User blog:Seieireppa/God Eater: Reverie for a Dying Star, chapter 1: Beginnings


 * BEGIN RECORDING


 * 12/22/2180

I still remember that day… the day my father died.

I was twelve, then. Barely old enough to wipe my own ass as far as world experience was concerned. All I knew was how to live—I was merely taken along with my group of survivors as one of the only kids as we moved from place to place.

Back then… it was 2172, I think, the Aragami had done in most of humanity at that point. And by “done in,” well, you know. Back then… “even” back then, I suppose, would be more appropriate… there were only a handful of us remaining, somewhere in the order of a few hundred. Few enough to fit in a tiny shelter if you packed us in tight enough. Most of them were holed up un some underground city in Europe. They used to have larger numbers, somewhere around 450… but that didn’t last. The Aragami grew and evolved faster than we could ever have comprehended, and eventually the settlement started to give way.

Of course, there were a number of God Eaters among our ranks—by “our,” of course, I mean “humanity’s.”  I’ve never seen the place, that underground city, personally… all my life I’ve been on the run out here in the wasteland, brought from place to place by our own group of survivors. There were twenty-five of us at this point, including myself and my father. He was a God Eater of the new era, the era where Fenrir’s grip on the world was over, ended almost overnight by the evolving Aragami. His father before him had been around during the old era, though… wish I could have lived through that instead of this waking hell… god, what a joke. Why’d I have to be born when I was? I just…

…I’m sorry. It’s unbecoming of me  I’m a big, badass God Eater of my own now… but I wasn’t always like this. Back then, before my father died, I was just a brat. A hardened brat whose soul had been worn down by the current age, to be sure, but a brat nonetheless. A brat whose complete lack of life experience couldn’t have prepared him for that day.

That day… I don’t remember what day it was. Humanity had long since stopped keeping track of silly things like days of the week. We lived from day to day… but I doubt you could even call that “living” at all. We were “surviving,” plain and simple.

And our day-to-day life of survival all came to a head on the day my father died.

There were twenty-five of us then… I think I mentioned that. Among us, seven were God Eaters, my father included. The alarm at our camp indicating approaching Aragami went off all of a sudden, in the dead of night. It was raining, then… I’ll always remember that rain. If only the rain could wash away the pain, the despair of merely living… but I digress.

It was one Aragami. Just a single one… and by the time it reached our camp, four of our seven God Eaters had been brutally destroyed. And then, well…

I’ll never forget its appearance. It was tall, weirdly tall, and made of sleek gray metal, with blades all over its body. It stood atop two impossibly thin legs, yet the speed at which it moved seemed almost unreal. It seemed more machine than Aragami, and hell, I would have assumed it WAS a machine were it not for its face.

Its human face, twisted by Oracle cell mutation into the face of an unholy monster with a countenance of unfathomable rage. Just looking at it induced in me a feeling of utmost fear… yet, at the same time, I felt sad, and a bit nostalgic. To this day, I have no idea why I felt that way, and I don’t know if I ever will… but that didn’t really matter when the beast slew my father. It blocked his God Arc like it was nothing, before impaling him with its massive claws, talons of coldest steel that seemed as though they could cut through any material that existed—and some that didn’t.

I don’t quite remember what happened after that. All I do know is that before my father even hit the ground, I was there, his God Arc in my hand as I charged towards the Aragami. The pain I felt was immense, beyond any sort of reason or description—but it was nothing compared to the rage in my heart. It was the first time I’d felt genuine emotion in a very, very long time. After that… my memory skips for a moment, but the next thing I do remember was a bright flash, along with the Aragami running away. Whatever I did, I guess it was something that this Aragami didn’t like, but it just turned and walked away.

We made no effort to pursue. We were down to two God Eaters—well, three if you count myself. Although at that point I was as much a God Eater as someone who doodles in their free time could be called an artist.

At any rate, we’d been granted a reprieve… for now.

But no amount of rest could have prepared me for what my life had in store for me…


 * END RECORDING

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