Lukas was slowly dragging himself home. It was already late, and he was tired. He walked with shoulders hanging lower than normal. It had been like that since he explosively grew in height in middle school, and his core simply didn't have the strength to support his height now. Dark circles under his eyes had become a staple image scarring his face. It didn't help that he was all in black. He loved black. He especially liked the long winter coat he had and his umbrella. It looked cool. He had always wanted such a long coat, and he finally got it. It was only when he threw away his hatred for one of his exes and visited the clothing store she used to drag him into that he found it. And it was a great decision.
As he walked, he was careful as to how he stepped, where he did so, and how much weight he put on his right leg. A year-long cancer treatment had made him bored and weak. He had every reason to be weak—he was lucky he was alive—but he hated that feeling, so he joined a fencing club. Only, going into such a heavy sport perhaps wasn't the best decision when he took into consideration the state of his muscles. Or rather, the fact that they simply did not exist.
He made it, surprisingly, half a year. He was always more tired than others, but he had the basics of swordfighting in his fingers now. He knew how to stand, how to hold a sword, and how to swing it. He knew a couple of good stances and a couple of good offensive and defensive skills. He was overall okay with a sword. But then, one day, his muscles didn't withstand a thrust he made. His right knee turned inward at an unnatural angle, snapped back, and Lukas was left in pain. That was three months ago. He could walk now; he could run a little; he could do a lot of things, but he didn't have the correct stability in his right leg. That would need an operation—one that he now couldn't afford. Not because he lived in countries he considered less developed—he lived in Europe and as such had free medical insurance—but because, so early after leukemia, he simply couldn't allow it. So now he was stuck there with a fucked-up knee and bad blood.
When he finally got home, it was nine. He didn't have the mood for dinner—a habit he picked up when he looked at hospital food after chemo—and went straight to sleep. His rest was welcomed but not a calm one. When he opened his eyes for the third time in the night and saw a white light, he simply assumed it was his brother. He picked that up after him, but now that Lukas actually wanted to sleep and not use the night to watch YouTube and other stuff rather left unsaid, he found it highly annoying. But adaptation was his strong side and he quickly grew accustomed to it, which is why he simply closed his eyes and went back to sleep.
It wasn't until he woke the fourth time that he finally registered that the thing he was resting his head on probably wasn't his fluffy pillow, and the hard ground he was laying on wasn't a bed. His brain processed information in slow motion so early after being woken up, and so he simply rolled to the side. As he did so, his back landed on something that was a meter in length and hard.
His thoughts ran quicker this time, so he finally paused. He recognized it by that shape. It was an umbrella. He opened his eyes to take a look at the umbrella, but he stopped before his eyes could make that journey. His eyes stopped immediately after they were opened, in fact. They were blinded by a bright white sky above him. It took him a good minute for his eyes to acclimatize to the brightness they were so unexpectedly met with. When he opened them again, he found himself in a place he didn't recognize.
He was in the ruins of some ancient building made almost entirely from black, otherworldly stone—maybe marble. The stones were covered by red moss. Those two looked like enemies, as if the black marble desperately tried to escape that red moss while it tried to strangle the black ancient stone to death. Above him, through a roof that was long destroyed, he saw a bright white sky. There were no clouds or fog, and he didn't see a sun or any other star that would emit that white light. It looked as if the light existed here independently from any source.
The light itself looked dead, as if someone took healthy, earthly light and sucked all life from it. When he looked at that light, he had the sensation that he was the only thing alive here, and that was only because he didn't belong. It was as if, if he were here for a longer time, the light would suck his life too, and his lifeless body would fall to the ground to be consummated by the vile red moss. He continued his search and found that the hard object he rolled over was truly his umbrella. He recognized the dents in the handle and the few broken strings. It was his umbrella—the one gifted to him by the mother of the woman he then considered to be almost his sister. The next discovery was that the thing he was laying on was his beloved coat. He couldn't decide which of the three discoveries was the most or the least surprising.
"Are people normally isekaied with their personal belongings? And shouldn't there be a god who is supposed to tell me now that he chose the most normal, unathletic guy to save the world and give me some OP powers? I always wanted to be a mage or a necromancer. Where the fuck are you, God? Hold up—I need to die before getting isekaied. Did I die in my sleep? That's like a top-five most normal death."
Then he simply stopped. Wasn't the most reasonable explanation a dream? He could be sleeping. It felt incredibly real, but he was aware that the five senses he was given weren't always the most reliable source of information. He slowly got up and pinched himself in the face. When that did nothing, he chose to give himself a nice slap. However, that hurt, so he stopped.
If this was a dream, it was vividly realistic.