Heyo, welcome to a new chapter. Would have taken an hour or two to bust this puppy out sooner, but my Grandma is visiting for the month for the first time in ages so i have been going around doing stuff with her. It so much fun to listen to her crazy outdated opinions on things!
God Complex: Chapter 02: Life After Death
A comrade of mine used to go on and on about the universal force of karma. That everything you do pays forward, good for good, bad for bad. I always viewed his beliefs similarly to the nuns from the orphanage, or really anything else in my life.
If I see no evidence to support a belief, and only evidence against, then in all likely hood it is not true.
On occasion however, I would humor the man and live my life according to karma. This was not atypical of me, on occasion I would try my hardest to adjust my worldview, if only for a minute, in search of that personal satisfaction people seem to obtain through blind faith and belief.
Though I must admit, rubbing it in his face when I proved him wrong was also quite pleasant.
The burning heat of victory was all I was able to get. The passionate glee from proving one's superiority over someone else, making them lift the scales from their eyes and challenge their own view on the world is quite a wonderful feeling. That golden flame that alights in the hearts and eyes of the truly faithful, that drives them to passionate action beyond their ken is a beautiful sight to behold, and something I have never been able to truly obtain.
Although I did fake it on occasion.
And in hindsight, karma might have bitten me in the ass over that one.
As a child I had a very deep understanding of fear. Orphans have next to no protection from the worse parts of society, later on in life these types of people, those without real connections of supervision would be defined as "high risk" for predation. Every so often one of the other children would simply vanish into thin air. No one knew what happened to them, and no one had the time or the motivation to search for a orphan in the middle of a city.
But those days after killing that boy over some food were terrifying. My first days in combat, the sound of artillery slowly closing in on your position, the hiss of a bullet passing by your skull, all pale in comparison to the all-encompassing terror that I felt.
Who can really blame me? I was just a kid.
That first night went by in a haze. Somehow, I managed to dispose of the body without being seen and wash my blood sodden hands.
I don't remember much of those first few hours.
My first solid memory after staring at the dead boy's body was late in the night. I was curled up in a ball and shaking like a newborn calf. The food I was so ravenous for earlier was trying its damnedest to force its way back out my throat with such fervor I had to clamp my hands over my mouth with a death grip just to keep myself from getting ill.
All night I was like that.
Shaking.
Eyes wide and unblinking.
Just waiting.
What for?
I wasn't entirely sure.
Keep in mind, I was raised in a church by a bunch of very passionate nuns who did their best to instill the fear of god into me. Without the knowledge or context for what they were telling me, I could not read between the lines for what they really were, simply stories with morals to keep ancient societies from ripping themselves apart.
I fully expected at any moment for a bolt of lightning to rip across the heavens and send me to hell to suffer for all eternity.
And yet, as the night went on, despite all my beliefs on the truth of the world.
Not a god damned thing happened.
I woke up the next morning when the rising sun made the attic too hot to be comfortable in, curled around my remaining food.
I cannot truly communicate the amount of shock I was in. When I closed my eyes at last that night, I expected the next time I opened them to be staring into the flames of hell. Certainly not for me to wake up hungry as ever with arms filled with the food I had killed for.
It was quite the revelation.
Or as close to a world-shattering revelation you can get as a seven-year-old brat.
The weeks passed much better after my first magical flare up.
It took a surprising amount of effort to force even the smallest amount of the strange blue mist from my body, and even more to actually make it do anything useful other than just float their meaninglessly. I didn't have the training or the resources to learn myself how to use my newfound abilities so I was left with the only other option.
Trial and error.
A frankly incredible amount of error.
My first attempts to actually bend the uncooperative force to my will went about as well as could be expected. I pushed the mist from my hands until I had a sizable amount floating in front of me and commanded it with all the fervor a kid can muster.
Only to immediately be disappointed when it all amounted to a single spark flickering in the air between my palms.
At least, I should have been. Anyone would have been saddened that all their effort had such a puny, nothing of a result.
But to my little self?
That spark floating between my hands was the most incredible thing in the world.
To me, that little meaningless glow represented every part of me. I was a nobody with no family, no friends, nothing to call my own until that moment. In that instant, when I forced my will on the world and bent it to my needs, I got my first look at true power. This thing between my hands had the potential to take me farther in life than anything the world had ever given me, and from that moment I forgot about the corpse I left in the woods, forgot the orphanage and the hunger.
All I could think of was using this wondrous magic.
And so, I did.
The next year, all the way up until my eighth "birthday", if you could call it that seeing as it was merely the day I was left at the orphanage as a baby, i practiced day in and day out. Every waking moment I was pushing this strange power through my body and thinking of new things to do with it.
I couldn't do much. Just enough to keep myself warm and fed through the winter and protect myself from other urchins.
My eighth birthday was something special. It was around that age where magic begins to present itself in a child at detectable levels, so the government would send testing crews around to all the orphanages they could, and often set themselves up in public for general testing, and see if they could find anyone with the gift of magic.
It just so happened that my eighth birthday was the day before they came to our ramshackle church.
What a strange coincidence.
"Next up is..." The greasy looking bald man checks his clip board for what must have been the thousandth time that morning. How the empires meritocracy let such an incompetent moron in charge of something as important as finding children with magical potential I will never know. I'm just thankful he wasn't like some of those worthless snobs that would try to hide and under report any lower-class kids with magic.
That's much more of a problem in the Allied Kingdom I'm told. Must be terrible living in such a rigid class system.
Poor bastards.
"Tanya Degurechaff." The man called out as if it was necessary. I was the only one left to be tested and was already standing directly in front of the man.
So, I pretty much just stood in front of the big potato headed slug man and stared up at him, waiting for him to notice me.
He kept looking at his clip board for almost a minute before finally looking up from it and surveying the room. No doubt he was expecting one of the other children who already were sat down in the tables behind me to have a hand raised or something.
I certainty did not hold it against him that he was just looking directly over my head.
If he survived the war, I am going to find him and cut his legs off.
"Sir!" I squeaked out. I did not mention before, but I am not a very talkative person. This was even more so as a child where I did not have any friends or associates.
Talking to strangers for extended periods, as embarrassing as it is to say, was difficult for me.
So I kept it short.
The man finally noticed me and didn't say a word, simply stepping to the side and patting the stool I was to sit on.
"Simple stuff Miss Degurechaff." said the man as he plopped a heavy metal helmet covered in enough wires to modernize a house, "The alignment crystals will take care of the heavy lifting, just focus on trying to make something happen."
With the benefit of hindsight i can say the man should have including more instructions, because I do not think he expected what happened next.
I closed my eyes as hard as I could and poured more effort into making the magic happen than I ever had before. I did not know the requirements to pass the test, so I gave it everything i had.
BANG!
The cold metal helmet flashed to burning hot in an instant and exploded away from my head sending shrapnel and molten metal blasting through the ceiling like a shotgun blast.
I opened my eyes in time to see the other children stare at me in wide eyed awe, the nuns hold onto them protectively, and the potato headed idiot drop his clip board.
It was only months later, when I was already in the middle of training my magical abilities in a classroom of other prospective battle mages that I was informed that performing magic without a conduit of some sort is almost impossible.
Needless to say, I was quite pleased with the results of the test.
Life moved fast after that.
No one felt the need to inform me of anything going on in my life until a few days later when I was taken from the orphanage by a military truck and taken to the training facility outside of Berun for the Imperial Military mages.
It turned out, as an orphan, I did not have the right of self-determination in the Empire.
Immediately upon receiving the reports of my innate magical abilities the military simply used their powers to take me away to learn how to use it.
Sure, there was the possibility that my magical talents would be in something mundane that would not have application to a military life, but someone with my potential would be useful wherever my skill sets lay.
You see, despite what the average Hans on the street thinks, magic isn't a catch all thing. Every person's abilities from the moment they start using it leans towards one kind or the other.
Some people are naturally good at healing magic, and will be rubbish at combat spells no matter how hard they try. Historically those were called healing mages, or more recently, medic mages.
Alternatively, it could be the opposite, with someone leaning towards combat magic. Those are referred to as battle mages.
Or as they are used now a days in the military, air mages.
Presumably because they fly so much.
There are other types of course, dozens of varieties depending on where in the world you live, but that two are the kinds the Imperial Military cares for.
The more medic mages you have, the less significant casualties are to your ability to fight. The more battle mages you have, the more firepower you can bring to bear upon the enemy.
How gifted a mage varies wildly as well. Most medic mages can only heal a few people from deaths door a day without risking their own lives, but hundreds of years ago when the great plagues sweat through the continent a healing mage from Parisii cured the entire plague in an instant.
Not in a single patient mind you, he cured every single living thing on the planet of the plague.
Most of these extreme cases don't have special names to go along with their incredible feats, mostly just the individuals and their achievements are remembered, save for two types.
Holy Mages, those "blessed by god" to go far beyond their normal abilities in a time of need like Joan of Arc. The single young girl managed to fight a dozen veteran english mages to a standstill without any training.
And lastly would be War Mages.
War Mages are unlike the other mages because historically they have changed the world every time they appeared. It is assumed that any country with one will be in a perpetual state of war until the mage either dies, or simply grows tired of fighting and retires. Because of this, every nation is on the look out trying to find battle mages of their own that might be potential war mages, along with spying on their neighbors to make sure they do not have one either.
And if they do, to try their hardest to kill them before they grow into a threat.
Napoleon had a War Mage by his side and won victory after victory until the man was assassinated by the combined efforts of the Allied Kingdom and a fledgling Empire.
The United States, of all modern nations, has had the most luck with getting War Mages. George Washington practically built the country with his own two hands after all and single handedly sunk half the Allied Kingdom ships blockading Boston. The lucky bastards even managed to have three, THREE of the damned things at once when they weren't at war!
The entire planet was terrified that the new world power would send their invincible mages to invade their country, yet they didn't. The mages were content with life in the United States frontier fighting the natives.
Although Buffalo Bill did cross the pond and put on a few shows every so often.
Needless to say, War Mages were incredibly rare, usually, baring those thick-headed Americans good luck, only popping up once a century.
Being so rare, my time in the military, if I was even eventually drafted, would be happily peaceful knowing there aren't any incredibly powerful harbingers of chaos and destruction flying about trying to invade everything that moves.
It certainly would have made my life easier if that turned out to be true.
Welcome to the bottom!
This chapter is kind of... split up, i guess is a good way to describe it. My first little scribbling had a lot more stuff with her at the orphanage for the year before her testing, but it wasn't really meaningful and just kinda dragged for ages.
As you have no doubt noticed, I changed some magical lore and shit. I figure in this version the golden eyed lunatics will all be holy mages, like modern Joan of Arcs, and Tanya will be a War Mage that pretends to be a holy mage so people dont try as hard to assassinate her in her sleep.
No doubt at many points in this story i will fuck up the names of the countries and their cities. I called Allied Kingdom "Britain" and United Kingdom like 500 times in my first draft of the damned thing, so no doubt i will continue to fuck it up, especially when Japan gets thrown into the mix.
As for long term goals for this... alot of my thinking has been going into how to have the empire last a long time against such overwealming odds. Italy, or whatever the fuck it is called in the YS universe, isnt a central power, nor is the Ottoman Empire, so the Empire should run into the same oil and manpower problems Germany did in World War 2. So far my main thing is just keeping the United States out of the war by distracting them with Japan, since being in the 1920 without nuclear bombs, American would have to invade mainland Japan, which would be pretty fucking insane and intense fighting for ages and drain incredibly resources.
If you have any recommendations for this I can change or improve compared to the show, or have just random suggestions/corrections/concerns/whatever you feel like yelling at me, please tell me.
Oh, and for anyone wondering, while writing this i was watching "Military History Visualized". Nothing makes me want ot write a Nazi Loli than listening to a german accent talk about Panzer tanks.
Onto the reviews!
Deathstrokenorris" Thanks for wishing me luck! And yeah, keeping her from being Mary Sue will likely be a pain in the ass. I enjoyed the scene in the anime where they essentially get "Dunkirk"ed and she is frustrated she could have won, and i enjoyed seeing her like that and i enjoy tortuting my characters, so i will likely have her fail often enough.
And hell, if i have the time i may even give her a personality.
Lewascan2: Thanks! Since i have no "Maguffin" in the form of being X to create things like the type 95 the same way it happens in the original, as you can see i had to make some significant changes to make Tanya strong enough to not just be an average mage. Pretty much alot of the conflict will be that as long as Tanya is alive (once they figure out she is a war mage) the world will always be at war, either the empire starting it because they can win, or other countries trying to prevent them from taking over the planet. Kind of like all the nations banding together to fuck up Napoleon.
And yeah, fighting people blessed by god and coming out on top is one heck of a way to build yourself up ahahaha.
Mogami Kumagawa: these types of plots are pretty much the first thing i think of when i see reincarnation stories. Such a shame "hey lets remove the gimmick and just enjoy the weird world and characters" fics aren't so common. Cause the main reason im writing this is because i want to read it hahaha.
And thats all folks!
I hope you enjoyed, or at least didn't hate it. The Pacing in this one is definitely worse than the first chapter due to how broken up it was, but i really want to get the exposition and set up out of the way to get into the actual... you know. plot and shit.
If "plot and shit" is not already the name of a writing help book, I am trademarking it immediately.
