3333 years ago - Somewhere in Iraq
"Gilgamesh, don't make it harder for all of your brothers and sisters of Uruk."
"Kill him!"
"Gilgamesh! For all your crimes, I, Ur-Uruk, sentence you to death!"
...
'Ah... That feeling... All of you have come to see me finish my requiem...' Gilgamesh thought, with a smile on his face.
Dozens of warriors, armed and equipped with shining armor, swords, spears, and shields, faced Gilgamesh. They were in the hundreds at the start of the battle, but not all of them could resist the might of this villain. They were all mages, what the Babylonian people liked to call Awakened. These were the forces of Babylon, all of them entitled to call themselves Warriors of Uruk.
Gilgamesh stood there, unfazed. His robes were in tatters, covered in blood—most of it not even his—but even his left eye had been taken. This battlefield had cost him a lot. But it had cost even more for those who fought him now.
Gilgamesh gave in to the feeling of death. It was near, an inevitable death. The bloody robe waved in the cold winds of winter as he raised his arms and closed his eyes to receive death. This brief moment of feeling the breeze was so pleasant for Gilgamesh that he used a part of his precious Quintessence—not that precious if he was going to die anyway—to make that moment last longer.
"Tsk, what are you smirking at, you fiend!" One of the Warriors of Uruk made a move, and a fireball was thrown at Gilgamesh, who then opened his eyes with anger.
Without a sign, or even a word, the fireball vanished as if it was never conjured at all. All the warriors around were surprised, growing even more cautious in these final moments of the villain. Gilgamesh started laughing.
"Yes... Excellent! I haven't had this much fun in ages!" Gilgamesh screamed in ecstasy. The warriors of Uruk were furious at him. It was as if he were mocking their efforts even in death.
"Come at me, Warriors of Uruk! Make your pathetic king proud! Defeat the villain! Honor the dead!" Gilgamesh screamed, snapping his fingers, causing an explosion in the face of the warrior who threw the fireball at him, killing him immediately.
He jumped back into the battle but was intercepted by four warriors who pierced several swords into his back midair, making him fall to the ground.
Gilgamesh coughed up blood, but there was no place left to stain. The entire battlefield was filled with bodies and a red snow of blood.
At his final moment, he laughed. He laughed until he couldn't. He laughed until he could traumatize all the Warriors of Uruk, making them remember all the people they had lost because of this crazy dog. He laughed until they realized that even with such a tremendous force of almost two hundred Awakened warriors... They had lost more than half that number to a single Awakened. He laughed because he destroyed all the ideals of Babylon, and their precious city of Uruk was burned to the ground.
Until his last breath... He laughed.
His entire life flashed before his eyes in his final moments. He remembered looking up from the Tower of Babel when he was still a child, awakening, and then recalled his slow evolution in understanding his Magical-Self. They said he was untalented, yet he still evolved quickly in his understanding of the Outer-Magical, the Spheres of Reality.
For every hundred thousand people, only one had the capacity to Awaken to magic. And from that meager number, one hundred eighty warriors gathered to kill him. That truly disappointed him. His journey ended here.
Or that was what he thought.
Ancient Age...
Middle Age...
Modern Age...
He was viewed as the utmost demon throughout the ages. As such, he was hunted down by other Awakened... He couldn't live long enough to evolve.
...
"Hey! Get the fuck out, all of you!"
The young Gilgamesh, now without a name, was tired, drooling, his infant body couldn't handle so much physical trauma. 'This is the fourth... No, fifth time already...' he thought as he got up and kept walking.
In this modern world, people no longer call themselves warriors, nor do they wear shining armor or wield swords and shields. Well, at least Gilgamesh hadn't met any swordsmen in his last six years of life. So why was he dreaming all of this? He hadn't gone to school to learn about these things; he could never do it in his current situation.
Every single night, he would dream of this man called Gilgamesh, as if it were his own memories, as if he were Gilgamesh, but he was just a child, a victim. The problem was: His child's brain couldn't sustain his last personality, nor his knowledge, not when he had not Awakened yet. He had never lived long enough after he was Gilgamesh. He couldn't know the full effects of reincarnation, but... He was not that last Gilgamesh.
Not until he awoke to reality!
Every time he slept, since he was a baby, small pieces of memories came into his mind. Memories of an infant life as a commoner in medieval France, or as a Briton in the Industrial Revolution...
All these memories were short. The only memory long enough to make him dream so many times of one single person was the dream where he was a Mesopotamian man named Gilgamesh. Alongside these dreams, there were dreams of him being other people in different time periods, but every time he passed through an event these dreams called 'Awaken,' he would soon be dead.
It was a set of constant nightmares for six years until he could dream of this man named Gilgamesh. He was one of the first mages of humankind, Awakened by the Tower of Babel. He used his power in a constant drive to go beyond the Awakened, but was surrounded by the forces of Uruk and killed on the spot.
In this life, Gilgamesh was a victim of human trafficking. He was in a dark and dirty container full of other children. As the man screamed for all the scared children to get out of the container, he opened it and the sunlight hit their eyes harshly.
There were three men: a big, fat white man with a cigar in his mouth, a black man so thin you could almost see his bones, and a Latino with a mustache.
The kids screamed in fear and tried to avoid those men, getting near the wall of the container, but their efforts were in vain.
"I like this one." The big, fat man blew a lot of smoke while laughing, grabbing a boy's arm, smiling viciously while looking at him.
"No! No! My brother!" One of the girls screamed when one of the criminals pushed her brother's arm, but then the Latino just kicked the girl's head back into the container.
"Quiet! Shut the fuck up! Be quiet!"
'So... What year am I now? Things must have changed again.' This thought surged into the child's mind. It was not his... It was something else.
The men sneered, dragging them forward like cattle. Gilgamesh's thin frame stumbled, his knees weak from malnutrition and countless nights of fear. But something in the daylight ignited a long-forgotten spark within him; a power buried and forgotten, now surging uncontrollably to the surface.
'Oh... Now I can see...
In the past six years, this boy had dreamed of this man called Gilgamesh. A villain that destroyed the city of Uruk in the Great Babylon. A man who killed hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children for centuries just to get stronger, so much so that every mage in the known world at that time united to fight him altogether. After his death, he reincarnated several times, but he was always killed by other mages who tracked his spirit and killed him on the spot, even when he was a kid. They never let him evolve again.
His pulse quickens, a sensation of boundless energy swelling inside him. In an instant, his vision blurs with memories: ancient rituals in dark temples, spells of pure, destructive force, and battles where his will alone obliterated entire armies... It was all he dreamed about Gilgamesh. The power floods him with a primal rage, not directed at the men before him, nor at the children surrounding him. It's simply a hunger, a relentless, consuming drive to destroy.
One of the men laughs and reaches out, pointing his gun at the kids. But as his fingers tighten on the trigger, Gilgamesh's eyes become sharp. The man gasps, his arm dissolving into a fine mist, blood splattering onto the children nearby.
"What the- What the fuck!" The fat man backs away, confusion and terror replacing his amusement.
In that split second, Gilgamesh becomes something unstoppable.
'In this short period of time of awakening... Hehheheheeheheh... I can kill them all!"
Power roars from him like a storm, ripping through everything and everyone around him. One man is flung backward as his chest implodes, ribs shattering with a sickening crack. The others try to run, but an invisible force drags them forward, one by one, twisting their limbs into grotesque shapes as their bones snap under the strain.
A scream echoes as a child nearby is ripped apart by the sheer force of Gilgamesh's awakening, their small body torn in two by the pressure. Others cry out, trying to shield themselves, but there is no escape. The cargo hold becomes a chamber of horrors, metal bending and twisting around them, the air heavy with the stench of blood and charred flesh.
Limbs are severed, bodies explode into showers of gore, the children's cries merging into a cacophony of terror. Gilgamesh's lips curl into a smirk, though his mind is nearly lost in the surge of power, a dark ecstasy flooding him as blood splatters his face. He's not just reborn; he's unchained, free from all restraint, a storm of vengeance and violence.
As the final scream fades, Gilgamesh stands alone amid the carnage, the silence punctuated by the dripping of blood from the walls and ceiling. The ground is littered with fragments of bone, limbs twisted at unnatural angles, bodies lying in heaps, their eyes wide open in lifeless horror. Drenched in blood and surrounded by the ruins of his awakening, Gilgamesh breathes in the metallic scent with satisfaction. For the first time in millennia, he feels alive.
He laughed.
'In chaos, life shatters,
Blood stains the ground,
Screams and laughter echo,
In horror, I'm crowned!'
He laughed as he finished his poem.
He could see now the big scenario he was in: A huge harbor full of containers, but now stained with blood.
"A massacre... I'm still pretty damn powerf-..." He suddenly gasped.
Then, everything went black. He simply fell to the ground, unconscious.