I am not a hero, I am a hunter. Be it humans, hunters, monsters, or gods, I always catch my prey. If I deem your existence to be detrimental to the greater good then I would even hunt you. I used to be a hero once. That was back before I understood how humanity worked. That was before I was killed by those I slaved away to protect.

They called me a monster, a danger to the world. Maybe they were right. Maybe if I was allowed to live I would one day turn on them as they did to me. But I guess those are all just what ifs. Let me tell you my tale.

My name is Devonte, I was born on earth and grew up in the city of Detroit, Michigan. As I grew up I lived in poverty, never knowing if I was going to get my next meal or not but knowing that at the very least my mom and step father were trying their best to give me what they could.

I learned later in life my mom had to work as an exotic dancer to make the bills since the loans she had to take out were making things difficult. Our small apartment was always clean if nothing else. I had a mattress that stayed on the floor and our couch was a hand me down from someone else who got it as a hand me down. We had one of those old box televisions and our food often came from food pantries since we usually couldn’t afford the grocery stores.

I had clothes for school and usually had food in my stomach. I struggled to make friends but I did have one, Alex. Alex Stone was his full name, he was a white boy who never seemed to see race. He didn’t care I was black, or that I was poor. He just wanted to talk and play. That was really all I needed back then.

One day when I was sixteen we were walking back from the food pantry when a vehicle pulled up next to us and opened fire. My mom and step dad shielded me from harm, though I still got one to the leg. None of us thought anything of the car pulling up, maybe we didn’t notice the small group of guys that were sitting on the stairs beside us. But I was on the phone with nine one one as soon as that car drove away.

I wanted to help my parents but they were both long gone. Bullets had pierced both of their skulls. Even then I knew they were beyond saving, but I did remember reading how a bullet to the leg can be deadly if not treated. I ripped off a piece of fabric from my dads shirt and shoved it into the hole in my leg and applied pressure. This was something Alex taught me. His dad was in the marines and taught his son this just in case.

To make a long story short, the ambulance and police arrived shortly. The EMT in the ambulance commended me on my first aid and suggested I go into medicine. Though my grades were far too bad to do that. I wasn’t dumb, I just never tried. I never saw a reason to. I thought I’d be poor forever.

I got to the hospital, they took out the bullet and stitched me up. The police asked me what happened and I told them everything I could remember. One officer tried to tell me that my parents were dead but I interrupted and finished it for them. I saw them first hand. I already knew it.

I got put into the foster care system and moved away from Detroit. Nobody wants to adopt a sixteen year old kid, especially not a black one that was in a shooting. So I aged out of the system and moved west to Muskegon, Michigan. I got a crappy apartment and a nearby factory job. I didn’t have a license so I walked an hour to work every day. I learned to enjoy my morning walks to work and listened to music. I got a girlfriend named Brenda, she always had a bit of an attitude but that never bothered me. Looking back on things she may be one of the biggest reasons I stayed poor.

Back then I thought nothing on bringing her out for a date at least once a month and spending a couple hundred dollars on it to keep her happy. Not to mention the anniversary gifts she expected was always some kind of diamond jewelry. I easily spent thousands of dollars on that girl to make her happy, all the while I just toiled away at my life. What else was there for me?

Well one day on my way to work I was a little too into my music and I walked into traffic. Out of the corner of my eye I noticed a bud not even a second away from hitting me. Then next second I was in an open field.

I thought I had just died. I wasn’t scared, but actually relieved. No more work, no more crappy apartment. I hadn’t done anything bad in my life so I assumed this was heaven. Then I looked up and saw a planet in the sky. I pinched my arm and felt pain so it wasn’t a dream, and I doubt I’d feel pain after death.

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One thing I neglected to mention was how big of a nerd I am, a weeb if you will. I spend a lot of my free time reading manga, manhwa, manhua, and watching anime. It’s just escapism at its finest. Sure the isekai genre may be littered with trash but it was my trash. The little make believe worlds I only wished I could be sucked into and leave earth behind.

I quickly learned this wasn’t quite one of those worlds. I’m every one of those worlds the hero is summoned or reborn with some sort of cheat ability. My only so called cheat was my fascination in everything. Magic, martial arts, swords play, battle strategies, anything they caught my eye I put my all into learning.

I learned to forge metal into the highest caliber swords and armor, how to cook with ingredients that should’ve killed you but was at the very least on par with earth food in terms of taste. Healing magic, attack magic, transformation, production, deconstruction, you name it, I learned it.

The other issue was the worlds difficulty. Even the weakest animals were so much more dangerous than any animal on earth. A simple rabbit almost killed me right off the bat if it hadn’t been for the fact that I was near someone’s campsite.

A knight named Jacob saved me and became a sort of mentor. The rest cared for me as if I were a sickly child, which I suppose I may as well have been. Earth humans are pathetically weak in comparison to them, but I learned we have the capability to go beyond their boundaries of power.

I spent a good two years training and learning from Jacob until one day we were attacked by a hydra. All things considered it wasn’t that strong of a monster, but it was strong enough that Jacob couldn’t beat it without sacrificing himself to do so. The rest of the group died before him and he stood his ground to allow me to live. His last words to me were “The strong protect the weak, I’m just doing my job to protect those I care about.”

Jacob died in my arms after he had bested the hydra. I continued on my way to become an adventurer. I had gathered enough strength to be considered E rank. The lowest they had, but it was above civilian standard. The first kind of magic I had learned was healing magic from one of the men who traveled with Jacob. I couldn’t heal wounds very well, best I could do is reduce fatigue and speed up muscle recovery.

I used my healing magic to extend how long I could work and how hard I could train. Along the way I got better at healing and began to heal wounds as well. I’d help groups of adventurers I came across by healing any wounds they had. My name started to spread as the wandering healer.

Though I wasn’t particularly capable, the fact that I would just help without expectation of any repayment was what got peoples attention. I began to get offers to join groups and even got threatened once or twice. Though that shifted my name to the bloody healer.

I didn’t wish harm on anyone, but I couldn’t just walk away like I could on earth. I would beat the bad groups into submission and then heal them back. I quickly raised my rank to B and began taking on harder quests. Including the hunting down of a hydra.

The hydra was laughably easy at this point and made me realize that Jacob wasn’t some great knight, but just an average knight who was doing his best to protect those around him. That alone made him my hero.

News of my rapid rise in rank reached the ears of the royal family and I was called for questioning. I hid nothing and told them my story. Apparently it was theorized one could cross dimensions but nobody knew how. The working theory was I was simply at the right place at the right time and slipped through a dimensional crack.

Putting aside the hard to understand things, I was taken in and taught by the knight commander Raquel. She taught me about the world and how to wield every weapon in the royal armory. How to utilize magic to reinforce my body and to use aura as well. Through her I learned the world was named Iddabus and the royal family was said to have been made by the hand of what they simply called the good god.

Raquel was what appeared to be a Latina woman with very short black hair and a physique that any woman should want. Fine muscle definition yet she still had, ahem, assets. While she had a great figure I don’t ever get to appreciate it due to the excruciating pain of the training I went through on a daily basis.

Alongside her training I studied with Richard, an old white man with sparkling blue eyes and long white hair who worked as the head of the royal mages. He taught me everything there was to learn about magic and toward the end of his life even helped me develop a few new spells.

It was a shame but he died of old age only ten years after I arrived in Iddabus. After I had grown strong enough to defeat Raquel repeatedly, the royals told me of their ultimate goal to eliminate the evil god. They told me the evil god was the reason all the monsters were so strong, the reason there was a sickness spreading from the west, the reason for all that was bad, and I believed them.

I lead an army with Raquel at my side and headed west. We fought countless beasts and demons, monsters of such strength that if even one went to earth it would be an apocalyptic event. We fought to the temple that held the evil god and Raquel was killed by the god’s guardian. I had no time to mourn as I made my way into the temple and confronted the evil god.

It tried to speak but I figured even the words of a god would be able to kill me. I enhanced my body to the max and plunged my blade into their chest. All that happened was it whispering to me “you’ve just doomed your world” and it went limp.

When I got back to the capital I expected maybe a welcome party, maybe a medal. What I didn’t expect was for people to be scared. At this point I had spent almost fifty years of my life in this world just training non stop. The next ten I spent in solitude. Nobody was comfortable around someone strong enough to kill a god.

Ten years after I killed the evil god I was summoned to the capital and was put to the sword myself. I was too much of a threat to allow to live. I didn’t care anymore. I was eighty four years old and had done nothing but fight my whole life. I just wanted it to end. Maybe I’d be able to see my mom and dad again.

As the blade came down on my neck I only saw two sad faces. One was the red headed receptionist from the guild I had been going to, face now wrinkled with age. The other was the princess, Kiara Godborne. She was my only friend through the years and still looked like a young woman. It seems the royals age incredibly slowly. At least I would be missed by someone.

I felt the bite of cold steel on the back of my neck and I allowed it to happen. A burning sensation spread across my neck and the world goes black. Next thing I know, I got hit by a bus.