A few years back I found myself at a certain crossroads. It was one that most good students in a developed nation would have to face. Namely, I was deciding where to take my studies, and perhaps, ultimately my career.
While it was not a choice afforded to me as Tanya Degretyav, the Imperial orphan with a 'God-given talent for magic', I had experienced it once before as a young Japanese boy.
In my first life, the choice came later than for some. There wasn't much in the way of elective studies in high school, so until I was sixteen or seventeen, life involved keeping my head down and frantically studying what I was told to, six days a week. They only abolished compulsory Saturday classes a few years after I graduated. Most of my childhood was a linear gauntlet of tests and examinations, but the choice did eventually come.
I had been a little bewildered. My sole objective up until that point was obtaining good grades and doing what I was told, so the sudden abundance of options had seemed overwhelming. I did as my parents and high school career counsellor suggested and aimed for the business faculty in a suitably prestigious school. As it turned out, the prestige was more important for my resume than the specific degree I obtained, but the business faculty did introduce me to the Chicago School of Economics.
I won't go into the details here, but suffice to say that I entered my third life with a greater understanding of the world around me, and I wasn't bewildered this time around.
I hadn't turned thirteen yet when I was accepted into university. A consequence of living amongst elves and vampires was that, compared to Japan, there were fewer ironclad rules about what age was appropriate for what. Common sense restrictions still abounded, of course, but not when it came to harmless fields such as study. As long as I demonstrated that I had the maturity and the aptitude, any university was happy enough to hand out a scholarship irrespective of my age, and that included the University of Rudolphina.
Naturally, neither maturity nor aptitude had been in question for me, so in the end it was a question of which discipline to choose.
Ideally, I wanted to make a lot of money doing something I was already good at. Job satisfaction would have been a nice bonus, but as long as I was well compensated I didn't care what I was doing. I just wanted to live well.
In my last days at the orphanage, on a cramped bunk on the third floor, I therefore found myself going through my skill set, highlighting which could be leveraged for the highest remuneration.
The first was Originium Arts. Well, strictly speaking, it wasn't Originium Arts that I was proficient in. I had simply been an adequately skilled magician once, and that was enough. While Arts couldn't be considered a one-to-one parallel to the magic I remembered using, they shared the general concept of directing energy and instructions into a medium for encoding and assisted computation. This naturally meant that they shared many of the constituent skills required to utilise them. An understanding of the natural sciences, the ability to visualise, complex mental calculations, the aptitude for directing metaphysical energies—all of these had been honed in high stress environments where I was under time pressure to deliver.
If I could do it while Being X conspired to have me shot out of the sky, I reasoned, I could perform doubly well when it was just a bossy project manager. Combined with the aptitude that this body was discovered to have with the Arts, it could have been an easy life as an Originium Arts technician.
The other area was, of course, my experience in management.
My life as a salaryman had endowed me with plenty of familiarity with balance sheets, and even more experience in project planning and project management. I worked efficiently, kept things within budget, communicated effectively with all stakeholders, and ensured things proceeded according to schedule.
Leadership and team coordination were areas I was an old hand in as well. When I turned thirty-one, I joined my company's HR department. I learned there how to best manage and allocate our organisation's FTEs, even with free riders and troublemakers obstructing my duty.
As for more direct management experiences, life as the head of the 203rd Imperial Flight Mage Battalion had familiarised me with the skill, and then my short time as deputy commander of Kampfgruppe Seven had applied it to a larger cohort. My experiences with the Imperial Army had also unfortunately given me plentiful experience in how to deal with superiors who expected impossible results with only meagre resources. That, too, was an invaluable management skill.
Either area would have served me well, and for a while I was truly torn.
On the one hand, I didn't want to be pushed in front of a train again. My first death had come at the hands of an irrational and erratic drug addict, after all. Working with others would always pose the risk of unpredictable outliers, and the more humans I came into contact with, the higher that risk would be. It was simple mathematics, and unlike in my second life, I wouldn't be allowed to execute them. Even sending them to die in a bunker was illegal, and while I might be able to get away with murder, I would not break the law as a matter of principle.
On the other hand, as much trouble as those outliers could cause, they were by definition few and far between. Off the top of my head, I could think of the aforementioned drug abuser, an American lunatic fighting for the Russies, and a pack of sad, petty, self-proclaimed deities. It would be a coward's choice to let a few rotten apples spoil working with others as a whole, and I had gained a lot of confidence in mentoring rookies. Visha, Grantz, Ponytail—all little puppies that I raised into wolves. I wouldn't have minded raising a few more in the corporate battlefield.
In the end, after much agonising, the decision had been made to enter the General Finance stream at my new university. The considerations had been multifaceted and complex, but the two deciding factors had been simple enough.
The first was that while the median salary of Arts Technicians was higher than those in finance, for those at the top of their respective fields, financial officers were far better paid.
This was true enough in Leithania, but held even truer outside of my mother nation. Knowing already that I wanted to put some distance between myself and potential trouble from Loyalists, choosing a life in business over Arts would only further divorce myself from the image of 'the daughter of a Leithanian aristocrat that happily supported the insane Witch King'. The harder I was to recognise, the better.
The second… was that the combination of 'little girl + war orphan + magic + conflict' was looking uncomfortably familiar, so I wanted to head that off as much as possible.
It was therefore that after her initial testing, Tanja Müller never touched an Arts Unit more complex than an electric kettle again. Originium Arts was a complex field of applied science and metaphysical visualisation techniques. People trained and specialised for years upon years to utilise complex Originium Arts, and while I imagined I would be good at it, I had no illusions about actually being a qualified Arts Technician.
All this to say that I was beyond surprised when I came out of my daze, only to realise I'd cast several thermal formulae, using for the foci what I could only assume were the crystallised Originium in my assailants themselves.
I really didn't have the knowledge or skill to do such a thing. Or at least I hadn't known before this moment that I did.
Was such a thing even possible? I had no idea, because as mentioned, I was not a qualified Arts Technician.
Had I been brainwashed by Being X again? After all, he and his posse had proven to only ever be blunt instruments. 'Tanja needs to struggle to find faith. Oh, Tanja isn't struggling enough? Let's have a lunatic stab her, and then we'll give her a solution that brainwashes her.' The dual-core Elenium Type-95 Operation Orb allowed me to perform similarly impossible feats, and the price was barely-remembered religious blackouts.
I would have known for sure had he finally appeared. Said something to me. Had at least one of his buddies appeared. Nobody did.
I grunted, and applied pressure to my wound.
No, even if I remembered nothing, it looked like what happened was that I lashed out in panic. My reaction had likely been all me. I could hardly complain about the threat being neutralised, but a part of me was irked that it hadn't been a calculated decision. I made impromptu decisions when I was a Flight Mage, of course, but beneath each of those was a careful consideration. This had simply been animal instinct.
For all that I had lost none of the knowledge of my previous lives, there had been things I did lose with each death. I had to learn to speak again. I had to learn to walk again. Bayonet routines that had once been second nature were once again an ill fit for me. All things that had once come easily were turned into tests of focus and recollection. It was like the wood had marks pencilled in, so I knew precisely where to chisel, but the grooves themselves hadn't yet been carved.
That had been fine with me, really. Even on the stage of Being X's self-directed drama, I was determined to prove that there was a place for a peace-loving and motivated businessman. I would never abandon my self-esteem or principles. All the more if the firearms in this world were held in monopoly by his church of all things. That blatant provocation had only galvanised my peaceable intentions.
I was going to walk my own path, unreliant on him.
As Tanya, he railroaded me into the military with a guaranteed conscription, and then his goon forced the Type-95 onto me. Otherwise, as a staunch pacifist, I would never have stepped foot in something as offensively wasteful as war, let alone lay waste to so many human resources. After all, within each poor sap that I killed lay the potential to bring us a step closer to a modernised, enlightened world. Even while doing what it took to survive the military, the Rhine, and then all the subsequent hells on earth, I was always determinedly seeking a non-combat role in the rear.
Since he seemed intent on staying out of sight this time, I jumped headfirst into civilised, civilian work. I lived and breathed for study, followed the rules to the letter, through my efforts moved to somewhere safer, and maximised my efficiency in my new company. Always staying faithful to the idea of enriching both myself and society through innovation and dedicated labour. Every moment that I prospered under my ideals was a slap in Being X's face with the righteousness of the free market economy, and my rise was a meteoric one indeed. If only he had had the temper to listen to sense, this satisfaction could have been his from the start.
I wouldn't ever be broken by his little tantrum, I swore.
So how had it come to this?!
I grimaced. Then I grimaced a second time when a spark of pain lanced through my gut. Everything was wet and hurting.
I should never have stepped foot in Ursus. Little good came of Rus, in any world.
I needed medical attention, and urgently. Leaning a shoulder against a wall and stifling a pained hiss, I examined my wound.
Shit.
I tried to recall what I could about first aid. What was this again? A stomach wound? The liver? …I'd have noticed a lung injury, I would think.
It was probably too high to be the large intestine. And the object that would bleed me out if I removed it… I tried not to think about it, but this stone was probably Originium.
The realisation would have turned my blood cold if I wasn't already freezing all over.
I took off my scarf and made a crude doughnut around the object. Then I removed my blazer and used it to lash the doughnut tight into my stomach, applying pressure around the wound as best I could. That… would have to do for now.
…I still wasn't entirely convinced that this wasn't Being X's doing. After all, even if some things in life were a coincidence, how could being reborn in a world of magic a second time be one? Especially as a war orphan. And a little girl. As far as I knew, that was pretty rare.
I squinted.
Was this some kind of houchi play, where I was supposed to feel humiliated at the neglect? Or was he still embarrassed about that car bomb?
I hissed and propped an elbow against the concrete.
Really? Nothing? No dramatic white space and bright clouds nonsense?
There were clouds gathering in the sky, but they were dark and stormy, and my consciousness was firmly stuck in my body.
I wondered what the chances were that this was simple, mundane misfortune.
Time was running out. I tried to get off the wall and had to stifle another cry of pain.
This was not even close to my first experience with penetrative injuries, but somehow things felt worse than ever.
Was it because of the girth of the object? The crystal was narrow, but it was still about twenty millimetres in diameter. That was a larger hole than any of the optical spells had ever punched in me, and displaced more flesh than any knife wound I'd suffered, but I'd been injured so much worse even in my first sortie over Norden.
It was only by pushing off the wall with my head, using the strength of my neck, that I was finally walking upright. Stumbling forward, I took a few quick, shallow breaths to clear my head.
I glanced at the carnage.
Gingerly dropping to my knees, I stripped a mostly intact hoodie from the closest corpse—the woman who stabbed me. First of all, it was getting cold without my blazer. Second of all, until I reached the police, an attempt at a disguise could only help me survive. With only a little hesitation, I removed the mask from her separated head. Hm. She was younger than me.
Rifling through her pockets found me a general Arts Unit as well as a packet of cigarettes. I tsked. What a little delinquent. After some hesitation, I took both of them. As long as the recipient lit these far away from me, I wouldn't mind trading them away. As for the Arts Unit, it was just in case.
To my left… Director Veselov… He was still breathing.
I rose to my feet, and biting down the scream that threatened to escape me, I dragged him around the corner before releasing him behind a bin. If he had spinal trauma, or head injuries, this might have worsened them, but if I left him amongst the pieces of the Infected, he would be a dead man come the next group.
Still might be, regardless.
That was the best I could do for him. It was already quite cooperative of me to drag him around the corner with this gut wound. For a moment, an old, vicious part of me whispered that he could not take offence to being abandoned if he were dead.
I quashed it. It was probably the smell of iron and burning flesh that was bringing that mindset back. Between the blood loss and the earlier concussion, I wasn't in the right headspace to be making split-second decisions, so I stuck to the plan a more cogent Tanja had developed. I moved west.
I needed to leave before the smell attracted their friends, and I was in dire need of medical attention.
The trek was a slog. What had once seemed like a long, but manageable jog, had turned into an endless ordeal. Everything was awful, prolonged, wet agony.
It felt awful.
I couldn't help but wonder again. It was strange. The injuries I survived in Moskva made this wound look like a scratch. The sortie that earned me my alias was even worse.
Was it because this body never built up its pain tolerance, or did the Analgesic Spell make that much of a difference? The spell had never made things painless, exactly, but maybe I was underplaying its effectiveness if this was abdominal trauma without it.
I forced myself to take another step. And another. Again and again, my feet fell upon the utilitarian concrete, as I continued my exodus west. As my mood worsened, so too did the skies. It looked like a storm was coming. Once more, I couldn't help but wonder if that band of devils had a hand in this. The grey skies certainly fit Being X's taste for the dramatic.
As I considered how waterproof the hood of my stolen jumper might be, I realised that one of my antlers had been chipped. Thank everything that I couldn't feel my horns. The last thing I wanted was the pain of a broken bone on top of everything else.
I continued to make my way down the increasingly dark and foggy street.
The more time passed, the worse the chaos got. I heard more and more screaming, both before and behind me.
More bystanders attacked for the quality of their clothes? For not being Infected? It felt like the whole city was screaming out.
I grunted and limped around another fucking truck. Peered through its windows. No key.
The truck behind the coffee shop had had a key. Hadn't thought to take it because we were trying to be discreet. Might not have been stabbed if we had.
The blood that covered my front had long gone cool. I suspected that I might have been lying still on the ground by now if the humans of Terra hadn't been so much more robust.
How long had I been walking now? Ten minutes? Twenty?
I checked my watch. Seven.
There was a small plaza ahead that interrupted the service street. As I approached, I could smell the scent of burning hair again. That was not a good sign.
I ignored the pain in my gut—more proof that humans could get used to anything—and carefully peered around the corner. The mist had grown thick and ominous, but I welcomed anything that might help conceal me.
There was no longer any question about where that smell emanated from; there were flames everywhere, and even through the mist I saw small piles of corpses. The mob of Infected had lost all reason and attacked Ursine civilians. Apparently I had been limping so slowly that I missed all the chaos. Either that or this particular group was especially insane.
I looked on, dumbfounded, at the scene. Even through the fog, I was sure some were women and children. This was hardly my first burning city, but I couldn't help but be taken aback. Were they trying to kill every un-Infected in the city?
The bourgeoisie-led Jacobin Terror had inspired the Red Terror, in which the persecuted were ironically the bourgeoisie. Between their bourgeoisie targets and political dissenters, the Bolsheviks had slain over a hundred thousand people, but that had only been managed by swindling the uneducated masses into providing overwhelming support.
These lunatics could never manage that, so what could their end goal possibly be?
I scanned the plaza while I listened carefully. I was still surrounded by atrocities and violence, if the wailing I could hear beneath the conflagration's roar was indication, but the plaza itself was fortuitously empty of the living. Just fire and corpses here.
I let out a ragged breath. With the way Ursus liked to keep their Infected numbers down, there wasn't enough manpower to sweep the nation in revolution. No matter how much senseless violence they peddled today, it would all be over the moment the Ursine military moved in. For all of their failures in recent decades—the failure to take Kazimierz, the Russo-Japanese War's Terran counterpart, and then Ursus' own civil war—the Ursus military was not to be trifled with. Everybody knew that. How could these terrorists not?
I put the thought out of my mind. It wasn't my problem. I doubted the answer would change what I had to do.
My fingers found the Arts Unit I had taken from that woman. I had to admit that I was tempted.
Generally speaking, it was beyond inadvisable to use a general Arts Unit without knowing what you were doing. On the other hand, it seemed that either Arts came naturally to me, or people were greatly exaggerating its complexity. If I could already cast thermal formulae with raw Originium, then with the encoding support of Arts Units to skip calculation steps…
Flight magic would still be out of the question—there would be no computing that in my head—but a protective shell only required a single point of reference. Even without the auxiliary calculations programmed into a computational orb, wasn't it possible that I could cast it? Was I willing to try?
I weighed the risks and outcomes in my head, and the analysis said no. Using a looted Arts Unit to cast Arts on myself, without training or practice, was simply tempting fate. As today proved once more, I wasn't a lucky person. The fact that it seemed like it would be easy was just another red flag. My hand left my pocket.
Instead, after making one final sweep of the plaza for rioters, I limped out of cover towards the ruins of a bookstore, in front of which sat a tour bus. It was tall and would hide my form as I made my way around, which would do just fine for now.
To be honest, I was growing desperate. If after all this time I only managed to reach an area the rioters had already swept through, how much further back must the MP garrison be? Originally I had worried about taking off the hoodie before the police saw me, but that was beginning to seem worryingly needless.
Under my stolen mask, I glanced back down the way I came. If I went back to the hotel, would I find better care, or just a more comfortable grave? What were the chances of a doctor in the hotel, if it hadn't been overrun by these lunatics?
No, my only chance of survival was moving forwards. I continued onwards, tracing the sides of the plaza, ears constantly in motion beneath the hood to apprise me of any newcomers to the area. But I made it to the other side just fine, and continued down another service street.
Was I going to die again? Here?
If only I had my computational orb, I could have used the flight formula to get out of here.
No, if only I had hired a bodyguard before coming to this shithole.
The Executive Officer who headed the Lungmen branch kept a Kazimierzan tourney knight as his bodyguard, which I had always considered a quirk of his enthusiasm for knightsports. Nobody else had bodyguards, after all. After today, however, I was beginning to see the appeal.
If I was on the salary of a senior partner, I could hire a whole squad of bodyguards indefinitely, but one guard would be better than nothing.
The dizziness had gotten bad enough that I had to focus not to stumble, even as I stubbornly ignored the further encroaching cold, and the numbness of my hands. At some point the skies had turned black, and overcast. Dying from hypothermia in the rain was looking more and more likely.
I grit my teeth and continued up the road.
When I got back to Lungmen I was going to look into hiring a Columbian veteran, or nice Goliath mercenary to take arrows for me.
Trading specialisations in a free economy was the basis of human civilisation. If focusing on being a productive employee meant that I couldn't fight as well, then I would simply pay somebody to do it for me. Never again would I rely on ghosts, devils, or prayers.
Never again would— Oh, there was a key in that truck.
Mastering my lightheadedness, I clambered into the driver's seat. Fuel seemed fine. I turned the key. Engine was starting up.
It seemed like things were finally looking up for me. So it was just bad luck after all. I would have chuckled if it didn't hurt to. The worst day of my life, and it was all just a coincidence.
The air-conditioner was already set to turn on with the engine, and the growing warmth in the truck cabin was driving away the bone-deep cold.
I didn't really want to draw too much attention to myself by driving, but I had already lost too much blood. It was already a wonder that I had survived this long. The shard must have missed any arteries, but I was still bleeding regardless. I needed to cover more ground and find medical assistance already. The truck could be my only hope, I concluded grimly.
After I fastened the seatbelt, careful to avoid my injury, I touched the Arts Unit in my pocket again.
From what I understood of Originium Arts, casting on an object like the truck would be safer than on my body. If I was being honest with myself, though, the reason I was willing to try it now was simply because I was more desperate.
I cast a defensive shell anchored on the truck's position, and lo and behold, it worked without tearing the vehicle apart. I rolled down a window and tossed a coin from the dashboard tray. When it reached where I knew the shell was, it bounced off of it as expected. I nodded with weary satisfaction. Hopefully I wouldn't have to cast it on myself when I left this truck, but at least I now knew that I could.
With everything ready, I began driving down the street. Even if I died in this thing, at least I would die warm. With one hand I flicked through frequencies on the radio for anything useful. Surely at this juncture the Ursine authorities would have given up on saving face?
The results were too disappointing to mention. Perhaps it had been no coincidence that Russia was the birthplace of Communism.
I should have been driving slower. The mist made everything hard to see. But it also made my new truck hard to see, so I gambled on not crashing into a building and went fast enough to kill any rioters who got in the way.
I focused on keeping the defensive shell up, and keeping the steering wheel straight.
I was cold, but it was so warm in here…
…
My eyes shot open when I was flung painfully towards the windshield, caught only by my seatbelt. I cursed and doubled over in agony as whatever did this jostled the shard in me.
"Get fucked, Imperial dogs!"
"Пошли нa хуй!"
"Fuck you! Fuck you!"
What the hell was going on?
Dazedly, I looked up through the window and what I saw made my stomach drop. My truck was sitting between two halves of a barricade because the truck had punched right through. My defensive shell was down, I realised.
Before my eyes, hollering rioters flooded through the breach and began brawling with the police on the other side, and scattered on the ground were the broken bodies of a few more Ursine Guards. My truck had probably hit them, I realised.
Oh no. No, no, no.
I quickly put the truck into reverse and tried to escape. The rioters parted around me with great cheer and continued to assail the gap I made.
"Elafia sisterrrr! Whooooo!" I heard one of them scream as I made a three-point-turn and hightailed out of there.
A/N: Houchi Play (放置プレイ) is a type of emotional SM roleplay where you ignore and neglect the sub for a long period of time.