Chapter 1: Death and Rebirth
The last thing I remembered was the taste of copper filling my mouth and the steady beep of medical machines fading into silence. Twenty-two years of living with a rare blood condition had finally caught up with me—Infinite Blood, they called it. Golden blood. Ironic, considering how it had made my life anything but precious.
I'd spent most of those years in hospital beds, watching the world through anime episodes and reading webnovels on my phone. Stories of heroes who defied fate, who found love and purpose in worlds where their struggles mattered. I suppose that's why, when the darkness finally claimed me, my last thought wasn't fear.
It was disappointment that I'd never get to finish reading that Fate fanfiction I'd been following.
When consciousness returned, it came not as the gentle awakening I'd imagined death might offer, but as a violent surge of sensation that felt like drowning in reverse. My lungs burned as they expanded, drawing in air that tasted of metal and something indefinably ancient. My skin tingled with unfamiliar energy, and behind my closed eyelids, I could see flickers of gold and crimson dancing like flames.
The surface beneath me was cold—stone or metal, not the sterile sheets I'd expected from whatever afterlife awaited someone like me. Voices echoed around me, urgent and panicked, speaking in a language that should have been foreign but somehow made perfect sense.
"His vitals are stabilizing, but the energy readings are off the charts!"
"Director Olga, we need to evacuate the medical bay. This level of mana output—"
"Absolutely not. We stay until we understand what happened during the summoning."
Summoning? Mana? My heart hammered against my ribs as fragments of memory tried to piece themselves together. These terms, this situation—it felt like something I'd read before, in stories that were supposed to be fiction.
I forced my eyes open.
White ceiling tiles stretched above me, lined with softly glowing runes that pulsed in rhythm with my heartbeat. The air hummed with an energy I could almost taste, thick and electric. This wasn't a hospital. This wasn't anywhere I recognized from life.
"He's awake." The voice belonged to a young woman, and when I turned my head toward the sound, my breath caught.
Short lavender hair framed a face that was achingly familiar—large violet eyes filled with concern, pale skin, and an expression of such genuine worry that it made my chest tight. She wore strange clothes, part military uniform and part something from a fantasy novel, with armor plating over key areas and a massive shield resting against the wall behind her.
Mash Kyrielight. But that was impossible. Mash was a character from Fate/Grand Order, a game, a story. She wasn't real. She couldn't be sitting here beside what appeared to be some kind of medical bed, looking at me like I was someone she actually cared about.
"Where..." My voice came out as a croak, raw and unfamiliar. Even that felt wrong—stronger than it should have been, carrying an undertone that seemed to resonate in the air itself.
"You're in Chaldea's medical facility." Her voice was exactly as I remembered it from the game—soft but determined, carrying that subtle accent. "There was an incident during the summoning ritual. You've been unconscious for three days."
Three days. Summoning ritual. Chaldea. The pieces weren't just falling into place—they were crashing together like a collision I couldn't stop. If this was real, if I was actually here, then that meant...
I tried to sit up and immediately regretted it. Pain lanced through my skull, and with it came something else—a warmth in my chest that felt like liquid sunlight, spreading through my veins in patterns I instinctively knew were wrong. Not wrong as in harmful, but wrong as in impossible.
"Don't push yourself," Mash said, and suddenly her hand was on my shoulder, steadying me. The contact sent a jolt through my system that had nothing to do with whatever energy was coursing through me. "Your body is still adjusting."
"Adjusting to what?" I managed to ask, though part of me dreaded the answer.
Before she could respond, the doors to the medical bay hissed open, and two more figures entered. A man with white hair and kind eyes—Dr. Roman—followed by a young woman whose orange hair and imperious bearing marked her immediately as Director Olga Marie Animusphere. Both looked exactly as they had in the visual novel, down to the smallest details.
This was either the most elaborate hallucination a dying brain had ever produced, or I was actually, impossibly, in the world of Fate/Grand Order.
"So our mysterious Master is finally awake," Olga said, her voice carrying that familiar mixture of authority and barely contained stress. "Do you remember your name?"
My name. In my old life, I'd been nobody special—just another patient with a rare condition, shuffled from specialist to specialist until my body finally gave out. But here, in this place that shouldn't exist, sitting across from people who couldn't be real...
"I..." The word caught in my throat. Whatever had happened to bring me here, whatever impossible circumstance had given me this second chance, I wasn't about to waste it by clinging to a life that was already over.
I met Olga's gaze and made the first decision of my new existence.
"Aion," I said, the name coming from somewhere deep inside me, feeling more right than anything I'd ever called myself. "My name is Aion."
And as I spoke it, that warmth in my chest pulsed once, like a heartbeat made of pure creation.