An indeterminate amount of time later, Henry awoke in darkness. His arms twitched, his legs spasmed, and his thoughts began to race as his appendages smashed into the sides of a wooden boundary to the darkness. Evidently he had been mistaken for one of the poor wretches destined to be present at his advent in this world. He screamed and clawed at the coffin until his fingers bled, and yet he could feel quite little change in its surface.
His lungs felt tight in his chest and the darkness clawed away at his sanity with every tearing movement of his fingers. The nails had begun to chip, and his muscles began to ache in the fatigue of such exertion. He was not used to this, nor could his mind even begin to keep up with his muscles consuming so much of his energy— his muscles consuming so much of the vitality remaining in the air. The thought of suffocation began to race in his mind as fingers tore themselves open faster and faster against the wooden coffin. He could feel the material begin to deform beneath the frantic scraping motion of hands acting more like claws than anything human.
With a cracking noise the dirt poured into Henry’s mouth. It had been open as he gasped for air, and now it was closed— filled completely with the pressure of six or more feet of soil bearing down atop this newfound earthen gag. His abdomen was crushed and though the air should have been blown out of his chest, the dirt in his mouth prevented it. Instead his lungs popped and Henry began to drown in his own blood and this world’s soil mixed together in one viscous mixture of mud that burned in his chest like oh so much fire. Henry, of course, blacked out, unable to withstand the pressure of this situation.
He awoke to the sensation of falling. His heart dropped into his stomach as he was forcefully jerked awake, and yet there was no wind. There was only the pitch black darkness and the cold damp feeling of earth pressing down all around him. By all rights he should have been in tremendous pain— by all rights he should have been dead. As the panic subsided Henry at last began to think about this situation, about how he had shot himself in the head and returned to life. He could understand this to some extent, assuming he was in an isekai the situation could not have been more clear, and yet he should have encountered a voluptuous goddess to bestow upon him the divine right to rule all things in this world and grant him super-OP protagonist powers. No such thing had occurred, of course, which left nothing but confusion.
He had not had time to think about this before, and yet after trying to kill himself again he awoke in a situation still more demanding of his swift action. In these situations he had possessed no time to think, nor even to begin to process the nature of what was happening. Now, cold in the dirt and unable to breath, he at last began to process what had happened over these last few… hours..? Minutes?
It felt more like a lifetime had passed, and in a sense it was several, but while there was a crippling pain in his chest where his popped lungs should have been, he could feel they were whole. The cold and even sensation of damp soil around his hands and fingernails told him they were not mangled as they should have been after clawing at a wooden coffin so forcefully for long enough to break it. Most of all, his head was whole— brain unexploded in his skull— and his skin had a sense of touch at the cold and wet earth surrounding him. The situation was almost peaceful despite the pain of being unable to breath, and yet it absolutely should not have been. He had killed himself twice over, and then died in his grave. How, then, was he still alive?
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Mixed with this thought was an overwhelming sorrow. It was something more than the feelings of despair which had caused him to end his life twice now, it was more akin to a growing sense of futility to all his actions. If he was unable even to die then there was quite little for him to achieve. Even if he accomplished all his dead dreams they would not make him happy, not for long. His heart was long cold, and this inability to die was more of a curse on the dead than any sort of wish one retaining some sense of hope may have made upon a goddess of another world. He did not want this, and yet he was forced to partake of it.
Despite— perhaps in part because of— this feeling of dejection, all the things he had abandoned flooded Henry’s mind. Images of women, of social life, of respect and awe and admiration and fear and hatred and spite and unending depravity unstoppably pouring out into the world all flooded into his brain and became overwhelming. He supposed that if he was forced to live by some eldritch curse he would do so fully. This benefactor had already forced Henry’s hand at mass-murder, so it wasn’t like he had anything else left to lose. Though he supposed it was unlikely anyone would know he had committed this crime given his burial with the rest of those condemned to die in his return to life, Henry would never forget and that was more than enough atonement for something he didn’t even directly cause.
In the moment these thoughts passed Henry recognized them as not his own. He was not someone to disregard such a tragedy as this; he had burned himself alive in response to it despite not having directly caused it himself. It was not his ill-intent that had caused those present to die, the cause likely came from the same source as the origin of these thoughts. Despite knowing this, he could not shake them.
It wasn’t that he lacked the willpower, it was as though they had been injected into his mind by a mixture of cold years and burning pain to at last awaken something deep within him. This wasn’t something created by depression. This wasn’t something someone else did to him or a toxic environment created, it was something contained deep within the darkest reaches of his character that had at last been exposed to his consciousness by overwhelming trauma. His sense of self wobbled, unable to determine which of these thoughts were truly his, and as he meditated on all he could accomplish with this newfound power his body began to radiate with it physically. He could feel his blood begin to boil, fading away into nothingness as vitality and strength at first returned and then began to overflow from his every muscle. In one swift motion Henry stood up below the soil and climbed out of what should have been his freshly-dug grave, and yet the first thing he saw upon the surface of this new world was not a graveyard, nor did it even contain a single visible grave, but rather a grassy meadow reminiscent of the Windows XP default background. It was as though what had occurred here was long forgotten, and above it rain fell in torrents Henry shivered in as though first exposed to the cold of the world at birth.