Bab 1: Same Shit, Different Reality
It's been a while since I'd been on a normal world. A normal Earth.
Many, many years ago, I died. Hit by a truck, ironically. Coincidentally, I woke up moments later in a new world. A world that was both unfamiliar and familiar to me.
It was a world which I knew from a series of games called 'Halo'. I was born to an unlucky woman who died giving birth to me and then put into an orphanage - by the age of six, I was approached by a woman in a lab coat who gave me a challenge of telling her what side of a coin would appear after a coin toss.
My new body was immensely talented in physical matters. Incredible strength, freakish athleticism and above all else terrific reflexes. So, using the latter, I easily saw what side the coin landed on and told her.
That's how I was recruited into the SPARTAN II Project. Designated George-007.
I was trained into the perfect soldier, made comrades of the legendary Master Chief, and gained my augmentations which turned me into an utter beast. I fought in the Covenant Wars. I fought against the Flood. I fought and I fought and I fought, until on a mission with John, I died.
Then I woke up in a new body, this time in the past. Seemingly in Japan, from what I gleamed at first.
I thought I was in a normal world but that was pretty quickly denied when I discovered my Spartan Augmentations had become completely biological and were in my new body. I knew something was up with this world but I let myself go soft because all I wanted after all the fighting I did as a Spartan was some rest.
My new family called me Yuji, our surname was Itadori. The name seemed vaguely familiar to me but decades of fighting had diminished my memories of things from my original Earth.
My softness was taken advantage of by the world when I came home from chopping wood to see my entire family slaughtered, torn to bloody pieces and bloodstains everywhere. My little brother, barely a year old, was being eaten by some monstrous humanoid.
I'd later know this was a Demon. At the time, however, what it was called meant nothing to me - I just wanted to kill it. So I tried.
But no matter what I did to it, it healed and healed. I broke it's bones, stabbed it with whatever I could, ripped open it's torso, lacerated it's major blood vessels, gorged out it's eyes...It just didn't die.
Not until the sun rose and burnt it to ash. By that point, I'd pinned it to the ground with an assortment of sharp, pointy things. When it burned to ash and was gone, I mourned for my new family and buried them, make some stone tombstones and engraved their names on them. My father, mother, twin sister and little brother. All dead. I was used to people dying - dozens of my comrades had died against the Covenant. Even more had died during the Spartan II augmentation procedures.
But my new and young body had new brain chemistry and new hormones...and these deaths were my first in this world. It tore me up and filled me with rage.
And so, I ventured forth into this new world to discover what these monsters were. Because I wanted to kill them.
I quickly found out they were called Demons, and there were people in this world that killed them called Demon Slayers. I went from place to place, trying to join this corps, until I found an old man on top of a mountain who took me in and trained me to become one of these Demon Slayers.
He taught me about how humans couldn't possibly overpower a Demon physically - which was true. Even with Spartan augmentations I had to use my superior combat skills to beat the Demon that killed my family, not my enhanced brawn.
But there was a ray of hope for humans called Breathing Styles. A specific type of swordsmanship styles that makes use of an esoteric breathing technique known as Total Concentration Breathing that allows a user to inhale the maximum amount of oxygen within a specific breath pattern to raise their physical and mental prowess to their utmost limits.
The effects, he told me, include a plethora of enhanced physical and mental abilities, like superhuman physical characteristics (i.e. Strength, Speed, Stamina, Durability and Agility), faster thought processes, maximizing concentration and hyper-information processing. At a more advanced level, Total Concentration is also capable of clotting wounds from severe injuries and slowing down the circulation of poison in the bloodstream.
I needed this, so I learnt it. I learned his style of fighting called Tiger Breathing and long story short, I became a Demon Slayer by the time I was sixteen.
I met more comrades, brothers and sisters I could call a new family. I discovered the origin of the entirety of the Demon scourge, was the first demon, an abomination called Muzan. And I succeeded in killing him. By that point, I'd become a Hashira called the Tiger Hashira and I'd gained the respect and awe of the entire corps. Sadly, I died shortly after the final battle with Muzan because I'd awoken something called a Demon Slayer Mark during the fight, so I died at the young age of 25.
And yet again, I was waking up moments later but this time in my body from the world I'd previously just been in. So, instead of being reborn as a child, I was waking up, standing at my full height of 6'10 and broad shouldered, covered in compact but strong muscles that were obvious even through my Demon Slayer Corps uniform.
I could even see the black tiger stripes just below my eyes when I looked down. I could even feel the scars all across my body from the many years of fighting demons.
Before I could even take in my new surroundings, instincts honed through decades of fighting warned me to dodge - which I did, blurring to the right and dodging a few dozen blasts of what seemed like energy projectiles hit the general area where I'd just been standing. The street blew up, throwing a cloud of dust and debris up into the air. I turned my head and looked to the origin of these shots.
Non-humans, that much was instantly apparent to me. Tall, gangly frames - about two meters tall - and covered in armor which seemed fused into their body. Crude cybernetic augments were sticking out of them as well, not to mention the soft hum of some sort of reactor that I could sense in their core.
Cyborg aliens. Of course I'd have the luck to go up against such things.
There were about thirteen of these aliens which seemed ever so familiar to me, but what really caught my attention was the pile of human corpses behind this squad. Charred and burnt, with holes blown out of them in places and some even missing limbs or heads.
My jaw clenched and I reached for my blade that was still attached to my waist. "Good to know you're just like those Demon bastards," I said, more to myself than to these unknown assailants, before rushing them and drawing my sword to cut them down.
They couldn't even react before I'd cut their heads off and put them down. They weren't even on the level of the lowest level Demon, let alone someone like Muzan.
I said a prayer for the humans who'd died and finally took in my surroundings in detail.
I saw from the blown up pavement that I wasn't in the past like before. Tarmac. Something I hadn't seen for a long time. But looking up at the buildings and seeing the ruined cars around, I knew I wasn't in a futuristic place like 'Halo'. I was in the in between. Not the future, nor the past but more like the present. Like my original world. The architecture didn't seem eastern but reminded me very much of America - it's good to be back, I guess.
Judging by the big buildings and the skyscrapers I can see in the distance, I'd say this is a big city of sorts. Cold-ish weather, so I'd say I'm on the upper East Coast. New York? Most likely.
Sheathing my blade, I looked around for a little while longer before finally beginning to walk.
Where to? I don't know. Finding more of those aliens would be first on my list. Killing them would be second. Hopefully that's enough to avoid something like Reach happening again.
/ / /
Walking the streets, I saw more and more dead bodies and flaming wreckages of cars and buildings. Not only did it enrage me to see this, it sobered me up and reinforced a lesson I already knew - do not let being in a new world soften you.
This world was obviously dangerous, and I needed to be ready to react to it. I'd already killed a hundred or so of these cyborg aliens but I've yet to see a group of humans who are still alive.
I'd studied the alien's biology with Transparent World and it was very human-like. Without the cybernetics, they weren't that much stronger than a human and I'd quickly found out their weak points. Their neck, of course, but also the right side of their chest held a reactor which seemed to power their cybernetics. So my earlier thoughts were proven right.
They were everywhere, like rats. But I was clearly getting closer to other fights as I could hear explosions and gunshots not too far off - kinetic gunshots as well. Not energy weapons.
I jumped from roof to roof, sometimes even running along walls and soon made it to where I found two people - one of them was a tall, broad-shouldered man in a blue costume, padded and armoured with a star placed in the center of his chest. The colour scheme for the costume was very...American. Red, white and blue. The helmet he was wearing covered the top half of his face yet left the bottom part uncovered alongside his eyes - a silvery metallic 'A' emboldened on the forehead section of the helmet.
The other person was a tall woman with an athletic yet buxom physique with long red hair and piercing blue eyes. Her outfit was skin-tight and black, fitted with an assortment of pockets and places for things like ammo and knives.
The weapons they were using were both unusual and normal. The man dressed up like America's Poster Boy was wielding a shield with incredibly efficiency, whilst the woman was using a pair of Russian-made pistols, if I remember correctly. But occasionally she'd use some sort of electric gauntlet to fry the cyborg aliens coming at her when they got too close.
They weren't normal humans. They moved too quick, with too much finesse and with too much power. Superhumans of sorts. Around the level of Spartan II's without their armor on.
I leaped from the building I was on and skewered one of the aliens coming at the man. He looked back at me, his eyes narrowing at my appearance but still nodding in thanks when he saw what I'd done.
Everything about this situation and these people were striking me as familiar but I pushed those thoughts from my head and began massacring the waves of these aliens coming at us now. When some sort of air chariot flew over us, I began jumping and slicing them down but I was called off on one of the approaching ones by the man in the American Flag outfit who flung the redhead up and onto one of them.
When I came back over, we had a brief respite and the man approached me.
"Thanks for the help," he said in somewhat fluent Japanese, which is when I realized how I must look to these guys.
"No worries," I replied in English gaining a somewhat surprised look from the man but he composed himself soon enough as I continued, "Any idea of what's causing all this? You might not believe it but I've had one hell of a day and I just appeared here, without warning."
There was no need to hide my sudden appearance in this world. Anyone who looked would quickly find I had no records or documents to my name - technically, I was an illegal immigrant right now. Didn't have a citizenship nor a visa. Let's just hope stopping this invasion will give me a chance at speedrunning one for myself.
He looked somewhat torn for a moment before he answered me, "A so-called God has come to Earth to conquer it and these aliens are his army. He's got a portal that's letting his army onto Earth. See?" he turned and pointed at a blue beam shooting into the sky and opening up a portal. Out of it flowed a near endless amount of those air-chariots and gigantic beasts which were also fused with machinery.
Huh. How the hell didn't I see that before? I must be going senile or something. My head's too focused on the fighting and not focused enough on the how and why.
Guess because I didn't see spaceships, I assumed they'd been put in here from orbit. New world, new ways of invading, man. Adapt to it before something bad happens.
Composing myself, I looked back to the man, "And what's being done about it?"
"We're trying to help civilians for now but part of my team are trying to get access to the sceptre used by the God who brought about that portal - that's where Widow, the redhead went."
"Hmm," I hummed before looking to the building which had Stark written over the front of it, "Oh," I realized, my mouth twisting upward in a sardonic smile, "So that's how it is," I said to myself before slapping the man on the shoulder, "I'll get the sceptre and close off that portal. Name's Yuji. See you around."
And with that, I was off toward the building which the blue beam was coming from.
The MCU, huh? A nice change of pace. Not easy or sunshine and rainbows by any means but much better than an interplanetary war or the potential degradation of human-kind into cattle. Just an insane purple giant who thinks he's the universe's Messiah and saviour.
It'd been a while - a LONG while - since I'd seen any MCU movies but I could remember a general outline, as of now, of what happens. So, the so-called God is Loki, right?
Let's go see how the puny God is doing then.
/ / /
I passed the falling Tony Stark and dodged the pieces of armor that flew after him, and soon enough I dove through the window he'd just been thrown through.
Loki, a tall and broad man, with raven black hair that cascaded from under his golden horned helmet and intelligent green eyes tinged with an arrogance that utterly ruined his brilliance. It saddened me that such potential was wasted on such silly pursuits like ruling the world or ruling Asgard. None of it made sense to me, really. Ruling just seemed like a lot of hassle for not much in return.
"And of course there's another one," Loki cursed upon seeing me, "I didn't see you on that flying machine - did they hire you like some sort of mercenary? Hm?" he asked and I just continued looking at him before taking a hand off my sword's hilt. His brows furrowed and he seemed to take my silence as provocation, "How is it that whenever I don't want you mortals to talk, you do, but whenever I wish to hear your answers you go silent?" he asked, his voice filled with a venom born of many years of being in Thor's shadow and perceived slights.
"Because I see no reason to answer such a stupid question, Loki, God of Mischief," I addressed him and my use of that title seemed to placate him a little, filling him with a pride at what he was.
"So, why have you come? To tell me how you have a Hulk? Or that my oafish brother Thor is soon to come and stop me? Or is it something new?" he asked, pacing around the room we were in, his boots clacking against the high-quality stone floor below us. He stopped and then looked to me, "Or have you come to switch sides after seeing my might and glorious splendour?"
I cracked a smile at that but shook my head nonetheless, "No, I'm afraid not, Loki. I don't see anything worthy in your quest, nor have I come to speak about how others will stop you. I've come because I will stop you," I confidently proclaimed.
Loki seemed taken aback by my frank answer but I gave him no time to answer as I rushed him.
I employed a stance of my breathing style, the first stance, called Tiger's Pounce, to cross the distance between us in a burst of explosive speed that turned me into a blur even in the so-called God's eyes.
Loki's physiology was much more advanced than the average human, from what I could see with Transparent World. Denser bodily tissue, blood that carried more nutrients and oxygen than the average human - but I wasn't worried. Was I an average human? No. I was naturally superhuman, even without Spartan Augmentations. With them I was even better. With a breathing style, I was even better than that. And with a Demon Slayer Mark? I was possibly the strongest pure human on this planet. Even back in my previous world I was the physically strongest Demon Slayer in the corps.
I was more than a match for Loki. In fact, I was superior in raw power and speed.
Which meant this was about to be my first fight in this new world and I could fully let loose, within reason. Let's see how long it takes for a God to fall before my attacks.
Status Power Mingguan
-- Peringkat
Power 
-- Power
stone