One hundred quintillion.
That was the number of times Axiros had lived and died.
Not reborn gently. Not granted second chances. He was thrown, ripped from one world and hurled into another without warning or mercy. Civilizations rose and collapsed around him like fleeting dreams, and through every single one, he suffered.
Not the romantic suffering sung about in legends, but the slow, grinding kind that hollows a person out from the inside.
The cruelest part was not the pain.
It was the memory.
Axiros remembered everything. Every scream, every final breath, every expression frozen on the faces of those he loved as they died. His mind did not blur the edges or soften the blows. Time did not grant him the mercy of forgetting.
Each life was preserved in perfect, agonizing clarity, stacked endlessly atop the last. Memory became a prison with no walls, only weight.
And there was one constant across all those lives, an unchanging rule written into his existence.
Every single person he loved died.
Not peacefully. Not meaningfully. They died afraid, betrayed, crushed by fate or circumstance or powers far beyond their control.
Mothers, fathers, siblings, lovers, children, faces he had learned by heart only to watch them vanish in blood, fire, or despair. Each loss carved something out of him. After enough lives, he could no longer tell what pieces were missing. He only knew that he felt… empty.
A shell walking forward because it had no choice.
With each reincarnation, something strange occurred. The wounds inside him, the ones that should never heal, the ones even time itself hesitates to touch, would close. Not gently, not kindly, but forcibly.
As if reality itself refused to let him break completely. He was restored just enough to continue suffering again.
Step after step. Life after life.
Some of those lives were cruel beyond words, years of starvation, slavery, war, humiliation. Others were gentle on the surface-wealth, comfort, admiration, power. But the ending never changed.
No matter how high he rose or how carefully he tried to protect them, fate would come. It always did. And he was always forced to watch.
There was no escaping the moment where everything he cherished was taken from him.
Yet, somehow, insanely, Axiros never stayed down.
In every world, in every reality, no matter the rules or the laws or the limits imposed upon him, he rose. He learned faster than any prodigy, adapted quicker than any survivor, and endured longer than any immortal.
He clawed his way to the summit of existence again and again, becoming king, god, sovereign, scholar, weapon, whatever the world demanded.
By now, he was more than a man.
He was a living archive. A walking library that held the knowledge of a decillion worlds. Languages that no longer existed, sciences built on dead laws of reality, philosophies born and erased across infinite timelines, all of it lived inside him. There was nothing left to surprise him. Nothing left to teach him.
And yet…
Despite the power.
Despite the omnipresent knowledge.
Despite standing at the absolute peak of existence countless times, Axiros wanted only one thing.
A normal life.
A quiet one.
A life where he could wake up without dread clawing at his chest. Where he could love without counting down the days to tragedy. Where he wouldn't have to steel himself for the moment fate inevitably reached out to tear everything away again.
He didn't want to ascend.
He didn't want to rule.
He didn't want to understand the universe anymore.
He just wanted a break.
A single life where pain was not inevitable.
A single world that did not demand his suffering as payment for existing.
A single chance to rest, truly rest, from the endless cycle of loss.
But after one hundred quintillion lives…
Axiros no longer knew whether such a world could exist. Or whether he was even allowed to have it.
Now, in the present-
Axiros stood alone in the heart of the battlefield.
Silence pressed down on the land like a suffocating weight. Not the peaceful kind, no, this was the silence that came after screams had been torn out of throats, after steel had finished singing, after hope itself had bled dry.
The ground beneath his feet was no longer soil but a grotesque mosaic of mud, blood, and pulverized bone. Bodies lay everywhere, if they could still be called bodies.
Most were mangled beyond recognition, twisted into shapes no living being should ever take. Limbs were scattered across the field like discarded weapons, torn free and flung far from their owners in the chaos of battle.
The air reeked of iron and burnt flesh. It clung to his lungs with every breath, thick and nauseating, yet painfully familiar.
He did not gag. He did not flinch. He had breathed this same air in more lives than he could count.
He looked down at his hands.
They were drenched in blood, some his, most not. The blood had long since cooled, sticky against his skin, seeping into the cracks of his armor as if trying to become a part of him.
He could feel it there, but it meant nothing. Pain had long lost its meaning to him. Violence, too, had become little more than routine.
Slowly, his gaze drifted across the battlefield.
Here lay a soldier frozen mid-crawl, fingers clawing desperately toward nothing. There, a shattered helm revealed a face locked in terror, eyes wide and empty, as if death had come a heartbeat too late to erase the fear.
Axiros saw them all, not as corpses, but as people. He always did. That was another curse memory refused to loosen its grip on.
And then he saw them.
Familiar faces. Broken ones.
His chest tightened, not sharply, not violently, but with a dull, crushing pressure he knew all too well. Family. Companions. People who had laughed with him, trusted him, believed that this time might be different.
Their bodies lay among the countless others, indistinguishable to the world, yet painfully clear to him.
He knelt beside one of them, movements slow and heavy, as if gravity itself had grown stronger. His fingers hovered for a moment before gently closing their eyes. The gesture felt hollow, almost mocking.
What use was respect for the dead when he already knew how this story ended?
"I tried. I tried to save everybody from the same fate once again." he murmured, though no one remained to hear it.
The words tasted bitter. He had said them before. Trillions of times. Maybe more.
He rose to his feet once again, standing amidst the carnage like a monument to survival that should not exist. Around him lay the proof of his victory, and of his failure. He had won the war. He always did. He had reached the peak of this world, just as he had in so many others.
And yet, the battlefield stretched endlessly around him, a graveyard carved by his hands and fate alike.
Axiros felt nothing but exhaustion.
Not physical, his body would recover soon enough. It always did. This was a deeper weariness, etched into whatever remained of his soul. An ancient, bone-deep tiredness that no reincarnation could wash away.
He lifted his eyes to the sky, stained red by smoke and dying light, and for the briefest moment, something fragile flickered within him.
Not rage.
Not grief.
Just a quiet, desperate longing.
"For once," he whispered into the empty world, with no beings, "let it end differently."
The battlefield, as always, gave no answer.
The ground itself had been stained a deep shade red, a silent testament to the cruelty of the war that had occurred here.
Every being of this existence had died. Only Axiros was left. He had watched every, single, one die with his own two eyes.
A Centillion beings, of various races, had died in this war. No one was left, not anymore.
Before Axiros knew it, he closed his eyes, as tears slid down his blood stained cheeks.
"Please, for once, let me rest. I don't want this anymore." Axiros spoke, a quiet longing that came down from deep into his existence. It was the longing of his soul.
Those were the final words he ever spoke in that world.
As the echo of his whisper faded into the blood-choked air, something deep within Axiros finally gave way.
Not with drama or resistance, but with quiet surrender. His body remained standing for a heartbeat longer, a lone figure amid ruin, then the light in his eyes dimmed, and the weight he had carried across an entire reality slipped free.
His soul detached.
There was no pain in the moment of death. No fear. Only a numb release, like loosening a grip that had been clenched for far too long. The battlefield blurred, dissolved, and vanished as his soul was drawn away, pulled into the same destination it had known one hundred quintillion times before.
The timeless void.
It was neither dark nor bright, neither empty nor full.
A place where distance held no meaning and time had long since been stripped of relevance. Axiros drifted within it, unanchored, carried by a current older than causality itself. Memories flowed through him, not as images, but as weight. Entire lifetimes compressed into sensations too vast to unravel.
He did not scream.
He did not resist.
There was no point.
His soul began to move.
Not forward, not backward, elsewhere. It traveled a length that could not be measured, crossing layers of existence, slipping between realities like a thought passing between moments.
Existences brushed past him and were left behind, their laws discarded as easily as worn garments. Worlds of raging energy, screaming gods, collapsing dimensions, none of them caught him this time.
Then, slowly, the current eased.
A new destination took shape.
Earth.
A small, unassuming planet suspended in quiet balance. No omnipresent energy saturating its air. No visible laws bending under the weight of power. No gods walking openly among mortals, no systems measuring worth or destiny. Just gravity, time, flesh, and fragile life.
Peaceful.
Ordinary.
For the first time in countless cycles, Axiros felt something unfamiliar stir within his soul.
Not hope, he had learned better than that.
But uncertainty.
Earth was unbound by power, untouched by the grand hierarchies he knew so well. A world where strength was limited, where lives were brief and painfully human. A place so small in the cosmic scale that most higher existences wouldn't even notice it.
As his soul descended toward it, layers of his might began to fall away, stripped not by force but by incompatibility. Knowledge remained, always, but the crushing weight of supremacy faded, reduced to something dormant, buried deep within him.
For once, fate did not roar.
It whispered.
And as Axiros' soul slipped toward its next vessel, toward a world where no one knew his name and no destiny had yet reached out to claim him, a single, fragile possibility emerged,
That this life might finally be quiet. But, Oh boy, would that be wrong.
That on this peaceful, powerless planet, the man who had conquered everything might finally learn how to simply live. Or not.
It entered the womb of a mother screaming in pain as she went into labour.
His black world was suddenly filled with vibrant light. He opened his eyes in a hospital, a lavish one at that.
The bright hospital lights bombarded hus tiny eyes, causes them to scrunch up in Instinct.
"Congratulations mam. You have given birth to a boy. You are now a proud mother." The head nurse, one who had supervised his birth congratulated the woman in front of her, his mother.
She proceeded to hand her over the newborn, as the mother cradled him in her arms.
"Welcome, my only light in this dark world, my sweetest son. You shall be named Liam from now on." She spoke with weary eyes, fatigued due to her going into labour.
Even with that, her eyes held warmth and love, a motherly Instinct, towards her newborn.
Axiros observed his mother and his surroundings keenly with wide eyes. With his countless years of experience in reading people, he caught onto the traces of abuse within his mother's eyes.
'Fuck! Not again.' Axiros screamed internally, as he realised his situation.
'I need a break from this shit. I can't do this anymore.' He groaned internally.
His mother noticing his discomfort pulled him closer to her chest, thinking he was starving. Eventually, feeding him.
'Looks like I have to speedrun this world once again. Maybe it won't be bad this time around.' He told, a faint hope lingering within his chest.