The transition was not a fade, but a violent, high-velocity collision. One moment, Alab was standing in the impossible, cerulean silence of Mozzafiato; the next, a wall of suffocating heat and cacophonous noise slammed into his chest, knocking the very breath from his lungs. He inhaled, but instead of the sterile, recycled air of a hospital or the neutral void of the library, his lungs were flooded with the taste of copper, kicked-up dust, and the heavy, cloying sweetness of fresh offal. It was a scent Alab knew with clinical intimacy—the smell of an open abdominal cavity in a trauma bay—but here, it was the atmosphere itself.
"Kill them!!! Break their line!"
The roar was ragged, the sound of vocal cords fraying under the sheer pressure of terror and adrenaline. Alab's eyes snapped open, but the world was a punishing white glare. Sunlight glinted off a sea of moving steel. To his left, a horse thundered past, its massive flank lathered in a pinkish foam of sweat and blood. The vibration of its hooves rattled Alab's teeth, sending a jolt of pure, primal panic through his nervous system.
His stomach, already reeling from the sudden shift in gravity, gave way completely. He collapsed into the churned earth, his hands sinking into mud that felt far too warm and far too viscous. As a surgeon, he'd seen death in controlled, sterile boxes. This was entropy. This was the raw, systematic undoing of human biology on a massive, chaotic scale.
"Respa mitsu algare!"
The shout was harsh and guttural. Alab didn't understand the words, but the intent—the sharp, murderous edge of a man hunting another man—was universal. He needed cover. Now. He scrambled away from the path of the charging cavalry, sliding down a slick, gore-stained embankment into a shallow, dug-out trench. The silence here was worse. The trench was a mass grave in the making, packed with bodies wearing the same leather-reinforced tunics. Alab gasped for air, his lungs burning. Suddenly, the scent of the battlefield began to shift. The metallic tang was being overwritten by something impossible: the smell of dried lavender, wet soil, and the soft, comforting scent of hearth-fire.
Alab's hand had landed on the face of a dead soldier at the bottom of the pile. The man was young, perhaps in his early twenties, his skin pale and cool. A strange, clinical impulse—the habit of a doctor checking for a pulse—made Alab reach out to brush a lock of dark hair away from the boy's forehead. The moment his fingertips touched the soldier's temple, the Rosenheim Plains didn't just vanish—they were violently overwritten by a life that wasn't his.
The heat of the sun mellowed into the gentle, golden warmth of a late autumn afternoon in the village of Telan.
"The wind is turning, Lucas. Can you hear the Matriarch whispering? She's restless today."
Lucas turned toward the small, thatch-roofed cottage. His mother stood in the doorway, her head tilted slightly to the left. Her ears were doing the heavy lifting that her eyes could no longer manage. She looked toward him, her expression serene, though her gaze remained fixed on a point three inches above his head.
"I hear her, Ma," Lucas replied. His own voice sounded different in his head—deeper, vibrating with the resonance of a man who spent his days wrestling with the earth rather than pens or scalpels.
He walked across the yard and took her weathered hand. She didn't need to see him; her thumbs instinctively traced the new lines and calluses on his palm with the precision of a mapmaker. "You've been at the roots again," she whispered, a small smile playing on her lips. "Planning for the snow."
Lucas glanced toward the backyard. There stood the Matriarch—a willow so ancient her trunk was a gnarled, silver-grey tower of wrinkles. To the rest of the village, she was just an old tree. But for Lucas, his mother, and one other, she was a presence. She didn't speak in words, but in the way the sap hummed in the spring and the branches creaked in the frost. Only the three of them knew that the Matriarch kept the secrets of the valley's soil.
"She says we harvest the tubers tonight," Lucas said.
A small, green-skinned figure emerged from behind the Matriarch's sweeping curtain of leaves. To a knight of the capital, he would have been a monster to be hunted. To Lucas, he was just a child with amber eyes and ears that twitched at the sound of a falling leaf. The boy crouched by a patch of dark, fertile earth, his long, nimble fingers delicately patting the soil.
"Lucas! Look! It's awake!" The boy's voice was high and raspy. He pointed to a tiny, stubborn sprout. "I gave it the fish bones like you showed me. I told it the secret names you whispered to the Matriarch."
Lucas knelt beside him, noticing the way the boy's moss-toned skin seemed to blend perfectly with the shade of the willow. "Good work. Keep the earth loose around the stem. If the Matriarch protects the roots and you protect the leaves, we'll all have enough when the frost bites."
The green child bared rows of small, pointed teeth in a wide, joyous grin, leaning his head against Lucas's knee. It was a secret circle—a boy, his blind mother, a moss-skinned stray, and a tree that kept time for them all.
"Don't worry, Mama," Lucas whispered as he stood to prepare for the harvest. "I'll be back before the first snow."
"Soldier! Get up! Bring the flag to the left flank!"
The voice was a thunderclap that shattered the peace of Telan. Alab's eyes snapped open, but the world was a fractured mess of colors. An agonizing spike of pain—like an ice pick being driven slowly through his left temple—blasted through his skull.
"Argh! This... this shit hurts!" he hissed, clutching his head.
It wasn't just a memory; it was a physical invasion. His brain felt like it was being re-wired in real-time. The guttural shouts from the soldiers above were no longer nonsense. "Respa mitsu algare!"—"Push them to the river!" He understood the language now, but the price was a vertigo so intense he could barely tell the sky from the mud.
"Hurry up, you damn farmer! The flank is being destroyed!" A man on horseback glared down into the trench.
Alab—now Lucas—forced himself to his feet. Every movement was a battle against the pulsing rhythm of the headache. He reached down and gripped the flag Lucas had been clutching. It was a heavy, splintered wooden pole. As he lifted it, he felt the true weight of his first role: the Bannerman.
The pole was nearly ten feet of solid, unyielding ash, topped with a heavy iron finial and a waterlogged silk banner. In the medical world, a tool was designed for ergonomics; this was a crude lever designed to fight the wind. The weight was uneven, centered high above his head, making every gust of wind a physical struggle to stay upright. To hold a banner wasn't just to carry a stick; it was to manage torque. He had to lean his entire body weight against the wind just to keep the colors visible, a calculation of physics he felt in his screaming lower back.
He scrambled up the embankment, his boots slipping on gore. He ran toward the left flank, his balance tilting. Every time his foot hit the ground, the pain in his head flared white-hot. Arrows hissed past him like angry wasps; one clipped his heel, the sharp sting jolting him enough to keep him from collapsing.
He reached the flank and unfurled the flag. It snapped violently in the wind. Ugh... this is too heavy. He waved it in the rhythmic, overhead arcs Lucas's memories provided—a "rally" signal that required a core strength Alab didn't yet possess. He watched, dazed, as a group of Heartwood soldiers used his signal to pivot, charging into the gap.
"New orders! Fall back to the ridge!"
The command echoed through the screams. Lucas lowered the flag and ran, blinded by sweat and the lingering static of another man's life in his brain. He finally reached the hill where the command tents stood, collapsing near a supply wagon. The ice-pick pain in his head finally dulled into a heavy, throbbing ache. For the first time, a sliver of relief washed over him. He was alive, and the "download" was beginning to settle.
He leaned back, eyes closed, and let his Librarian's mind organize the fragments he'd stolen.
Lucas Ternos. Farmer. Telan. But the memories weren't just personal; they contained the "why" of this butchery. This wasn't a mere border dispute. It was a war for the Gate and the Tower. For generations, the Gate had been a stable resource. It was a tear in reality that spat out monsters once a year, providing the kingdoms with crystals needed to fuel their mages. They had shared it because they had to.
But then, the Tower appeared.
It hadn't been there a year ago. It was an obsidian spike that had torn through the earth only months prior, arriving with a localized earthquake. It sat right beside the Gate, a silent, mocking monolith. Rumors claimed it held a genie at its peak; others said it was the source of the "Smith" powers. Whatever it was, its sudden appearance had turned a tense peace into a frantic land grab. And for that mystery, the Diamond Platoon was being irrigated into the Rosenheim soil. They were an anomaly—the only unit composed entirely of farmers, men pulled from the dirt to fill a gap in the line. Now, that gap was a red smear on the grass.
Night eventually bled into the sky. Alab sat in a dark corner of the camp.
"Hey, from what platoon are you?"
A large man in heavy metal armor—Lieutenant Marshal—approached.
"From the Diamond... sir," Alab replied, his voice raspy.
"So, it was you..." one of the soldiers behind Marshal muttered. "The lone survivor of the farmers."
Marshal stepped into the light. "I like a man who knows how to hold a line when his betters are running. Beat Sonny here in arm wrestling, and I'll let you join the Lion Platoon. Better to be a Lion than a dead farmer."
Alab looked at Sonny, then at his own hands. The headache was a dull hum now.
"I'm in," he said.
The match was a revelation. Alab's arm was slammed to the table almost instantly. The strength in this world wasn't just muscle; it was something denser, a physical weight that defied the laws of biology he knew.
"It seems your luck ran out, boy," Marshal laughed, raising a waterskin. "But you've got grit. Tomorrow, we finish this."
As Alab drank the sour wine, his gaze drifted toward the dark horizon. He thought of the Matriarch tree and the blind mother. He wasn't Alab Juno, and he wasn't quite Lucas Terno. He was a Librarian who had just finished his first chapter, written in the blood of a man who was still waiting to go home before the first snow.
He finally slumped against a supply crate, his body screaming for rest. Have the Information Points increased? I thought there would be contact from Mozza? The exhaustion finally won. He drifted into a sleep that felt like falling down a well.