"Urghh!"
Marcus gasped and his eyes shot open.
The light hit him first. Bright and clean and completely wrong for someone who had just had a sword pulled out of their chest. He blinked against it, chest heaving, one hand pressing against his ribs where the wound should have been.
Nothing. No pain. No blood. No torn fabric soaked through with the life draining out of him.
Just soft grass under his palms and birds somewhere above him doing what birds did when the world wasn't ending.
"I thought I was dead." His voice came out rough and dry, like someone who hadn't used it in a while. "What is this?"
He looked at his hands.
They were wrong.
Not injured wrong. Young wrong. The skin was smooth, the knuckles unscared, the palms soft in a way they hadn't been since before he picked up his first sword. Two years of constant combat had turned his hands into something that looked like they belonged to a working man. These hands looked like they belonged to someone's younger brother.
He turned them over slowly.
Wtf.
He pushed himself upright and got his first proper look at himself. Shorter than he expected. Lighter. The body of a teenager, eighteen at most, wrapped in rough clothing stitched together from animal hide that scratched at the neck and smelled faintly of woodsmoke. A significant drop from the twenty five year old frame he'd spent years building into something capable of surviving a war.
He stood in the middle of a dense forest. Thick trees packed close together on every side, the canopy above filtering the light into broken pieces that shifted when the wind moved through the leaves.
Through the gaps in the branches he could see distant structures, tall buildings made of dark stone, medieval in shape, unfamiliar in detail.
He looked at them for a moment.
"This isn't Lithuania," he said quietly.
Something about the whole place felt off in a way he couldn't name yet. Too clean. Too still. Like a painting of a world rather than the world itself.
"Second chance at life." He turned the words over slowly, remembering the last thing he'd seen before everything went dark. "What does that actually mean."
The urge came without warning. A word rising up from somewhere underneath conscious thought, pressing against the back of his teeth until he said it out loud.
"System."
The air in front of him shimmered like heat rising off summer stone and a glowing display materialized at chest height, blue and sharp against the green of the forest.
[SYSTEM INITIALIZING…]
[WELCOME, PLAYER]
[QUALIFICATION MET: SSS-RANK
POTENTIAL]
Marcus stared at the floating words.
Player?. Qualification?.
He opened his mouth to say something and the pain hit instead.
"Urghh!"
Not physical. Worse than physical. Memories crashing back in all at once with the force of something that had been held back and suddenly wasn't anymore. The fortress. The beast nest. Running toward the core with victory already tasting real in his mouth. Then the steel. Cold and precise between his shoulder blades, punching through his chest from behind, and the particular silence of understanding exactly whose sword it was before he even turned around.
Lukas's face. Completely calm. Already wiping the blade clean.
It was always supposed to end like this.
"LUKAS!"
The name tore out of him raw and loud and the birds above scattered from their branches all at once. His hands were fists, nails cutting into his palms, jaw locked tight against everything else trying to come out behind the name.
The display flickered and new text burned into it like the system had been waiting for exactly this reaction.
[PLAYER #?????]
[TRAUMA EVENT CONFIRMED: KILLED BY BETRAYAL, OCTOBER 1878]
[SSS-RANK SKILL UNLOCKED]
It knew. Whatever this thing was it had been watching. It knew how he died. It knew about the betrayal. It knew about Lukas.
"I will kill you with my own hands," Marcus said to the empty forest. His voice had dropped from a scream to something quieter and considerably more dangerous. "You and everyone who stood beside you. I swear it. Mark my words."
The forest disappeared.
One moment trees and light and birds. The next, nothing. Pure black in every direction, no ground visible beneath his feet, no ceiling above, just darkness sitting around him like it had always been there and had simply been waiting for the right moment to show itself. It didn't feel cold or hostile. It felt warm. Patient. Like something that had been holding a door open for a very long time and was quietly relieved someone had finally walked through it.
Then the words appeared.
They didn't glow the way the system display had glowed. They burned. Deep red against the black, the color of dried blood, each letter forming slowly like something being carved rather than written.
[SSS-RANK SKILL: SUMMON THE BETRAYED]
[DESCRIPTION: You who died from the ultimate betrayal may call upon others who share your fate. Throughout history, legends have fallen to treachery. They wait in darkness, burning with rage, hungry for vengeance that was denied to them in life. Summon them. Command them. Let them taste the justice they were robbed of.]
[THE BETRAYED WILL ANSWER YOUR CALL]
[DO YOU ACCEPT THIS POWER?]
Marcus read it twice. He didn't fully understand it. Didn't know what summoning the betrayed actually looked like in practice or what it would cost him or where these legends were supposed to come from.
He didn't care.
Free power was free power.
"Yes."
Something shifted in the darkness around him. Not violent, not sudden, just a change in the quality of the air, like a current running through water that hadn't been moving before. A warmth spread outward from the center of his chest, deep and steady, like a coal that had been sitting cold for years finally catching light.
It spread through his arms and down his legs and settled into his bones with the particular feeling of something that had always been meant to be there finally arriving.
The darkness broke apart.
The forest came back, but different.
Everything was sharper. More present. Like someone had cleaned the lens through which he was seeing the world and he hadn't realized until now how smudged it had been.
Glowing markers floated at the edges of his vision pointing toward distant locations. Small animals moving through the underbrush had numbers above them indicating their properties. Even the trees carried faint information tags that hadn't been there before.
Marcus turned slowly and took it all in.
"A game," he said quietly. "This is actually a game."
He stood with that for a moment.
Then the system display reappeared in the corner of his vision with a new notification sitting in it.
[THE SYSTEM IS AVAILABLE AS YOUR PERSONAL ASSISTANT.]
[CALL ON IT WHENEVER YOU NEED IT.]
[YOUR JOURNEY BEGINS NOW.]
The text dissolved.
Marcus looked at his reflection in the surface of the display before it went dark. A young face looked back at him. Round features, brown hair sitting slightly messy from waking up in a field, black eyes that looked older than the face around them. One hundred and seventy three centimeters of teenager dressed in rough animal hide clothing that had clearly been made by someone more concerned with function than comfort.
He tilted his head at the reflection.
Not bad. He smirked slightly. At least a decent head start.
The display vanished with a soft sound and his vision cleared.
He took a step toward the treeline. Then another. He needed to figure out where exactly he was, what this world ran on, and how fast he could turn this untrained body into something capable of surviving it.
POOOM!
A horn blast cut through the forest, deep and rolling, the kind that carried for miles.
Then voices. Multiple, overlapping, sharp with urgency.
"They're here!"
"Beast attack! Everyone to arms!"
Marcus went still.
"The Velnias are coming".
His blood ran cold and then hot in the same second. He knew that horn. He'd heard it more times than he could count in his previous life and every single time it had meant the same thing.
His hand dropped to his hip automatically, reaching for a sword that wasn't there.
Right.
No weapon. No armor. A body that had never trained a day in its life and a skill he didn't know how to use yet.
Marcus started running toward the sound anyway.