ACT I: DUSK TILL DAWN
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MAIN QUEST
WHO WILL YOU KILL?
> Emperor > Hero > Pope
I woke up and looked at the screen in front of me.
My thoughts?
I didn't understand.
Well, I understood that this was a System interface, but...
What is this, and why would I want to kill someone?
What an absurd prompt!
I was sleeping, or rather, the person whose body I was in was sleeping.
No, that was not it.
He died, and then I was in his body, which meant I died too.
What am I, a reincarnator or transmigrator?
I didn't quite understand the difference between these two, but that wasn't a problem, as this wasn't bugging me.
Why would it?
I was alive, and that was all that mattered to me.
I didn't give a fuck if it was my body in which I was alive or someone else's.
What mattered was being alive and living healthy.
But the system prompt in front of me made my eyes twitch violently.
I closed it.
I glanced around, rolling my eyes, and found my neck unwilling to budge due to stiffness. The surface beneath me was beyond uncomfortable, with rocks jabbing at my buttocks, back, and rigid hands.
Above, there wasn't a sturdy roof, just a makeshift shelter partially obscured by a couple of leaves. The scent was earthy, yet the air possessed a refreshing quality, fresher than what I was used to.
My taste buds were constantly tasting something metallic. Maybe I was wrong, but it tasted like blood, and a lot of it.
I gulped down my own blood. Taste wasn't the particular thing I would want to taste, so gulping it down felt like a good idea.
Oh boy, it couldn't have been any worse.
Cough* Cough*
I coughed as my lungs seemed as if they would lunge out from my chest; the blood, in my opinion, didn't only get in my oesophagus but also in my windpipe, and that made me choke on my own blood and cough it out, and now all the blood was covering my face.
You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.
It would have felt disturbing if I had seen my face, but there wasn't any source for it. It felt marvellous after coughing up all that blood, and my breathing felt even better and smoother.
This person, in whose body I was, was horribly injured. I skimmed through his memory and found out what had transpired for him to die.
Apparently, I was inside a 19-year-old Skylar Reigns body, who was the current chief of the last barbarian tribe that was on the run for their lives, and while protecting his tribe and fighting the soldiers, he was pierced by two arrows, one in his right arm and the other in his chest.
I didn't want to check any other information, as the situation was bad already.
They were on the run, running for their lives, protecting themselves from the soldiers, who numbered in hundreds, and these barbarians numbered only twenty-two.
'What a brave guy!'
I had admiration for the real owner of this body, the current chief of the last barbarian tribe.
Well, let me think about how I could help you and your people.
It was very weird for me.
Yeah, my situation was a bit weird.
This body felt calm, even knowing that the soldiers could attack them at any moment, but this body seemed to not mind that and was even ready to fight, if necessary, but I was freaking out a little.
A little?
I don't know; my soul was freaking out like farts, sometimes loudly and sometimes silently, and there were in between too.
Haaaa!
I sighed.
If the web novels in my world were correct, then my only hope in this situation was the system.
But that system seemed a bit retarded.
However, I opened the system interface, which again showed the same prompt from earlier.
MAIN QUEST
WHO WILL YOU KILL?
> Emperor > Hero > Pope
Emperor, hero, pope, barbarians
I didn't need any other hint to tell me that this was a fantasy world.
If I had to make a choice, then I had to make it carefully.
What an awful thing I had to make a choice for! If I had to sum it up, I wouldn't want to kill anyone unless it was do or die. And was that the situation? Heck yeah, it felt like it.
I didn't know if I was an overly intelligent individual, but I made good choices in life, even though the results would not have been as good as my choices.
Emperor?
Good, bad, partial, corrupt, or whatever type of emperor an emperor would be, I wouldn't care because I don't think I would have the strength to do anything against an emperor. From my fictional knowledge, emperors were levels above kings.
And his security...
'Ah fuck no! I'm not thinking about this choice. Never.'
Even if I had a million lives, I wouldn't dare choose this. An emperor, however, he was or if he needed to be killed or not, I didn't want to do anything with it because if a ruler died in a monarchy ruling system, it only brought more problems to the empire and its people, especially those at the bottom.
Hero?
I didn't understand a dime about this one, even after skimming Skylar's memory. Skylar hadn't seen the outside of the mountain range where barbarians lived, so his memory was not much help at all.
From my understanding of the fantasy fiction I had read, heroes could be the protectors of a nation or the chosen ones by the gods and killing them would mean bringing the wrath of God upon myself.
I didn't know if this was also how things worked in this world, but this option was also equally difficult.
What were the possibilities that the hero too had his own army? A hero party that had individuals who were strong as fuck and weren't heroes given the most broken abilities.
The fuck!
This was also an extremely ducked up option.
Pope?
I wouldn't even want to consider the Pope option. Even if I had a trillion years, I wouldn't want to even see this option.
Why?
Who were the popes?
Weren't they preachers of gods, weren't they representatives of a religion, weren't they popular enough that even emperors, heroes, and every nook and cranny ass would want to have the pope's blessings, and weren't in a fantasy world popes could communicate with gods? They were basically messengers of the gods.
No.
No.
No.
This option was even worse than the other two. While the other two might give me a chance to escape with my life if I were powerful enough and managed to kill them, the Pope...
'Nah, I don't think so.'
All three of the options were nightmares, but the Pope option was true hell, and that only left me with two options, and in that too, my choice became an obvious one.