Vol 1: Chapter 1 - Reborn

I shifted in my sleep, the way I always used to when my body refused to get comfortable. That part felt familiar. Belonging in discomfort wasn’t new to me. I’d done it plenty.

This felt different.

It wasn’t simple discomfort—it was heavier than that, slower. My body and mind felt slightly out of sync, like one of them had woken up first and the other was still dragging behind. When I rolled over, it didn’t feel natural. I felt more like a ball rolling awkwardly along a lopsided wheel.

That confusion finally pulled me fully awake.

I opened my eyes slowly, the heaviness of deep sleep still clinging to them, but the moment my vision cleared, my mind jolted.

I saw nothing.

There wasn’t even a trace of light. Just total darkness—the kind that made me question whether my eyes were actually open or whether I’d only imagined it. A yawn slipped out of me while I tried to make sense of the void around me, my vision straining uselessly against it.

Was it still night?

My brain offered that excuse quickly. I yawned again, and out of habit I lifted a hand toward my mouth.

It fell short, and the sensation was wrong, like my arm was no longer long enough to reach my own face. I strained to bring it closer, but it couldn’t.

That was when the first wave of panic hit me.

My heartbeat started sounding louder in my ears and my thoughts began racing over each other too fast to settle. I wriggled, and a wet sloshing sound followed my movement.

My body felt wrong. The darkness felt wrong. Even the air around me felt wrong. Every part of it pointed toward the same conclusion, and I didn’t want to face it.

A faint crack broke the silence.

It sounded like a thin twig snapping somewhere close by. I turned my head frantically toward the sound, trying to locate it in the dark, and before I really thought about it, words slipped out of me.

“Hello? Is anyone there?”

The voice that left my mouth sounded strange to me. Not just because of the darkness—because I wasn’t even fully sure I’d said the words properly. No echo answered me. No response came at all. Just silence.

Another crack followed, louder this time, more like a branch breaking in a storm than a twig snapping.

It came from above.

I looked upward—or what I thought was upward, which was harder to tell than it should’ve been.

That was when I saw it: a thin line of light. Tiny, narrow, but bright.

It slipped through the crack overhead and cut across the darkness in front of me. Another crack split away from it, branching off to my right, and the line deepened. Then came a long creak, like old wood giving under too much weight, and several fractures met at once. A small piece broke free and vanished, and suddenly the darkness had an opening in it.

Light poured through.

It was blinding.

I turned away immediately, my eyes shutting on instinct as the sudden brightness stabbed through the dark I’d already gotten used to. Warmth followed a second later. It spread over me like sunlight meant only for me.

That part, at least, felt good.

I opened my eyes slowly, using what was left of the darkness to let them adjust, and turned back toward the opening bit by bit. The cracks kept spreading. The void kept breaking. Through the gap, all I could see at first was blue.

A deep, open blue.

Sky.

At least, it looked like the sky.

I edged closer to the opening, my body straining in a way that still felt wrong even with such a small movement, and pushed as near to it as I could. I peered out through the gap and saw trees, sky, sunlight—things I knew immediately and yet didn’t feel like I knew at all. The leaves came in shades I wasn’t used to. The trees were broader, taller, more overwhelming than they had any right to be. The sunlight carried a warmth I recognized, but even that felt stronger somehow—familiar and completely wrong at the same time.

I pulled back from the opening as the constant cracking around me intensified. Whatever had been holding me in place was falling apart now. More pieces broke loose. More light flooded in. My eyes had almost fully adjusted to the brightness by then, and somehow that was comforting even while confusion kept climbing higher and higher inside me.

Then the whole thing gave way.

The upper part of the void collapsed inward. The walls broke apart around me and crashed to the ground, some pieces hitting with sharp, glass-like cracks, others stabbing into dirt with dull, buried impacts. The sound surrounded me for a moment, and when the last fragments fell away, I could finally see clearly.

A forest came into view for the first time, but before I could take it in properly, I heard another crack.

I tracked the sound and saw them—eggs. They were splitting open the same way mine had, creaking and cracking as pale pieces broke away and fell to the ground.

That would be ridiculous.

That would mean—

The thought died halfway through.

My eyes dropped to the ground around me. White and pink shell fragments littered the dirt. Then I looked lower.

At myself.

A sound escaped me before I could stop it.

All I could see was pink flesh.

I moved one of my arms slightly, and something pink slid into the edge of my vision. I flinched at once, startled by it, until I realized it had moved when I moved.

Because it was me.

This can’t be true.

I stared at myself harder, trying to understand what I was seeing. My body looked wrong—too soft, too fleshy, too unfinished. When I moved again, I watched the pink mass of my body shift with me, and the sight of it made revulsion come far too easily.

What am I?

I didn’t have an answer.

While I was still staring at myself, the sunlight dimmed.

I felt it before I understood it. The warmth on me began to fade, and a light touch of cold followed, just enough to make me notice. Only then did my thoughts catch up, and I looked up to see what had blocked the sunlight.

As my eyes lifted away from my body and toward the source of the shade, I saw that something was standing over me.

It was pink like me, but larger. Its face looked wrong—deformed in a way that made my mind recoil from it immediately. Every tiny shuffle it made came with a sticky sound, like it was peeling itself off the ground each time it moved, and every bit of it made me want to run.

Its eyes and mouth moved slightly, as if they never sat comfortably where they were supposed to be. Then its stare fixed on me.

I didn’t understand it.

I understood the danger of being stared at. I understood that instinctively. But there was something else in that look too, something I couldn’t place until its mouth shifted into what I guessed might have been a smile.

It wasn’t like any smile I’d seen before. It looked more like something trying to smile without ever having learned how.

Then it spoke.

“Look, darling.”

I recoiled.

The sound itself bothered me almost as much as the thing speaking it.

I can understand them.

The thought hit hard, and worse than that, I already knew what it implied. I just didn’t want to say it to myself.

The voice continued, lighter, higher, almost feminine.

“Our first egg hatched.”

Another voice erupted from my blind spot and made me jerk toward it. It had caught me completely off guard. My focus had been entirely on the first creature, and the second one speaking from the side made my whole body tense.

“This one seems… off.”

That voice was deeper. More masculine. I snapped my gaze toward it and saw another one of the same kind. Its face might have been frowning. Or confused. It was hard to tell when nothing about its features seemed to sit right.

The first one shuffled a little closer to me and peered not at me but down into the remnants of the shell around me.

“Off?” it repeated, sounding mildly confused. Then, after another look, it added, “It opened just fine.”

There was relief in its voice.

The other creature moved again, and my attention snapped back to it immediately. I was trying to track every movement now. Every shift. Every sound. It looked toward the other eggs nearby, and only then did I realize how many there were. Fifteen. Maybe twenty. Hard to tell from where I was. More shells kept cracking open, and more of the small pink things inside them wriggled and rolled around.

Then it looked back at me.

“It’s doing that,” it said.

I froze where I was, fear locking me in place.

I didn’t know if I was doing something wrong, but apparently I was doing something.

The other one asked, “Doing what?”

A brief pause.

Then the answer came, slightly hesitant.

“It’s sitting still.”

The feminine one leaned even closer and studied me again.

“Oh,” it said, almost pleased. “Maybe it’s scared.”

The deeper-voiced one let out a breath that sounded suspiciously like relief.

“Good.”

My body still refused to move.

Even if I’d wanted to run—and I did—I couldn’t seem to make myself do it. I was stuck among these things, trapped with them, but my own body’s strange lack of response made a different thought stir at the edge of my mind.

Maybe I wasn’t in danger.

The moment that thought formed, pain pulsed through my head.

It came sudden and deep, enough to smother everything else for a moment. Something stirred inside me with it. Something waking. Something ancient-feeling or instinctive or simply beyond me. I couldn’t name it. I only knew it was there.

Then, as the pain eased, I heard something else.

A chime.

A clean, familiar sound.

Something I knew from the real world.

My eyes were still on the forest and the monsters and the broken eggs when something appeared in front of my vision.

Something impossible.

Something invasive.

[System Initialized]
Species: Mimic Larva
Level: 1
Status: Stable
Gender: Unknown

The text hovered directly in front of me, swaying slightly even though I felt no breeze. I turned my head, trying to look past it, but it stayed fixed in the center of my vision.

I couldn’t avoid reading it, so I forced myself to take it in carefully, one part at a time.

My only real thought at the end of it was the same useless one.

What?

It looked wrong in the world, like it didn’t belong in something as real as dirt and trees and sunlight. But another part of me found it horribly familiar.

Like a game.

Then that screen vanished and another replaced it.

[Species Information]
A Mimic Larva is a low-tier monster born without innate abilities.
Commonly used as experience fodder.
Often killed for training or sport.

I stared at the words.

The meaning got worse the longer I looked at it. I had been forced into this body and the purpose of it, according to whatever system now sat in my vision, was to die for somebody else’s convenience.

I let out a slow breath.

That fills me with confidence.

Before I could keep spiraling on that, a loud boom sounded in the distance.

Birds exploded into the sky as the trees rattled around me. Small branches broke loose, and a bird’s nest dropped out of the canopy and landed in front of me. Leaves swayed as the force of it rolled through the forest, followed by a wave of warm air that passed over me and made itself known immediately.

Another sound reached me after that, and this one felt familiar in a way the rest of this world hadn’t.

Footsteps.

Human footsteps.

Relief hit me so fast it almost hurt. If anyone could explain this—if anyone could undo whatever curse or nightmare this was—it would be humans. That thought brought a rush of hope through me, the first real hope I’d felt since waking in this world.

The two creatures standing in front of me didn’t react at all. No tension came over them, no alarm, nothing.

Three figures pushed through the foliage and emerged into the clearing. One had red hair. The other two had black hair. They wore basic leather-padded armor, the kind that looked more medieval than modern, and bits of foliage clung to their clothes where the forest had stuck to them.

The red-haired one grinned when he saw the nest.

“Perfect,” he said, his voice still caught somewhere in the late stages of puberty. “Your map was right, Graham. The nest is right here.”

One of the black-haired men gave a small grin at the praise.

The red-haired man looked up toward the sky instead of at us. It was a little past midday from the angle of the sun.

“Don’t waste any time,” he said. “We’ve got two more nests to hit before nightfall.”

The other black-haired one—who hadn’t said anything until now—finally spoke.

“Yes, let’s make this quick and easy. I’m hungry.”

The red-haired boy turned and glared at him. The man straightened immediately, chest out, as if he’d never said anything at all.

The red-haired one sighed and looked back at the nest. He raised an arm.

“These are easy levels.”

His eyes closed as he said it.

My mind caught on the words instantly.

Easy levels?

His fingers spread.

When his eyes opened again, lightning had wrapped around his hand. At first it came in small sparks, scattered and snapping, but then it thickened and gathered around his arm like he was shaping it deliberately. The blue light intensified, wild for a second, then it condensed. The crackling energy drew tighter into a brighter shape, transitioning toward a yellow-orange light as it extended from his hand.

A spike of energy rolled through the nest.

The warm air hit me again, stronger this time.

I’d flinched slightly from the pressure of it, and when I looked back, something stood in front of him.

It wasn’t human.

Dust hung in the air around it. Then came a roar.

I saw the eyes first—orange, piercing through the dust—and then the rest of it emerged. Red scales covered its body. A tail trailed behind it with a small flame leaking from the tip. Its claws pressed into the ground hard enough to leave marks, and when it exhaled I felt the heat of it immediately, like smoke and fire packed into a single breath.

A dragon.

Not something that had existed in my world, but I’d seen enough movies to know what a dragon was supposed to look like. This was close enough that the name came to me instantly.

The red-haired boy smiled behind it.

“Kill them fast,” he said. Then more quietly, almost irritated, “Don’t waste my time.”

The other two men moved immediately. They raised their own arms, closed their eyes, and flares of light formed in front of them as well. One summoned a plated lizard-like creature. The other called forth a beast that looked like a dog if dogs had been given a jaw too large to make sense.

Every part of me wanted to crawl back into my shell.

But my shell was broken.

And for the first time since waking, I found myself missing the dark, empty safety of that void.

But even if I wanted to move, my body still wouldn’t respond properly.

The dragon stepped forward.

My parents—if that word meant anything now—shuffled in front of me and moved to meet it. They didn’t seem afraid. They didn’t even seem cautious. The feminine one spoke first.

“Well, isn’t this lovely,” it said pleasantly. “We’ve never had visitors before.”

The dragon inhaled.

It did not care.

It then exhaled fire.

The flames engulfed the deeper-voiced creature completely. It didn’t even make a sound. One moment it was there. The next, ash fell to the ground in its place.

I stared in horror.

The feminine creature turned toward the pile of ash with mild confusion, then tilted its head back toward the dragon.

“Oh, sorry about him,” it said. “He disappears sometimes. A bit foolish really.”

Its grin widened.

That was the moment I truly understood something vital.

These creatures couldn’t protect me.

Whatever they were, whatever they thought I was to them, they could not save me from this. If I lived through anything, it would be because I did something.

“Hurry it up,” the red-haired boy snapped.

The dragon inhaled again and burned the second parent away just as easily, leaving behind another dark imprint of ash on the grass.

I looked around at what should have been my siblings.

They barely reacted.

They rolled around in the nest, eyes and mouths drifting across their faces in strange little movements, living inside their own tiny worlds while death tore through the nest around them.

That terrified me more than the fire.

The horror wasn’t just the killing. It was how casual it all was. These humans weren’t hunting to survive. They weren’t desperate. They weren’t threatened.

They were harvesting.

That was what this was.

We were crops, there to feed whatever twisted desire they had.

Across the nest, flames spread and part of it erupted. Mimics burned alive without making any sound. Something dark purple shot across my vision and wrapped around one of the wriggling mimics before yanking it back. My eyes followed the movement and saw that it was the lizard’s tongue. A second later, it tightened around the mimic hard enough to make it pop.

Pink flesh burst across the grass.

The dog-like beast lunged into the mess and bit down on another mimic, but the second its tongue touched the flesh it recoiled as if it had bitten something disgusting. So it changed tactics. Its claws came down instead, ripping through backs and tearing bodies apart.

My heartbeat pounded so hard that I stopped being sure whether the thudding I heard was outside me or inside me.

I tried again to step backward, and this time my body responded. It felt sluggish, but it was enough for now.

It was only one step, but it was a start. Then my foot came down on something fragile, and a crack sounded beneath me.

The sound of shell breaking—now horribly familiar—rang out louder than it should have. The red-haired boy turned toward me.

“Oh,” he said, surprised. “Is this one trying to run?”

He laughed as he said it, as if the idea itself was ridiculous.

Then he smiled.

“Look at that. It’s got a bit of spark.”

One of the black-haired men stared harder at me and muttered under his breath, “I’ve never seen a mimic do that.”

I barely heard him.

Because the next words froze everything in me.

The red-haired boy turned to his dragon and pointed at me.

“Kill this one first.”

Then he added, “You two take care of the rest. This one is mine.”

The other two chuckled and nodded, going right back to ripping through the nest like it was nothing.

My body locked up under the attention of both the dragon and the human behind it. There was no hesitation in either of them. There was no curiosity in it. No mercy either. Just the pure intent to kill me.

I'd been alive for five minutes.

This can't be happening.

For a moment my body sank into the floor beneath me, flesh spreading into the ground like it was loose sand. My eyes stayed fixed on the dragon as its mouth widened, smoke leaking from between its teeth like a chimney in winter.

My fist tightened.

I won't die like them.