Nogin Tales

Hungry

Hunger was something unusual in my small unknown village when I was a baby. I was nothing but skin and bones along with everyone in the village.

Everyone was nice to one another even so, I never understood the reason why. The little food that our village had was mainly poorly grown vegetables and the small barely fat filled rabbits that the adults would sometimes catch.

My everyday life as a child would go from sleeping from lack of nutrition to sitting silently by my shabby and collapsing home. If it even was a home. The winters were worse, people would die, and seeing as we were not even overpopulated, my small town would become smaller. In the end there were only twenty four people inculting me.

I had a little brother, he was one of the victims from the harsh winters. He had barely turned six while I was ten. My parents were nice people, they fell in love with eachother in the small village and didn't even try to leave such a horrible place. My mother was delicate and cosiderate to everyone she would meet, which was no one since there were never travelers that would pass by. But every one knew her kind heart, if one of the orphaned children were to go without eating she would give her own portion to them. I never understood why they would even bother to have children in the first place. It's simply an extra mouth to feed when the village couldn't afford to feed them.

But their hunger ended when a horrible winter brought in a dangerous monster. It was a snow leopard, master level, they didn't even see it coming, as they senses were too much lacking from the little food they would eat everyday.

But I had seen it, yet I didn't warn them. I would still think about it to this day as to why I didn't do it. Maybe I felt sorry for them for suffering for so long? I wanted my own pain to go away along with everyone elses. I even felt joy when it began to slaughter the village, hoping that it will come for me next after the last one was ripped to shreds.

Yet before it could even pounce on me my own mother slammed me to the floor, her body wasn't heavy, she too was also skin and bones. But for a child of a ten year old who also lacked any kind of amount of fat she weighed a ton back then.

She smeared her blood on my face as she shed tears of sadness. She said one word to me before she passed away, my father no where in sight. "Live."

With that single word I froze, it was probably because of the hitting snow under me, or my own fear of death as I made no sound, even passing out from not risking to breathe. Yet when I had woken up I wasn't greeting with the afterlife, instead the heavy weight of my mother still on top of me while I was surrounded by rotting corpses.

I knew now why I had woken up, it was from the horrid smells of everyone else being dead.

I lived on after that fateful day, in all honesty I wasn't sure how I made it off that ice death trap in the first place. All of it was hazy, as if my feet and arms were moving on their own and the next thing I knew I was on a moving wagon, no longer shivering in the cold as the sun shined warmly up above me.

My mother's single word had kept me going, I didn't know why, I was probably the only one in that village who was fine with dying by the hands of a snow leopard.

The years had gone by as I meet enemies who I had thought were friends, we trained and traveled, joined a guild and traveled some more as we took up many low ranked jobs as our levels grew higher and higher. Yet as they did the low ranked jobs were of no use to us as we began to grab higher ones, and in the end we were taking up the most dangerous one, a tripple s, which weren't that many but also awarded the most, yet they weren't easy like the lower ranked ones, in fact the Kings army wouldn't even do them even if they had the power, too scared if what the requests were about.

Yet we took all three slowly and steady, gaining billions of gold coins in the process.

My enemies that consisted of three people, four including me had gone behind my back and stolen from me.

They were stupid, I was the strongest one out of all of us, and the wisest, yet not wise enough to see that my friends were actualy enemies. I hunted then down one by one and took everything of mine, including theirs and slaughtered them along with their families. My riches increased as so did my wisdom, I lived for thousands of years as I practiced everything to perfection, in the end my death was not of old age, in fact I had looked around middle aged when in truth I was nearing my four thousand birthday.

My death was planned by my own hands.

I didn't know why I had to keep living, everyone feared me, I could have easily ruled as a King yet why bother when everyone would tremble before me instead of showing respect and admiration.

My life was lonely, I never took in a partner or had kids, hell, I was still a pathetic virgin till the end. There had been so many times where I had tried taking my own life. But none of them worked, I was too strong to harm myself, if I even stabbed my self in my heart, by the time the dagger left my flesh it would already be stitching itself together.

In the end I had one final goal, to find a way to kill myself! I had now an ambition, I combined every poison I could find and ate them all, in all kinds of forms and equations, yet I had failed, I planted many bombs everywhere and ignited them as I stepped on the trigger, failure.

I jumped off the highest mountain, failure.

Walked into a den of demon wolves, failure.

Coarsed a witch to cast a spell of death one me, failure.

It bad been futile in the end, but as I was giving up hope I thought of something.

Why didn't I think of that?

I shall combust myself from the inside, success!

Yet when I opened my eyes I frowned; why was I still alive?