The Eclipsed Order

Chapter 2: Chapter 2: I Was Certain That I Had Died, So Waking Up as Someone’s Son Was Quite Unexpected

When I opened my eyes again, I was greeted by a ceiling that I had never seen before.

It took me a while to understand what that meant, mostly because my memories were still somewhat unclear. The last thing I could remember was the battlefield, the pain spreading throughout my body, and the rather unpleasant realization that I had finally reached the point where there was no strength left for me to use. After that, everything had disappeared into darkness.

Considering the circumstances, I had naturally assumed that I was dead.

Apparently, I had been mistaken.

I tried moving my right arm, expecting to feel the familiar response of a body that I had spent years training, only to discover that my arm felt strangely light and weak. I tried again, this time putting more effort into it, and eventually managed to raise it in front of my face.

I stared at my hand.

It was tiny.

Not injured, not damaged, and definitely not the hand I remembered having. The fingers were short and soft, and the palm was so small that I could barely believe it belonged to me.

I moved my fingers one by one, just to make sure that I hadn’t somehow lost my mind along with my life.

They moved exactly as I wanted them to.

That was good.

The size was not.

I looked down at the rest of my body and was met with the same problem. My arms were small, my legs were small, and judging by the difficulty I was having trying to move them properly, I had apparently been given a body that had only recently discovered the concept of coordination.

It didn’t take a genius to figure out what had happened.

I was a baby.

I spent a while staring at the ceiling after coming to that conclusion, wondering how exactly a person was supposed to react after dying and waking up as an infant.

There probably wasn’t a proper procedure for this.

I tried to sit up, mostly because I wanted to confirm that my body was actually as useless as it seemed. Unfortunately, my attempt ended with me making an awkward movement before falling back onto the bed.

Right.

Definitely a baby.

I had spent my previous life being known as Phantom, an assassin who could infiltrate guarded facilities, eliminate targets, and disappear before anyone even realized that I had been there. I had trained my body until movement became instinctive, yet somehow, in my second life, I had been reduced to someone who couldn’t even sit up without assistance.

I suppose the world had a strange sense of humor.

Before I could continue thinking about my unfortunate circumstances, I heard the door open.

Two people entered the room.

The first was a woman, and the moment I saw her, I immediately understood that she wasn’t an ordinary person.

She had long silver-blonde hair that flowed smoothly down her back, with a faint golden color appearing whenever the sunlight passed through it. Her eyes were a beautiful violet, and her face had the kind of refined appearance that would have made her stand out even in a crowd of wealthy people. She was wearing an elegant dress decorated with delicate embroidery, and although I knew almost nothing about this world yet, even I could tell that the clothes were expensive.

The man beside her looked completely different.

He had short black hair, deep blue eyes, and a tall, well-built body that immediately caught my attention. His clothing was formal, mostly dark in color with silver details around the collar and sleeves, but what interested me most was the sword hanging from his waist.

A sword.

Inside a bedroom.

I had no idea what kind of place I had been reborn into, but that seemed like a useful piece of information.

The man’s appearance was calm, but there was something about the way he carried himself that I couldn’t ignore. His movements were natural and controlled, his posture was excellent, and his eyes constantly seemed to notice everything around him even while he was looking at me.

I knew that kind of person.

A trained fighter.

Perhaps not an assassin, but definitely someone who knew how to use his body.

The woman noticed that I was awake and immediately walked toward me, her expression changing into a smile that was considerably warmer than the one she had worn when she first entered the room.

"Oh, you’re awake."

She reached down and carefully picked me up.

I wasn’t particularly comfortable with being carried, but there wasn’t much I could do about it. My current body had already proven that it wasn’t capable of doing much on its own, so I simply allowed her to hold me while I continued studying my surroundings.

The man came closer as well, looking down at me with an expression that was difficult to read at first.

Then he smiled.

"He seems healthy."

The woman looked at me again.

"Of course he is."

I couldn’t understand everything they were saying yet, but I could understand their tone well enough. They were talking about me, and judging by the way they were looking at me, I had apparently become the center of their attention.

That was when the woman gently touched my cheek.

"My little Ares."

I froze.

Ares?

For a moment, I wondered if I had heard her correctly.

There were plenty of things I didn’t understand about my current situation, but that name was not one of them.

Ares.

That was my name.

Not just some name that happened to sound familiar, either. It was the name I had carried throughout my previous life, long before people started calling me Phantom. It was the name written on documents, the name used by the few people who knew who I really was, and the name I had heard countless times before eventually dying on that battlefield.

And now, after apparently being reincarnated, someone was calling me by the exact same name.

That was a rather strange coincidence.

I stared at the woman holding me, trying to understand what was happening, but she simply smiled as though nothing unusual had occurred.

I wanted to ask her why she had chosen that name.

Unfortunately, my ability to communicate was currently limited to making noises that would probably be more appropriate for a particularly confused animal.

"Ah..."

The woman smiled even more.

"He’s responding."

No.

That wasn’t what I was trying to say at all.

I tried again, but the result was no better, so I eventually gave up and accepted that I would have to wait until my new body was capable of producing actual words.

At least I had learned something important.

My name was still Ares.

Whether that was a coincidence or something else, I had no idea.

The man reached over and gently placed a hand on my head.

"Welcome to the world, Ares."

I looked at him for a moment before looking back at the woman.

So these two were my parents.

I didn’t know their names yet, and I didn’t know their family name either, but there were already several things I could tell about them. They were wealthy, they were respected, my father was almost certainly a trained fighter, and judging from the room I had awakened in, there was a good chance that they belonged to some sort of noble family.

I had no idea how accurate that assumption was.

As it turned out, I was about to discover that I had been born into a family far more important than I initially realized.

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