REINCARNATION OF THE WAR LORD

ASHES BENEATH THE SKIN

There’s a point where anger stops being an emotion and starts becoming fuel.

Tonight, I was a goddamn bonfire.

By the time I stumbled back into my chamber after the day's work, my body was a collection of aches stitched together by exhaustion.

My knees screamed from kneeling all day, my hands stung from scrubbing, and my back, my back felt like someone had replaced my spine with a steel rod and beaten it with a hammer.

But none of that hurt as much as the words.

"Useless."

"Dog."

"Don’t breathe near us."

"Can you even feel mana?"

"Fetch that salt, you scum."

They looped through my head like a broken incantation. Every sneer, every laugh, every order I obeyed kept replaying, taunting, grinding deeper into my skull.

I kicked my door shut behind me so hard it bounced off the frame and slammed again.

My coat sat in its usual corner, pathetic and threadbare, as if mocking the concept of comfort. The air was cold, the walls damp, and the only light came from a single mana lamp sputtering in the corner, home sweet hellhole.

The rage started in my hands first... a trembling, pulsing heat that demanded somewhere to go. So I gave it somewhere.

I slammed my fist into the wall. Once. Twice and Again. The dull thud echoed through the tiny room as stone bit into my knuckles.

“Useless!” Thud.

“Dog!” Thud.

“Don’t breathe near us!” Thud. Thud. Thud.

The skin split and my blood smeared across the wall but I didn’t care. I kept hitting. My other fist joined in, then my shoulder, then my forehead as if maybe, just maybe, I could smash the humiliation out of existence.

“Why!?” I roared, voice shredding my throat. “Why bring me back for this? Huh?! Is this your joke, fate?!”

The walls didn’t answer. They just stood there silent and indifferent, mocking me with their stillness.

I grabbed my pillow and hurled it across the room, then the blanket. Then the chipped bowl I used for water. Everything that wasn’t bolted down went flying until the room looked like it had been looted.

“Three centuries,” I hissed, pacing back and forth. “Three. Damn. Centuries. I sealed Oblivion itself. I split continents with a word. Armies prayed before they dared say my name and now I’m fetching salt. Fetching salt like a dog for some spoiled brat who couldn’t win a duel against his own reflection!”

My breath came in ragged gasps, My chest ached, my throat burned. And still the fury kept boiling.

I punched the wall again, this time hard enough to feel something c***k. “You should’ve left me dead,” I snarled. “If this is punishment, then finish it. Don’t drag me back just to humiliate me.”

But there was absolute silence. Nothing but the echo of my own breathing and the distant hum of mana conduits through the academy walls.

Slowly, I sank to my knees, forehead pressed against the cold stone. The tears came before I could stop them not from weakness, but from the sheer, suffocating weight of it all, it's exhausting.

“I should’ve stayed gone,” I whispered. “The world doesn’t need me. It doesn’t even remember me.”

But even as I said it, the lie tasted bitter.

Because deep down, beneath all the anger and humiliation and broken pride, I knew the truth, the world didn’t remember me because it was terrified of the day I would come back.

The next morning arrived like an insult I hadn’t asked for. My body ached from last night’s tantrum, but chores didn’t care about bruises. They never did.

By mid-afternoon, I’d scrubbed another thirty floors, polished six conduits, and narrowly avoided being tripped by a group of laughing nobles again. My rage was a low, constant simmer now, a knife just beneath the skin.

The worst part is that I couldn’t even pretend to care. Because today was “research observation day,” which meant I’d be sent to stand in a corner while the academy’s brightest prodigies .... a.k.a. rich idiots with too much mana and too little common sense conducted what they called “cutting-edge experiments.”

Or, as I liked to call it: How to accidentally blow up a lab in three easy steps.

The lab was packed when I arrived. Rows of rune-etched tables hummed with energy, glass containment fields pulsed with arcane light, and the air crackled with mana so thick you could almost taste it. Students in pristine white coats clustered around a central dais, where a complex spell circle glowed faintly on the floor.

I knew that spell. I invented that spell back when humans were still figuring out how to stop burning themselves alive with raw mana.

Judging by the sloppy lines and unstable runes, I also knew exactly how this one was about to go wrong.

But hey, what did I know? I was just the janitor.

“Stand over there and don’t touch anything,” barked Instructor Velra, not even bothering to look at me.

“If something falls, pick it up. If someone faints, drag them out of the way. That’s your entire contribution.”

“Of course,” I said, bowing slightly. "Wouldn’t want to interfere with genius at work."

I moved to the corner, hands behind my back, and watched the show unfold.

“Are the catalyst stones aligned?” one student asked.

“Yes, but the resonance field isn’t stabilizing.”

“Did you inscribe the second containment rune?”

“I thought you did!”

“Wait, why is the matrix pulsing red?”

"Oh, this is going to be good."

The spell circle flared, flickering violently between blue and crimson. The containment field around it shuddered like glass under pressure. Students started backing away, muttering nervously.

“Maybe we should stop..” someone began.

“Absolutely not!” Jareth’s voice cut through the panic, of course he was here. “We’re on the verge of a breakthrough. Increase the mana input.”

“Are you insane? The structure can’t—”

“Do it!”

They did because Jareth Valen said so, And because nobility plus arrogance equals stupidity at its finest.

The circle screamed, well that’s the only way I can describe it. Runes flared, the floor cracked, and the containment field exploded in a burst of blinding light. A wave of concussive force tore through the room, sending papers flying and students sprawling.

“Shut it down! Shut it the f**k down!”

“I can’t .... the core’s destabilized!”

I watched it all calmly from my corner, arms crossed.

"So much for the brightest minds of our generation."

One girl was frantically trying to reverse the flow, drawing counter-runes in the air, but she was too slow. Another tried to construct a secondary containment shell but nah wrong angle. A third just screamed and ducked under a table.

“Why isn’t it stopping?!” Jareth yelled, panic cracking his perfect voice.

"Because you overloaded the third binding layer before stabilizing the resonance field," I thought dryly. "Which any apprentice with half a brain cell would know. But please do go on explaining how smart you are."

The surge reached its peak. Any second now, the entire chamber would detonate. It wouldn’t kill anyone because the academy’s wards would stop that but it would absolutely vaporize half their expensive equipment and probably set back their “brilliant” research by five years.

And I could stop it with just one gesture or one word. With just one fragment of the old power, and I could rewrite the runes mid-collapse and snuff the surge out like a candle.

But I didn’t do anything, i just watched.

Because why should I save them from their own arrogance? Why should I rescue the same people who used my back as a stepping stone?

“Get out of the way!” Jareth shouted as the core pulsed dangerously. “Everyone down!”

The final burst ripped through the room with a roar of blue-white light. When the smoke cleared, the lab was a disaster zone tables overturned, glass shattered, students coughing and covered in soot. The containment rig was a molten puddle of metal.

And the spell? It had fizzled, not actually detonated or exploded. Just died because, despite their incompetence, they’d accidentally run it out of fuel.

The irony was delicious.

After the chaos, I was, of course, ordered to clean it all up. Because who else would sweep up the fragments of “groundbreaking research” but the boy too stupid to understand any of it?

As I dragged a broom across the scorched floor, Jareth limped past me, still coughing. Our eyes met for half a second his full of frustration and embarrassment, mine calm and unreadable.

“You saw that coming, didn’t you?” he muttered.

“Me, young master? I wouldn’t dare assume to understand your genius,” I said softly, bowing just enough for it to sting.

He glared, but he didn’t respond. Because he knew.

And as I swept broken runes into a dustpan, a small, twisted smile tugged at my lips.

"They call themselves scholars," I thought. "And they don’t even know how to stop a simple mana surge. They’re ants playing with thunder. And one day… I’ll remind them what a storm really is."