Disclaimer: I don't own Youjo Senki or any of its characters.
A/N:
Hi.
Here is a link to my Discord: A3dTszc
It is the best way to get into contact with me should you wish to and I often post status updates for my chapters there. The Google Docs versions for all my stories are posted there as well, and anyone can suggest edits or comment on them. My server also gets early access to chapters, often by several days (sometimes weeks and in rarer cases, even months).
Chapters on this site are often outdated. It takes time for the accumulated improvements to make it here because I don't immediately post updated versions of old chapters. I release them in bulk along with new chapters to avoid sending out false notifications. The most recent versions are linked on my server.
- LeviTamm
Important Disclaimer #1: Since it seems like it has caused some confusion in the comments, and since it will not be mentioned explicitly in this story for quite some time (only hinted at), I'll say it now. Tanya is a lot older in this story than in canon. I actually haven't pinned down her precise age just yet as I'm still making modifications to the timeline and there are a few years of wiggle room. However, I can say this. She's over 18 and under 22 right now in this chapter. When I get to the point where I actually reveal her precise age, I assure you there won't be any problems. I figured everyone would have understood this implicitly due to the fact that Tanya/Visha is tagged in the description but a few people have brought it up so this disclaimer is warranted.
So to anyone with age-difference concerns: when the relationship between Tanya and Visha started developing, everyone involved was not only over the age of consent at the time, but they were also within the standard 'half age plus seven' weirdness rule. And that's just when the mutual attraction and handholding started. By the time anything rated R happens between them (if it ever does) it will be years later and both will be comfortably in their twenties. It hasn't happened yet and won't be happening any time soon.
Due to spoilery reasons I won't get into for quite some time, the war lasted a lot longer than anyone expected. More than a decade and it still isn't even close to being over. The full history of everything that happened is going to be revealed over the course of many chapters.
Important Disclaimer #2: This story is fucked up. Like, seriously. It's probably going to be one of the most messed up Youjo Senki fics ever written. That's by design, too. Some seriously weird shit is going to happen and pretty much every character is insane.
This is another thing that I figured would have been clear from the description but again, people have brought it up so I figured I'd say something about it. If reading about a crazy psychopath defeating, torturing, and beating the hell out of the main character for their own, sadistic amusement while said main character internally monologues about how annoying it is, isn't for you, you should go read something else. Because that pretty much happens right out of the gate.
That psychopath is very eager about it, too. They've been dreaming about it for years. And they are in complete control of the situation.
She doesn't die, though. Tanya. Well, not permanently anyway. And in fact, she eventually figures out a method by which she can undo all the damage done to her. All of it. Hint hint.
That doesn't happen for a while yet, though. It's just something to keep in mind for if/when she gets mutilated. The damage isn't as permanent as you might think, but saying anything more than that is spoilers. Even saying what I already have is spoilers, but enough people complained about it that I felt the need to say this, too.
That's it. No more disclaimers or AN's.
Christmas was an unusual concept that I've never properly understood.
You could say that I never saw the appeal in it.
...Or you could say the truth. That I thought of it as an unbearable waste of resources that only benefitted the ultra-rich, billionaire, toy-manufacturing CEOs all over the world. The holiday was a strict, net negative event that dragged down the human race as a whole and it could be proven as such in under a minute with nothing more than a simple cost-benefit analysis.
Or rather, a cost analysis.
...Because there were no benefits.
There were only negative things to say about Christmas.
It caused so much clutter, for one. So much plastic waste was generated by toy manufacturing conglomerates as they created shitty little toy trucks and trains for ungrateful, disgusting little children that didn't even know how to play with them properly.
A portion of those children would die as a result of this ignorance.
Every year, a shocking number of children died from attempting to swallow their new, unfamiliar toys―or small pieces of them―on Christmas morning.
Even more died by suffocation―by wrapping the plastic bag packaging over their heads and getting stuck inside it.
Yet more died by accidentally setting their houses on fire by knocking their unreasonably large―and pointless―Christmas trees over and into the fireplace.
It was actually very predictable and the statistics were known. You could predict the surge every year―the surge of children who died stupid and pointless deaths as a direct result of Christmas festivities.
And yet, despite this, nobody seemed to care.
Humanity at large was just so attached to the story of the fat old home invader that these swathes of dead kids were just considered acceptable losses and were swept under the rug.
It was absurd.
How many more Einsteins might there have been had they not died young after trying to eat the hat of a Lego miniature figurine?
It was such a waste.
And it was all in order to celebrate the big man himself. The fat man.
Fucking Santa Claus.
They called him 'jolly'. What a fucking joke. That fat old man watched every child at every moment, when they were sleeping, when they were bathing, when they were in the bathroom...he watched them and knew about everything that they did.
That man was not 'jolly'. He was spearheading a terrifying and sophisticated surveillance operation that put Big Brother to shame and he had an extreme, obsessive interest in underage children and what they were up to behind closed doors.
That was the true nature of the spirit of Christmas.
There was no purpose to any of the festivities as there was nothing worth celebrating at that time of year. The holiday was just an excuse for rampant, unrestricted consumerism to take hold and to display the worst parts of humanity. It was an excuse to blow billions of dollars on pointless gifts for children―gifts that they wouldn't either care about or appreciate.
Like the vile little cretins that they were, the children that didn't die outright from their stupidity would just bash their new plastic gifts into the walls and into each other over and over again until they get bored and finally cast them aside.
Then the toys would break, and the walls would break, and no one would come out ahead except for the repairman that would inevitably need to be called the next day.
I had seen it happen time and again with my younger cousins back in my former life as a salaryman.
I was by no means a family man back then. In fact, I actively avoided my family as often as I could. But every year, just like everyone else, I, too, had been forced to go to those family gatherings and holiday celebrations to bear witness to their horrors.
It did not matter that I did not care about the other people at those things—that I even hated a good number of them. It did not matter that I did not want to go. I had no choice but to go. If I did not, I'd never hear the end of it from my parents.
In terms of time efficiency, I had calculated that it was simply best to just bite the bullet and go to these gatherings rather than spend the rest of the year avoiding all contact with my family. At some point, my parents would show up at my house if I ignored their calls for long enough and then I'd have to contact the police if I wanted to force them to leave the premises.
...But if things actually went that far, I would immediately lose all public support from my coworkers and my job prospects would dwindle.
People would say: "Hey! Isn't that the guy who called the police on his own mother?! What a scumbag! We better not hire him!"
...Or something like that.
That was perhaps the only good thing that resulted from being reincarnated as an orphan in this new, war-torn world.
Having a family meant that you had to deal with them, after all. There was no way to just opt out. If you ignored them, you looked like the bad guy to those around you. That would affect your reputation and career prospects.
As a result, being reborn without one had been a breath of fresh air. It was such a relief to be beholden to no one but myself. No parents, no siblings, no guardians, no cousins...I had no one.
It was fantastic!
I didn't have any lumpy potatoes to look after, and I was not being forced to interact with any distant relatives or their hellspawn. No screaming children, no holiday celebrations, no reunions, no siblings fighting over access to their stupid toys, no bickering, no Christmas…
Just silence.
...Other than the war, anyway. But you couldn't win them all.
At least I didn't have to participate in those pointless festivities when I was on the front line.
At the end of the day, it was a well-established fact that giving a toy to a child was like giving a shotgun to a goose. It might be very happy for a short time after but you still shouldn't do it.
Because what ultimately became of all of these broken and unused Christmas toys after the kids that received them got bored?
All of this plastic, toy-shaped garbage would end up in a landfill somewhere. Though, to be fair, a good amount would also end up in the lungs of a baby seal, too. Or in the nostril of a sea turtle.
The true cost of Christmas was paid by the environment and the thousands upon thousands of dead animals with stomachs full of plastic.
It was sickening.
...And all of this was only considering the non-religious version of the holiday. I was well aware of the fact that various religions all over the world celebrated Christmas for entirely different reasons. Spiritual reasons that had nothing to do with a fat―though unexpectedly spry―magic man shimmying down the chimneys of every house in the world, eating a bunch of leftover food as though he were entitled to it and leaving 'gifts' behind.
It's honestly a surprise he hasn't been shot yet.
He sure wouldn't make it into my house without a fight, I'll tell you that much. On Christmas morning, I'd be ready. Make no mistake, we would find out very quickly which of the two of us was better at combat magic if he tried to get inside.
I could take him.
I'd clean his fucking clock with the Type-95, I was sure. Santa Claus had nothing on me. And then I'd serve him medium-rare reindeer steak right after. My treat.
Those things were abominations too. Don't even get me started on those fuckers. They needed to be put out of their misery for their own good.
...But I digress. All of the spiritual reasons for celebrating Christmas were just as nonsensical as the non-spiritual reasons for one simple reason:
No religion is true or has any intrinsic value to anyone.
All religious beliefs, without exception, are nothing more than the 'Santa Claus' for adults―make-believe, feel-good stories that only make sense when you don't think about them too deeply. Once you start questioning them with any intellectual rigour whatsoever, they are blown apart leaving nothing behind.
These 'stories' were shackles on human progress and as a result, I think I hated the religious version of the holiday even more. It primed children to ignore facts and reason and left them in a perfect state of mind to be brainwashed into a religion.
It was sickening.
In conclusion, I fucking hated Christmas with a burning passion because I didn't like waste. And I didn't like family. And I didn't like organized religion. And I didn't like people. And I didn't like that there were so many people. And I didn't like that there were so many people that were willing to accept such silly ideas at the cost of their own well-being, that of their children, and at the cost of the environment.
They were not just 'harmless stories' as many morons liked to claim. They had a real impact on society as a whole.
Even before my reincarnation to this new world, those were my views on the most wasteful holiday that mankind had ever produced.
Christmas was just awful and I hated it.
...And my hate has only grown since then.
What's the worst Christmas that you've ever had?
...
Go ahead.
Sit back. Relax.
Think about it.
...
I'll wait.
…
…
…
…
…
…
…
…
...
...Have you pulled up a memory? Some 'awful' Christmas from years ago where something terrible happened? Where you got rejected when you asked your crush out perhaps? Or where someone told an embarrassing story about you at a party? Or where your goldfish died?
What happened to you?
…
I don't actually care, in case that wasn't obvious yet.
I personally guarantee that your suffering in that moment, whatever it may have been, pales in comparison to my Christmas experience today.
Mine is worse than yours.
Well...it's worse than the experiences of 99.9%+ of you. So pretty much everyone. Effectively everyone. A small portion of you might have had some legitimately shitty Christmases that involved deaths of family members and close friends and severe personal injuries and the like but I'm not talking about you. People like that have also earned the right to stand with me here today in our collective victimhood and our hatred for the holiday but their proportion is small enough for me to safely ignore them in this disgruntled rant of mine.
But as for the rest of you...my Christmas was way, way worse than whatever BS story you just remembered that wasn't even that bad.
I already hated Christmas before suffering through this one, but now, my hatred for it was on the level of my hatred for Being X himself. Total and all-encompassing.
Because this one, in particular, was especially bad.
So I didn't care that your goldfish died or that you broke your elbow that one time at a Christmas party because you were drunk.
My Christmas today was worse.
...
Now, I know what you're probably thinking. Tanya is such a Scrooge, right? Because who hates Christmas as much as she?
Everyone is happy on Christmas.
Blegh.
Happy people fucking sucked. They sickened me.
...But anyway, leaving that aside, I believe that I have some legitimate grievances on why today sucked so hard even if you ignored all my earlier criticisms of the holiday as a whole.
To be fair, it actually hadn't started out so bad.
...I was still in the middle of the Great War on the Eastern Front in the most violent and deadly conflict that the world had ever seen, but I had gotten used to that reality by now. So if you set that aside, Christmas this year had started just like any other day: with a suicidally dangerous mission or two and several hours of staunch, heated, bloody combat.
It was how the day ended that was the problem.
...With me lying in a field full of dead bodies, broken and bleeding, and completely unable to move.
In the middle of a blizzard, too. Because why not? Today seemed to be 'Shit All Over Tanya Degurechaff Day and All Her Hopes and Dreams Too' so why not throw an icy storm into the mix?
Merry fucking Christmas.
Ho ho ho.
I could hardly see anything. The snow and blowing winds made it impossible.
I also totally wasn't exaggerating when I said that I couldn't move. I meant that I literally could not move right now no matter how much I wanted to.
As far as I could tell, either a bullet or a piece of debris had been lodged somewhere in my spinal column and had rendered me paralyzed.
I was quite literally a quadriplegic now. No electrical signals reached my limbs and so they were completely unresponsive. I couldn't even twitch. The only muscles I could move right now were the ones in my face. Everything below the neck was just gone. Immobilized forever. Even if I survived this ordeal, I'd be confined to a wheelchair for the rest of my life and would need a nurse at my side to assist me with every single bodily function.
For the rest of my life.
That wasn't a life if you asked me. I'd sooner detonate my computation orb and kill myself than suffer through such indignity because no medical technology in the world―magical or otherwise―had the power to deal with a condition like that and we weren't even close. We were probably more than a hundred years away from being able to address a neurological disability of that sort.
Not that it mattered. Even if my spine could be repaired somehow, I still wouldn't make it to a hospital in time.
…Because on top of my quadriplegia, my entire body was littered with bullet holes, cuts, and lacerations. I was choking on blood, trying to gasp for air but I couldn't get any full, deep breaths because my lungs weren't working properly.
It really fucking sucked.
...And if that wasn't enough, I couldn't even remember how I got here. The last thing I could truly recall was activating my Type-95 and diving into the abyss of power head-first, and then swimming directly downwards to try and reach the bottom of the deepest part of the pool.
I had thrown myself into it completely and utterly.
For the first time since I had been given that blasted device, I had been forced to draw on 100% of its capabilities. Ordinarily, I would only use small amounts at a time and only for brief moments―bringing forth just enough energy to get the job done before deactivating it.
But this time, that had not been an option.
I had needed all the power it could grant me and I had embraced it all, hating every second of it. The Type-95 caused a huge amount of mental corruption, after all. It warped my emotions and feelings, and the intensity of that warp was proportional to the amount of power I drew from it.
So drawing on all of it had been completely out of the question until now. I had only done so this time because not doing that would have killed me.
Once I summoned that power, however, any hope of actually remembering what I did while under its influence flew right out the window. Especially since I had gone so deep. I had probably turned myself into a religious lunatic, raving about how amazing and wonderful and holy the Lord Almighty was. So there was a huge blank spot in my memory.
I could make a few educated guesses about what had probably happened based on the sheer size of the wasteland around me...but I did not actually remember the specifics.
It must have been one hell of a battle, though.
The world looked like it was on fire. Everywhere around me, there was nothing but burning land.
I was also at the bottom of a crater.
And by crater, I meant that it was a fucking crater. It was an absolutely massive, several hundred-meter deep impact crater that had to be well over a kilometre in diameter. From above, it probably looked like a large meteor had created it, or that it was the aftermath of an atomic bomb explosion.
It had probably been the single largest man-made explosion in the history of this world, whatever had caused it.
All the land around me was in ruins. And despite the blizzard in progress, there was hardly any snow on the ground. The intensity of whatever battle had taken place had been so high that all of it had melted. So the ground beneath me was muddy―not solid and laced with ice like it usually was in the Rus Federation at this time of the year.
New snow was precipitating from the clouds above me, but the old snow that had been on the ground until now had all evaporated.
There were dead people all around me, too. Well, pieces of them, anyway. The explosion had churned them all up a little and sent random body parts all over the place.
"Demon!"
"Witch!"
"Heretic!"
...Oh yeah. I forgot to mention that part.
There was a tiny detail I accidentally left out in my explanation for why I hated Christmas so much right now and for why I was in such rough shape. It also explained why I wasn't all that worried about living a hellish life in a wheelchair after all of this and why I knew that my death was guaranteed.
That particular detail was the fact that Mary fucking Sioux was currently straddling me.
She had torn my uniform open, pulled the front of it off, and was now in the process of holding me down and carving her own name and a bunch of expletives into my bare chest and abdomen with a mage blade.
I was being mutilated and fucking branded at the same time.
And these cuts were deep, too. These were not mere 'surface level' scratches. We are talking organ-penetrating depths.
And let me tell you.
It was not a very fun experience on my end. I would rather it wasn't happening, in fact. I was not having a good time at all.
Getting slowly tortured to death kinda sucked. Who would have thought? I definitely would not recommend it to anyone.
Mary's blade was as hot as a furnace and as sharp as a scalpel, and it was buried to the fucking hilt inside my body and now she was twisting it.
I was in no position to put up any resistance anymore. I had suffered so much under that blade already and all my strength had bled out of me long ago.
I had lost so much blood. I could practically go for a swim in the puddle of it underneath me. I had popped open like a fucking water balloon.
…But without the ability to move, I couldn't do a thing about it. I could really only lie there and take whatever punishment Mary decided to dish out on me.
Luckily for me, however, there was one small silver lining. I was a quadriplegic now, so I couldn't actually feel the pain from what she was doing to me anymore. I didn't have any sensory feedback of any kind below my neck, so her attempts to rip my body apart and inflict catastrophic levels of pain and suffering on me didn't really work out and she hadn't caught on to that yet.
Don't tell her that, please.
I suspected that she would go fucking ballistic if she knew that I had largely escaped the agony she tried to inflict on me. I didn't want that to happen. An even more energetic Mary would not bear well for my health at all.
Discord: A3dTszc