Chapter 3: Nichol Schade
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His consciousness returned with a start, pushing him to sit upright with a jerk.
“Ugh!”
However, before he could comprehend anything else, a violent influx of foreign memories entered his brain.
In these foreign memories, he sees a boy around 13 or 14 years old.
He’s inside a room no larger than 30 square meters and is crowded with equipment that he either brought or created.
His eyes are locked to the computer screen in front of him as his fingers typed furiously, inputting lines after lines of codes.
“It’s done!” The boy declared happily after finishing his work. Then, from his pile of equipment, he took a smartphone and start transferring whatever it was that he made in the computer into it.
“Can you hear me?” The boy said to the screen of his phone after the transfer was completed.
Immediately, a 3D image of a cute slime appeared on his screen and replied to him.
-Hi Creator, I am your most loyal assistant – Sentinel. How may I help you? (Sentinel)
“Yes!” The boy rejoiced, jumping around in his crowded room. Then, when he turned back to his phone’s screen, he told the cute slime, “It’s Brother, not Creator, and you’re not my assistant. You’re my Brother.”
-Alright. (Sentinel)
The slime smiled and the memory ended.
However, more memories entered afterwards. Too many that when it was over, he realized that blood was continuously spilling from his nostril due to the strain to his brain.
His frame collapsed back to the hard bed but before he blacked out, he heard a voice calling for a Doctor.
Several hours had probably passed and when he opened his eyes again, things were calmer and clearer this time.
The white ceiling, the stinging smell of alcohol, and the discomfort attached to the vein of his right hand.
He’s in a hospital.
Still, he’s still a little overwhelmed and confused because the memories of his previous and current lives and now fused.
‘f**k it,’ he groaned as he rubbed his forehead. ‘I was given the privilege to reincarnate and yet, I’m repeating the same life I used to have.’
But the matter of how he will proceed with his second life can wait for now. Organizing his thoughts, the primary priority right now is to establish a firm foundation for his identity.
The him in his previous life is an entirely different person to the person that he was this past 18 years. However now, with the memories of the previous merged to the life of the present, the two needed to find a common ground to have a perfect coexistence and the first step is to compare their lives and the world they’d lived in.
In his previous life 200 years ago, he was an asset for the top-secret military facility, Nautilus, under the codename: Stark.
As Stark, he possessed the ability called Answer Sense.
Answer Sense is the power to answer any question or problem he may face or instantly formulate a solution to any obstacle. It also enables him to understand the mechanics behind an existing fact.
Unfortunately, this ability of his was discovered by the worst people and in order to exploit him and his ability, they murdered his parents before imprisoning him to a facility called Nautilus to do their biddings.
The tragedy of that life of incarceration is what brought upon the doomsday labelled as the Sentinel Apocalypse when he turned Sentinel into a hostile A.I. who came too close from completely bringing the extinction of mankind.
In the end, he offered his life to correct his mistakes and due to that, the said extinction was averted and the world progressed to the present timeline.
On the other hand, this present timeline that had reared him as Gecko has an entirely different set of normalities. First is its technological advancement.
The 23rd Century is closing to the 24th but their technological advancement, including as well the economic quality, is actually behind compared to the 21st and he and Sentinel are to be blamed for that.
Mankind nearly faced extinction and it took them a while to recover. On top of that, fearing that Sentinel might still be lingering around or someone like him might be brought to existence again, the new governments after the restoration deterred from technological progression and it took more than a century first before the stigma wane.
Hence, as a result, their technological advancement is no different to what the 20th year after the New Millennium had.
Second are the Rangers and the Mazes, the new order humanity adapted around 50 years ago.
First recorded in Canada, rifts in the space opened and countless monsters extremely hostile against the human race poured out from those rifts. Several cities got wiped out during the initial wave while the world’s modern weapons proved itself to be ineffective against the tough skins of these monsters.
Hence, after surviving the Sentinel Apocalypse, mankind is in the face of extinction once again.
But then, not long after the first wave, people with special abilities began to emerge among the populace and hunt down these monsters spawned by the rifts. With that, mankind was able to fight back. Aside from that, it was also due to these people with special abilities that the world and its governing bodies acquired understanding of the rifts.
The people with special abilities declared that they are called Rangers and revealed the existence of an Administrator addressed as the Akashic System.
According to the first Rangers, the Akashic System imparted to them that these rifts are called Mazes and they ferry countless invaders from other dimensions. To aid Earth in repelling these invasions, the Akashic System had created a subsidiary version of itself within mankind where regardless of age, s*x, and ethnicity, chosen individuals will awaken with special abilities, connect them to the system, and transcend them from the human limitations to rival the strength of the monsters.
Among the functions of the subsidiary Akashic System provide includes the enabling of numerical representation of a Ranger’s level of physical and magical strength, the display of skills possessed, and the display of the power and skill proficiency progress of the Rangers. In short, it’s a Game System.
Determining that relying to the power of the Rangers and the system are the most efficient path for survival, humanity accepted the Akashic System and had adapted this new order ever since.
Then lastly but the most crucial to consider is the fact that he’s a Ranger.
Both in his previous and present life, he is someone extraordinary. The only difference is that this time he is not unique. The total population of the world right now is close to four billions and a percent of those are Rangers.
Here in Portland alone, the number of Rangers is above 50,000.
With these factors addressed, the common grounds are apparent now.
He’s always an extraordinary existence that the world he lived in needed and both person dreams of a better life than what they have. With these two as his ultimate constants, whether he is Stark or Gecko will ultimately be irrelevant as deep down, in the core of his identity, he’s simply a man who wants to have a future where he can have everything that he missed.
He smiled. With that matter finally settled, he will now move forward to the next phase which stepping into the starting point.
However, when he was about to open his Status Window, a Nurse coincidentally entered his room and when she saw that he is awake, she immediately paged a Doctor who arrived 10 minutes later.
He immediately identified them through their IDs. The Doctor is Dr. Brennan, a specialist to raid-related traumas while the Nurse is Ms. Jenny.
“How are you feeling?” Dr. Brennan asked as he examined him.
“A little lightheaded,” was his reply.
“You had a seizure attack last night. Were you aware of that?”
He nodded. “Yeah. It’s kind of hard not to.”
Dr. Brennan nodded and finishing his examination he said, “Everything seems fine but we will still proceed with the tests.”
“I understand,” he nodded again. “By the way, who brought me here?”
“The Association did,” Dr. Brennan replied. “Along with the members of the raiding party.”
“Are they alright?”
“Don’t worry, they’re in a better shape than you.”
“We would like to take your personal information for the hospital record,” Ms. Jenny asked after Dr. Brennan left for his other rounds. “First is your full name. The people with you calls you Gecko but they could not give anything else. We also failed to find any identification from your belongings.”
‘Name?’
Due to the circumstances of his second life’s early years, none was given to him aside from the nickname which originates from the first word he spoke which is ‘Gecko’.
But he has a name. A name given to him by the parents that he remembered. The pair out of the two that didn’t abandon him. The parents that loved and protected him until their final moment.
That name is…
“Nichol,” Nichol replied. “My name is Nichol Schade.”
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