A/N: komo & jaon, thank you for beta-reading everything and putting up with my rambling


Chapter 1 - Vorspiel zur Dämmerung

After passing away in my second life due to what I could only surmise was a car bomb, I had been a little surprised to find myself immediately reincarnated once more.

After all, in our first meeting he complained about all the effort he went to reincarnating us. A ridiculous complaint, as he was the one who built the system that led him there, picked the specific model too, only to complain about lack of consumer interest. In our subsequent meetings he would gloat that he didn't need me, because violence and warfare had indeed succeeded in igniting humanity's reliance on him.

And yet at the end of it I woke up as a baby again, without a word from him. Had he finally grown a sense of shame after his failed hypothesis of 'LITTLE GIRL + WAR ORPHAN + MAGIC + CONFLICT = PIETY' or had he thrown in the towel after putting me through hell, only for one of his little buddies to reincarnate me again?

I didn't have to wonder for long, because only a few months in and I realised my situation was uncomfortably familiar. By the time I was a year old, I was ninety-percent sure it was another experiment. Whether my second death was Being X flipping the chessboard like a child to try again with small changes, or whether he had failed to predict the explosion that killed me and this was the closest he could get to a redo, it was just yet again another piece of evidence that he had no claim to being an omnipotent, omniscient God.

To explain, my third world was both mundane and fantastical. From the perspective of my first life, there were plenty of things to find familiarity in.

People had mobile phones. The gendarmes back in my hometown would patrol the streets with little earpieces worn.

Colour televisions were everywhere, even in my early youth, so long as your definition of 'everywhere' discounted the impoverished district I grew up in.

Globalisation reached a stage where multinational companies were an everyday occurrence. Even in my conservative, dinky little hometown of Wolumonde, you could find a Cambrian selling faux-fur coats.

Technology and culture developed to the point that being a livestream host was a legitimate profession these days. The internet existing said plenty on its own.

But for all the superficial resemblances to the world of my first life, it was unequivocally not the same.

On the world of Terra, civilisation revolved around a substance called Originium. All the familiar technologies I previously mentioned were powered by power plants running on Originite Prime, a processed, high-yield form of Originium. Originium was nigh ubiquitous, found all over the land, and cultures around the world had developed since antiquity around its use. Most modern technologies were reliant on Originium and its derivatives, whether through crucial components or simply for power.

The catch was that modern research had identified Originium exposure as the causative agent behind Oripathy, a cancer-like wasting disease that had the added bonus of being infectious. Despite that, there was little to no chance of moving away from its use. Originium was essential in keeping our nomadic cities moving, which were a necessity because Terra had natural disasters every Tuesday.

Even if that weren't true, Originium was simply too cheap, too energy rich, and too plentiful to stop using.

Only poor people caught Oripathy, anyway.

Originium propped up the magic too, which existed like in my second life. What was unalike was that, once again, Originium products were crucial to powering, amplifying, or otherwise enhancing that magic. It was so important that magic itself was referred to as Originium Arts.

In fact, for all the modern, corporate trappings, Terra was decidedly more fantastical than the worlds of either of my previous lives. For starters, there were no humans in the traditional sense. Only various flavours of beastkin, demonkind, and other assorted fantasy races. My next door neighbour was a vampire.

There was even a small-statured race of smiths and engineers who lived in a kingdom beneath the ground. I'd say what that reminded me of, but that word was a racial slur here.

I myself had been born an Elafia, some sort of deer-person, and sported a small pair of antlers. It was a little strange, given that I seemed to recall that only male deer had those, but I was no animal expert. It was what it was.

Also, 'small' was a relative term. My antlers still made putting on a t-shirt an exercise in manoeuvrability.

At least I was fairly tall.

My name, Tanja, had obviously carried over from my second life, so I wouldn't take it for granted that I could reach the top shelf now.

There was a time when I had worried malnutrition might smother any chances of that in the crib. Wolumonde, the nomadic town I grew up in, had been an impoverished one, neglected for more glamorous neighbours by the local aristocrat who ruled them all. And I lived on the worse side of town. The orphanage I grew up in was in the slums, right next to Zwölftontechnik Street, where they forced all the Oripathy sufferers to live before the war.

We didn't have it as bad as the disenfranchised Infected, but winters were still too cold, especially with how closely Wolumonde stayed to the Winterwisp Mountains, and we had few enough blankets that we had to share. Dinner on every night of the year but one was boiled onions with stale bread bought at a discount from what didn't sell on Viktualien Street.

It was a sight better than not eating at all, but I had been worried about what that diet would do to my growth. After all, I'd never been an Elafia before, and didn't know what nutrients one needed. The ladies at the orphanage had done their best, but it was a second childhood lived out in deprivation.

When I was born, it had just been me and my mother. A beautiful woman with ivory white horns and sad blue eyes. We moved from place to place, me swaddled in a coarse blanket, and her hiding beneath a dull green shawl.

From time to time she would speak to me about how my father was fighting for the nation right now, and that when it was over he'd find us and bring us back home. He was a mighty count, she would whisper to me, and he'd win the day soon enough.

I would be very surprised if she expected me to actually understand any of that given that I was an infant, but Leithanien and Imperial were mutually intelligible enough for me to piece it together with repetition.

When the war ended, people all around us had been making merry, all smiles and relief, and my mother tried to look the part. She never quite managed.

One night, she brought me to a decrepit three story building. Apparently my father had been on the wrong side of the war, and bad men were looking for us now. But when things were safe, and it would be no time at all, she promised, my mother would return for me.

In the end I lived there for the next twelve years, and she never did return. Not that I really resented her for that.

While I grew up in the orphanage, I learned more about the war of my infancy. The previous ruler had apparently been some kind of evil wizard. Our current rulers, the Twin Empresses, had taken umbrage with his human experimentation, and overthrew him with the support of the Electors. That was fair enough, honestly. I, myself, had some less than positive experiences with mad scientists, and couldn't imagine living with one as my monarch.

Unfortunately, all signs pointed to my father being one of his loyalists. The thing about supporting mad tyrants is that when they're overthrown you catch a lot of the flak too.

The violence in Leithania had not stopped with the Twin Empresses' victory. It simply spilled over from soldiers to civilians, and the people who had been tormented by the former monarch poured out all their anger on everybody related to him. Great manhunts had been conducted for the Witch King's relatives, his supporters, and their relatives as well.

Any hope I might have held of my mother getting me out of there died with that knowledge. It would have to be me.

We had all seen more than enough of the poor sods over on Zwölftontechnikstrasse. As someone who had gone hungry before, I could say with authority that starvation was a bad way to go, but slowly turning into an Originium crystal from the inside out sounded an order of magnitude worse.

Not me. That would not be me. And so after cursing Being X more than a few times for my lot in life, I continued what I had already been doing anyway. I studied, and demonstrated excellence as best I could.

When I reached my teens I applied for a university scholarship in a proper nomadic city. They accepted me, and I left Wolumonde for good. A few years later, I found a job at a prestigious service firm, before eventually getting an offer for an even better role in Lungmen, one of Yan's nomadic cities.

Leithania had been comfortable enough. Despite some of the similarities, Leithania wasn't the fantasy equivalent of the Empire, exactly, and the cuisine was similarly different. Or maybe it was simply the benefit of being dozens of years ahead in development, despite this being the nominal eleventh century. I suppose I would never know.

At any rate, the food had been all right, and the entertainment was fine too. I'd take Leithanian opera over Noh any day.

Unfortunately, a few years back, whatever surviving loyalists to the previous monarch began stirring up trouble again, and in response, some of the old manhunts recommenced. Not wanting to tempt fate, I thus decided to move halfway across the world.

And wouldn't you have it, I was accepted into the Lungmen branch of one of the four biggest professional service firms in the world.

To be frank, I had been hoping to move a little further east for nostalgia's sake. Between the names and the fact that they had shinobi, the Far East was undoubtedly Terra's version of Japan. Sadly, they were going through some Nanbokuchou thing right now, which I wanted to stay well clear of.

The position in Lungmen also paid better.

That had ultimately decided things for me. Besides, there were plenty of examples of cultural cross-pollination. A consequence of Lungmen's Madam Governor being Lady Fumizuki, no doubt.

You could find izakaya here and there in the alleyways of downtown Lungmen, and there were plenty of authentic restaurants. Despite the name, Uncle Leung's, down the street from MountainDash Logistics, served some incredible shimesaba. I didn't even really like sashimi, but I had eaten there twice.

I could get a taste of home in Lungmen, if Japan could still be called that, while making a lot of money. That sounded like the perfect place to me.

Plus, I had been to Hong Kong in my first life. I liked it enough. How much worse could it be on wheels?

That was how I found myself living in Lungmen for the next few years.

I'd never donated in my first life, except for tax incentives, but the orphanage had funded my schooling when they realised my precociousness. Over the years, while I climbed the ranks of my company, I sent money back home as a form of repayment. As a wealthy businesswoman, I wouldn't begrudge giving more money than they had invested in me.

At any rate I ended up keeping in contact, so if by some chance my birth mother survived, she would be able to find me. I kept the name she gave me, was the youngest woman to ever make junior partner in my company, and I was the spitting image of what I remembered of her.

And well, if somebody else went looking instead, I was all the way over in Lungmen, and the L.G.D. were very good at their job.

Not that I was in Lungmen right this moment. In fact, I wasn't even in Yan.

As previously mentioned, I had made junior partner. With Terra being so prone to natural disasters, travel wasn't as convenient as it had been on Earth, and a consequence of that was that business trips were a slightly bigger deal.

Apparently I was the only one who could be trusted to get this one right.

That was why it was looking like I'd be spending Christmas in Chernobog of all places. Which was where I was now. Standing in my hotel room. Staring out the window into the drab streets of the city.

As much as it had supposedly developed over the years, the industrialisation did no favours for the appearance of this derelict.

It was also uncomfortably Russy. How could a place that had never developed Communism look so disturbingly communist?

If it hadn't been for the deal we were brokering with one of the local mining companies, I would never have willingly stepped foot here.

I ran a hand over my face and huffed.

At least the food was all right. It felt like I circled back to that point when it came to a lot of problems, actually. Was this a lingering occupational hazard from my second life?

A knock on the door cut that thought short.

"Coming!" I said.

Unlike some of my colleagues, I had no habit of walking around hotel rooms without clothes on, so I immediately made for the door. Hotel rooms weren't a sauna or an onsen, after all, and if it felt like one, they always came with air conditioning these days.

On the other side of the door was an unhappy-looking Ursine girl with my room service. Wonderful.

"Thank you," I said with a nod.

"Enjoy your drink," she responded with a strange look, as I shut the door behind me.

If time flowed linearly between dimensions, Serebryakov would be in her forties by now. The others might even be old enough to be grandparents.

As was tradition for my birthday, I raised a glass of hot chocolate to them. Technically this tradition had only begun after I died, the hot chocolate the orphanage made was to celebrate Christmas, and it wasn't so much my date of birth as the day my mother hid me there, but it was close enough.

I closed my eyes with my glass held aloft.

Wherever you are, my battle-crazy men, I hope you're staying out of trouble.

Back in Leithania, some might have considered it gauche to drink hot chocolate out of a wine glass, but it was the truth that I had grown up in poverty. I wasn't ashamed of that. The past was just a spice that made my current salary all the sweeter.

That was the beauty of a modern economy. Anybody with half a brain and the grit to put in the work could reach the top, even if they grew up eating slop and wearing dresses made of thick curtain cloth.

I kicked back and turned on the television.

"Currently, the Military Police have already surrounded the thugs who had taken Vaschuk Prospect," said the news anchor. "As you can see, this senseless violence is about to be put to an end. Please do not panic. Stay indoors, and await another victory for Chernobog…"

I felt my ears twitch forward in alarm. It just had to be now, while I was in this shithole of a city.

My face went tight with a frown. Was this going to affect my work?

I just hoped that tonight's meeting would go smoothly, and I could go back to enjoying my Lungmen Dollars in their city of origin.

I had only finished my glass of chocolate when the building across from me exploded.