Pain. Damn, it hurts so much! I would have sworn if I hadn't woken up inside a mangled car. Complete darkness made it hard to get my bearings, and the absolutely terrible pain in my back and legs kept me on the edge of unconsciousness. Son of a bitch!
If I didn't imagine it and haven't gone crazy, then Death...
I didn't have time to think about it before I heard someone's shouts. Wait, that's English! I tried to shout something coherent in response, but I just ended up coughing from the blood gathered in my mouth. After vomiting the blood right onto my own chest, I cracked one eye open and noticed a glimmer of light somewhere to the side.
"Another one! Hey, get over here! And bring the pry bar; he's inside the cabin!"
I only caught and understood part of it, but even a complete idiot could piece together the overall picture. It seems "I" was in a car accident. At least that explains the presence of rescuers. And the ray of light that gently touched my cheek with warmth slightly illuminated the car's interior. Damn, everything looked as if I'd really been run over by a steamroller.
Wait, I'm sitting in the back, right? Yes, and up front... Somehow, I managed to twist my head to see the front of the cabin, but what I saw wasn't encouraging.
Well, the driver and the front passenger weren't lucky; they definitely can't be resuscitated. Judging by everything, they died instantly. Since blood from a head wound was flooding my right eye, and the pain in my back was intensifying, just like in my legs, I had to return to my original position. Essentially, I had no viable options left except to silently wait for help while the rescuers moved chunks of concrete aside and tried to reach the car door.
And why doesn't reincarnation come with any instructions? I could have been greeted with an end-user agreement that explained the rules of the new life, outlined some approximate boundaries for acceptable actions, the rough duration of the "game session," generous bonuses for deciding to take the risk and ending up here...
I don't know how much time passed before I came to from a touch on my shoulder and slightly turned my head to the side, squinting from the bright flashlight.
"Kid, you alive?!" the rescuer addressed me, a tense half-smile flashing across his mustached face. Noticing my weak nod, he turned and shouted a bit louder. "Hey, I've got a survivor here; help out! Anderson, bring the pry bar!"
I don't know how long it took the whole group of rescuers to clear away all those fragments of concrete slabs blocking the way to the flattened car where I found myself, but in the end, they pulled me out. Honestly, I would have preferred not to see what my legs had turned into.
So, I was outside, where they immediately transferred me to a stretcher and carried me off somewhere, giving me a chance to assess what was left of... the destroyed building. Damn, what tore it apart like that? Judging by everything, some explosion, followed by the collapse of a wall onto parked cars. Now all that remained was to figure out where I was. Based on the noticeable American accent of the rescuers from the very first seconds, this is the States, but which city are we in?
Despite the oxygen mask, I was still in some pitiful semblance of unconsciousness. Wincing as they wiped the crusted blood from my face with a wet bandage, I managed to crack my eyes open afterward. So, judging by the interior, I'm inside an ambulance. Glancing to the side, I noticed a badge on the medic's sleeve with a suspiciously familiar abbreviation.
NYRRT.
Am I in fucking New York?! But what exactly happened to me? Where did Death throw me?
"Man, he got lucky," the second rescuer winced, adjusting the oxygen mask that had slipped off my face. Breathing became a bit easier, but suddenly I started feeling sleepy. Judging by everything, he didn't even notice I was conscious. Well, that's for the best. "The car is just totaled. Judging by everything, the parents were in the front seats; they'd have to be scraped into a bucket. It's amazing the kid survived."
"Well... most of him survived, yeah," another rescuer agreed, and I felt them securing my legs below the knees with some kind of tourniquet.
Fuck. Reincarnation. Second chance. Death threw me into a world where mortal danger was waiting for me right away!
The chain of guesses led to nothing good, because a lack of information only leads to endless generation of meaningless fantasies that have nothing to do with reality. Nevertheless, all these guesses could be systematized into some understandable structure, the main point of which was my unconditional death. I'm dead. Andrew Miller is dead, killed by a shot to the head. Following this realization came the next one: the one whose body I occupied must have died a moment before my reincarnation.
Everything I remember about the first days in the new world, I remember against my will. Constant balancing between sleep and reality, when I woke up from another examination or operation, and then plunged back into oblivion, where there was no one and nothing. I had never felt so free and unfree at the same time: chained to the bed, unable to take a single step, I closed my eyes and was transported to a world of mad, incredible dreams. At the same time... I didn't know if I was glad to have become an "isekai protagonist." On one hand, ending up in the body of eighteen-year-old Christian Russell after taking a bullet to the forehead is good news no matter how you look at it, since going to hell wasn't too appealing either. On the other hand...
Okay, let's cut all these musings to the bare minimum, agreed? Good. In the first four days in intensive care, police visited me multiple times, clearly informed of acceptable visiting hours, and from those meetings, I understood where I really was. Ready?
I'm in the Marvel universe. Yes, that one. Apparently, the structure of the multiverse itself isn't so far from the truth, since such a world turned out to be reality. And I believed in its reality by the second day in the hospital, when my perception slowly adjusted to the new body, and the painkillers' effect began to wear off. The very fact of such pain existing was the best proof that I wasn't dreaming or in a pre-death delirium. Everything happening was true.
So, how did I connect the dots despite the obvious and clear lack of reference information? Surprisingly, the reason the car with the former owner of this body and his parents ended up under the rubble of an apartment building was the Hulk, who was fighting some other abomination of similar size in the middle of Harlem. Honestly, I'd like to say that's where the coincidences end, but...
The next shocking news was a fleeting mention of those who died in the car next to mine. Three people died because the driver lost control and crashed into a drab Toyota parked there—this led to the second car ending up under the rubble right next to ours. May, Ben, and Peter Parker died.
Didn't expect that? I don't want to upset anyone, but my appearance in this world might have killed Peter Parker. I'll say it straight: I have no idea how the absence of Spider-Man and his relatives will affect the fabric of reality. Damn, after this news, I regretted not watching all those endless superhero movies and series that came out in my world two or three times a year, if not more often. Why do you think I called Hulk's enemy some "abomination of similar size"? It's very simple: I have no idea what enemies Hulk has, since I've never watched the movies about him. Motherfucker, the last time I seriously thought about comics was when I traded them for candy in the orphanage!
So, back to the "new me"—Christian or Chris Russell, a seventeen-year-old lonely, withdrawn kid who in an instant lost not only his family but also... his life. Yes, from the doctors, I learned that I managed to experience clinical death under the rubble. I have no idea how they figured that out without observing me "live," so to speak, but I'm inclined to believe them: apparently, that was the condition for an isekai protagonist. Death could probably track such situations, calculate the probability that everything would go to shit, and then make a decision based on... some unknown conditions to me, which I apparently met.
They tried to talk to me about something coherent, but I barely caught all these ridiculous attempts to get me talking, because I was busy digesting and assimilating someone else's memories, of which I had plenty in my head. As it turned out, that was possible too.
Chris Russell died, and I took his place, and the procedure couldn't be called simple or painless. Even if we ignore the physical pain (no one canceled the broken spine and fractured legs), the most difficult stage for me was the sudden process of merging memories. It felt like fragments of the real Chris's personality, his memories, entered into some kind of battle with my own, causing me to drool and mumble incoherently for three days while my own personality tried to defend against such an "attack." The result, however, was a strange state that I'd prefer to call some kind of balance between Chris and me.
I remembered everything about my past life, but the memories seemed... faded, while Chris's memories were like recollections of vivid dreams, where we remember only individual details but can't retell the whole plot. In fact, by the end of the twelfth day, I understood why Death chose Chris for this whole "operation"—the kid was a true symbol of human loneliness. Shy and even a bit unhinged, from early childhood he couldn't communicate coherently with people, so he spent all seventeen years of his life with his parents within four walls.
Of course, the medical records were found pretty quickly, but what are they to me? Some scattering of symptoms, presumptive diagnoses, confirmed mental disorders, an endless list of recommendations... All of that was relevant to the previous owner of this body, but certainly not to me.
To sum up?
The parents were taking their son to another meeting with the family psychotherapist when Hulk decided to throw his enemy right into an apartment building in the middle of Harlem. Parents dead, son crippled and in the hospital, treatment paid for by the Oscorp fund. They strapped me to the bed so I could only move my arms very slowly without risking harm to myself, and they didn't trust me with a laptop despite all my requests and pleas. Apparently, Chris's diagnoses meant something to the doctors, since I was under such close observation.
However, this only gave me the opportunity to think things over, assessing not only the upcoming prospects but also everything that had happened, including the last few hours of my previous life. You know what conclusions several days of brainstorming led me to? None, unfortunately. I could confidently say that I don't miss the life of a mercenary taking any jobs as long as the price was right, but the new life hasn't impressed me much yet either.
Marvel? Well, cool, I guess. Thanks, Death, for choosing a universe where I don't understand a damn thing. Huge fucking thanks! And for the spine and legs, double... no, triple thanks! I dreamed of spending at least a year in a hospital ward; just wonderful!
Okay, okay... Probably shouldn't get worked up either, because a battle with a higher entity would definitely not end in my favor, so let's return to what I can at least work with. Let's return to the world I've ended up in.
I should start with what I know about all this. Well, first there was Iron Man... or Hulk? Honestly, I never watched the movie about the second one. Okay, let's say Iron Man, then... the Avengers, probably, and there were definitely several of them... Damn! Okay, there were also the Guardians of the Galaxy, and I remember them well because Peter Quill's playlist of tracks was just excellent, and there was Black Panther, which told something about a mysterious African country that lived and prospered thanks to deposits of mythical material in the Earth's bowels.
You know when I realized that all this knowledge doesn't matter? The very moment representatives from Oscorp came to my ward. It happened on the eighteenth day.
A knock on the door pulled me out of the doze I'd been in for the last few hours. The information hunger was seriously pressing on my nervous system, forcing me to close my eyes and run through an endless chain of memories over and over—both my own and someone else's. In general, if you ignore the short conversations with police, child services, lawyers, and nurses, that's what I did around the clock. That's why the knock didn't surprise me: either the police decided to drop by again to report on how the investigation was progressing regarding "another meta-human whose fault people are dying," or it was the lawyers again, preparing documents for a lawsuit against the state of New York, according to which I was actually entitled to a hefty compensation that I couldn't use until I turned twenty-one.
In short, deadly boredom either way, and the visit from the cute nurse was supposed to happen half an hour later, so I didn't even respond. However, the lack of an answer didn't faze the unfamiliar guests, and the door opened, letting in a middle-aged man with a briefcase that went out of style about thirty years ago. Following him into the ward was a young girl clutching a thick folder of papers, and they both smiled upon seeing me.
Okay, just not sudden distant relatives; I definitely won't survive that.
"Mr. Russell?" the man said with a grin from ear to ear, glancing briefly at the girl who almost bumped into the IV stand. "Good afternoon, Mr. Russell; very pleased to meet you."
"Uh, and you are..." I didn't want to seem rude.
"Oh, my name is Bernard Smith, Mr. Russell. Chris, may I call you that?" He approached me and extended his hand, which I shook with great difficulty. The restraining bandages hindered normal movement, making me look like some tied-up crab.
"Yes, I suppose," I would have shrugged if I could, "are you from child services? If you're a lawyer too, the state has already provided me..."
"No, no, no," this "Smith" shook his head with the same smile, "I'm not a lawyer at all. You see, Chris..." he adjusted his briefcase, "I work for Oscorp. It's our fund that's handling your treatment and will handle your recovery going forward. Given some changed circumstances, my management decided it was worth arranging a personal meeting."
I tensed up hearing this. According to the nurse's stories, my treatment and rehabilitation would cost me hundreds of thousands of dollars (God bless the American healthcare system; what a wonderful invention), but it was the Oscorp fund for victims of meta-humans that covered all current and future expenses, sparing me the need to prove to the government that I was harmed precisely because of it.
"I think you've surely heard about the media buzz that arose from what happened," Smith continued without waiting for a response. "After all, this is far from the first incident with meta-humans leading to a huge number of casualties. It's impossible to forget the problems that regularly arise in our society because of mutants, which entails additional headaches for those dealing with... the legal peculiarities of such events."
It sounded like some word salad. I frowned but managed to catch the mention of mutants. I think they took a test for the X-gene from me, but I was thinking about something else then... Apparently, the X-Men exist in this world too!
"Anyway," it seemed my response wasn't needed by Smith at all, "the Fund's board decided that we shouldn't leave you in the care of public healthcare. No, no," he immediately shook his head, noticing my look, "we're not talking about stopping treatment. We simply wanted to offer you to resume the process at Oscorp's newly opened research complex, where your recovery will take from two to four months."
"Honestly," I said after a pause, recalling what I knew about Oscorp. Honestly, nothing except that they developed some cool drugs, and Norman Osborn eventually went crazy and became the Green Goblin in the old Spider-Man movies, "I'm not sure I want to take the risk."
"Risk?" Smith feigned surprise, and I noticed dissatisfaction flash in his eyes. Yeah, fuck them. "Chris, Oscorp, working in conjunction with the Department of Defense, has made serious advances in treating injuries like yours. The entire research complex was built to provide the military with the ability to recover from wounds in compressed timelines that ordinary medicine can't handle. Of course, you'll be briefed if you're interested in the details."
After hesitating for a couple of seconds, I still shook my head.
"Thanks for the offer, of course," I said, clearing my throat delicately and shifting my gaze to the girl who was still clutching the folder to her chest, "but I'll decline. I'm not sure I want to agree to something I don't understand. Regular medicine will suit me."
Without saying anything, Smith smiled and took another step, stopping right at the bed. I raised my eyes, but at that very moment, the man suddenly pulled some strange object from his pocket, very much like a syringe, and pressed the tip to my shoulder.
"You should have agreed right away, Chris," he said with a smile, and I felt pain as the needle pierced my skin.
Honestly, I immediately tried to scream, but realized my voice had simply... disappeared. The inability to move properly meant I couldn't even fight back, but the odds were against me anyway. With such injuries, I wouldn't have been able to offer proper resistance, so all that remained was to watch as several more people, looking very much like doctors, entered the ward while my eyelids grew heavy and my consciousness dissolved into the world of dreams.