Arjun felt a cold shock wash over him, sharper than the desert heat.
I'm in the Nightmare Desert, he realized, his mind racing through the fragments of forbidden knowledge he had carried from his previous life. But this isn't just a random skirmish. This is a fragment of the Doom War. The War of the Gods.
He looked at his calloused, blood-stained hands. In this era, "heavy hitters" didn't mean simple Awakened or even Masters. It meant beings who could level mountains with a breath. And here he was: a Vessel, an Aspirant, a nameless piece of cannon fodder tossed into the gears of a conflict that had ended the world once before.
'How do I derail a history written by Gods and Supremes? he wondered. How does a grain of sand change the path of a hurricane?'
Before he could find an answer, a deafening chant rose from the thousands of soldiers around him. It was a rhythmic, guttural roar that vibrated in the marrow of his bones. Every man took his stance. Every shield was raised. The air grew heavy with the static of impending slaughter.
The sky over the Nightmare Desert was not blue; it was the color of a bruised lung, heavy with the weight of impending slaughter. Below, the horizon was a jagged line of bronze and iron as two massive human tides—remnants of a forgotten empire's civil war—collided with a sound like a mountain shattering.
Arjun stood in the third rank, his boots sinking into the shifting, red-hot sand. His heart hammered against his ribs, a frantic bird trapped in a cage of leather and steel. To his left and right, men screamed—some in fury, some in abject terror—as the first wave of the enemy legion slammed into their front line.
The sound was the worst part. It wasn't just the clatter of shields; it was the wet, rhythmic thwack of bronze cleaving through muscle and the high-pitched whistle of air escaping punctured lungs.
"Hold the line!" the mace-wielding giant roared from somewhere behind him, but the line was already a memory. A spear, tipped with a jagged obsidian head, punched through the throat of the soldier directly in front of Arjun. The man didn't even have time to gasp; he simply slumped, his blood spraying across Arjun's visor in a warm, iron-scented mist.
The world narrowed.He was a participant in a massacre.
As the dead man fell, an enemy soldier surged into the gap. He was a veteran, his armor scarred and his eyes hollowed out by a thousand miles of desert marching. He lunged with a short sword, the blade aimed unerringly at the gap in Arjun's leather harness.
In that microsecond, Arjun felt a strange, cold clarity wash over his mind. It wasn't just that he saw the attack; he understood it. The [Fast Learner] attribute was not merely a mental buff; it was a physical bridge. His muscles, though foreign to this body, began to mimic the thousands of hours of training he had observed back in the Song Clan's palace.
Arjun didn't panic. He pivoted, the movement fluid and precise. He brought his heavy wooden shield up, catching the enemy's blade on the reinforced bronze rim. The vibration hummed through his arm, but he didn't fight the force—he redirected it. With a sharp, guttural grunt, Arjun stepped inside the man's guard. His iron sword, heavy and dull-edged, didn't slice; it crushed. He drove the point into the soldier's exposed armpit, burying the metal deep in the chest cavity.
He kicked the body away, the weight of the kill settling in his stomach like lead. But there was no time for grief. Ten more men were screaming as they climbed over the mounting pile of corpses to reach him.
The battle escalated into a symphony of horror. Above the infantry, the real monsters of the era clashed. Lightning crackled in a cloudless sky, and shockwaves from the "heavy hitters" sent plumes of sand hundreds of feet into the air. Arjun became a whirlwind of evolving efficiency. He learned to use the sun to blind opponents, to use the slippery blood on the sand to slide beneath a spear-thrust, and to use the weight of his own shield to crush windpipes.
He killed a third man, a fourth, a fifth. Each death was a frantic lesson in anatomy. The desert floor became a marsh of red mud, intestines tangled in the boots of the living and the dead alike.
An enemy officer, mounted on a chitinous desert beast, saw the carnage Arjun was wreaking. He roared a command, and a squad of five elite guards narrowed their focus on the "prodigy" in the leather armor. They surrounded him, their spears forming a cage of jagged steel.
Arjun's breath came in ragged, burning gasps. His shield was splintered, the bronze rim dented and warped. His sword was notched, the edge dulled by bone and mail.
Is this it? he thought, his vision blurring. Is this where the story ends?
The world slowed. He looked at the five spears. He saw the pattern. It was a classic "Star-Fire" formation used to pin down high-value targets. He had read about it in the ancient scrolls of the Song Clan. He didn't wait for them to strike.
Arjun threw his sword. The iron blade spun through the air, thumping into the throat of the center guard before he could react. In the same motion, Arjun dropped his shield and lunged for the fallen man's spear. He caught the weapon mid-fall, spun it in a dazzling, lethal blur, and swept the legs of the two guards to his left. As they tumbled into the red sand, he drove the spear through the chest of the fourth man and used the momentum to vault over the fifth.
He landed behind the officer's beast, his hands shaking, his chest heaving. He was covered in so much blood that his original features were unrecognizable. He looked like a demon birthed from the desert itself. The officer turned his beast, his eyes wide with a sudden, visceral fear. He saw not a boy, but a monster.
Arjun didn't give him a chance to speak. He lunged, the spear-tip glistening with the lives of those he had already taken.
As the blade sank into the officer's throat, Arjun felt a sudden, icy chill creep up his spine. The ambient noise of the battle—the clashing steel, the screams, the war cries—simply vanished.
The entire sky went pitch black. For a single heartbeat, the world was plunged into a void. Then, a presence of such immense, suffocating scale appeared above.
A dragon, vast enough to blot out the heavens, dropped from the sky. It wasn't a graceful descent; it was a falling moon. The creature slammed into the center of the battlefield with the force of a tectonic shift.
Arjun didn't even see the impact. He only felt the shockwave—a wall of kinetic energy that shattered the sand into glass and sent bodies flying like autumn leaves. He was thrown backward, his ribs snapping as he was slammed into a pile of debris. His vision fractured into a thousand shards of white light before his consciousness finally flickered out.
When Arjun finally opened his eyes, the silence was more terrifying than the noise had been.
He was lying in a myriad of corpses. The air was thick and heavy, stenched with the cloying, sweet smell of blood and scorched meat. He groaned, pushing himself up. Every muscle in his body felt like it had been shredded and stitched back together with rusty wire. He looked around. As far as the eye could see, the desert was a graveyard. It looked as if he alone had survived the cataclysmic landing of the dragon—or at least, he was the only one still standing.
"This... is the worst nightmare to the core," he croaked, his voice cracking.
He was tired, his throat felt like it was lined with sandpaper, and his wounds were sluggishly bleeding through his leather armor. Survival wasn't a given yet. Thirst was now an enemy as dangerous as any legion. He heard strange, clicking noises in the distance, but his priority was immediate. He needed water.
He dragged his feet through the crimson sand, searching for anything—a waterskin that hadn't been burst, a puddle that wasn't blood. After an hour of agonizing trekking, he reached the edge of a valley. Below him lay a body of water.
It looked like a lake, but it was wrong. The water was dark, almost oily, and an eerie. In any other situation, Arjun would have wept with joy. Here, he only frowned.
"A lake in the middle of a desert war zone? That alone is suspicious," he muttered, shaking his head. "Better to avoid it."
He forced his aching legs to move, passing the tempting shimmer of the dark water. He climbed a jagged ridge, hoping for a better vantage point, but what he saw in the massive dip of the valley floor made his soul shrivel.
In the center of the valley stood a creature
It was colossal, an avian horror of staggering proportions. Its crow-like form was a chaotic mass of obsidian plumage, topped with long, needle-like feathers that stood on end like a crown of thorns. From its head extended a monstrously elongated, dagger-thin beak that tapered toward the dark water below. Two tiny pinpricks of spectral white light served as eyes, radiating a cold and unsettling intelligence. Its wings were layered with massive, iron-like feathers that draped downward like funereal shrouds.
Arjun's breath hitched. A primal, ancient fear took hold of him, sending his heart into an erratic, panicked rhythm. He knew that silhouette. He knew the stories
"The Vile Thieving Bird..." he whispered, his voice trembling.
IA creature that shouldn't even notice an ant like him, yet its mere presence felt like it was unravelling the fabric of his reality.
Suddenly, the bird's head twitched with a mechanical, predatory precision. It turned. The two pinpricks of white light locked onto Arjun's position on the mount.
It had found him.
==========
I was not sure about the timeline,but what I learned ,corruption started before the war,So,Yeah,I Constructed like this.So,Yeah,Enjoy