Gio pushed himself out of the fetal curl, his back scraping against the cold stone of his corner. My corner. My corner. The territorial instinct felt strangely necessary, a tiny pocket of control in the wreckage.
The limbs that had twitched and jolted moments ago now responded like his own, though they felt alien—lighter, weaker, and utterly exhausted. The lethargy was profound, worse than after a full day of fieldwork and workout combined, partly due to the abysmal strength of Wyatt's body and partly due to whatever the hell he'd done.
Flashes of ethereal violence—a creature's lunge, a tearing sound that had no source—whipped across his mind. He forcefully shoved the images away.
Don't think. Don't remember.
Finally, the discipline held. Gio took inventory.
He was kneeling in a ruined ritual chamber. He knew, with absolute clarity, that his name was Giovanni, a wanderer. But the information coming through his senses, filtered through the body, screamed Wyatt.
NO! He was Gio. He had killed/absorbed? Wyatt.
Wyatt, a seventeen-year-old boy, had tried to perform a Familiar Summoning Ritual far above his capabilities. The boy's arrogance—his belief that his talent for memorization and above average intelligence made him superior—had convinced him he could bind a familiar and cast a modified ritual before he could even properly channel a simple spell. A fool of a boy.
A tear welled in Gio's eye, a painful, automatic reaction of grief for taking such a young life, not only taking it but destroying his soul. But a flash of hard anger instantly burned the moisture away. He despised Wyatt for forcing this choice, for making him kill a minor. Why couldn't he just neatly "wake up in the body of an already dead idiot," like all the other transmigration stories Gio had read in his downtime?
Then came the chilling realization, cutting through the anger: If Wyatt hadn't yanked his soul here, would he have simply dispersed into the vacuum? Would he have become one of the screaming colors?
A full-body tremor racked his frame, and the air seemed to thin. He fought a desperate, internal battle against the lingering memory of the folds—that agonizing, cold knowledge of un-logic. He couldn't breathe. He couldn't stop shaking.
A sound from outside the cornered room sliced through the panic. A low, deep bark.
The sound was a single, perfect note of external reality, slicing through the remnants of Gio's existential panic. It was nothing like Bear, but the sudden, primal trigger stopped his internal tremor cold.
Don't think. Don't remember. Move.
He pushed himself up, finding his footing on the smooth, cold stone. Wyatt's body was a miserable one: weak, starved, and listing slightly from the mana exhaustion, but intact. He was no longer a gaseous soul fighting dispersion; he was a fragile container.
The room—the ritual chamber—was indeed in a tower, but it was small, circular, and dominated by a single, narrow window cut high into the stone wall. The air was thick with smoke residue and the cloying scent of the coagulated blood in the bronze basin. The ritual circle, scratched into the floor, was a chaotic mess of dark lines and scorched earth.
He ignored the devastation and focused on the exit. His eyes immediately went to the tower's heavy wooden door, instinctively searching for defensive positions and possible ambushes. The door had no external locking mechanism, suggesting the room was either secured magically or simply forgotten.
Then, he heard the bark again, closer this time, accompanied by the faint, muffled sound of distant voices and the grinding of stone on stone. People were moving outside, and the sudden shift from night to day meant his hidden status was about to expire.
Gio rejected the door. It was a potential choke point, and he lacked the strength for a fight. Instead, his focus snapped to the single, high window.
He crossed the cramped room in three quick, clumsy strides, using the momentum to jump. His hands caught the cold stone sill, and he leveraged his weak, light frame upward, hauling himself into a crouched position. He pressed his face against the pane of thick, slightly distorted glass.
The light was a shock, washing away the shadows of the ritual chamber and the lingering geometries of his mind.
From the tower, the view was one of stark, professional excellence. A campus built of flawless white marble and dark gray granite, its connected towers forming a precise, geometric assembly. The architecture was engineered for efficiency: sharp, clean lines and minimal ornamentation that gave the campus the look of a prestigious Royal Technical Institute. It was a structure built for function, not comfort, and this calculated austerity resonated with Gio's mind.
The faint sense of déjà vu was a dull, persistent hum—a benign data point rather than a threat. He was cataloging the environment, absorbing the geometry of his new world.
Below, in the central courtyard, a handful of students were gathered. They were playing with an animal unlike any Gio had encountered.
The creature was magnificent: larger than a Golden Retriever, built with the lean strength of a predator. Its coat was a striking, distinct pattern of black and white stripes, like a zebra, and a powerful, dark lion-like mane framed its intelligent face.
The students, including a beast kin his new secondary fragmented memory faintly recognized as Rikkia Stone-Pelt, were teasing the animal with small pieces of food.
Arcturus Academy Wyatt's brain faintly supplied.