Scribble 25: Samsara Ignition (1)

Hello, Wanderers. I wish you all good day, merry belated Christmas, and happy New Year.

So, in this narrow period between Christmas and New Year, on the verge of a new decade, I’m doing an Isekai story. For some reason.

Okay, it’s been sitting on my draft for several months, so the timing is purely coincidental. The rest of my blog to some degree could be called “isekai” stories, but they aren’t technically one because one of the crucial aspect is missing: Reincarnation. A main character in an isekai story has two motivations, first is the one they had before their death, and one that they gains after their reincarnation in the new world.

Cross-universe information transfer is also a key element for an isekai story to qualify as one. Knowledge of original world has to shape the main character’s actions and—you know what? Let’s just get on with it.

I didn’t even have the time to let out a shriek.

Scribble 25 Samsara Ignition (1)

There were slender fingers wrapped on the handle of that knife, the point of which buried deep within my neck.

The pain was masked by surprise, leaving only a burning sensation where the blade pierced, all the while the rest of my body was freezing cold. Blood entered both my esophagus and my trachea, filling every smallest crevasse such that I can't even cough anymore. A single word echoed within my fading mind:

Why?

---

I tried to breathe, but I couldn't feel any of my muscles moving. I started to panic, as my brain received no stimuli that normally flooded it from every nerve receptor all over my body. I tried to move, to open my eyes, but there's no response, as the signal sent by my brain simply dissipated into nothingness.

Is this...afterlife? Is this all that are?

"Tentative affirmation. This is existence where consciousness gather after they have been removed from physical frame, a realm of exposed conceptual framework. Similar, but hardly equivalent to the concept of afterlife." Something that resembled sound invaded through my consciousness. It's almost as if someone recorded how human brain process words and jolted the signals directly to my brain.

Well if this is where I go after my life ended, it IS an afterlife.

"Denial. Conceptual framework still, to some extent, understood as continuation of life. Thus, life cannot be judged as ended."

Who are you? Are you a god?

"Denial. Term God implies great power and freedom, to observe and interfere. Existence only allows limited observation of domain, unequal to most deific interpretation. Amalgamation of multiple frameworks allows complex maneuver, but any interference is impossible."

"So you're just another." A phantom mouth moved in accordance to my will, receiving phantom signal from my phantom brain. "An especially complex existence, but is not of different nature than mine." The memory of my physical body gave myself some kind of form, whatever limited this world supports.

"Affirmation. Entity and you shares base concept. Not implausible, entity and you originates from similar existence." There are no tone transmitted through the imitation of sound, but a thousand mental alarm incited a cacophony within my mind.

"You're going to eat me. Assimilate me."

"Affirmation. Integration to entity allows greater capacity. Perceive complexity, project interference. Resistance unadvised."

Stumbling with my ghostly form, I 'saw' the entity for the first time. A formless concept forcibly interpreted as images and words by my simple consciousness, the entity likely consumed countless other minds until it reached its current complexity.

"You must've known that humans aren't exactly the most obedient creature in existence." I could barely 'stand' with my phantom projection, but I had to 'run' if I wanted to keep my mind intact.

Let's see if space exists at all in this...world, I guess? Then again this thing has been here longer than I have. Running might be useless...but it's also the only thing I could do.

"Affirmation. Fact is known by entity, and source of confusion. Resistance is useless. It only prolongs suffering. 'Human' frameworks feeble, weak."

I tried moving my legs. They felt so heavy and brittle. I imagined a great force propelling my body from behind, but there are limits to what I could achieve by will alone.

Move, damn it!

The entity expanded to 'engulf' my form, as if an amoeba extending its pseudopodia.

I remembered cold, and suffocation, and shock. My phantom body was not complex enough to simulate these things, so it must be a memory from my dying moments. A single feelings surfaced, eclipsing even the shock and surprise from the sudden sequence of event and my discovery of the perpetrator.

Hate. More than fear and shock, I hate. And it burn ever brighter as it consumed the love I once had.

Starting from my neck, a fire consumed my form. Now immolated, I grasped and burned the entity's 'tendrils' into 'ash', the complex fractal of unknowable concept of innumerable beings reduced into simple lines intersecting on sharp angles.

A slanted line remained. A simple linear function. And then it too disappeared.

"May all of you finally find peace."

Fire dissipated, and solid weight gradually returned to my form. Flesh and blood once again filled the space outlined by my phantom.

I lost consciousness before my body fully solidified.

---

When I opened my eyes again, it was amidst the shadow of an alpine forest. A pine cone fell right on my forehead, urging me to regain my awareness faster.

"Where am I?" My lips moved, but it's certainly not my voice that escaped. "Okay, what the hell is happening?!"

I stood up, a bit swayed by my new body balance. The predominantly bright orange vegetation was jarring amidst the otherwise normal sky and forest.. A patch of burnt material marked where I recently laid down—or fell down, apparently, as broken branches also scattered around the telltale sign of impact.

"I've seen Wraiths fly, but I never seen one fell from the sky." I jumped at the voice coming from behind me. "Are you okay?" I turned around to find a girl, clad in simple yellow outfit, standing behind me with a basket of pine cones. A rapier hung by her waist, but I see no armor on her person, although she might wear simple padding or chain mail under her dress.

"Other than concussion, I'm never better!" I tried to laugh, but only concern appeared on her eyes.

"Are you okay?" She repeated her question.

"Sigh, no, I'm not okay. Well, my body is okay, minus scratches, but...I don't have any memories." Not of this world, anyway. I still have memories from that nightmarish afterlife and my original world...I wonder if I will ever know why she killed me.

"A Wraith with no memories. Very suspicious..."

"Well, if you don't want me around, why don't you tell me where you'll go so I could walk the other way?"

"The other way would be into the deep forest. There aren't really demons or giant spider in there, but it's still not a place an amnesiac Wraith would want to go."

"Ah, how kind of you to be worried for my well-being."

"I just don't want to feed the salamanders. Once they tasted human meat there will be no stopping them. Rats and golden ants are one thing, but the village guard won't be enough to handle salamanders—and nor would a Wraith."

"I'll avoid the salamanders, thanks for telling me."

"...you're still going?"

"Gonna bet the forest would be more hospitable to an amnesiac Wraith. Judging from your example, I'd guess the villagers would treat me even worse."

"Oh I wouldn't worry about that. I have prejudice against Wraiths, most villagers don't."

"I'm more worried about the amnesiac part. Most people would find that suspicious—like I had a history to hide. Who knows whose spy am I."

"You have a point. Are you a spy?"

"Well, no, but would you even believe me if I say I'm not? That's exactly what a spy would say, after all." Both of us sighed. The sky began to adopt an orange tinge, signifying the diminishing time that we had.

"What should I do...the salamanders are a real threat, but I don't want to risk my reputation and life by sheltering you..."

"How about this, you'll go back to the village and I'll go after you. That way you won't be associated with me, and you don't have to worry about anything."

"But then you'd be suspected as a spy—well, that would happen anyway, but at least they could trust me..."

"Can you trust me, though? I just happen to fall from the sky in front of you, it's not like you have any obligation to accommodate me."

The increasingly dark sky urged us to finish the conversation.

"Don't go deeper into the forest." She finally said. "And don't overuse fire. The golden ants are attracted to it. This is of course a common sense, but from how easily you talked about the salamanders I won't expect you to remember anything about common survival guidelines. The seed of these trees are edible, I'll share half of my yield for tonight. If you follow the outskirt of the forest to the northeast for three days you'd find a frontier city, they tend to tolerate strangers better than the village. Just make a plausible back story for yourself."

"I'll keep your advice in mind...say, I don't want to make enemies, but you said you're prejudiced against Wraiths. Why'd you help me this much?"

"I hate Wraiths, but I'm not a murderer." A more experienced psychoanalyst would notice the mixture of emotion passing through her face, but I could only notice incredulity. "Besides, we girls ought to help each others, no? This is the least I could do."

Right, I'm a girl now. Thank God, I guess? I have the feeling she'd just stab me if I'm a guy, despite her "not a murderer" statement.

"Say, just give me a rough estimate, how old do you think I am?"

"Maybe twenty, twenty three at the eldest?"

"Okay...okay. I won't keep you much longer, you have to go back to the village. Forget the pine cone, I'll gather them myself. Just go for now. I'll survive, I promise." The girl gave me a doubtful look, but she walked away finally. She tapped her rapier's pommel, and a faint light shone from it, before disappearing between the trees.

I was left in darkness.

---

I did a little inventory check after she went away. Whoever let me into this world had been kind enough to supply me with boots and clothes, but not weapon or any protective equipment. I would have to hide and run instead of fight, which was probably the best idea anyway since I had no fighting experience whatsoever.

True to the yellow-clad girl's word, the seed of these trees are edible, if not particularly fulfilling. I have no water on my person, but after spending some time tripping over tree roots and hitting low branches, I found a small stream—with the light of the village visible in the distance.

She said not to overuse fire...but I can't make fire in the first place. I started to regret not paying much attention to those survival guides that my father hoarded. I wonder if I could do anything that I did in that weird afterlife.

I focused on my neck, recalling the grand conflagration that consumed the abstract consciousness. But this world is so...lacking. My mind and the world was so detached, so disconnected that I can't even recall the feelings of fire igniting from my phantom. I only spent moments within that universe of thoughts and concepts, yet no amount of reality would ever feel more real than those moments.

I focused again, this time on my throat, where that fire exploded. The phantom wound. The memory deeper, now merely faint shade of red on black backdrop. Of her face.

It took me seconds to realize that I had been thrown backwards, landing atop a tree trunk felled by a blast.

"What the hell was that?!" Steam rose as the river re-converged on the small crater, pooling muddied water on the scorched floor. "Oh God. I'm going to die right away, don't I? Shit. Shit!"

I have to get the salamanders away from the village. I started running deeper into the forest, away from the faint light, following the stream. Then again, I did learn something. I could do a blast. I have more concrete grasp on my, Wraith, was it? Powers now.

I focused on the same memory once more. I suddenly become aware of a network of vessels centered on my throat, circulating an unknown form of matter throughout my body. Is that...the Wraith power?

A new sensory organ I only realized exist allowed me to perceive the distribution of this matter within my body and my surroundings, overlapping with my normal sight. Like a magnet passing through Jell-O embedded with iron dust, I saw space itself deformed as I move my Wraith power-filled body through it. My mind hasn't caught up, but my brain clearly has a dedicated function for this.

I wasn't exactly a scientific genius—I was a language student when I died, so I couldn't really comprehend the implication of this deviation from normal science. All I knew was that if I was to survive the first fight, I have to master this power fast. I gathered the distortion in space and creates a ball of compressed Wraith matter, creating a more controlled detonation to once again attract the supposed creatures of this forest. That still knocked me back, and it doesn't have much destructive power outside the shockwave either. It's pretty much the worst of both world—destructive power and distractive power.

I started again, this time focusing to re-circulate the matter within my body from my throat. I know that these stuff could explode when concentrated, but the condition for proper detonation isn't exactly that clear. The correlation between quantity and pressure...

I didn't have the leisure to experiment, but I succeeded in using my power to create reasonably sized balls of Wraith matter that would gain matter and pressure as I propel it along my fist, letting it explode on impact. I could more or less shape the blast to barely prevent my knuckles to be fried in the process, but first order of business when I get to the city is getting some gauntlets. These barks-and-cloth knuckle guard won't last until morning.

I moved slowly through the wood, occasionally making ruckus to lure the creatures.The golden ants are probably stupidly large insects, and I don't know how effective my fists would be against carapace, but that's all I could do for now. I really wish the salamanders are just large lizards and don't breathe fire or have super hard skin.

I briefly checked around, ready to make another blast, before a glint of gold stopped my heart. A swarm of black ants, their shiny carapace barely visible, with golden mark on their heads crawled slowly through the forest not far away from me. There must be thousands of them, each as large as a kitten, but with mandibles accounting to almost a third of their body length.

There's no way I could defeat them all with my fist. Am I really going to die again already?! I clenched my fist, gathering Wraith matter. Well, there's no option other than to fight! If I'll die either way, I'll die fighting!

I prepared to smash the ground to attract the ants, but something else caught my attention: a crescent of light, its beauty exemplified by the sharp collection of Wraith matter that surrounded it—no, that created it.

An arc of glowing Wraith matter slashed through the ant swarm, detonating just before its blast would reach me. On the other end of its path of destruction was a glowing sword, illuminating a woman's form clad in chain mail and metal pauldrons.

"Can't you be suicidal a bit farther from the village?! For gods' sake, this is why Wraiths are so..." Her complains continued, but her slashes again and again decimated the swarm. I was dumbstruck by her radiant form, that I couldn't even retort. "Are you going to help me or what?! This is your fault, if I may remind you!"

"Uh, but you look like you're handling it just fine..."

"And that excuses you for not helping?"

"No, ma'am!" I re-gathered Wraith matter and slammed it at nearby ants, blowing its brethren away.

"Stupid and weak. I wonder if I should really save you." A horizontal arc swept a swath of the ants—and headed right at me.

"What happened to 'girls should help each other'?!" I punched at the arc of light, detonating it. The resulting explosion knocked me back to a tree, pine cones raining on my head.

"I am helping you. If you died while fighting mere golden ants with a Paladin helping you, it's a you problem."

I gritted my teeth, and kept punching the ants, while observing the behavior of Wraith matter around her sword. So the Wraith matter is something like mana, I guess? Instead of cleaving through, the sword shaped the Wraith matter, and acted like a catapult. Is it a matter of personal compatibility? Or is it just the sword? I don't see her body influencing the Wraith matter...

We fought waves and waves of the golden ant swarm, their corpses piling into small hill. My memories devolved into a blur as we mechanically sliced and smashed the ants. Finally, as the darkness of the night progressed, we sat out of breath with out back against a tree, facing each other.

"Recover as much as you could. Next is salamanders."

"Right, you did mention the salamanders." I have better grasp and control of my Wraith power now, and I could use them for cuts and impacts other than just explosion, but I wonder how useful it'll be... I turned my eyes at her, only to find her looking straight at mine.

"Listen, carefully. We will die. In this next fight, this very next moment, we will die. There's no clean victories against the salamanders, we could only minimize the number of victims, even with our life on the line. Especially, with only our life on the line." She sighed, while turning her head away. "I kinda figured already that you're a Newborn. An unaligned Wraith, barely known this world. But you just born in the worst place possible."

"And now I'm going to die."

"Yes."

I forced a smile. "It's nice knowing you."

"Considering meeting you led directly to my death, it's not a nice meeting for me." She stood up, and the ground rumbled. "Be ready. It's coming."

I tried gathering Wraith power in my hands, but the continuous use of it had thinned the distribution of Wraith matter too much. I wasn't strong enough to gather meaningful amount of it.

"Hey, can you throw some power my way?"

"Hah? You're out of power already?"

"Hey, miss Paladin, just like you said, I'm basically a newborn. I don't have precise control of my power yet." She only shrugged, before throwing an arc of Wraith matter with her sword, the blade sucked energy as if a bottomless crack in reality.

"Being a newborn is one thing, but aren't you too weak?" I only gritted my teeth as I "caught" the Wraith matter and "shaped" it into a sword.

One shot. I need to inject the matter directly—

My thought was interrupted as a massive lizard, easily over six meter long and two meter tall, with bright red skin wreaked havoc upon the trees using its massive claws and fangs. It ignited Wraith matter expelled from its mouth and spilled fire and shockwaves everywhere.

Well, the good news is I won't be in shortage of Wraith matter. By synchronizing my internal Wraith matter and the incorporeal sword, I "deflected" the fire and destruction heading my way. I shaped another sword, and imitated the pose I saw in television a while ago.

"You go left!" The Paladin ran to her right, her sword glowing as it sliced through the salamander's shockwave. I ran to my left, and using my swords—

—I did no damage. Not even scorch mark was left on the lizard's scales as my swords exploded on impact, only the shock on my hands being the evidence that they existed at all.

This must be a joke, right?! I reformed the swords, and again and again tried slashing at its horrifyingly durable scales. I caught a glimpse of her Wraith matter arcs barely performing any better than my attacks. She did say we will die, but I didn't expect the situation to be this hopeless!

Think! I focused at the lizard's body, but my senses are obstructed by the scales. I can't commandeer the Wraith matter within it, then. Hmm...

A light-bulb appeared in my mind. While still distracting the lizard and slowing it down from reaching the village, I gathered a dozen balls of Wraith matter, compressed just right below its activation limit, so that a subtle impact of additional matter would ignite it. Encircled by those balls was a globe of Wraith matter containing more than I could directly compress and ignite, capable of detonation incomparable to anything either of us had achieved.

It was a weapon design taken from; by this world's standard; a hard sci-fi, applied into hard fantasy system of this universe.

"Paladin! I need to put this in its mouth!" I showed her the complex arrangement of Wraith matter blobs.

"Then just do it!" She slammed another arc of Wraith matter against the lizard's scales, but it only served to anger the lizard.

"It would explode if it gets in the fire! I need space!"

"This better be worth it!" A horizontal wave struck the lizard's mouth and detonated, leaving a momentary vacuum.

This is my only chance! I rushed forward, with the spheres of magic in my left hand, extended forward to the lizard's open mouth.

Wraith matter rushed in right behind my arms, gathered by the lizard's inhalation.

And my spell detonated.

I couldn't differentiate the tinnitus from the blast with my scream, as my left arm was shredded entirely by the detonation. My vision was painted red from the pain; mine and the lizard's blood splattered on the charred soil illuminated by the pale moonlight.

In front of the massive lizard's headless carcass, my body was curling on the ground, lacking even the power to scream or clutch my stumped shoulder.

And then true darkness descended.

---

I watched as the Wraith girl recklessly thrusted the strange collection of magic into the salamander's mouth, and blood drained from my face. I didn't think that she would just put her arm in its mouth—one must be insane to let their body part enter the mouth of a gigantic lizard, much less the magical beast of fire, salamander.

Predictably, the magic imploded in her hand, taking out her arm and the salamander's head. It must be pure luck that the salamander was fatally injured in the detonation, else her crippled body would be immediately devoured by the beast. The stump bled heavily to the moonlit ground, mixing with the lizard.

I need to at least stop the bleeding. I tore part of her clothes, and firmly tied it on what remains of her upper arms. The bleeding lessened, but her blood would be drained long before I could get her proper treatment. I tightened the makeshift tourniquet, to no avail.

There's no other choice. I pulled out my sword, and let it gather magic until it's glowing. I pressed the white hot blade to her wound, cauterizing it, thankfully the girl was already passed out from the shock.

Carefully, I dragged her body out from the forest, back to the village.