Regina's POV
She was awake. She always was.
Sleep was a dull necessity, a thin veneer she tolerated rather than welcomed. The hour before sunrise was her kingdom—the liminal space when the world had not yet decided whether it would live or die, when every whisper carried weight, and the silence smelled like possibility.
This morning, she perched on the edge of her balcony, her robe pooling around her like spilled ink. Her fingers traced the smooth stone railing absently, fingertips tasting the cold grit that lingered there from frost and night air. She inhaled sharply. The courtyard below already thrummed with life, the mist of breath from cadets drifting up like smoke from a cold fire.
Four bells.
The air was sharp and clean, cutting into her lungs with icy precision, yet the cadets did not flinch. Boys and girls, clad in simple training tunics and boots, moved in staggered yet determined unison across the stone. Swords glimmered faintly in the torchlight, staves struck stone with hollow thuds that shook faint vibrations through the floorboards beneath her robe.
Their chant rose ragged, voices raw and cracking, stitched together like frayed thread becoming braid:
"Today, today, if I die today… I will die no more!"
The repetitions were sloppy at first, desperate, each voice on the verge of cracking—but repetition forged rhythm, rhythm bred precision, and soon the chant became a war drum in living form.
Her aunt's second-in-command stalked among them, boots sharp against stone, a whip-crack in the morning fog with every order:
"Squad! Fall in!"
The cadets scrambled, knees scraping, leather boots scraping stone. Shoulder to shoulder, breath puffing in white clouds.
"Squad! Attention!"
Spines snapped straight, heels slammed together, hands locked at sides. Movement rigid, ritualized.
"Stand at Ease!"
A single shift: left foot sliding out, hands clasping at the small of the back, thumbs crossed. Eyes forward, breath tight.
"Stand Easy!"
A flicker of humanity returned—a blink, a small sway, a subtle exhale. The smallest concession to mortality.
Regina did not blink. She observed.
These were not peasants clinging to pitchforks. Not militia scraping together order. This was design. Precision. Control. Too polished. Too patterned. Too perfect.
And then her eyes found the anomaly.
The maid.
Flailing. Gasping. One step behind, always. Boots streaked with yesterday's mud, hair damp and plastered to her face, tunic twisted in haphazard folds. She staggered but kept moving, each command a hammer blow against exhaustion.
"Squad—Attention!"
The maid lurched late, knees threatening to buckle.
"By numbers—Left Turn!"
"One!" Pivot.
"Two!" Stamp.
Clumsy. Weak. Yet she did not falter.
"About Turn—By numbers!"
"One!" Pivot.
"Two!" Stamp.
Arms trembling, chest heaving, sweat staining hairline and collar. She looked like a doll winding down, but still she obeyed.
When the final call rang—"Dismissed!"—cadets scattered toward mess halls and bunks, voices lifting in laughter and complaint, but the maid did not flee. She hauled herself toward the manor like a roach pressed under heel, eyes half-lidded, skin pale, body trembling.
Regina felt nothing. Not amusement, not scorn. Only a flicker of curiosity, like noticing a moth fluttering despite torn wings.
By six bells, the girl had dragged herself inside, eyes glazed, hands raw from training. She moved through the room silently, folding sheets, drawing curtains, laying out the day's clothes and boots with clockwork precision. Routine hammered until obedience was reflex. Pavlov would have been proud.
---
MC's POV
I ran on fumes.
Dragged from sleep at four bells for drills, nearly collapsing against stairwells in a fleeting moment of "rest," only to be yanked at six into maid duties. Breakfast? Optional. Sanity? Definitely optional. Now, still hollow and bone-tired, I was being yanked along on a "field trip."
Regina glided ahead as though her slippers had never touched dirt. I trailed like a drunk dog, half-stumbling, completely humiliated, chains of exhaustion clanking with each step.
We cut through the training yard. Cadets still drilled, eyes red, faces pale from pre-dawn exertion. Their commander's voice tore the morning open:
"Today, today, if I die today… I will die no more!"
The chant struck like a hammer against bone. Boots pounded the stone, echoing against sky and walls. And it hit me.
The cadence. The rigid "By numbers!" calls. The drills.
This wasn't some cobbled-together fantasy militia.
This was Earth. Military. Structured. Synchronized. Imported.
My blood ran icy.
"System," I whispered, voice trembling as I stumbled after Regina.
[Yes, Host?]
"That drill… you didn't give me that, right? Not one of your upgrades?"
[Correct. That level of tactical formatting was not part of your transferred knowledge.]
"…So it came from somewhere else?"
[Possibility: another Transmigrator. Probability: eighty-seven percent.]
I nearly tripped over my own boots.
Not the first. Not the only.
Someone else had been here. Long enough to reshape knights into Marines. Long enough to etch Earth into stone and bone. Long enough to survive—and thrive.
Which meant they were powerful. Dangerous.
"Perfect," I muttered, half to myself, half to the void. "I finally get reborn into a new world… and someone else already beat me to colonizing it."
Sunlight cut across my hands as I followed Regina toward the manor gates. Dust rose with every boot-strike, clinging to my skin, sticking to my sweat. The air smelled faintly of horse and straw, distant wood smoke from early-forged fires, and the acrid tang of stone warmed by first sun.
I tasted fear, exhaustion, and a thin layer of adrenaline. My borrowed body trembled with every motion, muscles unfamiliar, responding sluggishly. My wrists ached from yesterday's drill, and yet, step by step, I moved. Because failure was worse than exhaustion.
And through it all, that faint, crystalline pull inside my mind—the System—hummed quietly. Threads beneath my fingertips, faintly shimmering. Waiting. Alive. Ready.
Someone else had been here first. Someone else had shaped this world into order. And now, by some cruel twist, I had been dropped into their design, a pawn, a display, a student—or maybe a test.
And I would survive.
Because I had to.
Because survival was more than instinct. It was the first rule of playing a world not built for you.