As the sun rose over the horizon, a figure sat breathing heavily. The most noticeable thing about this particular scene was that she was bruised and bloodied, not to mention sitting amongst innumerable corpses.
As the pain coursing through her body assaulted her over and over again in waves, she saw, in her peripheral vision, two--no, was it three?--figures approaching what was just the slaughter house of the Oreca Clan, her family. As she slipped into unconsciousness, she thought, : I don't want to die here...someone...save me…
"...how is she?..."
"...needs...rest and...no complications…"
"...thank you…"
As she swam in the darkness of unconsciousness, voices permeated the silence and resounded across the boundless void.
What was going on?
Where was she?
What happened after she blacked out at...at her family's training ground?
Was she in danger?
As confusion hit her and she struggled to find the answers to her endless barrage of questions, she felt unconsciousness grip hold of her and drag her back down into its dark, murky depths.
It was dark. She couldn't see anything. She put out a hand in front of her. It was as if she didn't have a hand at all. She turned and looked around. The was nothing. Nothing at all.
"...save...me…"
Sharply, she turned and looked towards the direction of the voice.
"..please.."
Was there someone there? Was it a person who could help her? Could that person help her leave this dark, empty void?
She moved towards the voice, as if entranced by the whispered call in the darkness. She could not see her legs, nor could she feel the surface she was walking on, but she felt like she was moving. She didn't really know how she could tell. At that moment, she only wanted to get closer to the voice calling out to her.
Where was it?
"wh-who's there?" she called out hesitantly.
"..."
"h-hello?" When there was no answer, she tried reaching out to the voice again.
"..help..." the voice was fainter this time.
"I'm coming! Hold on!" She walked faster towards the voice. It got weaker and weaker. She started sprinting at full speed, her legs -- did she even have legs here? -- pumped up and down, pushing her closer and closer towards the source of the voice. That voice...it was so familiar...where had she heard it before...
A bright white light cascaded upon her as she cracked open her heavy eyelids. The light blocked out her vision, and she took a while to adjust to the sudden brightness of her surroundings.
"She's awake! Hurry, call the doctor!" A hushed voice -- a female one -- was heard from somewhere on her left.
"Wh-What's going on..?" she tried to ask but her voice was too weak to be heard. Her memory was jumbled and vague. The light was too bright and it hurt her eyes. Her head throbbed ever so slightly. She fought to remember what happened, where she was, even who she was.
At this moment, a young female doctor wearing a white labcoat entered the room.
"Hello, my name is Tong Xia Yi. You can call me Doctor Tong. I've been taking care of you since we found you a few days ago. You were passed out and barely breathing, but thankfully you were strong enough to pull through and awaken. How are you feeling now?" The unfamiliar face scrutinised and searched her own, the gaze of the doctor travelling from her head to her toes.
"...I'm fine..." the young patient answered, but a haunted look still dwelled in her eyes as she recalled the horrors she'd witnessed before passing out.
The painful memories slowly came back to her, crawling and slithering into the empty spaces of her mind.
"...ugh..." It made her head hurt.
Her family killed off, her near-death experience, waking up in an unfamiliar environment and not knowing of the dangers that lay ahead, all those thoughts swam around in her head. For the first time in a very long while, she felt...alone. Scared.
What purpose did she have now? Before the massacre that stole her family from her, her purpose in living was to protect the people she loved. The people who raised her and taught her everything she knew, and who showed her love and kindness when she had no one to turn to. Now, again, she was facing the future alone. She didn't even know if she could trust the people who supposedly saved her.
"...hello?...Excuse me, miss...?" She was shaken out of her dreary thoughts by a worried voice and a light pat on her back.
"h-huh?" Shook out of her miserable state, her eyes flew to the doctor's face. The doctor was...Doctor Tong...she recalled, from how the doctor introduced herself. "Yes?" she replied, unsure of what to do in her situation, as this 'Doctor Tong' worriedly looked at her up and down again, then quickly put a slight smile on her face.
The doctor gently asked, " Do you...remember anything that happened? What is your name, little girl?"
At the words 'little girl', the patient's left eye twitched ever so slightly. Little girl? She was a grown woman! With curves in all the right places and definitely of age! How could this...obnoxious doctor refer to her as a little girl of all things!
"... I'm not very sure myself." The patient realised that she had no clue where she was and how she got there after what happened to her family. Even though the doctor and whoever saved her seemed nice enough to help a dying woman like her, there was no guarantee that her safety was ensured. She decided to play it cool and reveal as little as possible.
In actual fact, the patient knew very well who she was. Her memories seemed to work just fine after a painful and sudden recollection of them.
Her name was Xi Jia En. She was an only child who parents had left her for the afterlife when she was still a young child, and who was after that taken in by a kind family who she treated as her own.
On the day she passed out, she didn't know who attacked her clan, or why they did it...but she knew that now, as the sole survivor of the massacre of the Oreca Clan, she had to find a way to seek vengeance, and to create a life for herself in this lonely world.
She would one day stand atop their mountain of corpses, for whoever did that to her family must have had an organisation behind it, which meant that she would have a great time picking them off one by one, making them suffer in the most horrible way imaginable, until they...begged her to kill them to end their suffering, because she wasn't going to let them die and get off easily.
In the silent white-walled room that smelled of hospital disinfectant, the young woman, no longer bloody and dishevelled, sat motionless, her eyes gleaming. Even the bright rays of sunlight filtering through the hospital curtains could not hide the cold, murderous glare in her eyes.
She now had a new purpose.
Kill them.
Kill them all.