The first sense to return to Kaito wasn't sight or hearing, but pain. A raw, stabbing, omnipresent pain that reminded him at every moment he wasn't floating in nothingness, but anchored to an infernal reality.
He opened his eyes. Instead of the familiar fluorescent light of his hospital room or the bright blue sky of the Isekai portals he'd dreamed of with his brother, there was only a thick, wet, clinging darkness. The air reeked of mold, excrement, and, disturbingly, rotten magic.
He was chained. Not with smith-forged shackles, but with thick strands of some biological material, cold and vibrant, that dug into his skin down to the bone.
"Is this an Isekai? Is this what Ren and I always wanted?"
He sat up with a dry cough, feeling every atrophied muscle. Around him, the cave was a quagmire. Other figures, barely gaunt silhouettes, moaned in the gloom. Kaito recognized the desperate faces: refugees, slaves, the outcasts of some great conflict. Tragedy was their new atmosphere.
A woman with long, pointed ears turned toward him. She was an Elf, though her mythic beauty was wilted by filth. Her eyes, once bright as jade, now reflected only deep fear.
"Silence, boy. If the Paladins of Light hear you..."
Kaito frowned. The Paladins of Light. In the novels, they were the heroes.
"The Heroes?" he murmured, his throat rough.
The Elf spat on the ground with a mix of rage and resignation.
"There are no heroes here, child. Only tyrants in gleaming armor. We're in the depths of the Vorthus salt mine. We belong to the Heroes. We work till we die, and if you survive, you die anyway."
A gut-wrenching scream echoed in the adjacent passage, followed by the metallic sound of a whip and an energy burst that momentarily lit the cave. Kaito saw his hands. They were thin, dirty, but not his own. He was in the body of a malnourished teenager, bruised and starved.
Reincarnation had come with a one-way ticket to slavery.
A thought hit him like a punch: Ren. His older brother, with whom he'd shared the dream. Had he arrived too? And if so, where was he now? Was he fighting this tyranny, or had he adapted differently to this world?
Physical pain mingled with growing despair. The cold air and dampness seeped into his bones. But then, beneath the weight of the biological chains, Kaito felt something unusual. A slow, heavy vibration, like a heart beating in the darkness.
The cave's dark magic seemed to recognize the desperation of its new inhabitant. The suppressed dark energy was an agonizing balm to his soul.
"If this is the path I've been given, I'll start from zero. And I'll make Ren proud... if he remembers me."
In the mine's blackness, Kaito closed his eyes and, instead of praying to gods, invoked the same dark, resilient spirit he'd admired in the toughest protagonists of his novels.
The path of ascent, no matter how bloody, had just begun.