Something came awake in the dark, slowly, the way a man surfaces from a long sleep, and the first clear thought it had was that it was already dead.
It remembered dying. It could not remember anything else — not a face, not a house, not a name — but it remembered dying, and so it lay in the grass and waited to feel whatever came after.
Then it looked up. The night sky overhead was full of stars in no arrangement it recognised, and across them, unhurried, a dragon passed with its wings spread wide enough to blot out a whole quarter of the sky.
Not dead, then. Reincarnated. Another world.
He looked down at the ground in front of him to find his own body, and found instead a shadow lying long across the grass — a straight, narrow shadow with a crossguard and a pommel.
He had been reincarnated as a sword.
No legs. No arms. No mouth to swear with. He could not sit up, could not crawl, could not so much as roll over in the dirt. He was a length of metal stuck point-first in the soil of a world he had never seen.
Right then a voice spoke, from nowhere he could point to, and told him he had a long road ahead of him.
Wonderful. At this point he was ready to ask whether he could just be hit by a truck again and start the whole thing over. For once, he decided, that was a perfectly reasonable thing to want.
The voice did not answer. It faded out and left him alone in the grass, and he spent some time wondering who it had been, or whether a sword lying in a field could hallucinate.
He tried to make sense of it. If people who were reborn into fantasy worlds were given new abilities — and he was fairly sure that was how it worked — then he must have been given some too. His attention sharpened. Something in him blinked like an eye opening, and appraisal came up.
Name: unknown. Wielder: none. Type: intelligence weapon.
That last one caught him. Intelligence weapon. He turned the phrase over. Then he looked at his skills, and found two: self-recovery and telekinesis.
The stats were not bad at all. He began to wonder whether he was a powerful sword. His appearance certainly suggested something important — a fine blade, an ornamented guard, the sort of weapon that stays in its stone through nine tenths of a game and only unlocks at the crucial moment.
Then a hand closed around him and yanked.
Goblins. A whole knot of them, jostling each other, grabbing at his hilt, each one trying to claim the weapon for itself. He recoiled — not physically, he had no way to recoil physically, but in every part of himself that could still object. He refused. He was not going to be wielded by a goblin.
They kept pulling. When pulling failed, one of them picked up a rock and began hitting him with it. And then another one leaned over, worked its throat, and spat on him.
That did it. He took the spit as a formal declaration of war.
He flew.
It happened before he had time to plan it — the telekinesis caught hold of him and he rose straight up off the ground into the air, and for one astonished moment he simply hung there, discovering that he could move. Then he came back down and drove himself through a goblin's chest.
Killing it did not feel bad. He noted that about himself with some interest and went on. He cut through the next one, and the next, and when his edge went through the small hard crystals inside them he felt something like accomplishment go through his metal.
When they were all finished he cut through one more crystal on the ground, and light ran up his blade.
He checked his stats. They had gone up. He had absorbed something out of the goblins — that was the only explanation.
Then the voice came again, a different one, and told him his current memory was at ten. It asked whether he wished to set his skills, and unrolled a list in front of him.
He tested a theory. He went back to a goblin he had already killed and stabbed it again, and crushed the crystal inside it, and new skills came to him: vigilance, poison resistance.
So that was the rule. Crush the crystals, gain the skills. He experimented until he was satisfied, and then he returned to the patch of ground where he had woken up.
It was very quiet there. He had no wielder. Nobody to carry him, nobody to swing him, nobody at all. He decided that he would become stronger, so that whoever eventually picked him up would have the best sword in the world in their hand.
Elsewhere, in another part of that country, villagers were being worked in a line under guard. Among them was a small black catgirl. She stopped for a moment — only a moment, only long enough to wish that she were stronger — and a blow landed across her for slacking. She stood there, helpless, and wished for power, and put her hand up toward the sky as though the sky might hand some down.
The sword, meanwhile, kept exploring. He learned quickly that telekinesis drained his mana, and that when the mana was low he could not move at all, which put a hard limit on how far he could wander in a day.
Flying low across the grass he found another beast, and decided to hunt it for the skill it would give him. The creature caught him. Tentacles wrapped his blade and held him, and his mana began falling away at a frightening rate while he strained against them. He cut. He kept cutting, desperate, until the tentacles came apart and the beast died — and out of it he took floating, which improved his movement enormously.
He combined floating with telekinesis and found he could travel much farther on the same mana. He kept hunting. He killed a serpent and took its crystal, and then something new triggered inside him: self-evolution. He had reached rank two, and he had evolution points to spend. He put them into mana and attack.
He was thrilled. His wielder was going to be so pleased with him —
And then he remembered that he did not have a wielder, and the thrill went out of him like heat out of a coal.
He was lonely. That was the plain truth of it. He wanted someone to praise him.
He kept moving. He found a goblin lair and cut his way through a great many goblins, taking skills off them as he went, and then he turned on stealth and slipped inside. He killed the goblin king quickly. He killed the goblin mage after it, and out of the mage he took fire magic, and his sword skills improved along the way.
He was happy again. Whoever ended up holding him was going to be strong.
Far away, the slaves were still working. A man beat one of the girls, and the black catgirl stepped in front of her to stop it. For that she was punished with the collar and denied her food.
The next day they were driven out to work again. This time she refused. She turned and tried to attack, and the collar shocked her, and she went down and did not get up.
When they were loaded up to be transported, she sat where they put her, restrained, saying nothing, and made herself a promise: she would evolve. She would become stronger.