I did not live a very long life, but I could say with assurance that I went through some of the worst places on Earth. I traversed the city of Ellisburg, a place humanity had given up to mutated monsters controlled by a mad man. I infiltrated Cauldron's headquarters depths, taken over by the organization's own twisted experiments.
And then there was Brockton Bay. What happened there hurt me deeply, it was my home after all, but even looking at it objectively it was the worst. Endbringers were more akin to natural disasters than proper attacks, more than the human cost it was the indiscriminate damage to infrastructure that was to be feared. People came back to ruined homes, no electricity, no running water.
Desperation pushes people to criminality, survival above morals. Endbringer touched zones quickly became lawless. And Brockton Bay had been a gang infested cesspool before Leviathan. Not to mention the chaos the Slaughterhouse left in their wake.
This place made Brockton Bay look like an ad for a seaside resort.
The only buildings here were rundown wooden shacks, the few people who were walking the dirt roads covered with a mixture of mud and blood were all bare footed, covered in grime and had some manner of injury. Every few second a pained and panicked scream could be heard in the distance. There were a few corpses here and there in the open that nobody seemed to care about. And of course, the air was pungent with the odor of blood and desperation.
This was the supposed afterlife?
What amounted to little more than a slum? Scratch that, calling this place a slum would be giving it too much credit. In slums there was at least a sense a community in shared hardships. This was… was there even a word for it?
I had been there for 30 minutes. I walked the muddy path, my clean white clothes a stark contrast to the other residents. It attracted attention. I could feel the eyes around me sizing me up as if I was a piece of meat. I gave back a long practiced and tested intimidating look. Most of them lost interest, like predators who found their prey too feisty to bother hunting.
Yes, that was it. It could barely be called civilization. I was in the wild.
And I was prey.
What's more, I had no real way to defend myself. No weapons, no hideout, and like I surmised earlier, no powers. I didn't feel any bug anywhere and some people passed close enough to discount the idea that I retained Khepri's abilities.
Damn it!
I gave everything to save the world, even my sanity. In the end I welcomed death, hoping to have some peace from my regrets and misery. And this is where I ended up? A place where I would have to fight every second for my life?
…
…
Perhaps this was Hell. A place where only the worst humanity has to offer could thrive. I certainly did enough to deserve it.
God damnit, this wasn't the moment to get mopey! People were starting to eye me again, sensing my weakness like sharks smelling blood.
I couldn't afford to be like that right now, I had to keep my head in the game.
The Soul Pass said this was the 80th district of the North Rukongai, which meant there had to be at the very least 79 others. There was a good chance civilization was properly maintained somewhere.
If this Soul Society was divided in districts there had to be some sort of governing body that divided the territory in this manner. I had to be in the far outskirts.
Then my objective was simple: find civilization.
Far easier said than done. First of all, I didn-
My train of thought was interrupted when my arm was grabbed and I was pulled in a small passage between two shacks. My back was pressed against a wall and a small makeshift stone knife was put against my throat.
"Heheh. Don't move or you know what's going to happen."
I had a hard time assessing my surprise opponent, his self-satisfied face taking up over 50% of my vision, but I could see that he was quite muscular, and the scars on his face told me that he had at least some experience in fighting, though I doubted he was formally trained.
"Finding complete newbies like you is rare you know, doesn't take long before someone gets to them. But today's my lucky day!"
His rugged hand went to cup my face. His frankly horrible breath nearly made my gag.
"Don't worry, you're going to enjoy this as much as I will."
His hand strayed to the collar of my robes, his intent obvious. It didn't matter. If his intent was to rape me, or merely to mug me, the end result would be the same. I may not have my bugs, but I didn't train tirelessly for two years to become a defenseless victim the moment I was depowered.
Either he would be on the ground, or I would be dead.
I grabbed both his hands and pulled them down, kneeing him in the groin in the same instant.
Following that I grabbed his hand and performed a basic arm lock. His knife fell to the ground. His arm immobilized behind his back, I kicked him behind the knees, forcing him down.
"Alright, now that we are in a more appropriate position, we should talk a bit. If you don't answer my questions, I break your arm. Got it?"
"Fuck off bitch!" I put more force in the joint lock. I could hear a small whine coming from him as he tried to hold back his scream behind clenched teeth.
"Last chance. Talk or your arm goes, and I won't stop there. I will continue asking until you're out of functioning appendages."
"Don't bother. I've been here long enough to know how it works."
Suddenly I was thrown off his back as he screamed in pain. He had willingly broken his arm to escape. He quickly drew a rusty knife from his robe and charged me.
I had but a moment to react. I grabbed the weapon he dropped earlier, ducked under his swing, and plunged it in his throat.
His spasming body fell on me, covering me in his blood. I pushed him off me as he choked on his own knife until he finally stopped moving.
I couldn't stay here, someone was bound to come see what was happening. I ripped the knife from the guy's corpse. It was incredibly crude, the indents on it clearly indicated it had been made by simply mashing two rocks together at an angle, but at least it had a wooden handle covered in cloth for a better grip. It wasn't much but it was better than the iron one, it was so rusty that I wasn't sure it wouldn't break at the first stab.
I stood up.
I probably should have been thinking about how up close and personal this kill was. I was used to fight at a distance using my bugs, having someone I stabbed to death bleed all over me should have at least been rattling.
But honestly, it barely registered.
The only thing I thought about was his face as he rushed me. It wasn't the vindictive look of someone who wanted to get payback for a humiliation. It was the look of a cornered animal, one who had been ready to chew off its own leg to avoid what he thought was an inevitable death.
I hated that he was probably right.
I had been walking in the same direction for 10 hours now and there was no change in scenery.
Thankfully after my first fight I only had been attacked 6 times. I supposed that people were a bit more wary of me now that my white robes were covered in blood
More importantly, how big was this place? It wasn't as if I had wandered aimlessly, I picked South since I was supposedly in the North of Rukongai and did my best to stay in that direction, I should have reached something by now.
But there was no change, just some more bodies in the street and the tang of blood in the air.
Additionally, the sun was starting to set, I would need to find some shelter soon. I didn't want to be out in the open when the more devious ones would start getting bolder.
I couldn't pick just any house though, barging in on some random nutjob was the last thing I wanted. I would have to look for an abandoned one, a place dilapidated enough to suggest no one inhabited it.
It took me about 20 minutes, but I found something sufficient for my needs. It was out of the way enough that few people would stumble upon it. It was pretty shitty, no windows and some of the wood was straight up rotten, in fact the door didn't look like it had been opened in years, I was pretty sure the moment I would touch it it would crumble to the ground.
It wasn't much, but it was my best shot. I approached the door. The grass in front of it was undisturbed, a good sign but I wouldn't take any chance.
I gently slid the door open, my knife at the ready. What greeted me was a small empty room.
Nothing special at all. There was only one other room. I slowly approached it, the floor slightly groaning under my weight.
As soon as I entered it, someone yelled and lunged at me. I dodged my assailant on instinct and quickly pinned him to the ground. I readied my knife to stab, no time for hesitation, I had seen what the people here saw that as.
"N-No! Please w-wait don't kill me!"
His panicked words made me stop in my track. It was the first time since I got here that someone had bothered to plead for their life. I looked at him.
He was small, young, perhaps around 14. But more importantly his robes were near immaculate. If I understood the mechanics of this place, people were sent seemingly at random here in the white robes they had just gotten. This kid's were clean, he couldn't have been here for long.
I looked in his eyes. He was completely terrified. Not the feral sort you saw around here, just a fucking kid about to be killed.
God, had I really been about to murder a 14 year old boy?
I got off him and sat down next to the wall.
I took a deep breath. The kid still looked terrified but at least he wasn't anymore in mortal danger. I had to break the ice eventually, we couldn't stay under the same roof and utterly distrust each other.
"I'm Taylor, what's your name?"
"I-I-I'm Isamu Kodama. W-W-What are you going t-to do to me?" The poor kid was still shaking like a leaf.
"Look, I'm not going to hurt you. I just want to stay here for the night, alright? Nothing more." I tried to be as placating as I could. It didn't seem to be working much, but at least he was now more wary than panicked.
"Alright, but s-stay on the other side of room okay?" Fine with me, if he needed some space to feel even remotely safe, I wasn't going to deny him.
So we stayed like that in silence. 10 minutes, 30 minutes, an hour until the sun completely disappeared and the light of the moon was the only thing left.
That's when Isamu finally started talking again.
"I-I never saw someone like you before. Where are you from?" What did he mean by that?
"I'm from Brockton Bay, it's on the East coast of the United States."
Silence followed for a full minute.
"Uuuh…where is that exactly?"
….
….
What?
Okay. Calm down. Maybe he lived in some isolated backwater place.
"And you, where are you from?"
"I'm from Kyoto."
Alright then. Maybe I was in an alternate reality where the USA never existed.
"What exactly did you mean when you said you never met someone like me?" He looked somewhat embarrassed.
"Well, I admit I had never seen or even heard of people with such strange features." I didn't like where this was going.
"You didn't die long ago right? What year was it?" I said perhaps a bit too forcefully: Isamu looked more and more worried.
"Uh-I think we were in the fifth year of the Enbun era. Why?" I had no idea when that was.
Well whatever, the when didn't really matter for now. I was without a doubt in a parallel universe, or perhaps this "afterlife" encompassed all worlds. No, if that were the case there would have been far more people in Hengoku.
So parallel universe it was. Maybe this was a universe where history was delayed, or perhaps Europe had been obliterated by a meteor, I had no way to find out at the moment. I would have to deal with it when the time came.
"So, are you like a foreign kunoichi? You certainly know how to fight, although you don't look like you'd be good at seduct-wait, sorry! I apologize! I didn't mean that you were-uh you know…"
I sighed.
