The rain started like a whisper.
By the time Toren climbed out of the wreck and pushed past the tangled vines, it had risen to a steady patter, tapping on leaves and metal and skin like a ticking countdown. Clouds, thick and gray, rolled over the canopy—fast, unnatural. The sky was bruising.
He didn't run at first. He walked. Staggered, almost.
The console's glow still lingered behind his eyes. The words—"Kingdom Protocol", "Reclaimer", "Population: 17"—looped in his head with the same impossible weight as the names from his dream.
New York. Coffee. Netflix. Kora.
It all spiraled now into one undeniable truth:
He hadn't imagined his past life.
He'd remembered it.
And that meant this wasn't just another world. It was a specific one. A universe that felt wrong in all the right ways. Too symmetrical. Too systemic. Too Star Wars.
That smuggler's symbol on Jakel's old scrap cloth, the ship wreckage with its strange hull, the mysterious holocron that never opened—he'd ignored all of it for years. Treated it like myth. Village nonsense. But now?
Now he had a system whispering quests in his ear like he was in a sci-fi strategy sim.
And it knew his name.
Lightning cracked above the trees, and the sudden boom of thunder jolted him out of thought. He broke into a sprint.
Branches slapped at his arms. Wet leaves brushed his cheeks. He ducked under a low limb, skidded down a slope, hopped over a narrow rivulet that now ran high from the rain.
The village's perimeter lights were flickering by the time he reached the outer huts. The first fires had been covered in clay-pots, but smoke still rose in uncertain spirals. Most of the villagers were indoors—waiting for the storm to pass, probably arguing over whether to plug the last power cell into the heater or the nightlight for the kids.
Toren paused just outside his own hut, soaked, heart rattling in his chest like a broken compass.
He looked back once.
Toward the jungle. Toward the crash site. Toward everything he now knew.
And then, for the first time since waking, he smiled—not wide, but slow and certain.
He was no longer just a survivor.
He had a mission.