CRACK—
That metallic clang still echoed, sharp and coarse, shattering what should have been a peaceful morning. A morning where farmers should be plowing fields, merchants opening stalls, and life just beginning. But inside Fort Thares, that sound meant only one thing: desperate last-ditch resistance.
Johann beheaded another corpse. His movements were no longer elegant—just short, heavy swings like a woodcutter hacking at hard blocks. The head rolled, empty eyes still open, mouth agape in an eternal expression that was not pain, not anger. Nothing at all.
But he didn't stop. Couldn't stop.
Just die, all of you, he thought, but even that thought was exhausted. I've already died once. I won't die a second time in this other person's body.
The air was thick with swirling black smoke from everywhere—collapsed roofs, exploded storerooms, burning corpse-flesh. The smoke was dense, cloying, making every breath feel like inhaling burning wet cloth. Johann's lungs fought, but this body—Johann Reth's body—persisted. Still forcing air in, even if only poison entered.
CLANG—
The rapier inherited from Captain Vogel struck again, severing the arm of a corpse trying to grab him. Its sound replaced the birdsong that should have been heard on a morning like this. The birds had fled. Only the sounds of fire, stiff footsteps, and his own sword growing blunt.
The corpses he destroyed fell. But there were always others. Always. They emerged from behind smoke, from charred doorways, even from under debris—rising with the same motion: stiff, unnatural, like wooden puppets with half-cut strings.
Damn it, he thought, this time bitterly. This is impossible. I can't keep this up.
His body had reached its limit. His muscles trembled not from fear but from pure exhaustion. His wounded right arm pulsed with heat. His knees felt like they were filled with stones. His breath was short, rapid, like a panting dog.
And the questions he'd held back from the beginning—why he was here, how to get back, what was truly happening—now assaulted him again, this time with a desperate tone.
Stupid. I'll die before answering even one.
A walking corpse—still wearing a ragged imperial jacket, with the strange cross on its necklace—stepped closer. Its movement suddenly quick, unnatural, joints cracking loudly like breaking twigs.
CRUNCH.
Not the sound of Johann's bone. But the corpse's own bone shattering from overforced motion. Yet it didn't stop. The corpse lunged, stiff hand reaching for Johann's leg.
Johann tried to dodge, but his body was too slow. Johann Reth's reflexes were worn out. Alex Tan could only watch from within.
His leg was caught.
The grip was cold. Strong. Unnaturally strong.
"Let go—!" he shouted, his voice hoarse from smoke.
But the corpse only pressed. Pressed with a strength not of a human, not even of something alive.
CRACK.
This time, the sound came from within his own body.
Pain. Sharp. White. Exploding from his shin bone up to his brain, erasing all thought, all questions, all fear. Only pure, absolute pain.
His leg was broken.
He fell, his back hitting hot stone. The world spun. Smoke, fire, approaching empty faces—all blurring.
No. Not now.
He writhed, tried to get up, but his right leg could only be dragged. The bone was cleanly broken. The pain made him nauseous, made his vision swim.
The corpse still gripped his leg, its fingers like rusty iron locks.
With a final motion born of survival instinct—not skill, not strategy—Johann swung the rapier that now felt as heavy as an iron rod.
Thwack—!
The blade pierced the corpse's skull from the side, sinking to the hilt. The corpse swayed, then collapsed. Its grip released.
Johann gasped, lying between the corpse he'd just killed and dozens of others still walking closer.
His leg was broken. The fire was closer. The smoke thicker.
He tried to crawl, but every movement sent electric jolts of pain from the broken bone. The heat of the fire scorched his skin, making the burns on his palms feel like being stabbed with red-hot needles. He panted, each inhalation a struggle against toxic smoke and despair.
This is it, he thought, as the corpses formed a perfect circle around him. Empty faces, clouded eyes, stiff hands outstretched. They weren't rushing. No need. He couldn't run.
But the thought didn't come as surrender. It came as a dull anger, like a sledgehammer hitting a pillow. I've already died once. Already risen with a hole in my chest that closed itself. Once, twice, three times, I've killed. For what? To end like this? Trampled by flesh puppets not even alive enough to hate me?
He looked at the sky through rolling layers of black smoke. The morning sky that should have been blue was now a dirty gray, like a ruined painting. Somewhere behind that smoke, the morning sun probably still hung, watching indifferently. Therion the Cold and Logical, he thought bitterly, borrowing dogma from Johann's memory. Is this your design? An experiment? Or just a silly thing you created with your supposedly great perfection?
Mom… The word surfaced not as an image, but as a sensation: the smell of sesame oil and soy sauce in his old apartment kitchen, the noisy sound of a wok, her voice calling in Hokkien, always mispronouncing. Not Johann Reth's sister who needed protection from debt—but his own sister, Mei Lin, who called every Sunday morning to ask if he'd eaten. I'll never know how that K-drama you were watching ends, he thought. A small thing that suddenly felt huge. Then came various memories belonging to Johann. Memories from before he decided to join the imperial army, his last conversation with his sister, Christine Reth.
"This is a bad decision, brother!" Christine's voice rang shrilly through the Reth family home, an inheritance from their father and mother in the Südsea state capital, Selevia.
"No. This is our only choice. Charles hasn't come home for months since joining the colonial expedition to the Gilgamesh archipelago. Edward either, after going to Esia." Johann's voice, rejecting his sister's opinion, sounded unsteady. He knew this wasn't ideal, but in the end, he had the responsibility that his sister should live well.
This made me realize… that Johann also had a family. That made my own resolve to survive even greater and stronger.
One of the corpses—a young soldier with a gunshot wound to the chest, his blue uniform blackened by soot—bent over. Its movement was unhuman: its waist didn't bend, but its whole body tilted forward like a falling board. Its hand, fingers locked in an unnatural claw, reached for Johann's neck.
Johann raised Captain Vogel's rapier. Its weight now felt like lifting a flagpole. His right arm trembled not from fear, but from muscles at their limit—fibers tearing, lactic acid a river of fire within. He swung. Not an expert slash, not a precise thrust. Just a desperate swing, like a child hitting a piñata.
Clang!
The already blunt blade only struck the corpse's collarbone, making it sway for a moment. Not enough. Never enough.
The hand drew closer. Johann could see details: black, long, cracked nails, full of dirt and dried blood. The smell emanating from the corpse was no longer simple rot. It was the smell of static electricity before lightning, the smell of rusted iron after rain, the smell of an overheating server room—the smell of something fundamentally wrong.
He closed his eyes. Not to pray. But from exhaustion. An exhaustion deeper than bone, seeping into the soul of this trapped tenant. Alright. If this is the end, at least I tried. I pushed. I killed. I…
But what came wasn't a touch.
What came was silence.
Not the silence of death. This was an active silence, like a giant machine suddenly switched off. The roar of fire remained, but seemed heard through thick glass. The shriek of wind through ruins suddenly vanished.
Then, a faint vibration in the ground—not from an explosion, not from corpse footsteps. A deep, low-frequency vibration, traveling through centuries-old fortress foundation stones. Not an earthquake. It was like… a pulse. Once. Then stillness. As if the earth beneath Fort Thares was holding its breath.
Johann opened his eyes.
The corpses had stopped moving.
All of them.
The hand almost touching his neck froze in the air, no more than a hand's span from his burned skin. Feet mid-step froze, some with feet lifted, physically unbalanced yet standing like impossible statues. Heads that had been staring at him now lifted in unison, those empty faces looking upward—at the smoke-covered sky. The simultaneous movement made the hair on Johann's neck stand up. This wasn't coincidence. This was a command revoked.
Then, the first drop fell.
Cold. Incredibly cold. Not ordinary rain cold. This was cold like mountain spring water from the deepest caves, a cold that pierced straight to the bone. Touching his soot-covered, wounded, salty-sweat cheek.
Rain.
But this… was impossible.
Johann, through Johann Reth's memories now mingled with his own, knew this: early February in the Thares mountains. Dry winter. Snow maybe on higher peaks, but rain? This month? Almost never. The weather here was governed by dry northeastern winds from the Schwagen highlands.
But rain it was. Heavy. Like the cloudbursts in Bangladesh extreme weather reports he'd read—a month's rain in an hour. The drops were large, heavy, as if poured from a giant bucket in the sky. The water was clear, very clear, and its cold made his teeth chatter.
Ssss—!
The first sound of fire being extinguished. The blue-orange flames that had licked ceilings and walls, burning centuries-old oak, now hissed angrily. White steam shot out everywhere, replacing toxic black smoke. The entire fortress hissed like a giant snake. Johann saw the half-burnt roof of the northern barracks—its fire shrank, then went out, leaving a blackened wooden skeleton smoking like a defeated dragon's corpse.
The corpses remained still. Rainwater streamed down their faces. On the young soldier's face that had almost choked him, it cleared paths through the grime, revealing pale skin beneath. The clouded eyes didn't blink even as rain struck them directly. They just… existed. Wet statues in a hell-garden being washed.
Johann didn't understand. This was a violation. First corpses rising. Now rain in the dry season.
But his body, Johann Reth's severely wounded body, had its own intelligence. Its survival instinct was older than Alex's thoughts, deeper than Johann's training. It was a primitive hiss in the bone marrow: Move. Now.
With a groan eroded by pain, he pushed his body to roll away from the circle of frozen corpses. His broken right leg jerked, and the world whitened for a moment. He bit his own tongue until blood flowed, the metallic taste anchoring him to reality.
One. More. Move.
He crawled. His left hand (palm burned, skin peeling, pink flesh bleeding) gripped a stone whose heat had lessened from the rain. He pulled. This body not his own moved, obeying a command deeper than despair.
The rain grew heavier. Now like a curtain of water, blurring everything beyond a radius of a few feet. The roar of fire had almost vanished, replaced by the deafening hiss of rain. Johann screamed in pain as he had to drag his broken leg over stone fragments, but his scream was drowned by the sound of water hammering the earth.
He had to get out of this open area. Had to hide. But where? Gate closed. Towers collapsed.
The jacket.
The thought came with strange clarity. Luke's jacket—the shabby brown rebel jacket he wore as camouflage—was torn, partly burnt on the back, wet and heavy with blood (his blood? Luke's? Frederich's?) and now rain. It was a flag saying "NOT FROM HERE" to anyone who saw.
His eyes, watering from smoke and now from battering rain, searched. Nearby lay a dead imperial soldier—not a newly risen one, but one truly dead, probably from the initial battle. A middle-aged man, his face still wearing a frozen expression of shock. His jacket, dark imperial blue with a faded eagle embroidery on the chest—relatively intact. Only a small tear on the sleeve, and dried blood stains now washing away in the rain.
Symbolism was inelegant in this situation. But survival wasn't about aesthetics. It was about camouflage.
With an effort that made black spots appear in his vision, Johann crawled toward the corpse. The rain had turned the ground to mud, and he slipped, his face almost hitting stone. His burned hand landed in a puddle of cold water, and the pain was so sharp his tears mixed with rainwater.
He reached it. The corpse stared at him with glassy eyes already clouded by long death.
Sorry, Johann thought, though unsure who the apology was for—this soldier, his family, the original Johann Reth's soul whose body he'd stolen.
With his teeth and half-functional left hand, he unbuttoned Luke's jacket. Every movement was torture. Wet wool stuck to his burned skin, and peeling it off felt like flaying himself. He groaned, his voice ragged. Luke's jacket finally came off, and he tossed it aside. It lay in the mud like a shed snake skin.
Now, the imperial jacket. He had to turn the soldier's body—heavy, stiff, cold. Johann used a wooden beam he'd grabbed earlier to push, rolling the corpse onto its side. A sound of stiff bones grating. Then, with an awkward, pain-filled motion, he pulled the blue jacket off the corpse's body. The fabric was wet, heavy, and smelled—of old sweat, dried blood, and now wet earth.
He forced his left arm in, then painfully sat himself up to get his right arm in. His bruised and possibly fractured right shoulder screamed protest. The jacket was too large for Johann's slender frame, and as he buttoned it (his burned fingers could barely feel the buttons), it hung loose. But the color was right. Dark imperial blue. From a distance, in the rain and smoke, he might look like a surviving soldier, not a disguised rebel.
Down. Deeper underground. The lower storage room.
That wasn't Alex's thought. It was a whisper from Johann Reth's muscle memory. A map embedded beneath consciousness: beyond the first storage room (which had collapsed), more stairs led to an older chamber, perhaps an earlier storage cellar or even a tunnel entrance. A place to hold out if everything above collapsed.
He looked around. The rain had turned the fortress courtyard into a smoking lake of mud. The frozen corpses still stood in the rain, some beginning to sway slowly, like trees in strong wind. But they weren't pursuing. They seemed… confused. Disoriented. One corpse—a woman with a servant's apron—walked in small circles, spinning like a toy with tangled springs.
The rain… disturbed them. Or disturbed whatever controlled them. Like a radio signal jammed by a storm.
No time. Johann grabbed a longer piece of timber to use as a crutch. With that and the last of his strength, he pushed himself to stand on one leg. His head spun, the world whirled. He almost fell, but his crutch dug into the mud, holding him.
He headed toward the east side of the courtyard, to the ruins where the kitchen and small storeroom once stood. There, behind a pile of stones fallen from the tower, was a low door of oak and iron—the door to the second-level basement.
The door was partially buried, but the gap was still enough for a slender man—or a man with a broken leg—to crawl through.
With trembling hands, Johann pushed aside the obstructing debris. A small stone came loose, and he fell again, his face hitting cold mud. He coughed, water and mud entering his mouth. The taste of earth, ash, and something sweet-rotten filled his tongue.
Get up. Get inside.
He crawled. His broken leg dragged behind like a useless tail. Stone stairs descending into darkness appeared ahead—wet from rainwater flowing down, slippery, reminiscent of a dragon's maw.
He looked back one last time, through the curtain of rain. Fort Thares was no longer burning. White smoke and steam rose from the wet ruins. The corpses were still there, wandering aimlessly, circling, or standing still. Some were starting to move again, but their movements were slow, chaotic, like broken machinery.
And above it all, the sky still poured water with unnatural fury. This wasn't a blessing. Not a salvation. It was a disruption. An inconsistency in a reality already wrong since he opened his eyes on a pile of corpses.
With a final groan, Johann pulled himself through the door gap and fell onto the first step. He tumbled, unable to control his fall, down several cold, wet stone steps before finally landing hard on the floor below.
Darkness welcomed him. Damp, cold, and smelling of old earth, mold, and absence.
He closed his eyes. Behind his eyelids, he didn't see darkness. He saw the strange purple moon. The face of Lisa Müller from the love letter that would never be answered. The face of Luke Anderson as the bayonet entered his stomach. The face of Captain Vogel before the axe struck.
And behind it all, like a weak signal from a very distant radio station, flashes of fluorescent office ceiling lights, the sound of a keyboard being tapped, the smell of Starbucks coffee in the morning.
Is this karma? he thought, an irrational thought. What did I do to deserve this? I was just a negotiator. Just chasing bonuses and promotions. I didn't believe in sin or merit.
No answer. Only the sound of rain above, and the sound of water dripping from the basement ceiling into puddles on the floor. Plop. Plop. Plop.
Like a clock's tick. Like a countdown.
He didn't know how long he lay there. Time lost meaning. The pain, strangely, began to recede—not from healing, but because his body was entering shock. That was dangerous. He knew that. But he couldn't move.
His mind wandered. To the rain. Why the rain? What was its connection to the corpses stopping? Was there… a cause-effect relationship? Or just a strange coincidence in an already strange world?
He remembered the extreme weather reports he'd read—about high-pressure systems suddenly disrupted by unexpected jet streams. About how climate was a chaotic system, sensitive to small changes. Was this a small change? Or was this rain a symptom of something larger? Something… done?
With a final effort, he opened his eyes and looked around the room. Dim light from above, through the door gap, illuminated part of it. This room was smaller than the upper storage room. There were rotting wooden crates, some open and empty. Barrels that might have held water or food, now rusted and leaking. On the walls, iron torch sconces stood empty.
And in the farthest corner… something different.
Not a crate. Not a barrel. It was a stone structure built into the wall—like a niche, or perhaps a low doorway covered by a pile of stones and debris.
A secret door? A tunnel? Or just the imagination of a dying mind?
Not now. He couldn't reach it. Maybe tomorrow. If there was a tomorrow.
He took a deep breath, and felt something strange in his chest—at the place of the miraculous scar, where the hole had been. Not pain. But… warmth. Gentle, like a heating pad set to the lowest temperature. A sensation almost unnoticeable amidst the storm of other pains.
Was this body still healing itself? Or was this something else?
He didn't know. He was too tired to know.
From above, the sound of rain began to lessen. The deafening drumming turned into a hiss, then into regular dripping. The storm ended as quickly as it came.
And with it, from the distance, through stone and earth, came a new sound.
Not the sound of corpses. Not the sound of fire.
But the sound of trumpets.
War trumpets. Distant, but clear. Rhythmic. And not one—several. Blowing a pattern he didn't recognize, but which from Johann Reth's memory meant one thing: an assault. Or… a victory march.
The Empire? Or rebels returning?
No matter. Whoever they were, they would enter this fortress. They would find the moving corpses (or the still ones now?). They would find him.
He had to move. Hide deeper. Had to…
But darkness finally won. His consciousness evaporated like vapor in cold air, carrying him into dreams without images, only sensations: cold, wet, pain, and the strange warmth in his chest that pulsed slowly, like a second heart trying to start something new.