"To change is to grow. To transform is to die while your heart is still beating."
The violet glow of the phone didn't just illuminate the room; it seemed to consume the shadows. My thumb hovered over the screen, trembling with a mix of exhaustion and a sudden, primal fear. I pressed down hard on the "Soul Roulette" icon, dragging it toward the trash bin at the top of the display.
*Delete.*
Nothing happened. I tried again, my movements becoming frantic, my breath hitching in my throat. I tapped the screen until my nail clicked against the glass, desperate to purge the digital ghost that had invaded my only sanctuary. But the app didn't move. Instead, the purple light began to bleed out from the edges of the phone, crawling up my fingers like glowing, electrified ink.
The air in the room suddenly dropped to sub-zero. My misted breath swirled in the violet light, and then, the world simply... unraveled.
One second, I was sitting on my bed in Minokia; the next, the floor beneath me dissolved into a bottomless, oily abyss. I didn't fall—I was pulled. A silent, gravitational scream tore through the room as my physical form was stretched like wire. My apartment, the textbooks, the unwashed dishes, and the memory of Sofia's knock all vanished into a pinprick of white light that eventually blinked out.
I was in the Void.
There was no up or down. No air to breathe, yet I wasn't suffocating. It was a complete, pressurized blackness that felt like being buried alive in outer space. Then, the switch began. My mind couldn't comprehend the geometry of what was happening. It felt as if my soul was being threaded through a needle's eye. I felt my 16-year-old limbs—thin, soft, and scarred by the Minar—being stripped away like old clothes.
My consciousness was being poured into a new vessel. It was an agonizing, disjointed sensation, like my nerves were being rewired one by one. I felt a sudden, massive increase in weight. My bones grew denser, my shoulders broadened until the skin felt like it would snap, and a phantom beard sprouted across a jawline that wasn't mine. I tried to scream, but my voice was a deep, gravelly vibration that died in the vacuum of the black space.
*Syncing... 100%.*
The void shattered.
The silence was replaced by a deafening, wet *thud*. My face slammed into something cold, metallic, and smelling of iron. I tried to gasp, but my lungs hit a solid wall of steel. I wasn't wearing a t-shirt anymore. I was encased.
I was lying face-down in thick, freezing mud. My vision was restricted to a narrow, blurry horizontal slit—the breathing vent of a heavy visor. Every breath I took was a struggle; the leather straps of a breastplate were tightened so hard against my chest that it felt like a giant's hand was squeezing the life out of me. The armor was a monstrous weight, at least thirty kilograms of cold-forged plate that turned my every movement into a clanking, agonizing chore.
I managed to roll onto my side, the metal plates of my pauldrons grinding against each other with a screech that set my teeth on edge. I looked down at my hands. They were gone. In their place were heavy, scarred steel gauntlets, caked in a mixture of dark soil and fresh, steaming blood.
As my eyes adjusted to the dim, grey light of the battlefield, the true horror of the "Soul Roulette" settled in.
I wasn't in Minokia. I wasn't in the year 2526.
I was in a graveyard of flesh.
All around me, the earth had been churned into a red-black soup. I saw limbs—severed arms still clutching broken spears, legs still encased in greaves—scattered across the mud like discarded wood. A few feet away, a soldier's head lay tilted at an impossible angle, his eyes literally forced out of their sockets by the sheer pressure of a mace strike. They stared at me with a dull, milky emptiness.
The equipment of war was everywhere, half-buried in the dead. Jagged swords were driven through ribcages, their hilts vibrating slightly in the wind. Shattered shields, painted with faded crests I didn't recognize, acted as makeshift tombstones for the piles of bodies. The smell was the worst part—a sickening cocktail of emptied bowels, rusted iron, and the copper tang of a thousand open wounds.
I tried to push myself up, my new, 26-year-old muscles screaming under the weight of the plate armor. My gauntlet slipped on something soft. I looked down. I had placed my hand directly onto the chest of a fallen boy who looked no older than I had been five minutes ago.
His throat had been opened by a clean horizontal cut. His blood was still warm, seeping into the gaps of my armor.
I wasn't Rian the student anymore. I was in a world that had forgotten the meaning of mercy. And as a distant horn wailed through the mist to the North-West, I realized the switch was only the beginning of the nightmare.
I see nothing around me more than blood.