Victor woke up face-down in mud.
The first thing he noticed was pressure—heavy, invasive, wrong. Not pain. Pressure. As if something solid had been driven through him and left there.
His mind catalogued the sensation automatically.
Foreign object. Abdominal cavity. Severe trauma.
He tried to inhale and felt resistance. Leaves crunched beneath his cheek. The smell of damp earth filled his nose.
Slowly, carefully, Victor lifted his head.
A tree branch jutted out of his stomach.
It was thick, splintered at the end, darkened with old sap and something that should have been blood. It pierced him just below the ribs, angled upward like a grotesque spear.
Victor stared at it.
He waited for the pain to arrive.
It didn't.
That, more than the branch itself, finally triggered alarm.
"That's… not possible," he murmured.
His voice sounded wrong—higher, thinner—but he barely registered it. His entire focus narrowed to the impossibility embedded in his abdomen. The human body did not tolerate this kind of injury. He knew that with the certainty of a man who had studied structures, stresses, and failure points all his life.
There should have been shock. There should have been screaming. There should have been death.
Instead, there was… nothing.
No agony. No dizziness. Just a dull awareness that something did not belong where it was.
Victor's hands moved before his fear could catch up.
He gripped the branch.
The texture was rough under his fingers. Solid. Real.
He pulled.
The branch slid free with a wet sound.
Victor flinched, bracing for agony that never came.
The wound—open for less than a heartbeat—closed.
Muscle knit together like time reversing. Skin smoothed over itself, pale and unblemished, leaving behind nothing but torn fabric and a faint warmth that quickly faded.
Victor froze.
He pressed his palm against his stomach.
Warm. Solid. Intact.
No blood.
No scar.
No pain.
"…Okay," he whispered.
That single word carried more weight than any scream.
---
He forced himself to breathe slowly.
Panic was inefficient. Panic obscured variables.
He needed data.
Victor scratched his arm with his fingernail until a thin red line appeared. The sting was sharp, immediate. Real. Before the blood could well, the scratch vanished, skin returning to pristine smoothness.
Healing.
Rapid. Autonomous. Energy-intensive by any known biological standard.
Victor swallowed.
He looked down at himself properly for the first time.
His clothes were rough and ill-fitting, made of coarse fabric stitched crudely together. His arms were thin, underdeveloped, with the awkward length of adolescence. His hands were calloused—but not in the way his own had been. These were the hands of labor, not machines and tools.
He pushed himself upright.
The world tilted briefly before stabilizing.
Trees surrounded him—tall, old, unfamiliar. Sunlight filtered through dense leaves, painting the forest floor in fractured gold. Birds chirped somewhere overhead. Everything was too vivid, too sharp.
Too real.
Victor stared at his hands again.
"They're not mine," he said quietly.
Saying it out loud made it undeniable.
This wasn't his body.
---
The memory of death came unbidden.
Concrete screaming as it tore itself apart. The ground convulsing beneath his feet. Load-bearing columns failing in sequence, exactly as he'd calculated—just faster than expected.
Victor Constantine, engineer.
He remembered calculating an escape route in the half-second before the ceiling collapsed. He remembered thinking that the math should have worked.
Then rubble.
Pressure.
Darkness.
No tunnel of light. No revelation. Just—
This.
He laughed once, softly, without humor.
"So this is what happens when the equation is wrong."
---
The headache came suddenly.
It wasn't pain so much as intrusion—foreign thoughts pressing against his own, insistent and disordered. Victor staggered, gripping a tree trunk as images flooded his mind.
A different life.
A smaller body.
Cold mornings. Callused hands. Hunger.
Names without faces. Faces without names.
A boy.
Fourteen years old.
Victor.
No last name.
No parents.
An orphan raised by circumstance and necessity, drifting between odd jobs and scraps of shelter in a town that barely noticed his existence.
A peasant.
A commoner.
Disposable.
Victor exhaled slowly as the memories settled into place—not replacing his own, but layering themselves atop them, like a poorly merged dataset.
Same name.
Different life.
"Well," he muttered, "that's inconvenient."
---
Understanding followed acceptance.
This world was not Earth.
That fact became unavoidable as the boy's memories clarified.
This was a world where magic existed—not as myth or superstition, but as infrastructure. People wielded fire as easily as tools, summoned wind to carry them across distances no human should cross unaided. Lightning was channeled, water shaped, earth commanded.
Elemental manipulation.
Victor's mind immediately began sorting.
Fire. Water. Earth. Wind. Lightning. Ice.
Further classifications surfaced: Telepathy. Telekinesis. Flight. Enhanced speed.
Abilities that violated Newtonian physics with casual disregard.
Victor felt no awe.
Only irritation.
"This isn't sorcery," he whispered.
He knew sorcery. Had grown up drowning in it—forced to listen to elders chant prayers older than recorded history, to memorize symbols and rites that never explained why they worked, only that they did.
That ambiguity had driven him away.
Science was clean.
Magic—real magic—had always been messy.
But this?
This was something else.
This world's magic was blunt. Forceful. Obvious.
Applied phenomena without understanding.
He frowned.
---
Then he felt it.
Something inside him.
Warm. Persistent. Quietly humming beneath his awareness.
Healing magic.
The boy's only talent.
In this world, healers were valued—but rarely respected. Support. Utility. Not power.
Victor's lips twitched.
Healing violated entropy.
Healing reversed damage without equivalent visible cost.
That meant one of two things: Either the energy cost was hidden— —or the system itself was lying.
Both possibilities fascinated him.
He flexed his fingers slowly, feeling the subtle pulse beneath his skin.
Life-force manipulation.
Not elemental.
Not kinetic.
Fundamental.
---
He searched the boy's memories deliberately now, probing for critical information.
Geography.
Politics.
Power structures.
Wars.
Kings.
Nothing substantial surfaced.
Just fragments.
The town of Erantel. The Kingdom of Langley. A vague awareness of taxes, guards, guilds.
No maps.
No grand narratives.
He was alone in an unknown system with no documentation.
Victor straightened, brushing dirt from his clothes.
A slow smile crept onto his face—small, restrained, but unmistakably dangerous.
"I don't know your rules," he said softly to the empty forest.
He looked at his healed hands.
"But I know how to find them."
The forest remained silent.
Somewhere far away, something ancient shifted—just slightly.
And the boy who should have died took his first step forward.