Pain was a concept Orion had long since stopped respecting.
The world was spinning. Or perhaps he was. It was hard to tell when one's head had been driven through a slab of jagged rock at an insane speed.
Dust, thick and tasting of ozone and alien copper, choked the air. The sound of the impact still echoed across the crimson wasteland—a desolate expanse that looked nothing like Earth.
Orion lay embedded in the crater wall, his body twisted in a way that would have killed a normal human twelve times over.
His ribcage was a concave mess of splinters. His left leg was bent backward at the knee.
He sighed. A long, bored exhalation that blew a puff of red dust from his lips.
With a wet, sickening crunch, Orion pushed himself off the rock. His spine snapped audibly, realigning itself with the casual pop of a knuckle being cracked. He didn't wince. He didn't even blink. He just stood there, swaying slightly as his body began the familiar, violent work of stitching itself back together.
Flesh knit together. Bruises faded from purple to nonexistent in a heartbeat. The crushed organs inflated and resumed their function.
He looked down at his left side.
"Ah," he muttered, his voice raspy from years of silence. "That's annoying."
His left arm was missing below the elbow.
Orion scanned the debris field around him. It didn't take long to find it. The severed limb was lying a few meters away, clutching a handful of alien gravel in a death grip.
He walked over, his boots crunching on strange little critters. He bent down, picked up his own forearm by the wrist, and shook the dust off it like he was cleaning a dirty glove.
He aligned the ragged, bleeding stump of his arm with the severed limb.
Squelch.
Muscle fibers lashed out like seeking tendrils, grabbing onto each other. Bone fused with the sound of grinding stone.
Nerves reconnected with a spark of white-hot agony that Orion ignored entirely. He rotated his wrist, opening and closing his fingers.
"Good enough," he grunted.
A flicker of light caught his attention—a familiar, intrusive prompt hovering in his peripheral vision. He focused on it for a split second, just to check the progress.
[ SYSTEM INTERFACE ]
Seed Name: The Ouroboros Heart
Seed Grade: Mythic
Seed Saturation: 899,401 / 1,000,000
"Slow," he whispered.
His attention shifted to the only thing that mattered as much as his stats and limbs.
A few paces away, half-buried in the chitinous shell of a dead behemoth, was his weapon. It was a Curio—an artifact that refused to break even in this hell. It took the form of an Odachi, a greatsword with a blade longer than a man was tall. The metal was chipped, stained with violet blood that would never wash off, and radiated a dull, murderous intent.
Orion strolled over, gripped the handle and wrenched it free. The metal sang as it cut the heavy air.
SKREEEEE—
The shriek came from the city ahead.
Sprawled across the horizon was a twisting, organic metropolis of black spires and throbbing hives. This wasn't an invasion force; it was a civilization. And he was the pest they couldn't exterminate.
From the hive-spires and the subterranean tunnels, they poured out.
A tidal wave of humanoid monsters. They were pale, faceless things clad in natural chitin armor, wielding crude weapons made of shadow and bone. Hundreds of them. They scrambled over the buildings of their own world.
Any sane man would have run. Any army would have surrendered.
Orion just rolled his neck, cracking it one last time.
He had been here for two years. He had died a thousand times. He had been bitten, burned, crushed, and slashed. And every single time, he got back up.
He was the anomaly. The Suicidal Immortal who refused to let them sleep.
He lifted the massive sword, resting the flat of the blade against his shoulder. His eyes, cold and ancient, locked onto the approaching tsunami of death.
"Alright," Orion whispered to the empty air. "Another round."
He didn't scream. He didn't rage. He simply kicked off the ground, shattering the rock beneath his feet, and charged alone into an entire world.