LIGHTNOVELWORLD Chapter 2: Existential Crisis
Meanwhile, someone who wasn't even supposed to be there—Lucas, the current patient—laid on the hospital bed.
Breathing struggles marred his beautiful face, and some stray, long black hairs were stuck on it.
Some nurses even felt compelled to chase the stray hairs because he looked pitiful. When beautiful people looked miserable, one felt obligated to help.
Unbeknownst to these spectators, their beautiful patient was off, reliving his painful memories.
***
Explosions of varying sizes occurred around him. Debris kept on falling, and the place reeked of blood.
One moment, the sight of people enjoying their picnics greeted him, and then the next, he would hear the same people screaming for their lives. What followed was the sound of crunching bones in between guttural growls.
"ROAR!"
"KYAAAAAH!"
"HELP! PLEASEEEEE!"
"Someone!"
Various pleas echoed around him, but he just stood there, unmoving.
Because Lucas knew that there was nothing he could do; this was his past. And no amount of effort would change the fates of these people.
He knew that because he'd tried. So he just waited for the inevitable.
Then, as if sucker-punched, the scene changed.
He was now looking at a young man. The place was dimly lit, with various instruments beeping, but the man inside the tank remained oblivious, and if not for the bubbles from the breathing device, one could assume he was dead.
Lucas didn't know how long he stayed there, but it felt like forever. Thankfully, just as he had gotten bored counting the number of buttons around all the panels, his vision suddenly blurred.
This time, he couldn't see clearly. His view was covered in a strong haze, and every now and then, the landscape before him would sizzle.
He feared that he would lose sight of what was before him if he touched anything. But he had nothing to worry about because the choice had been made for him.
Before he could even grasp what was happening, an intense explosion ate into the scene he was looking at. And Lucas practically dispersed.
It felt like an out-of-body experience as if his consciousness was floating and expanding.
He should've felt free, but he remembered how he felt being contained in a body, and that was far better than being scattered around like the wind.
But maybe he was just hallucinating; after all, that took up most of his time. When he wasn't trying to improve his place, he was stuck daydreaming. And he did that all day, every day.
He had no other option because Lucas was now incapable of moving—just a cluster of preserved organs.
A Guide whose only role was to produce pills with whatever was left of his body.
Lucas felt fear. Even now, he tried making light of his memories, ignoring the visuals presented to him.
No more, please.
He begged, just like he always did when he was forced to relive his short life. But this time, instead of blacking out like normal, a prompt violently intruded his consciousness.
[SYSTEM RESTARTING IN 3…2…1]
That woke him up, eyes suddenly bolting open, his panting became labored, and several nurses attempted to check on him.
"Whe…where?" Lucas tried his best, but that was all he could manage.
"You're at the Academy's Medical Bay, Lord Luca. Please rest. We'll continue to monitor your condition." It was the same woman he saw earlier. The one that freed him from the tank.
But Lucas couldn't dwell on that. He heard several words that made sense individually but had no place being strung together.
Academy's Medical Bay? Lord Luca? Condition?
Wasn't he butchered and stored in some tank? Last he remembered, his consciousness showed him his remaining organs. So what was he doing lying down on a bed with what seemed like complete body parts?
He thought of asking again but hesitated because he could barely breathe properly. But he had a very wild guess. Something that could probably explain the things he kept on seeing.
"Plan-Planet?" He used what willpower he had left to ask again.
The nurse found the question odd, and her eyebrows furrowed in wonder. "Planet Nova, specifically the Nova Base Station, Lord."
Oh.
Oh shit.
He was Tessarian. And they only had one puny little planet. It was precisely that reason why many of them perished, trying to keep it intact.
Their advanced technology also included high-tech devices, but they were certainly not like what these women were looking at.
So he had a hunch. And true enough, he wasn't in Tesseris.
He wasn't even Lucas anymore!
That got him hyperventilating, which cued in another fainting spell.
By now, the nurses have started questioning their medical practices. How could their patient keep on fainting like this?
***
The next time he woke up, he was forbidden from speaking.
Several devices were attached to him, and people kept checking several instruments.
By now, his vision has stopped spinning. But that hasn't fixed his existential crisis.
He knows he's in someone else's body, and this someone was named Luca. Not that he remembers introducing himself, but because his memories now include people calling him that.
From what he can tell, "Memories" wouldn't even be the correct term. He had visions of things passing by and people interacting with each other, but he was never really included. The body itself felt like a third-person observer.
What did I get myself into this time?
But honestly, this probably couldn't be worse than his old life, right?
Wait. Was he still a Guide?
Back in Tesseris, Lucas had been a Guide. Technically, it was just a "Guide" in name because Lucas never had the opportunity to guide Espers in the conventional sense.
He was known to be defective.
A Guide that caused addiction to the strong and mania to the weak. But he was kept as a guide because of his boundless spiritual powers.
In his humble opinion, this "defect" was due to the circumstances of his "birth." And not because he was some harlot or a homewrecker.
Tsk.
Lucas was just Specimen 401 before he borrowed a name from some ad.
He had no parents and was just born to replicate the first human Guide.
One day, their planet was thrown into the fire when a Dungeon suddenly appeared.
The government tried to probe the Dungeon using various explosives and attacks, but no one thought to enter what was apparently a gate.
I don't know how they missed that when the thing looked like a super-sized door! Hello?!
However, I'd like to believe it was because no one was suicidal enough to pick that route.
So that gate burst—a Dungeon Break.
Monsters that humans have never seen spewed out with the intense explosion.
This explosion of spiritual power awakened the first batch of Espers—those capable of entering and closing Dungeons before they burst.
For a while, humans rejoiced in their ability to fight back. But when more Dungeons started appearing, the Espers, who had been stretched too thin, began showing signs of instability, something close to madness.
'Rampage.'
That was the term they gave to these Espers' outbursts.
Massive damage and staggering death tolls were the price paid to attain power.
But when everything seemed hopeless, someone awakened as a Guide.
Guides like us were mostly weak chickens.
No need to pretend otherwise, as evidenced by my fainting tally.
But we could purify an Esper's mania.
Ideally.
There had always been a stark imbalance in the number of guides versus the number of Esper awakenings, so the government commissioned researchers to study the first Guide in the hopes of awakening more.
Sadly, he perished from a Dungeon Break, which rushed the scientists into starting different replication studies.
And I was a product of one such experiment.
Specimen 401 was a failure like all 400 specimens that came before it.
The researchers only managed to make vessels but couldn't figure out how to integrate consciousness.
These vessels were useless without consciousness, so they were all slated to be scrapped along with the entire study.
That was six years into Specimen 401's existence. But before they could be discarded, a mutated Dungeon engulfed the laboratory; then, one vessel suddenly woke up with consciousness.
Hi.
That's me.
Specimen 401, reporting for duty.