A Salamander, but Mighty

Daylight hit her face, causing her to squint and raise a hand to try to cover her vision, only then realizing that her arms seemed somehow…limited, compared to the ones she'd always had up until a few moments before. Her limbs came to a stop when still far apart and ended up hitting the sides of her mouth.

What's happening?'Tamara thought, trying to squirm and kick to gain greater mobility, there was something keeping her stuck in an oval pose and... why did she feel a sort of third leg moving starting from just above her butt? have I become deformed???

One more effort… one more effort!!!

Tud!

Tamara fell over on the ground after breaking what was holding her and found her chin and throat rubbing on a damp patch of grass; there was something that didn't fit with the proportions of her body. First of all the grass appeared much bigger than she remembered, as if she had returned to being a newborn, but this was excluded by Tamara since in that case she would have had to be at least in a room, with someone around, or at least hearing the heavy breathing of the new mother... but nothing, it seemed like she was lost in nature, all alone.

Then, Tamara noticed movement, then others.

She was petrified as she observed monsters similar to european salamanders hatching from eggs around her. Not only did she find the reptiles disgusting, but they were also as big as her. The monsters moved their large, black eyes almost imperceptibly, observing their surroundings, opening and closing their horrible triangular mouths.

“Stay…stay back!”

No words came out of Tamara's mouth but only screeches and puffs of air, what the hell was happening to her?

Why can't I talk? She thought as she tried to lower her head and look at her body, but under her chin – or where there should have been a chin – there was only the ground.

Then, Tamara turned her head towards her shoulders, first to the right, then to the left.

…

SHE WAS ONE OF THOSE SALAMANDER MONSTERS!!

Panic and fear took over her: perhaps if she had had more time to rationalize what had happened she wouldn't have gone crazy and started screaming and running in a completely random direction in the vegetation of the place from which she came into the world, but you had to understand the poor girl, dead first, reappeared in front of a deity who she thought was only a figment of the imagination of a writer of children's stories then, only to be sucked into a dark vortex by a second deity, and finally discover that she was reborn as some sort of salamander.

In short, going crazy after a series of sequential episodes like this is something that would have happened to even the most isekai-loving Japanese person imaginable.

She kept running until she tripped and fell down a gentle slope, rolling somewhat like a tree trunk until her fall was broken by a stream of water. She waved her stubby little legs around as the air escaped her lungs, she couldn't even swim properly!

The current began to drag her, Tamara grabbed onto the first hold she could find and held onto it with all four legs and her tail. She began to climb along the handhold until she managed to discover that it was the large root of a tree that had embedded itself partly in the river bed.

"Mom! Dad!" She whimpered, throwing her noises into the forest. Even as a salamander monster her voice rang with desperation, “I'm scared! I want to go back home! Lyndvrath! Take me away from here!"

Champion? Great powers? All she had achieved in her reincarnation was to be treated like a puppet in the hands of squabbling deities before being thrown into the body of a damned lizard!

“Stop… please, I want to wake up…” she whined moving away a few meters from the river bank to at least be safe from the current of water in which she had discovered her new body was not very well suited for swimming.

Tamara curled up under a tree and closed her eyes; somehow she was certain that she had escaped something like total annihilation by touching that light that had rushed to her rescue as she sank into the tunnel of darkness, but was being reborn as some sort of salamander really worth her survival? She needed time, she needed to think about it for a while, too much had happened in too little time between the time she died and now.

In desperation, sadness and tiredness from having recently been reborn, Tamara fell asleep.

Evening had almost arrived when Tamara woke up from a sleep disturbed by a myriad of nightmares in which she saw her own tragic end, the faces of her parents, the friends she had and would never see again... she woke up with a start to find herself face to face with a floating ball of light. It was a strange experience given that she was sure that having that luminous sphere in front of her muzzle was real but for some reason that she didn't understand the light seemed not to radiate and not illuminate around her as would otherwise be dictated by the laws of physics.

“Please, don’t panic.”

Only the fact that she remembered that the voice she heard coming from the ball of light was the same one she had heard in the dark tunnel was the only thing that kept her from going crazy and starting running again.

“Can… can you understand me?” Tamara asked tentatively, “I can't talk anymore, what happened to me?”

The light couldn't nod, what body language could a ball of light have? “Yes, I can understand you. I managed to undo the deletion process started by Groffward, but I had to act quickly and that means I couldn't control your reincarnation by a large extent.” It said apologetically, "The only thing I could control was the place where you were reborn."

"Deletion? Did he want to kill me??” Tamara immediately forgot that the light had not introduced itself, even if it was sounding like a she.

“That's right, unfortunately, not even deities have access to what lies beyond the veil between worlds, so the only thing he could do was annihilate your consciousness so that your life force would have returned to the cycle of your world of origin.”

Tamara remained silent.

“He was trying to kill you,” the glowing orb explained more succinctly, “there was no way he could send you back to your world.”

“But I didn't do anything to him! I hadn't even asked Lyndvrath for anything! I didn't want to be her champion!” Tamara exclaimed, “that's not fair!”

“The gods often don't give much consideration to what mortals want or don't want for themselves,” the light said apologetically.

“Are you a goddess too?” Goddess seemed like the appropriate term, judging by how the voice sounded… and also how the creature looked. Maybe there were monsters that looked like balls of light? She certainly had no idea.

"I?" The voice sounded flattered, “that would be nice! But no, I'm… oh crap!"

The movement of something large and ferocious, which slipped from the vegetation barely illuminated by the red light of the sunset, interrupted the discussion between Tamara and her savior.

How rude.