Prologue - Balance sheet of a past life

Am I drowning? How long have I been trapped in this weightless drift?

The surrounding warmth was almost suffocating—too soft, too quiet, too comfortable. I had tried. I really had. My name was Jun Taniuchi, and I died in the dark, icy rush of a canal near my home, reaching for a child who had fallen in. Now, I seemed to have been reincarnated, plucked straight out of a light novel and dropped into a body that wasn't mine. I was fully conscious, though most moments I wished I wasn't.

Mother, please forgive your stupid son. I had only tried to do what was right, just as she had always taught me. Imagining the exact moment the news reached her tore through me; with my father gone since my early childhood, I was her only son. Her entire world. It was heartbreaking—though, to be fair, my sudden death was a bit of a shock to me as well. I was the one who ended up dead, after all.

Making matters far more awkward, I was currently being nursed by a woman I didn’t know. She cooed soft words above me in a language that sounded like total nonsense—a fluid string of foreign syllables. It made sense, though. I was an infant. That explained why my limbs felt like heavy bags of sand, refusing to obey my brain’s commands.

Adjusting to a new reality was going to be an uphill battle, but where was a guy even supposed to start? I’m dead. The sheer weight of that truth still hadn't fully sunk in. I used to think reincarnation was just a convenient trope for overworked Japanese authors. Were those writers secret reincarnators themselves? I’d love to track them down and ask how they pulled it off—though how anyone returned to Earth after dying was a question with no answer.

When the nursing finally ended, the strange lady gently set me down in a wooden cradle. She’s probably my new mother, I reasoned, or someone close. Being fed while fully aware of your own adult mind wasn't as horrifying as one might expect, but being tucked into a cradle as a twenty-three-year-old man was undeniably surreal. Well, I suppose I wasn't a grown man anymore.

Two months crawled by. By then, I was already blurting out rudimentary baby babble. It sounded insignificant, but since normal infants usually didn't start making those sounds until four to six months, my progress was moving at a breakneck pace. More importantly, I noticed the presence of magic in this world—a discovery that brought a strange sense of relief. If a universe went through the trouble of reincarnating someone only to leave out magic, it would make for a pretty boring story.

My physical control, however, lagged behind. It wasn't until I reached six months that I managed to stand upright and wobble forward for ten glorious seconds before collapsing into a helpless crawl. Day after day, I turned my infant routine into a brutal training regimen, building strength for the day I’d finally need it.

THIS IS BORING.

What else was a baby supposed to do? Why couldn't I just skip ahead, grow up, and go explore the world? The universe was teasing me. Out of all the possible reincarnations, it just had to start from infancy. On the bright side, I was alive, fed, and impeccably cared for. The strange woman was indeed my new mother, and as it turned out, I was fatherless once again... Oh, the tragic irony. Maybe in my next life, I’d finally get a dad who stuck around.

By the time I hit my first birthday, I could walk and sprint for a solid minute before my tiny lungs gave out. That was the highlight. Nothing particularly thrilling happened—and really, what could? Life moved at a normal, agonizingly slow pace. I wasn't some prodigy infant who could flex grand magical powers and set off on an epic quest.

I was, however, vastly more intelligent than a typical child. Before long, the meaningless gibberish my mother spoke began to take shape, morphing into clear, understandable words.

Months blurred into a steady rhythm. Piece by piece, I began to reconstruct the layout of this world through the bedtime stories and casual chatter my mother shared with me. She had no idea I was actually comprehending her every word—and why would she? What kind of parent looks at a one-year-and-nine-month-old toddler and suspects they're harboring the soul of a twenty-three-year-old Japanese man from an entirely different dimension?

From what I could gather through her gentle chatter, I was living in the Empire—the strongest, wealthiest, most densely populated, and culturally superior nation on the entire continent. At least, that was the grand picture she painted. My new mother was an unapologetic patriot, constantly leaning over my cradle to whisper glowing tales of the Empire's greatness into my tiny ears.

She also spoke endlessly of my late father, a man who had served in its elite military as a First Lieutenant. He had commanded a hyper-specialized unit known as the 109th Heavy Marauder Detachment. Their mandate was high-stakes warfare: operating deep behind enemy lines, sabotaging crucial supply chains, executing lightning raids, and gathering high-value intelligence.

On the field, they were known by two nick-names: the 109th Scavengers or simply the 109th Heavies. Both nicknames stemmed from the brutal, highly specialized heavy body armor they wore—a cutting-edge marvel of imperial engineering designed to make them nearly unstoppable in the chaos of battle. Truly what a frightening time to be alive.

For now, my mother only mentioned the Empire, keeping any talk of other nations off her lips. Whenever she brought up my father, she simply referred to the opposing forces as rebels—a rowdy, disgraced bunch who were a stain on imperial glory. From that, I had to infer that the Empire was engulfed in a bitter civil war. It was a conflict so brutal that they had resorted to engineering heavy mechanized body suits, as if both sides were driven by a desperate, mutual urge to wipe each other out completely.

I couldn't help but wonder what could have possibly triggered such hatred... I mean, we were supposed to be fellow countrymen. What a tragic waste of human life and resources.

My mother had named me Michael Eisner. From the endless, one-sided conversations she had with me as a baby, I gathered that her name was Alba Eisner, and that she had married my father, Jan Eisner, when she was just sixteen and he was eighteen.

I suppose rambling to her infant son—even believing I couldn't comprehend a single word—was simply her way of coping with the unbearable loss of her husband. Her parents, as it turned out, had strongly disapproved of the marriage, despite sixteen being the legal age for marriage in this era, a little fact I would come to discover much later.

The years flew by, and I grew into what appeared to be a completely normal boy—though I ended up a bit shorter than the rest, with pale skin, a fine complexion, and silverish hair. I even managed to make a few friends along the way. It felt undeniably strange at first, considering my mental age, but I didn't want my mother worrying that her son was becoming a lone social outcast.

My inner circle consisted of just three kids: Silvia Blume, Peter Vogel, and Sebastian Hase. We spent our time together at school or hanging out around the neighborhood, mostly doing what any normal children in the Empire did—pretending we had guns and "shooting" at one another. It sounds crazy on paper, but that was just the baseline conditioning for kids in this society.

The Empire was aggressively militaristic, priding itself on having the most dominant army on the continent. In this world, military doctrine generally fell into two distinct camps: those who relied on swords and magic, and those who weaponized machines and firearms. I'm sure you can already guess which route the Empire chose.

That was about the extent of my knowledge for now, though I was dying to learn more about battlefield tactics—specifically, how magic-wielding swordsmen managed to go toe-to-toe against heavily armored machinery. Maybe I'd join the military one day. Who knew? I hadn't quite figured out what I wanted to do with my second chance at life yet.

In my previous world, I was just an accountant for a corporate firm that was, in every sense of the term, a soul-crushing black company. I could only hope the labor laws in this Empire were stricter, though from what I had seen so far, that didn't seem to be the case. It might actually be worse. My mother came home every day groaning like an old man, so I did what I could to lighten her load, eventually taking over every single household chore. In return, she would praise me as her little angel, ruffle my silver hair, and plant a giant, affectionate kiss right on my forehead.

I considered myself a deeply empathetic person—keenly attuned to the emotions and well-being of others, a trait engrained in me by both of my mothers, past and present. I wished no harm on anyone, but I couldn't help but wonder if such a gentle nature would prove to be a flaw in a place like this. What good was empathy in an empire built on steel and blood?