When a person dies, they feel a strange kind of pain.
The soul tears itself free from the body — slowly, agonizingly — and the mind becomes a shattered, terrified thing, consumed by dread of what comes next. Because what comes next is unknown.
And the unknown is the only thing that has ever truly frightened anyone.
I told them I would paint the sky with their blood.
I said it while looking directly into their eyes — watching the fear bloom behind them like ink dropped into still water.
They were frozen in shock.
Then one voice broke the silence:
"You cursed little brat — I'll cut your head off!"
He was already moving toward me. Fast. Reckless. Alone.
Fool. Why charge by yourself? Why not attack with the others?
"If you want death that badly — who am I to refuse?"
He was raising his weapon, preparing to skewer me where I stood — but before he could close the distance, I snatched Rashad's sword from beside his cooling corpse and launched myself forward with a speed that swallowed the space between us whole.
He didn't see it coming.
The blade buried itself in his stomach before he could blink.
I had aimed for his throat — but I'm still short, unfortunately. The moment the steel found his gut, he buckled, folding at the waist and crashing to his knees. He stared up at me with eyes wide and glassy, drowning in something between agony and disbelief.
"H-how... how is this...? Aren't you a mage? How can you use a sword? What kind of madness—"
Someone behind me said those words. I didn't bother turning around.
I had a promise to keep.
I told you the sky would rain today. But you were too foolish to believe me.
I looked down at the man kneeling before me — at the fear carved into every line of his face — and I spoke clearly:
"Cleaving Strike."
A white light bled from the blade like moonlight through a wound. I swung it in a single clean arc toward his neck.
The sound it made was brief.
His head left his shoulders with a speed that almost seemed merciful — almost — and I watched it happen the way I always watched these things: with complete and total attention. The way the flesh separated. The way the light went out of his eyes mid-arc. The expression frozen on his face in those final, bewildered milliseconds.
Misery. That was what was on his face.
Beautiful.
Blood erupted across my cheeks, my clothes, the dark earth beneath my feet. Warm and immediate and real.
How I love this.
I straightened up.
Around me, twenty-eight men stood in absolute, cathedral silence. The forest itself seemed to hold its breath — no wind, no rustling leaves, no insects. Just the dripping of blood from the tip of the sword I was holding.
A child. A child who had been sobbing and trembling in their arms not three minutes ago had just beheaded a grown warrior without flinching.
I tilted my head at them.
"I don't understand why you all look so frightened."
Then I sighed.
"This is getting boring."
They all attacked at once.
Good. That's exactly what I wanted.
And that was when my beloved cats arrived.
They poured from the darkness between the trees like a wave of living fire — thirty bodies of burning crimson muscle and fury, their massive paws silent against the forest floor until the moment they weren't. Marous led them, his enormous frame cutting through the undergrowth like a boulder through still water, his amber eyes blazing, his coat radiating waves of heat that made the air around him shimmer. The smaller ones fanned out in practiced formation, encircling the group with the calm efficiency of creatures that had done this many times.
The thieves hadn't imagined — not for a single second — that the child was also a Beast Tamer.
I found myself a comfortable spot and sat down to watch.
My Qaraween are not simply large cats. Their claws are curved like short blades, dark and dense as iron, capable of shearing through leather armor as though it were cloth. And their fire — unlike the controlled, channeled flame of a mage — comes from somewhere deeper. It rolls from their throats in concentrated bursts, orange at the edges and white at the core, hot enough to melt the links of chainmail on contact.
The screaming started almost immediately.
I rested my chin in my hand and observed.
I didn't lie to you, by the way. I personally killed only three of them. The bodies surrounding me now — those belong to my cats.
I'm not the villain anymore, remember?
The battle was, in all honesty, entirely one-sided.
It was still ongoing when my father arrived with a contingent of guards at his back.
Amir — Level 40 Mage, Village Chief of Zahour, and the man who had the spectacular misfortune of being my father — stepped into the clearing and stopped.
I was standing in the center of it all.
Covered head to toe in blood. Surrounded by thirty corpses in various states of ruin. My expression perfectly calm. Marous sitting beside me like a loyal, enormous, mildly terrifying housecat.
My father's face went through approximately seven emotions in under two seconds.
"S... son..."
He crossed the clearing in quick strides and pulled me into his arms without another word. He held me tightly — the way he always did when something scared him badly enough that words became useless.
After a long moment, he pulled back and looked at me.
"What happened?"
"Nothing serious," I said. "I killed them."
He stared at me.
"...You did it again?"
"They tried to kidnap me," I said simply. "So I let Hell kidnap them instead."
He had known about this side of me since I was ten.
The first time I left the house and ventured into the village, a group of older boys decided I looked like an easy target. They surrounded me with the confidence of children who had never once miscalculated.
I beat them until they stopped moving.
My father found out. He sat with me for a long time — longer than most men would — and extracted from me a single promise: I would only kill those who attacked me first.
He told my mother nothing. He understood, in the way that quiet, perceptive men often do, that some truths would only cause her pain without serving any purpose.
He is a deeply lazy man, my father. He prefers his garden and his wife's cooking to politics and power. When King Jabir — ruler of all human lands and apparently an old friend of his — came personally to offer him a position as Royal Advisor, my father declined without a second thought.
He simply doesn't like politics.
But for me, he became something else entirely. He taught me Fire Magic, Ice Magic, Soul Magic. He taught me how to feel the Mana — how to hold it, how to shape it, how to release it without destroying myself in the process. He found me a seasoned warrior to teach me the blade when I told him I wanted to learn, even though he believed I only had one specialization to work with.
What he didn't know — what no one knew — was that when the warrior put a wooden sword in my hand and explained how to feel the internal energy, the Qi...
I already knew what energy felt like. I had been controlling Mana for months.
I spent over five hours swinging that wooden sword. Five hours of silence and repetition, the blade cutting the same arc through the air again and again, until I felt it — that deep, coiled current beneath the surface of my muscles, different from Mana but recognizable in the same fundamental way.
The wooden sword released a faint white light.
"Cleaving Strike — learned."
The warrior told my father I had grasped the foundational principles of Qi and the Warrior path in a single session.
My father was so stunned he stood there in silence for a full minute.
Then he came to my room, embraced me, and told me — his voice genuinely shaking — that he had never heard of anyone doing what I had just done. Mastering more than one specialization. He made me swear to never reveal it. Never use magic in front of strangers. Never let anyone suspect.
He doesn't know the half of it.
A year later, I tamed Marous.
My father had quietly arranged for his soldiers to capture a juvenile Fire Cat from the deeper forest so I could attempt it myself after I told him I thought I could do it. There were no teachers — Beast Tamers are extraordinarily rare, even by this world's standards. I worked it out through instinct and stubborn repetition, spending weeks in a secured pen with a creature that could have incinerated me at any moment.
When my father finally saw me sitting cross-legged on top of Marous's back — the great red cat utterly relaxed beneath me, tail moving slowly — he stood at the pen's entrance for a long time without speaking.
That was a good day.
Now he stood in a clearing full of corpses, watching me with an expression that had moved past shock into something resembling exhausted resignation.
We walked home together.
Zahour Village sits in a wide, sunlit valley edged by forest on three sides and a slow river on the fourth. The houses are built from pale stone and dark timber, neat and well-kept — the kind of village that reflects the character of the man who runs it. The streets are clean. The market is orderly. The people are neither wealthy nor desperate.
My father's home — our home — is the largest structure in the village. Stone walls, a wide courtyard, a garden that my mother tends with a devotion she applies to very few other things. It is warm in the way that only genuinely lived-in places can be warm.
When we came through the gate, my mother was already in the courtyard.
Rahab saw me — saw the blood covering my face and hands and clothes — and her expression did something I had not prepared for.
She crossed the distance between us in three steps and pulled me against her chest without a word.
I stood very still inside that embrace.
I love this woman. I love her in a way I have no real framework for, because I spent an entire previous life never once experiencing anything like it. She sat beside me for three months straight when I was five years old and too sick to leave my bed. She never once made me feel like a burden. She was simply there — every morning, every night, every time the pain in my chest woke me before dawn.
The doctors who examined me back then found a strange marking burned into my skin — unusual symbols arranged across my sternum, radiating a persistent heat that none of them could explain. They assumed it was some form of curse or rogue enchantment. My father suspected otherwise, but said nothing. Whatever it was, it kept me bedridden until I turned ten.
My mother stayed the entire time.
For that alone — I would protect her from anything this world could produce.
She was crying now.
And for the first time in recent memory, I felt something close to genuine regret about a decision I'd made.
I shouldn't have let them take me. I didn't think she would worry this much.
"Don't cry, Mother. I'm fine."
She pulled back — and hit me on the top of the head. Hard.
"Don't you ever make me that afraid again."
I rubbed my head and said nothing.
When I'm with her, I become someone else. Someone I don't fully recognize. Someone quieter.
I had wanted a normal life when I arrived in this world. I had genuinely meant it — in those first moments, held in her arms as a newborn, I had felt something settle in my chest and made a real decision.
Normal. Quiet. Ordinary.
But there is no such thing as a normal life here. I understand that now.
"Attributes"
Name: JokerLevel: 17Occupation: NoneHealth: 100/100
Strength: 30 Intelligence: 60 Endurance: 25 Luck: 40 Charisma: 20 Magic: 25
Level zero until the age of ten — that's normal for humans in this world. No one's level rises before then.
By the standards of everyone around me, reaching Level 17 at fourteen makes me a prodigy of unprecedented scale. Ordinary humans plateau at Level 10. Those who surpass it go on to become Warriors, Mages, or Tamers — one of the three, and nothing more, for the rest of their lives.
I am all three simultaneously.
I didn't achieve it through talent alone. I hunted. Systematically and deliberately — starting with the weak ones. Mist Rats first, those pale, half-translucent creatures that drift through the lower forest like living fog, quick but fragile. Then Swamp Frogs — heavier, with thick hides and a toxic mucus that made the early fights genuinely unpleasant. Gradually stronger. Gradually higher.
Now I can take on a group of Fire Cats alone without breaking a sweat.
A week passed under my mother's enforced house arrest.
The moment her attention wavered, I was gone.
Back into the forest.
I moved deeper than usual that day — past the familiar hunting grounds, past the territory markers I had set for Marous and the others — pushing further into the ancient dark interior where the trees grew truly massive, their trunks wider than houses, their bark black and deeply grooved, their canopies so dense overhead that the light came through only in scattered, pale columns like the remnants of something holy.
That was when my chest began to pulse.
Not pain. Something different — a warmth, building in the marking on my sternum, directional in a way I had never felt before. Like a compass needle swinging into alignment. Like something calling to something else.
Go this way.
I followed it.
The forest grew stranger as I went deeper. The undergrowth thinned despite the increased density of the canopy above. The air took on a different quality — heavier, older, carrying the faint mineral smell of stone that hasn't seen sunlight in centuries. The sounds of the forest faded, replaced by a silence so complete it had texture.
And then I saw it.
The tree.
It was enormous in a way that made the word inadequate. Its trunk was wider than my father's entire house, its bark so ancient it had taken on the color and texture of dark stone. Its roots erupted from the earth in great arching curves, some as thick as a man's torso, creating a cathedral of twisted wood at its base. The branches above were beyond counting — they spread outward and upward and interlocked with each other in patterns so complex they looked deliberate, like the vaulted ceiling of some primordial structure built by hands that no longer existed.
The leaves were black.
Not dark green. Not the deep brown of autumn. Black — the dense, lightless black of ink, rustling softly in a wind I couldn't feel against my own skin.
And at the center of the trunk, where the bark had parted slightly, there was a light. Faint. Deep gold. Pulsing in a rhythm that matched, exactly, the rhythm of the warmth in my chest.
I stopped.
I have walked through this part of the forest before. Many times.
I have never seen this tree.
What is happening to me?
The warmth in my sternum surged — and I felt my body begin to move forward without any clear decision from me, pulled by something beneath conscious thought, the way iron moves toward a magnet. The marking on my chest erupted into a blazing golden light that shone through my shirt, casting strange shadows on the roots around my feet.
I was almost at the trunk.
I braced for impact —
And then the bark simply opened.
A light poured outward — not the gold of the marking, but something whiter, deeper, ancient in a way that pressed against the inside of my skull — and it wrapped around me like hands, and pulled.
The forest disappeared.
What am I looking at?
What in the name of Hell is this?