There was nothing.

  Not dark, not light, nothing.

  He hung in a space that had no weight, no up or down. No breath moved through him. He couldn’t tell

  if he had a body or if the idea of one was just leftover memory. The silence was total; even thought

  seemed to make no sound. For a long stretch that could have been a heartbeat or a century he believed

  this was what death truly was, awareness trapped inside absence.

  He tried to breathe. Nothing.

  He tried to open his eyes. There were no eyes.

  He tried to scream, but there was no throat to carry the sound.

  He drifted.

  Then a thought flickered through the void like static: the knife, the green glow, the weight of his

  father’s voice shouting his name. The last breath. The pain. The silence.

  And with that came memory.

  Grandma Kate’s warm laugh over the smell of soup on the stove.

  Grandpa Masaharu’s firm hands guiding his grip on the bokken, saying, “Focus. Always know where

  your feet are.”

  Mom’s arms around him after a nightmare.

  Dad’s steady calm in every storm.

  All of them gone. All burned away beneath the violence of an alien and the blinding frost that devoured

  their street.

  A sharp ache bloomed inside him. He tried to curl around it, but there was no body to curl. Grief

  echoed through the emptiness until it became its own kind of sound.

  Emily.

  Her name came like a gasp of air in a place with none. The tiny hand that used to grab his sleeve. The

  way she smiled through missing teeth. Her voice when she laughed, thin, musical, perfect.

  Emily.

  “Emily?” The thought came out like a ripple. “Emily, where are you?”

  No answer.

  “Mom? Dad? Grandma? Grandpa?”

  Silence swallowed everything.

  “Someone answer me! Please!”

  Still nothing. No echo. No sense that words even existed.

  He kept yelling, louder each time, until it became a wordless roar of panic that vanished before it

  formed. The nothing pressed closer. It felt alive now, heavy and waiting.

  He stopped. Every part of him trembled though he had no muscles left to shake. “Please,” he whispered

  into the dark. “Please don’t leave me here.”

  Something shifted.

  At first it was only a vibration, a hum so deep it was almost imagined. Then a voice, soft and distant,

  threading through the black. A woman’s voice, speaking in sounds he didn’t recognize. Not words, not

  any language he knew. The syllables rolled and clicked like water over metal.

  Bash froze. “Who’s there?”

  The voice continued, calm, melodic, a sequence of alien tones.

  “I can’t understand you! Do you speak English? English!”

  The sound faltered, then resumed, slower, more deliberate.

  “I don’t know what you’re saying!” he shouted. “Please, help me!”

  A pause. Then, faintly, “…help…?”

  His chest tightened, or he imagined it did. “Yes! Help! Please!”

  More fragments came, broken by static: “…where…you…is? Identify…?”

  He almost laughed from relief. “Bash! My name is Bash! Who are you?”

  The voice paused. Then it came again, still strange, the words drawn out, the cadence uneven.

  “...Ahn…ah…lee...zing… li…ngw...”

  Bash frowned into the dark. “What?”

  The sounds repeated, closer to words this time. “Ana…lee...zing. Lin...gwi...stik.” A beat of static.

  “Ad...dap...ting.”

  The tone shifted, softer now, like the metal was learning how to breathe.

  “Sys...tem...integ...gra...shun...active...”

  Bash’s breath hitched. “You’re learning English… aren’t you?”

  The voice answered with a broken melody of syllables. “Learn...ing. Eng...lish. Cor...rect.”

  Every word trembled, half mechanical, half human. Each pause stretched longer than the last as if the

  machine were thinking, if thinking was something it could do.

  Then, slowly, the consonants steadied.

  “Analyzing linguistics. Adapting. System integration active.”

  Now it sounded almost like speech, but still wrong in ways that made his skin crawl.

  The sound grew clearer. The cadence smoothed. Each repetition was more human than the last. He

  realized the voice was learning. It was learning English as they spoke.

  “Can you tell me where I am?” he asked. “I can’t feel anything. I can’t see.”

  “Language and brainwave analysis ongoing.”

  The silence that followed wasn’t empty. It vibrated with low, pulsing energy, like the hum of hidden

  engines.

  When the voice came again it had form, almost gentle beneath the mechanical undertone.

  “Welcome back, Reincarnate. Would you like to begin with your last abilities?”

  “What?” The word came out half-breathless. “What abilities? Who are you?”

  “I am the Self-Core,” the voice said. “You may call me S-C. I hold the cumulative data, the memories,

  the Essence logs, and the tactical schema of the occupant. I am a Reincarnation Protocol operating on

  your neurological architecture. I do not think; I process, compute, and stabilize the raw potential you

  carry.”

  He stared into the dark that wasn’t dark. “I have no idea what that means.”

  The voice didn’t answer right away. Tiny motes of green light drifted through the void like dust in

  sunlight. Bash tried to follow one with his eyes, only to realize he wasn’t sure if he even had eyes, or if

  he was just imagining the green in this nothingness. Cumulative data… neurological architecture…

  stabilize potential…

  He turned the words over in his head, but they slipped away, half nonsense, half nightmare. None of it

  sounded real, like hearing a language made of math and electricity. Cumulative data, essence logs,

  stabilization protocols… The phrases tangled together until he couldn’t tell if they meant something or

  were just noise echoing in his skull. He tried to focus, but the more he thought about it, the less it made

  You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

  sense. Eventually he just let the words go. “Okay,” he muttered, voice low. “I don’t get any of that.”

  He rubbed at his temples on reflex, felt nothing. The weight of it all pressed down until he gave up.

  “Okay,” he muttered, voice cracking. “I don’t get any of that.”

  He swallowed a breath that didn’t exist. “But… did you say something about abilities?”

  “Abilities are advanced through Protocol Refinement,” S-C replied immediately. “Refinement requires

  successful Essence Harvest of external life-forms to supply the necessary Synthesis Material for

  upgrade.”

  “Essence Harvest,” Bash repeated slowly. “You mean… killing things?”

  “Affirmative.”

  He felt sick even though he had no body to be sick with. “What kind of abilities?”

  “Processing brainwaves and linguistics.”

  Light flared across the void. For a second it blinded him, then condensed into a thin layer of light that

  seemed to settle over his vision, like a contact lens burning onto his eye. Symbols appeared on it, lines,

  curves, fragments of some alien language, scrolling across his sight as though written on the inside of

  his eyelid. The script twisted and rearranged until it stabilized into words he could finally read.

  ABILITY SYNTHESIS LOG – PRIOR CYCLE VERIFIED

  Ice Control ?

  Mineral Manipulation ?

  Energy Absorption and Reflection ?

  Reincarnate Protocol ?

  Thermal Projection – Locked

  Quantum Transport – Locked

  System Expansion – Locked

  ...

  He stared. They weren’t just wordsIce Control. Mineral Manipulation. Energy Absorption and

  Reflection. Reincarnate Protocol. The words hummed in rhythm with his heartbeat, each one sparking a

  flicker of memory: the frost crawling across the ground, shards of stone rising from broken pavement.

  He realized, with a slow, sinking dread, that these were the same abilities the green Spartor had used,

  they pulsed. Each line glowed faintly against his vision, and with every pulse he felt a subtle vibration

  move through his body, as if the data were being etched directly into him. , the same creature that had

  killed his family .

  “These were the alien’s abilities,” he whispered.

  “Affirmative. Inheritance successful. Integration at forty-seven percent.”

  The panel flickered. Characters bled into static.

  “System instability detected. Core integration compromised. Abort now or risk malfunction.”

  “S-C?” His voice trembled. “What’s happening?”

  “System error. System error. Abort now or, ”

  The words stuttered into distortion. Feedback shrieked through the dark. Light exploded, fracturing into

  shards of color that stabbed across his vision. Each pulse came with pain, a sensation he hadn’t known

  until now, electricity ripping through nerves that shouldn’t exist.

  “S-C! Stop it!”

  The noise rose until it became a roar. Then everything snapped off.

  He was alone again.

  He floated, shaking, until he realized he could feel something pressing against him, soft, viscous,

  warm. The void thickened. Pressure crushed his chest. Air, heavy and wrong, tried to force its way into

  him. His heart jolted back to life with a single, blinding beat.

  A pulse of light throbbed behind his eyelids, deep orange-red.

  He coughed, but liquid filled his mouth. His body convulsed. He clawed at the invisible walls around

  him and struck something solid. A hollow, watery thud echoed in his ears.

  He opened his eyes.

  He was submerged in glowing fluid, encased in a translucent shell. The light burned through the orange

  haze, showing a curved wall inches from his face. Veins of gold ran through the liquid, pulsing in time

  with the slow, mechanical heartbeat around him.

  Panic hit like a hammer. He kicked, flailed, felt the resistance of a body that didn’t feel like his. Tubes

  snaked from the pod walls into his arms, his legs, his chest, melded, not attached. The skin around each

  junction glowed faintly green.

  He tried to scream, but the sound became a surge of bubbles that raced upward and vanished.

  He hammered at the wall. It flexed but didn’t break. The glow outside shifted, shadows moved, blurred

  shapes gliding past, huge and indistinct. For an instant he thought he saw eyes, luminous and inhuman,

  staring in.

  He struck again, pain flashing through his hands. He pulled at one of the tubes. It resisted, then tore

  free with a wet snap. Liquid gushed out, cold fire searing along his side. The wound sealed itself

  instantly with a line of light. He gasped, lungs burning for air that wasn’t there.

  “S-C!” He tried to shout, his mind screaming even as his mouth filled with fluid. “Help me!”

  No reply. Only the rising hum, faster now, resonating through the pod until the walls trembled. The

  light dimmed, flared, dimmed again.

  He froze.

  Something moved outside the pod, just beyond the orange haze. A shadow. Tall. The outline of a figure

  gliding through the mist.

  He pressed his face to the glass. The shape stopped, turning toward him.

  It wasn’t human.

  For a moment, all he could see were two faint points of light, eyes, or maybe sensors, watching him

  from beyond the cocoon. The figure leaned closer, its movements smooth and deliberate, and Bash felt

  every instinct in his body scream at him to get away.

  He pounded against the barrier, shouting soundless words. The shadow didn’t move. It only watched.

  His lungs burned. The light outside dimmed until the shape dissolved back into darkness. The edges of

  his vision blurred. He tried once more to breathe and found only liquid.

  The world narrowed to a single flicker of red, then went black.