The end was a quiet relief.
Bartholomew's final decade, spent staring at the peeling wallpaper of his small room, had been a long, slow drift. The twenty years of screaming madness in the asylum had been traded for eleven years of silence, a lonely peace bought at the cost of his mind's health. He was eighty, worn down by the ghosts of the Great Blood War (1914-1945), a conflict that had consumed thirty-one years of his first life. He died as he lived in those final moments: alone, in his bed, the setting sun painting the dust motes orange as he simply ceased to be.
The quiet didn't last.
A sound like a cannon shot—no, not a cannon, a Sergeant's roar—obliterated the silence.
"Get your sorry arses out of that cot, Private! You have ten seconds, or you'll be scrubbing latrines with a toothbrush until you taste copper!"
Bartholomew's eyes snapped open. The familiar ache of old age was gone, replaced by a dull, throbbing exhaustion, not of decades, but of an all-night march. The sight was even more jarring. He wasn't in his quiet room; he was in a barracks—a cramped, stinking room filled with two dozen other young men, their faces slick with sweat and fear.
His hand shot to his chest, searching instinctively for the comforting weight of his medical charm. He found nothing but taut, youthful muscle beneath a scratchy, ill-fitting military undershirt.
What… what year is this?
He scrambled out of the narrow cot. The floor was rough wood, slick with spilled water and mud. His legs, once stiff and unreliable, moved with effortless, aggressive energy. He caught a glimpse of himself in a cracked mirror near the door: a face barely eighteen, clean-shaven, and utterly unfamiliar. But in his eyes was the chilling certainty of eighty years of memory.
The Sergeant, a man with a booming voice and a Gem-harness strapped tight over his chest, slammed a metal cup on a nearby table. "Private Bartholomew! Five seconds!"
Bartholomew. That was his name. He was eighteen, and the year was 1914. The Great Blood War had just begun.
The reality hit him with the physical force of a shell blast: the war he had survived for three decades, the war that had cost him his sanity, the war that was supposed to end in 1945, was happening again. And he, the shell-shocked front-line weakling, was back at the very beginning—in Boot Camp.
"Private Bartholomew!"
"Sir!" Bartholomew roared, his voice cracking from disuse, though his vocal cords hadn't been eighteen years old in seventy years.
He quickly dressed, pulling on the heavy wool uniform and the standard-issue Gem-harness that housed his pathetic, low-grade F-Rank Aether Gem. He saw the numbers on the Gem with a practiced, weary eye: MP: 50/50. He was just a basic mage, weak and utterly disposable cannon fodder, again.
⚙️ The War Logistik System
As he buckled his belt, the chaos of his mind stabilized. The vast, fragmented knowledge of his eight decades—the war's turning points, the secret agendas, the technical specs of weaponry yet to be invented—compressed itself. It wasn't a sudden flood of calm, but a single, clean interface projected onto the inside of his eyelids.
A cold, mechanical voice echoed only in his mind:
[WELCOME. HOST: BARTHOLOMEW]
[SYSTEM: WAR LOGISTIK SYSTEM (WLS) ACTIVATED.]
[INITIAL RANK: F (Barely a Mage)]
[CURRENT GOAL: AVOID FRONT LINES. (Failure will result in 31 years of re-traumatization.)]
[WARNING: MEMORY ACCESS RESTRICTED. KNOWLEDGE ONLY ACCESSIBLE VIA HIGH-STRESS PTSD TRIGGERS.]
He had a System. It was cruel, fueled by the very trauma he desperately wanted to avoid, but it was his only chance.
Avoid the front lines. Get to a desk. Any desk.
But his new reality quickly blocked that path. He wasn't a logician yet; he was a recruit.
"Today, boys," the Sergeant barked, "you learn to tune your Deflection Gems." He held up a tuning fork—the exact, silver-plated model Bartholomew remembered from 1914. "You'll tune it to frequency 14.88—the standard military defense band. This protects you from basic Aetheric shrapnel. Get it wrong, and you might lose an arm, or worse, shatter your Gem!"
As the instructor began demonstrating the calibration, the high, metallic whine of the tuning fork reached a critical pitch.
Bartholomew's vision instantly dissolved.
The barracks vanished. He was back in the mud of the Flanders Trench, 1928. The smell of gunpowder was replaced by the cloying scent of blood and ozone. He saw Private Peterson next to him, laughing, only to be instantly vaporized when his newly tuned Gem detonated, scattering his limbs and shrapnel into the mud.
The resonant feedback loop. 14.88 on these cheap field-issue Gems causes a catastrophic overload in high-stress Aetheric fields! They never fixed that flaw!
His entire body locked up, eyes wide with the terror of a forgotten death. This was a PTSD Trigger.
The recruit next to him, Private Davies, began tuning his Gem to the deadly frequency, blissfully unaware.
Bartholomew had to choose: freeze and be sent to the asylum, or act and risk court-martial.
Driven by the pure, life-saving instinct honed over thirty-one years of endless war, Bartholomew lunged forward, his 18-year-old body moving with the panicked efficiency of an 80-year-old veteran. He didn't speak; he just shoved the tuning fork out of Davies' hands, sending it clattering away from the dangerous mark. Then, with a desperate, shaky hand, he grabbed his own Gem and, relying on the perfect, instantaneous mathematical memory provided by the trauma, tuned it not to 14.88, but to a forgotten, non-standard emergency bypass frequency known only to the war's most desperate survivors.
The Gem flared a moment, but held steady—impossibly so.
The Sergeant's face, now contorted in rage, was inches from Bartholomew's. "What in the bloody hell was that, Private?! Insubordination!"
But even as the Sergeant raised his hand, a small, cold voice registered in the back of Bartholomew's mind, a voice that promised survival and power.
[Trauma Response Successful: Critical Failure Averted. +50 EXP Gained.]
He was going to be punished severely, but he had survived the first trap. And now, someone, somewhere, would have seen that an F-Rank recruit possessed the instinct of a master mage. His escape from the front lines had just begun.