Your world is on fire
Volume 1. Chapter 1. Live or Die
In the fantastical world of Remnant, deep in the woods far from safety, a boy appeared. He hadn't expected to end up in another world after closing his eyes.
Upon his arrival, the boy's body, standing upright, began to fall. Though he could have face-planted into the ground, the boy reacted quickly, landing on his hands and knees to soften the impact.
Although the expression on the boy's face indicated that his instinctive reaction hadn't quite softened the blow.
He felt very bad, as if he had been run over by a steamroller. It felt like a tank with large titanium eggs was sitting on the steamroller.
From his words, it was clear that his body was experiencing excruciating pain.
"Fuck, that hurts." He began to lie on the ground. "Ah, that's nice," notes of satisfaction and relief echoed in his voice.
Although he tried not to face-plant into the ground, the pain spoke otherwise.
The relief he felt was slight but effective. The cool earth brought a sea of pleasure, like cool water on a hot day.
"Alright, time to roll over." He said, with considerable effort turning onto his back. "Ah, what a wonderful feeling," he sighed in enjoyment.
He remained in this state for another ten minutes until he began to slightly grasp the situation.
"Hold on, where am I?" He spoke, surveying the forest before him.
Trying to rise carefully to avoid causing pain throughout his body, he managed to lift the upper half of his body to get a better look at where he ended up.
"Where the hell am I?" He began to slowly turn his head in all directions. "How did I end up in the woods?" his gaze caught a tree with leaves standing ahead.
"Anyway, I need to get up. At least try to." He said as he began to rise.
His legs felt like they belonged to a drunkard and barely supported him, causing him to almost fall back on his rear several times. Despite lifting his body cautiously and slowly.
"What's wrong with me?" He said, surprised by the awkwardness of his legs.
As he trained his body to walk, his mind finally grasped the most important thought.
"I was at home." He said with a concerned voice. After these words, he saw a flashback.
"Brother, want to play?" A child's voice echoed.
"No." He said curtly.
"Why?" The child asked, bewildered.
"Because I'm tired." He replied, lifting the upper part of his body.
"Well, brother." The child said sadly. "Please, play with me," he said sweetly.
"Can't your parents play with you?" He said wearily, lying back down.
"No. I already asked them, they refused." He said, disappointed.
"I see." He said understandingly. "Then why don't you go play with the kids outside?" He looked at his brother.
"All the friends I could play with right now can't do it." He said, looking out the window.
"I see." He said suspiciously.
"You won't play? Then I'm going." He said, turning away from the window to his older brother. As his words were spoken, he turned back to leave the room.
"Wait!" He said loudly, so he could be heard from behind the door. "Don't go. I'll play with you. Just let me get up from the couch." He reluctantly began to rise.
"Brother, let's go play outside then." He said happily.
"Alright. Wait for me." He said, getting up and putting on his sneakers.
"Okay." He said, standing by the door.
The wave vanished like a dream of relaxation.
"Alright, I'm ready to..." He started to say as he approached, but didn't finish the sentence.
At that moment, an explosion occurred, which demolished the house with its shockwave. Although the explosion was powerful, it happened at a sufficient distance for the boy to remain alive. He could see the body of his dead brother, crushed by the metal door in front of him. He himself was partially pinned down by a scaffold, which held back the brick wall that could crush his head along with his body.
"Brother!" A hoarse voice was heard. "Brother!" As he uttered the last words, he felt himself starting to suffocate.
When he looked down at his lower body, he realized that his right lung was pierced by part of the scaffold. Blood began to pour into his mouth faster and faster, but he did not have time to savor a slow death. Another explosion occurred, much stronger than the first. Although it happened at a considerable distance, the shockwave reached the wall next to him. This stone wall completely broke through the scaffold and crushed his head.
As memories of his past life began to fill his mind, he felt the despair again that he had felt upon seeing his brother's death. His mind slipped from the reins of reason at that moment.
And he fell to his knees again with a painful thud.
"No! How!? Why!?" His words of despair echoed loudly and clearly, like those of a wounded animal.
Tears began to flow from his eyes, impossible to stop. His body began to lose its motor functions, and he leaned down to the ground again, placing his hands under his face.
He began to scream from the infernal pain in his heart, continuing to lose his sanity. Although his mind was shattered and his senses lost, there was still a shred of self-preservation within him.
In his broken mind came the thought: "I am still alive. Therefore, I must conceal my feelings until I find a safe place to fully surrender to madness." These words were whispered by his inner demons, which had haunted him even before death. His inner demons continued to speak: "You must live, and you can shove your tears up your ass. So what if everyone you loved is now dead." At that moment, he felt a sense of horror from these wondrous words in his head.
But they frightened him not so much with their horror as with their truth. Although unexpected to him, his voice uttered the following words: "It's true. I'm alive, and I must find a safe way out of here."
Stopping his tears, he slowly raised his head and began to survey the forest, trying to push away the gloomy thoughts. Starting to rise from his knees and pull himself together, at least partially, his mind flashed with thoughts: "Where am I going? And for how long?"
After some thought, he decided to go to the right in the hope of finding some elevation to look around and figure out where exactly he needed to go.
After some walking, he found a hill and a tree that he could climb to get a better view of the area. As he managed to climb up with great effort to carefully make his way to the top, only despair awaited him in his eyes. For there was nothing but forest as far as the eye could see, with no trails for people to walk on or roads—just unforgiving wilderness.
Although this sight might have provoked fear in many, it only evoked laughter in him.
"Ha-ha-ha!" His exclamation of joy had undertones of madness.
He then carefully began to descend, ensuring he didn't fall and break something.
After walking for two minutes, he heard movement in the bushes ahead. Initially, he froze in surprise, unsure if it could be people or animals. Slowly, he backed away from the spot, cautiously observing the potential threat.
And then suddenly, a rabbit leaped out. A regular rabbit, and the boy felt a wave of relief seeing it. For him, this was a great comfort as he assumed that if the rabbit looked normal, it meant he hadn't ended up in a grim fantasy where he could be attacked and killed for no reason.
As the rabbit started running away from him, the boy thought it might make a tasty meal if he could catch it.
"Too bad I don't know how to hunt or make a fire." He said sadly. "If I had survival skills, I could live in the forest long enough to find a road to a settlement and not die of hunger." He added with sorrow.
"Alright. I need to find a way out as quickly as possible. That will be my mission. If I fail, I'll die." These words built up his motivation to fight, but after the last words, he realized there was no hope. "If I die, so be it, it's not the first time anyway." After these words, he continued walking, accepting his fate.
After walking a few meters, he heard a sound again, but from different bushes.
He stopped and narrowed his eyes, expecting someone dangerous to emerge from the bushes.
"Now I won't be as lucky as in dumb standard horror movies—here comes the monster." He said, turning his back in the direction he had come from, keeping an eye on the new danger.
From the bushes emerged a fox, a regular red fox—beautiful but wild. Seeing the boy, it seemed startled and began to growl, trying to intimidate him. But this threatening gesture didn't last long: realizing he wouldn't harm her, the fox darted back into the bushes to his left.
However, before he could change his stance, he saw something terrifying. From the bushes where the fox had disappeared, a massive monster resembling a giant bear emerged. It was entirely black with red eyes, large teeth, and claws. When this monster opened its mouth, black slime, akin to oil, began to drip out.
While anyone else would have fled at full speed, the boy didn't run. And it wasn't because he was paralyzed with fear—no, he simply didn't know where to run. Where could one possibly escape from a hungry bear three times their size?
Then he remembered the tree he had climbed to survey the area. A plan for escaping this potential new death formed in his mind.
He started sprinting with all his might, weaving between the trees to slow the monster, which began chasing him after a loud roar. He ran as fast as he could, adrenaline fueling his every step. But suddenly, he heard several more loud sounds approaching. The monster's roar had not just been an attempt to scare him but also a call to others.
As he neared the tree, just a few meters away, he saw another monster waiting by it, seemingly anticipating his arrival.
When he saw the Beowolf, his instinct was to dodge to the side to avoid the frontal attack. But another Beowolf was already waiting for him, biting into his neck. The pain was intense but barely registered due to the adrenaline and shock. Though the boy knew his end was near, he started fighting back against the monster with his hands. His actions were futile, but the taste of blood in his mouth and the desire to remember all those who had left him pushed him to fight until the very end.
A scream of pain and despair burst from his bloody mouth.
"I will never die from these monsters; I must live to remember!" His raspy cry sounded like that of a madman.
But bad news awaited him ahead. He saw a large bear and another Beowolf approaching him with a clear intent to kill and tear him apart.
When he saw the face of the bear coming toward him, with black slime dripping from it, he shouted his last words before the monster's teeth bit into his head.
"You are all dead, just like me. You will all turn to ash, just like me. You will all vanish into the void of madness with me. Ha-ha-ha!" When his sanity left him, only madness remained.
Although death nearly bit off his head, the beast stopped and began to back away. Suddenly, the large bear grabbed the Beowolf by the neck and bit off its head.
The Beowolf holding the boy by the neck ended its life with a severed neck, courtesy of another Grimm. When this thought crossed his mind, he began to laugh.
"Ha-ha-ha!" A cry of pure malevolent madness echoed from his bloody mouth.
As the Beowolf disappeared from his body, he wanted to push its main body away to stand up, but when he rose, he did so with the utmost care not to dislodge the monster's head from his neck, to avoid triggering a massive bleed.
Although measures were taken to stop the bleeding from the artery and vein, the monster's head would act as a plug only for a short time, and then it would disappear. As he rose from the ground, supporting the monster's head to keep it in place, he noticed that he was glowing like a rainbow in all the colors of the spectrum. But it didn't matter to him. As long as they were alive and could kill him, nothing else mattered.
What the boy saw when he finally looked around was a horribly magnificent sight: Grimm creatures were tearing each other apart. Although there were many of them, they could not resist the madness that had engulfed them. Besides the Grimm creatures, there were also ordinary animals.
This continued until all the enemies were still alive. When all the enemies lay dead, everything around was drenched in the blood of both the animals and the Grimm, although the Grimm's blood was black slime.
The sense of death prevailed around, but the only one pleased by it was the boy, who was already standing with one foot over the abyss that could take the remnants of his mind into the void.
"I told you, you are all dead, like me…" He exclaimed joyfully. But his words were cut off by the blood that poured from his mouth, preventing him from continuing his tirade. "Ha-ha-ha!" Instead, a scream of painful laughter escaped, like that of a true madman.
When he noticed that the monster's head, which had been holding back his bleeding, had completely disappeared, a thought flashed in his mind that aura was not a panacea for all wounds and even such a wound could not be quickly healed.
"It's a pity that my life will end here surrounded by dead Grimm and animals." After these words, he fell onto his back with a thud.
The boy's body hit the ground with a dull thud, and the world began to darken in his eyes. The monster's head had already vanished, but his desire to live did not die along with the madness. He raised his hand to his neck to press the wound, but the wound was too large to be closed with one or even both hands.
"Ha-ha-ha." Hysterical laughter echoed. "My… death… will be… at least… fun." He said, choking on his blood.
Just as he closed his eyes again to sink into the icy world of the unknown, which had already become his familiar home, someone's words echoed.
"Boy, do you want to live?" A woman's voice was heard.
When he heard these words, spoken as if Satan or Death itself had come to ask him this question, he opened his eyes and, looking at her with anger, replied:
"Why the fuck… did you… bitch… come here… if you're not… going to save me? Huh!?" Choking on his blood, he said with hatred and a desire to destroy this woman.
When he said this, her expression did not change, not a single muscle moved. But a thought flashed in his mind that it was in vain that she came here because the only thing he hated more than such words was zero reaction to his words: "So you'll go with me, bitch."
As he said this, a power was activated in his mind instantly. His eyes glowed with a rainbow light. And he heard her swing to strike him with her weapon, but her attempts to kill him while she still could were futile.
She froze, feeling the most intense fear a person can feel in their life. Her mind imagined a huge monster, resembling an owl, with sharp claws, teeth, and large eyes.
At the moment this happened, he was looking at her weapon and her. Although he couldn't make out her face due to the blur from the severe blood loss, the weapon seemed very familiar to him as it glowed red. To confirm his suspicions, he glanced at her belt. When he saw the rectangular box on her belt, he knew who she was.
"Raven." He said in surprise.
Although she felt terror, she heard his words. She was too scared to even breathe. Her astonishment was boundless when the three-meter Grimm in the form of an owl turned back into a bloodied boy.
When the boy deactivated his ability, she began to see everything as it was again, but the sense of fear did not go away. She stood still for another minute until the boy uttered strange words.
"Stupid… you…" He choked on his blood, trying to speak.
After these words, his hands could no longer keep the wound pressed, they began to relax and grow cold. A thought flashed in his mind: "My hands are no longer moving. My last seconds, and I'm alone with my demons. They tell me: 'Why did you let her go? She herself is to blame for dying by our hands. Why don't you take her with us?'"
A tremendous number of voices, overflowing with various emotions, raged in his mind. They constantly demanded the destruction of anyone the boy disliked even slightly. But he restrained them to avoid snapping and killing her — the one who was important for the future plot of the world. With his last strength, he decided to resist his madness.
When he closed his eyes, the world darkened and everything disappeared, but there was no end. Then his world was filled with light again, and he opened his eyes. Weakly, he asked, "Where am I?"
Rising to survey the room he found himself in, he heard a woman's voice he had heard before. She asked, "How are you, boy?"
Looking up, he stopped when he saw a woman with red eyes and black hair, a weapon on her belt.
"Cat got your tongue?" she looked at him with narrowed eyes.
When she said that, not a muscle on his face twitched.
As she was about to say something else, he interrupted her.
"You don't want..." — she was already preparing to leave the tent.
"Why?" — his gaze darted from the door back to her.
"What do you mean by 'Why'?" — she stopped before leaving the tent, turning back to him.
"Why did you save me?" — he asked with curiosity in his voice, looking her in the eyes.
Silence lasted a good thirty seconds before she answered.
"Do you want to know?" — she said with a kind of casual seriousness.
His gaze on her was sharp and thoughtful. He wanted to know not only what he had asked but also everything he could learn from her about the world and her life since she left.
"Yes. I want to know," he said firmly, looking at her sword and then back at her.
After these words, he began to rise from the bed. But as soon as he stepped on the ground, he felt that his body had become smaller. He was shorter, and the hair on his chest and legs was gone. The sensation was strange, as if he had grown younger again.
When he realized everything, his gaze became more angry than enigmatic.
"Did you do this?" he asked with a stern look, pointing at his body with his hand.
"No," she replied just as sternly, looking at him. "When I saved you from death and brought you to my home, your wounds were very serious. Your manifestation did not allow my people to approach you because you unknowingly drove them mad. So I took care of your treatment myself. For some reason, your power no longer affected me," her tone was such as to remind him that he owed her his life.
He continued to wait for her to continue, and after two minutes of tense silence, she spoke again.
"I hope you will also answer my questions," she said with a stern look.
Hearing this, he smiled slyly.
"Why should I answer you? You didn't answer my question, why did you do it?" — his gaze swept around the room, and at the last words, he looked her in the eyes again.
"Are you a clever boy, huh?" — she said with interest. "Alright, I'll tell you why I saved you. I was curious to know who you are and how you know me," her gaze on the last words became sharp as a taut string.
He froze at her words, realizing that mentioning her name before his death was unnecessary.
"I'll tell you when you tell me how I became like this?" he said without fear in his voice.
"Okay. I'll tell you. The treatment did not yield significant results. I thought you would die, but your strange aura healed you and did this to you," she said these words without hesitation.
Her words surprised him. He could not understand if this was the same woman he knew from the series or not. He saw her as a person with hair, nails, skin, muscles, eyes, teeth, and lips that were real and detailed.
The boy was not very strong in spirit or body. In that world, he was an ordinary person. He didn't even have relationships, and no girl had taken his virginity. But after a mental breakdown, did he become different? No. He remained the same guy, with even more mental illnesses and demons constantly wanting to devour him.
So he answered her honestly.
"I know you from death," he said, looking at her.
After these words, she quickly jumped up to him, drawing her weapon with a blue blade in a second. But she stopped in front of his neck and ominously asked:
"Do you serve that witch?"
"Are you talking about Salem?" — he waited for her reaction before saying these words.
She froze after these words and stood like that for ten seconds before saying the next:
"Who are you?" — she said quietly but firmly.
He could not name his past name, as it did not fit into this world. But the only thing his imagination could come up with was a strange but very accurate description of his current essence: a mentally unstable monster.
"My name is Abyssus Noctu. Are you more afraid of her than me?" — when he said the last words, a horrible smile appeared on his small lips.
The silent game lasted five minutes. During this time, Raven's mind was flooded with terrifying memories of the past, how she first met Salem and what happened to those who were with her. "Recent events showed that there are still those in this world who can be as frightening as her. This boy named Abyssus had a very eerie power and view."
Although he now looked like a twelve to thirteen-year-old child, his diminished appearance did not reduce his ability to instill fear. Despite his new form, he still frightened her every time she looked at him.
She knew her fear was provoked by his manifestation. However, she could not understand why he scared her even without using his power. Perhaps the bird she saw was just an illusion of her mind. But the owl she saw seemed too real. Its claws, feathers, beak, and even teeth were so vivid that she could feel the breath of this monster as if it were real.
At that moment, Abyssus spoke words that answered her questions she had been asking herself: "Why did he leave me alive?"
"If you want to know why you were left alive when I attacked you, and why my manifestation did not affect you when you were treating me." He said, unexpectedly making a pirouette.
At that moment, he turned his back to her and added:
"It's because you were not meant to die that day. Until you explain why you left your daughter." When he finished the last word, he turned again to see how she reacted to that word.
When he saw her, she was no longer standing with her sword raised, ready to cut off his head, but was looking somewhere to the side, thoughtfully reflecting. In his turbulent emotions, demons and the corpses of his relatives constantly wandered. Therefore, when he heard words from Raven, he was puzzled.
"You will become one of the members of my family." She said, looking at him with curiosity and a desire to kill.
"What?" He said in surprise.
"You will become a member of my band." She continued, sheathing her sword.
"You know I can't control my power?" He asked confused.
"Yes. But you cannot use it against me until I tell you why I left my daughter. Right?" Her emotions changed quickly, she looked either serious or murderous.
He began to slowly approach her.
"What happened to you?" He asked, looking up at her and saying these words confusedly.
When he said these words, she abruptly turned her back to him and ran out of the tent.
"Why did she do that?" He continued to stand in place, thinking.
Life always brought surprises, but Raven, as he remembered her, was different, at least in the image of a leader. He saw her not as a character from a series but as a real woman. But he did not know why she acted that way.
Raven herself ran out not from shame or sadness, but from strong emotions — anger and a desire to kill him before he tried to kill her again. Why didn't she finish everything with one blow? This question she asked herself countless times, especially when she heard him mention her daughter.
The only thing that stopped her was his power, which she could not understand. She realized that he could destroy her settlement in seconds if he wanted. This did not frighten her as much as the information that he knew about her daughter. "So I need to study him to kill him. And if possible, persuade him to my side." She decided.