Sound came first.
It wasn't a noise; it was a full-blown assault on senses I didn't know I possessed. The grinding of steel, the frantic neighing of horses, and the screams of men dying in languages I didn't recognize—yet understood in the very marrow of my borrowed bones.
War.
Then sensations rushed in like a dam breaching. A cold so profound it burned. Snow whipping like shards of glass against exposed skin. The air tasted of iron, entrails, and the acrid stench of desperation.
I opened my eyes.
Bad decision. The world was an abstract painting of white, red, and ruin.
Corpses lay scattered like discarded dolls across the frozen ground. Bodies were frozen in mid-scream, limbs bent at impossible angles, armor gaping open like overripe fruit to spill contents that steamed in the frigid air. This wasn't a battlefield; it was a charnel house where the carnage had yet to settle.
A shadow loomed. A massive warhorse, clad in lacquered bronze armor, eyes rolled white with panic, charged directly at me. On its back, a knight in black plate—his face hidden behind a snarling oni mask—raised a naginata that gleamed with fresh, steaming blood.
They were closing the distance in seconds, transforming the snowy field into a dance floor of ice and death.
Beautiful. If not for how final it looks.
Then, a realization dawned.
Freedom.
I wasn't in the Academy. I wasn't in that sterile, suffocating loop. This was somewhere new. Somewhere real.
A sinister, wild smile cracked my frozen lips—manic and entirely inappropriate for a man about to be trampled. Relief, anger, and an electrifying ecstasy wrapped around my soul like a blanket I had been searching for across lifetimes.
Anyone who saw me would have thought I was a raving lunatic.
Good.
The Palimpsest of Flesh
I tried to stand, but my legs didn't respond with the surgical precision of Kai Sterling. I looked down at my hands—rougher, calloused in unfamiliar patterns, wrapped in lightweight lacquered leather.
Cheap. Functional. Wrong.
My body felt younger, more worn, like a tool that had been used hard and put away wet too many times.
This isn't my body.
The thought crystallized with horrifying clarity. I wasn't me anymore. I reached for my memories, trying to grasp the thread of my existence, but what came back was pure chaos.
Kai Sterling sitting in a lecture hall. Someone else standing on a throne in a shattered dimension. A child holding a rag doll, crying. Another person teaching sword techniques in a sun-drenched courtyard. This current body kneeling before a girl, accepting a brand.
The memories didn't connect; they overlapped, bleeding into each other like watercolors in a storm.
"I'm a palimpsest," I whispered to the frozen air. "Layers of people written over each other. And I can't read any of them clearly."
The horse's hooves pounded closer.
Philosophy later. Survival now.
I forced this borrowed body to move, observing details my Academy-trained mind absorbed by second nature. The battlefield occupied a high ridge. Below us was a blue immensity—the kind of drop where distance becomes a theoretical concept.
In the distance, two forces clashed with a power that made the bedrock tremble. One side was wreathed in red flames; the other in blue lightning and something much darker, radiating a profound wrongness.
This ridge won't hold. One shockwave and...
The thought didn't finish. The horseman was upon me.
The Anatomy of a Kill
My body knew things my mind didn't. Muscle memory surged—someone else's lifetime of training trying to guide limbs that weren't quite synchronized.
But this body was weak.
The realization hit as I tried to intercept the cavalry charge. My mind demanded a perfect parry, a fluid counter. But this frame was malnourished, abused, and running on nothing but spite.
My legs buckled. I slipped on ice slick with blood, and the naginata's shaft caught my ribs.
CRACK.
Pain—white and absolute—blanked my vision. Something inside broke. Ribs, likely. Or perhaps the delusion that I could fight like a God in a beggar's skin. I rolled aside just as hooves slammed down where my head had been, carving divots into the frozen earth.
"Die, scum!" the knight roared.
Nearby, salvation arrived in a blur of motion. An old man with a massive odachi—a blade as tall as he was—stepped between me and death.
He moved like water sculpted into steel. A kick to the horse's knee. A diagonal strike that made the air scream. The lancer flanking us lost his head before his body realized it should fall.
But there was something wrong with the corpse's eyes. They were empty. Like someone had scooped out the soul and left only meat in armor.
"Shinobi slaves," the old man spat. "Hollowed out by the Asura's breath."
Asura. That name again.
"Anko! Move your ass!" the old warrior barked.
Anko. Not my name, but close enough to the truth that I didn't argue.
The horseman turned sharply, already charging again. The old man sprang into action, his odachi clashing against the naginata in a shower of sparks that lit the snow like dying stars. He was deflecting, not winning. The difference in reach was brutal.
"To the flank, you dunderhead!" he ordered.
I can't out-muscle him. I can't out-reach him. So use physics.
We were near the ridge's edge. I studied the setup with eyes that had analyzed a thousand battlefields across lifetimes I couldn't remember. The horse was frothing, pushed too hard. The saddle was standard issue. A leather girth strap.
Worn. Stressed. Vulnerable.
"Put him down!" I shouted.
The old man shot me a murderous glare, then understood. He feigned a bad sidestep, dropping his guard. The rider rose in his stirrups, naginata raised for a crushing strike.
Now.
I dropped to my knees, sliding across the bloody ice. I grabbed a broken katana from a nearby corpse and struck upward. Not at the knight. At the strap holding the saddle.
SNAP.
The girth strap gave way. The horse panicked. The rider staggered, his balance vanishing as the saddle slid. The naginata strike went wide, and before he could recover, the old man's odachi fell like judgment.
A sickening crunch ended the argument.
The Breach of Reality
The rider's body collapsed, his mask cracking open to reveal black veins crawling beneath his skin like worms.
"Corrupted," the old man muttered. "The Asura... it doesn't kill. It empties. It takes what makes you human and fills the space with obedience."
I leaned against a rock, gasping. Every bone ached. "Not bad, kid," the veteran said. "Your eyes... they're too old for that face."
"Does it matter?" I shot back. "I just saved your life."
He chuckled, a dry, broken sound. "Maybe. Or maybe you just bought us a few more seconds before the mountain kills us both."
I looked toward the valley below. Reality was breaking.
Purple and black lights erupted in geysers. Blurs moved faster than sound. At the center of the carnage, a giant—three meters tall and shrouded in shadow—seemed to be eating the very light of the world.
The Asura.
He was fighting a swarm of elite warriors as if they were insects.
"The Light Swordmaster is here!" someone screamed. "Push back the Shinobi slaves!"
The pressure of that distant battle hit me like a physical wave. This was no mere war. This was gods using mortals as playing pieces.
I tried to access... something. Anything. Grace? System? Stats? The void didn't answer. Always alone when it matters.
Then, a flash. A collision of red flames and blue lightning incinerated the clouds. The shockwave rolled up the mountain like the fist of an angry god.
RUMBLE.
It wasn't a sound. It was a sensation. The ground beneath my boots groaned—a deep, subterranean complaint. A hairline crack split the ice.
Then it widened.
"Oh, fuck me," I whispered.
The cliffside gave way. The entire ice shelf detached from the mountain with the sound of reality breaking.
"Anko!" the old man yelled, reaching out.
Too late. I was already falling. To my left and right, friends and enemies alike plummeted into the blue abyss.
I didn't scream. I acted.
The broken katana was still in my hand. Muscle memory kept me armed even while falling. I twisted mid-air, driving the blade toward the passing wall of ice.
SCREEEEEECH.
Metal sparked against rock. The impact nearly dislocated my shoulder. The pain was white-hot, but I held on. I slowed down, just enough—
CRACK.
The cheap steel shattered. My grip vanished, and gravity reclaimed me with vindictive enthusiasm. As I fell headfirst into the freezing void, a single thought occurred to me:
One day, everything will end.
"But not this damn day," I snarled to the wind.
I reached inside—past Kai, past Anko, past the confusion. I reached for the fire.
And it answered.
Warmth bloomed in my chest. Not external, but from the layer buried beneath eighteen years of pretending to be small. An ember, still burning.
I closed my eyes and extended my right hand. Three golden cubes materialized in the air. They hummed with a power that recognized me. They pulsed like hearts made of starlight.
As they formed, a memory was ripped away. A park bench. A tree. An old man. Gone.
The cubes interlocked in my hand, forming a blade of solidified sunlight. I wasn't afraid anymore.
[Grace]: Trial Phase 1 – Survived.
[Classification: Reckless. Effective. Broken.]
[Warning: The Asura remembers your face.]
[Status: Hunted.]
I tried to laugh and ended up coughing blood.
Hunted? Great. Let them come. If my name was Light, I was the one who held the flame. This nightmare had barely begun.
[Estimated time until impact: 47 seconds]
[Recommended course of action: Pray.]
[Grace]: Ha.