I looked down at my torso, simply unable to come to terms with the fact there was no longer anything below it. I had been cut in half by the lord of demons which only meant I would die soon.
It was kind of funny, I didn't even feel the pain, it was just... acceptance. We all knew we would lose this battle. Even if we had been hailed as humanities best but compared to the demons we were hardly anything special, they were simply a superior race. More intelligent, stronger, faster, more powerful magic and far more brutal.
It was nearly twenty years ago that they managed to find a way into our world and now the last humans were about to die.
No... all the others were already dead.
The last human was about to die.
So now was time for the last resort, return magic. We had found it long ago but the material components of the spell were so scarce we had only been able to make a singular one and that very one was inscribed on the base of my neck and around my skull, as was how it was made. It had to copy the mind and spirit after all but it didn't care about anything else, so why would it be inscribed on any other part of my body?
We didn't know exactly how it worked, the ruins we found it from was heavily damaged but remarkably this one spell was still completely intact. The writing around it, or the writing we could piece together and translate described it as a greater being's magnum opus. We figured out as much as we could about the spell from both the ruins itself and from analysing the spell itself but we didn't find out an incredible amount. Only how to apply and activate it.
Countless of our plans flew through my mind, about how we needed to learn as much as we could before I returned, how we would try find materials for as many of them as we could manage to make both for the current moment and where these materials had been in the past for when the return happens so we can once again use the spell, about when we would return to, what we would do once we had returned.
Once I return.
I was beginning to lose consciousness, made obvious by the fact I was barely able to see anymore.
Before that could happen I forced my mana to circulate, pushing and pushing with all the strength of soul I could muster then released it into the spell as I drifted off.
—
My eyes could only see static, countless colours and shapes which reminded me of how I used to press my eyes in as a child and would see strange lights, I always wondered why that happened.
This was very different though, in very many ways. The most apparent one to me currently was the fact that it was painful, VERY painful. It was like thousands of needles pricking my entire body, as if a tattoo artist was simply inking my whole body, inside and out. I was glad I wasn't quite lucid enough to fully process the pain, or maybe I was just completely out of it mentally.
Even if I did feel the full brunt of the pain I wouldn't care, it was to return back to the past after all. In the face of that, any pain is worth it.
—
I opened my eyes to see luscious green trees above me with the sunlight poking into my eyes. I didn't care that it burnt my eyes, it felt peaceful. The smell was no different to moments before in the demon lord's war camp though weirdly.
Maybe it was something like ptsd I reasoned, my mind just simply unable to forget that horrifying stench. I wanted to look around, just simply to put my mind at ease and make my dumb human brain realise we are back in the past and there is no danger here but I didn't have the strength to move my body.
My soul was absolutely spent, it was rare that one's soul itself could be felt but currently i felt it and it absolutely ached. Because of that I simply didn't have the force of will to move my body, this was pretty much to be expected though. Traveling through time was bound to be extremely harsh on a soul.
Minutes passed as I laid there on the ground, as I did my mind drifted. Trying to figure out when exactly I had ended up but it was weird. I didn't recall being anywhere like this, which is especially weird considering how good my memory is. My memory was the whole reason I was the one to return.
Eventually I mustered up the strength I could to sit up. It was like trying to hold up a boulder with a stick but I eventually managed to push off the ground enough to sit up.
As I did, I went light headed. I saw bodies, seventeen bodies… The same size of party as the assassination team to kill the demon lord.
I hadn't returned back, I was still here. There was no returning to the past, there were no do overs, no changing the fate of the human race. I was stuck, here and now. stuck with the fact I am now the last human.
Fear and dread like nothing I had ever felt before washed over me. I had such confidence in the fact that this spell I had forgotten the fear of any consequences. I simply thought all those mistakes, all those regrets, all those deaths would be washed away and so all those emotions had been erased. Why would I truly care about those who suffered around me… those who suffered because of me if all of this would be erased anyway? But it wasn't erased, all those moments actually happened and there was no undoing it.
I took to my feet in a daze, I tried to take a step forward but collapsed, slamming into the ground. I laid with my face in the dirt, just sobbing into the grass.
—
I woke with an indescribable thirst, my throat was dry and each of my breaths felt like sand paper scraping up and down inside me.
Even through the weakness I forced myself up to my feet, in the back of my mind i felt like there was something wrong with that but it was ignored in service to my primal instinct of absolute thirst.
My head jolted around until it found it, a small stream with water glistening like the most precious liquid known to man. Its beauty may have stunned me if not for the fact my body was already sprinting towards it out of thirst, continuously tripping as it did so.
Right as I was above the little stream I tripped and fell right into it, hitting my head on a rock. The pain didn't mean anything to me, I had found water and there was nothing that would stop me.
My body fell on top of the water, my mouth was filling with water. I didn't have the strength to even cup my hands and drink. I took gulp after gulp of water even as my lungs began screaming at me to breathe. I rolled onto my back and felt the water rush through my hair, down my black and under my legs.
My legs… I had legs. I suddenly shot up, looking down at my lower body. I still had the vest and armour on but below my torso I was completely naked. At the same time I noted that my head no longer hurt, wiped my hand over the spot where I had been hit. I pulled my hand down to see blood, lots of it but I hadn't actually felt the wound itself. It was as if it had already completely healed.
My brain began to piece things together, like bricks falling into place more and more things began to make sense. I recalled what the actual translation for the great one was.
'The Timeless Lord'
We thought it was a faulty translation and they called them what is essentially the god of time in credit for them creating a spell to return to the past. It would be a miraculous feat even back then when magic was far more advanced than now so would be worthy of such a title but now it was obvious.
The man was an immortal, he had created a spell to make someone immortal. Resetting their body to what it had been in their prime and keeping it that way.
I wasn't a returner, I was an immortal.