The Witcher - Uchiha Madara!

Chapter 01 - Uchiha Madara!

[Chapter Size: 2100 Words.]
Third Person POV

Cindra, northern kingdoms.

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In the dim light of dawn, a six-year-old boy awoke with a throbbing pain in his head. He opened his eyes, confused, scratching the ache on his forehead while an old woman scolded him severely. "Useless!" she shouted. "You do nothing worthwhile and still spill all the water from the well before bringing it to the orphanage!" Her voice was as rough as gravel, and her face was wrinkled by age and disdain.

The boy, still dazed, looked around, trying to understand where he was. The earthen floor beneath him was damp and cold, with blood from his head. He was in an open courtyard, surrounded by dark stone walls that formed the orphanage, a place he should recognize, but his mind was blank. The woman continued to berate him, but her words seemed distant, muffled by the buzzing in his ears as he tried to figure out if this was a very strange dream.

Finally, he found his voice, weak, and looked at the woman freaking out. "Who are you?" he asked, staring at the woman with eyes full of confusion. The question seemed to surprise her, and for a moment, but soon the perplexity on her face gave way to anger again.

She glared at him, her narrow eyes studying him as if he were a stranger. "What do you mean, who am I? I'm Mother Greta, the head of this orphanage, and you are one of the orphans I have to endure day after day!" Her voice rose an octave in frustration.

The boy tried to get up, but dizziness overcame him, and he fell back to the ground. He put his hand on his head, feeling the wound formed where he must have hit.

'This doesn't seem like a dream, where was I before this, wait, who am I...?' He thought, and the answer came soon after with another migraine with clouded memories. The memories were still hazy, escaping his grasp like shadows in the fog.

"I don't remember you... I don't remember anything," he murmured, more to himself than to Mother Greta. His heart began to beat faster, a growing panic taking hold of him at that moment. Where was he? Who was he?

Mother Greta sighed, a sound laden with impatience and disgust. "Get up, boy. We have no time for foolishness. There's much work to be done, and you've already caused enough trouble for today."

The boy tried to obey, supporting himself on trembling arms. He looked around, seeing other orphans beginning to gather, drawn by the commotion. They watched him with a mix of curiosity and caution. No one came to help him.

As he struggled to get up, a strange feeling began to form in the back of his mind. The memories that had been clouded until then began to emerge, as if something inside him had awakened with the fall, an unknown force he couldn't understand.

He pressed his temples with his thin fingers, a sharp headache hammering in his skull even more. He closed his eyes for a moment, and flashes of memory began to come one after the other. He remembered poor, loving parents, a life that now seemed distant and unreal in a small village until there was a monster problem. While they sought a better life outside the village, there was a brutal ambush by bandits on the roads near Cindra. The terror of that fateful night flooded his mind – the glint of swords, the screams of his parents, the feeling of helplessness and fear, watching them die in front of him, he would be taken as a child slave, but the bandits had been found by city soldiers, after all of them died, he was a lonely and traumatized 4-year-old boy. With no one to claim his guardianship, he was taken to the orphanage, a place that should have been a refuge, but which turned out to be another form of prison.

Since then, the life of this boy had been an endless cycle of hard work and cruelty with adults demanding endless things from the child and he would have to do to have something with which he could fill his stomach at the end of the day. Even being just a child of four, five and now six years old, he was forced to perform heavy tasks, far exceeding what would be expected of someone his age.