Valkyrie Smash

The scenery changed again, this time to what appeared to be a living room. Young Rollo was sitting on the sofa with his head hanging down, and standing over him was a very angry-looking couple.

'Yeah… I messed up really bad back then…'

The house belonged to his parents so naturally all electronics belonged to them as well. When his father found out he had been sneaking into his office and messing with his laptop, little Rollo ended up in some really big trouble. Thankfully that laptop was for personal use.

If he had made the mistake of messing with the ones his parents used for work, a little spanking would've been the last of his worries.

'Well, it was their mistake for showing me the passwords…'

The younger him didn't care much back then, but now that he was older, Rollo realized it must've been quite the terrifying experience for two Russian nuclear scientists to find out that their computers had been tampered with. The same could be said about when they found out it was all their five-year-old's doing.

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'I could've gotten all of us killed…'

Just thinking about it gave him the shivers. Fortunately for them, they soon had the Russian government off their backs. The sequence of events that followed the appearance of the Calamities was a blur at best. His parents called in some favors and used the chaos to get out of their homeland, never to return.

The scene changed again, this time to a refugee camp that would later become the Second Settlement.

'I remember getting electricity was a struggle around this time…'

Without a way to charge his laptop, young Rollo had no choice but to play around with the other kids. He had quite some trouble getting along with anyone. Being raised with a tablet from the age of two was never good for his development. Thankfully, things soon changed for the better.

That's what young Rollo thought back then, but now that he was older, he recognized that this was the point where things started going downhill.

The scene changed again. The refugee camp was gone, replaced by the cold white walls of a room with a high ceiling and no windows. it only had very simple furniture and lacked anything of note. Young Rollo didn't care, however. The room had electricity, meaning he didn't have to worry about his laptop running out of power.

'What an idiot…'

As he watched his younger self endlessly tapping on the laptop's keyboard, the door to the room opened and his parents entered. They seemed to have aged quite a bit since the Calamities appeared, and signs of stress were visible on their faces.

It gotten so bad that even he noticed it at the time, and at one point he began to suspect that it wasn't the war that had been taking a toll on them but something else.

'...'

The scene changed once more. Seven-year-old Rollo woke up one night wanting to get some water. Leaving his bed, he went to the kitchen and poured himself a cup. Once his thirst was quenched, he was about to return to his room when he noticed that the door to his parent's room was slightly open. Both his mother and father had to work through the night and wouldn't return until morning.

It was a little difficult to tell day from night since they were apparently underground, but young Rollo didn't need the sun or a clock to know morning had yet to arrive.

'Don't do it… Don't open it…'

Of course, he could not change what already happened. The scene changed again, but this time it didn't jump too far into the future. Young Rollo stood frozen at the door to his parent's room, his hand reaching for the light switch, having just turned the lights on.

Driven by curiosity, he went to check if his parents had returned earlier than expected. His guess was right; his father did return earlier than he should. Only he didn't come back to rest or retrieve some documents he forgot to take with him. He came back to run away from something, and seeing the state his son found him in, whatever that thing was, only a rope could have helped him escape from it.

"... Why…"

Rollo knew his father was an extremely rational man. Because of that, he failed to understand what could've driven him to take his own life.

"Why are you showing me this?..."

Following his father's suicide, his mother's mental state got even worse. The incident caused the young Rollo to mature faster and he soon began to question what was happening around him. At one point, he understood that his parents didn't move them to their new home because it was a better place to live than the refugee camp.

They were scientists specializing in several fields including nuclear physics. Someone had recruited them to work on something, most likely a weapon to be used against the calamities.

Even after concluding that much, young Rollo still couldn't figure out why his father ended up that way. He was a hero trying to save humanity, after all. Why would someone working toward such a noble goal take their own life? The child's desire to learn the truth led him to do something he had always avoided.

He hacked into the facility he was trapped in for two years and searched tirelessly for what might have been the reason for his father's suicide.

It wasn't that difficult of a task to accomplish. He was already inside the facility, after all. Before long, he learned everything there was to learn about the place and what his parents were doing.

As he had predicted, the facility turned out to be a research center for developing weapons to be used against Calamities, or so it was at first. Those funding and running the facility weren't too happy about the autonomous humanoid weapons Odin had created. They sought a way for humans themselves to fight the war and that desire led them to a rather dark path.