Reborn As A Useless Mage, But I'm Already The Angel Of Death

The battlefield stretched endlessly under a sky choked with ash and smoke, and Adrian Blackwood lay in the middle of it all with a hole the size of a fist punched clean through his stomach.

Blood pooled beneath him in a thick, warm puddle that had long stopped bothering him. Around him, hundreds of corpses littered the scorched earth. Some were demons. Most were not. Most were his own men, soldiers he had personally raised from the dead and thrown back into the fight like discarded tools, because that was all he had left to throw.

The Angel of Death. That was what they called him for it. Not a title he had asked for. Not one he was proud of.

Twenty meters to his left, the massive body of the Demon Lord of Wrath lay crumpled and still, its seven horned skull split open by Adrian's final strike. Victory. If you could call it that when everything around you was already dead.

"Is anyone... still breathing out there?" Adrian's voice came out cracked, barely louder than a whisper.

Nothing answered him. Just the wind dragging smoke across the corpses.

Then a flash of golden light cut through the haze, and a woman dropped from the sky, landing hard on one knee beside him. A golden serpent sigil glowed across her collarbone, pulsing with holy energy.

"You look terrible." Jenna Faircross pressed her palm against his stomach, golden mana flooding from her fingers into the wound.

"Don't." Adrian grabbed her wrist, but too late.

The holy mana hit his body like acid poured into an open cut. His back arched off the ground and dark mana erupted from his skin in violent black sparks, rejecting her power completely. The wound tore wider. Blood sprayed across her white sleeve.

"I told you not to do that." Adrian collapsed back, breathing hard through his teeth.

"And I told you to stop being stubborn ten years ago. Look how well that worked out." Jenna pulled her hand back, her fingers trembling and slick with his blood.

Adrian stared at her face. She looked calm, but he had fought beside this woman long enough to recognize the tightness around her eyes. The way her jaw clenched just slightly too hard.

"You are dying too." It was not a question.

Jenna glanced down at her own body. Beneath her armor, faint orange cracks spread across her skin like fractures in porcelain, glowing with a heat that warped the air around them. Cataclysmic Fire. The Demon Lord's parting gift. A flame that could not be extinguished by any magic in existence, including her own.

"Observant as always." She sat down beside him, folding her legs beneath her like they were sharing a picnic instead of a grave.

"How long do you have?"

"Less than you, probably. The fire is already in my lungs." She coughed once, and flecks of orange light scattered from her lips like embers.

Adrian closed his eyes. The pain in his stomach had dulled to a cold, distant throb. That probably meant he was running out of blood to lose.

"Do you remember the academy?" Jenna's voice softened, losing its sharpness.

"What about it?"

"I tried to talk to you once. Second year. You were sitting alone in the eastern courtyard reading some book about soul theory that nobody else in the entire school could even understand. I walked up to you and you looked at me like I was a cockroach that had crawled onto your desk."

Adrian opened one eye. "I did not look at you like that."

"You told me, and I quote, that you did not have time for holy empire mongrels sniffing around dark empire business."

"...I may have said something along those lines."

"You were sixteen, Adrian. Sixteen years old and already the most unbearable person I had ever met." Jenna's lips twitched into something that was almost a smile but did not quite make it. "I hated you for years after that. Genuinely hated you."

"And now?"

"Now I am dying next to you on a pile of corpses, so I suppose my taste in company never improved."

They sat in silence for a moment. The wind picked up, carrying the stench of sulfur and rotting flesh across the field.

"I could have talked to you." Adrian's voice dropped lower. "At the academy. I could have just talked to you like a normal person instead of pushing you away because I was terrified my father would find out I had spoken to a holy empire student."

"Yes. You could have."

"Would it have changed anything? All of this?" He gestured weakly at the battlefield around them.

"I do not know. Maybe. Maybe not." Jenna turned to face him fully, and the golden serpent sigil on her collarbone flared so brightly it hurt to look at. "But I can tell you that I have already tried to find out."

Adrian frowned. "What do you mean, tried?"

"This is my second regression, Adrian."

The words hung in the air between them like something physical.

"You are delirious. The fire has reached your brain."

"The Serpent of Time. It is embedded in my Holy Mark. It allows me to turn back the clock and relive everything from the beginning. I have already done it once before. I watched you die the first time. I came back. I tried to change things. I watched you die again because you are the most pigheaded, impossible man who has ever lived and you refuse to listen to anyone about anything, ever."

"Jenna..."

"I am not finished." Her eyes burned with something far hotter than the Cataclysmic Fire eating her alive. "I watched everyone I loved die twice. I buried my mother twice. I held my sister's hand while she bled out on the floor of our cathedral twice. And both times, both times, I came back to this same stupid battlefield and found you lying in a pool of your own blood with that same stupid expression on your face."

Adrian stared at her. The impossible knowledge she carried, the details she should never have known, the raw fury behind her words that only someone who had lived through genuine repeated loss could produce. His skepticism cracked, then shattered entirely.

"Why are you telling me this now?"

"Because I cannot do it again. The mark only had enough power for two regressions. Mine are spent." She reached for his left arm and pulled his sleeve back. "But yours is not."

Golden light erupted from her palm and seared into his forearm, burning a serpent shaped sigil into his skin that glowed so intensely he thought his arm would catch fire. Jenna's body convulsed, her sigil dimming rapidly as she poured the last of her power into him.

"Find me. In the past. Find me before all of this starts and do not push me away this time, you stubborn, impossible, infuriating man."

"Jenna, stop. You will kill yourself."

"I am already dead, Adrian. I have been dead since that demon touched me." The orange cracks spread across her face now, glowing white hot. Her smile was the saddest thing he had ever seen. "Just do not waste it. Please."

Her hand fell from his arm. The light in her eyes went out. The Cataclysmic Fire consumed what remained of her body in seconds, leaving nothing but ash that scattered in the wind.

Adrian lay alone on the battlefield, surrounded by the dead. His body grew cold except for the burning mark on his left arm, pulsing with golden light that had no business existing on a dark mage's skin.

He thought about the academy courtyard. About a girl he had been too proud and too afraid to speak to. About every single choice that had led them both to this wasteland.

The mark pulsed brighter. Warmth spread through his chest, then his limbs, then behind his eyes.

Adrian Blackwood closed his eyes and let the light of the regression swallow him whole.