Restoration Berserker Rewrite - A Danmachi Story (Patreon)

AN: Hey all, been around half a year since I updated. Sorry for that, and I'm honored that some of you stuck around this long. Been in a slump when it comes to writing, couldn't make myself do anything and felt pretty depressed about it. Can't say what it was, maybe this random Kizumonogatari AMV I watched, but i got the urge to get back to this story and did so. Got a few chapters so far. I'll keep updating as I go along.

Hope life's treating you all well. 

To anyone who hasn't read the old versions, this is a Danmachi story set with the MC arriving far away from Orario. 

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Disclaimer: I don’t own any source material.

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Chapter 1: Falling Down the Rabbit Hole.

5 years before Bell arrives in Orario.

“Be careful what you wish for, because you may just get it.”

Those words had never been more prominent in his mind than the moment his life changed forevermore.

One moment, he was falling asleep as an ordinary twenty-year-old college student trying to make it through school while listlessly wishing for an exciting life of adventure, and the next, he was waking up in the middle of a god-forsaken desert.

How did an idle wish for a life of adventure lead to waking up in a desert without a soul in sight? He wasn’t sure.

All he knew was that his tiny college dorm room exchanged for an ocean of rolling sand dunes and blistering sunlight.

At first, he thought it might be a dream, only compounded by the fact that a floating status screen, like something out of a video game, hovered in the corner of his gaze, with shifting symbols he didn't recognize. The screen faded in and out and slowly became more solid with every passing minute.

But when the feel of coarse sand rubbed against his skin, as sweat dripped from the beams of light burning intensely upon his skin, and as the earthy perfume of sunbaked clay filled his nose, Marik knew he hadn't ever dreamed up something so realistic.

A part of him wanted to question it, yet it was as if he was stuck in a trance. There was an odd calm as he transitioned from one state to another as if something was settling and he was slowly waking.

He put the floating screen out of his mind and just stared off into the distance from atop the peak of a giant sand dune. Sitting up there and looking on at the vast ocean of yellow sand, the majestic waves of a dry and harsh sea without an end in sight, Marik felt a bubbling confidence in his circumstances.

‘I’ve been drugged. Mom, college kids are scary.’

He had always been a big guy, maybe not the most muscular, and he might have had a gut forming due to years of studying for med school rather than playing sports, but he had the natural endurance of a horse and the frame of a big guy at 6’4.

In his experience, people tended to leave the big ones alone. At least, that was before he started living in a dorm room where anyone could seemingly walk in. Perhaps it was some fraternity prank; he’d heard of them being done before. He’d wake up nude in a teacher’s office with a condom and a Viagra pill taped to his chest.

‘I should have just bit the bullet and gotten that apartment; I could survive off instant noodles and spite, right?’

Marik’s thoughts bounced around on his living arrangements as he searchingly stared off into the distance with a post-nut clarity level of calm, not truly reacting but just being.

It was peaceful.

He could be angry and probably would be when he sobered up, but for the time being, he was just going to enjoy the scenery.

It was quite beautiful and humbling in a way. ‘Imagine if it really was my wish coming true. A life of adventure just waiting behind the next hill. No exams, no annoying people, no expectations.’ He smiled at the thought.

A manly, adventurous romance that called for exploration.

A romance that was brutally crushed harder than his stammering confession to his first crush in 3rd grade as an eighteen-wheeler-sized centipede broke through the surface of the sand and stared down at him with twitching pincers.

“…”

“…”

Man and Monster stared off amongst the majestic dunes, and all thoughts of adventure fled faster than he could think them up.

The monster clicked its glistening mandibles, and like any good Samaritan, Marik nodded his head to the passerby and adjusted his seat to face the other way, ignoring how his heartbeat steadily increased in intensity.

Even if this was some drug-induced imagination, it was important to have manners. Marik's mother taught him that. She also told him not to be racist. So, he was pretty sure her lessons incorporated giant imaginary murder centipedes.

However, her lessons did not include how to deal with giant imaginary murder centipedes with very real-looking fangs that did not return said manners. 

Survival instincts blared, and for the first time since he woke up, the world seemed to snap into full focus like a rubber band snapping into place.

“Holy shit!”

Marik barely moved out of the way as the behemoth crashed into the dune right below the peak he was sitting on. A wave of sheer wind slammed him, skipping him down the mountain like a stone as he hit the heated sand and rag-dolled his way down.

Air whistled as he flew uncontrollably, slamming front-wise and back-wise into the sand as the monster's growls echoed in his ears, hot on his tail.

Not that that was his first concern, as his trip downward was accompanied by the pain of sand grinding against his skin like burning knives.

Pain that had him reacting more than thinking as, by chance, he rolled onto his feet and took off running without a shred of hesitation. He didn't even process his actions as he fled for his life from an imaginative creature that didn't seem so imaginary anymore.

His heart beat in his ears as a monstrous roar made him run with everything he had.

‘This can’t be real, can it?’

Blood dripped from a dozen scrapes, flaring with all too real pain.

‘It’s just in my head.’

The sunlight seemed to turn harsher, making him more aware that he was being terribly sunburnt and that heat stroke was settling in.

‘It won’t matter when I wake up.’

Each step felt like traveling through mud as the sand stole his momentum and ate away at his stamina.

‘I don’t have to run.’

Each breath came out harsh with growing panic as reality began to set in with the thundering steps of the predator behind.

‘This can’t be happening.’

A shadow blotted out the sun, and Marik dared a single look over his shoulder. His eyes widened at the centipede extending its body vertically, towering over him like a human witnessing an ant and making Marik take it in far more detail than before.

Pale golden segmented chitin gleamed in the sunlight. Dozens, if not hundreds, of spindly black limbs twitching. Mandibles dripping saliva as cruel eyes sadistically eyed up its newest prey.

‘This is real…. isn’t it?’

The beast moved, and Marik found that reality had decided to answer his question in the most literal of ways.

The centipede hit the ground like a meteor, stirring up a massive cloud in a deafening explosion of sound and gritty sand, launching Marik through a tornado of suffering as he screamed out his desperate hope of escape. 

He flew as the sand tore away at him, blinding and choking, tumbling through yet more and more fresh burning surface layers of sand, only to find himself once more on his feet, running without being capable of thinking, hoping against hope that he wasn’t snapped up in a hungry maw with every step.

Yet, much to his confusion, the beast didn't catch him, allowing Marik to make some distance. 'Did I lose it?'

The thought barely formed in his mind before the monster burst from the sand behind him as if it had been there the entire time, dropping down and throwing up another explosion of sand and sound, sending him right back into that torturous burning shredder of a tornado with all the feeling of being torn at by a thousand burning paper cuts.

The second time, he had to stumble back onto his feet, making it a minute unmolested before the creature burst up behind him once more and repeated the cycle.

The third time, he was already covered in blood and nearly buried under the sand, a likely death sentence if he didn't keep moving.

The fourth time, he was crawling his way back up, silent tears falling, and the pain begged him to stop.

But he never stopped. He was never allowed to stop. The monster was always there, just a step behind with waiting jaws.

The chase went on for what could have been seconds or minutes, Marik couldn't say, but by the sixth time he got to his feet with a strength he didn't know he had, the monsters' actions couldn't be more apparent as Marik saw its eyes narrowed in an almost human-like delight.

‘It’s playing with its food.’

Sweat dripped from his brow, mixing with blood and sand as he desperately kept it out of his eyes. Great heaving breaths left his lungs, desperately bringing in dry, heated oxygen.

It was like running a marathon inside a sauna. Survival had pushed Marik harder than he ever had been before, the fear of death pushing his body past whatever limit he previously may have had.

Yet in that moment, as he got to his feet the seventh time, as a part of him just wanted to curl up and die to escape the all-consuming pain; seeing those sadistic eyes gleaming at him sparked something deep in his chest.

A spark of anger.

‘I didn’t ask for this.’

A spark of rage.

‘This wasn’t my wish.’

A spark of fury.

‘What kind of bullshit is this?’

A spark of wrath.

‘And how dare this fucker toy with me?!’

Wrath drowned out the fear and pain as a clarity sharpened Marik's mind like never before.

His will to live was eclipsed by his wrath toward his tormentor. Even if all he did was take a single claw, he refused to fall before he made the monster feel an inch of pain for the mile it caused him.

A change occurred in the landscape as the latest explosion sent Marik flying toward an outcropping of stones.

Mid-flight, Marik grabbed ahold of a rough boulder, feeling his skin scrape off for the effort, and flung himself out of the way as the centipede’s massive head flew a bare foot above his own head, smashing into a boulder that stalled it for but a moment as the rock gave way.

But that single second of opportunity was all Marik wanted as his bleeding hands grabbed hold of a gleaming stone shard and jammed it up into the soft underbelly of the beast.

The instant of steaming blood that splashed over his face gave Marik a sense of deranged, spiteful pleasure. Yet, that instant passed in a blink as the next thing he knew, he was being taken for a ride, his stone jammed into the beast from one end and stuck in the flesh of his palm on the other.

The centipede roared its pain like a foghorn as it dragged Marik forward, grinding him against the sand until he slammed into another boulder and came to a brutal stop.

A sickening crack rang out, and Marik learned a new level of pain as one of his arms snapped, shattered at the elbow, and pierced through the palm by the stone shard he had used and dragged along the centipede's stomach as the beast kept moving forward, shearing open its own stomach as the stone cut a third of the way down its body before slipping out, spilling blood and organs like a rain.

A shrieking bellow escaped Marik's own lungs in tune with the centipedes, sounding more like two wounded monsters than a human and beast.

Steaming monstrous blood drenched Marik's entire body from head to toe as electrolyzing energy pumped through him, forcing away the pain and fueling the wrath inside like he was injected in the heart with a lethal dose of liquid adrenaline.

Some cower in fear in the face of adversity, others bravely stand up in the face of it; Marik wasn't either. He stood with spiteful hate as a situation far beyond his understanding made him suffer, and he wasn't about to roll over and die without taking a pound of flesh.

His arm dangled uselessly, bone sticking through the skin in places, but by this point, he was too far gone to notice it.

"Is that all you got, you multi-legged piece of shit!"

Stone and sand exploded as the monstrous centipede rose out of the ground, twitching mandibles clicking with wrath of its own as it stared across at the prey that no longer amused it.

Marik grabbed the stone embedded in his useless hand's palm and yanked it out without feeling a thing, pointing it threateningly at the behemoth. "Come on then!"

The centipede roared and charged, met by a human who refused to die.

Having run from it for so long, Marik knew the creature wasn't as smart as it first seemed. It was a tunneling creature and didn't have a good sense of its surroundings above ground, its eyesight weak in the sunlight that reflected through the rocky stone outcroppings.

Marik used that to his advantage, desperately diving out of the way of its charges and jamming his makeshift weapon wherever he could.

Seconds, minutes, perhaps even an hour passed as the two went back and forth. Death called to them as their lifeblood quenched the desert's thirst.

Marik’s first blow against the creature evened their odds as it gradually lost its speed, dizzyingly tilting from one side to another with more and more gashes aiding in its demise.

But Marik wasn't much better; blood trickled from not only his broken arm but also scrapes and gashes that he had accumulated while learning how sharp the centipedes' legs were. He was beyond exhausted, pushed far beyond his breaking point with a severe case of heat stroke and sunburnt skin only adding to his laundry list.

Yet for all of that, for all of the pain and suffering, he was laughing.

Laughing at the insanity of it all as the odd energy running through his veins kept fueling his high.

One moment, he was just reading a textbook and falling asleep at his desk with worries over his future, and the next, he was clawing his way toward death's door in a scenario he would think to see in a fantasy book.

Nothing made sense. Nothing gave him a warning. Nothing was there to save him.

He had been tossed down the rabbit hole without warning and made to run before he could crawl.

And he reveled in it.

With his brain turned off, facing down a creature that couldn't be real, Marik laughed because that was all he could do. All he was allowed to do.

Laughing intoxicatingly as he bobbed and weaved, stabbed and got stabbed, shed blood, and spilled it in a euphoria he didn't know existed.

The very fact that he could laugh at all was a testament and reward to surviving as long as he had.

And before he knew it, he stood there on legs that had more missing than there, staring straight into eyes half as large as his entire body as man and beast faced off one final time in an arena lost to time.

Caged in on all sides by towering stone, sand stirring in wind blowing through cracks, and a sole beam of sunlight shining down through the roofless sky.

Just a man facing a monster with nothing else in sight.

Nothing was spoken. Nothing could be spoken.

All that could be shared was a silent feeling of respect that crossed species as a wild monster regarded its prey in the eyes as an equal for the first time in its admittedly short life.

By some unseen signal, the two charged the other one final time.

Sunlight flickered as Marik took advantage of the sole light beam, reflecting off the crumbling stone shard held in his hand, blinding the centipede as the human’s legs gave out with his final burst, throwing his entire weight behind one final blow.

As stone and mandibles pierced flesh, two piercing howls echoed throughout the desert, echoing along the wind for miles around until two became one, and one became none.

Marik would remember that moment.

In this life and the next, that moment would never leave the core of who he was.

It was the moment when he learned the true feeling of freedom with the intoxicating joy that came with achieving it.

And it was in that moment, as the light faded from his eyes, that his mind subconsciously registered a drop of golden liquid falling from the heavens above, landing on his forehead with the sound of chimes.

Chapter end.