The silence of the void was shattered by the deafening roar of the Kurukshetra-style battlefield.
The scorching sun of ancient India beat down on him, not with warmth, but with a blistering, judgment-day heat.
The air didn't smell of oxygen; it smelled of iron and bowels.
The ground beneath his sandal-clad feet was no longer dirt; it was a slick, churning mud of crimson sludge.
Bodies lay in mounds—friends and foes tangled together in a grotesque tapestry of severed limbs and shattered armor.
He tightened his grip on his tulwar, the curved blade chipped and dulled from hours of slaughter.
He was the last line of defense.
Around him, the "Great War" had already been lost.
He watched as the grand war elephants of the enemy trampled the broken remains of his countrymen, their massive feet crushing ribcages like dry twigs.
This is not glory, he thought, his heart sinking. This is butchery.
He lunged forward, a scream tearing from his parched throat.
He parried a thrust from a spearman, slicing the man's throat in a spray of hot arterial red that blinded him for a second.
He wiped the blood from his eyes just in time to see the enemy banner rise over his kingdom's citadel.
Distracted by the sight of his failing country, he didn't see the second spear.
Thwack.
The sound was sickeningly wet. He felt the cold steel tip enter his back, shearing through muscle and lung before bursting out of his chest.
The world tilted. He fell to his knees, clutching the bloody wooden shaft protruding from his sternum.
He tried to breathe, but only blood bubbled past his lips. His vision blurred, the screams of the dying fading into a dull hum.
He fell face-forward into the blood-soaked earth of the country he failed to save.
The darkness took him, and the soldier died with the taste of ash and regret on his tongue.
"Gah!"
The boy gasped, bolting upright in his futon, his small hand clutching his chest where the phantom spear had pierced him.
There was no blood.
There was no mud.
There was only the cold, slick sweat soaking through his sleeping yukata and the frantic hammering of his own heart against his ribs.
The smell of iron and bowels from the battlefield faded, replaced by the scent of tatami mats and old wood.
He looked down at his hands.
They were not the calloused, scarred hands of a warrior who had wielded a tulwar for decades.
They were small, pale, and unblemished.
The hands of a six-year-old child.
He let out a long, shaky breath.
It was just the dream again, he told himself, though he knew it was more than a dream. It was his history.
He cast a glance around the room. It was sparse, devoid of the toys or warmth that should belong to a noble's son.
The moonlight filtered through the paper shoji doors, illuminating the emptiness.
This isolation was his punishment for being "wrong."
He had been born into this prestigious clan six years ago, but he had not cried like a babe. He had looked at his new mother with the weary, hardened eyes of a veteran killer.
The wet nurses whispered that he was cursed.
The family elders said he carried a bad omen.
He didn't play; he assessed threats.
And so, the "Noble One" became the "Cast Aside One," relegated to this detached quarter at the very edge of the estate, far away from the warmth of the main household.
The nightmare faded, but the soldier's discipline remained.
He didn't wait for a servant to dress him. He folded his futon with military precision, corners sharp and aligned, before sliding into his day robes.
He picked up a broom.
The estate staff rarely visited his isolated quarters, so he maintained them himself.
The rhythmic swish-swish of the broom against the wooden engawa was meditative, a way to center his breathing.
Chores finished, he slid on his sandals and stepped out into the estate grounds.
The morning sun was bright, but the air felt wrong. It was heavy, carrying a static charge that made the hairs on his arms stand up—a sensation of pressure he hadn't felt since the days before the Great War in his past life.
He walked the perimeter of the garden, his small hands clasped behind his back, his gait too steady for a child.
He observed everything. Near the wash basin, two kitchen maids were huddled together, scrubbing clothes with frantic intensity.
They didn't see him approach.
"...third one this week," the older maid whispered, her voice trembling. "Just like the weaver's daughter.
Gone from her bed without a sound."
"They say it's a demon," the younger one replied, checking over her shoulder. "That it eats the souls of those with high spirit energy.
My husband says the guards found footprints near the North Gate... but they weren't human feet."
The boy stopped in the shadow of the eave. Souls. Spirit energy. The terms meant nothing to him yet, but the fear in their voices was a universal language.
He continued walking, moving away from the main house toward the wooded edge of the property where the estate walls met the forest.
The birds were silent here. There were no crickets, no rustling squirrels.
It was the silence of an ambush.
He stopped at an ancient cherry blossom tree near the boundary wall. Something had stripped the bark away.
He reached up, his small fingers tracing three deep, parallel gouges in the wood. They were jagged and raw, cutting deep into the heartwood.
They were located nearly seven feet off the ground—too high for a wolf, too deep for a man with a knife.
Claw marks.
He looked at the base of the tree. The grass was withered and black, as if the life had been sucked out of the soil itself.
He stepped back, a cold sweat pricking his neck. He wasn't just being ostracized by his family; he was being corralled.
The rumors, the heavy pressure in the air, the marks on the tree... something was hunting in this district.
And judging by the throbbing headache he had felt all morning—a pressure pressing down on his skull—he had a terrible feeling about what was out there.
It is looking for me.
Night fell over the estate like a shroud.
The boy did not sleep.
While the rest of the household extinguished their lanterns, he sat in the center of his dark, isolated room.
He waited. He watched.
Then, just past the hour of the ox, the smell hit him. It drifted through the thin gaps in the woodwork—thick, hot, and cloying.
It was the scent he had known intimately in his first life.
Blood.
He stood up and silently slid the shoji door open. He stepped out onto the wooden engawa.
The garden should have been peaceful, but the shadows seemed to writhe.
"Who is there?" he whispered.
The darkness above the garden wall shifted.
Floating in the pitch blackness, hovering ten feet in the air, was a single, massive burning eye.
It was the color of molten gold, slitted like a reptile's. It stared down at him, unblinking.
The pressure he had felt earlier exploded ten-fold, slamming into him like a physical wall. This wasn't just fear; it was a spiritual gravity that his human body couldn't withstand.
He tried to scream, but his lungs collapsed under the weight.
Thud.
He hit the wooden floorboards hard. The burning eye was the last thing he saw before the world turned to gray, then black.
In the darkness between death and awakening, the soldier's memories bled through. He saw the flash of steel, the trampled bodies of his kin, and the red mud of a lost kingdom.
He felt the old shame—the shame of a warrior who died while his world burned.
I couldn't save them, his soul whispered. I was too weak.
The sensation of falling ended with a jarring thud.
He didn't wake to silence. He woke to a cacophony that made his blood run cold.
He scrambled up from the hard, dusty ground, his small chest heaving.
The air here was wrong. It was thick, vibrating with a crushing weight that made every breath a struggle.
It tasted of ozone, ash, and the unmistakable, metallic tang of fresh slaughter.
He looked up, and the breath hitched in his throat.
He stood on the edge of a shantytown, but it was being torn apart. Wooden hovels were splintering like matchsticks.
Dust and smoke choked the air, turning the sunlight into a sickly, bruised purple.
And in the center of the ruin stood a nightmare.
It was a towering monstrosity with pale, gray skin and a chest that held nothing but a gaping, empty void.
Its face was a stark white skull mask, frozen in a permanent, hollow grin.
ROAAAAR!
The beast howled, a sound that wasn't just noise—it was a shockwave of pure malice that rattled the soldier's bones.
He watched, paralyzed, as the creature's massive hand swept through a crowd of fleeing villagers. It wasn't a hunt; it was a harvest.
Men and women were crushed instantly, their bodies bursting into sprays of red mist that painted the dirt streets.
The screams... the screams were identical to the ones he remembered.
The soldier looked around, his eyes wide. He saw a woman clutching a child, running blindly before being buried under falling debris.
He saw men trying to fight back with sticks, only to be devoured whole by the laughing skull-faced beast.
He knew this sight. He knew this chaos.
This isn't a village anymore, he realized, the horror settling deep in his gut. It is a battlefield.
It was the same carnage he had died in centuries ago in India. The same frantic desperation. The same overwhelming stench of bowels and iron.
The only difference was the enemy. Instead of elephants and spears, there was this singular, god-like horror.
The dread settled over him, heavier than any armor.
He had hoped for peace. He had hoped for rest.
Instead, he stood amidst the gore, watching the monster tear a soul in half.
"It never ends," he whispered, his voice lost in the roaring wind.
"The war never ends."
He had walked out of one slaughter and straight into another.