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Chapter 2: This Body Isn't Mine
When I woke up…
This wasn't Earth.
It looked like it—
Blue sky. Metallic roads. Neon signs floating midair.
But everything was… off.
The air smelled sterile.
The buildings shimmered like low-resolution models.
And the sun?
It wasn't shining.
It was burning.
Like a white hole suspended in the sky, radiating not heat—but power.
I took a shaky breath.
"Where… am I?"
A robot zipped up to me on tiny wheels, its voice cheerful like a bad commercial.
> "Congratulations! Your cancer has been successfully eliminated."
"…What?"
> "Please enjoy your second chance at life. You are free to go home!"
But I had no home.
No memory.
And this… wasn't my body.
I looked at my hands.
Clean. Unscarred. A scar I remembered… gone.
My heart pounded.
This skin didn't belong to me.
I stepped into the light.
The burning sun hit my eyes like a punch, and behind the light, I saw it—
The world was cracked.
Patches of sky replaced with coding grids.
People walking beside cyborgs.
A mechanical dog barking at a vending machine that tried to bark back.
> "Yo! You're finally up!"
A man ran over.
Tall, smiling, casual like he saw me every day.
> "They said you'd be groggy, but hey—good as new, huh?"
I nodded instinctively.
"Y-Yeah…"
I didn't know why I said that.
Something about him… pulled at a memory I didn't have.
He clapped me on the back.
> "Let's grab food. You look like hell."
I followed.
The food was delicious—too delicious.
Like it was engineered to be perfect.
But what caught my eye were the people.
Some had metal arms. Others had eyes that blinked sideways.
Even children had glowing spines and floating bracelets.
This wasn't home.
This wasn't anything.
> "This world was destroyed once," my "brother" said, chewing calmly.
"The sun went supernova. But some genius turned it into a power source. Now it runs the whole city."
My mouth went dry.
"You mean… the sun fuels everything?"
> "Yeah, crazy right? But hey—he made it work. That guy could fix anything."
Just then—
A loud explosion shattered the sky.
> BOOM!
Alarms blared. Sirens screamed.
My brother stood up so fast the table flipped.
> "Damn it. They're breaching again. Come with me—NOW!"
I turned to look.
A tear in the sky opened—
—and from it, something massive crawled through.
It had wings. Scales.
Eyes that blinked in different dimensions.
A dragon.
But it didn't look like fantasy.
It looked like a glitch in the system, rendered with corrupted code and infinite hate.
My legs froze.
> "MOVE!" he shouted.
And I ran.
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