Tale of Discovery

Chapter 2: Vision

I just stand where I am and stare at her. I don't know what to say. I have no idea who the person she just mentioned is, who she is, heck, I don't even know who I am. More like, I don't know what I am.

Am I a ghost? Didn't I die? Wait a minute. Is this the cycle of reincarnation that those monks in eastern movies rambled about? I thought all of that stuff was nonsense.

It should be nonsense. If that was the case here, I should be reborn as an infant, and shouldn't remember my past life... Huh? I can't... remember?

Suddenly, I feel an excruciating headache. I clench my head and try to keep in my voice as much as possible. My vision is hazy, but I can see the girl panicking and I assume, calling out my name. I feel like something is being extracted from my brain. My vision grows hazier by the second. The moment everything became dark in my sight, the pain stopped.

I feel like my eyes are closed. I open them. What met my sight was a scene that I would never ever forget.

Horrible. Disgusting. I can't find the right word to describe what I'm seeing right now.

Dead bodies with amputated limbs and huge chunks of their flesh missing are all over the place. I am in some sort of street in a city. The buildings around me are all... barely recognizable. Everything is a wreck.

I take a step forward, but I fail? What? I look down and realize that I have no legs, no, I don't have a body. I feel like I don't exist, in the physical sense. I imagine why I can't move around, and suddenly, I move. What? I didn't even try to move.

I repeat what I just did, and once again, I move. It seems like the secret to my movement is my thoughts.

I think about moving forward, and that's exactly what happens. I want to think more about my current situation, but my thoughts are suddenly interrupted by a loud and violent roar.

I look at where the sound came from, only to be bewildered by the sight of a man riding a, what seems to be a dragon. Yes, a dragon. The dragon suddenly makes a turn and flames burst from its mouth.

Looking at the direction the flames are heading to, I see several men and women flying. They seem to have... wings? How does that even work? From what I can see, there are 3 types of wings. A magnificent pure white pair of wings. A raven black pair of wings. And a featherless dark pair of wings.

Those wings seem to remind me of something, but I can't figure out what no matter how much I rack my brain.

Focusing back on what I see, I see the dragon-rider jump off of his dragon. The sky abruptly turned darker, and I could see black clouds forming a spiral at where the dragon-rider is at a ridiculous speed. Then the dragon rider's hands started glowing while electrical sparks appeared all over his arms.

He punched. Not the people, just the air. He punched the air in their direction...

*BOOM*

I feel the reverberation of a strong shockwave, as I see ripples appear in the sky at where he punched, followed by electrical currents striking down 2 of the winged people.

The dragon-rider seems to have the ability to fly? Or is he just floating... I can't tell. He needs no wings to do that, he just floats there casually.

The winged people that weren't affected by the attack began spreading out and started surrounding the dragon-rider.

What followed next was an absurd battle of power. One dragon-rider versus several winged people with various powers. It might seem unfair, but neither side seems to have an advantage over the other.

I just realized that my wish to see the battle more clearly has brought me closer to them. I am now standing about 5 meters away from them as each side tries to destroy the other.

I notice the dragon rider's chest has started eerily glowing in red. No, all of them have a glow in their chest, although in different colors. The dragon rider's glow is the brightest of them all and seems to be getting brighter by the second. This doesn't seem to be affecting their battle though.

They either don't see it, or it's not an unusual thing for them.

It disappeared. The glow just vanished. I take a look at the others, and they still have a glow, but the dragon rider isn't visible to me anymore.

He abruptly backs off from the person he was fighting and smiles in a way that I can only describe as creepy. His left hand which was balled into a fist opens up, revealing a gem-like thing in the middle of his palm.

The gem-like thing starts glowing in red, the light covering his left arm to the elbow. He punches the air once again, but this time in the direction of the sky.

The glow covering half of his arm disappeared, and a red circle appeared in the sky. The circle seems to have runes written in it and is growing at a fast pace, covering most of the sky.

"Inferno reducto!", exclaims the man with a lot of vigor.

As soon as his strangely familiar voice faded out, extremely bright red flames started materializing out of the circle and began swallowing up everything within the vicinity.

The only ones that remain unaffected by the flames are me and the dragon-rider himself.

Once the flame dies out, I see that none of the winged people are in sight, most likely burned to ashes.

The dragon-rider scratches the back of his head and smiles. Then suddenly he looks at where I am, his smile growing wider.

Before I could react, everything around me started fading out, and the only one that was left was myself floating in a white space that seems to be never-ending.

"A precognition of a disaster. Not unheard of, but a fairly rare occurrence.", a soft voice resounds within my head.

I notice that something is materializing in front of me into a humanoid figure.

Once the materialization is done, I am dumbstruck by the identity of the person in front of me.