Re:Demon - Reborn as a Demon Book 1

1

 The first thing that she realized was that she felt awful, that nothing seemed to work right, her limbs didn't want to respond, her eyes wouldn't open and that there was something wrong with her ears, since everything that she could hear was garbled and off. Also, there was an irritating wailing going on that she couldn't place the source of.

Trying to figure out what was going on, she took a step back and tried to remember the last place she'd been and through the blur, one scene came back to her. She'd been on a bus, it had been a class trip and she'd been trying to ignore the idiots of her class goofing off. Taro and Kanaka had been hanging over their seat, talking to Yamada and Toshiro. Risa and her friends, Nanao and Mia had been trading snacks back and forth across the aisle. Akane had been preening in her mirror, not that it would help her. No matter what she did, Akira was always going to be prettier than her, even though Akira never realized it, she was always more interested in playing sports and such to bother, completely unaware that most of the boys she hung around with had crushes on her. Then again, she'd been pretty popular with the girls too.

The rest of the class had been there as well, not to mention Miss Fujishima, who'd been talking to the bus-driver, but that was all she could remember. It was as if the moment was a still frame, one that she could look around in, but it wouldn't go forward, like the last frame of a movie. Like there was nothing afterwards, which made her wonder what had happened next. Had they been in an accident? That might explain why she felt so weak. It might also explain why she couldn't open her eyes and why her senses were so dulled, there might be bandages around her, nothing else seemed to make sense.

Just as she came to that conclusion, she felt something warm and wet rub across her face, telling her that at least she wasn't completely wrapped in bandages. It also seemed to clear away whatever was sticking to her, and she was able to peel her eyes open.

At first, she couldn't see anything, there were blotches of color, but that was it. She'd never needed glasses, so it took her a moment to realize that everything was blurry and that it was her eyes that were the problem, that they couldn't seem to focus on anything. From what she could figure out, the room seemed to be made of wood, or at least was of the coloration, so that was the most logical explanation, which worried her, this was no hospital, so if there had been an accident, she must have been found and brought to a cabin. Maybe the road to the hospital was closed, or the person that had found her couldn't leave her until they were sure she would be alright on her own for a little while.

Squeezing her eyes shut as best she could, she opened them, trying to clear things up, but nothing changed, so she struggled and managed to raise one of her arms, reaching out to try and see how far away things were, only to be confused, the arm that entered the side of her vision was extremely short. Not only that, but the skin was slimy and wrinkled. But the weirdest thing was that the skin was a turquoise blue-green.

She wriggled the arm, which got an excited sounding reaction from the babbling coming from somewhere in the room, but that didn't matter to her at the moment since the arm waved generally how she'd wanted it, which meant that it was hers, which meant that there was definitely something wrong with her eyes. Judging by that, she had to reassess her assumption about the room, since she couldn't tell colors, it meant that the ceiling could be any color really, but that didn't address the problem of how the arm that was waving was short, chubby and wrinkled.

As her mind tried to wrap itself around what it was seeing, a massive blob moved into her line of sight. The blue shape moved closer and resolved itself into what seemed to be a face, complete with eyes, a nose, a white slash that she took to be a mouth and horns.

It was the last thing that drew all of her attention. The blue of the skin she could chalk up to her eyes being messed up and seeing colors wrong, but the horns jutting from the top of the face were something that she couldn't ignore.