The convoy was gone.
Three Humvees lay wrecked on the roadside, their frames torn open by explosives and gunfire. One was flipped onto its side, flames licking at the engine block. Smoke drifted upward in a steady column.
The ground was littered with brass casings, splintered armor glass, and burned gear.
No survivors were moving.
Bodies lay scattered around the vehicles—soldiers in tattered uniforms, limbs at awkward angles, blood drying in the dust. Some had fallen mid-sprint; others lay behind cover that hadn't mattered.
No radio chatter. No screaming. Just the crackle of fire and the pop of heated metal.
Specialist Elias Calderon was among them.
He was on his back near the rear Humvee, his vest blown open, three rounds having pierced his chest. Blood pooled beneath him, already turning dark.
His eyes were half-open.
No rise in his chest.
No pulse, and no one bothered to check twice.
A short distance away, the attackers were finishing up.
A man in an expensive suit was being pushed toward a truck by armed men. Raza walked beside him, calm and focused, issuing orders in Pashto. The Ten Rings moved with the confidence of a group that knew reinforcements weren't coming.
As Raza climbed into the truck, something slipped from his neck: a black stone on a broken cord. It hit the dirt and remained there.
He didn't look back.
The truck rolled out, carrying the man and the remaining fighters down the valley until the dust enveloped them completely.
The road fell still again.
Wind pushed smoke across the asphalt. A shell casing tapped against the ground. Nothing else moved.
Then the black stone twitched.
It wasn't the wind. It lifted slowly, as if something were pulling it upward from inside. Thin red lines glowed across its surface, pulsing in sharp, rapid beats. The glow spread, brighter and hotter, until the shard rose fully off the ground.
It turned in the air.
Then it shot forward.
It struck Eli's chest dead center. The impact didn't bounce—it sank, forcing its way through skin and bone with a crack and a wet grind. His back arched. His fingers curled tight. For a second, everything held still.
His heart fired.
Once, hard enough to jolt his entire body.
Again.
Air was forced into his lungs. He choked, coughed, and dragged in another breath like someone coming up from underwater. His eyes snapped open, wide and unfocused, staring straight up at the gray haze above him.
Specialist Elias Calderon, dead by circumstance and common sense, was breathing again.
He was alive.
(1st POV)
I woke up as if someone had slammed a defibrillator into my chest.
Air rushed in, followed by sharp, deep pain.
I tried to move, but nothing responded. My body felt like a forgotten sandbag, heavy and lifeless.
My face was half-buried in hot, gritty dirt. The taste of metal and dust coated my tongue. Each breath scraped like broken glass—shallow and futile. The sunlight beat down mercilessly, making my skin burn.
I forced my eyes open.
Sand. Rock. The wreckage of a Humvee lying on its side, still ablaze.
Smoke drifted into a washed-out sky. Bodies lay on the ground—uniforms, gear, blood. No movement. No sound except the crackling fire and a ticking noise from an engine.
My brain struggled to make sense of it all and failed.
I had gone to bed.
In my room. With my phone. My life. 2025.
Not this.
Not here. Not a convoy. Not a battlefield.
Panic clawed at my throat. My chest heaved, my lungs refusing to fill. I attempted to roll onto my side, but a bolt of agony shot through my ribs. I froze, gasping.
Think.
Focus.
Fragments hit me: training yards, barracks, a sergeant's voice calling cadence, faces I didn't know but somehow remembered. The feel of an aid bag on my shoulder. Snow in upstate New York. Deployment orders. Sand and gunfire.
Two lives folding into each other like mismatched pages.
And then it clicked. Not slowly. Not gently. Just a brutal, obvious truth slamming into place.
This was that scene.
The ambush. Tony Stark. Ten Rings. The start of Iron Man.
Marvel.
And I was the poor bastard escorting him—the one who doesn't make it home.
My pulse hammered. I wasn't supposed to survive this. Nobody did. Stark gets taken. Everyone else gets zipped into bags. That was the script; that was the movie.
I was lying in the middle of a kill zone in a universe where people like Thanos existed, where gods dropped out of the sky, where regular humans got wiped out as collateral.
And I was bleeding out.
My training—Eli's training—finally cut through the panic. Three gunshot wounds to the chest. Massive blood loss. Possible internal bleeding. Shock. Breathing shallow and uneven. No medical support. No evac. No chance.
I should've been dead already.
That's when I felt it.
Not like a heartbeat—more like a pressure inside my sternum. Wrong. Foreign. A weight that wasn't part of me but sat dead center in my chest, pulsing in slow, steady beats.
I couldn't see it, but I could feel it. Like something was lodged deep, fused into bone and muscle. Alive in a way that didn't make sense.
And then—without warning—information flickered across my mind. Not words. Not images. More like pages turning somewhere behind my thoughts. Diagrams. Runes. Flesh splitting, reshaping. Techniques. Procedures. A system of altering living bodies cell by cell.
Sith alchemy.
A codex. A full one. Ancient, ugly, and hungry.
It didn't talk or whisper; it simply existed, heavy and present—like an open book waiting for a reader willing to bleed for every line.
My chest tightened, not from emotion but physically, as if the thing were welded to my heart.
I forced a shaky breath.
focus
I was shot, alone in hostile territory with no help coming. In a universe designed to kill ordinary people.
And whatever was inside me…
…was the only reason I wasn't a corpse already.
I focused all my waning effort on the codex.
The pressure in my chest shifted, like a door cracking open somewhere I couldn't see.
I didn't "read" the thing so much as fall into it.
A first page, a first instruction. Primitive. Brutal. It wasn't healing, but more binding. Sith alchemy wasn't about restoration; it was about control. Using flesh as material, pain as leverage, and survival through force.
The idea was simple: coagulate, constrict, seal. Stop the bleeding. Everything else could wait.
I concentrated on the wounds in my chest. I could feel them—not metaphorically. I sensed the torn vessels, shredded tissue, and holes punched straight through muscle and lungs. The bullets still lodged inside added to the pain.
My breathing hitched. Every inhale came with a wet whistle.
I reached for that page, that technique, whatever it was, and pulled.
It felt like hooking a live wire into my nervous system.
Heat tore through my sternum. My muscles locked. Something under my ribs twisted, as if invisible hands were wrenching tissue together. I screamed silently, my jaw clenched so tightly that my teeth ached.
The bleeding slowed.
Not stopped, but forced shut. Vessels pinched. Flesh dragged into place like someone stitching with barbed wire and no anesthetic.
I could feel the bullets still lodged inside, cold and wrong, but the leak around them began to choke off.
My lungs seized.
Pressure surged into my throat. I rolled onto my side—barely—and coughed. Hard. Wet. A stream of dark, half-clotted blood spilled from my mouth onto the dirt. My entire body shook with the effort, each cough sending pain radiating through my chest.
When it finally stopped, I was left gasping, my cheek pressed against the hot sand.
For a moment, I sensed something beyond myself.
A presence. Heavy. Cold. Watching. Silent. Just…observing. Like an ancient predator assessing whether the creature before it deserved to live or be reduced to meat.
Then it withdrew. Not gone—just waiting.
I lay there, trembling, struggling to draw in thin air through my barely functioning lungs. The wounds inside me felt sealed but wrong—tight, unnatural. It was as though the tissue had been forced together instead of healed. Every breath burned.
And I felt lighter.
Not metaphorically—physically. As if something had stripped weight straight from my body. A few pounds lost in seconds. Cells cannibalized. Energy siphoned from me to piece me back together. Crude. Expensive. Unsustainable.
This wasn't the Force. I couldn't feel the Force like a Jedi—no sensing of life, no lifting of rocks, no destiny. Just raw, biological manipulation, limited to my own flesh. A patch job that came with a price.
Fear took hold.
I was alive—barely. Still stranded in the middle of nowhere, still trapped in the Marvel universe, still a nobody surrounded by corpses. I had no plan, no weapons, and something alien lodged in my heart.
I forced my arms beneath me, shaking like wet paper.
Move.
I inched forward, dragging my elbows while my legs remained useless. Each movement sent sparks of pain shooting through my ribs. Sand scraped against my palms, and my vision blurred at the edges.
The overturned Humvee was close—maybe ten feet away. The shadow beneath it seemed like the only tolerable place in the world. I crawled toward it, taking one breath at a time, teeth clenched, my chest tight and uneven.
By the time I reached the shade under the wreck, my arms gave out. I slumped against the metal, panting, sweat and blood drying on my skin.
I wasn't dying anymore.
But I was still very, very screwed.