The metal tasted like pennies. Then a loud bang, a massive burn in my chest, and everything went black.
I figured dying would be quiet. Instead, it was a complete shitshow.
A bunch of high-pitched screaming wrecked my ears. I snapped my eyes open, but everything was blurry, bright, and freezing cold.
My chest felt tight. I tried to take a deep breath to calm down, but my lungs completely glitched. A massive spasm shook my body.
Before I could even process how I went from getting shot to this trash situation, my face twisted up.
My tear glands went into overdrive from the bright lights and cold air. It was a pure physical reflex. A loud, pathetic cry burst out of my mouth.
I was bawling my eyes out. Not because I was sad, but because my new body was completely overwhelmed.
I tried to lift my hand to wipe my face, but my arm felt like a heavy, useless log. It just flailed around in front of my nose. I blinked hard, cleared the tears, and looked down.
My arm was tiny, chubby, and wrinkly. I was sitting in a wooden crib.
I forced my stiff neck to turn side to side. The blurry shapes around me finally cleared up, and what I saw was straight-up creepy.
I wasn't alone. I was in a giant room with a high ceiling that went on forever.
Rows and rows of identical wooden cribs lined the stone floor. There had to be hundreds of them. Every single crib had a squirming, screaming baby inside.
A bunch of women wearing matching grey uniforms walked fast between the rows. They weren't hugging the babies or acting sweet.
Their moves were totally mechanical and cold. They checked the kids, wiped their faces, and moved to the next crib like robots on an assembly line.
Where the hell am I? I thought.
My brain was working like a normal teenager, which felt weird since I was trapped in this tiny sack of meat.
Did I reincarnate here? Is this some kind of messed-up waiting room?
Before I could come up with a better guess, a heavy pressure dropped on the room. The air got freezing cold.
The loud crying from the hundreds of babies felt quiet, like the air was too thick for noise to travel through.
The massive iron doors at the end of the hall groaned open.
Footsteps echoed against the stonh. A guy walked down the center aisle.
Even from my crib, the vibe he gave off made my basic survival instincts scream that I needed to run.
As he got close to my section, the nannies nearby dropped straight to their knees. They slammed their foreheads right against the dirty stone floor, trembling like crazy.
"Report," the guy said. His voice was deep, smooth, and full of authority.
It gave me a weirdly familiar chill, but I couldn't put my finger on it yet.
"L-Lord Patriarch," the main nanny stammered shaking her voice. "This batch is fully processed. No deformities. No physical flaws. Every single baby is completely healthy."
The guy stopped walking right next to my crib.
I forced my weak eyes to focus through the wooden bars. The man wore a perfectly fitted black suit.
His hair was pitch black and slicked back neatly. He had a sharp jaw, high cheekbones, and an expression that showed absolutely zero human emotion.
But his eyes were the wildest part. They were a bright, glowing, blood-red color.
He took a quick, bored look at the sea of crying kids.
He turned around to leave, seeing nothing interesting in the crowd.
But I kept staring. My brain, trapped in this stupid baby body, locked onto him. I wanted to figure out if he is the man I think he is.
Maybe he noticed a random newborn staring at him with actual focus instead of just crying like an idiot, because the guy paused.
His boots pivoted on the stone. Those blood-red eyes locked right onto mine.
For a second, everything went totally still. The patriarch of this creepy place stared down into my crib. His gaze felt like it was drilling straight through my forehead.
I refused to look away. I kept my eyes wide open, memorizing his face.
Seeing nothing but a weirdly bold baby, the guy's face stayed stone-cold. He turned back toward the exit.
"Proceed exactly as planned," he ordered.
"Yes, Lord Patriarch!" the nannies chanted together, their faces still glued to the floor.
The guy walked out without making another sound, and the heavy iron doors slammed shut. The suffocating pressure in the room vanished.
The nannies slowly got up, wiping sweat off their faces and sighing in relief.
Sitting there in the quiet room, all the clues in my head suddenly slammed together.
Blood-red eyes. Black hair. A brutal patriarch.
A wave of pure panic hit me, way worse than the fear of getting shot in my past life. I knew this exact world.
I had spent thousands of hours playing it, cursing at it, and mastering it on my computer.
I was inside Blood and Iron.
It was a notoriously dark, hardcore MMORPG that was super popular before I died. And the guy who just stared at me was Somes Bloodrune, the current Patriarch of House Bloodrune.
House Bloodrune was one of the most powerful and terrifying factions in the game's Empire. In the lore, they supplied the military with the most ruthless, highly skilled swordsmen in the world.
In the game's main story, Somes Bloodrune was a major boss. A brutal, unyielding bastard who was so annoying and difficult that players often skipped his fight.
And according to this new setup, that villain was my dad.
I broke out in a cold sweat. The dark secret of House Bloodrune that the game never fully explained was right in front of me.
The lore never said how the house kept getting an endless supply of elite fighters. Now, looking at hundreds of cribs stretching into the dark, the messed-up truth was obvious.
They were mass-producing babies like a factory.
There were no moms here. No noble wives, no families. This was a biological laboratory. And since I was sitting in a communal nursery without any special family crest or a mother around, it meant I was an illegitimate kid.
A bastard. In the strict social ranks of this game's empire, a high-born bastard was considered a total piece of trash even worse than a regular commoner living in the slums.
I wasn't a rich young master who was going to get spoiled. I was just a piece of meat in a high-stakes survival grinder.
...A few weeks went by in a blur of boring routines and basic survival.
They fed us just enough to make our bodies grow unnaturally fast. In this world, the Bloodrune DNA gave babies a ridiculous physical boost.
By week three, my bones felt solid enough that I could crawl incredibly fast. My brain can coordinate my arms and legs with strict focus.
Then, the food stopped completely.
For three straight days, the nannies didn't bring a single bottle of milk. The room turned into an absolute madhouse of starving, screaming babies.
Hundreds of kids cried until their throats were completely raw. My own stomach burned with a crazy, twisting hunger that made me want to scream, too.
But I just lay in my crib, saving my energy. I realized the family was setting us up for something awful.
On the fourth morning, the nannies showed up.
They didn't have food. Instead, they silently started scooping up the starving babies and dropping them onto the cold stone floor.
I got picked up and dumped on all fours. My knees stung against the hard rock, but I held my balance.
"The First Trial begins," a guard shouted from the front entrance.
The heavy doors at the other end of the nursery swung open, revealing a massive, terrifying hall. The floor of that next room looked like a straight-up horror movie.
Thick, wiggling purple vines covered the ground, dripping a glowing green slime that literally hissed when it hit the stone.
Mechanical iron spikes were clicking and popping out of the walls, and there were deep, pitch-black holes in the path.
At the very end of this insane obstacle course, sitting under a bright light, was a massive silver trough filled to the top with fresh, warm milk.
These sick bastards.
The smell of the food drifted across the room, hitting our starving noses like a drug.
The second that smell hit the nursery, the babies completely lost their minds.
They didn't know what danger was. They only knew their stomachs were totally empty.
Dozens of babies immediately scrambled forward on all fours, creating a chaotic wave of loud, desperate kids rushing toward the food.
This is completely insane, I thought, my eyes going wide.
This is serial killer behavior. They are literally killing babies.
But I couldn't waste time being mad. A baby right next to me lunged forward, desperate for milk.
He ran straight into the next hall, his tiny hands splashing right into the green slime dripping from the purple vines.
A sharp, horrible scream echoed through the room. The glowing slime was a brutal acid poison.
Within three seconds, the kid's skin turned black and blistered. His crying cut off instantly as the poison stopped his heart.
To my left, a few babies who hadn't learned to crawl properly tried to drag their bodies forward.
They fell behind immediately, lacking the strength to even cross the starting line. They just collapsed from hunger on the cold floor, and nobody helped them.
The guards just stood there with their arms crossed, watching like it was a boring TV show.
Pure survival instinct, I realized, my heart thumping against my ribs.
No Bloodrune is allowed into the actual family without passing these trials. If you die here, you were just a broken product.
The hunger in my gut was screaming at me to run blindly toward the milk. I clamped my mouth shut, using my conscious mind to think carefully.
I couldn't just rush in. I had to play this like a hardcore survival game.
I mapped out the course in my head. The purple vines called Viper's Snare from the game moved in a repeating pattern every four seconds.
The iron wall spikes triggered whenever a heavy weight stepped on the darker grey tiles on the floor.
I took a deep breath, dropped my body low to the stone, and moved out.
While the other kids screamed and charged straight into the traps, dying from poison gas or falling into spike pits, I moved through the chaos with total precision.
A baby right ahead of me stepped on a trap tile. I stopped instantly, pressing my body completely flat against the floor.
A split second later, a massive iron blade swung across the hallway, cutting through the air exactly where my head would have been.
The kid who triggered it dropped straight into a pit.
Without looking back, I scrambled over the safe, lighter-colored tiles. When the Viper's Snare vines swung toward me, I didn't panic.
I timed the gap perfectly, sliding my small body under a thorny arch, completely missing the acidic green slime.
My buffed-up baby body worked perfectly under my conscious commands.
While the hallway behind me turned into a graveyard of failed kids, I moved like a ghost through the death traps.
I ducked under the final poison vent, hopped over a gap in the floor, and crossed the finish line.
The silver trough was right there. I was the absolute first one to make it.
I didn't waste time and jammed my face straight into the warm milk, drinking like a maniac.
The liquid filled my empty stomach, giving me a massive rush of energy and relief.
As I drank, I looked back over the edge of the trough. Out of the hundreds of babies that started the run, only a tiny handful made it across.
The rest were dead.
"Report this to patriarch," a guard muttered in the shadows near the trough, his voice shaking as he stared at me.
"The first kid cleared the gauntlet in record time. Zero scratches. Perfect execution. He dodged every single trap like he already knew where they were."
An hour later, the surviving babies were lined up in a smaller, clean room.
The vibe shift was crazy; the floor here was polished white marble, completely clean of blood or dust.
The heavy doors clicked open again.
Somes Bloodrune walked in. He looked just as terrifying as before, his sharp black suit totally clean.
He walked past the guards, who bowed so low their armor clattered against the floor.
"Which one?" Somes asked, his red eyes scanning the small group of survivors.
One of the guard pointed a shaking finger right at me.
"This one, Lord Patriarch. He didn't mess up once. He got a flawless victory and finished first. His movements were... completely unnatural for a kid his age. He took the safest path with zero hesitation."
Well what can you say. For a kid broken since early age, this was nothing. Though a normal person is bound to panic in such situations.
Somes stopped right in front of me. He looked down, his crimson eyes locking onto mine for the second time.
This time, I saw a tiny, dangerous spark of interest in his face.
He reached down, his large, rough hand grabbing my chest. With one easy motion, he lifted me up into the air, holding me right at eye level.
His grip was incredibly tight, solid, and had zero warmth.
A tiny smile showed up on the Patriarch's face.
"From today on, your name is Ran. Ran Bloodrune."
I survived the first level of this garbage dump. I wonder what other crazy things come in my way.