Holmcross Project (Year 1)

Prologue: The Man In The Box

[System restart...]

That was impossible; there was no one alive to awaken him now. But, still, he could feel himself being pulled from the grips of what he intended to be an eternal stasis, distant voices reaching his ears. And cold...why was it so cold...?

"Hey, he's alive after all!" Another man's voice cried in surprise. "Rudy, what did you do?"

"Nothing...I just touched his shoulder." A boy's voice replied, his voice almost a whisper.

"Are you the one who woke me?" Lips unused for what felt like decades said, as the man curled up in the human-size ARMs case slowly uncurled and sat up. Green eyes gazed into orange ones as the light-blue-haired man in the box looked up at a blue-haired teenager, who had to be no older than seventeen. He looked at his shoulder, which the teenager had his hand resting on, and then back at the stranger before him.

"Why?" He asked, reaching up to move his hand. The teenager grew flustered and moved it himself, his other arm grasping that one awkwardly once it was back at his side. There was a large gauntlet on the hand that had been resting on his shoulder.

Now that he was standing up straight, the man in the box could get a better look at him. He had short, blue hair, brown-orange eyes and pale skin, with a red vest over a white t-shirt, both of which had seen better days. His jeans, also damaged, were blue and he wore brown gloves and boots. He also wore a red bandanna, and the man in the box was hit with a pang of grief as he thought of another he knew that had a similar style. He had a holstered gun at his side.

"You ask 'why', but we honestly didn't know you were alive!" A woman's voice said, and he looked to the side to see a blonde woman that looked around twenty with blue eyes standing near the box. She was dressed in a red and white overcoat that had an ornate design over a green skirt with red boots with a red hairband keeping her shoulder-length hair back. She carried some kind of pole with a round top that had some strange design in her pale hands, and the man vaguely recognized it as a magic staff.

'A mage?' He thought. 'Great.'

"When we saw you inside, we thought this was a grave!" She went on, unaware of his silent disdain.

"It was intended to be." The man replied shortly. "Why have you awakened me? Are the Demons back?"

"We don't even know who the heck you are!" A man said, walking over. "Why would we intentionally wake you up? We thought this was a treasure chest! Anyway, sorry, but the Demons are all dead. Have been for a few years."

This stranger was the oldest of the trio, maybe in his thirties, a blond man with long hair tied back into a ponytail. He was also pale, though not as pale as the other two, and wore a brown trench-coat over a white shirt and blue jeans that were tucked into brown boots. He carried a sword at his side and looked at him with wary, brown eyes. He carried himself like a warrior.

"Dead...?" The man in the box breathed, realizing what he'd said. "All of them? Even Alhazad?"

The blond man frowned. "Yeah. You seem shocked."

"I had been trying to kill him for years before his sealing." The man in the box said, slowly standing up. The blond man noticed he was shivering and offered his trench-coat. The man accepted the offering and looked at it thoughtfully, an almost confused expression on his face, before he pulled the jacket on and secured it shut over his light clothes, the dirty brown an odd contrast to his light-blue hair. "Thank you."

"I'm Jack," The blond man said. "This girl is Cecilia, and the one who apparently woke you is Rudy. Who are you?"

"...I am H-08: Wesson. Just call me 'Wesson'." He looked at Rudy. "...You can use the ARM, can't you? And not like other humans."