Alex didn't hear the boom. He felt it. The vibration traveled from the soles of his boots pressed against the wet stone, up through his shins, rattled his still-sore pelvis, and resonated in the strangely intact cavity of his chest. The air in the corridor, which a moment before had been still and hostile, now hissed like hot iron dipped in water. Dust and small stones rained from the vaulted ceiling above his head. The torch in his hand, the tiny blue flame that had shrunk in fear, now went out completely, leaving him in a sudden darkness adorned with red sparks from distant embers.
The world Alex had just understood—a world where death came from axe blade or musket muzzle, personal and close-quarters—turned out to be a joke. The true reality was far larger, colder, and indiscriminate.
"Bang."
A boom so loud shook the entire fortress again. And Alex, who had just learned to be a killer on a human scale, suddenly understood the true scale: he was merely an ant between two giant stones slamming together. The Lahelu Empire that had made Johann Reth die for debts and false promises had now arrived to burn down the fortress containing the newly resurrected Johann. An irony so bitter it almost made him laugh in the dusty darkness.
A second vibration followed, louder. Fragments of old plaster and mortar rained down. They weren't just shelling the courtyard. They were leveling this fortress, and everything in it, to the ground.
Then, the sound arrived: a long, tearing roar that came not from one source, but from the entire fortress vibrating under the blow. Cannonfire. The word surfaced in his mind, as if from a library of unused memories. Not muskets, not an infantry assault. Siege-class artillery fire.
The Empire was retaliating.
In the darkness, guided only by distant sparks, Alex moved. His body reacted before his mind commanded it. His legs took low, careful steps, his hand groping along the cold stone wall for guidance. It was the movement of Johann Reth, an infantryman trained to survive bombardment. But inside that skull, behind eyes now adjusting to the dark, another consciousness worked.
If they've started an artillery bombardment, it means they've finished positioning their batteries. That takes time—hauling six- or eight-pounder cannons through mountain terrain requires dozens of horses and soldiers. They must have been gathering outside for hours, perhaps since before dawn. Why fire only now?
His mind, Alex Tan's mind, tried to reason. They were waiting for confirmation. Waiting for a report that no imperial personnel remained alive inside. Or waiting for dawn for better firing accuracy. But if they thought the fortress had fully fallen to the rebels, why not level it immediately?
A memory surfaced—not Johann's, but Alex's. He was sitting in a 32nd-floor conference room in a Marina Bay office tower, his fingers tapping the mahogany table while listening to a risk mitigation presentation. "When something feels inconsistent, it means there's a variable you haven't considered," he'd told his junior team.
What variable was here? Heh, could it be they were truly waiting for all imperial troops to leave? If so, then I truly am unlucky, transmigrated into a corpse's body.
No. Focus on what can be understood. Cannons meant full-scale war. Long-range artillery. They didn't care who was inside—rebels, remaining imperial troops, civilians. This was total destruction.
He crawled forward, left hand feeling along the cold, dusty wall. The dominant smell had changed—still the scent of blood and death beginning to rot—but now mixed with crushed stone and something else... sulfur on a massive scale. Artillery powder had a different aroma from musket powder—coarser, sharper, with a bitter aftertaste like burnt salt. It reminded him of New Year's fireworks at Marina Bay, but a primitive, dirty, deadly version. How ridiculous and pitiful it was that he could be in a situation like this.
Pain in his arm pulled him back to reality. During the first cannon blast, a sharp piece of stone, like a razor, had sliced his arm, cutting through Luke's jacket and the skin beneath. Blood flowed steadily now, soaking his sleeve. The pain was sharp and clean, a worldly, comprehensible pain, different from the deep, strange ache in his chest that had somehow sealed itself.
He tore a strip of cloth from the hem of his jacket and began bandaging his wound with clumsy motions, as he had never experienced anything like this. While his fingers worked, he became lost in his memories.
In Singapore, if I got a wound like this, I'd go to a 24-hour clinic. Sterilize, maybe stitches, definitely antibiotics. Here... infection alone could kill me. But this body seems to have an unusual healing mechanism. Too bad there's nothing like that here, and it seems his super-regeneration isn't something he can use continuously, based on his earlier experiment.
"Bang."
Another vibration, this time accompanied by the sound of closer collapse. Alex pressed himself against the wall, survival instinct overriding analysis. From the corridor ahead came the sound of hurried footsteps and shouts.
"Down! To the lower storage room! They're destroying the eastern tower!"
The voice was in Rethian, but with a different accent—flatter, harder on certain consonants, with shortened vowel stresses. A Schwagen accent, from the northern mountain region where many rebels came from. Johann froze, pressing himself into a dark wall niche. Luke's rough wool jacket, still smelling of the man's sweat—a mix of sour sweat and the scent of straw that clung to all working-class clothing in this world—was now his best disguise.
Three men emerged from a corridor junction, their silhouettes cut by reddish light from somewhere behind. They carried torches, and the yellow-orange light illuminated faces full of dust, sweat, and a fear held barely in check. Their uniforms were a potpourri of whatever was available: simple leather jackets with rough stitching, wool doublets patched with differently colored cloth, trousers worn through at the knees and repaired with overly thick thread. The clothing of people fighting out of necessity, not duty.
One of them, a broad-shouldered man with a red beard tangled like a burnt bush, raised his torch high. Its light swept the wall, almost touching Johann's hiding spot.
"Reinhold? You're still alive?"
Damn it, thought Johann, or perhaps Alex thinking through Johann. This jacket is Luke's. They recognize it. They think I'm Reinhold.
He nodded, forcing a raspy voice appropriate for someone who had just been through trauma. "Yeah. Luke and Frederich... they..." He didn't need to finish the sentence. His choked voice, filled with a weariness that wasn't feigned, sounded convincing enough.
The red-bearded man cursed, not in standard Rethian, but in coarse Schwagen dialect, full of guttural consonants that sounded like stones grinding together. "Therion curse them. Killing us from outside like rats in a hole." He stepped closer, and his torchlight now fully illuminated Johann's face. His eyes were pale green like moss on stone—narrowing. "You're injured?"
Johann looked down at his emergency bandage. "Just a scratch. Stone shrapnel."
"We have to go down," said the second man, younger, his voice almost shrill with anxiety. His face still held remnants of boyish innocence not yet fully erased by war. "Giovanni says they'll pound us until nothing's left."
"Giovanni reads too many of his Wahrheitskirche pamphlets," grumbled the third man, shorter but with shoulders as wide as a barn door and arms muscled from years of physical labor. "They won't completely destroy their own fortress. They want to recapture it. These stones are too valuable to waste."
"Gilbert's right," said the red-bearded man, named Weiner—Johann caught the name from a new flow of memory. "But we still have to go down. Wait until the firing stops or they storm the place. Reinhold, come with us. Safer together."
Johann nodded again. Refusing would be suspicious. He joined them, taking a position at the back, as someone still in shock would.
They moved through a labyrinth of corridors and stone staircases growing narrower and descending. The fortress architecture, Alex noted, was a strange mix of military function and geographical constraints. The corridors weren't straight—they twisted and turned following the contour of the natural rock that formed the fortress foundation. The stone stairs had inconsistent step heights, some almost twice as high as others, clearly carved by different hands at different times.
This fortress wasn't built in one phase, his analysis ran automatically. It's accretion over centuries. The oldest parts might be from the first Rhein Empire era, the most powerful empire of its time in this world, the only one equal to it being Rum. But when Rhein collapsed to Woland, this was just a trading post. Then expanded into a border fortress. Now it's a tomb.
Every few minutes, another "Bang" echoed through the stone. Sometimes the vibration was so close Johann could feel the thump in his ribs. Sometimes it was just a distant rumble like thunder far away. He began noticing the pattern.
Average interval: three minutes forty seconds. Not precise—varied between three-twenty and four minutes. That meant they weren't firing in perfect coordination. Possibly different gun crews, maybe different guns. The deeper sound every third shot—probably a larger cannon, an eight-pounder perhaps. The others higher-pitched—six-pounders or even small howitzers.
The analysis gave him false comfort. It was something understandable, something with logic. In his old office, he could spend hours analyzing market data, finding patterns in chaos. It was a game. Now the pattern could mean life or death.
"You're very quiet, Reinhold," said Giovanni, the young man, as they paused at an intersection to confirm direction. His voice was full of an anxiety needing to be filled with conversation, with confirmation that they were all still human, still thinking, still feeling. "Usually you're the one complaining the most about the food, the cold, everything."
Johann thought about what a shepherd who had lost two close friends, trapped in a stone tomb being destroyed from the outside, would say. He thought of his old life—client presentations, contract negotiations, endless meetings. How irrelevant it all seemed now.
"What's the point of complaining?" he said finally, his voice lower and deeper than he intended. "Words won't stop cannonballs. Won't bring back the dead."
Gilbert, the broad man, gave a bitter chuckle—a deep, resonant sound like a stone rolling on a cave floor. "See? Reinhold's learning philosophy in hell. Maybe you'll join Giovanni and his Wahrheitskirche priests later, debating free will and fate while cannonballs decide your destiny."
"Don't mock my faith, Gilbert," said Giovanni, but without real heat. Just weariness. "The Wahrheitskirche teaches that every soul has responsibility for its own choices. We chose to rebel against imperial tyranny that squeezes peasants with taxes and sends their children to die in border wars. And now we face the consequences of that choice."
"Consequences," repeated Weiner, shaking his head, torchlight making the shadows on his face dance on the stone wall. "You and your priests have a pretty way of wrapping up bad things. Death becomes 'consequences'. Torture becomes 'tests of faith'. Starvation becomes 'purification'."
"Better than the Glaubenkirche in Indropa," Giovanni retorted, a bit more animated now. "Which teaches that we must accept our fate, that rulers are ordained by Therion himself, that rebellion is a sin against divine order. They keep the poor poor and call it God's will."
Johann listened, gathering information like he used to gather data for market analysis. Wahrheitskirche. Church of Truth. In Johann Reth's fragmented memory, it was a protestant sect that broke away from the imperial Glaubenkirche about fifty years ago. It started in the Crownlands of Bagech. Their religion was essentially the same one God, Therion, the Cold and Logical Creator said to have designed the universe like an architect designs a giant palace, the Creator who is the blood and brain of the first Creator. But their interpretation differed radically. The Glaubenkirche saw Therion as an architect who had established a hierarchical order to be obeyed without question—king, nobility, clergy, commoners, all had fixed places. The Wahrheitskirche saw Therion as a watchmaker who gave humans reason to understand the machine and freedom to fix it when broken.
Religious war dressed as a war of independence, Alex thought through Johann. Just like the Protestant Reformation in Europe, the Thirty Years' War, all those conflicts. Only here they're still using muskets and cannons, not atomic bombs or drones. But the motives are the same: power, money, and who gets to speak for God. They had the same symbol as the Glaubenkirche cross—the one with the odd proportions unlike Earth's and a circle at the top—as if it were an evolution from an imitation of an original cross.
"Bang."
This vibration felt different, closer, more personal. A crack appeared in the corridor wall beside them, running from ceiling to floor like lightning frozen in stone. Dust billowed, and for a moment the air was filled with fine particles shimmering in the torchlight like dirty snow.
"Faster!" shouted Weiner, and they broke into a jog, descending ever-steeper stairs.
They reached the basement, a large rectangular room with a low ceiling supported by old oak beams darkened by time and dampness. The air here was different in temperature—at least five degrees colder—and damp in a way reminiscent of a cave or an old spring cellar. The smell of earth, mold, and something sweet-rotten—perhaps rotting roots or food stored too long—filled every breath.
In corners of the room, wooden crates lay scattered in varying degrees of order. Some were stacked neatly, still sealed with rusty imperial iron bands. Some were open, revealing their contents: iron cannonballs the size of a grown man's fist stacked like strange fruits at a market; canvas bags of gunpowder tied with leather cords; small barrels likely containing water or wine; sacks of grain hardened into solid blocks. On the walls, rusty iron racks stood empty—perhaps once for weapons or tools.
This was the fortress storage vault, its logistical heart. And now its final refuge.
There were already about a dozen other rebels here, sitting on the compacted earthen floor or leaning against crates. Their faces, illuminated by several torches stuck in the walls using simple iron brackets, were a gallery of human expression on the brink: bone-deep weariness, fear felt so long it had become numbness, and a grim acceptance that this might be the end of their journey.
"How much longer?" someone asked in a flat voice as Weiner's group entered. The man was cleaning his musket with a rag, his movements ritualistic, like a priest preparing sacramental tools.
"Until they get bored or we die," Gilbert answered with the cynicism that had become his protective blanket. "Or until our corpses start moving on their own and go attack them."
A few people gave short, mirthless laughs. Dark jokes in a dark room.
Johann chose a seat on an empty wooden crate in a somewhat separate corner. He wanted to observe, listen, understand. It was his old habit—in meetings, he always sat where he could see everyone, read body language, catch unspoken dynamics.
He unwrapped the emergency bandage on his arm and examined his wound again. The blood had clotted well, forming a dark scab over the roughly three-inch gash. The wound edges were slightly red, normal inflammation, not infection. Probably. He tore a cleaner strip of cloth from the inner lining of his jacket—simple, rough linen—and rewrapped it more neatly.
While his hands worked, his eyes scanned the room. The structure seemed solid—stone walls perhaps two feet thick, oak ceiling beams that, though old, looked sturdy. But one direct cannon hit above...
He looked up. The beams were supported by stone pillars at each corner. On some beams, he saw hairline cracks following the wood grain. In one spot near the eastern wall, there was a dark stain—perhaps years of rainwater leakage, or maybe something else. The wood is damp, he thought. Damp wood is more prone to fracture under stress.
"Bang."
This vibration was accompanied by a clear sound of wood snapping from somewhere above. Several people looked up, eyes wide. Dust fell from the joints between beams and stone walls.
They're targeting this area, Johann thought coldly. Or they're targeting the entire fortress, and this area just happens to be under the impact point.
Then, from the corner of his left eye, he saw something move.
At first, he thought it was just a play of shadows—the flickering torchlight, perhaps a mouse or other small animal seeking shelter. But then he focused, and his body stiffened.
In the darkest corner of the room, far from torchlight, was a form sitting slumped against the wall. Initially, he thought it was a pile of sacks or perhaps another corpse brought down to be hidden. But then the form moved again.
Not a deliberate human movement. Not someone shifting their sitting position or stretching stiff muscles. It was a strange, jerky, uncoordinated movement. Like a wooden puppet whose strings were being pulled by an awkward puppeteer, or like... like a body still trying to move after its nervous system had died.
Johann stared, his eyes trying to pierce the gloom. The torchlight didn't reach that corner well, leaving it in a gray zone between light and dark.
It was an imperial soldier. A dark blue uniform filthy and torn in places, simple wool trousers, boots with worn soles. The face—as far as Johann could see—was waxen pale beneath a layer of dust and something dark that might be blood or dirt. The eyes were open, but from this distance Johann couldn't tell if there was awareness in them.
No, something was wrong with the posture. The head lolled forward unnaturally, as if the neck were broken or the muscles could no longer hold it. The right hand lay on the floor, palm up, fingers slightly curled. But those fingers were moving.
Not a grasping or clenching motion. It was a slow, rhythmic bending and straightening, like flower petals opening and closing in extreme slow motion. Index finger, middle finger, ring finger—all moving in strange synchrony, as if regulated by a clockwork mechanism hidden within the hand.
"Bang."
Another vibration, louder this time. Dust rained from the ceiling in an alarming amount. Someone screamed in fear, the sound high and cracking in the acoustically good room.
And in the dark corner, the imperial soldier who should have been dead suddenly lifted his head.
The movement was stiff, unnatural. Not the movement of someone lifting their head to listen. It was a mechanical movement, like a crank being turned to lift a heavy weight. The head rose slowly, with little jerks, until the face now faced the room.
The torchlight, though dim in that corner, now illuminated the face enough to see details.
The skin wasn't just pale—it now looked grayish, with dark spots on the cheeks and forehead like bruises that had spread and settled. The lips, chapped, parted slightly, and from within came something dark and sticky—perhaps old blood, perhaps mucus, perhaps something else. The eyes...
The eyes were wide open, but there was no consciousness in them. No focus, no recognition. But they reflected the torchlight wrongly—not the living reflection of wet eyes, but a flat, dry reflection like sanded glass or an oily water surface. And in the center of those eyes, the pupils seemed...
Lifeless.
As if they were marionettes being played with by a puppeteer.