I breathed slowly. My consciousness had faded considerably, and I could barely stay awake.
I didn't know how much time had passed; nor was the amount of blood I had lost insignificant.
I couldn't feel my arms or my leg. In fact, I could barely manage small movements.
I'm sleepy, I thought, trying not to lose consciousness.
I glanced sideways at my grimoire. I didn't know if it was me or mere coincidence, but it had opened at some point and was lying to the side, waiting.
"Three... one more," I murmured.
I wasn't far from having enough magic points to treat myself. The main problem was that I doubted it would cure my other ailments.
Although healing could close the wounds, replenishing the lost blood was an entirely different matter.
For that, I had to pray that the same thing as last time would happen.
It must be midnight by now, I thought faintly. A good amount of time had passed, so at the very least, the night should be well advanced, but the other half was still left, and in my current state I doubted I would make it.
Don't think about that, I told myself internally, avoiding discouragement. At this moment, the last thing I should do was be pessimistic.
I held my breath; my body stiffened in horror.
Footsteps were heard.
Slow, soft, barely audible, but for some reason they seemed to echo from all sides at once.
It seems this is the end.
I thought as I heard the footsteps approach; I knew nothing made sense anymore.
I hadn't expected things to end like this, but there was also nothing to be done.
I did what I could.
The footsteps stopped very close to where I was.
Slowly, a dark hand stretched out toward me.
"Whoa, I knew you'd be in bad shape, but not to this point," a voice said, bewildered, as if it hadn't expected this.
I opened my eyes in surprise as I looked at him.
The figure, dimly illuminated by the moonlight, was revealed.
It was a man with dark brown hair, light brown skin, brown eyes, and a face that was neither handsome nor ugly.
His face wasn't extraordinary in any sense; on the contrary, it was plain and nothing more.
The strange thing was that he had my same face.
"Is this... a hallucination?" I wondered, confused at seeing myself.
Although the voice was different, more shrill, everything else was almost identical to me.
I quickly relaxed and ignored the vision, knowing it was just a hallucination. And even if it weren't, I didn't care either.
"Seems I caused more confusion than anything else; I hoped this form would give you confidence," he muttered to himself while snapping his fingers. "Let's take the form of the previous guy instead, although the clothes... nah, doesn't matter, let's leave them as they are."
Immediately, his body began to transform in real time. His insides expanded from within outward as his shape changed rapidly.
But the change was so fast and strange that my brain couldn't process it. As if something too bizarre to be real happened before your eyes, and your brain simply couldn't register it.
"What is it?" I asked, confused, looking at him again.
His reflection changed into that of a boy with blond hair, quite young; he seemed to be around twelve to fifteen years old. He had blue eyes and was wearing strange clothes: shorts that reached his thigh, tight to his body.
He also wore a black leather jacket over a shirt with a strange design of many colors and strokes.
The strangest thing of all was that he had half his brain exposed, he was missing an arm, and his legs seemed to be held together by thin threads of steel and bone.
His stomach was wide open, allowing a view of his entrails.
It was such a strange sight that I didn't understand if it was a bizarre dream or if I had already died.
What I did know was that I had an incredible urge to vomit just from seeing it.
"I made a mistake doing it; I should have practiced with this form before," muttered the strange boy as his body changed in real time. The tears and signs that clearly showed he was dead began to change, erasing themselves as if they had never existed.
His body recomposed itself entirely, as if he were a normal person.
But the previous sight clearly denied that he was anything that could be categorized as normal.
"What are you?" I asked the creature before me. At some point, I realized I wasn't hallucinating.
First of all, if I were to hallucinate, I doubted it would be with a nightmare-like sight like this one.
The boy smiled slightly with a touch of madness in his eyes as he pointed at himself. "Me? I am what you might call a God," he said with a misshapen smile that stretched from ear to ear.