Waking up in Another "Life"

Like an onion, everything had layers.

Like a maze, everything could be confusing.

Like an idiot, you stared at the speeding train in mind-boggling terror, your eyes already beginning to roll up to the back of your head as your body began to shut down to escape feeling your own ****.

In less complicated wording, you were fainting.

Unfortunately your brain wasn't fast enough and you still felt searing pain as your skin tore, your nerve endings obliterated, bones smashed, and the liquid red vitality that was the fuel of flesh, splattered across the varying surfaces of the train station.

For a second you thought you heard screams originating from the other soon-to-be train riders.

But then you were ERAS--

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[Cause] --> [Effect]

["Total Destruction" of the physical body] --> ["****"]

["Total Destruction" of the physical body] --> ["****"]

Rewrite.

["Total Destruction" of the physical body] --> ["Transference of the "Soul"]

[Transference of the "Soul"] --> ["Transmigration"/"Reincarnation"/"Rebirth"/"Merging"]

Execute.

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--Your eyes opened up to a swash of color, bright and dark contrasting in a way to make your eyes sting as you blinked the crust from your eyelids. You tried to open your mouth for air and or inhale through your nose, but froze when you realized you couldn't do either.

They were blocked, or no, your throat was blocked.

Your eyes widened as far as the crust allowed, instinctual fear and panic blooming in your mind as you tried to will your body to move, to twitch, to do anything. But you couldn't, the only thing you could do was look around with blurry vision in a dark room with what looked like a bright monitor playing some sort of video.

You could feel your lungs clenching, your mind going white, your conscious going numb as you suffocat--

Except you didn't. You blinked as a sudden calm overcame you, a sense of rationality, reason, and self-awareness coming back to calm you. You weren't suffocating. You felt how much control you had over your body besides your eyes, none. Other than your eyes, everything was completely numb. No, wrong description.

Everything was dead. Your body was dead. But now calm and self-aware, like a computer you would suppose now, you sensed a packet of information your brain wasn't processing. With a sense of control over yourself you never felt before, you Interfaced with your own mind and processed the packet sent by your Sense Of Touch, and you finally realized that you felt something around your neck.

Something extremely tight around your neck, something that crushed your wind pipe. It was almost painful, but you guessed your nerves were dead from how your whole body felt chilled, frozen to the marrow of its bones.

But the way it dug into your skin and its roughness, ripped skin from where it was tightest, your confusion grew as you realized you were hanging by a noose.

You died and then woke up in another dead body?

If so, why weren't you waking up in yet another dead body?

How were you thinking with a dead brain?

You felt your body jolt and then slowly begin to sink lower. Then for some reason your body finally fell, the rope still tightly wrapped around your throat, and limply sprawled itself on the carpeted floor face down.

Did the rope snap?

You watched calmly, carefully, as the obviously inhuman stick-thin foot of some creature stepped in front of you, five toes and with a human resemblance but not human, a knee coming into view as it seemed to squat down. You felt your left hand get grabbed by a steel-like grip, bony fingers digging into your forearm.

Another hand grabbed your hand's palm and then with a quick motion your left wrist was broken, the palm wrenched back and the forearm pulled forward with a **** impossible to exert with the level of effort the creature exerted, which was none.

Chilled breath that was almost as cold as your body rolled over your wrist before in a moment there was an excruciating pain exploding from your body's nervous system as your blood threatened to burst your veins open whilst they were sucked out.

In a couple seconds you were empty, shriveled and dry. You could no longer see anything and you barely felt your broken appendage slap onto the floor.

Was that a vampire?

That... was crazy. But so was reincarnating into a body that had already died.

So... a vampire killed you? Did it hang this body itself or did it find it and see an opportunity?

Either way, you had a decision to make. So you made it. You decided you didn't like being taken advantage of like this, and made the conscious thought of, "I want to kill it".

You don't know what it was, but something pinged on your Mental Interface, and you processed something your reincarnated mind didn't feel was familiar but from what was left of this body's brain did. You carefully let it into your own mind, ready to kick it out, and then watched as it unfurled itself to be a sort of metaphysical ability that carried along with it a physical one.

You grabbed it, and with it your senses grew. You saw outside of your body with 360 degrees of vision. You looked at the "vampire", a looming figure that while willow and generally sickly-looking with pasty pale grey-ish skin stretched taut over a warped slender anatomy, was still creepy and "scary". You didn't like it.

You didn't like it, and with what you knew was a somewhat childishly simple motivation, you watched carefully as you **** your body up to its feet.

It was weak, and even worse looking than the supernatural creature, but with whatever power you had gained you were able to move your body like it was a puppet on strings and raise your right hand. You saw one of the creature's ears twitch, possibly due to a droplet of blood hitting the carpet if it had hearing as inhuman as its appearance and strength.

You decided the power was shape-shifting from the way you effortlessly, naturally, remade your raisin-looking hand into a blade you refined to have an edge as small as you possibly could in a thousandth of a second. In another thousandth, you sharpened your 360 degrees of vision so you weren't just looking at mostly blurry figures you had to finagle the visual details from.

Like a puppet on strings, you threw your body at the vampire, its figure already blurring with speed. But while your vision wasn't fast enough to track it, your mind was fast enough to comprehend the shifting of its shadow as the monitor provided light. You flicked your hand-blade in an approximation of where its chest should be.

You felt the blade cut through something like butter before your body was flung back by a kick that shattered your bottom 4 ribs.

Absentmindedly you realized you couldn't hear, taste, or smell anything as you slammed into the wall of the small bedroom, your foot clipping the monitor sending the thing careening off the desk, your spine fracturing and the back of your skull cracking. You fell limply on the bed, but with your 360 degrees of vision you watched as the vampire silently, at the least to you, screamed in what might've been agony or just sheer panic and fear.

The gaping wound you left through its chest become wider and wider, the edges steadily turning into ashes.

In 10 seconds it finally dusted completely, and you began to contemplate what to do now. Experimentally you "tugged" on "your" strings, and curiously enough found that your body could still move.

Huh, so you really were the puppet master of your own body. That's nifty.