Luna Solumbra

The air in the apartment always smelled the same: a sick cocktail of stale ramen, unwashed laundry, and the static-charged heat of a computer that I never shut off. I stared at the reflection in the darkened monitor. It was a face etched with the kind of hollow exhaustion that sleep couldn’t fix. I was a shut-in, a complete loser who had opted out of existence. If I died today, the world wouldn’t even notice; it was full of desperate losers like me. No family. No friends. I was just a weak, pathetic target waiting to be eaten alive by a cruel, predatory society.

I disgusted myself. But as I pulled my faded black hoodie over my head, my eyes caught my own gaze in the cramped hallway mirror. That self-disgust was a drop in the ocean compared to the pure hatred I felt for everyone else. I hated people. I hated the weak who wallowed in their pity, and the businessmen rushing blindly through life. But the ones I hated most of all were the predators. The real ones. The ones who didn’t just rot in their rooms, but actively went out and preyed on the weakest, the smallest, the most vulnerable among us.

The worst part of this goddamn, plastic world was that you couldn’t even tell the sheep from the wolf at a glance. A loving family man and a degenerate monster both smiled at you exactly the same way in the grocery store. Everyone hid behind a meticulously crafted mask of normalcy, allowing the world to just keep turning, pretending it wasn’t rotting from the inside out.

I stepped outside into the afternoon sun, the sudden heat beating down like a physical weight. It had been months since I’d last left my apartment. My heart immediately began thumping a panicked rhythm against my ribs, and my skin crawled at the mere sight of other people. The only thing that had successfully dragged me out of my hole today was a pre-order for a limited-edition anime figure. I was braving the sun for a piece of painted plastic to fill another empty inch of the void on my shelf. How truly pathetic I was.

I kept my head down, aggressively dodging through the crowded city sidewalks. Thousands of masks passed me by in a blur of motion. Businessmen barking into phones. Students laughing. Mothers pushing strollers. They all looked so meticulously fake... and then, I saw her.

She couldn’t have been more than twelve years old. She was small, wearing a bright pink backpack, walking fast with her head down as she desperately tried to remain invisible. But the three men following behind her were faster. They didn’t look like monsters out of a movie; they wore the same normal masks as everyone else on the street. One of them was even laughing casually at something his friend had just said. But I recognized the heavy, possessive way they looked at her. I watched as they systematically pressured her away from the foot traffic and toward the mouth of a narrow, grimy alleyway.

One of them reached out, resting a familiar hand on her shoulder as he leaned down and whispered something into her ear. It made my stomach turn over. She flinched, her small frame trembling violently as they guided her off the sidewalk and into the shadows. I could clearly see the naked fear in her eyes as she frantically looked at the passing faces for someone to help. But no one did. The sidewalk simply kept moving. People pointedly checked their watches or stared blankly down at their phones. Nobody saw... because nobody wanted to see.

I looked across the street at Taya’s anime shop, my supposed sanctuary. Then I looked back at the dark, swallowing mouth of the alley. I’m weak… I’m just a loser, I reminded myself desperately, my sweaty hand trembling deep in the pocket of my hoodie. I’m nothing.

But my feet were already moving, my body acting on it’s own. The shadows of the alley swallowed the sounds of the city. One step past the threshold and the roar of the busy city turned into a muffled hum. It was just us now. Before I could see them, I heard her voice “Please... please help me.”

It was a small, fragile sound. I felt my chest tighten, my lungs seizing. I wanted to run. Every cell in my useless body screamed at me to turn around, go back to Taya’s, get my plastic figure, and hide. Instead, I opened my mouth “Get... get away from her!”

My voice was a pathetic, shaking wreck. It didn’t carry the weight of a hero; it sounded like the stuttering sob of the loser I was. The men didn’t even flinch. One of them looked back over his shoulder, a mocking, jagged grin spreading across his face. To him, I wasn’t an obstacle. I wasn’t even a threat. I was nothing.

Hearing their disgusting laugh as they turned their attention back to the girl, clenching her backpack tightly to her chest, I felt a familiar dread lock my limbs. I knew exactly how she felt: to be so weak that you are rendered invisible; to be a victim so small that people can’t even be bothered to acknowledge your existence. Suddenly, the alley’s shadows deepened, and I was fifteen again. I felt the phantom sensation of rough hands tearing at my clothes, heard the sickeningly distinct sound of a belt buckle being undone, followed by the heavy thud of denim hitting the floor.

No one had saved me then. In that moment, the bubbling panic in my chest suddenly turned into something else entirely. Something cold. No one saved me... but I can save her.

I didn’t think, didn’t plan. If I had paused for even a fraction of a second, I would have stayed on the relative safety of the sidewalk. Instead, I reached deep into my pocket, my slick fingers clenching around my keys until the brass dug into my skin. I lunged. My legs were heavy and my movements clumsy, but I threw my entire, miserable life into the forward momentum of the strike. As I slammed into the first man’s back, I swung my arm in a wide arc, a blind, primal scream tearing from my throat as the sharp metal teeth of my house key raked viciously across his left eye. The scream he let out in response was glorious.

Hot, metallic-smelling blood sprayed across my arm as he recoiled violently, clutching at his face. I didn’t stop; I couldn’t. I threw myself at the remaining two, tackling their much larger bodies with the unrestrained weight of my suppressed rage. As our mass of flailing limbs hit the wet pavement, I twisted my head toward the shivering girl and yelled, “Run!” I thrashed against the men under me, clawing, biting, doing anything I could think of to keep their attention pinned entirely to me. “Run! Go!” Out of the corner of my blurring vision, I saw it, a bright flash of pink. The girl didn’t look back; she ran with everything she had, tears streaming down her face as she burst back out of the grim alley and melted into the light. She was gone. She was safe.

A sudden, strange pressure built up in my lower back, halting my thrashing immediately. At first, it didn’t hurt at all. It was just an overwhelming, hot sensation spreading out from my spine, like someone had leaned a heated iron against me. I sluggishly tried to push myself up from the dirty pavement, but my arms felt as heavy as lead. My physical strength was draining out of me, spilling into the gutter faster than my panicked brain could process the loss. I rolled onto my side, my breath hitching in my throat as I looked down at my body. A serrated blade was sticking out of my stomach, the metal winking dull silver in the gloom as dark blood spread everywhere, soaking into the pavement and mixing with the trash and rainwater. I heard their boots on the stone—fast, panicked footsteps as they ran. The monsters were cowards after all.

I looked up at the thin, impossibly distant strip of blue sky between the brick walls as my vision began to fray at the edges, pulling reality into a soft, grey mist. I realized that I couldn’t feel the weight of my legs anymore. Within seconds, I couldn’t even feel the struggling rhythm of my own heart. This world fucking sucks, I thought quietly in the absolute privacy of my fading consciousness. My blood-flecked lips twitched involuntarily, trying to pull themselves into a defiant smile as my heavy head finally fell backward against the cold stone. It really, truly sucks. But I saved her. I actually did something. I allowed my eyelids to fall closed. For the first time in thirty-nine years, the silence didn’t feel lonely. The soft, grey mist of death, however, didn’t fade to black as expected. Without warning, it flared into a blinding, oppressive white.

I tried to blink against the sudden glare, but quickly realized I had no eyelids. I looked down in a panic, desperately searching the white expanse for my blood-soaked hands, my black hoodie, my key ring. Nothing. I didn’t have a body at all. Stay calm, I told myself, the sheer panic buzzing through the vast nothingness around me. You’re dead. That’s fine. Stay calm.

Then, a voice broke the silence like a crack of thunder tearing the sky in half.

“WELCOME TO THE UNIVERSE REINCARNATION SYSTEM.”

It was undeniably a woman’s voice—soft, lilting, and sickeningly sweet—but it vibrated through whatever disembodied consciousness I had left with a truly deafening volume. She wasn’t actually yelling. She was simply, overwhelmingly loud.

“CONGRATULATIONS! YOU DIED BY SELF-SACRIFICE. AS SUCH, YOU WILL BE ALLOWED A CROSS-WORLDS REINCARNATION. HOW EXCITING!”

I listened to the perfect, bright enthusiasm in those words and found absolutely no warmth in it whatsoever. None. It figured that even a god—or whatever the hell this thing was supposed to be—wore a mask. It felt like a cheerful, prerecorded smile violently slapped over an infinite, unfeeling void that obviously didn’t give a single shit about me.

“YOU WILL CONTINUE YOUR LIFE IN ANOTHER WORLD. PLEASE CHOOSE YOUR RACE.”

Wait, I thought, my lingering anger instantly spiking. Continue my life? I’m still going to be a thirty-nine-year-old dude? I don’t even get a clean slate?

“YOU WILL CONTINUE YOUR LIFE IN ANOTHER WORLD. PLEASE CHOOSE YOUR RACE.”

Don’t just ignore me, bitch...

I released the mental equivalent of an exhausted sigh. Fine… Whatever. Let’s see. Dwarf? Absolutely not; I’ve spent more than enough time voluntarily living in the dark. Human? Over my dead body, no pun intended. Elf… Yes! Long lives. A natural affinity for magic. Inherently high agility. Let’s go with Elf.

“YOU WILL NOW CHOOSE YOUR APPEARANCE.”

How do you successfully hide in a world full of monsters? I thought to myself, pulling from thirty-nine years of observing the ugliest sides of society. You certainly don’t skulk in the dark, the real monsters always know the shadows better than you do. You hide in plain sight by being the absolute most distracting thing in the room. You have to make them instinctively think you’re fragile, making them believe you’re entirely weak.

I focused my scattered thoughts, carefully organizing the parameters in my mind like I was typing at my old terminal.

Give me some deep crimson-red hair to act as a blazing beacon. Keep the fair complexion, but push it to an absolute porcelain white. Make the eyes mesmerizing enough so they can’t bear to look anywhere else... make them heterochromatic. Emerald green resting in the left iris, deep royal purple in the right. I wanted them aggressively staring at my face, confidently underestimating me with every passing second. Thinking ‘exotic.’ Thinking ‘prey.’ Now shrink it down, give me a thin, significantly shorter build. I need to look completely physically pathetic. Harmless.

As the system parameters locked in, the white light fractured violently, gathering in the center of the void to seamlessly shape a physical avatar. I ‘stared’ intently at the new biological body gracefully floating before me.

My invisible jaw dropped in stunned shock.