There was a flash of light.
Not pain. Not heat.
Just—white.
Then the white thinned, peeled back, and Jack saw a world.
A planet hanging in the dark.
Blue oceans. Vast ones. Green continents shaped almost like Earth's, but wrong in subtle ways. Too much forest. Too much untouched land. Rivers wandering freely where cities should have been. Coastlines uncut by roads or ports.
It was familiar enough to be unsettling.
"Okay," Jack thought hazily. "Yeah… that's not San Diego."
The view tilted.
Fell.
Slammed down into cold.
Snow. Wind. Blood.
A battlefield spread beneath him, frozen in the moment after death. Torn banners snapped weakly in the wind, still clutched by corpses half-buried in snow. Crusader symbols. Imperial colors. Men in mail and plate lying broken where they'd fallen.
And moving among them—
Giants.
Not myths. Not metaphors.
Huge, fur-clad men well over two meters tall, blond hair matted with ice, eyes like cold glass. They moved calmly, methodically, scavenging the field—pulling blades from hands, stripping armor, checking bodies with the indifference of hunters after a kill.
Jack's stomach tightened.
"Those… are Vikings. Or something worse."
The vision jumped.
A short distance from the battlefield, deep in a snow-choked forest, he saw a cave.
Light inside it.
Life.
On the cave floor lay carefully set gear: a cross-marked tabard, a flail, a small shield, a compact crossbow—equipment that screamed holy warrior, not peasant. Beside it, heavier armor. Crusader plate. A greatsword resting against the stone wall.
And in the firelight, two people clung together—not in peace, not in comfort, but in desperate defiance of the world outside. A man and a woman, young, exhausted, alive. War pressed close on every side, and they chose life anyway.
Jack didn't linger on how.
He just understood.
Then the scene tore forward again.
A caravan.
Wagons creaking under supplies and wounded. Armed men walking alongside with spears and shields. Women and children huddled under furs. Horses breathing steam into the air.
They entered a forest.
The horn sounded.
Chaos exploded.
The giants burst from the trees.
Jack watched men die like twigs snapping. Axes fell. Bare fists crushed skulls. Arrows the size of spears punched through armor and bodies alike. Wagons burned. Horses screamed. People scattered in every direction at once.
And in the middle of it—
Her.
The woman from the cave, now heavy with child, braced against a wagon, black cloak thrown over her armor. She fired a crossbow with practiced fury, jaw clenched, teeth bared, reloading even as blood soaked the snow beneath her boots.
The man stood in front of her.
A giant himself, though human.
Broad. Bearded. Bleeding. Holding a cracked shield in one hand and a massive two-handed sword in the other. He fought like the world had personally offended him—cutting down raiders, refusing to fall even as the giants pressed in.
Jack barely had time to think—
—then pain.
Pressure.
A scream that wasn't his, but was far too close.
The world narrowed.
A child was born.
Red. Screaming. Slippery with blood and life.
Born into snow, steel, and madness.
"No—wait—why am I—"
He wasn't watching anymore.
He was inside it.
Cold air burned lungs that shouldn't exist yet. Rough hands wrapped him in cloth. Panic. Urgency. Love.
A face filled his vision.
Blonde hair stuck to sweat-soaked skin. Blood streaked across her cheek. Blue eyes—sharp, furious, terrified, unbreakable. A crossbow still in her hand even as she cradled him close.
Mary.
Then another face.
Bearded. Ice-blue eyes. Exhausted but burning with stubborn hope. Armor dented, shield broken, sword slick with blood.
Jesus.
Jack's thoughts short-circuited.
"No. Nope. That's—no—"
A voice cut through the noise.
"Marino."
Another voice, deeper.
"Marino Colombo."
The name echoed.
Settled.
Like it had always been there.
That's… me?
The giants closed in.
Then the earth shook.
A massive white shape lumbered forward—a polar bear, enormous, ridden by a warlord crowned in bone and iron. Laughter rolled across the field. A hand lifted.
The slaughter stopped.
The family was spared.
The vision shattered again.
Time slipped.
Snow melted into rain. Rain into sun. Forests thinned. Roads stretched south. The war—crusade, invasion, whatever it was—fell away behind them like something nobody wanted to speak of again.
They traveled far. On foot. By wagon when kindness allowed. From cold lands into warmth.
Then—
Cliffs.
Salt air.
Olive trees twisted by coastal wind. Sheep grazing on rocky hillsides. A southern port town clinging to stone and sea.
Segres.
A small harbor. Fishing boats. Ship frames rising along the docks.
Jack watched the man—Jesus—work timber like it was part of him. Hulls shaped cleanly. Keels laid true. Boats slid into the water as if they belonged there.
Mary laughed again. Softer now. Tended a home. Tended a child.
The child.
Marino.
Running barefoot between nets and planks. Rope-burned hands. Salt on his lips. Years passing too quickly. A quiet, honest life.
A good one.
And then it collapsed.
The dock flickered.
Turned into asphalt.
The shipyard snapped into a parking lot.
Mary's voice tangled with Sam's.
Sirens bled into seagulls.
Jack's thoughts spun out of control.
I'm Jack.
No.
I'm Marino.
No—what the fuck—
I lived this.
I lived both.
Which one was real?
Which came first?
Which one is me?
The light slammed shut.
Jack jolted awake with a shout, his voice coming out wrong—too high, too thin—echoing off wooden walls.
"What the fuck—"
He dragged air into his lungs. Real air. It smelled like salt and old wood.
He lay on a straw-stuffed mattress, staring at a warped plank ceiling.
Not sky.
Not asphalt.
Wood.
His heart pounded.
Alive. Breathing. Thinking.
He lifted his hands.
Small.
Soft.
Not Jack's.
"…Okay," he muttered. "Yeah. No. I don't like this."
His head throbbed with overlapping lives—soldier and child, modern and medieval, Jack and Marino.
"I'm Jack," he said.
Silence.
"…No. I'm Marino."
Another pause.
"…What the fuck is going on?"
The world did not answer.
His head throbbed with overlapping lives—soldier and child, modern and medieval, Jack and Marino.
"I'm Jack," he said.
Silence.
"…No. I'm Marino."
Another pause.
"…What the hell is going on?"
The world, as usual, did not answer.
Alive.
Somehow.
Breathing. Thinking. Panicking quietly.
Definitely alive—just… wrong.
He lifted his hands toward his face. Small. Pale. Soft. No calluses. No scars. No familiar weight in them at all. They looked like a child's hands because they were a child's hands.
And the voice he'd just shouted with—too high, too thin—confirmed it.
Jack swallowed.
"Okay," he muttered. "Okay, no. That's… not ideal."
He turned his head.
A young couple stood beside the bed, close enough that he could smell salt and wool on them. They watched him the way people watch something fragile—worried, careful, hopeful all at once.
Late twenties, maybe.
Then—without warning—his skull lit up.
Not pain. Not sound.
Memories.
Faces. Names. Places that weren't his—except they were.
His father's name was Jesus.
Tall. Broad-shouldered. Built like a man who'd carried shields and bodies in equal measure. Dark-blond hair, thick beard, hands scarred not from battle anymore, but from wood and rope. A sailor. A shipbuilder. A man who knew how to make things that survived storms.
His mother—Mary.
Twenty-six. Smaller than Jesus, but harder in ways that didn't show at first glance. Calm eyes that had once looked down the sights of a crossbow. A former warrior-nun of the Church of Sighard who had walked away from her vows and paid for it with exile and silence.
They had survived a crusade together.
A cave. A fire. Winter. Fear.
And somehow—life.
Jack's thoughts scrambled.
"No," he whispered. "No, I don't—why do I know this?"
His mouth betrayed him before he could stop it.
"Father? Mother?" he heard himself say. "Why… why do I know your names?"
The man—Jesus—stiffened slightly, then softened.
Mary leaned closer, worry etched deep into her face.
"You frightened us," she said gently. "You would not wake."
Two lives collided in his head.
One was Marino Colombo—a quiet boy from a coastal town, raised among ships and salt, shaped by rope and tide.
The other was Lieutenant Jack Fritz—a naval officer who remembered sirens, steel, fire, and a friend named Sam dying in his arms.
Both felt real.
Both hurt.
"Was it… a dream?" Jack—Marino—muttered. "Or something worse?"
Fragments drifted past: light, a presence, a warning that made no sense anymore.
He squeezed his eyes shut.
Before he could spiral further, a warm hand closed around his.
Mary.
"Are you well, my son?" she asked. "You missed breakfast. We feared illness."
He blinked up at her.
"…Yeah," he said weakly. "Just—thinking too hard."
Jesus let out a breath he'd clearly been holding and forced a smile.
"That's my boy," he said. "Thinking himself into knots already. Come—food will help."
They murmured a brief blessing.
"May Sighard guard you," Mary whispered.
"And give you strength," Jesus added.
They left him alone.
The door shut softly.
Marino lay back against the straw mattress, staring at the wooden ceiling. He was alive.
But he wasn't just Jack anymore.
And he wasn't only Marino either.
Something had folded one life into another and walked away without explanation.
He exhaled slowly.
"…Great," he muttered. "New world. New body. No instruction manual."
A beat.
Then his eyes widened.
"Sighard?" he whispered. "Wait—who the hell is Sighard?"
And with that question, a second wave of unfamiliar memories began to rise.
Apparently, in this world, the Church of Sighard didn't just exist—it owned the sky.
There was no neat little Holy Trinity story everyone whispered about in Sunday school. No gentle cross-and-carpenter tale at the center of everything. Here, the name people said with fear and devotion wasn't Jesus.
It was Sighard.
A hammer-wielding savior who, according to the sermons stitched into Marino's bones, fell from the heavens like a star that chose violence.
The memories didn't come as a clean history lesson. They came as fragments: priests arguing, old women whispering, sailors swearing it was all true, and the occasional church mural where Sighard looked less like a saint and more like a warlord blessed by lightning.
They called the ancient era before him the Age of Darkness—a time when humanity didn't rule the roads at all. People hid in forest enclaves and hill forts and caves, while the lands between belonged to things that hunted humans the way wolves hunted deer.
Monsters. Flesh-eaters. Night-beasts.
Then came the Yellow Comet.
And from it—so the story went—Sighard descended.
Not on a cloud.
Not with a sermon.
On a colossal gryphon, hammer in hand, its blows said to crack stone and make the air itself shine. He united the great tribes of men beneath one banner and forged something that later generations spoke of the way poor people speak of rich ancestors:
The Empire of Man.
For a time, it worked.
Cities rose again. Roads became safer. The night was pushed back. People dared to live under open skies without clutching prayers like weapons.
A hundred years of glory, if you believed the priests.
Then Sighard vanished—ascended, died, disappeared, went back to the stars, depending on which holy text you were forced to copy.
And without him?
The empire rotted.
Not all at once. Slowly. Like wood left too long in seawater.
By the time Marino's world existed—the early 900s After Sighard, the years people now lived and died in—there wasn't one empire. There were a dozen kingdoms wearing the memory of it like a stolen cloak, squabbling over borders, titles, and whose church had the "real" authority.
And on the edges?
The world was still hungry.
In the north, the barbarians came down like winter itself—giants in furs, two meters tall and more, raiding caravans and crusade lines and laughing as they did it. The Church called the campaigns against them "holy." The men on the ground called them what they were:
survival.
Marino's inherited memories anchored the timeline without asking permission: the Second Holy Northern Crusade, the marches, the blood, the retreat south—916 to 923 After Sighard, and his family fleeing the front in the tail end of winter 918, reaching Segres by spring 919.
"Damn," Marino muttered to himself. "This world's metal as hell."
It was.
And it was also… stalled.
Most people were too busy surviving to innovate. Lords wanted taxes and soldiers. Priests wanted obedience. Peasants wanted next winter not to kill them.
Only the dwarves—reclusive mountain smiths who, according to story and rumor, had once fought beside Sighard—kept pushing forward. Their cannons and strange firearms were talked about like myth. You heard the word "muskets" at docks the way you heard "dragons" at taverns: with awe, exaggeration, and a heavy dose of bullshit.
This place felt like late medieval Europe with a different coat of paint: mud roads, stone walls, iron laws, and faith everywhere like smoke.
The power languages—at least in Marino's head—were cousins of German and French. Courts and churches spoke them. Merchants used them. And across the western sea lay Albion, a fog-bound island kingdom people spoke of like a place where normal rules went to die—monsters, ancient magic, stone giants, the kind of stories that made sailors drink harder.
As for Marino?
He wasn't a noble. Not a starving mud-peasant either.
He was… in-between.
His father—Jesus Colombo, not the Jesus—was a master shipwright respected enough that the local lord of Segres gave them a home and steady work. People whispered the old man's hands were blessed, because ships came out of his yard straight and seaworthy, surviving storms that should've snapped them in half.
Their home sat near the coastal cliffs, outside the town's tight streets—stone below, timber above, close enough to smell the harbor, far enough to breathe. Olive groves in the warmer hills. Sheep in the fields. Salt in everything.
And then there were the stars.
Even Marino's "new" memories couldn't make them feel normal.
The constellations were wrong—patterns that didn't belong to Earth. The sky looked like someone had taken the familiar night and rearranged it just enough to make you uneasy.
"What the hell is up there?" he whispered. "And what's looking back down?"
Down at the docks, sailors traded their usual friend-of-a-friend epics: wars in the east, green hordes in lands no one here had ever seen, and darker rumors still—dead legions marching, old imperial horrors waking up, the kind of tales that always ended with someone crossing themselves and saying, Light protect us.
The Church preached salvation through devotion. That in moments of true desperation, the devout could be filled with Sighard's strength—like courage as a storm, holy power bursting into the veins.
"Sounds like bullshit," Marino muttered.
But other stories ran colder: necromancers, witches, forbidden rites—power that worked, sure, but rotted the soul like seawater rotted wood. The Church hunted those with fire and iron.
Marino found all of it… interesting.
He didn't know how much was true. He didn't know how much was propaganda. He didn't even know how much of him was him.
But he knew one thing:
This world was big, broken, and full of edges.
And the Colombo name belonged to ships.
So maybe, in this life, Marino Colombo would be the one to push past the edge of the map. Find what nobody here had named yet. Build something the priests couldn't control and the lords couldn't tax.
He wasn't the bravest guy. Not naturally.
But give him a stout hull under his feet and a crew that didn't mutiny at the first shadow in the water… and he liked his odds.
Marino smirked to himself.
"This could get interesting."
He stood, pulled on a roughspun tunic, leather boots, and a salt-stained belt, and headed downstairs toward breakfast.
The world was waiting.