“Take what was stolen!”
From the Hamster’s teachings.
Damn, I don’t have night vision!
Fine, I’ll cover Simba’s eyes.
His eyesight is perfectly fine.
I knew where the Dark Ones were hiding.
Confident in their impunity, they hadn’t even bothered to conceal their tracks, so their base in the caves was easy enough to find.
But before crawling into the bear’s den, I still had a couple of things to take care of.
The first, though not the most important, was the question of a name.
I decided to do things the same way I had in my previous world: look for the answer in my reflection.
I don’t remember what I came up with last time, but apparently I liked it, so why reinvent the wheel?
My mirror was a puddle in the road.
A gloomy young man of nineteen or twenty stared back at me from its depths.
He had silver hair and a look that promised very serious trouble.
I was reminded of Sephiroth’s cosplay from Final Fantasy.
If there were a contest right now, I’d take first place without even trying.
Hmm.
Not a bad name, and he had an interesting personality, too.
Any objections?
No objections.
(There are objections!
But the owner of this section told me to get lost.
Author’s note.)
So, from now on, I’ll be Sephiroth.
Fortunately, I even have a katana, though thankfully not one of those ridiculously enormous ones.
That settled, it was time for the more difficult problem: how exactly was I supposed to clean out a bandit’s hideout?
I didn’t particularly feel like storming in there with my sword drawn.
There were mages among them, and I had no idea what they could do to me.
I preferred not to find out the hard way.
All right.
First, let’s examine the cave and the approaches to it.
Yeah, they’re not quite as stupid as I’d hoped…
What a shame.
The location of their base was actually very well chosen.
A cave in a small cliff.
There was a clearing in front of the entrance, so sneaking up unnoticed was impossible.
Even the laziest sentry would spot an infiltrator.
Invisibility had gone out the window along with all my other goodies.
Oh, I have a feeling I’ll be bitterly remembering my old abilities more than once.
Unfortunately, today clearly wasn’t my day.
The only other option was to climb down directly from the cliff, but that wasn’t something an ordinary person could do easily.
I, however, had a chance.
Fine.
Suppose I climbed up there without breaking my neck along the way.
What next?
Next, I carefully eliminate the sentry, enter the cave, knock out the mages, and cut down everyone else.
The mages could still be useful for explaining a few things to me, and a promise is a promise.
But what if there was more than one sentry?
Or one of the mages wasn’t asleep?
Hmm.
Why knock out the sentry when I could take control of him?
Yes.
That’s probably what I’ll do.
The whole world in the palm of your hand!
You are happy and silent,
And only a little jealous of those
Whose summit still lies ahead.
Vysotsky, “The Summit”
Author’s note.
Those lines kept running through my head as I climbed the damn cliff, trying not to make a sound.
At least the blade in its sheath on my back wasn’t getting in the way or catching on every protrusion.
At first, I hadn’t thought to hang it there and had started climbing with the sword at my waist.
That’s what happens when you get used to flying.
In any case, I eventually reached my destination.
There was only one sentry on watch below.
All right.
Now I’ll need every bit of processing power I’ve got.
Combat mode.
Objective: eliminate the enemy.
Restrictions: none.
Additional objective: collect information from biological hosts.
Begin?
Warning.
Unknown radiation detected.
What the hell is that?
Fine.
I’ll deal with it later.
Begin execution.
A blade plunged into the skull of the unsuspecting sentry.
His brain died instantly, but the attacker had no need for the victim’s brain.
A black substance flowed along the blade and filled the wound.
The man jerked several times before beginning to walk toward the cave with a stiff, wooden gait.
Inside was another sentry, who was somewhat surprised to see his colleague returning from outside.
He never got the chance to voice his surprise.
His former companion, wearing the same calm, indifferent expression, drove a knife into his throat and caught his falling body to keep it from making unnecessary noise.
Then came the monotonous work.
Approach the sleeping man.
Drive the blade beneath his jaw.
Cover his mouth just in case.
A few minutes later, the fifteen-man gang ceased to exist.
Three mages remained, but they spent the night separately.
The assigned task had been completed, at least partially.
The current operative was no longer required.
The bandit with the hole in his head collapsed onto the rocks and stopped moving.
The symbiote flowed out of the wound and slowly crawled toward the mages.
A few minutes later, it reached the sleeping men.
Dividing into three parts, it entered their bodies.
Mission accomplished.
And that was that.
I came to at the entrance of the cave.
Oh, my brain is boiling.
Although I remembered how to control Simba’s cells, doing it in practice turned out to be much more difficult than it had been in my memories.
Was it something about this world, or had I simply not gotten used to it yet?
Fine.
I’ll deal with that later.
But what was that information about unknown radiation?
It obviously wasn’t radiation.
I would have recognized that.
After combat mode, my brain was working sluggishly, but at the same time, it felt as though some kind of veil had been lifted from my eyes.
That desire for frantic activity and that feeling of overflowing energy…
they hadn’t been mine.
Well, they had been mine, technically, but they had been induced from outside.
Fortunately, the boy’s body had possessed a large reserve of adrenaline.
He had gone through a lot that day.
A lot.
If he hadn’t had that reserve, I might have fallen into a coma from exhaustion or something even worse.
Things are getting stranger and stranger, as a certain girl once said in a rabbit hole.
On the other hand, this could explain some of the anime’s stranger plot twists.
More precisely, it could explain why all the local mages seemed to have been hit in the head.
If you’re constantly exposed to something like this, you’ll eventually start thinking and behaving…
unconventionally.
Then again, I had far too little data.
Maybe it was something that affected only me.
And I seemed to be gradually coming down from it.
Not enough data.
I should question my new acquaintances.
Although, why question them?
I’ll simply extract everything they know in the most painful way possible.
After all, I have to keep my word.
With a heavy sigh, I headed into the cave.
There was a lot of work ahead, and not exactly a lot of time.