Some thoughts were scary. Not knowing whether the people close to you would die in the next minutes before you could reach them was a terrifying thought.
And it wasn't the first time Jacob felt something like this. No, it was most definitely not the first.
...
Jane, God.
Jacob was holding a woman with tattered clothes and blood all over her body. She had been hanged on a cross and stabbed until she had breathed her last breath.
It had not been an easy death.
The Volcano Queen from Poland, Jane Dobrowski, had succumbed to the Undeath Tyrant. Jacob had rushed to the US to help her as soon as he had gotten the message. Undead had poured out from the ground, as numerous as the stars, and had torn apart city after city. Jane had rallied the warriors and the population, clashing with the strongest undead servants and making it possible for many civilians to be saved.
But, in the end, her efforts had not been enough to save her life.
The Undeath Tyrant had caught her and tortured her for a long time before Jacob could tear apart the fort she had been kept at.
It had been a painful death, one you wouldn't wish to be your worst enemy. The man had messed up her soul even before her body. Jacob could still feel bits of necromantic energy in the air.
He could feel the death around him like a new hateful taste in his mouth. It had been terrible, an experience that had scarred him. But, it had also been the experience that had made him choose to fight the necromancer to death.
He had pursued the bastard for so long that he had almost forgotten everything else in his life. His only objective had become to kill him, eliminate him from Earth, wipe away the tainted stain that he represented.
He had shared many battles with that woman, always admiring how unrelenting she had been, despite her shortcomings. She had taught him much by simply observing her.
Jane had risen alone from nothing in Poland, and she had managed to get to New York as an exchange student in Finance and get a double degree. One from Poznan, one from Columbia.
New York had been invaded by huge Hydras and razed to the ground in less than a day. The hideous multi-headed monsters had flattened all the mighty skyscrapers.
She had found an ancient ruin in the subway system right under Brooklyn, and that had saved her. She had been one of the very few city survivors and one of the first humans to get a Cultivation Technique and a Spell Tome.
That had made her an instant hero, one of the true warriors of humanity. She would one day, centuries later, free New York from the Hydras before perishing to the Necromancer.
But the loss of Jane meant that another piece of him had been chipped away from his soul.
And while chasing the Undeath Tyrant, Jacob had found out all the terrible remains of his folly. Tortures he wouldn't even be able to imagine had brought Jacob to the Undeath Tyrant, finally allowing him to kill the bastard.
But that chase had cost Jacob a lot. Not just in terms of lives lost, but in terms of what his soul had to endure, both literally and metaphorically. The same search to eradicate that great evil had brought Jacob closer to the Necromancer in character; in fact, once our protagonist understood how terrible the world could be, he dropped many of his inhibitions in order to be able to become stronger.
In the end, beating the Undeath Tyrant had required Jacob to become similar to that monster in certain regards. He had become ruthless, acquired an otherworldly calm judgment, borderline evil.
…
And even though he was rushing to his friends, other parts of him had been tainted by all the Evil he had fought in his past life. It resulted in the way he had talked to women who had been raped, the way he had made Helena stay, and the same way he had continued to accuse Frederick in his heart at the start of this new life.
It sounded cheesy for those who had not gone through what he had, but the famous quote 'if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back' meant a lot for him.
While the car went at full speed, barely a minute away from the place, Jacob felt the same coldness he had acquired in his past life spread through his body. People would blame him, judge him, make a monster out of him.
But that was welcome.
He would embrace the dark thoughts everyone else was afraid to even grapple with. He was already deep down in the abyss, so far below that he wasn't sure he would be able to come out of it the day this war would end. As he had discussed with Juliet, he wasn't sure he had a future among other humans; that was the reason he never really thought about it. It just wasn't that important. He would try hard to build one, sure.
But the war he was now fighting… it required to be ready to see the mangled corpses of his friends. And you could do that with a clear mind only once you start descending into the same abyss the Necromancer had gone into. If you didn't do that, the monsters inside the abyss would always be able to blindsight you, more accustomed to the dark than you were.
He braked and got out of the car with an ice mask over his heart and a sword tightly held in his hand. He left his humanity inside the car together with the dreams of a normal life, of a future; instead, he brought the dreams of power, of all the legendary battles to come.
For Jacob needed to be ready for anything.