Life.
Death.
They were simple concepts. Beginning and ending. You lived, then you died. That was all there was supposed to be. The sum total of a human's existence was so short that it was inconsequential in the grand scheme of things. There were the remarkable few who, even in death, had their names immortalized, etched into the annals of history. In a world where the human population was north of 8 billion, I was not one of that infinitesimally small group of people.
I lived as anyone would have, my life a boring slog of monotony, barely propped up with the few brief glimpses or flashes of fun. My first bicycle ride, the first time I had sex, when I got admission into the university, the first time I held my nephew. Oh, there were a couple more, dozens at best, but in all my twenty-four years of existence, those brief moments barely counted, because they were all overshadowed by one dark moment. My death.
Luckily for me, it came quickly. Going back home from a supermarket, AirPods in my ears, groceries in my hand, and an overspeeding drunk driver that thought the roadside pedestrian walkway looked pretty good that particular evening.
I didn't even hear it happen because of the AirPods in my ears. Bright beams behind me had made me turn back to spot a man with bloodshot eyes hidden behind his windscreen, and that was followed by something hitting me with enough velocity that other than a brief spike in pain, it pretty much just faded.
I was dead. Now, why this long drawn-out musing? Because somehow, despite dying, I was still aware, and in the unknown time period where I had drifted aimlessly in this dark void of nothingness, I'd grown bored. Bored enough that I think I was beginning to hear things.
"Sacred treasure swing and ring, ring."
Anyway, my brief romp through oblivion continued, and I went back through my memories. They were beginning to fade, which probably spoke to just how long I'd been drifting in this empty void. Yet I didn't feel the slightest hint of panic at losing some of the essential things that made me me. Instead, I thought about just what kind of life I had lived. An uneventful one. If I had another chance at life, I would've loved to live a more interesting one.
A wolf's howl echoed in this empty void I rested in, and if I had a brow to raise, I would've raised one. It seemed like I was still hearing things as what began as a simple wolf's howl multiplied, and the sound grew, echoing from one canine throat to what felt like a dozen. If the wolf's howl didn't make my brows rise, the follow-up sounds would've.
There was the continuous and annoying croaking of bullfrogs, and hidden beneath those persistent and loud two was a lower canopy of noises.
I couldn't be sure, but I was pretty certain there was a trumpet from an elephant, a hoot of an owl, the great hiss of a snake, and lastly the roar of what seemed like a lion or a tiger. The remaining noises were indistinguishable owing to my ignorance of the vaguer animal sounds. Regardless, the animal calls were loud.
If I thought I was simply hearing things before, then this sudden cacophony of noise ended that delusion, for with those calls came the sudden strange pressure I felt, which was very real. It was peculiar, suddenly feeling things for the first time after an eternity of nothingness. I felt like I was in a womb unrealized, a never-born fetus trapped in the bindings of its own aborted umbilical cord. I was bound tight, with anchors to stop me from drifting even as the calls continued and strange words echoed.
"Eight-Grip Sword, Divergent General."
It took me a long time before I realized the calls were not random. Some part of me, a part I was not aware of till a split second ago, understood what they were. They were an exultation, a divine symphony that none but I understood, a request and a plea, a proclamation and a declaration of my existence.
I could not say the particular act that weakened my bindings around me. It could be the strangely familiar chant, or the cacophony that continued now. Regardless of the particular reason, for the third time since I was trapped in a void of fading memories, there was a change. My bindings loosened around my mouth and I did something I never thought I would be able to do again.
I let out a breath.
"MAHORAGA"
Like the proverbial drop in the ocean, my simple act of exhalation loosened the rest of my bindings, and I could feel my tethers, the unknowing things that had pinned my bound form to the spot, loosen. With that loosening came the revival of atrophied senses that sought understanding.
I could see once more.
Yet to call it sight was a simple misnomer, for I could perceive. Yet before I could make do with the sudden introduction to existence, my body jerked. A body bound was slowly being freed as the restraints, the umbilical cord of my existence, slowly loosened around my neck, around my shoulders, my waist and my legs and fell to the ground, dissolving before they dropped onto the broken and wrecked road I stood on.
I felt a sudden weight on top of my head.
However not even the sudden return of feelings in my limbs could compare to the strange scene before me. Someone stood in front of me, with his back turned to me. He was small, barely reaching where I assumed my belly button would be if I had one. His hair was black and scattered, and his clothes were torn and ripped in multiple places where he leaked what I recognized as blood.
I could already tell that with the amount of injuries that littered his form, he would be dead in minutes unless he received medical attention. Yet instead of that, the boy looked at another figure, this one with familiar features. Blonde hair tied up in a strange hairdo. Tattoos beneath both of the pair of wide and terrified purple eyes. He was also missing a ridiculous amount of teeth, leaving his mouth a wide, bleeding, and gaping mess.
"Hey, you bastard."
The boy in front of me called out to the blonde-haired man, who was too busy staring at me with wide eyes and clear terror on his face to do any more than draw breath through his nose and exhale it through his mouth.
"I'll be dying first."
The boy finished and stretched out his hands to the side and waited.
The silence stretched out for three seconds before the boy turned to me, his movement wooden, like he didn't understand what was going on. His confusion was clear in his black eyes and his furrowed brow. He was like a director looking upon an actor in confusion at the sudden change in a planned scene. Like I was a performer that had somehow decided to spurn his directions, and as I looked upon the tired and weary features of Fushiguro Megumi, I suddenly understood.
My eyes, or at least the four wings resting where my eyes should be, finally interpreted things enough for my still confused brain to understand. I looked at myself from an outside point of view. It was a strange thing, viewing myself from a remote perspective as I observed my body in a 360-degree angle with an ultra-clear vision of my bulk.
I was massive, heavily built, and muscled. My sheer bulk was somewhere around nine feet, and my weight was somewhere north of a thousand pounds considering the fact that I could feel my feet in the ground. My tail. The long appendage connected to the back of my head swished behind me, and I could instinctively tell that the appendage had something to do with balance and growth.
There was a slight ruffle in the air, wind blowing and bringing to life the ornaments implanted into my chest as they moved with the wind. My lower body was covered by a black hakama and a white gi, while my wrists were wrapped with a single blade hidden beneath the wraps of the right one, but my most important feature was the wheel hovering above my head.
If I somehow did not recognize the body I was inhabiting after this many clues, then I was either living under a rock, a hater of good fiction, or my stint in oblivion had robbed me of what I felt was a vital part of my memory. Luckily for me, all of that was wrong, so I recognized and understood the position I was in at once.
I was Mahoraga in the middle of the Shibuya incident.
"W-what is wrong?" The blonde-haired man finally called out as he observed the face-off between Megumi and me. I vaguely remembered his name was Haruta, or Hinata. Whatever his name was, it wasn't actually important. The sole important thing and person here was the boy before me. My summoner, and the boy with a potential to rival that of the greatest sorcerer of the modern era.
Megumi's face was still scrunched up in confusion as he looked up at me. I tilted my head to the side to match his look of confusion, then I focused on his injuries. The bruised and broken bones from where Toji had used him as a brief punching bag, to the stab wounds that littered his form.
If I remembered correctly, he was supposed to activate some technique that would put him in a state of suspended animation after Mahoraga hit him. But I was not that Mahoraga, and more importantly, I did not want him dead, especially not when I did not know what it meant.
A return to that oblivion, or a more permanent darkness.
I could not die, not again, and it was with those thoughts running through my head that I was left staring into the eyes of a boy with more suicidal attempts than anyone I ever knew, and I was burned with the knowledge that a monster, one that was perhaps greater than even me, was making his way here.
Whatever decision I was going to make, I had to make it fast. Otherwise, Shibuya was going to see a real incident.