Chapter 2: Chapter One
Somewhere in a nearly empty and dimly lit building, a pair of nurses-in-training on their night-shift continued their animated conversation.
"Oh, come on, relax! It's New Year's Eve!", Lady One sitting on her desk complained in their Jinsong language, "Everybody else is enjoying their celebration at home, while we will be staying here for the whole of next week and watching over this place with only one patient! It not like we haven't done something like this before anyways... "
The other one, Lady Two, remained silent for a while. Her face was conflicted. Should she stay or should she go?
Then Lady Two argued back, "Last year was last year. What if we leave this building unwatched and the girl suddenly wakes up? What then, huh? I would rather not go to a New Year's party than loose my hard-earned job on a whim."
"Okay, you are right! A party would be too much. I still want my job after all... But at least take a break and go out to eat something with me, please? I am starving!"
Usually, her willful personality wouldn't allow her to give up, but in this special case, reason was stronger than her disappointment. Now, onto her next target: The closest convenience store she could find for a 'quick' celebratory snack.
"Yeah, let's do that. I am also very hungry!", Lady Two explained and together they quickly left the monitoring staff room.
In the building it was as empty as a ghost town. Only a few background noises broke the silence. The automatic lights were turned off in the empty hospital-like building and the clock on the wall continued its infinite loops of ticking.
Minutes after the departure of the nurses, the control room was suddenly filled with the steadily increasing beeping and buzzing of the heart monitoring machine. It broke through the prevalent routine of sounds.
Like thunder the sound reached an unnatural high thumping, while in another room, in which the aforementioned female patient lie, a sudden otherworldly shout could be heard. It was exactly like how you would imagine a banshee that took the wrong medication.
"NOOOOOO! AAAAAAHHHHH!!!"
With a jolt the girl on the bed sat upright. Only to gasp in pain a second later. She was as pale as the white hospital bedsheets and her neatly combed short, brown hair stood on edge.
Where are the monsters? The man-eating plant? Wasn't it right behind me? And the explosion... This was how I died...! Looking left and right in panic, Tessa soon realised that everything around her was back to how she remembered it.
Unfamiliar yet normal... Hah! Normal? Well, as normal as anything my past self has experienced can be. I am saved. I am back!
It was evident that she was in a health facility, but she didn't know why. Did I faint after falling asleep for too long again?
The last thing that Tessa could clearly remember was her falling asleep in her grandparent's home on the night of her 8th birthday, which was coincidentally also the 1st day of the New Year.
She could still remember seeing the fireworks burst in the sky above the entirety of Kingdom Estana and her hometown, Adrein in particular.
With the intention of finding someone to help her, she pressed the red button for the nurse room and tried to speak, "He-- Ehem. H--hello? Can anybody hear me?" Unfortunately, her mouth was drier than sandpaper, making this small goal a lot harder to achieve.
Silence.
Nevertheless, she tried it again after clearing her throat.
"Is there anybody? Please?"
Still nobody answered her. A little groggy, she stayed on the bed and rested her head on the pillow. Why am I here? And why did I have to remember my last life? Where is my family...
Her eyelids became heavier. Soon enough the rest of her energy reserves were depleted and she fell back into a dreamless sleep. The clock continued to tick and the area was quiet again.
In another store just two blocks away from the facility, the nurses were busy talking the whole night long and didn't even bother to think about going back to the jobs they were handsomely paid for.
The next morning, single rays of light woke the sleeping Tessa. A genuine smile appeared on her face and she slowly opened her eyes filled with new determination and hope.
My dream was free of those monsters.
A miracle!
No more sleepless nights that end with dark eyebags under my eyes.
Tessa thought about the possibilities that the knowledge of her past and the end of her nightmares gave her, with a dazed look on her face.
So, this is what it feels like to live! Getting up without nightmares. Without those unsightly dark circles under my eyes! The only thing missing are people to talk to... Why is nobody here? Oh no, is the apocalypse here already? That's impossible!
Tessa reached for the remote on her side table and hesitantly switched on the TV opposite her bed. The news channel was on the screen and the muted anchor was just about to recount the most breaking events of the day but her brain could only focus on the right side of the screen.
More specifically, the corner with the time and the current date.
For a moment, happiness was the only thing Tessa felt, before what she saw made reality crash in on her like a wave. She still had a long way to go until the apocalypse started...
BUT WHY was the current date the 1st January of the year 20XJ.
"WHAT?! Wasn't it the Year 20XH? How can this be? I was asleep for 2 years!" Tessa was shocked by the news. She remembered the feeling of being trapped in her apocalyptic nightmares. The time frame that she had to live through again was at least around three decades long.
From that alone, Tessa concluded those dreams had to be her memories of a different lifetime. What she did not expect was that it would take two years to finish.
"What should I do now? Why am I alone here? Where are mom and dad?", she stammered confused and her head felt like it was about to break in two.
Falling asleep as a mentally handicapped 8-year-old child and waking up with a tortured 40-year-old soul in the body of a 10-year-old - the disorientation was no joke.
On the bright side, at least she knew her youth was a lie and her favourite novels couldn't be trusted.
"How should I behave when I see them again? They didn't abandon me here, did they?" Too much information at once overwhelmed Tessa and tears appeared in the corners of her eyes. Hugging her aching legs closer to her, she cried and cried. This emotional breakdown of hers dragged on into the early afternoon and was interrupted by her stomach's insistent grumbling.
Wipping away the remaining tears, Tessa carefully removed the things attached to her and slowly moved her legs out of the elevated bed. At first everything seemed to be fine, but after only one step, her knees gave in and she fell forward. Face first greeting the tiles.
Embarrassed, Tessa grumbled, "Luckily nobody saw that... I seem to have a lot of work ahead of me. It's either now or never! If I don't training myself to my previous physique, won't I become a waste in the Apocalypse of 20XS with these puny legs? Maybe I can even convince dad to let me start my training..." Thinking about it her mind drifted off.
In addition to her body condition, the 10-year-old Tessa had to also worry about her age. It was a fact that if she acted more mature than her age she would have to end her once in a lifetime chance of acting like a spoilt child and if she played dumb she wouldn't be able to skip grades and learn the skills she lacked in her past life.
This dilemma was something nobody could understand! Her worries were on a whole new level of crazy.
"If somebody had told the Old Me - the most efficient secret agent and the youngest assassin ever - that I would live my next life stuck in the body of a child, I would have made them disappear from the face of the Earth for cursing me, but now...", she sighed and told herself, "I want to use this opportunity to play around and have fun with my family, while it still lasts."
In Tessa's previous life, a group of people from an organisation kidnapped her from an orphanage at the age of 5 because of her 'genius' mind working faster than her peers and forced her to undergo a brainwashing, strenuous training up until the age of 10.
From then on she had to act in different missions, or work as a target practice figure, get hit, take poison and die. With neither choice being something she really wanted, she chose the cowardly way of living.
They ranged from disguised information collecting and hacking to language mediating and killing.
Never questioning their orders, Old Tessa knew from the first mission onwards that what she did was wrong, but then again she delusionally reasoned with herself that at least everything she did, had a justified reason for it to happen. Even now from the perspective of a child, she knew how wrong she was!
Tessa's messed up life became even worse when the Apocalypse started.
Zombies emerged from left and right, and wherever you looked you saw ugliness in the flesh. Docile plants evolved into living and aggressive beings. Human nature made their instinct to survive raise its ugly head.
On the streets murder became a daily occurrences and the governments' Fortresses changed into places of oppression.
Some of Tessa's informants' reports even said that they took on similarities to tyrannical monarchies, crowning new royals - based on the amount of 'natural purity' their power cores possessed.
Just a bunch of some messed up clowns! Cores naturally evolved to higher levels the more you went hunting... Or the more power you actively absorbed, which led to the creation of zombie farms (but that was a horror story for another time).
The Old Tessa died trying to save a child from falling into a sea of zombies - The Abyss - after being chased by a hostile plant. In Old Tessa's last moments of life she remembered an enormous explosion behind her and the cries of the saved child, before everything went dark.
This was the life she recalled.
Belly crawling to the bathroom door, she pulled herself up from unintentionally wiping the floor.
"No more waiting. I have to move otherwise I'll go mad from loneliness and a shower is exactly, what I need right now. Maybe I should relearn how to walk too... Where should I start? There are too many things I have to do!"
Closing the door, Tessa soon figured out how to turn the shower on without falling in on herself as a humanoid blob of jelly and came out feeling like a living person again.
Afterwards she sat down on a nearby stool and tried to get some feeling into her almost non-existent leg muscles. And miraculously, Tessa could stand up without support!
"Finally, I can stand!", she exclaimed and calmly moved in front of the mirror.
Up until that moment Tessa hadn't realised how much her body grew in height. For a 10-year-old she was extremely tall with her about 150cm. "Can laying comatose in bed have this effect?", she wondered.
Her hair was also one of the major changes in her appearance. From what Tessa could remember, she used to have a blazing red colour in her past life, but now she had a hazelnut brown bobcut with a pair of emerald green-blue eyes.
Pleased with how her complexion didn't look too bad, she moved onto the wardrobe, where she hoped to find a pair of clean clothes.
Fortunately, in one of the shelves were a set of underwear, her forest green t-shirt dress that she used to love and a pair of socks with matching brown ballerinas ready for use.
Tessa suspected that her parents had come to visit her short before she woke up for the first time, so all she had to do was find some food and somehow call her parents.
Weekly Power Status
-- Power
Ranking 
-- Power
stone