An early update, unexpected, I suppose. Before we go deeper into the story, I want to give you clear ideas regarding this story:

Here's what is going to happen in this story:

1. Tanya is a half demon, so she will have some demonic nature seep into her. You may guess what it is.

2. Being X = Megami/The Goddess of Creation. It is convenient, efficient and logical.

3. Tanya will be trained by The Hero of the South and a mage from Kraft's era.

4. The story starts from the two years before Himmel began his journey and continues all the way to Frieren's own journey in canon.

5. Tanya's motivation is to lead a peaceful luxurious life and she will "try to become a merchant", but life is hard...

6. The story is divided into three parts. The first one is: the beginning of her life, training, growing up and beginning her journey. The second one is her stay in the Fortified city of Weise, some shenanigans with the Hero's party and Macht, Denken etc.

7. The third part is the longest one, I won't spoil it.

Well, hope you like it, I guess I will be uploading every Sunday.

Chapter 2: The Perfect Goal

My name is Tanya Degurechaff. It's the second name I've carried, in the third world I've been dumped into, and I'd like it noted that I never once asked for any of them.

Huh, what? You think that sounds crazy?

Fair enough. It sounded crazy to me too, back when I was still a man in a suit with a very good pension plan.

I was a salaryman, a human resources executive at a big Japanese company. My job was deciding who was worth keeping and who wasn't. I was good at it, because I trusted numbers and not feelings. Show me proof and I'd listen to anything. Hand me a story about souls and God and judgment after death, and I'd smile politely and check my watch.

That attitude got me promoted. It also got me killed.

It happened on a train platform, after I fired a man for missing every target for months. I'd done everything by the book. I'd written warnings and held meetings and kept careful records. The company was better off, and so, in the long run, was he. Anyone with a calculator could see that.

He took the news badly and shoved me onto the tracks.

I remember the headlights. I remember thinking, with a clarity I still find funny, that this was a spectacularly stupid way to die. Killed by a subordinate who couldn't live with the paperwork.

Then the world froze.

The train hung in the air a few feet from my face. The horn's scream stopped halfway through its note. I couldn't move a finger. And a voice slid into my skull from nowhere, smooth and enormous, and introduced itself as… God.

It said it was THE God. It said I was wrong about everything, that I had turned my back on the divine out of pride, and that it was time to kneel.

I said no.

The thing could stop time and speak inside my head, which was impressive, though impressive and divine are different things. Any technology sufficiently advanced looks like magic. For all I knew, it was an alien. Or a man from a future century. Or a very strong computer with a God complex. I decided to call it… Being X. 

"Your management style is terrible," I told it. "A real god wouldn't need to force people to believe him. A real god wouldn't care if one salaryman bowed or not. You're insecure. You want applause, and that tells me you've got limits, which is the one thing a god can't have."

Being X took that badly.

It called me arrogant. It called me foolish. And then it decided to teach me a lesson the way petty bosses always do, with a punishment that was meant to look like education. I would be reborn in a world of constant war. I'd be a girl, small and weak, and suffering would grind the pride out of me until I begged for help from above.

It was wrong. It's been wrong ever since.

I woke up in a place that looked a lot like Europe a century ago, only with magic bolted on and anything resembling a kind god taken out. Trains and factories and rifles, alongside spells and mages and a war that never stopped. I was Tanya Degurechaff. I was small. I was an orphan. And I was furious.

My plan was clean and simple. Be useful. Be competent. Climb through the ranks on merit, and then land a cushy desk job far from the front, where I could live out my days in boredom and peace. The army needed good officers. Good officers got promoted. Promotion meant better posts. Better posts meant safety. A child could have seen the logic.

I was the child, and I missed the catch.

I did well. Then I did better than anyone expected. I won battles and kept my soldiers alive and killed a great many enemies, and the generals looked at my record and saw a hero, or a monster, or a weapon, depending on who you asked. None of them saw a woman who deserved a desk. They sent me to the worst fronts and handed me the worst jobs, because I'd already proven I could win where others failed.

Competence buys you more work, and comfort never comes with it. I should have known that. I used to write the reports that said it.

And all that time, Being X kept poking at me. Little gifts, little disasters, little miracles. A lucky escape here. A suspicious enemy ambush there. Every one of them had a plain, ordinary explanation if you looked for it, and I looked for it every time. Luck. Skill. Somebody's mistake. Nothing needed a god to explain it.

I never prayed, yeah. Not once.

The end came at Osfjord. I fought Colonel Anson Sue, a man Being X had picked out and filled with borrowed power. He was a fanatic. He believed every word of the holy cause he'd been handed, and he fought like a man who had already paid for his own funeral.

He cornered me over the sea. We traded spells in open air above black water, and he was good. He had real training behind the stolen strength. I held him off, and I pushed him back, and for a moment I thought I'd actually win.

Then he set off a suicide blast, empowered by Being X, aimed at the one human in that war everyone called the Devil of the Rhine.

It worked. I felt my body come apart like paper in a storm, and then I was back in that frozen place outside time, face to face with the thing that had just killed me.

It gloated. It explained how wrong I'd been. How real God was. How every hardship had been a lesson, and how I had finally learned.

I told it to go to hell.

"Kill me again," I said. "Send me back again. Torture me through every life you've got. I still won't bow to a boss who runs on force and blackmail and can't give me one good reason why I should."

Being X went quiet for a long time. When it finally spoke, its voice had changed. It sounded, God help me, amused.

"I think I know just the thing to do," it said.

The next thing I knew, hands were pulling me out of a dead mother's body.

My lungs were full of fluid. My skin was slick and cold. Something lifted me, and something else lowered me, and then I was floating in liquid inside a hard curved wall, and the most disturbing part was that I could breathe it.

I don't know how long I stayed in that glass. Years, probably. Ten, give or take. Time was hazy. I was barely awake in any real sense, drifting in a dark, warm blur with no thoughts and no shape, like a dream somebody else was having. When I think back, only a smear of nothing sits where those years should be.

Then I woke up.

I woke in mud, on my back, with glass in my hair and cold liquid running down my ribs. A wall of soldiers stood in a ring around me with their weapons raised. And one of them was swinging a sword at my head.

A man stopped that sword with two fingers.

I should probably explain how I'm able to tell you this in perfect, fluent language, because I have no good answer. I never learned to talk. I never learned to walk. I'm fairly sure I've never been alive long enough in this body to do either. But the moment my mind surfaced, the words were simply there, sitting in my head like furniture in a rented room. I opened my mouth and they came out.

I suspect Being X. Who else? But it hasn't said a single word to me since the stable, and I'm not about to ask for credit on its behalf.

So that's the situation, summed up the way I'd sum it up in a quarterly review.

I'm a small, weak body that can't stand up. I've got horns. I've got teeth that feel like they were designed for a nasty purpose. I have no memories of any parents, any home or any childhood in this world, and I don't know who I am beyond a name I somehow knew. The nearest thing to family I've got is a mustached man in a blue cloak who carries two swords and carries me, too, apparently, since my legs won't hold my weight.

Not a promising start. But I've worked with worse.

· · ─ ·✶· ─ · ·

The tent is cold, and I'm sitting in the dark with the cloak wrapped around me like a shell and the last of an apple in my fist.

I'd like to talk about that apple.

The Hero of the South, which is what the soldiers keep calling him, walked in a while ago and handed it over. Just handed it over, with no speech and no demands. I studied it for a long time. I considered poison. I considered tricks. I looked at his face, and he waited with a patience I found deeply suspicious, and finally my stomach made a noise like a dying animal.

So I ate it.

It was the best thing I have ever put in my mouth.

I'll say it plainly. I've eaten at expensive restaurants on three continents, in two different bodies. I have never tasted anything like that apple. It was cold and crisp and sweet, and the juice ran down my chin, and I sat there in a stranger's tent with tears running down my face and absolutely no idea why.

Don't read anything into it. It's a body thing. The brain does stupid stuff when it's starving.

He watched me eat. He ignored the crying and sat on a crate until I finished, and then he said: "We leave at dawn."

"Where are we going, sir?" My voice was a rusty hinge. I'm still getting used to it.

"A house I keep."

"And what will I do there?"

"Get well."

That's all he said. No questions about the horns. No demand to know who I was. No explanation for why a famous warrior was bothering with a stray child pulled out of a demon's tank. He just patted the crate, stood up and went away.

I've been reading people for two lifetimes. Here's what I've got.

Everyone in that stable was afraid of me, yet he stayed calm, which is strange. He looked at me like he'd been expecting me, and I don't like that look. It's the look of someone who has already read the report.

He's hiding his reasons, and I can tell. Men don't carry strange children out of burning laboratories for free. There's always a price. Always an angle. Always a second reason, hiding behind the first one like a coin behind a curtain. I don't know what his is yet. I do know it exists.

And I know one more thing, the one that actually keeps me from sleeping.

He's strong. Strong enough to scare me, and I faced down a cosmic being. I watched him stop a sword with two fingers while appearing out of thin air. Whatever he wants from me, I can't make him give it up by force, which means I'll have to do it the old-fashioned way. I'll have to be useful. I'll have to be so valuable that a man like that would sooner keep me than lose me.

I've done it before. I'll do it again.

I'll survive.

That's my goal in this third life, and I'd like to state it plainly, since I've got no one else to tell it to. I want to stay out of the way. I want a quiet life, far from the front lines, far from the army, far from anyone who'd look at my record and see a weapon. I'll be average. I'll be forgettable. I'll build a small, dull, comfortable existence in a corner of the world that nobody cares about, and I'll never again let a general, an emperor or a self-appointed god use me as a tool.

Being X is probably watching. It's probably enjoying this. A weak body, a hostile world, a scary protector and a girl with horns who has to be nice to everyone to stay alive. It must think it's finally built the perfect trap.

It's wrong again.

I've been a salaryman. I've been a soldier. I can be a mouse, if the job calls for one.

· · ─ ·✶· ─ · ·

I spent an hour testing the body.

That sounds more dignified than it was. Mostly I lay on my back in the dark and ordered my fingers to curl, one at a time, like a man checking whether a machine still ran after a flood. The fingers obeyed. The wrists were stiff but willing. The arms shook when I lifted them, and the legs didn'thing at all except hang there, pale and skinny, like a pair of boiled noodles somebody had stuck on me by mistake.

I tried to roll over. It took three attempts. On the second, I flopped on my face and lay there for a long moment, listening to my own breathing, while I decided whether to laugh or scream.

I did neither. A guard was walking past outside, and a squeak at the wrong moment would have meant a lot of questions.

So I did what I always do when a situation has no solution. I made a list.

One: I can move my arms, so I can feed myself, eventually.

Two: I can't move my legs, so I can't escape.

Three: nobody is currently trying to kill me, which is an improvement on how this body started the day.

Four: the next meal is somewhere in the future and I'd better find out when.

It's a small list. It's an honest one. In my old line of work, you learned to write the honest version first and the version for the boss second.

My stomach growled again. The sound filled the whole tent, loud as a rusty gate. I put a hand on my belly and glared at it.

Quiet, I told it. We're working on it.

The stomach didn't care. It never does.

· · ─ ·✶· ─ · ·

The tent flap rattled a while ago.

I thought it was the wind until a shape ducked inside, small against the lantern light, and a voice whispered, "Er. Miss?"

It was the boy with the lance.

He stood there in the doorway, hunched over like he was trying to take up less room, with a folded blanket in both hands and a face so red that I could see it in the dark. He couldn't be older than seventeen. He looked about twelve.

"I'm, um. I brought you this. It's cold out." He swallowed. "I'm the one who broke the glass."

"Ok," I said.

It came out hoarse and thin, and the boy winced.

"I'm sorry. I'm really sorry. I don't know what I was thinking. I just saw it, and I couldn't stand it, and then I..." He stopped and stared at the floor. "I thought you were dead. I thought I was setting you free."

I should have said something kind. It was what the situation wanted. A scared little girl would have said it's all right, I forgive you, and given him a shaky smile.

I looked at him for a while instead. I thought about the lance and the glass and the cold liquid in my lungs. And then I thought about what a boy like that was worth to a person in my position, a boy who would carry a blanket across a camp at night because his conscience wouldn't let him sleep.

"You didn't know," I said. "I do not blame you."

His shoulders sagged. "Really?"

"Really?"

He put the blanket down at the foot of my crate as if it were made of glass. He stood there another moment, mumbling something about how he'd be outside on watch if I needed anything, and then he fled.

I'm keeping the blanket. It's warm, and it smells like horse.

I'm also keeping the boy. I don't know yet what I'll use him for, but it's never a bad idea to have someone who owes you.

· · ─ ·✶· ─ · ·

I should probably keep track of the details, in case I forget.

First, the language. I understand it all. I speak it fluently. I can't explain it. When I try to remember learning it, there's nothing there, only the language itself, solid as a floor. The writing is another matter. I looked at the marks on a crate in the tent and couldn't read one of them. So whatever gave me speech left letters out. That's useful. It means the gift, if it's a gift, was narrow and specific, and anything narrow and specific can be investigated.

Second, the body. It's wrecked. It's skinny and pale, and my legs are about as strong as boiled noodles. I can sit up. I can hold a cup. I can't stand without help. I've got a sharp pair of canines and a tiny pair of horns that make soldiers reach for their weapons. If the horns are really a curse, they're a very small one. If they're an advantage, I haven't worked out how.

Third, the Hero. He says I'm human. I believe him, because he's the first person who seems to know something I don't. He calls the horns a coat. He says the researcher painted it on. If that's true, then something was done to me in that stable, and it was done a long time ago, and I don't remember a second of it.

I'd like that to bother me more than it does. What actually bothers me is the part I can't prove. Who was I, in this body, before I woke up? Was there a mother who knew about me? A father? Anyone who held this small, ugly, shivering thing in their arms and wished it well?

I don't know. Nobody has told me. And somehow that makes the cloak feel heavier than it should.

Fourth, and most important, the stable itself. I never saw the inside of it. I never saw the sketches or the researcher or the other captives. I woke up in the middle of the mud and saw only the soldiers, and I've heard them talk since. I know what they think I am. I know what they're afraid I'll do.

That means any story I tell about my past has to be built from scratch, and it has to be good. They'll ask. Sooner or later, someone will ask, and "I don't remember" won't be enough. They'll want details. A village. A family. A tragedy. A reason to feel sorry for me and a reason not to kill me.

I can manage that.

I'll make it sad. I'll make it small. I'll make it fit the facts I can see, so it fits the facts they can see. A siege. Dead parents. A long time in the tank. A tragic, boring, ordinary little tale about a poor orphan the demons got their hands on.

Nobody questions a story that makes them feel guilty.

Tomorrow I'll start collecting details to make it airtight. How big was the village? What did the demons do? What do the soldiers want to hear? I'll listen. I'll nod. I'll hold a cup in both hands and look scared and small, which is easy, because I am.

Outside, the rain has softened to a drizzle. A guard walks past the tent, whistling off-key. Somewhere farther off, men are laughing too loudly at some joke, the way people laugh when they've been through something they don't want to talk about.

The cloak smells of smoke and wet wool. The apple core sits in my palm. It's the only thing in the world that belongs to me, and I intend to keep it for a while.

I'll get through this. I got through the train, and the war, and the explosion, and the glass.

And if a man with two swords wants to be my friend, I can live with that. For now.

One more item for the list, just so it's on paper. If I ever meet the clerk who assigned me to this body, I'd like a word about the return policy.

I've been a salaryman, a soldier and a thing in a jar. Nobody ever asked what I'd prefer. The next time someone offers me a choice, I'm going to be so polite about it that they'll never recover.

Fine. I'll settle for becoming a quiet shopkeeper with a good lock on the door.

It's a small dream. Perfect.

I'm going to sleep now and I will throttle someone if Being X comes in my dream.

No, she isn't crippled. It's just that she is weak for obvious reasons. She should be fine soon.

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