Chapter 1: Prologue 1

Author Note:

Hi, guys. The start might be a bit slow but I'd like to believe it gets better.

Oh, well, I guess you will be the judge of that.

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"Why?" A middle-aged aristocratic man rasped while slowly being choked to death by a runic array that also bound his body to his chair in his office, immobilizing him and preventing him from saving himself with a spell.

"You should have expected this outcome the second you murdered my mother, father." A younger man in his late teens, one that wore a hoodie and worn-out jeans, more to spite his father than any personal sense of fashion, emotionlessly spoke as he watched his long-awaited patricide finally going off without a hitch.

It was somewhat freeing. All the worrying about consequences and possibly being found out too soon finally left his shoulders.

The dying man's eyes widened in horrified realization, not understanding how his son could know about that. That happened ten years ago when the boy was just a snotty brat and there was no evidence...!

He didn't get the answer to that question. His oxygen finally completely ran out and his brain shut down.

Nathaniel Prest, the head of a small upstart house of magicians and a man with too grand ambitions to be healthy, was completely dead.

...

Thomas Prest...

That was his new name after he reincarnated.

And if such an outlandish thing was not enough, he just had to be reincarnated into a family of magicians.

Needless to say, Tom took the very first five years of his life to get used to such ridiculous notions, hence his progress as a baby was neither slow nor fast, appearing completely normal up till that point in his life.

Severe cases of depression and denial can do that to a person.

The problems started when he showed his intellect and learned how to read and write English very fast. Well... it was no hurdle for him, really. After all, he already knew the language. So despite trying to slow down his progress, he did the stupid thing. He got all of his exercises done very fast and that caught the attention of his... father.

The man he had never seen before that happened.

Not that he complained about his father being an absentee one. His mother, Grace, was a very loving woman. She showered him with motherly love, patiently teaching him and during his first few years, Tom was really left wanting for nothing.

Just to make that kind woman smile, he happily pretended to be more childish than he actually was. Even if it was a drag.

Only later on did he understand just how hard it must have been for his mother to always be cheerful and never show how unhappy she was.

The story between Grace and Tom's father was not of romantic nature. Simply put, Nathaniel had a few drinks, managed to woo Grace for a one-night stand, and she, unfortunately, got pregnant.

All would have been fine... if not for the fact Nathaniel was the heir to a magical house. And Grace carried his heir. At that moment, her life was effectively over.

That's how Grace's imprisonment and years-long neglect started. She could not leave even to visit family, nor could she even contemplate running away. She was just a normal human without any magical ability and the wards around her living quarters would not let her out no matter what.

Really... Tom had no idea about how stifled and despairing his mother must have felt. That knowledge really soured his happy childhood memories. The memories of happier times.

When he first saw his father, the first thing that stuck in Tom's memory was the expressionless gaze the man graced him with, as if judging his worth and finding him disappointingly wanting.

Well, there was not much a five-year-old child could offer, duh.

It really was not the best first impression one could make to a child but fortunately, Tom was mentally an adult and so, he didn't become a scared fidgeting mess whenever he saw his father as most kids would.

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How Nathaniel managed to woo his mother for that one-night stand, Tom would never understand.

In fact, he didn't want to know. Ignorance was sometimes really bliss.

And as Tom expected, when his lessons in magic started, he found out Nathaniel was a strict, demanding, and heavy-handed man who didn't tolerate failure and acted as if he had never failed the lessons when he was a snot-nosed brat himself.

It was... ridiculous. First of all, the Prest House was just an upstart one. They were neither rich nor important and they didn't even have proper servants outside of one creepy old maid who took care of the cooking.

Yet, Tom's father was full of himself at all times as if he was living the high life.

Tom quickly learned to stop slowing his learning progress down, not fond of the magical beatdowns he suffered from the permanently dissatisfied bastard.

If he wasn't mentally an adult, he would probably turn into a sociopath or something. Not that his second childhood didn't affect his way of thinking because if that was the case, he would have never killed his father.

Yet, here he was. Looking at the grave of the bastard shortly after his funeral, inwardly satisfied at his newly gained freedom.

Admittedly, this would have never happened if Nathaniel didn't murder Grace. Oh, the man thought himself smart and in a way, that wasn't false. He really did not leave any evidence and Grace's death seemed eerily natural.

But all those years ago, when Tom stood in the morgue in front of the corpse of his mother as he was supposed to say his last goodbye to her...

He remembered that day vividly.

His tears were streaking down his face as he touched her in a vain attempt to make sure that…

The only reason why the over-the-top magical lessons were bearable to him was the time with his mother. It was the only thing he was looking forward to in his days of harsh apprenticeship to his father. And yet…

But when he touched the dead body of his mother, Tom was surprised when he suddenly gained a glimpse of... something and fainted.

The observers just assumed it was because of the mental shock and left it at that but when Tom woke up the next day, he not only found out his father was extremely angry at this weak display of his but also that he now possessed something that made his blood run cold for several reasons.

Obviously, with him being a child of a magical household, Tom didn't think the world he was in was the same as his last.

First of all, he was born in 1983 and the technology level of the world was not very different from his last one. Well, at that time, Tom didn't know much about the world outside of his house but he could take a guess from the appliances they were using. He surmised that if he was born to normal mundane people, he would have probably never realized a difference from his last life.

But when he gained an instinctive understanding of what a Sacred Gear was and the basics of its use upon unlocking the one in his soul, Tom realized what world he was in and it frightened him immensely.

First, the shock of his mother's death, then the shock of being in a world that was running towards apocalypse at breakneck speeds, and then the shock from unlocking a Sacred Gear and using it to glimpse into the past of his mother which brought yet another shock upon him as his magical energy was totally drained, causing him to faint.

He only remembered that he suddenly felt deadly tired and afraid... before fainting again.

Fondly smiling at the memory that he deemed to be his 'real' beginning in this world, Tom kneeled in front of the gravestone of his father and touched it.

As big of a neglectful and abusive bastard Nathaniel Prest was, he never crossed the line and the beatings were always used only to give Tom the drive to learn. They also completely stopped a year after his mother's death as Nathaniel finally deemed Tom's learning speed adequate.

But by that time, Tom's motivation to learn was already set in stone. And now, he finally fulfilled his first goal.

"Don't worry. I will fulfill your dream for you and make our house great." He quietly whispered to the gravestone, making a few acquaintances of his father give him a respectful look at his dedication to his family despite this disaster.

'After all, I alone am House Prest now.' Tom amusedly added in his mind.

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