Chapter 2: Born Again.

[ Author’s Note: Quick clarification regarding the MC’s name: Nikolai is his name from his previous life. After reincarnating, he was originally named Llewellyn Di Zierghardt, but I’ve decided to change his current-life name to Sigurd Di Zierghardt going forward.

So, to keep things simple:

Previous Life: Nikolai

Current Life: Sigurd Di Zierghardt

Any mentions of Llewellyn in earlier Chapters refer to Sigurd. I’ll be updating those Chapters accordingly.]

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Darkness.

There was only darkness.

For how long, Nikolai couldn’t have known. Time meant very little when there was nothing with which to measure it. There was no light, no familiar sound, no sensation he could use to determine where he was or how much time had passed since the explosion.

Then something crushed his head.

Nikolai’s consciousness returned violently. His instincts awakened before coherent thought did, and he immediately tried to move, only to discover that he couldn’t. Something pressed against him from every direction, compressing his body within a hot, wet darkness so complete that he couldn’t distinguish whether his eyes were open or closed. His arms refused to obey him properly, his legs were curled tightly against his body, his lungs wouldn’t draw air, and even his sense of proportion felt strangely distorted.

Alive?

The thought came with immediate disbelief. Nikolai remembered the explosion. He remembered the timer reaching its final second and the pharmaceutical complex disappearing inside an expanding sphere of fire. There was no surviving that. Yet he was conscious, capable of thought and apparently still in possession of a body, even if that body felt completely wrong.

Another crushing pressure suddenly enveloped him and forced his entire body downward. Nikolai instinctively tried reaching toward his thigh for his handgun, but his arm barely twitched before encountering something soft and slick.

There was no weapon, no holster, no knife and none of his tactical equipment. Worse, his limbs were too short, his muscles impossibly weak, and when he tried closing his hand into a fist, his fingers responded with all the strength of wet clay. He couldn’t even control his neck properly.

For the first time in years, Nikolai had absolutely no idea what was happening. Had he been captured?

Drugged?

Was this some kind of sensory deprivation chamber? The organization possessed resources he had never been permitted to investigate, so perhaps they had used some experimental non-lethal weapon before the explosion and transported him to a black site while he was unconscious.

It was an absurd explanation considering what he remembered happening to the building, but it was still more reasonable than believing he had somehow survived being at the center of that blast.

Another wave of pressure struck him, considerably stronger than the previous one. It wasn’t a tactical restraint tightening around his body or a heavy object pressing against his chest. It was an all-encompassing, rhythmic squeeze that began around his head and traveled down the rest of him, forcing his curled body downward.

Nikolai tried extending one arm to locate a surface, wall, latch or anything else that might tell him what kind of confinement he was trapped inside, but his hand traveled only a few inches before encountering the same soft, slick barrier. He pushed against it and achieved absolutely nothing.

Sedated, Nikolai thought. It remained the only logical conclusion he could produce. Perhaps he had been placed inside some form of chemical suspension tank designed to distort his spatial awareness and suppress his motor functions.

It would explain the heat, the liquid surrounding him and his inability to properly control his muscles, although it still did nothing to explain why his body felt as though someone had reduced it to a fraction of its original size.

The pressure descended again before Nikolai could investigate further, squeezing hard enough that his thoughts momentarily scattered. He attempted to draw a breath to gauge the condition of his lungs, only to discover that his throat refused the command entirely. Strangely, there was no immediate sensation of suffocation.

His body simply wasn’t breathing, as though it didn’t currently need to. That discovery should have frightened him more than it did, but Nikolai had spent twelve years learning that panic was useful only when it forced someone to act. Anything beyond that was wasted energy.

So he stopped struggling and listened.

Most of the sounds around him were muffled beyond recognition, distorted by the fluid and whatever barrier enclosed him. Then, through the dense silence, a woman’s scream reached him.

"AAAAAAAH!"

Nikolai froze.

The voice was ragged, strained and extremely close. Before he could determine where it had come from, several others followed, their words muffled but still understandable.

"Again, my lady! You’re almost there!" an older woman shouted urgently, and another voice immediately joined her.

"Push! Just a little more! He’s coming!"

For several seconds, Nikolai’s thoughts went completely dead.

He had spent twelve years listening to intercepted communications, tactical briefings, emergency calls and coded conversations across hundreds of operations. He knew the terminology of extraction, interrogation, execution and surveillance.

This terminology belonged to a delivery room.

No.

Another violent contraction seized the space around him.

Absolutely not.

The pressure behind him intensified, pushing him downward toward something that hadn’t existed moments earlier. A sudden drop in temperature touched the top of his head, followed almost immediately by the first thing Nikolai hadn’t seen since regaining consciousness.

Light.

Raw, painfully bright light cut through the darkness ahead. Nikolai stared directly toward it, but his eyes refused to focus properly, reducing everything beyond the opening to enormous shifting shapes of grey, orange and brown. He tried blinking to clear his vision, only for even that simple movement to feel strangely clumsy and unfamiliar.

Then the pressure doubled.

His body was shoved forward.

His head passed through the opening first, followed gradually by his shoulders and torso. The sudden absence of pressure was disorienting, but Nikolai had barely begun processing the sensation when cold air struck his exposed skin like countless tiny needles. A pair of enormous hands immediately grabbed him beneath the arms and lifted him into the air.

Nikolai reacted on instinct. His right arm moved toward the nearest hand as he attempted a basic counter-joint lock that should have allowed him to twist the person’s thumb backward and break the grip. Instead, his arm merely flapped uselessly through the air like a wet piece of cloth.

Nikolai stared at it. He tried again.

The result was somehow even more pathetic.

There was no leverage behind the movement, no coordination and practically no muscle strength. His arm didn’t even reach the hand holding him.

Before Nikolai could process that humiliation, the person above him shouted excitedly, "It’s a boy! A healthy boy, my lady!"

A boy?

Cold air suddenly flooded Nikolai’s lungs. His chest expanded violently, and he opened his mouth with every intention of demanding an explanation from whoever was holding him. What emerged instead was the most humiliating sound he had ever produced.

"WAAAAAAAH!"

Nikolai’s mind stopped.

...What the fuck?

Another cry immediately escaped him. His body was doing it automatically, drawing air into tiny lungs and releasing a high-pitched wail completely independent of his conscious thoughts.

Stop, Nikolai commanded himself. Cease noise. Assess the situation.

"WAAAAAAAH!"

His body ignored him.

Nikolai had been shot, stabbed, poisoned and nearly drowned over the course of his career. He had once completed an operation with a bullet lodged dangerously close to his heart. Yet somehow, being completely unable to stop himself from crying was rapidly becoming one of the most infuriating experiences of his life.

Someone wiped him down with a coarse cloth that scraped unpleasantly against his sensitive skin before wrapping him tightly in thick fabric. His arms were pinned against his sides, leaving him almost completely immobilized. Nikolai attempted to move them once, discovered that he couldn’t and abandoned the effort before his remaining dignity suffered further damage.

"Let me see him," a weak, exhausted voice said from somewhere beyond his blurred vision.

The person holding Nikolai immediately moved. He felt himself being passed into another pair of arms, these ones thinner, warmer and trembling slightly. Nikolai forced his eyelids open and waited for his useless vision to adjust enough for the shapes around him to become distinguishable.

The room was enormous. High stone walls rose toward an arched ceiling that disappeared into shadows overhead, while the orange glow of a large hearth illuminated heavy wooden furniture, hanging fabrics and several people dressed in clothing that looked completely out of place in the modern world.

There were no medical monitors, electric lights, plastic tubes or concrete walls. Nothing about the room resembled a hospital or a black site. If anything, it looked like the interior of a wealthy medieval European residence.

Nikolai shifted his attention toward the woman holding him. She was pale from exhaustion, with dark hair plastered against her forehead by sweat and uneven breaths still escaping her lips.

Yet none of that concealed the warmth in her eyes as she stared down at him. A large smile slowly appeared on her tired face, and she carefully adjusted her hold on him before drawing him closer against her chest.

Nikolai stared back at her.

Something about the expression made him strangely uncomfortable, not because there was anything threatening about it, but because there wasn’t. There was an unmistakable tenderness in the way she looked at him, a kind of affection Nikolai had spent so little time around that he almost didn’t know what to do with it.

After several seconds, the woman finally looked away from him and turned toward the elderly midwife standing beside the bed.

Her smile weakened slightly as she asked, "Did he come?"

The question was quiet, but the expectation behind it wasn’t.

The elderly woman hesitated before slowly shaking her head. "No, my lady."

For the briefest moment, something in the woman’s expression broke. The happiness in her eyes dimmed, and her gaze lowered toward the bundle in her arms as though she had expected the answer but had still desperately hoped to hear something different.

Nikolai noticed the change immediately. Reading people had kept him alive for twelve years, and the disappointment on her face was impossible to miss.

It lasted only a moment.

The woman buried it beneath another smile and returned her attention to him.

The elderly midwife seemed to notice as well and gently changed the subject. "My lady, have you decided what you wish to name the young master?"

The woman remained silent for several seconds, her fingers gently brushing against Nikolai’s cheek as she looked at him. Whatever disappointment had appeared moments earlier gradually disappeared, replaced by the same unmistakable warmth from before.

"Sigurd," she finally said quietly. "His name will be Sigurd Di Zierghardt. My son."

Nikolai didn’t move. Admittedly, he couldn’t have moved much even if he wanted to, but for once, that wasn’t the reason.

His mind was working rapidly as he was completely confused and shocked about what is going on right now.

He fought it for several seconds before his eyelids became impossibly heavy and the enormous room blurred once again. Nikolai had survived ambushes, torture, assassination attempts and more firefights than he cared to remember.

He had spent twelve years becoming one of the most efficient killers in his world, earned the name Blood Hound, and eventually forced his own organization to blow up an entire building just to guarantee his death.

Now he had been reduced to a newborn who couldn’t control his arms, couldn’t focus his eyes and couldn’t even stop himself from crying.

His mother gently stroked his cheek as Viktor’s eyes finally closed.

As the exhaustion of his new body dragged his consciousness back into darkness, the last coherent thought of the infamous Blood Hound contained absolutely none of the composure that had defined his previous life.

You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.