(Start of Volume 1 Part 2 - House of the Rising Sun)
NSQC moved a lot like any other city did - without awareness of itself. Hundreds of thousands of interactions were happening every moment, and ordinary life proceeded in every direction. Streets carried the traffic of most of the city on foot. Buildings held their occupants. The air was as pungent and horrible as always.
Nestled into an unremarkable block of the city, right next to the dirty Outskirts, was a police station. Compared to police stations of the bygone days, this one looked more like a fort. Obviously, it did, as in the age of the Nightmare Spell, all the important buildings had to be fortified to be able to fend off as many Nightmare Creatures as possible.
Inside, the station went about its business. Mundane officers moved through its hallways with the efficiency of people whose days were long categorized by similar events. The building breathed its industrial breath, steady and loud, the background hum of defense machinery that everyone was used to. Overall, this day seemed to be like any other ordinary day.
Except for three occupants.
Deeper in, past the public-facing rooms and the administrative corridors, sat a heavily reinforced door that would, hopefully, stop any Awakened Beast from breaking out of. The sound from the outside didn't quite reach this far, so the air had a particular quality to it that was different from the polluted air outside.
Past this door sat a large medical room. It was clean and unremarkable in every way that a medical room was supposed to be. It had two beds and two chairs next to them.
On the first bed lay a small and pale boy. His hair was raven black, and so were his clothes. His whole body looked small too, clearly defined by the savage life in the Outskirts. He was not asleep, as he was currently in his First Nightmare. He had arrived two days ago from the outskirts of NSQC, and he had not woken up since. This was obviously Sunny.
In the chair beside him sat a young and extremely beautiful woman. She had short, raven-black hair and icy-blue eyes. Her flawless skin was smooth, supple, and as white as snow. She was as pale as Sunny. However, while Sunny's pale skin looked strange and unhealthy, the beautiful stranger was nothing short of striking. This was Jet, the Master sent by the government to oversee the First Nightmare of two supposed Outskirts rats. From one to another, or something along those lines.
Then there was the other boy.
In the second bed, sitting crossed-legged and upright in a way that completely contested with Sunny's horizontal stillness, sat Juno. The current body he was in looked to be about fifteen or sixteen, the kind of age that was early to go under the Nightmare Spell. It was doubly weird that, back in his time, Juno was a nineteen-year-old instead.
Anyways, his angular face was currently deep in concentration since he was meditating. His eyes were closed. His still scarred hands rested on his knees with deliberate placement since he had been practicing this deliberate placement for almost four days straight.
His hair was the most immediately striking thing about him. Dark red, thick and slightly wild, shot through with strands of deep purple that surfaced in certain lights like veins of a different mineral running through stone. It was pulled up into a loose topknot, which was inspired by a Murim Manhwa he had read in his past life. It was the kind of style that implied either a very long tradition or a complete indifference to current convention. Long strands had escaped the knot and fell around his angular face and down his neck in loose waves, the red bleeding into purple at the tips where the colors bled into each other, the whole arrangement slightly disheveled in a way that somehow looked considered rather than careless.
His eyes, when they opened, were black with a deep red undertone that surfaced like embers viewed through dark glass.
At the corners of his forehead, half-hidden under loose strands of dark red hair, two small horns curved slightly backward against his skull. They were the same deep black-red as his eyes, smooth and close to the bone, warm in a way that ordinary bone wasn't warm. Easy to miss if you weren't looking. Difficult to stop looking at it if you were.
If you looked at him from a certain angle and with a certain amount of shadow, he looked like a devil.
A devil you didn't want to know.
…
'My beautiful blonde hair, replaced with this! How superb!' he thought, not for the first time. 'Eyes are different. My face is mostly the same, just more handsome. Oh, Awakening, where have you been?'
He had done this inventory before, on the second day, when his senses had settled enough to allow for relatively calm reflection. The body he had woken up in after the First Nightmare was not exactly the body he had gone to sleep in back in Bucharest. The scars were the same, though.
He had noticed that on the third day, running his fingers over his knuckles with the detached curiosity he applied to most things about himself. They had carried over from one life to the next with the fidelity of something that had decided it was part of him, whether his body changed or not.
He didn't mind. He had never minded them particularly. They were just there.
The horns, however.
He reached up without thinking and ran a finger along the base of the left one, the way he had done several times already when his attention drifted there. Smooth. Hard. Warm as if there was blood flowing through there. They were small now, easy to hide under the loose strands of his hair with minimal effort, but the Anunnaki attribute had been clear enough that he had a general sense of where they were going. They would grow. They would become harder to ignore. At some point, they would stop being a coincidental secret and start being a deliberate decision. This was his Corrupted lineage shining through.
He found that he was looking forward to it quite a lot.
'So exciting! Imagine all the nicknames and titles people will give me based on the horns!' He wanted that fame. That recognition.
Grinning to himself, he turned his attention back to the considerably less interesting problem of making the world louder.
Four days since the end of his First Nightmare. Four days of this.
He sat cross-legged on the narrow medical bed and tried, for what felt like the five hundredth time, to impose some kind of order on the noise.
It was working better than it had been. That was the important thing. Better was relative when your hearing had decided overnight to become about seven times more sensitive than it had any right to be, but relative progress was still progress, and Juno was choosing to be grateful for it rather than the alternative, which was not being grateful for it and also not solving anything.
The ventilation system somewhere above him had a cycle he had memorized without wanting to. Jet's heartbeat, forty beats per minute, knocked along in the chair beside Sunny's bed with the steady patience of the woman herself. Down the hall, a door opened, and the sound of it arrived with a specificity that was almost offensive — the weight of the door, the speed of the swing, the acoustic signature of that specific hallway. Outside the building, NSQC layered itself into individual sources, a conversation forty meters away clear enough to follow if he let himself, which he was actively trying not to.
Besides hearing, all his other senses were about three to four times stronger. His vision now caught the exact quality of light through his closed eyelids, the dust that sat in the corner dozens of feet away, and even the pores on his skin. The room smelled of antiseptic and recycled air and the faint chemical trace of stress from someone who had been sitting in a chair for a long time. His skin registered the texture of the sheets with a completeness that was occasionally distracting.
It was always the hearing that dominated.
As his new brain had hinted to him before, he needed to breathe through it. Slowly and deliberately. That was another thing that had changed, but it was too elusive to place a finger on. If he had to guess, his new mind was just simply better.
Faint memories before were now incredibly vivid. He could process and understand things better, like the mathematics he didn't understand before, which suddenly opened up to him. This was all faster, too. The feeling of becoming smarter was simply exquisite, just like a lot of the other things Awakening had brought him.
'Ah, if only it didn't hurt,' thought Juno with mock melancholy.
Slowly, his mind drifted backwards to the time after he awoke.
Four days ago, he had woken up from killing a Master before promptly falling unconscious due to the world becoming unnavigable.