Garret Thompson died the way he lived: face-first in a puddle of his own bad decisions.
He was standing on a rickety kitchen chair in his shitty one-bedroom apartment, trying to pry the cap off a fresh bottle of bottom-shelf whiskey with his teeth. The chair wobbled. Garret, weighing somewhere north of two-sixty and swaying like a ship in a storm, decided the solution was to lean harder.
Physics had other ideas.
The chair bucked. Garret flailed. The bottle slipped, shattered against the edge of the counter, and the jagged neck of the glass drove straight into the soft underside of his jaw like it had a personal grudge. Blood sprayed. He hit the linoleum hard, still clutching the broken bottle like a trophy.
For one glorious, stupid second he actually laughed — a wet, gurgling sound that sprayed red across the cheap tiles.
"Well… shit," he wheezed, staring at the ceiling. "At least I died doing what I loved."
The world went dark mid-chuckle.
When the dark spat him back out, Garret was lying on his back in dirt.
Real dirt. The kind that smelled like turned soil, manure, and something green and alive. Two suns hung in a painfully blue sky — one bright gold, the other smaller and faintly orange. A lazy breeze carried the distant cluck of chickens and the creak of wood.
Garret blinked slowly.
"…The fuck?"
He sat up. His head didn't spin the way it should have after a three-day bender. His body felt… lighter. Not skinny, not athletic, but nowhere near the bloated sack of regrets he'd been carrying for years. He looked down.
Rough linen tunic. Mud-stained trousers. Calloused hands that were bigger than he remembered, but not fat. Just solid. Farmer's hands.
He touched his face.
Scar. Thick, jagged, running from the corner of his mouth up across his jaw like someone had tried to unzip his head. Nose crooked in two places. Stubble that felt like sandpaper. His hair was dark, greasy, and sticking out in every direction.
He looked like the kind of man who started bar fights for fun and finished them by accident.
Garret groaned. "Great. I died a fat loser and woke up as a slightly less fat loser with a face that lost a fight with a cheese grater."
He pushed himself to his feet. The movement came easier than expected. The body knew how to move — there was muscle memory in the legs, a faint ache in the lower back from days spent hunched over tools. His brain, however, still expected the old drunken sway. He stumbled once, caught himself, and muttered a string of creative curses.
The farm wasn't much. A weathered wooden house with a sagging roof, a small barn that had seen better decades, and a few scraggly fields where half the crops were winning the war against the weeds. A rain barrel stood near the porch. Garret shuffled over, cupped his hands, and splashed cold water on his face.
The reflection that stared back was ugly in a lived-in way. Not hideous — just the kind of face that made people cross the street at night.
"Garret Mole," he said aloud, testing the name. It felt right in his mouth, like it had always belonged there. A faded ledger he'd spotted through the open doorway earlier had the same name scrawled across the top in clumsy handwriting.
He wandered inside the house. One room, basically. A lumpy straw mattress on a wooden frame, a table with two chairs, a cold hearth, and — thank every god that might exist — a small clay jug tucked in the corner.
He uncorked it and took a cautious sniff.
Weak ale. Homemade, probably watered down, with a sour aftertaste that spoke of cheap grain and zero quality control.
Garret drank anyway. It was wet. It was alcoholic. It would do.
He took a longer pull, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and sighed in something almost like contentment.
"Okay… new world. Fantasy setting. Two suns. Scarred-up farmer body. This is some isekai bullshit if I've ever seen it." He chuckled darkly. "And the hero's probably out there somewhere doing push-ups and collecting tragic anime girls while I'm over here trying to figure out how to grow potatoes."
He sat heavily on the porch step, jug dangling from his fingers. The distant treeline of the Ashfeld Borderlands looked dark and unfriendly. Something howled far off — not a wolf, not quite. Garret took another drink.
"Not my problem," he told the horizon. "I died once already. I'm not signing up for round two just because some kid with a glowing sword needs backup. Nope. I'm gonna fix this farm just enough to keep the ale flowing, sleep when I want, and stay the hell away from anything that smells like destiny."
A cheerful voice shattered his peaceful denial.
"Mister Garret!"
He turned his head slowly.
A scrawny girl of maybe sixteen was jogging up the dirt path that led to his farm. Dark hair flying loose, face smudged with dirt, and a wooden practice sword bouncing at her hip. Her eyes were bright with the kind of unearned optimism that only teenagers could muster.
"You promised yesterday you'd show me that fancy footwork today!" she called, skidding to a stop in front of the porch. "The one where you trip the goblin and then stomp on its neck! I brought my sword!"
Garret stared at her for a long moment, then looked down at the jug in his hand.
He took a slow, deliberate drink.
"Kid," he said, voice rough and tired, "I don't even know what day it is. Go bother someone who still has working brain cells."
"But you said—"
"I say a lot of things when I'm drunk. Most of them are lies."
The girl — Pip, his new memories supplied unhelpfully — planted her hands on her hips and gave him the exact look his mother used to give him when he came home at 3 a.m. "You're not drunk right now. You're just being lazy."
"Same difference."
Pip puffed out her cheeks. "Fine. But I'm coming back tomorrow! And the day after! You're the only one around here who actually survived more than three monster fights without dying, so you have to teach me!"
Garret watched her march off, wooden sword swinging like she was already imagining heroic deeds.
He leaned back against the porch post, closed his eyes, and muttered to the empty air:
"Welcome to the new world, Garret. Try not to die again before lunch."
Somewhere in the distance, another unnatural howl echoed across the borderlands.
Garret Mole raised the jug in a lazy toast.
"Not my circus," he said. "Not my monkeys."
Then he took another long drink and waited for the ale to make the apocalypse feel farther away.
End of Chapter 1