the city, I noticed some corpses twitching down on the ground. The sight was unnerving enough that I managed to tear my eyes away from the demonic spectacle outside, giving the city’s dead my full attention.
As the song rose into a frenzy, as the demons lamented and taunted in one breath, the bodies of the slain defenders rose. Eyes ignited with glaring red flames, their fingers searched for weapons they had dropped in death.
A roar rose from near me, and I watched in stunned silence as the brute whose spear I stole tore his way through a wall, his face frozen in a blend of hatred and resentment. He seemed different from the rest of the corpses, as though more of him had made it back through the veil of death.
And now it was focused wholly on the death of the living.
This new threat almost made me reconsider my determination to earn more souls, but much to my relief, the undead streamed right past the few other demonic soldiers I spotted down below. Their hatred seemed wholly reserved for their past allies.
Well, if the demons were finally willing to get off their asses and assist, I could hardly continue to hide in the darkness of a half-fallen tower.
It was time to fight.