A painful headache shot through his nerves.
Reynolds clenched his head in anguish, his arms shaking as the pain pulsed through every one of his nerves and veins.
"Agh—" He screamed, "It hurts… It hurts too much…" His voice trailed off.
It wasn't a sharp stab. Not a clean slice either. It was endlessly more painful, a crushing, suffocating pressure tearing through his chest like a fist made of fire and cold and static all at once.
Reynolds sucked in a breath, or at least he tried to, but the air caught in his throat, ragged and foreign.
His lungs didn't respond the way he expected. His body didn't move the way it should.
He fell to the ground, his knees hit stone, the sharp pieces of loose gravel digging into his skin, but that little scratch didn't hurt one bit compared to the pain he was experiencing.
A cathedral bell rang far in the distance.
Dong—
Dong—
He opened his eyes, his vision swarmed with black streaks, fragments of his office collapsing inward, collapsing into nothing.
He dragged in another breath. This time, it burned.
He blinked hard.
Once.
Twice.
The darkness finally peeled back… He found himself staring at a cathedral ceiling soaring far above him, broken arches, cracked stone ribs, and a chandelier that hung crookedly by a few desperate chains.
"What…" The word scraped out strange, too rough, too unfamiliar. Not his voice.
He pressed a hand against the floor to steady himself.
Stone. Cold. Textured with dust and something else, sticky, drying.
He looked down.
And froze.
Blood.
A lot of it.
A pool of red, dark, thick patches smeared across the ground around him, some fresh enough to gleam under the thin moonlight leaking through shattered stained glass.
His breath quickened. His pulse slammed against the inside of his skull.
Then he saw the corpse.
A young man lay sprawled just inches away, limbs limp, head turned at an unnatural angle, neck broken.
His clothes, some sort of dark coat, torn and soaked through by the bloodied mess on the floor, it was ripped open at the chest, revealing a gaping wound where something had blown a hole clean through him.
Reynolds jerked back instinctively, the movement too sudden for the body he was in. Pain flared up in his ribs, sharp and unfamiliar. He hissed, hands shaking.
"What the hell?"
He looked down at himself.
The coat he wore wasn't his own. Black fabric clung to him, damp with blood. A matching wound marred his chest, raw, ragged, ugly. The edges were crusted with dried red and shredded flesh. No hospital stitching. No bandages. No way he should be alive.
Except he was.
Barely.
His stomach twisted.
This wasn't his body.
This wasn't his chest, his wound, or his blood.
Cold reality washed over him in a slow, crushing wave. Every nerve in him screamed denial, but the facts sat heavy and immovable.
He wasn't in himself anymore.
"Did I… get transmigrated?" He muttered in a small voice, broken by the lack of air.
His hands trembled uncontrollably as he pressed them to the floor, pushing himself upright despite the agony radiating from the wound.
The cathedral spun for a moment, the walls curving in strange, slow arcs, but he forced himself still.
Slowly, the wound in his chest started hurting less; it was almost like his heart was healing. With every beat, it became stronger, louder, healthier.
Badump.
Badump.
But still, He needed something, anything, to ground him.
His gaze fell to the broken vase lying beside one of the corpses. A piece of curved glass, still intact despite its fall, caught a sliver of moonlight.
Reynolds reached for it. His fingers felt wrong, longer, slimmer, colder, but he wrapped them around the shard and lifted it close to his face.
The reflection staring back at him was a stranger.
White hair, disheveled and damp with sweat.
Pale skin, almost ghostly under the moonlight.
Eyes that looked too sharp, too bright, with red pupils that had the same colour as the blood still dripping from the corners of his coat.
"That's… not me," Reynolds whispered, the voice that came back young yet deep, trembling despite every effort to control it.
It felt ridiculous to say out loud, but hearing it helped something inside him click, even if the pieces still refused to form anything sensible.
This wasn't a hallucination. Not a nightmare from exhaustion. This was real in a way that scared him more than he wanted to admit.
He slowly lowered the glass shard.
His hands kept shaking.
He noticed the other bodies only after his breathing steadied enough for him to look away.
Three… no, four others lay scattered across the cathedral floor.
Some slumped against pillars, others fell mid-step. All dressed in gothic clothing similar to the one he currently wore. All silent. All unmoving.
All dead.
A cold shiver crawled up his spine.
His first reaction was the most human thing he could think to do… Fear. He stumbled backwards, landing on his butt.
This was the primal, instinctive terror that a person would face when stripped raw. His chest tightened, not from the wound, but from the shock of it all.
He tried to swallow, but his throat felt tight, the saliva in his throat clogged as he choked.
He shouldn't be here.
He shouldn't be among corpses.
He shouldn't inhabit one.
He shouldn't feel blood cooling on his skin that wasn't his.
His heart hammered, frantic in a body that didn't feel like it belonged to him.
He forced himself to breathe, slow, shallow, anything to keep the rising panic from smothering him completely. His mind scrambled for logic, reason, explanation.
But nothing fit.
The cathedral was unfamiliar. The clothes were unfamiliar. The wound was impossible. Nobody should have a gun in his country, unless he wasn't in his country, that was the only explanation… But how did he get here?
His thoughts boomed in the emptiness louder than ever before, echoing in his mind like they were trapped in an eternal prison.
The silence, absolute and consuming, pressed on him from all sides.
The stained glass along the walls was shattered inward, not outward, as if something had exploded inside the cathedral with enough force to tear through ancient windows. The moon outside was too large, too red, the light too strange to be natural.
The air smelled of burnt gunpowder.
Smoke and blood.
He scanned the bodies again, forcing himself to look, to take it in, because pretending wouldn't get him anywhere. The nearest corpse's face was pale, eyes open in a frozen expression of shock. A pistol lay beneath his limp hand, the metal reflecting faint red light.
Reynolds clenched his jaw, trying to keep the tremor out of it.
He'd never seen a dead body before today.
And now he was surrounded by them.
He closed his eyes for a moment, sucking in a shaky breath, the unnerving smell of blood causing an uproar of puke building up in his stomach.
He felt every beat of his heart, the unnatural rhythm, the weight of the wound, the thin thread keeping this stolen body conscious.
He needed to think.
But all he could manage was a desperate attempt to piece together the last thing he remembered.
The office.
The dark fog swallowing the city.
The lamp flickering.
The world bending.
The vase falling.
And then…
This.
His hands curled into fists.
He wasn't dreaming.
And he wasn't waking up from this.
Reynolds opened his eyes again. The panic didn't vanish, but it settled into something sharp and manageable, fear still, but the kind he could at least breathe around.
He pushed himself to stand, gritting his teeth as the movement pulled at the wound.
The room tilted, but he forced his balance to hold.
He needed answers.
He needed to figure out who this body belonged to.
Why was he in it?
What happened in this cathedral?
Where the hell was he now?
All he had was an endless barrage of questions and nobody to answer.
He swallowed hard, gaze drifting back to the corpse nearest him. The dead man's coat had an insignia stitched at the shoulder, an unfamiliar emblem of twisted thorns wrapped around a blade.
Reynolds didn't recognize it.
He didn't recognize anything.
A quiet, shaking breath escaped him.
He turned toward the cathedral's entrance, a set of massive wooden doors cracked open, moonlight and mist seeping through. Each beam of pale light cut across the stone floor like a path leading out.
Reynolds didn't know what waited on the other side.
But he knew he couldn't stay here, in a room full of dead strangers, wearing the body of a young man who should be among them.
He took his first step toward the doors.
It hurt.
It scared him.
But he moved anyway.
Because whatever nightmare he'd fallen into, standing still wouldn't save him.
And survival was the only thing he understood right now.