Tanya dies in the battle of Osfjord. As always, she rejected Being X. Being X decided to do something different, he reincarnates her in a fantasy world, again, as a human... Who was artificially transformed into a demon by a certain someone.

The Hero of the South finds her one year before his legendary battle against the Eight Mighty Demons.

Updates are not yet decided, feel free to tell me when you want, though I haven’t written much for this story, 2 chapters, so far. I posted this to see reactions and opinions.

Chapter 1: The Child of War

The northern advance had stalled, and nobody in the imperial camp could quite believe it.

For three seasons the demons had rolled north like a slow tide. They had flattened every fort and chewed through every defensive line that human hands could raise. Walls that had stood for centuries were now heaps of rubble. Garrisons that swore to hold until the last man were names on a list nobody had the time to carve into stone.

The plateau defenses were the final barrier before the heartland. Anyone with a head for strategy understood what came next. If the plateau fell, the demons would sweep past the capital and spread across the continent like ink in water. No mountain fortress would hold against that many. No island would be far enough.

People had stopped hoping. Farmers quit sowing crops that needed more than a season to grow. Builders quit making things meant to last. Folks spoke of tomorrow the way they spoke of a debt they had no plans to pay. The taverns stood empty at night, and even the old drinking songs had gone quiet.

Then a man walked into the front lines carrying two plain swords, and the whole war changed shape.

Nobody knew his name. He was a middle-aged fellow with a mustache and a patient face, and he looked more like a noble man than a general or a warrior, with no fear in him at all. That had been a year ago. In the time since, he had killed more demons than any mage or soldier in recorded history. The clerks who kept the tally gave up after the first month, because the numbers read like a fairy tale and nobody would believe the record books.

He cut down demon lieutenants in a single stroke. He cut down demon generals in fights that ended before a man could finish a short prayer. He fought quietly, with no chanted spells and no called-down fire, and every attack aimed at him seemed to miss by exactly the width he needed. His blades found the core of each creature with one clean motion. Soldiers who watched him said it looked less like a battle and more like a craftsman finishing a job.

The demons had never faced anything like him. Their numbers and their size counted for little against him. He turned up wherever the human line was about to break, and the demon line broke instead. He stood over every fallen demon commander, and the rest ran.

Reports came in from every flank, and the news was the same each time. So the retreat began.

Demons couldn't panic, so they pulled back in good order, giving up land they'd held for months. Imperial soldiers followed behind them to retake the villages and dig out whoever was left inside.

Most of those people were still alive, and that was the strange, ugly part. The demons had never wiped out the humans they captured. They kept them the way a farmer keeps cattle, fed just enough to stay breathing and packed into the smallest space the buildings allowed. They worked them in ways that served no purpose except to wear them out. Demons felt no pity at all, and they had worked out that a dead human was useless and a living one could be used.

Some of those uses were far worse than labor.

· · ─ ·✶· ─ · ·

"This one's different," the scout said.

He stood in the road with his helmet tucked under his arm, staring at a low stone building at the edge of a burned village. Smoke drifted past its door.

"Different how?" asked the Hero of the South.

"The other places had guards. Locks. Something. This one's wide open, and I don't like it."

The Hero studied the building. It had been a stable once, a long rectangle of stone with a squat roof. Years of hooves had packed the dirt floor as hard as brick. A cart lay on its side in the road outside with one wheel still turning in the wind, and a child's wooden horse sat in the ash by a doorway. The scout had looked at that toy for a long moment on the way in.

"The villagers were hauled north in the first month," the scout said. "We found the cellars empty. Whatever's in there, it's been there a long time."

"Then let's see what it is."

"We'll c-come with you, sir."

"Keep your hands off your swords until I say."

He pushed the door open and stepped inside. The soldiers filed in behind him.

The air hit them first. It smelled of old blood and wet earth, with a sharp chemical sting underneath that made every nose in the room wrinkle. One soldier gagged. Another pulled his collar over his mouth.

A demon researcher had taken over the stable and remade it.

Where horses used to stand, the stalls held people, some stirring faintly and some never stirring at all. Every wall was papered with drawings. They showed human bodies laid over demon bodies, one on top of the other, with notes scrawled in a spiky script nobody in the room could read. One drawing showed a human heart in careful detail. Beside it hung the demon version, the same shape, but built from nothing except mana.

The tables told the rest of the story. Knives lay in neat rows. Jars of pale liquid sat in racks. Pages of handwriting ran across every flat surface, tidy and patient, like the account books of a very careful shopkeeper. The demon had opened up living people to see what was inside. It had taken out organs to learn what they did. It had tried fitting demonic parts into human bodies and had written down, in that neat hand, exactly how each body fought the intruder off.

"Research" was the closest word. It was too clean for what had happened here, but the demons had no other. They studied people the way people studied beetles, with plenty of curiosity and no pity at all.

A soldier threw up in the corner. Another stood with his lips moving, whispering an old funeral rite over strangers who couldn't hear him.

And in the middle of the room, on a stone stand, sat the worst thing.

It was a big glass tank, taller than a man, filled with clear liquid tinted faintly blue. Something floated inside.

It was a child.

She was small and thin, with bare limbs drifting loose in the fluid like a sleeper's. A white mask covered her face from hairline to chin, smooth and blank, with no holes for the eyes or mouth. Nothing moved. No bubbles rose. A scatter of pale hair floated around her head like smoke.

"Megami…" somebody whispered.

The youngest soldier in the group was seventeen at most. He stared at the tank, then at the floor, then back at the tank. His knuckles had gone white around the shaft of his lance.

"How disturbing," he said. His voice was flat as a plank. It carried no feeling at all, which made it the most honest thing anyone had said all day.

He stepped forward.

"Hold on, kid," the veteran beside him began. "Don't—"

The boy planted his feet and rammed the lance into the glass.

The tank burst apart in a spray of shards, and a flood of liquid burst out and soaked his boots and spread across the dirt in a dark, steaming stain. The small body slid out with it and landed in the mud with a wet slap. The mask slipped loose in the fall and slid away.

The face underneath belonged to a little girl. Her skin was pale as milk. Her hair, plastered flat to her skull, was blonde so light that it looked nearly white. Her eyes were shut.

For a long moment, nobody breathed.

"She's dead," the veteran said quietly. "Poor thing's been dead for—"

The girl's eyes opened.

They were blue, and the blue was fierce. It was bright and cold and sharp enough to cut the dim light in the stable. Half the soldiers took a step back before they knew they were moving. The Hero stayed where he was and watched her without letting anything show on his face.

She tried to push herself up. Her arms shook and folded under her. She tried again, and this time she got one knee under her body before it gave out and she sprawled back into the mud. Instead of crying out like a child in a place like that, she lay for a moment breathing hard through her mouth, then turned her head and studied the room.

That look was wrong. It moved from the drawings to the notes to the soldiers with their weapons half raised, and it took in each thing for only a moment, one after another, the way a clerk counts coins. It was far too calm for a child.

Then it landed on the Hero, and stayed.

They looked at each other for a long while.

"Sir," the scout muttered. "Her e-ears."

The Hero had already seen. They came to a faint point, but that might have been a quirk of the light. The next detail was harder to explain away. On her forehead, just above the hairline and half hidden by wet strands, sat two small bumps no longer than the first joint of a finger. They curved backward in a shape every human soldier had learned to recognize.

Horns.

They were small and still growing, yet every soldier recognized them at once.

· · ─ ·✶· ─ · ·

A veteran who had spent years fighting demons in the north, and who had found whole villages emptied of their children, attacked first. He drew his sword with his jaw locked and strode across the room without a word of warning.

"Step back, sir," he said. "Step back, please!"

The blade came down in a long, flat arc that would have cut the girl in half from shoulder to hip.

It never arrived.

The Hero was suddenly beside her, though he had been ten feet away a heartbeat earlier. Nobody saw him cross the distance. His right hand was up, and two fingers had caught the flat of the sword between them. The veteran heaved. The steel stayed where it was, as if it had been set in stone. The Hero's skin wasn't even scratched. He held the blade like a man holding a sheet of paper.

"S-sir?" The word came out as a croak. The veteran looked at the fingers, then the Hero, then the girl, then the Hero again. He was a strong man who had trained with that weapon for years, and he couldn't win a tug of war against two fingers.

"She's human," the Hero said.

He said it mildly. He said it without anger, the way you would tell a man the sky was up.

"But the horns!" The veteran's voice cracked. "Look at them, sir. She's got horns like the demons!"

"She's human."

He let go. The veteran staggered back and almost sat down.

The Hero crouched next to the child. Up close, she was even smaller than she'd looked in the glass, a stick-limbed scrap shivering in a puddle of cold liquid. He unfastened his cloak, a heavy dark blue wool one with the mark of the Southern command stitched at the collar, and laid it over her. It swallowed her whole. It hid the horns and the shivering and most of her face.

She looked up at him from inside the folds.

She looked like she was doing sums as her eyes went over his face, his two swords, the hand that had caught the blade and the calm set of his shoulders, and the whole time her expression said she was weighing him against some private standard he couldn't see.

"What's your name?" he asked. "I know you can talk."

Her mouth opened. Nothing came out.

She tried again. Her throat worked. A thin croak escaped, and she flinched at the sound of her own voice as if it belonged to someone else. The soldiers saw it. A girl who'd never spoken a word in her life might have sounded just like that, they thought, and some of them felt a flicker of pity in spite of everything.

"T-Tanya," she said. The word was hoarse and cracked, but every sound in it was clear. She swallowed and tried again. "Tanya D-degurechaff."

It was a strange name. It matched no naming habit in the empire, and the soldiers traded glances. The Hero tilted his head and studied her face as if he were reading something written very small.

"Tanya," he repeated. He didn't sound surprised. "All right."

She tried to stand.

It went about as well as the first attempt. Her legs folded like wet paper, and she dropped back onto the mud with a grunt of annoyance. The cloak slid off one shoulder. Her small hands scrabbled at it, furious, trying to pull it back into place.

The Hero scooped her up.

She went stiff in his arms. He was warm, and he smelled of rain and leather and woodsmoke, and she weighed no more than a bundle of kindling. Her head hung against his shoulder because her neck hadn't the strength to hold it up. Her blue eyes stayed open. They watched the room over his arm, the soldiers, the drawings, the wreckage of the tank, and they kept counting.

"Secure the records," the Hero told his men. "Take what you can carry. Burn the rest."

The veteran opened his mouth.

The Hero looked at him.

The veteran closed it.

"This place gets cleaned out," the Hero said. "Every stall. Every table. Nothing left. Understood?"

"Understood, sir," the scout said, quickly, and the others echoed him.

He walked out with the child in his arms. Rain had started, a thin cold drizzle from a grey sky, and the mud was getting deeper. The girl kept her eyes forward. Her head bobbed against his collarbone with each step, and her eyes were fixed on the path ahead as if she were memorizing the road.

Behind them, the soldiers worked fast. None of them wanted to spend a minute longer in that place than they had to. They stacked the notes into sacks and carried torches to the doors, and they tried very hard not to think about the child with the horns, or what the demons had done to her, or why she had looked at them with such measuring eyes. The thoughts came anyway. One by one the men went out into the rain, and they stood in a silent row and watched the stable catch.

· · ─ ·✶· ─ · ·

"You brought a demon into my camp?"

The commander of the imperial forces had been waiting for him. He stood in the doorway of his tent with both fists planted on the map table, and the lamp threw his shadow big and black across the canvas. He was a broad man gone grey at the temples, with the gritty look of someone who hadn't slept properly since the northern campaign began. Two staff officers hovered behind him, pretending to read dispatches.

"I brought a child," the Hero said.

"A child with horns. Half my men saw them. The other half will hear before supper." The commander straightened up. "I've buried more good soldiers than I can count, and every one of them died to things that look exactly like what's sitting in your tent. I won't have it in my lines. You might be famous and strong but I'm the leader here.”

"She's human."

"So you keep saying."

"Because it's true." The Hero stood with his arms loose at his sides. He had never needed to look dangerous. "I can see her core. It's human. The rest is a coat the researcher painted on top. It might flake off and it might not, but it doesn't change what's underneath."

One of the officers coughed. The commander glared him quiet.

"Say I believe you," he said. "What then? I ship her to the capital and the court decides her fate. You know what the court does when it's frightened."

"She isn't going to the capital."

"That isn't your call."

"It is now." The Hero said it gently, which was somehow worse. "There's a house up on the plateau. Quiet. Walled. I'll keep her there. You'll write in your report that the laboratory was cleansed and the only subject died in the fire."

The commander stared at him. Outside, the rain drummed on the canvas, and somewhere in the camp a man was shouting for a medic.

"You're asking me to lie to the Emperor?"

"I'm asking you to leave out one detail. You've done it before for smaller reasons." The Hero kept his eyes steady. "Tell me what the plateau needs this winter? Your supply lines are thin. Your mages are burning out. If I walked away tomorrow, how many weeks before the demons noticed?"

The commander flinched. He rubbed his jaw with the heel of his hand and glanced at the map, where red pins marched along the northern ridge like a rash.

"Not many," he admitted.

"Then arguing over one girl is a poor use of the time we've got." The Hero's voice stayed easy. "I'll hold the plateau. You hold your tongue."

"And if the court finds out?"

"Then they can ask me."

The commander let out a long breath and dropped onto a camp stool. "The men won't forget."

"No," the Hero agreed. "Some will keep quiet because I asked. The rest will keep quiet because they're ashamed of how they looked at her. Either one works."

He ducked out into the rain.

The camp was a sea of mud and cookfires. Men stopped talking as he passed. A few bowed their heads. Most only stared. The child had been put in a small spare tent near the supply wagons, with a patched roof and a floor of bare earth, and a cook had left a pot of thin broth beside the flap.

The boy who had broken the glass was waiting by the picket line.

He was holding his lance against his chest like a child with a doll. When the Hero passed, he stepped forward, and his voice came out in a rush.

"Sir. I didn't know what else to do."

"I know."

"Was it wrong? What I did?"

The Hero stopped. Rain ran off his nose and dripped from his chin, and he looked at the boy for a good while before answering.

"It was fast," he said. "That's what I'd say about it. Next time, be fast later and think first."

The boy swallowed and nodded. The Hero walked on toward the little tent where a lamp was burning.

Behind him, the boy stood in the downpour for a long time.

Back at the edge of camp, the soldiers who had been in the stable sat in a ragged circle, passing a flask and arguing in low voices. Some swore the girl had been dead and had risen. Some said the horns were mud and a trick of the light. The veteran who had swung his sword refused the flask every time it came to him, and kept his eyes fixed on the ground between his boots.

When the boy finally crept into the circle and sat down beside him, neither of them said a word. After a while the veteran reached out and, very gently, thumped the lad on the shoulder with his fist. Then he went back to staring at the fire.

Inside the little tent, the Hero lifted the flap and stepped in. The girl sat propped against a crate with the cloak wrapped around her like a shell, and her blue eyes were already waiting for him.

"I brought you an apple," he said, and held it out.

She looked at the apple. Then she looked at him.

It was the look of a person deciding whether a stranger's gift was a trap.

She took it.

Hmm, next chapter is written in first person POV: Tanya. What's her opinions and plan regarding her current predicament.

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