Chapter 1: Well, This Sucks
What really sucked trying to perfect the "Divine Dragon Sword Technique" in that piece-of-piss one room of his was that space really wasn't enough for anything even close to decent form, let alone any serious practice… but then, of course, none of this mattered in any way: at this time of Jang Young's story, he mostly wished he died.
He was lying sprawled on his worn tatami mat, with a trickling of blood from his nose and scattered pages of various martial arts manuals and printed manhwa panels everywhere around him.
The paused video on his laptop screen showed the action sequence from some old-timey martial arts movie that he'd been trying to duplicate-a frozen, ancient master in midstrike of what Young had been desperately attempting to mimic.
"Fucking. finally," he wheezed, a wide smile spreading across his face despite the searing pain in his chest. This was it; this was how all those manhwa protagonists started their journey. Die in the modern world while training, wake up as some noble's son in a fantasy realm. He'd read this scene a hundred times.
The edges of his vision began to dim, yet Young's smile only seemed to broaden.
All that secret practice throughout the years, every martial art he could get a hold of; memorization techniques from real dojos he'd never been able to afford entrance into, but studied nonetheless with ancient texts "borrowed" from university libraries. The man had done no wrong, including mastering basic forms with seventeen different swords.
Sure, he'd never actually had a real sword before, but this was what broom handles were for.
"See you. in the next life." he managed to croak out, then immediately felt stupid because no one was actually there to hear his cool last words.
The darkness claimed him.
And then, because the universe had a particularly twisted sense of humor, light stabbed into his eyes again. Along with, you know, actual stabbing.
"What the f—" Young tried to say, except it came out as a wet gurgle because there was definitely blood in his mouth. Different blood. New blood. Not-his-old-body's blood.
The first thing he registered was the smell-copper and shit and something burning. The second thing was pain, which, okay, fair enough, he'd just died. But this was different pain. This was "someone just ran me through with something sharp" pain, which was decidedly not the "I just burst all my blood vessels trying to channel nonexistent ki" pain he'd been experiencing a moment ago.
He forced his eyes open. Grey above, stone walls to either side. A distinct sensation of lying in something wet and sticky which he really did not want to think about too much.
With great effort he now lifts his head and looks down at himself.
"Oh, you have got to be shitting me."
He was wearing armor- cheap, leather armor that had most definitely seen better days, currently sporting a brand new hole right through the chest area. He was also about sixteen years old, if body size was anything to go by. And he was most definitely not in a noble's mansion.
The alley he was lying in was littered with bodies. Most of them young, all of them armed, all of them very recently dead. Some wore similar cheap armor to his, others had slightly better gear. The word "mercenaries" floated through his mind, along with information that felt both foreign and familiar – muscle memory and knowledge from whoever's body this had been.
"This isn't how it's supposed to work," Young muttered, then caught himself. The voice wasn't his. It was younger, with a slight accent he didn't recognize. "The protagonist always wakes up in a soft bed with silk sheets and worried servants hovering around. There's usually a hot maid. Where's my hot maid?"
A shuffle of movement caught his attention. Someone was picking through the bodies at the far end of the alley, pulling off anything valuable. They were getting closer. The muscles and limbs of Young's new body were crying out in complaint as he started to move around, but all of those years of martial arts kicked in-years that were his and, it was surprising to realize, this body's muscle memory as well. The previous occupant might've been the "weakest war child", if the splinters of recall floating through his brain were any gauge, but at least he kept himself fit.
His hand fell upon the hilt of a sword. Not his own-it had flown from his grasp when he'd been run through-but it would serve. The blade was notched and badly tempered, but still sharp enough.
The scavenger was three bodies away now, muttering to himself in his work. He hadn't noticed him yet, probably still thinking he was just another corpse.
The thoughts running through Young's head were in overdrive: he was in a fantasy world, check; he had access to his knowledge of martial arts, check; he could feel something humming beneath his skin that had to be mana, big check. But he was apparently a "war child" – some kind of child soldier/mercenary – in what felt like a slum, and he had a very immediate problem to deal with.
"Well," he whispered, tightening his grasp on the sword as the scavenger reached the body next to his, "at least I am not stuck within some stuffy noble's mansion." The scavenger reached out to him. Young grinned, and it wasn't a pleasant grin by any means. Time to see if all that training paid off.