LIGHTNOVELONLINE 3 – Return to Flesh
The thought that this suffocating encasement might be some sort of hellish afterlife came into her mind, only for a few seconds of struggle to prove otherwise. Whatever was trapping her came apart like some sort of rotten, waxy polymer. Chunks of the stuff plummeted into nothingness below.
Krahe’s first breath in this world was one filled with the stench of decaying flesh and sting of chemicals in her nostrils. She fell on her hands and knees and pain jolted through her body - pain the likes of which she hadn’t felt in a long, long time, so unlike the simulated pain signals of cybernetics. The mental image of a burning Megacity Gamma was banished by the sight of a bottomless void in front of her face and a draft of ice-cold air from below. She was gripped by a sudden survival instinct. In moments, without thinking, she scrambled on all fours over the walkway and well away from the pit, nearly hyperventilating as a curtain of raven-black hair obscured her vision. A layer of revolting, slippery slime coated her skin, and her eyes ached like hell from the lights. And the air, the air was so cold as to make the throat ache…
Her chest heaved as she struggled to get her breathing under control, leaning her head back against some sort of wooden table. Wood… That was real wood grain. Not synthwood. She felt it under her fingertips. At first she thought that it must’ve cost a fortune, but she quickly shook her head. This wasn’t her world. That much she knew. Why she knew it, or why she was so deathly certain of it, she couldn’t say. It just seemed… Self-evident, somehow.
Krahe blinked a few times until her eyes acclimated to the bright illumination of this chamber, a stark, white-blue glow which spilled forth from great crystalline orbs held in the hands of kingly statues in alcoves all around the chamber. Her attention was entirely taken up not by what she saw, but by what she didn’t see: Her HUD. The reality of her situation sunk in when she wrapped her own arms around herself and felt her own skin and flesh, when she ran her fingers through her hair to get it out of her eyes and found a few black strands left in her hand.
“I’m… A full organic again,” she murmured.
As she looked down at her hands, her eyes were drawn to that which stood out. That which didn’t look like meat. Her left arm. Its surface was like a hunk of charcoal dipped in pitch, yet it moved and felt like any living limb, she could feel her own pulse through its skin and its surface didn’t stain her right hand’s fingers. A black, perfectly skin-tight leotard hugged her body - the only of her possessions which had come with her, as it seemed. She chose not to question it for now, considering her eldritch surroundings.
For a while Krahe just sat there, looking around, breathing without thought as she fruitlessly tried to process how she was alive. Krahe’s thoughts drifted towards her own death, the minutes-long decline of her cognitive functions as the backup life support in her head ran out. She remembered it with a brilliant, cruel clarity, the entirety of her death and her own bitter rejection of it, the slow decay of the nuked cityscape’s image into a smear resembling the sun rising over the ocean. The reality that it was all gone sunk in. Everything she’d done in that world, even if that world still existed, was gone to her now. She knew better than to agonize over something as undeniable and irreversible as her own death; she assumed that it would only bring her madness if she tried to understand how or why she had seemingly come back to life in an alien world. A sudden, ever so brief flash of light issued from that strange altar; for just a moment, there came a loud buzzing sound and blue light flooded the chamber, a wave of incredible heat washing over her. Right then, she felt something. Her heart skipped a beat, and into her mind’s eye were burned the words of a foreign intelligence that wasn’t her own, something vast and unfathomable.
YOU, WHO WERE CUT DOWN ON THE PRECIPICE OF GREATNESS.
YOU, WHO BARED YOUR FANGS AGAINST THE SKEINS OF FATE.
YOU, WHO SO STAUNCHLY REFUSED DEATH’S COLD GRASP.
LEAVE THIS PLACE.
JOIN THE WORLD OF MAN.
ACHIEVE THE GREATNESS DENIED TO YOU.
There was no name, no voice, no discernible source she could attach to them. All she found was a nauseating, fanged grin in the middle of her mind, one which faded like a bad dream the moment she turned her thoughts towards it.
It was replaced by a new foreign thought; the idea of a gift from that vast, unknowable something, accompanied by the suggestion of a mental command and a series of actions. It was a familiar process, the same one she had used to VR-dive into the web in her previous life, as if that alien intelligence was trying to use what she already knew to nudge her along. Emptying her mind, closing her eyes, and issuing that spark of will, a simple menu flashed into view of her mind’s eye. She immediately closed it, shaking her head and opening her eyes as she struggled to her feet.
Name. Age. Sex. Race. That all made sense. Other terms like “Thaumic Throughput” and “Eidolon Vaults”, however, implied something that demanded more focus than she could be bothered to spare right now.
“Not now, not when I’m this filthy…” she grumbled, looking around the chamber in the hopes of seeing something she could use to clean herself. It looked like a laboratory set up inside a temple. That much she could discern, even if most of the equipment looked nonsensical. There was something resembling an ancient, solid-base operating table with a giant lamprey-thing atop it. It was crudely split down the middle, a bullet hole in the granite tabletop suggesting that it had been shot in half, but it had obviously been cut open beforehand. All these details were irrelevant, just her brain running on adrenaline and utterly failing to contend with its newly unregulated hormones. What had drawn her attention in the first place was a slightly-bloodied cotton rag next to an array of archaic surgical tools and syringes, alongside the promise of more in one of the table’s many drawers.