[OLD] So I'm a Snake, So What? (Kumodesu x OC)

Step 2: All That Will Never Be

For a month. I'd been trying to figure out where it was I ended up after I got "killed" by that Wyrm in the Middle Stratum of the Great Elroe Labyrinth. Was I trapped in some kind of limbo? Was I locked up in some imaginary prison?

Who knows? All I could tell was that I was just... existing. I wasn't in pain—hell, I couldn't feel anything at all. And that fact alone was enough to drive me up a non-existent wall.

I'd already lost my hands when I got reincarnated into that stupid snake body D threw me into, making it just about impossible to navigate through a good portion of the Labyrinth. That showed when I got cremated by that stupid wyrm.

Pain Resistance didn't do a damn thing to make the whole process any less agonizing—I could feel skin, flesh and scale alike burning to a crisp by the second. Until eventually,

Darkness.

And that's where I stayed. In the pitch black of non-existence, each second ticking bye as I replayed my own death over and over again in my mind which somehow retained its consciousness. Time and time again, I replayed the events, thinking of every possible solution—trying to think up every single play I could've made to get out of that situation.

But not a single one came to me.

I had backed myself into a corner as soon as I got onto that seahorse. The only way I could've made it out would've been if I'd gotten lucky and had drawn the attention of one of those catfishes. One off them would have made for a decently easy kill, and an even better mount once I got it under Creature Training.

But that would have been far too situational. Even with Probability Correction, the odds of that would've been way too low. At best I would've just run into another seahorse. At worst, I would've run into a full-blown Fire Dragon.

But even though I knew it was pointless—that there was nothing I could've done to make it out of that alive—I kept going. Time. And time. And time again. Over and over.

Like playing the same footage, on loop, indefinitely. It was starting to drive me crazy.

Each time I thought about it again, it got to me more. Whether it was anger, or sorrow, I couldn't tell. It all muddled together after a while.

The situation didn't get any better when I found myself finally being able to perceive... well, anything. All five senses—after going so long without any of them, they all came back to me in an instant, flooding my mind with all sorts of sounds and smells and feelings. But what took all the excitement and relief out of it; made it damn-near infuriating to have them; was the fact that none of them were my own. Everything I was feeling, everything I was seeing, smelling, touching!

None of it. Was. My. Own.

All that I was perceiving was through this strange individual known as Fritz Tsukurai—a person I'd never met or heard of before, apparently piloting the body of a bat monster. A bat monster back in the Lower Stratum of the Great Elroe Labyrinth.

In the end, all getting sensory abilities did was add more pieces to an already broken and unsolvable puzzle I had been trying to put together for what felt like an eternity.

And to make matters worse, when I had finally put one piece of the puzzle together, after figuring out that, even in wherever-the-hell I was, I was still capable of using Appraisal, both on things Fritz was seeing, and on myself.

And through these appraisals, I had noticed a trend—with every level Fritz was gaining, and with every large step in progression he made, some of my own skills would degrade. Whether it was some kind of coincidence or not, the timing was far too specific.