Apocalypse respawn

'Damn it! Where are they?'

Truckdriver grimaced, his hand on his stomach, trying to forget the pain while frantically searching with his radar. Although he had to master and hunt for upgrade tokens after his memory loss, he still couldn't correctly locate those damn tokens.

'It changed again!'

The radar displaying a position to the north started tilting slightly northeast. He clicked his tongue.

'Damn leaking magic!'

He started swearing about his situation and his enslavers

The radars were becoming more and more useless in this world. He had woken up without memories in a hole in the rock blocked by a corpse. When he got up, he had caught sight of a battlefield. He had dragged himself, injured, across its entire length and barely survived.

A few months later, barely after getting out of danger from his most worrying injuries, he was being whipped into searching for tokens!

'Fucking shit!' He slammed his fist on a wooden table, which cracked under his blows, its pieces of wood scattering around the house.

Patiently, he lit a lamp and searched every nook and cranny of the different houses in the neighborhood.

***

 Rargnes woke up the next day feeling Truckdriver's breath of anger infusing into him, narrowly avoiding breaking his alarm clock. Strangely, other than firearms and modern protections, everything else wasn't prohibited by the king, just by customs.

Rargnes obediently followed orders, guided by Roaes to the goblin priest, who welcomed them joyfully. They gave the lands and discussed words that didn't advance anything but would facilitate their insertion into the network of churches.

They went around the houses and companies with no rest other than the days when they found no meetings to attend. On those days, Rargnes used the training exercises learned from Redstar, feeling his stock of energy from the last murder diminishing to truly manifest as his own.

Then, they let the mobsters know when the reservoir started to run low. After letting a goblin manage the speeches in their names, the group of five, Rargnes, Yurs, the commander, the scribe, and the other goblin, took the carts to the border, training on the road.

They arrived a few days later, entered the fourth world, and, guided by the goblin, found themselves in the commander's military base, the operations center of the fourth world.

Two soldiers saluted them at the entrance with a salute and led them to a room guarded by a soldier.

Seeing them arrive, the soldier opened the big padlocks, which were congratulated by the commander for their resistance and magic content, and the door opened onto a small cold room.

Four people were kneeling, blindfolded, and tied up. They all had good proportions of energy within them, about equal to the city guards.

They silently took their blades. Heads fell, blood spilling onto the floor. Yurs and Rargnes did it cleanly. The scribe and commander lacked strength, only half-severing the neck with their weapons. Then, the screams resonated in the room through the prisoners' gags.

Blood gushed everywhere, staining their clothes.

'Is this what you do to save yourself?' Rargnes wondered. 'What does it get you, exactly? Do you think doing the same thing you've been doing all this time will work?'

'It will work,' said another voice. 'With enough power, everything works. It's different. We're going to unite everyone against the noble.'

'Great! And after that it will be a bloodbath between you to decide who will be the noble. The reality is that you're just doing more of what doesn't work, so you shouldn't expect any changes. You hate your life. You hate killing them, I know, I feel it. But don't believe it will change by doing more – you'll just suffer more. I mean, do the people doing that actually live longer? No!'

Rargnes cleaned himself up and threw his bag on his bed before lying down and rethinking. His dark circles were gaping. This voice was new. As much as the voice telling him to endure resembled the one he had always heard, sounding like his own voice, this one had appeared out of nowhere.

'It won't work,' the voice told him. 'You'll just suffer more.'

'It's not just for you: it's for all the versions of you that will succeed you. I know it's hard. Endure. This is just a bad moment. Once you're strong enough and out of danger, you will be able to do what you really wish. In any case, what other choice do you have? Run away, and you'll end up like Truckdriver – worse, they don't care about him, but because they consider you an ally, the punishment will be all the crueler. They already consider you as their tool, and you can only play along - there are no other solutions.'

Rargnes collapsed from fatigue listening to his voices waging battle – without even wondering if his voices were battling for him.

In any case, 'the situation decides choices more often than the person.'

This voice helped him hold on. Wasn't that just enough for that shitty world? He was just... doing what others did.