"Haak—cough, cough!"
Isaac lurched awake as if he had been yanked out of deep water: air scraping into his lungs in ugly bursts while his vision refused to settle, the ceiling above him wavering at the edges as though the world itself couldn't decide what shape it wanted to hold.
His chest rose and fell too fast, too uneven, and the second he tried to drag in a proper breath, his throat burned, as if he had been choking on something moments ago and his body hadn't caught up to the fact that it was over.
'What the fuck is going on?'
His face was wet.
When he wiped it with the back of his hand, he came away with damp fingers.
Blinking hard as tears kept gathering anyway, the confusion only sharpened because he didn't remember crying, didn't remember feeling anything strongly enough to cry, not in the last few months, not without having to force it back down first.
His entire body ached in that deep, bruised way that made him feel as if he had been hit by a truck and then left on the road long enough for the pain to soak in properly, and as he tried to orient himself, the room around him insisted on being unfamiliar.
Sterile white walls, a faint smell of herbs tangled with something antiseptic, long curtains drawn over a window that still let a soft golden light leak around the edges, warm enough to look almost kind, and nothing about it matched his room back home.
He was lying on a bed that looked like a hospital bed, or something close to one, the sheets crisp and tucked tight beneath his legs, the kind of neatness that didn't belong to a place people actually lived.
He lifted his left arm without thinking, and a sharp tug of pain made him hiss.
There were bandages wrapped from shoulder to wrist, firm enough that the skin beneath felt trapped, and when he stared at them, the question landed in his head with a heavy, nauseating weight.
'Where am I?'
He pushed himself upright slowly, moving like his skull might crack if he shifted too quickly, and the effort made the room tilt.
His stomach rolled, his head throbbing in a way that didn't feel like a hangover, not exactly, more like something had been pressing on his brain from the inside.
He needed an anchor, knowledge of how he got here, something that made sense, so he reached for his memory, carefully at first.
Last night, he had been drunk, that much was easy, because the stale taste still clung to the back of his throat and his body held the sluggish heaviness of it.
He remembered stumbling home, keys scraping against the lock, his shoes catching on the edge of the mat because his coordination had been gone long before he reached the door, and he remembered the glow of his monitor cutting through the dark of his room, cold and familiar.
He remembered seeing the End-of-Service notice.
A date.
A time.
A clean sentence that had felt like the last thread snapping.
Then… nothing.
Not a blur, not a vague image, not even the sense of what he had done next, only a flat blankness, as if someone had taken everything after that moment and cleanly carved it out of his head.
He frowned, trying to press closer to the edge of it, and the instant he did…
"Ack!"
Pain speared through his skull with brutal immediacy, like a spike driven in behind his eyes.
Isaac clutched his head, nails digging into his scalp as tears sprang up again, sharper this time, dragged out of him by force rather than emotion.
He sucked in a breath and nearly choked on it, his whole body tensing as if bracing for a second hit.
It wasn't normal, and it wasn't subtle.
It was his brain rejecting the attempt outright, slamming the door so hard it rattled his thoughts.
He leaned back against the pillow, breathing hard, blinking through the sting in his eyes.
"Okay," he rasped, voice hoarse. "Calm down. Just… don't push it."
The words steadied him a fraction, and he forced his gaze away from that blank stretch of memory, focusing on what was tangible instead, on what he could see and touch without his skull trying to split open.
Something brushed the side of his neck.
A light tickle, almost like a feather.
He reached up, fingers catching strands of hair, and for a second he didn't think much of it because his hair had always been a bit long, but then he saw the colour against his skin and his stomach dropped so sharply it made him nauseous.
White.
Not pale, not light blond, not something the lighting could explain, but pure snow-white, the kind that looked unnatural on anyone who wasn't deliberately dyeing it.
He stared at the strand between his fingers, his breathing slowing into something tight and careful.
'Did I go insane?'
He had heard of hair turning white from shock, stress, or trauma, but this wasn't a patch, and it wasn't gradual; it was simply there, as if it had always belonged to him.
He didn't have time to spiral properly before a sound broke the silence.
Swish.
The curtains around his bed were pulled aside, and a woman stepped into view wearing a nun's outfit.
For half a second, his brain tried to label it as cosplay, because anything was better than accepting that a real nun was standing before him, but the way she carried herself didn't feel forced.
Her posture was straight, and her expression calm in a professional way rather than a warm one.
Her gaze held an old-fashioned gentleness that made Isaac feel as if he had been dropped into the wrong century.
On her arm was an armband marked with a white-and-gold symbol, and the moment Isaac saw it, a shiver of recognition crawled up his spine.
He knew that emblem.
He didn't know how, yet he did, and when he tried to place it, the warning throb returned in his skull, sharp enough to make him flinch.
"Ack—fuck…"
The woman's eyes widened slightly.
"Soren Arden? Are you alright?"
Isaac froze.
'What?'
"Soren Arden?" she repeated, looking directly at him, as if the name was obvious.
He lifted his hand and pointed weakly at himself, the gesture feeling absurd even as it left him.
"…Me?"
"Hmm."
She tilted her head, studying him with the mild concern of someone checking symptoms rather than believing words.
"Perhaps you need a little more rest."
"I'm fine," Isaac said quickly, maybe a little too quickly, because saying that she had his name wrong felt like too much of a hassle right now. "Really. I'm fine."
Her smile softened, and for a moment she looked relieved.
"That's good to hear. I came to inform you that your body has recovered enough for discharge, so please take it easy with your left arm for a while. You may return to your dorm whenever you're ready."
Hospital.
Nun.
Soren Arden.
Dorm.
The words landed one after the other, and Isaac's mind tried to build something coherent out of them, failed, then tried again, as if repetition might make reality more reasonable.
The woman bowed politely and turned to leave, letting the curtain fall back into place behind her.
Silence returned like a weight.
Isaac stared at the ceiling, heart beating too fast, his mouth dry.
"…What the hell is going on?"
He pressed his palm to his forehead, careful this time, as if the angle of his hand might decide whether he triggered that pain again, and then he forced himself to think sideways around the problem instead of straight through it.
That armband symbol.
He had seen it before, he was sure of it, and when he let his mind brush it gently, without grabbing, a spark of recognition finally caught.
'No way.'
"Isn't that the crest of Stellaris Academy…?" he whispered, the words sounding ridiculous even as they made his blood run cold.
Stellaris Academy belonged somewhere specific, and it wasn't in his world.
"That's… impossible, right?"
He laughed under his breath, shaky and brief, because saying it aloud felt like the only defence he had, the only way to insist the universe had to be joking.
But the room didn't change, and the smell of herbs and disinfectant didn't fade into anything familiar, and there was no comforting sense of waking up from a nightmare.
No one answered him.
••✦ ♡ ✦•••
Leaving the room should not have been easy, yet it was, the corridor outside open and quiet as if the world had already decided he belonged here, and that was somehow worse than being stopped.
Isaac moved through the halls in a daze, shoulders tight, gaze kept low out of habit, because even in a place that looked nothing like his old life his body still remembered how to make itself small.
The academy corridors were wide and clean, lit by tall windows that poured in soft daylight, and the architecture was old and grand in a way modern buildings never managed: arches and polished stone and carved details that looked like they were meant to last centuries.
People passed him in uniforms that made his brain itch with familiarity, chatting as they walked, laughing, living in the sort of casual ease that said they weren't questioning whether the floor beneath their feet was real.
Isaac didn't speak to anyone.
He didn't ask where he was supposed to go, because asking meant admitting he didn't know, and the last thing he could afford was drawing attention when he still couldn't even explain himself to his own thoughts.
He followed signage that made too much sense, arrows pointing toward dormitories and departments, and with every turn, his stomach tightened because the layout matched something he had memorised without meaning to, not with a map in his hand, but with years of moving through these same spaces in a game.
Every few minutes, his mind circled back to that missing stretch of memory, the blank after the End-of-Service notice, and each time it did, he felt the faint threat of pain behind his eyes, warning him not to touch it.
It wasn't just "I don't remember," it was "I can't," and the distinction made his skin crawl.
Eventually, he found a door with a nameplate, and his throat tightened when he read it.
Soren Arden.
His fingers hovered over the handle for a moment, because opening it felt like crossing another line, like committing to something his brain still refused to understand, but there was nowhere else to go.
Click.
The door shut behind him, and the sound landed like a lock turning.
For a breath, he simply stood there, listening to his own heartbeat, taking in the shape of the room, letting the quiet settle, and in that quiet something in him loosened, not because he was suddenly happy, but because there were no eyes on him, no voices waiting, no familiar footsteps outside the door.
It was private.
Safe.
And that small, simple fact hit him harder than the crest or the hospital bed ever had, because it came with a thought his mind hadn't allowed itself in a long time.
'They can't reach me here.'
A laugh escaped him before he could stop it, thin at first, then sharper, his shoulders shaking as something like relief clawed its way up through the numbness he had been dragging around for years.
"Heh… ehehe…"
He pressed a hand over his mouth, and the laugh turned into something half-hysterical, half-disbelieving.
"I actually… transmigrated."
————「❤︎」————