The silence that follows combat is a lie. It's a void that the brain rushes to fill with the echoes of violence. Back at FOB Triton, the roar of gunfire from Zarin Dah was replaced by a high-pitched hum in my ears and the pounding of my own heart. Kilo team reacted in predictable ways: Marcus was a whirlwind of nervous energy, reliving every moment with euphoria; Javier was quiet, his gaze distant, cleaning his rifle with obsessive meticulousness. Thorne and the other veterans simply submerged themselves in routine, their professionalism a shield against trauma.
And I... I was fractured.
I sat on my cot, ignoring Marcus's attempts to start a conversation. The system screen kept showing me the mission rewards, the increased funds, the new perks, the availability to summon Simon "Ghost" Riley. The Alex within me, the gamer, saw these as achievements, like an expanding skill tree. But the Kenji within me, the one who felt the weight of the knife in his hand and saw life fade from another man's eyes, was screaming.
I closed my eyes and the image instantly returned: the man with the knife, his face a mask of surprise and agony. He wasn't an NPC. He wasn't a set of polygons. He was flesh, bone, and blood that now stained my hands, both literally and figuratively.
"Shut up," I whispered to the system, to myself.
Compartmentalization was the problem. Alex wanted to put the experience in a box labeled "Mission Accomplished." Kenji couldn't stop opening the box and looking at the horror within. That night, sleep offered no escape. It offered a confrontation.
I found myself in a place that was and wasn't the Tanaka family dojo. The floor was tatami, but through it seeped lines of green code. On the walls hung ancestral katanas alongside tactical screens displaying maps of Afghanistan. The air smelled of incense and cordite. In the center of the room, two figures awaited me.
One was Kenji. Young, slender, dressed in the training kimono he wore the day my father last struck me. His eyes burned with a mixture of fear and a deep, repressed hatred.
The other figure was harder to define. It was a humanoid silhouette made of television static and corrupted data, a flickering outline vaguely resembling a soldier in tactical gear. It was Alex. Or rather, the gamer shell Alex had been.
"You," Kenji hissed, pointing at me, but his gaze was fixed on the data silhouette. "You're enjoying this. You use my body, my pain, like a damn video game."
Alex's voice resonated, not from the silhouette, but in my head. It had no sound, it was a torrent of pure logic.
"Purpose?" Kenji scoffed, stepping forward. The tatami beneath his feet rippled like dark water. "You call this purpose? Killing strangers in a country that isn't ours for money. It's no different from our father! You just traded suits for uniforms."
"Clean!" Kenji yelled, and the dojo trembled. The katanas detached from the walls and fell to the floor with a metallic clang. "Did the sound of the knife entering his throat seem 'clean' to you? The warmth of his blood? You didn't feel that! You were hidden behind your HUD and your stupid perk notifications!"
Kenji lunged forward, but not at the silhouette. He lunged at me. And when he hit me, I merged with him, seeing the world through his eyes filled with tears of rage. I felt every blow from my father, every word of contempt from my brothers, every ounce of humiliation. His pain was mine.
Then, Alex's silhouette lunged at us, and the perspective shifted again. Now I saw the world as Alex saw it. Kenji's pain became a flickering red status bar:
"I am not your mission!" Kenji's voice roared from my throat.
We were in a civil war within a single skull. Kenji's trauma against Alex's dissociation. Rage against logic. The human against the player. The dojo was disintegrating around us, the code walls crumbling into a digital void. We were tearing each other apart. And in that chaos, a third truth emerged.
Alex was right. Without his tactical knowledge, his gamer's mind that could process the battlefield like a map, Kenji would be dead. His ability to detach and execute was a vital asset.
Kenji was right too. Without his connection to reality, to pain and consequences, Alex was just a monster playing a game, a sociopath with a cosmic cheat system. Kenji's humanity, his pain, was the anchor that prevented Alex's logic from veering into pure monstrosity.
They couldn't exist without each other. They couldn't win this war. They could only accept it.
In the center of the whirlwind of data and emotions, I stopped fighting. I let Kenji's pain flow. I let Alex's cold logic analyze it. I let the son's rage and the gamer's ambition meet. Not to cancel each other out, but to fuse.
The dojo stabilized. The two figures, Kenji and Alex, ceased to be separate entities and folded back into themselves, merging into a single form. My form.
I opened my eyes. The morning sun filtered through the barracks window. The hum in my ears was gone. The knot in my stomach had dissolved. I didn't feel like Alex piloting Kenji, or Kenji tormented by Alex. I felt... whole. The memories of both lives were there, not as conflicting files, but as facets of a whole. I accepted the pain of Kenji's past. I accepted the death of Alex's past. And I accepted the blood on my hands from my present.
I was Kage. And it was time to go to work.
The next few days were different. There was a new economy in my movements, a new calm in my gaze. Thorne noticed. During training, he watched me with renewed intensity. He no longer saw a talented rookie, he saw an equal, perhaps even something more. Something he couldn't define.
On the third day after Zarin Dah, Pierce summoned us again.
"Kilo, you have a new mission. A 'milk run'," Pierce said, with a slight mocking tone. "You're going to taxi a big shot around. An HCLI representative, European logistics branch. She wants to have a chat with some tribal elders in the Khyber Pass. You'll pick her up at the airstrip in an hour, take her to the meeting, make sure no one shoots her, and bring her back. Easy. Don't screw it up."
The name HCLI hit me like lightning. HCLI. Heavy Combat-Life Industry. In Alex's life, that was the name of the corporation Jonah's father worked for in the anime Jormungand. A coincidence. It had to be. This world already had a Call of Duty cheat system; it would be too absurd if it were also a crossover.
An hour later, we were on the airstrip, watching a white Gulfstream private jet, so pure it hurt to look at it under the Afghan sun, land with a grace that heavy C-17s could only dream of. It stopped a respectful distance from our MRAPs.
The ramp lowered.
The first to emerge was a woman with an eye patch over her right eye. Her body was a symphony of defined muscles under light tactical gear. She moved with the lethality of a predator. I recognized her instantly. Sofia "Valmet" Velmer. Former Finnish special forces commander.
The second was an older, gray-haired man, with a relaxed smile and eyes that had seen everything. He carried a sniper rifle as if it were an extension of his own arm. Lehm Brick. Former Delta Force operator.
My heart stopped. This was no coincidence.
And then, she appeared at the top of the ramp, a vision of immaculate white against the blue sky and brown dust. Short silver hair, a radiant and playful smile on her face, and sky-blue eyes that held a cold, calculating intelligence.
Koko Hekmatyar. The merchant of death princess. The protagonist of Jormungand.
She paused, breathing in the desert air as if it were the most expensive perfume in the world.
Shit, was the only coherent thought my newly fused mind could form. The system flickered frantically in my peripheral vision.
Koko descended the ramp, her heels making an almost inaudible sound on the metal. Her gaze swept over Thorne and the other Kilo members, evaluating and dismissing them in an instant. Then, her eyes settled on me. And stopped.
Her smile widened, becoming genuine for an instant, filled with predatory curiosity. She walked directly towards me, ignoring Thorne, the team leader. Valmet and Lehm subtly positioned themselves on her flanks.
"Well, well," she said, her voice exactly as Alex remembered it from the anime, cheerful with an undertone of steel. She stopped a meter from me, tilting her head. "Thorne-san, your report said your team was competent, but it didn't mention you had something... quite so interesting."
Thorne, bewildered by being ignored, stepped forward. "Ms. Hekmatyar, I'm the team leader..."
"I know," Koko interrupted, not looking at him. Her eyes remained fixed on mine. "Most soldiers I know reek of fear or fragile arrogance. Others wear the ghosts of the men they've killed like a heavy coat."
She took one more step closer, her smile becoming enigmatic. I could smell her perfume, something citrusy and expensive.
"But you..." she whispered, as if sharing a secret. "You carry no ghosts. It's as if you are one. A phantom with a rifle. What's your name?"
My mind, Kage's mind, processed the situation. Alex's initial panic was suppressed by Kenji's cold resolve. Revealing my knowledge was suicide. Playing my part was the only option.
"Kage," I replied, my voice a quiet, even murmur.
"Kage?" she repeated, savoring the word. "The Shadow. Oh, that's perfect." Her eyes sparkled with a mix of amusement and deep analysis, as if she could see the fusion, the seam between Alex and Kenji. "I have a feeling my little business trip just got a lot less boring."
She turned to Thorne, her smile now purely professional, but the echo of her personal interest still lingered in the air between us. "Well, Kilo team. I have some elders to charm and some weapons to sell... err, I mean, some hearts and minds to win. Shall we?"
As she climbed into our MRAP, Koko cast one last glance over her shoulder at me, an almost imperceptible wink.
My world had just expanded in the most dangerous and unimaginable way. Not only was I in a video game come to life, but I was in an anime. And its unpredictable, brilliant protagonist, a woman who could sell weapons to both sides of a war and come out on top, had just set her sights on me.
The mission was no longer just about surviving the insurgents. Now, I had to survive Koko Hekmatyar. And I wasn't sure which was more dangerous.