Blood dripped from the edge of Z's blade, a dozen bodies lay crumpled in the shadows, but the mission was complete. He adjusted the black mask covering half his face and turned toward the signal flare—his best friend had made it out.
Good. That was always the plan. One of them escapes first. The other follows.
Z sprinted toward the extraction point, heart steady, breath even. He had rehearsed every step and memorised every route. He and K had trained for this kind of operation since they were barely tall enough to hold a knife.
They were the only two left from their batch of recruits. Everyone else had died—some from the grueling tests, others in the field. It had always been him and K. Two ghosts. One mind. One mission.
So when the army pursuing him moved wrong—too fast, too synchronized and in the direction of the place he was hiding—Z only frowned.
He ducked behind a wall, eyes scanning. They are too many and they weren't supposed to catch up to him now, it was too soon. No time to be careless. But it wasn't fear that gripped him. It was curiosity. The kind that tasted like blood.
They were waiting for him.
"Trap," he muttered under his breath, sliding his knife back into its sheath. But it didn't matter. He had a contingency plan. Z always did.
He slipped a smoke pellet from his belt, ready to vanish into the dark—but then it hit him.
His knees buckled.
The smoke pellet fell from his fingers.
His body... it wouldn't move.
Z collapsed, fingers twitching uselessly. A burning, aching numbness spread through his limbs, like every bone in his body had turned to rubber. Like his skeleton had dissolved.
His breathing grew ragged.
No... no, this isn't panic. This is...
Recognition crashed into him like a bullet. Bone-softening powder.
He hadn't ingested anything today except—
The can of drink.
K had handed it to him with that usual crooked grin. "For luck," he'd said. "Hydrate or die, brother."
It had tasted... odd. He'd noticed. But he hadn't questioned it. Not from K. Not after years of fighting back-to-back, surviving hell together.
The first shot ripped into his shoulder.
Then another into his side.
Then they all opened fire.
Pain bloomed red-hot and searing, but it couldn't compete with the howl in his chest. Not pain. Rage.
Why?
He collapsed, blood soaking into the dirt beneath him, vision blurring as boots circled his broken body. The world dimmed, but that question screamed louder than the gunfire still echoing in his mind.
Why did K betray me?
Then—darkness.
____________________
For what felt like an eternity, Z wandered through a dark tunnel with no end in sight. At first, he had run—desperate, determined, hopeful that if he just kept going fast enough, he would find the exit.
But no matter how long or how far he ran, the darkness swallowed him whole, stretching endlessly in every direction. His breath would catch in his throat, his legs would burn, but the tunnel never changed. No light, no warmth. Just him and the oppressive, silent void.
Eventually, the desperation wore away, scraped off piece by piece by hopelessness. He stopped running. His legs carried him forward in a sluggish, automatic march. There was no more fight in him, only numb acceptance.
He couldn't tell how long he walked. Days? Months? Years? Time had no meaning in the dark. All he knew was that he had stopped hoping for an end. He was just a shadow moving in the void, existing without purpose.
But then, one day—if it could even be called that—a speck of light flickered in the distance. Faint. Fearing that his mind was tricking him, z blinked. It was still there. His heart stuttered. He stared at the glimmer, as if afraid it would vanish. And then, as if pulled by some instinctual force he could not name, he ran.
The darkness fought him. His limbs screamed with fatigue. His body didn't remember how to move so fast anymore. But his soul—whatever was left of it—dragged him forward. Toward the light. Toward something. Toward hope.
And then—
A rush of sensation.
Beeping.
The sterile scent of antiseptic.
Z gasped—no, he couldn't gasp, not yet, but something in him stirred. Light pierced his vision like knives as he cracked his eyes open for the first time in what felt like centuries. Shapes formed above him—white ceiling tiles, dull fluorescent lights, and to the side, a figure dressed in a nurse's uniform checking an IV drip.
His body felt like stone. Heavy, sluggish, foreign. He tried to move, to speak, to let the nurse know he was awake—but his tongue wouldn't cooperate, and his vocal cords failed him. It wasn't until the nurse turned to check on him that her eyes widened.
"Oh my goodness—you're awake!" she exclaimed, nearly dropping the clipboard in her hands. "Wait here—I'll get the doctor!"
Z watched, amused and mildly annoyed, as she rushed out the door like a whirlwind. "Wait here? he thought with dry sarcasm. As if I could just hop out of bed and take a walk" Z thought to himself.
He lay there, still and silent, taking in his surroundings. The room was large, private, and immaculately clean. It looked like a VIP suite in a high-end hospital—far more luxurious than any medical room he'd ever been in before. Strange. This didn't feel like one of the organization's recovery rooms. The decor, the lighting, even the layout felt foreign. Where was he?
Z's mind buzzed with questions. He remembered the gunfire. Too many shooters. Too many bullets. The overwhelming certainty that he wouldn't make it out. And yet—here he was. Alive. Somehow.
He didn't dwell too long on the impossible details. All he knew was that he'd made it back. He'd escaped the tunnel. He was awake. That was all that mattered now.
I'm not going back there, he told himself. Not ever.
Just as the thought crossed his mind, the door opened again. The nurse returned, accompanied by a middle-aged man in a white lab coat, who walked in with a warm smile on his face.
"Well, well," the man said cheerfully, striding over to the bed. "I see you're finally awake. You've been in a coma for a year now, Mr. Axel."
Z blinked.
Mr. Axel?
"I can see your eyelids moving," the doctor continued, clearly pleased. "That's a good sign. You should be able to talk now—go ahead and try."
Z swallowed. It felt like dragging sandpaper down his throat, but he managed to croak out a single word. "Yes."
The doctor's smile widened. "Excellent. It's a miracle you survived. We'll need to run a few tests, of course, just to make sure you're truly out of the woods, but this is very promising, Mr. Axel."
There it was again. That name. Mr. Axel.
Z frowned inwardly. That wasn't his name. Not even close.
He opened his mouth to ask about it, but before he could form the words, something happened. A sharp, stabbing pain surged through his skull, and then—
Memories. But not his.
Flashes of unfamiliar faces, places he'd never been, voices he didn't recognize. Emotions that didn't belong to him tangled with his own like wild vines. A life he had never lived poured into him like water through a broken dam.
His eyes widened in horror and confusion. "Mirror," he whispered. The sound barely made it past his cracked lips.
The doctor leaned in. "What's that? I didn't quite catch that."
Z's heart pounded. Panic set in. He needed to see. He needed to know. Mustering every ounce of strength he had, he forced his lungs to cooperate, gritted his teeth, and shouted, "Give me a goddamn mirror!"
Both the nurse and the doctor froze in surprise. The nurse instinctively reached for the emergency button before the doctor raised a hand to stop her.
"It's okay," the doctor said calmly. "He's just disoriented."
Then he turned back to Z, a hint of curiosity flickering in his eyes.
"All right, Mr. Axel. We'll get you a mirror. Just try to stay calm."
As the nurse hurried off, Z lay there, heart racing, dread crawling under his skin. "Who the hell is Axel?" he thought. "And worse—why do I remember being him? God please don't let it be what I am thinking".
The nurse returned moments later, her shoes clicking softly against the sterile floor as she carried a rectangular mirror in both hands. Z watched her approach with growing dread twisting in his gut. She held the mirror up gently, angling it toward his face.
Z stared.
His breath caught in his throat.
The face staring back at him—pale, elegant, and unfamiliar—mirrored his every movement. When he tried to raise a trembling hand toward his face, the reflection did the same. His fingers brushed against unfamiliar skin—smooth, soft, nothing like the rugged texture he remembered. A deep, suffocating silence filled the room. His heart pounded against his ribs like a war drum.
"This face… it's not mine".
His eyes widened with realization. His skin paled further, and a cold shiver crept down his spine.
"Oh my God," he thought. "I've really reincarnated… into someone else's body."
The horror of it settled into his bones like ice. His own identity—the face he'd known since childhood, the face he'd looked at in mirrors before every mission—was gone. Erased. What stared back at him was someone else's image… delicate, androgynous, almost too pretty. It was like waking up in a stranger's skin.
He barely noticed the doctor speaking again, giving some recovery plan in a calm, but soft tone. None of it registered. Words blurred together, sounding like static in Z's ears. When the doctor and nurse finally left, the room fell into a haunting silence.
Z stared at the ceiling, his mind a storm of disbelief.
He hadn't even heard the door close.
His entire world had been turned upside down, and all he could do was lie in a hospital bed, trapped in this unfamiliar body with machines quietly beeping around him. If he had the strength, he would've punched a hole in the wall—or at least broken the damn mirror.
And then the cold truth slammed into him like a sledgehammer: "I must have died."
That mission… all those bullets...
He gritted his teeth as the memory flashed in his mind—gunfire, chaos, the searing pain of betrayal. K. The name exploded like a landmine in his chest.
"K betrayed me. That snake" he thought.
Z's jaw clenched. The rage boiled beneath his skin like magma, threatening to spill over. If it hadn't been for K's betrayal, he would still be alive. He wouldn't be lying in some strange hospital, in a stranger's body, trying to remember how to breathe.
He looked back at the mirror, still resting on the nearby table, and sneered at the reflection. Slender neck, delicate collarbones, soft lips—he looked like a damn twink.
"What kind of sick joke is this? he thought bitterly. A manly bastard like me… reincarnated into this porcelain doll's body?".
To Z, who had always prided himself on his sharp jawline, his muscular build, and his lethal swagger, this was nothing short of an insult from the universe. It was an irony so cruel even he couldn't help but chuckle darkly under his breath.
Of all bodies… I got this one.
He lay still for a while, letting the storm inside him settle. Eventually, the reality began to weigh in.
This was his body now.
Whether he liked it or not, he was alive, and he wasn't going back to that hellish tunnel. No way. He'd rather rot in this twink's body for a hundred years than walk that endless void for even a second longer.
Slowly, he turned his focus inward. The rush of memories he'd initially received—blurry images, muffled voices, fleeting emotions—he'd shoved them aside in the chaos of realization. But now, he sifted through them carefully, organizing fragments like pieces of a puzzle. And Z couldn't help but curl his lips into a sneer.
The original owner's name was Axel. A boy's band member and his life was really pitiful but at the same time foolish.