POV Cynrik
Dating back to my childhood on Earth, there has always been one thing I didn’t handle well. Emotions. From a young age, I was raised to believe that a man should never outwardly show what’s going on in their head. That to offer any form of emotion was considered a sign of weakness.
I can still remember vividly not feeling what it means to be happy or sad. I was damaged. I’m not sure when exactly it started, all I can remember is being unfeeling and learning the outward appearance of what ordinary people looked like. This was to emulate it and wear the mask that I was a regular person. All the while, deep down, all I was, was empty.
My parents were divorced when I was young, and the split was more devastating than you’d expect. I was only seven at the time, and I went from having a happy, typical familial environment to the family only being my brother, mother, and I.. Then the custody battle began, and our father won. So we moved in with him while our mother moved out of state, over a thousand miles away.
I can remember the day I found my father sitting alone in the living room with the lights off, in tears. It wasn’t just my world that changed when our family fell apart, but also his. My father loved my mother dearly, and honestly, to this day, I believe he did his best to do right by my younger brother and me.
The problem was he was from a different generation. The over twenty-year age gap between my parents saw my younger brother and me as the 3rd and 4th of my father’s children. So he was at an age where his kids should be off and grown, yet here he was, having to raise a seven and 5-year-old. My younger brother was still too young and wasn’t really aware of what was going on, but I was different; I was already in second grade and knew something massive had changed.
Looking back, it’s kind of funny; in my first life, I grew up in a family of all guys, without a mother to run to for any comfort. Yet after my reincarnation, I was gifted the familial love I never realized how badly I wanted and needed.
There was a common phrase I heard my father say thousands of times on Earth, “Men raise boys differently.” Honestly, it wasn’t until I was an adult that I truly understood what he meant. My brother and I were raised to be warriors. From the time my parents split, we were thrust into all kinds of martial arts. Karate, Taekwondo, Jiujitsu, Muay Thai, Kick Boxing, Wrestling are only a few things we learned. Each time we would reach a suitable rank of progression, we were forced to choose another discipline.
But that’s not all; while kids were growing up watching cartoons about dinosaurs teaching you how to count, my brother and I were watching Fighting Championships. Instead of watching sing-along movies, we were watching war documentaries.
Then, there was the survival and weapons training. Every three months, my father would take my brother and me, and ditch us in the woods for two weeks, hundreds of miles from home, with only an empty two-gallon jug, knife, machete, and a backpack.
Over time we started to change, robbed of any semblance of a normal childhood; it’s honestly amazing I didn’t crack back then. I found the only solace in Manga, light novels, and Anime. In every story, there was a set of rules that characters abided by, and honestly, I desperately wished before bed every night that I could be reincarnated into a world like that.
But everything changed when my brother entered middle school. Unlike me, who had become highly adaptable to our situation, he wasn’t able to. He became withdrawn, started losing weight, and became a target for bullies. It was around that time I got into my first real fight. I had come home from school one day and found a group of older boys beating the shit out of my little brother, and I snapped. That day ended with me being covered in my own blood, with several broken fingers and a broken rib, but I had devastated the group of four boys; they even had to be sent to the hospital, one of which ended up in a coma for six months.
After that, I had one sole goal, to protect my brother, and give him at least a somewhat normal childhood. So I sacrificed my own and started playing the part of a caring parent to my brother. I made sure he ate three meals a day, woke up on time for school, made it to and from whatever martial art we were practicing on time.
Things went on like this until I graduated high school and moved out independently. Then, thanks to my insane memory, I learned five different languages and computer programing, and thus landed a job at a big video game development company. After that, my brother moved in with me, and we went on with life until he graduated.
Until one day, he came to me and told me he was enlisting in the Marine Corps. The day he left for boot camp was the day I lost motivation. In my depression, I joined the Airforce, but I injured myself during a training exercise and was medically discharged after a year. From there, it was all downhill. My mood and image of myself took a nosedive, which spiraled out of control; the end result was me becoming a NEET.
I was never given the tools to be anything other than a fighter, and here I was, physically and mentally crippled to the point that I couldn’t leave the house six of the seven days in a week. Yet, during that time, I forged a virtual identity and became a streamer on the internet; hell, I even amassed quite a respectable number of followers. But inside, I was still empty, unable to feel or regulate my emotions properly.
My life stagnated, girlfriends and fiances came and went, friendships wouldn’t last more than a couple of weeks, I was irritable all the time and constantly picking fights with everyone I knew or met. Then…the drinking started. Heh, that was a pretty lousy time; let’s just say it’s not a good idea to pick barfights in bad areas of town; back then, I could even show you all the different knife or gunshot scars I had.
This seemingly never-ending cycle of depression and pain continued throughout the majority of my early and mid-twenties until my brother finally got out of the Marine Corps.
However, gone was the little brother who needed me to protect him and guide him to a path of success; in that person’s place was a man who had been to hell and back in combat warzones he couldn’t speak about, just like that the final constant in my life was gone. It had always been my brother and me against the world, but after his military service, he had changed, had grown up. In contrast, I was precisely the same.
Things weren’t all bad, though; once a week, I’d go over to his house to binge-watch whatever the popular Anime was at the time. That is, until the day the world went to war for the third time.
It started as a ground invasion of the United States by the RNKC Axis forces, and very quickly, things took a turn for the worst, with nearly every country attacking their enemies out of the blue.
In the flames of war, I felt my relationship with my younger brother go back to how it was when we were children; we solely relied on each other while beating those who stood against us. That is…until the sky fell and all that was left was an empty white void.
Meeting Odin, the Allfather still feels like a dream…well, either that or some kind of horrid nightmare, I still haven’t fully decided to be honest. Being a fighter, I have always had a perfect understanding of my body and how my mind reacts to things, and from the instant, my Mjölnir pendant merged with my soul, something felt wrong.
From the depths of my soul, I felt the ever-growing rage and hunger bubbling inside me. In the beginning, it wasn’t unmanageable, and eventually, I swept it under the rug and was, for the first time, experiencing what happiness was; I had two loving parents who went above and beyond to show me affection and the care I never got in my previous life.
PLUS HELLOOOOO Magic, swords, a fucking SYSTEM, I was getting to live out every weebs fucking dream. How could I let something as small as an attitude adjustment control me? I was wrong. Each time I got a new blessing from Odin, I felt as if I was losing part of myself. I went from having the best life I could imagine to drifting dangerously close to my NEET habits again. Before Brance was born, it got pretty bad. Being unable to control my body or communicate honestly with anyone except Tobs, I started losing myself.
Luckily, I made it through that period of my life in one piece, and once Brance was born, things were as they should be. The two of us trained together, experimented with magic, and learned everything we could about our new lives. And for a little while there, things were fucking great.
Hell, thanks to Cinyah’s helicopter parenting style, I was finally beginning to understand emotions and develop as I should have in the first place as a person.
Still, there was something constantly nagging at the back of my mind, that primal feeling that would increase with every blessing, and it hit a breaking point when Brance and I were kidnapped. My first kill since reincarnation was euphoric. During WW3, when I took a life, I was numb, desensitized to what a person was supposed to feel. It was always them or me. But on Vinestra…I enjoyed it.
Each time I killed a member of Haylons Shadow and got instant gratification from seeing my stats increase, I would enter a euphoric state like an addict. Each kill I executed fed that primal urge within, and after we left that hotel, I felt as if I had eaten a five-star seven-course meal. Complete and satisfied.
I was satiated for five whole years, but that ended when I received one single line of text from Tobs.
-Your Race has changed to 99% Human 1% Æsir.-