Four days.
That was how long it had been since he woke up in this unfamiliar world, inside a borrowed body carrying a name that wasn't truly his.
Hidesuke Shinohara.
A name he'd only ever heard spoken aloud by one person. A name that felt worn down, barely held together by leftover coding and sympathy points.
For four days, he had stared at the sterile ceiling as it faded from one artificial shade to another, watching light try and fail to feel like sunlight.
The air in the room smelled of antiseptic and something older—like memory rot.
He listened to his own breath echo back at him, soft and hollow.
For four days, he had tried not to think of Lucy. But grief didn't work that way.
She still slipped into his thoughts when the room got too quiet. He saw her tail loop gently around his wrist when she wanted comfort but didn't want to beg for it. He imagined the soft click of her claws on the bathroom tiles, the way she would follow him silently from room to room.
The ache that came with remembering her had dulled, but not because it hurt any less. He was simply growing used to carrying it. It had settled inside him like scar tissue — tender, but familiar.
His days passed like a prewritten script with no variation.
Wake up. Eat something flavorless. Hobble around with assistance from a machine that wheezed softly at his side. Return to bed. Spend too long studying the other patients. Pretend to sleep. Repeat.
He wasn't trying to recover. He was just existing.
Surviving.
It seemed like this body—Hidesuke's body—was built for that. Regeneration, after all, came standard in most underappreciated RPG characters. He shouldn't have been surprised.
Today had followed the same pattern, except for one small shift.
The ache in his ribs had faded to a distant murmur. Just a dull signal from somewhere under the skin. The pain in his leg had gone too, replaced by something close to normal function. His steps were no longer tentative. He wasn't limping anymore.
He hadn't needed crutches since the day before. Just a guiding hand from the nurse whose head swiveled on a ball-jointed socket with a mechanical softness that made the skin on his arms crawl.
Now, he sat up slightly in bed, propped against a responsive hospital pillow that adjusted its temperature based on his vitals.
Beside him on the tray was what passed for breakfast: a bowl of pale, glossy gelatin that shimmered like it was part dessert and part data core.
It was supposed to taste like custard. Maybe. He didn't care enough to confirm.
He hadn't touched it. He rarely did.
Because his attention was elsewhere again — floating, wandering, tracking back to the same place it always landed.
That voice.
The one that greeted him seconds after he woke up. Smooth, artificial, impossibly calm. It had spoken of "bio-memory syncing" and "sensory alignment" like they were standard onboarding procedures.
He hadn't heard it since that day. But the sense of it remained, lodged somewhere deep beneath his skin.
A vibration.
A pulse.
Something within him still tingled, quiet but constant, like pressure building against a wall only he could feel.
Whatever it was, it hadn't gone.
It was still watching. Or waiting. Or maybe both.
He exhaled slowly, his breath turning faintly visible in the chilled blue air of the room.
His gaze wandered toward the other beds. Another habit he'd picked up: observation disguised as boredom.
Most of them looked human at first glance. But only at first.
One girl had translucent skin that glowed faintly like a fluorescent glass tube. Her veins pulsed with color beneath the surface, forming a delicate web of circuitry across her arms.
A man in the farthest bed had three pupils in each eye, blinking out of sync. Occasionally, his jaw would pop open at the wrong angle, as if his bones refused to behave like they belonged in a body.
Another patient didn't seem to lie on his bed so much as hover above it, suspended in midair like a balloon tethered by nothing more than suggestion.
None of them spoke to him.
But they looked.
Some glanced at him curiously, their eyes full of something unreadable. Others didn't bother hiding their disdain. Their gazes landed on him like a judgment—then slid away in disinterest.
Or worse.
Contempt.
He recognized that expression. He had seen it in his old life too. The look people gave when they had already decided you weren't worth the effort. When your existence was more nuisance than novelty.
So he found himself wondering again.
Who had Hidesuke been here, before all this?
Before he became Hidesuke.
A minor character in a game world. A throwaway asset. Someone so invisible that even the players barely remembered his name unless they were trying to speedrun a side quest.
But now that he was trapped behind those eyes, he saw it differently.
The way people stared. The way they recoiled. The way they seemed to hold back whatever insult or question was rising behind their eyes.
They weren't reacting to him.
They were reacting to him.
Whoever Hidesuke had been in this world — he had left behind a reputation.
And judging by the looks on these strangers' faces, it wasn't a good one.
He wasn't just wearing someone else's body.
He was dragging that person's entire legacy behind him, whether he understood it or not. And that was terrifying in a way no monster or boss fight could ever be.
Because this wasn't just a game anymore.
It was personal.
And everyone else knew more about him than he did.
'But seriously, has the guy always been such a loser?'
Even in Arc Zenith's lore archive, he barely warranted a footnote. No spotlight missions. No curated cosmetics. Just a name buried under NPC dialogue and system lore nobody read unless they were farming achievements.
Nathan had pitied him once.
And now he was him.
What a cosmic joke.
He clenched his jaw as he returned a few of their stares — blank, unreadable, undaunted. Let them wonder whether the forgotten trash lingering on the edge of their world had grown teeth.
He almost hoped they'd come closer. He was just curious enough to see what would happen if they did.
But then—his gaze caught movement.
Subtle. Barely there.
The patient beside him.
The boy looked like something out of a painting no one had the skill to finish. Ethereal. Still.
His skin was the color of new snow under a clear sky, hair long and silver-white, draping down his back like silk under starlight. His lashes curled soft and frosted against porcelain cheeks, too delicate to belong to anything ordinary.
His eyes, when they opened, were the opposite of gentle. Glacial blue, so piercing they looked like they could cut through lies.
Until now, the boy had barely stirred. Quiet as stone. But then he lifted his hand and tapped his wrist once.
And the air changed.
A screen blinked into existence above his arm — soft, translucent, flickering with coded light. It hovered like a living thing, swaying slightly as if catching a current only it could feel.
Not a phone. Not a tablet. It didn't even project.
It breathed.
And Hidesuke's breath caught.
He'd heard about this technology from Lily in passing, buried in quest lore or layered behind system menus.
She often yapped about personalized UI—interfaces hidden or encrypted, only viewable by the user or designated party members.
But hearing about something was not the same as watching it unfold three feet from your face.
The panel's contents shimmered, indecipherable from this angle. Lines of text and glyphs moved like fish under a frozen pond — visible, but just out of reach.
The boy made no move to explain. No reaction to Hidesuke's staring. He didn't even glance sideways.
It was… private. Intimate, even.
And suddenly, Hidesuke felt the strangest flutter low in his ribs.
Could he do that too?
He glanced at his own wrist. The silver band there pulsed faintly. Almost like it was waiting.
His hand hovered uncertainly.
Left wrist steady. Right index finger raised.
He hesitated.
There was something incredibly cringe about failing to access a UI you were technically born with.
But whatever. Worst case, he'd pretend he was stretching.
He tapped.
And the world folded open.
A soft shhhff whispered into the air as a panel bloomed into place above his wrist — cool, glowing, rippling like pale-blue silk in motion.
Glyphs shimmered. Text scrolled. Symbols rotated along curved axes. Some of it looked familiar, like health meters or squad tags. Other parts… weren't.
He blinked slowly.
"What the hell…"
He stared, spellbound, as data shifted beneath his gaze. The UI pulsed slightly at the corners, as if reacting to his focus.
It worked.
It actually worked.
Hidesuke Shinohara—forgotten character, digital footnote—had a functioning interface.
And somehow, that felt like power.
Not a lot. Not enough. But something.
In the top corner, a pulsing light stuttered once, a signal searching for deeper sync. It didn't connect, but it didn't vanish either.
He sat frozen, the screen's glow reflecting faintly in his eyes.
Things were slowly unraveling.
The boy beside him—mirror-quiet, snow-pale, unreadable—had shown him something he hadn't realized he could reach.
And now, there was no unseeing it. He had stepped forward. Now he could only brace for whatever was coming next and hope he didn't drown a second time.