CHAPTER ONE

Reborn Into the Army

It’s often said that life flashes before our eyes in the moments preceding our death, and I guess that was true enough. For as I lay there on my deathbed — the beeping monitors heralding the finale of my tired existence — I saw them there superimposed over the paneled white ceiling common in most hospitals. It was like viewing a photo album with each page turning to a cringe-worthy moment in a life that had been plagued by indecision and mediocrity.

I started out well enough. A bouncing baby boy filled with the vigor and zest most kids possessed. Mine was a fairly normal childhood too, with a brief flash of inquisitiveness and daring that made me stand out in those early years. Sports, studies, even social interactions, I had these locked.

Then came the first stirrings of fear — that desire to blend in with the crowd most of us slide into once we were old enough to understand what peer pressure and cliques were. After all, the nail that stands out gets hammered, and kids could get very cruel with those who weren’t part of their pack.

I wished someone had told me it was okay to be unique, to stand out and just be you. Perhaps then I would have tried my best to rise to my potential instead of dulling the sharpness that had been childhood’s blade so that I wouldn’t cut myself unnecessarily.

Life after school wasn’t so bad, either. A perfectly regular college earned me a lackluster diploma which then got me into an acceptable career that ensured a perfectly normal future. It was all tediously dull and static. And I was pretty sure this mediocre path had snuffed the life out of me long before I received my diagnosis.

It was a Friday. I’d scheduled a visit with my doctor because I was feeling more fatigued than usual. I’d lost a bit of weight, too. Then, after a single test to confirm one’s worst fears, my world shattered around me.

There was this moment in the seconds after I heard the doctor say the words, “I’m sorry,” when my mind just went blank and my surroundings tilted sideways. Suddenly, I was lost, confused, angry, frustrated — all these emotions raging inside of me — which was when I realized I’d wasted my life because I chose to be normal rather than attempt to be extraordinary.

Here I was months later, dying on a hospital bed alone and contemplating a life deprived of its potential. No, I didn’t get many visitors. For most, that pack we join as kids had an expiration date. And as the monitor’s beeping slowed down at the conclusion of my twenty-seven years, the last words to escape my lips were, “I wish I could do it all over again... I’d do my best... to live a life worth living.”

I died. Then darkness took me, and I strayed out of thought and time. No afterlife, just that inky void where the stars wheeled overhead and every day felt like reliving a lifetime on the Earth. But I didn’t end up with eternal rest. I felt breath in me again.

It was the crying. They’re what I heard first — the sounds of babies crying all around me. It was the worst wake-up call in the world.

Alright, alright... I’m up, so shut up already. Only, I didn’t actually say that. Instead, the words that escaped my lips were, “Waah, waah, waah~~h!”

Oh. My. God...

My eyes blinked open, and after adjusting quickly to the brightness, I found myself staring up at a paneled white ceiling. This suggested that I was back in my hospital room, and that thought calmed me down. But I could still hear the babies crying all around me, and when I tried to call for a nurse, all I got was, “Goo, goo, goo...”

In a panic, I turned my head left and then right — noticing how difficult this was to do, as if I wasn’t as attuned to my body as I should be — and discovered that I was surrounded by a metal barricade on all sides.

What the fuck...

Two pale-faced and blonde-haired giants in black military uniforms appeared above me. Nope, they were just men, although they looked enormous for some odd reason. The lankier of these men poked and prodded me with one of his fingers.

Hey, asshole, it’s rude to pinch a grown man you don’t know in the stomach, is what I would have said, but my actual words were, “Goo, goo, waah!”

Great, my vocabulary was limited to these two words... what the fuck was wrong with me? And why does my voice sound so damn tiny?

“Blonde and blue-eyed... Eurian perfection,” the lankier man said in an approving tone.

Okay, at least I understood him. I guess that meant my cognitive functions were working well enough. Wait... Eurian perfection...? Where have I heard something like that before?

“Do you think he’ll be blessed with the spark, Major?” the lankier man’s companion asked.

“We’ll know soon enough, Lieutenant... At the very least, he will become useful breeding stock in the future,” the major replied. “Come... let us inspect the next babe in this nursery.”

They left me there in a daze while my mind tried to make sense of their conversation. Although there were plenty of red flags in what I’d just heard, the one that really stood out was the fact that they thought I was a babe. No, I didn’t think they meant I had become some ‘hot woman’ either.

What did they mean, though...?

When I raised my left arm to inspect my hand, I found five pudgy little fingers in front of me.

Eh... Eh~~h! I’m a freaking baby?!

Unfortunately, I couldn’t give in to the panic swelling up inside me because I heard the two men speaking over the crib next to mine, and it sounded like something was wrong with it.

I forced my tiny body up so I could peek over the crib’s metal barricade. Seriously, just the act of sitting up took herculean effort, and my body ached all over with sweat coating my back by the time I managed to see past my crib.

“This girl has dark hair and dark eyes...” The major was giving the baby inside the crib a disgusted look that kind of made me want to punch him in the face with my tiny fist. “We don’t want this one... dispose of it.”

No, no, no, no... Are you fucking kidding me?! She’s a baby, man!

It wasn’t like they could hear me screaming in my mind, but my glare followed the lieutenant as he picked the dark-haired baby up and carried her off to the far side of the nursery.

Don’t do it... Don’t you do it, dammit?!

The lieutenant pushed open the door.

Have a conscience, man!

He passed the child over to a man and woman waiting outside the door. Both of them were blonde and pale-faced and beautiful in a youngish TV star kind of vibe. They looked happy to see the baby, and they carried her in their arms in a way that suggested they might not actually be out to murder her.

Uh, what’s happening? I’m so confused!

The lieutenant returned to the major who had moved on from the next baby which he’d already passed because the child was blonde and blue-eyed like me, apparently.

“The Wagners were happy to adopt the defective child, sir,” the lieutenant reported.

“I don’t care, and neither should you.” The major gave his lieutenant an icy glare. “Children unfit for the primarch’s arcanist program are none of our concern... am I clear?”

“Ye-yes, sir,” the lieutenant replied.

He turned away from his superior’s glare, and that’s when his eyes drifted over to me. I watched his green irises widen in surprise before I realized I was sitting up in my crib, something I didn’t think babies could do immediately after they were born.

Shit... can’t get caught now.

I quickly plopped back down into my bed and did my best to look inconspicuous just in case the lieutenant went back to inspect me a second time, which he did. He spent a whole minute searching my face and poking my toes, causing me to squeal like a child — so embarrassing — before the major called the lieutenant back to his side, leaving me safe from discovery.

By the end of the day, the number of babies in the nursery dwindled from a hundred-and-fifty to a meager twenty-five of us — yep, I’d taken a headcount when no one was looking. Sadly, not all the babies had been adopted, and I didn’t know what became of those children who weren’t given new parents.

I hope they were sent to an orphanage and not... Sheesh, where the fuck am I?

Later on, a couple of beautiful women arrived at the nursery, one for each crib. They were all blonde and blue-eyed too — and I was beginning to see a pattern here. They picked us up from our cribs, with me feeling hot in the face from embarrassment, and drew us close to their breasts.

Wow, I didn’t know they could get that big.

Luckily, babies didn’t get hard-ons because I was definitely thinking about stuff babies shouldn’t be thinking about. And since this gorgeous woman wasn’t my mom, I didn’t feel too guilty about enjoying myself during this, uh, feeding time. Still, the small part of me that wasn’t focused on this wonderful act asked a question I didn’t have an answer to yet.

What the hell was going on?

The months passed by rather quickly as we continued on a routine of inspection, feeding, and sleeping just as if we were animals at a farm. Within that time, I came to realize a couple of things.

First, I had definitely been reborn as a baby just like in those light novels I used to love reading. Honestly, I would have preferred resurrecting as a different type of species like a slime or spider in a fantasy world that didn’t scream racism to my adult brain, but I couldn’t exactly complain about a second chance at life while looking like the baby version of Thor from the movies. I mean, I could see my reflection on the crib’s metal surface and I looked damn fine for a baby.

Second, I was definitely in another world. The snatch of conversations I caught between the nursemaids and military officers observing me and my fellow babies proved that enough.

The information I’d gleaned from them told me I’d been born in a country called Armestys, which sounded a lot like the word armistice. I thought that seemed ironic since this country was governed solely by its military. It was information I would soon see proof of.

I was five months old by the time I learned to crawl, the first of my nursery mates to do so. As this was a pretty big accomplishment according to the major, it earned me a window-side crib with a view of the backyard so I could, in his words, “Enjoy the splendor of the fatherland!”

Not that a baby would have known how to enjoy that. Well, the man might be an eccentric, but I did appreciate him giving me this benefit as looking through that window daily had been educational.

Every morning, I would sit up and watch dawn’s first rays shed its light on a lawn of fresh-cut grass and the occasional patch of wildflowers. The sky would quickly turn an ideal kind of blue, giving one an impressive vision of idyllic countryside scenery. Then the soldiers would appear on the lawn for their morning drills, and I would watch them train, first in swordplay, which was awesome, and then with guns, which somewhat ruined my fantasy of a swords-and-sorcery world.

Seeing these outdated bolt-action rifles that first time caused my eyes to widen in shock even though they were a far cry from the automatic guns that were so prolific in my old world.

“Load, aim,” the lieutenant ordered his men, “and fire!”

When they unloaded their six-shot magazines on the target dummies that first time, an unbidden thought surfaced in my mind. Yep, this was definitely a military state... but what does that mean for me?

As for me and the other babies, well, according to my big-breasted nursemaid, we were the future champions of the state. Children born from a state-approved breeding program aimed to raise the birthrate of what the major called, “Eurian children,” which basically meant we were racially pure and healthy... and something else. That last bit was the part I didn’t understand yet.

The major and lieutenant referred to it as the ‘spark’ but they were never clear on what exactly this meant. All I knew was that the program’s researchers were constantly hooking us up to tubes and wires connected to these outdated-looking machines — the kind of refrigerator-sized computers with knobs on them that would have been beyond retro back on Earth — and checking our stats for signs of whatever this ‘spark’ was.

This new world wasn’t as advanced as my old one. I noticed that quickly in the old-school gas light chandeliers hanging from the nursery’s ceiling, the lack of proper air-conditioning units, and in the way the nursemaids and soldiers were dressed. Their uniforms were outdated pre-World War II stuff. More importantly, no one had a smartphone, and that was all the proof I needed to know that I could kiss gaming consoles and PCs goodbye. Not that those distractions mattered much anymore.

It was abundantly clear to me that I’d been given a second chance to make something out of myself, and I wanted to do better in this life than I did in the last one. But there lay my dilemma. Did I want to be extraordinary in a place that seemed so wrong in the things that mattered?

Well, I was about to get my answer. You see, it turned out I was pretty special because I was the first among my nursery to awaken this ‘spark’ — and that meant magic, baby.