AN: Got bored and busted this sucker out in an hour while waiting for my free copy of Destiny 2 to download.

God Complex

HUNGRY

I learned from a young age that the easiest way to get what you want is to kill someone who has it and take it from them.

Growing up in an orphanage was hard. The empire did not allocate state money for them like other nations did, so everything from food to clothing was hard for us to come by. The nuns tried their hardest to keep us clothed and fed and there were plenty of locals willing to donate their time to help us keep a roof over our heads, but life was hard none the less.

Most mornings we would wake up to no food for us to eat, clothes filled with holes that do nothing to keep you warm, and constant work day in and day out just with the hope that someday down the line we will have something to finally eat.

It was a regular occurrence for the larger, most physically endowed children to "appropriate" things from the meeker quieter ones. The nuns for the most part ignored these altercations as long as they did not occur inside the church proper. They had more important things to worry about, and spent all their spare time trying to get a hundred rowdy children to follow them along in prayer so they had neither the time, nor the inclination to nip the cruelty in the bud before it could escalate.

It wasn't anything too violent most of the time. We were after all young children. Mostly it was just vague childish threats of violence and grabbing food from others hands before they could react. There were a few bad eggs, but they were woefully outnumbered by ones who simply wanted to get by without any more troubles.

Unless we went outside and intermingled with the rats living in the city. Then we had to play by their rules.

Unfortunately, due to my dislike for interacting with others, most would label me in the second group. They considered me prey. Someone to take advantage of without fear of retaliation.

My small size might also have been a contributing factor. I have always been a slight girl, even after extensive training. Malnourishment did not compliment this.

And according to the many military doctors I have been forced to visit over the years, it may have been the contributing factor to my pitiful size.

One of the many faceless children at the orphanage took it upon himself to make my life as miserable as he possibly could. Day in and day out, he would annoy me, push me down, steal my food, and in general make a nuisance of himself at every opportunity.

It was around this moment I learned the importance of having a unit of trusted compatriots and friends to defend you and leverage your abilities as a group towards common ends. All the other children, be them in the orphanage or the homeless street rats from the city we would occasionally interact with, organized themselves into tight knit groups that functioned together as teams.

I did not have a group, and before I knew it I was branded an outsider by everyone else and was unable to form any connections with the other children.

Everyone else had a person that had their back if push came to shove. Some littles followed the bigs around for protection. Others went out stealing together, some keeping watch while others nick whatever they could get their grubby little hands on.

Even in the orphanage I was alone. Forced by circumstances instead of faith to follow the nuns around like a loyal dog hoping for scraps. Unable to keep any food of my own from grabbing hands I required the nuns charity to keep me alive.

I could, and did, go out and pilfer food on my own on occasion. The danger from doing it alone, along with the risk of other hungry rats ambushing me and taking it immediately made it too risky an endeavor to do unless absolutely necessary.

I couldn't even keep any property of my own in the orphanage like the other kids. Being a loner, anything I left out of my sight would instantly be snapped up and horded by the kids in their groups. Getting them back once they were taken was an impossibility, which I quickly learned after a few beatings.

Eventually however, I learned how to take care of myself.

One hot day in mid-summer in my 7th year in this world I was once again starving for food. The orphanage was doing worse than ever and food was almost nonexistent. The little child-like part of my mind was thoroughly entertained for a few minutes a day with the realization that I can count my ribs through my skin just by looking, the more rational part I relied on was terrified by the knowledge that I could waste away and die any day.

So, without any other options I left the orphanage and journeyed into the main city in search of food.

The city had changed quite a bit over my short life. More glowing lights showing the popularization of electricity to cut through the cloying dust and smog that always blanketed the city when the winds were not favorable. A few children when I was even younger died from lung problems exacerbated by the horrendous air quality in the city.

Killed by your lungs. What a pitiful way to go.

The biggest change other than the lights and smell, was of course the people. At some point, for whatever reason, the nationalism the Empire is known for has gone to new heights never before seen. I assume any outsider who did not know of our nations tumultuous history would never guess that just a few decades ago the entire empire was a rag tag band of small micronations at war with each other almost constantly.

Already, so recently united, the people of the Empire were preparing themselves to war once again. This time not for land, or to dominate the other Germanic peoples, but to simply prove their superiority to the massive nations around us. To prove that our industry and military might was infinitely superior to the long-standing centuries old nations that have looked down on us for so long.

Almost every weak there were nationalist rallies urging the people to action. Ordering the citizens of the Empire to prepare themselves for the coming assault by the evil lesser nations surrounding us.

Unknown to them, the other countries were holding similar rallies demonizing us.

People really are stupid creatures.

I did not care for these rallies as a child. They were noisy affairs, attended by people who cared too much about things that don't matter. After all, why worry about a failing militant empire to the west when you don't know if you will starve to death by the weekend?

What the rallies did provide, for a rat like me, was an ample amount of cover and distraction. The rallies regularly got out of hand which meant the shop owners minding their stalls would be focused on the grown men marching through the streets shouting their nonsense and waving their hastily made signs and banners.

That or looking on in politics fueled glee at the passion of this great empire's citizenry!

Or whatever it is the newspapers said about it. I took to reading the papers the nuns left lying around when I finally figured out how and it had long sense become a habit.

Despite the overall poor quality of writing.

At least they burned well enough to drive out the cold.

The long day of pilfering and thievery was a good one. I went about unseen among the large crowds and made off with half a loaf of bread, some sort of a citrus, and a stick of some sort of cooked meat.

What I should have done is hide someplace where no one could find me and slowly pace myself through the food over the next few days to prevent vomiting it back up or giving myself refeeding syndrome and shutting down my tiny heart.

Instead I did what any overly excitable child would do and ran back to the orphanage as fast as my little legs could carry me.

Why I decided to go directly to the place filled to the brim with people I neither like nor trust I will never know.

Upon entering the large ramshackle building attached to an old church, I immediately realized my mistake. The other children had also been starving, not to the same degree as myself, but more than enough to make them willing to take drastic measures to obtain food. Normally the children inside the orphanage were milder than the street rats and less likely to... bite, but these kids were starving to death, same as me.

Not exactly the same, they were also much larger than me.

I do not remember the name of the child who followed me to my corner in the attic where I usually chose to sleep. He was one of the taller orphanage kids, bulky around the shoulders from whatever puberty he somehow managed to squeak out between periods of starvation. He had the awkward middle size of someone too old and tall to be a little and too small to be a big. His group of rats were all in similar states, not big enough to be intimidating or strong enough for actual work, but too big to go unnoticed when stealing from the city folk.

I was just getting ready to chow down into my illegally obtained meal when he stomped up the rickety ladder. Immediately my mind went into overdrive. I was in a worst-case scenario, I had something that someone bigger than me wanted, and I was in the attic alone.

The big oaf at least had the decency to look around and make sure there were no witnesses before stomping over and threatening me.

I did not want to give the boy the food. After all, I was the one who did the work to obtain it, why in god's name would I ever give it over for nothing?

So I did something I had never done before in my short life, I fought back.

When the boy roughly grabbed the loaf of bread from my hands, I leapt at him with all the force a malnourished 7-year-old girl could muster. Any self-respecting adult could have easily fended me off, but this boy was no healthy grown up. He was just another sickly rat, same as me.

I did my best to pummel the boy as much as I could, but the bigger boy regained his wits almost immediately and back handed me across the face, sending me tumbling back head first into the wall. The oaf was upon me instantly, slamming his fists into me over and over again. Each blow felt like a rock hitting my skull.

I could hardly breath with the boys' weight on my chest. For the first time in my life I genuinely thought that their, in that crummy church attic, with this oaf on top of me, I was going to die.

And when that thought shot through my head, something changed.

Deep inside of me, a glorious warmth spread through my body. It spread out from my center to every little corner of my body, easing my aches and clearing my vision. The familiar aches in my bones diminished until they were almost unnoticeable, and each fist impacting my face felt more like a gnat was attacking me.

It was the first time my Magick came to me, and it was wonderful.

I was still a scrawny little girl, but now with magick flowing through my veins I easily through the boy off of me and hit him again and again.

The rage, so pure and unfiltered I felt in that moment as I punched that cretins face until it resembled ground meat was like a raging torment ripping through my body. I don't know how long I pounded on him before he passed into the next world, or how much longer after that I beat his mangled corpse until it was completely unrecognizable.

I only remember afterwards, staring down at his body as blood dripped from my bruised knuckles.

For the first time in my life, that hollow, hungering in my stomach was barely noticeable.

Somehow, standing their covered from head to toe in blood, I was genuinely happy.

Welcome to the bottom!

So this was pretty much a random impulse write, and it was quite fun. Youjo Senki is one of my favorite... anime/ln/manga and i had been meaning to write something for it for quite some time now.

In case anyone was confused, the POV in this chapter is Yanya as a kid. This is going to pretty much be an AU where Tanya is just a genius psychopath with no reincarnation involved. Reincarnation, while it is one of my favorite tropes in typical fantasy (probably because I liked Wheel of Time so much), is one of my least favorite things in pretty much every other circumstance so i wanted to just run through the story without it and see what I come up with.

Not much to say with this.

I dont have schedules for my uploads, i have like 6 stories running atm and just post immediately after finishing a chapter, which I write as soon as I feel the motivation. Most likely their will be a chapter every week or so, unless of course I get bored and write chapters back to back like I have been known to do, in which case their might be bursts of one a day for a few days.

So before anyone complains about whatever people complain about, this is an AU. I will be changing some things. Nothing too major to the overall world state. Still basically magical world war 1 and a half. Mostly just changing a bit of details for the magic system, removing reincarnation, and Being X will be much more low key.

Also Tanya will be getting one hell of a god complex.