Dark Fate: Book 1 – A New Fate
: Chapter 1

Beep Beep Beep Beep

I gasped as an annoying sound brought me to my senses. An alarm clock? I hadn’t had one of those since before the apocalypse. What damned idiot brought an old alarm clock on an expedition to kill the Demon Lord?

Wait. The Demon Lord was dead. I killed him! Had that been some kind of sorcerous trick? The Demon Lord wasn’t known for illusions and enchantments, but I knew one of his lieutenants had been. He’d been most troublesome to kill, as we cut our way through the Demon Lord’s army.

We. My comrades. People I had fought and bled beside, and had considered family. Everything started coming back to me now. The bitch had betrayed me! She’d killed me.

Hold on, if I was dead, how was I here? And where was here? I looked around, trying to get my bearings. The room was oddly familiar. A pre-apocalypse construction, obviously. Standard apartment bedroom, bookshelves, computer, electric lights. None of that made sense.

Wait. Those posters, the figures on the shelves. I knew them! I’d had ones just like them, before the apocalypse, when I’d lived in a simple one-bedroom apartment. In fact, they’d even been in just the same place! What was going on? Was this some kind of twisted heaven or hell, where I was placed in my old room?

I took a breath, and called up my status with a mental command. Nothing happened. I tried again. Still nothing. No System? Had someone managed to knock the thrice-damned thing out again? No, that was impossible. It had taken the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs to knock the System offline the first time. It wasn’t something any mere mortal could do.

I needed to clear my head, think this through. I got up from the bed (definitely looked like my old one), and noticed that I was wearing my old pajamas. If this was some recreation, then they spared no expense. I stepped out into the main room of the apartment, and grimaced. This was definitely my apartment from before the apocalypse. Now that I was actually awake, it was easy to recognize my old things.

Not knowing what else to do, I went to the bathroom, and turned on the light. I turned on the tap, and cupped my hands under the cold water, before slashing my face a couple times. It certainly felt real.

I looked up, and my jaw dropped as I saw myself in the mirror. This was not me! Well, it was, but not me as I had been when I was the Black Knight. I was overweight, and nowhere near as ripped as I had been. The scars from a thousand battles were gone, like they’d never been. The cursed runic tattoos that had bound the powers of the Black Knight into my flesh were gone, as well. And my eye, the right eye that I had lost during the battle for Atlanta, and had replaced with a black crystal, was looking back at me! That wound had come from a cursed weapon, and no healer available at the time had been able to regenerate my eye as it was. And yet, I saw both my brown eyes in the mirror, looking back at me.

And that was when I remembered. At the end, right as I was dying from those traitors’ blade, I had tried to pull off a last-ditch miracle. I’d combined the powers of the [Disc of Dark Rebirth] and the [Philter of Bottled Time]. Not just combined them, unleashed them, with no real focus or idea of what I was doing, save trying to make the traitors pay. At best, I hoped to create an explosion that would kill them both. Though I would have settled for them being irrevocably cursed in some horrible way.

Instead, it seemed like something altogether different had happened. I rushed back to my room, to the computer. I needed to know what was going on in the world. The first thing I saw, as the computer booted up, was the date. August 24, 2018. The day the world ended.

Had I gone back in time? Not just a back to the future thing, where I had to avoid meeting my old self, but actually sending me back to my old body? Had I been given a second chance? I thought of all the mistakes I’d made along the way to becoming the Black Knight, and slaying the Demon Lord. So many things I’d wished I could have changed, but never knew how to. I could do it all differently this time! Yes, I would do it all differently with this chance that I’d been given. Starting with my so-called ‘friends’.

Jessica Meadows was a childhood friend. I’d asked her out in high school, and we’d had an on again, off again relationship ever since. Not really love of your life stuff, but two people who were comfortable together, and enjoyed each other’s company. I knew she came from an abusive family situation, so I was always considerate of not pressing things too hard, or too fast.

When the System Apocalypse happened, we’d found each other on the first day. I’d taken the Swordsman class, and she was a Lightning Sorceress. She’d been turned into an elf, and I’d become a freaking angel of all things. Unfortunately, I’d lost my wings, and the better part of my powers, when a demon captured us that first week, and ripped them from my shoulder blades. But I managed to get Jessica out, and grab a potion off a shelf as we fled.

That potion had what was, in essence, a curse bottled in it. I didn’t know it at the time. I just thought it was another healing potion, like we’d seen one or two of before. But it wasn’t. When I drank the cursed potion, I took the Curse of the Black Knight into myself, and the last of my angel blood burned away, making me human again, but augmented and marked with the tattoos across my body.

Jessica had stood by me in that moment, helping me back to health, and we became far closer than we ever had. My ability scores grew exponentially in the first few days, thanks to the curse, making me stronger, faster, smarter than I had been before. More charismatic, as well. When I suggested we take our relationship beyond ‘friends with benefits’ to being an actual couple, she agreed instantly. She wanted the security my new powers provided.

I remembered James, as well. James Masters. He’d been a friend from work. Had the desk next to mine in the twenty-four-hour call center where we spent the nights on the midnight to morning shift. He was my best friend there, but that wasn’t saying much, honestly. There were only four of us in the office at that time, and Greg was a bully while Frank was a drunk who somehow managed to avoid getting caught by the boss.

When things went down, he’d picked up the Priest class. Told me that he wanted to be essential to anyone he ended up partying with. After all, a healer could be the difference between life and death, when you were dealing with monsters. I could understand the reasoning. He wanted some job security, preferably with as little getting hit in the face with goblin clubs as he could get. He wasn’t a coward, but he didn’t exactly enjoy pain, and he was always worried about how he’d look if he was injured. The one time I saw him get hit in the face, he absolutely lost it.

Perhaps that should have been a major sign right there. After all, if someone was so vain and egotistical in the middle of the end of the world that they couldn’t take a bruise to the cheek without freaking out, then what did that say about them as a person? Would they actually stay with you, when things got tough? Or would they run? Turned out, James went for door number three, and turned into a damned backstabbing traitor who tried to use his ‘friends’ to boost his own power.

I took a deep breath to calm myself. No, I couldn’t let myself get worked up over this. Not right now. I had to think, to plan, to prepare. If this was a back in time situation, as I thought, then that old life didn’t matter anymore. I wasn’t going to forget, and I sure as hell wasn’t going to forgive, but working myself up over it right now wouldn’t do anything. I needed to prepare for my revenge. And it needed to be something they never saw coming.

I looked at the time. 8:15 AM. Assuming everything went according to the same timetable as last time, then I still had eight hours to prepare for the apocalypse. Plenty of time. I took a breath, and focused on the computer screen, bringing up various news sites. They were all focusing on the stories of the day. None of them interested me. I’d heard them before, and in a few hours, none of them would matter. That wasn’t what I was looking for, anyways.

What I was really looking for was any sign that there were others like me, who had come back from the future. I didn’t see anything on the news suggesting that anyone important had realized what was happening, so I checked different forums. Nothing. Not even Reddit or 4Chan had anything. The closest you saw was basically isekai fanfictions, and none of them actually talked about anything that had actually happened in the last timeline.

While it wasn’t conclusive, I decided that this was good enough evidence that I was probably the only person to get thrown back in time. But then, I had been at the center of the energy storm. I was the one that unleashed it. Made sense that I, if anyone, would be the only one thrown back to experience the end of the world a second time.

I had eight hours to prepare. If things went as they did last time, when the lid blew off Area 51, the System would come online, and ‘character creation’ would begin. It would be great if the System launched, and I was instantly converted back to the Black Knight, with all my stats, levels, and items from ten years of struggle, in a ‘New Game+’ kind of situation, but I wouldn’t count on that. I couldn’t count on that.

I remembered that, when the System first came online, everyone had one item of theirs converted to the System for free, but there was a catch. It had to be a melee weapon of some kind, even just a piece of wood that got turned into a club. The stats on this starting item were universally garbage, but it was a system weapon, and it gave people a fighting chance if, say, a zombie spawned in their living room.

The real benefit of these starter weapons, that most people never realized, was that they all had the Indestructible feature. A wooden bat wouldn’t break, no matter what you hit with it, or how hard you hit. A knife never lost its cutting edge, and wouldn’t chip or shatter, even in the worst conditions. Even better, if the weapon came with a sheath or scabbard, it got the benefit, as well. This was a unique feature, as far as I knew, only present in those starting weapons. Starting weapons that the System had been sure to buy back as quickly as they could.

The first thing I did, was grab the fancy replica katana I had on a display stand. It was a show piece, not made of the strongest steel, by any means, and with a faux ivory handle made to look like one of the swords off the Highlander movies. But it was a sword, and it had an edge. If I made that my starter weapon, I’d have an unbreakable, indestructible weapon. Which would be good, because there were monsters and abilities that focused on destroying weapons. Sure, the stats would be crap, but crap stats and armed beat a broken blade any day.

With that thought in mind, I considered what else I could do to prepare. I couldn’t assume that I’d have any gear. In the hours after the Apocalypse, the outdoors stores had been ransacked by panicking crowds, looking for any advantage that could help them survive against the monsters. I could go now, and beat the rush. Just charge everything to a credit card. It wasn’t like I would have to pay the bill after the apocalypse. So many people went missing in that first month, it would be child’s play to become another one of the lost, and skip out on the bill.

I smiled. After all the finance charges and service fees that the card companies had charged me over the years, the idea of sticking them with my apocalypse prep bills brought a warm glow to my heart. Couldn’t happen to nicer guys, really.

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