DXD SI : Chapter 1.1 (Patreon)

His eyes snapped open, a gasp escaping his lips as he tried to greedily drink in air that he was not getting, only to pause as he took stock of his surroundings, or lack thereof, and then himself. 

He had no eyes to snap open, no lips to gasp through, no nose to breathe properly, and certainly no lungs through which the air necessary for the sound could be pumped through. He was seeing but not through his eyes. He did not even have a body for that. 

He just….was.

If he had lungs or the ability to produce stress hormones or neurons to overthink about this, he would have begun hyperventilating. Instead, he just drifted. Not on purpose, mind you, but somehow, the emptiness that he was subjected to was buoyant, allowing him? His soul? to float as if the darkness was a river and he was some log that was a ride along for a journey he had absolutely no way of controlling.

It was oddly relaxing as well, after he got over the fact that he was ripped from all he knew, from everyone he had ever known, from the life he had built?

His mind, if he even had a brain, paused for a beat as he tried to think of the meaning of the sentence that had just sprouted in his brain. 

He was ripped from what life? What people? What everything? 

He couldn't remember a thing.

The thought should have sent him into a spiral of panic, of existential crisis, and yet, nothing of that sort happened. He had no idea why, and frankly, the thought of questioning that faded away within moments, or atleast it seemed like it. He had no idea of the time passing in this place of nothingness.

Was this hell, then? A thought with dull curiosity emerged in his mind, and as if whatever higher authority that ruled or managed this place heard his question, he felt and saw a hole in this nothingness appear a small distance away from, or so he thought. He also had no sense of distance in this space as well as no sense of the speed of his drifting.

Even though he had no senses to speak of, he instinctively knew that the hole was rainbow coloured, as if a Kaleidoscope had bloomed in front of him. He also realised with a detached awareness that he was headed straight to the hole, and he seemed to be accelerated, violently.

The nothingness all around him surged forward towards the hole, as if angry for disturbing its nothingness, bringing him all the closer to the hole. His instincts, if they were even real, told him that the hole was the way to escape from this nothingness.

The thought made him feel something, something too dull to correctly quantify, as if the emotions were far too muted for him to feel them. In the end, he was swept into the rainbow hole without any conscious input on his part.

The nothingness really did not like the rainbow hole, it seemed.

___xx__

The next moment he opened his eyes, they were real, actual eyes, flesh and blood. Well, a little bit more than regular blood and flesh but he had no idea of that at the time. All he could see was blurred shapes, giants, and hear intermittently. All of that was also coupled with a crippling sense of weakness.

Soon enough, the weight of his eyes became too heavy for him to bear, depriving him of that blurry vision as well as that small piece of awareness he had managed to snag for himself after spending who knows how long in that nothingness. 

___xx__

He had no idea just how much he hated that nothingness until he escaped it. Everyone was wrong. Hell was not boiling oil or purgatory where you had the chance to repent, or a place where all evil was gathered, or a place where Satan took great pleasure in torturing you.

No, that was hell. An absolute absence of everything. No light, no sound, no pain, no happiness, no sight, no senses, no sense of time, no sense of up or down, no sense of direction, no control over his soul self, no way to think properly, no emotions. Nothing.

That was hell.

It was only after his first year here, in this new world, that he realise just how ironic his current thoughts were.

___xx__

It had been some time since he escaped that hellhole, and to this day, he still got fully body shivers whenever he thought of that place and how he could be dragged back to that hell any time, because he did not know how he reached that place, nor how he managed to escape it, without any repercussions whatsoever.

In fact, he seemed to have gotten some benefits out of it. He did not know if he was just special for that to happen or if his time spent in that hellhole and coming out without losing himself entirely played a part, but something changed within him.

For one, he was sure that someone as young as him was not supposed to have full motor control, or have the ability for the advanced thought processes his brain continued to think of. He was also far stronger than normal, capable of pulling his entire body by a single arm, and it hadn't even taken him a lot of effort to do that.

His mother also was….odd. He instinctively knew who his mother was, and she looked….not sad but not really happy either. He was breastfed a couple of times by her since he could properly see and identify people, but she looked odd the entire time, after which she just placed him in his crib and went out, never to be seen until the next day. 

He thought it odd, expecting to be born in like a rich people family, where the baby was just given birth to, for inheritance purposes, with no emotions or love involved. That still did not explain why he never had to worry about diapers and such. 

He had no urge to go number 1 or 2, at all. Frankly, he should have noticed it far sooner, but he blamed baby hardware running adult-ish software for that. There were bound to be some glitches in such a configuration.

So, to summarise, he was strong, more aware than he should be, with muscles that should not be there right now, and wholly incapable of pooping, a fact that should have alarmed any self respecting human parents, or their nannies, of which he had seen none of. His mother came in once a day, fed him, looked over to see if he needed a change of clothes before going out of the big ass room he had to suffer in, by himself.

A normal baby would have cried, woken up the entire house, gotten himself sick, peed himself, and more in such an environment, and the fact that none of that happened and that didn’t alarm anyone here raised alarms in his mind.

Alarms that did not abate for quite a while after that because while he did not know much about children and how to raise them, he did know that you were supposed to not keep them locked in a room for months on end, and not check up on them save for the single visit a day.

He had no issue with it since, adult-ish software, but that did mean that his prospect of having a good life with good parents went down the drain. The room itself was extravagant, with carpet that probably cost as much as his salary back when he was working for…for…..

He squeezed his eyes and hands as his accidental effort to remember part of his past sent in lancing strikes of pain, not just in his mind but also all throughout his body. Something to do with being a baby, he supposed. 

Full body migraines. Fun.

When he opened his eyes once more, his gaze went to his hand, which was, up until a moment ago, gripping the crib, and now? It had bent the metal frame of the crib. His hand shot up from the crib as he stumbled a bit and sat down on his ass, looking at the dented metal with the imprint of his hand on it. 

Shocked, he crawled forward a bit, to see if his eyes were not playing games on him. Yup, that was a hand imprint alright. He blinked, rubbing his eyes to check if he was hallucinating. The vision in front of him even passed the pinch pain test, which meant either it was true or he never left that nothingness, and his mind, or what was left of it anyway, was just hallucinating everything to give him respite in the final moments.

No. He shook his head, rejecting the latter option. This felt way too real for it to be a dream. Plus, that pain should have woken him up, and as far as he could remember, he had never lucid dreamed before….

A familiar dull throbbing emerged in his mind, and he only had time to think Oh shit, before his mind was assaulted by the same lances of pain, making him grunt. If he was not hallucinating the whole thing, this time, the pain was not as unbearable as before. Sure, the shit was painful, but compared to before, it was not blacking out pain.

When the entire ordeal was done, he just collapsed on his back and stared straight up, at the ceiling, his eyes growing heavy as he fell asleep with barely a struggle, unlike the past, where he fought the sleep with all he had out of fear of finding himself back in the realm of nothingness.