One of Many

. . . . . .

The Waking Arc

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"By blood a king, by heart a clown."

~Alfred Lord Tennyson~

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(A/N: Please review!)

Damp.

That was the first thing I felt when I woke up.

Reaching up, I touched my face and gasped.

It was... wet. Wet and very, very cold.

'What is this?'

Pulling back, I examined my hand, stretching it out and looking at it, the liquid covering it reflecting in the moonligh-moonlight?

Stopping for a moment, I quickly found the source of the light and found a window. Paying closer attention to my surroundings, I realised that I was inside a laboratory. Well, I didn't really know how I knew it was a lab...

Wait.

Why can't I remember anything?! I ran my hand across my hair and tried desperately to remember the few I knew. My head started hurting as it seemed to respond to my probing.

Brushing this feeling off, I waded around in the mysterious liquid until I found a wall, then proceeded to shimmy against it until I found a light switch.

Rubbing my eyes against the unexpected brightness, I took a look around.

Blood.

Blood was the mystery liquid I was wading around in. Great bucketfuls of blood filled the floor of the room, staining the walls with gallons of it.

I should've been sick, but the moment I turned around, it hit me.

My name. WHAT WAS MY NAME?

At this, my head throbbed, and I fell to the floor, my head slamming unto the floor and creating a wave of scarlet as my legs failed to support me. With the pain, I remembered. Not my name, but something else.

What I was.

The memories hit me wave by wave. The people I've killed, the crimes I committed, their faces as they were slayed, their screams… it was all too much. I screamed, a great searing scream, that even to my ears sounded animalistic and full of sorrow. My head felt like it burst open, and I felt only my blood thumping as my screams wracked my throat sore. I remembered where all this blood came from.

Through blood-lidded eyes, I saw the amount of bodies that filled the room, explaining the amount of blood that I saw now. However, this wasn't this what sickened me. What sickened me was what my body wanted to do, and what was happening around me.

Seemingly by its own, my wrists opened up, and as this would've killed an average human, it didn't kill me. The blood from the floor of the lab surged in great waves, then turned completely black before forming tendrils and connecting to several parts of my body.

'Wha-What is this?!'

Slowly, but surely, the blood around my feet started being sucked in, and gradually lessened.

Then was gone.

To put it bluntly, I passed out.

. . . . . .

I woke up to the cheery chirping of the birds and warm sunlight bathing my face. Blinking, I realised that I was still in the same room as yesterday.

Then I remembered what had happened the day before, and I threw up, right in front of me, and what made me throw up again was the sheer amount of red in my vomit.

After several repeats of this, I finally reached a point where I could puke no more. Retching, I cradled my stomach with my arm and crawled, losing use of my legs somewhere in the repeated expelling of my the contents of my stomach.

Unable to see where I was going, I bumped my head against a far wall of the room, pushing aside the corpse I found there, and leaned against the wall.

If anything, the events of last night seemed to create an immunity to blood and corpses, as I didn't feel sick as I surveyed the sheer amount of corpses in the room with me.

Catching my breath, I held my head with my hands, and tried to remember the few I actually remembered.

The first thing I recalled was my name. Or a name anyway.

Akabane.

'What did that mean?'

Noting my lack of a given name, I peered further into my mind and recalled a scroll was in a bag.

Somewhere in this room. Standing up so quickly it made me sick, I inspected the corpse beside me...and basically looted it at the same time.

From its pockets, I withdrew strange-looking knives.

Triangular in nature, and ending in a circular handle, a memory arose in the fore of my mind.

'So these are kunai?'

Withdrawing them, I stuck them in my pocket, deeming them useful for later.

I moved on to the next body. Then the next. The next. Next. Next.

. . . . . .

It took me an indefinite amount of hours to check all the bodies, and even then, I still wasn't able to locate the scroll. This was when I realised that maybe looting the bodies was too drastic for a first move.

So, I patted myself down.

And facepalmed. Drawing the scroll from my pocket, I was thinking 'Seriously?'

However, as I drew the scroll from my pocket, I saw that I was wearing a weird outfit.

Tight pants made of some rubbery material, and a fitted shirt made of the same material. A pouch was fitted unto the side of my leg, and after closer inspection, was full of kunai, not unlike the ones I've found. Also, one other small detail.

I was covered head-to-toe in blood. I groaned. This blood thing was getting really old y'know? Why can't the damn author of this fanfic think of something else?

Shrugging this thought off, I picked up the scroll I set down on the nearby table and opened it.

The first thing I thought of when I first skimmed through it was: 'What the actual hell am I reading?'

And seriously, the text in front of me was actual gibberish. Full of lines and squiggles. Well, not really gibberish. I could detect a pattern to the "words", and this worried me.

If I could detect patterns and identify rooms by their contents, then my memory loss might be more serious than I thought. I can still apply parts of my memory to commonplace things and stuff, but the more personal memories are gone.

Heck, I can't even remember my own name. Or my age for that matter.

From all this, I can only come to one conclusion.

Someone wiped my memory.

Shuddering from the thought of someone going through my head, I closed the scroll up again and put it back in my pocket, ignoring the blood all over my pants.

Locating a set of drawers to the side of the room, I decided to go through those first, with the intention of looting the four tables in the middle of the room later.

Opening the drawer closest to me, I peered inside and groaned. It was full of scrolls and other misc. weapons.

It'll be forever before I finish sorting through these.

. . . . . .

Wiping my forehead with the back of my hand, I carefully sorted through the things that I had found all in all.

In summary, I found at least a box of kunai, at least a storage crate of scrolls filled with the same gibberish, 3 swords of varying lengths (or was it katanas?), 3 2 matching bracelets which felt weird whenever I held it, and four different kinds of forehead protectors.

Of all of the things I've found, the protectors were the most decorative and the most interesting. One of them was a design of four. . .squiggly lines? Another one had a-what is it with all these squiggles?-squiggly circle with a point to the left. That one, specifically, had a bunch of scratches all over it. The other two were just blank, quite shiny actually.

Setting those aside, I picked up one of the swords and held it horizontally, at eye level.

'Well balanced.' I mused.

Gripping it firmly at the handle, I swung it experimentally, and it was lighter than I thought. Taking advantage of its lightness, I swung it against a wall, quite awkwardly if you would imagine, and damn, it actually left a really big slice in the wall.

Holding it at arms-length, I carefully sheathed it back into it's container, and attached it to one of the loops in my pants. I'm definitely keeping this bad boy to myself. Checking out the other two swords via same experiment quickly told me that they weren't as sharp as the one I already had.

Moving on, I examined the pair of ebony bracelets I'd found and saw that they were made of some kind of strangely shiny metal, carved with snakes along the sides. I mean, not stainless steel shiny, but weirdly shiny for something of its color. And the snakes were...creepy at most.

In the middle of the strangely ornate bracelets was a seal. Well, I didn't know how I knew it was a seal, but it was probably because of my memory wipe.

The seal was on a raised bevel and was set with some jewel as its base. Not knowing any better, I just put both of them on.

"OUCH!" Screaming out on reflex, I tried to shake the bracelets off...and failed.

Through streaming tears, I inspected the bracelets closer and saw a spike had gone completely through my wrist and met with the other side of the bracelet, not to mention that it hurt like no tomorrow. However, the pain, while taking a chunk of my attention, wasn't the most shocking of the current happenings.

I looked on mute horror as the spilled blood from my wound caused by the bracelet was slowly sucked into the seal, and causing the jewel to light up.

Curious, at the same time horrified, I touched the blood leading into the seal, and looked upon as blood sourced from the wound unto my palm. At first, the blood simply formed a ball, but after I thought of the spike through my wrist, the blood bunched up then formed a ball akin to a spiked mace.

Interested of the things I can do with such an ability, I quickly brushed the pain away and imagined the countless kunai I'd found throughout the day. Almost immediately, the blood floating in my hand sourced more from the wound and formed a kunai. Curious about its properties, I poked the floating kunai and my hand and my finger went right through.

'That's not gonna do anything but splatter isn't it?' Thinking of a solution to my current problem, I thought about the problems I needed to fix.

'Density. Solidity. Sharpness?' The moment I thought of these aspects, these qualities were applied to the kunai floating in my hand.

It took on a metallic sheer to it, and I let go of the control I had. It dropped into my hand, and after comparing it to one of the kunai in my pouch, it weighed exactly the same, confirming my suspicion that this blood-control ability of mine had something linked to my imagination.

Balancing out the kunai I had created, from my blood no less, I threw it, hard, against the opposite wall, where it sunk deep into it.

Well. Guess I didn't have to worry about it's capacity to weather outside forces, because it sunk handle deep into a solid stone wall.

Looking back at the things I had gathered, I reached for the first scroll in the my crate of manuscripts.

This was gonna take a while.

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Hey! You just read my first ever chapter of my first ever fanfic! Yey! Thanks for reading and please give reviews of what you think of my story, and what you think will make it better! Also, if you think that this story isn't up to your "standards", read Dreaming of Sunshine by SilverQueen.

See you in the incoming chapters. Fave and follow if you like.

~DecidedlyPassive~