Chapter 1: Awakening
A bullet snapped past his ear before he even understood he was running.
Gunshots cracked through the dense jungle, echoing like thunder. Vikram Singh's legs moved on adrenaline alone, one leg gone half-numb below a wound he couldn't afford to look at. Branches whipped his face, stinging. Thorns tore at his arm. Every breath came like a blade drawn slowly through his ribs. The air was thick—humid, heavy—every inhale sharp with the scent of earth, wet leaves, and decay.
Heavy boots crashed behind him. The soldiers fired wildly through the trees, unable to get a clean shot, but they didn't need one—not yet. They wanted him alive long enough to confirm what he carried, or didn't. That single fact was the only reason he still had a heartbeat.
Bullets thudded into trunks, spat up earth near his feet, biting his shins. He dove behind the thick trunk of an ancient fig tree, bark rough and cool against his burning back. His lungs burned, ragged and metallic with each breath.
He pressed a shaking hand to his side. Blood pulsed between his fingers, warm and sticky. Five bullets—he'd felt each one turn his flesh to fire. His vision pulsed dark at the edges.
*Don't stop. Not yet.*
One memory rose above the rest and wouldn't let go: his father, the night before he left for training, standing in the doorway with the porch light behind him so his face was only a shape. *"If you're going to disappear into this life,"* he'd said, *"disappear all the way. Don't do it halfway and get killed for a country that will never say your name."* Vikram hadn't understood it then.
He understood it now, bleeding out in a jungle that wasn't home, for a country that would deny knowing him if he were caught. Four years undercover in Pakistan. Seventeen attacks that never happened. Seventeen thousand lives, maybe more. Had any of it been worth it, if no one would ever know?
Something ticked inside his jacket—the block of RDX strapped to his chest, cold and heavy. Standard deep-cover protocol: if capture became inevitable, neither he nor what he knew could be allowed to fall into enemy hands. His final contingency. He thumbed the timer with numb fingers. Two minutes. Last gambit.
He staggered into the narrowing valley, the chase dissolving into noise—gunfire, shouted orders, his own hacking breath.
"There he is!" a soldier shouted.
Bullets scythed the air. Impacts spun him down before the sound of them reached him. He hit the ground; boots pounded around him, foreign syllables mixing with the copper tang of blood in his mouth.
"Allahu Akbar!" Someone cheered. A boot pressed against his chest. Someone laughed. Hands grabbed his collar and hauled his face up to see.
Their faces blurred, shadowed by the failing light. The noise faded. In those final moments, something like relief—unexpected and almost sweet—bloomed in his chest.
*3… 2… 1—*
BOOM.
A shockwave of light, white-hot and searing. Then, for a timeless instant, there was neither pain nor light—only emptiness.
Then, suddenly, he was gasping for air.
Vikram jolted upright, drenched in sweat. His hands flew to his side, his chest, searching for the wounds, the wet heat of blood. Nothing. No blood, no pain, no ragged holes where the bullets had gone in. He lay instead on a soft, musty bed, the room reeking of old wood and mothballs and a faint trace of kerosene.
A ceiling fan turned overhead, slow and complaining. Sunlight filtered through gauzy curtains in shifting rectangles across a dusty floor. Somewhere a mechanical clock ticked, sharp and insistent in the hush.
His heart slammed against his ribs. Outside, birds chattered, a bicycle bell rattled past, and an old radio drifted the notes of an Urdu ghazal through the wall. Beside the bed sat an enamel water jug and a rotary telephone, black and heavy, the kind he'd only ever seen in archive photographs.
"What the—" His voice came out hoarse, unfamiliar, his throat raw as if he'd been screaming all night.
He scanned the room, hands trembling, some old training instinct already cataloguing exits, checking for hidden microphones, wondering—clinically, even now—if he'd been drugged. That was the part of him that never turned off. Then his eyes reached the wall calendar. Crisp. Not yellowed. The numbers printed clean and sharp, like it had gone up that week.
He blinked twice, willing the numbers to rearrange themselves into something that made sense. They didn't.
July 15, 1970.
Pakistan.
His mind reeled. Dreaming. Dying. Captured, maybe, and drugged into some interrogator's fever theater. A cold sweat slid down his spine, and for a moment the room's shadows seemed to thicken, to press in.
Then it hit him—not gently. A headache split behind his eyes like something tearing. Flashes came first: a stranger's childhood, a stranger's mother's voice, names and faces colliding and dissolving before he could hold onto any of them. Then, like a dam breaking, it steadied into memory—a whole life, not his own but eerily familiar, settling into place behind his eyes.
This body was also Vikram Singh. Also RAW. Also mid-mission—fragments of coded meetings, border maps, unfamiliar names surfacing and sinking again before he could read them.
But this wasn't his time. And it wasn't quite his war.
His breath came short and sharp. He forced it slow, forced himself to think like the officer he'd trained to be instead of the man who'd just died in a jungle forty-some years from now.
A voice resounded in his skull—mechanical, precise, and utterly unbothered by the fact that it shouldn't exist.
> *Booting…*
> *Scanning host…*
> *Identity confirmed.*
>
> **Host:** Vikram Singh | **Age:** 23 | **Occupation:** RAW Agent
> **Skills Unlocked:**
> — Combat: Level 2
> — Weapons Mastery: Level 3
> — Cold Weapons: Level 2
>
> **Perks Activated:**
> — Gamer Body (Enhanced Learning)
> — Adaptive Mind
> — Face Morph (Initial Level)
>
> *Most skills remain locked behind unknown conditions.*
He went very still. He'd read about systems like this—in pulp fiction passed around the barracks, never once in a briefing that mattered.
A system. Actually real.
Testing a wild impulse, he pictured Tom Cruise's face—every line of it, from a hundred film stills he'd half-watched over the years. Heat prickled across his skin. He stumbled to the antique mirror propped against the dresser, its glass speckled and warped, and stared at a face that was no longer his. Cheekbones sharper. Jaw firmer. Even his voice, when he murmured a testing "hello," came out with a stranger's cadence. Not a mask laid over his features—a complete rewrite of them.
He willed it back. Features slid and settled into his own again—gaunt, sweat-slicked, haunted—and he exhaled slowly, half-disbelieving, half-electrified.
"A golden finger," he muttered. "The cheat power from every web novel I used to laugh at."
Not all-powerful, though. The system had said as much itself. Skills to be earned, not handed over.
His pulse hadn't slowed. If this was real—if he was truly back in 1970 with knowledge no one alive should have and powers no one should be able to explain—what was he supposed to do with it? Redemption, or just a longer, stranger way to die twice?
Somewhere beyond these walls, history was still unfolding exactly as he remembered it.
But for how much longer.
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