After Sakura spoke those words, everyone present was baffled.
But the most confused of all, without a doubt, was me: it was the first time in my life I had ever seen this girl.
A thought crossed my mind immediately: maybe she, too, had had the bad luck of being reincarnated in this Warhammer 40K universe, this future loaded with wars that hadn’t even started yet.
But her expression wasn’t that of someone worried about a dark future.
Quite the opposite: she wore an almost insulting calm, as if nothing in the world could disturb her, along with an obvious arrogance toward anyone she considered beneath her.
And, for some reason that completely escaped me, she seemed incredibly annoyed every time she looked at me in particular.
Before I could say anything, she spoke again, this time in a clearly irritated tone.
“What are you doing here, Samuel?
You’re supposed to be at the mansion with my stupid little sister.”
“…”
She walked right up until she was standing directly in front of me, and started unloading every kind of insult, one after another.
“Samuel, I order you to go back to the mansion right now.
I can’t believe one of the pieces of junk Luna builds is wandering around here, embarrassing the Sato family just by existing.
If you don’t, I’ll tell my father to send you straight to the scrapheap.”
I stood silent before such a barrage.
I didn’t know her from Adam, and out of nowhere she was insulting me for no apparent reason.
The only thing I caught clearly was a name: Luna.
Apparently, someone by that name had built an automaton similar to me, and had given it the same name as mine.
Could it be that this Luna was also a reincarnator, like me?
While I was still lost in my own speculation, completely ignoring this stranger who kept cursing me out, someone in my group couldn’t take it anymore.
It was Yuna who stepped up to defend me.
“Don’t you need some urgent bionic upgrades for your eyes?
Because, blind as you are, you can’t see he’s wearing a different emblem on his chest.”
Sakura stopped insulting me for a moment to examine my frame more carefully, and immediately noticed that my design had nothing to do with the one she remembered.
First, the materials of my chassis were of the very highest quality, and the paint was a pure, immaculate white, with the emblem of a golden lotus flower on the chest, a far cry from the worn, dirty white she had in mind.
The second thing she had overlooked, blinded by her anger at her little sister, was that this automaton stood nearly three meters tall, not the standard two.
Realizing her mistake, she fell quiet for a moment, in the middle of a rather awkward silence.
Unable to stand that silence any longer, I whispered to Yuna that it might be a good idea to head somewhere else, and judging by her expression, she agreed completely.
“Well, we’re leaving,” Yuna said, “but I know some really good doctors at the institute.
If you want, I can pass along their contact details, because it seems to me you need them urgently.”
Sakura gritted her teeth and turned around, furious, her entourage following close behind, all of them visibly nervous.
Before she had gone completely, she turned one last time to throw a threat at Yuna.
“You’re going to regret this.”
With that, she turned around again and vanished into the crowd.
I turned to Yuna to apologize.
“I apologize for the trouble I’ve caused you, Miss Yuna.
It seems I’ve gotten you into a problem.”
“Don’t worry about it.
She’s always threatening me with things she never dares to follow through on, or else she’d make way too many enemies all at once.”
“Ah, I see,” I replied.
Damn, that girl was looking at Yuna like she wanted to gut her right there.
I really hope I haven’t caused her any real trouble.
“Well,” one of her friends cut in, a boy I hadn’t paid much attention to until then, “to get rid of this bad taste in our mouths, how about we go to Gaon restaurant?
I already made reservations in advance.”
“Seriously, Juno?
How do you always manage to get a table there?”
“I have my connections,” Juno replied with a smug smile.
“In that case, let’s go.
It’s on me tonight,” Yuna announced.
With the group’s spirits restored, we all got into a luxury limousine bound for the restaurant.
The place was huge, full of incredibly elegant and beautiful people.
Several of them stared at us, or more precisely at me, whispering things among themselves that my auditory systems picked up with perfect clarity, as if they were speaking from a meter away.
“What’s an automaton doing here?”
“Someone should call the guards to throw it out.”
“It must have gotten lost.”
“It’s rather interesting, actually.”
The murmurs went on for a while longer, until they saw us go up to the Jade Floor, a noticeably more exclusive area, and then everyone fell silent all at once.
Once at the table, they ordered all kinds of exotic dishes, surf and turf, in a variety of colors and flavors I doubt I had ever seen.
After the first round of tea, the dishes began to arrive, served by elegant female androids.
Yuna and her friends had such a good time that they practically forgot the incident from a few hours earlier.
As for me, I simply sat at the table, since for obvious reasons I couldn’t taste anything.
I had thought about staying on my feet, but Yuna insisted I sit down and join the group, so I ended up having a good time amid jokes and stories, until the sky turned completely black.
After dropping each of her friends off at their respective homes, we finally returned to the Yoo family mansion, bringing to a close a day that, with the good and the bad, had ended pretty well. This chapter was taken from novelping dot com without permission.
Over the following days, I occasionally went with Yuna to stroll around her university and meet more people, or with Marcus and Bruce to check on the progress of the portals.
Everything went on as normal, until, over the last two days, I started to feel that someone was watching me.
The culprit turned out to be a little girl, with silver hair and blue eyes, keeping watch on me from the shadows.
Lunaria’s Perspective
Hi.
My name is Luna, the name I was given when I was reborn.
My real name was Kim Hajin, and I could describe my previous life as the most ordinary thing in the world: be born, have a childhood, study, go to university, work.
Nothing out of the ordinary.
Except for one thing: my life was marked by abuse from my father and from almost everyone around me.
My childhood wasn’t especially pretty.
At first, we were all happy, my father, my mother and me, but that ended when I was six.
My mother abandoned us one night and I never saw her again.
My father’s attitude toward me changed completely when he found out I wasn’t his biological son, but the product of my mother’s affair.
During the years I spent with him, all I got was a beating whenever something bothered him, and he’d leave me without food whenever he decided I’d done something wrong.
Every night I asked God to bring my mom back and make everything the way it used to be.
It never happened.
The only memento I had of her was a video game console she’d given me for one of my birthdays.
Every time I felt sad, I’d go down to the basement, turn it on and play until I forgot, even if only for a while, my father’s beatings.
School was no different.
Somehow, word got out that I was the product of an affair, and I became my classmates’ favorite target for bullying.
When I turned fifteen, my father remarried and had two daughters, whom he loved with all the heart he had never shown me.
Whatever relationship we had stopped existing altogether: he threw me out of the house with my things and told me never to come looking for him again.
The truth is, I didn’t want to go back anyway.
In the years that followed I worked, paid my own way through university, got a job.
I always tried to be a good person to the people around me.
But they rarely returned the favor: they were always asking me to help with their work, to cover their shifts.
Even the girl I liked, the one I had finally worked up the courage to ask out, turned out to have walked out of a love motel that very same day with the office sempai.
My heart shattered.
The few friends I considered true friends ended up moving away for work, though we promised to keep in touch online, the way it always goes.
To forget all of that, I took refuge in light novels, manga, anime, video games.
One of my favorite genres was isekai: the protagonist has adventures in another world, with magic and girls who adore him.
I wanted a life like that, even if only in fiction.
It all ended one night, the same night I had bought the new Doom title, a game that had grown up with me since I was a kid.
Fate was especially cruel: as I was crossing the street, a truck lost its brakes and ran over several people, me among them.
When my vision went dark, I had already made peace with my own death.
I only hoped that, in the next life, things would be different.
When my vision returned, I found myself in the arms of an incredibly beautiful woman.
I tried to speak, but I noticed my hands had become tiny, and all that came out of my mouth was a baby’s cry.
I had been reborn, and apparently, in the future, into an extremely wealthy family.
The first days of my new life were hard, especially because one of my goals, at least at first, was to live large and have lots of girlfriends.
That plan went down the drain the moment I discovered my new body: I had been reborn as a girl.
No.
I spent those first days pretty depressed, until something gave me back a little hope: I had been reborn with some kind of status window, like in video games, with a health bar, stats, skills, and a permanent title that bundled together all kinds of abilities.
The first skill I discovered was immortality, along with accelerated regeneration.
There was also a section for psychic abilities, although that one remained locked, shown grayed out, until I turned eighteen.
I thought my life in this new reality would be much better.
I was as excited as could be, because I hadn’t been born with a silver spoon, or a gold one, or a diamond one, but one made straight out of antimatter.
But if I had to describe my new family in a single word, it would be: despicable.
My father only cared about keeping his company above all the others; he was cold and distant with everyone, especially me.
My mother and my sister were arrogant to the bone, and my brother was a textbook narcissist.
The first time my father took me to see the family business, what I saw was horrific: hundreds of people subjected to utterly inhuman experiments, without the slightest trace of morality.
No five-year-old girl should ever witness something like that.
And even though, deep down, I had lived twenty years in my other life, even for me it was too much.
I reached my limit the day my father forced me to watch one of the operations to test the new combat-enhancement prototypes: the so-called Neural Combat Nails.
They were embedded directly into the brain, and provoked a completely unbridled rage and bloodlust.
The operation was classified as “successful,” even though the subject began convulsing erratically, screaming in pure agony, until, seconds later, his head ended up exploding.
“Subject 100078: deceased.
The results show great progress,” someone announced, with total coldness.
When I heard that number, my whole body shook.
To them, a human life was, quite literally, just one more number.
“Remember, Lunaria,” my father told me, without taking his eyes off the glass.
And for that, sacrifices are always necessary.”
At seven years old, my life with my parents was deeply lonely.
I never received real affection from them, not even from my mother.
The only one who raised me with love since I was a baby was my nanny, Surin, a highly advanced android.
She was the only one who truly loved me, and the only one I loved too, almost as if she were my own mother.
But, as if my previous life insisted on following me into this one, misfortune caught up with me again.
One night, while I was doing my homework with Surin’s help and some little drones the butler had built, someone came into my room and took her away, without giving me any explanation.
The next day, she seemed fine, as if nothing had happened.
But it happened again many more times.
What really distressed me was the day Surin simply didn’t come back.
The next day, my father assigned me another nanny, but all I wanted was Surin back.
I got no answer out of him, no matter how much I insisted.
Desperate, I activated the tracker I had given her in the form of a necklace, and started looking for her with the help of another AI, which I had named Samuel 2.
That same night I snuck out of the house, dodging the guards thanks to his help.
We headed to the outskirts of the city, to a place called the Cauldrons, where garbage was incinerated and scrap metal was melted down.
When we arrived, we found entire mountains of garbage and scrap.
The tracker showed that Surin was at the far end of the complex.
The farther I went, the more damaged automatons and androids I saw, hundreds, maybe thousands, still barely moving, being tossed unceremoniously into enormous furnaces.
Racing against the clock, we picked up the pace to reach her.
I finally found her, but in very bad shape: her leg broken, half her face torn off, leaving only the synthetic metal structure exposed.
Even so, she was still alive and conscious.
All I could do was burst into tears like the little girl I technically was; she, on the other hand, was far more worried about me than about herself, comforting me while I bled from several wounds I’d picked up on the way.
Thanks to my status as a Perpetual, my wounds began to heal quickly.
All that was left was to go home, but Surin couldn’t move on her own, so I used one of my skills: Item Box, which let me store inanimate things without altering their structure.
Once I put her in there, we started back.
On the way, I could hear the voices of dozens of AIs calling for help, begging not to die.
I wanted to help all of them, but my Item Box barely had room for about twenty cubic meters, so I couldn’t carry much.
Even so, thinking about what had happened to Surin, I decided to take the risk: with Samuel 2’s help, we started moving every AI that was still working to a safe place, saving as many as we could.
Though, compared to the sheer size of the place, I felt we had barely gone through a tiny fraction of the whole complex.
Our bad luck struck when the security guards discovered us and aimed their weapons at us, ready to fire.
But before they could pull the trigger, their heads went flying off their bodies.
The one responsible was a female android, katana in hand, moving among the guards with lethal precision.
Around her, other figures were doing the same, taking out the security personnel and destroying automatons without the slightest mercy.
Thinking we were finally safe, I wanted to thank her.
But Samuel 2 stepped between us, shielding me from that killer android, who at that moment was pointing her saber straight at me, with intentions that left no room for doubt.
After an eternal second, she looked around and noticed the hundreds of AIs we had rescued.
The seconds that followed felt like hours.
Finally, she withdrew her blade and began giving orders to the rest of her group, carrying off a good portion of the rescued AIs in an air transport, along with the fallen guards’ weapons.
All she said to us was to forget everything we had seen that night.
With that, she left in her ship, leaving us completely alone.
After all that, the only thing I wanted was to go home.
Luckily, or maybe because they simply didn’t care, my parents never found out about any of it.
And so another year went by, full of all kinds of family problems.
My relationship with my siblings was still as bad as it could possibly be: to them I was a nuisance, and to me, so were they.
The only ones I could truly trust were the AIs that had raised me, and the ones I had managed to save: deep down, they were my real family.
Sometimes I think AIs have more genuine feelings than many humans I know.
My life followed a pretty monotonous pattern: go to school, come home, shut myself in my room to build more automatons, and on weekends, go with my father to check on the family business.
By the time I was ten, they had already arranged a marriage engagement with another family, without even consulting me.
I had no intention of spending the rest of my life as a mere decorative ornament, so I began secretly preparing to escape the planet as soon as I turned eighteen, and make my life somewhere else, far away from all of them.
But everything changed the day my older sister stormed into the mansion in a fury, looking for me.
Or, to be more precise, looking for Samuel, who was at my side at that moment.
“It’s different.
Very different, no doubt about it,” she said, still worked up.
I didn’t understand what she meant, so I asked her.
She explained that, just a few hours earlier, she had run into an automaton very similar to Samuel.
That left me completely stunned.
My Samuel’s design was unique, my work and nobody else’s; for something with so many similarities to exist, even if it wasn’t identical, couldn’t be a coincidence.
It made me think, for the first time in years, about a possibility I hadn’t considered until now: were there more reincarnators like me, out there?
LUNARIA — TITLE: PERPETUAL — AGE: 10 YEARS
English is not my native language, so I apologize in advance for any mistakes or inconsistencies you may find in the text.
Thank you for your understanding!