I was born screaming. That wasn't particularly noteworthy; apparently orc infants cry just the same as human infants. No, the part that was noteworthy was that my last memory before crowning was that of being incinerated.

I used to be a 26 year-old barista. I had a college degree, not a particularly useful one, but a degree all the same. I read in my spare time. Mostly shitty fanfiction, but I deluded myself into thinking it was better than TV. Then a blinding flash, a crushing heat, the melting of my skin, and I was gone.

And now, I was an orc child. Isekai, reincarnation, self-insert, whatever your chosen form of self-indulgent day dream, I was living it. My escapist fantasies usually involved less raw meat and more cool magic, though. I used to be a vegetarian, you know. Just my luck to be reborn into a species that gifts knives on naming days and expects any self-respecting teenager to hunt their own food.

They thought I was delayed. It took me too long to learn how to work a mouth with bottom canines that jutted out past my lip. I didn't quite get the hang of the growling, snapping language until I was six. And my new parents didn't give a flying fuck that I knew what calculus was.

At least I wasn't alone. Everyone born from a year before me, to three years after me was similarly odd. I had an especially stranger brother, just a year younger than me. Rolk cried a lot. I found out why not long after strange children stopped being born. He was reincarnated, of course. I'd figured out the gist of my circumstances very young. The first reborn children had a full year to compare notes before I came along.

But Rolk had been seven when his first life ended. And only six when my first life ended. I'd heard stories of reborns living a few pain-filled hours before succumbing, but he'd made it three weeks. A nuclear bomb, he said. Radiation poisoning. He celebrated his seventh birthday in a hospital, fully aware that he was dying.

I grew protective of him. The adults, the real orcs, thought it was just a side effect of his oddities. Of course I'd be protective of my younger brother who rarely spoke, cried at the strangest times, and never seemed to relax. I learned to soothe him, to spot his triggers before he did.

And when he was fifteen, I got our parent's blessing to travel with him. There were whispers among the reborns. Whispers of a city, made up entirely of those who remembered a life before. A city where he'd be understood. He hoped that we'd find his first parents, killed nearly instantly in the blast. I just wanted him to be safe.

Their journey was meandering. They were pointed in the general direction of the major cities of the land, but without a clear end, there was little reason to move linearly. Rolk did most of the hunting. He knew I hated it. And he didn't look at me strangely for cooking the meat, even if he'd adapted to eating it raw.

Our first hint was from a soft-spoken reborn in one of the larger dwarf villages. She was happy with her new life as a religious scholar, having been a lonely history professor in her first life. She said that elves were known to accept refugees of all species in their vast forested territory. Their forests were the only place on the continent that'd be able to handle an extra city's worth of people, and which weren't ruled by someone who'd be threatened by such a settlement.