After Being Reborn, I Tortured The Vicious Sister-in-law - Chapter 24

THE LAST MARINE– Series SynopsisThe world ends not with a bang, but with a prayer and a shattered test tube. Marine Quinn Calloway, a man accustomed to the structured chaos of war, finds himself on leave in the deceptively peaceful mid-sized city of New Havenburg when the unthinkable happens. Dr. Lucian Kael, a brilliant and devoutly religious scientist at the prestigious Blackwood Research Institute, driven by a fervent desire to unlock humanity's “divine potential,” makes a catastrophic miscalculation. His experimental “Kael Strain” virus, designed for benign purposes, is accidentally unleashed, and its effects are swift, brutal, and biblical in their apocalyptic scope.

My old man pointed to the flower-like woman and said, "Call her mother from now on." He then pointed to a flower-bud-like girl and said, "This is your little sister."

We have all heard the legends of great wizards, but do we know how those stories begin? Ardan Egobar, a young man living in a remote corner of the New Monarchy Empire, does not. He doesn't realize that this story is about him. Not yet...In a world where steam locomotives chug along iron rails, where massive airships hover in the skies, where in the cities you might encounter orcs in suits involved in organized crimes, dwarves with cigars controlling major banks, or elves strutting down fashionable boulevards, where humans have built vast nations on the brink of a world war, almost anything seems possible.Maybe, in such a world, even an ordinary young man, the last of the mountain hunters, might one day become the greatest wizard in history.

Cairn is a prince who is already tired of ruling. Faced with an imminent coronation and an overbearing father, he wants nothing more than to drown his responsibilities in cheap liquor and poor decisions. With the help of his sister, he hatches a plan to escape the clutches of the throne once and for all. It all goes terribly wrong, and Cairn finds his priorities shifting in the face of unimaginable tragedy. The change of heart comes too late, however, and Cairn dies. He reawakens to find himself transported ten years in the past. He immediately begins to plan for the future, only to discover his killer has somehow followed him. To succeed, Cairn must unite the kingdom and discover the motivation of his killer, using as many tries as it takes. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++I exhausted pretty much every time loop story ever written and decided to write my own. You'll see a few similarities here between this story and some existing stories, at least initially. There's a lot of inspiration drawn from both MoL and Re:Zero, though in terms of pathos and darkness, this story leans more towards the latter. Be warned, it is something of a slow burn. The main character will grow and become powerful, but a theme of this story is that power comes slowly and often at great cost.