Silence stretched across the void.
In the infinite stillness of space, countless meteorite fragments drifted through a haze of violet light. Time itself seemed frozen here, all things locked in an eternal, soundless pause.
And there, suspended among the stones, floated a dark-haired girl.
A colossal ring of light blazed into existence before her. At its center yawned a diamond-shaped rift, like the pupil of some vast eye, radiating prismatic brilliance woven from pure Frequency. A god's gaze, cast downward.
From within it, another girl appeared.
Starlight clung to her long black hair. She wore white, and when her crimson eyes opened, twin golden halos turned slowly behind her, solemn and unhurried. There was something divine about her, something that belonged to a higher order of existence entirely.
She gathered a sphere of light between her palms and pressed it into the dark-haired girl's chest, her eyes heavy with sorrow. A scar-like sigil surfaced on the back of the girl's hand.
"It is time for you to set out once more."
She pushed the girl away, sending her plummeting into a surging tide below. Beneath that tide lay a world built from Frequency itself.
Its name was Solaris-3.
"First Instance: Time. Objective complete. Handing off to Second Instance: Space. Concluding... hm?"
The divine girl had finished her task and was preparing to leave, to continue with other duties, when a figure materialized out of nothing in the void before her. Her eyes widened.
"What? How... there's another version of her? A different one? Well... no matter. Down you go too."
After a moment's hesitation, she repeated the process. This time she pressed the light into the chest of this new arrival, a boy, and shoved him into the tide as well, down into the world called Solaris-3.
...
"Ugh! Cough... cough?!"
Where am I? This feeling... drowning?
His mind hadn't fully surfaced, but the suffocating pressure and the wet were already crushing in. He grimaced, arms cutting instinctively through the water around him, and broke through to the surface within seconds.
What greeted him stole the breath he'd only just recovered.
The world hung upside down above his head. Mountains, forests, entire cities, all of it inverted against the sky, suspended where clouds should have been.
Or maybe it wasn't the world that was inverted.
Maybe it was him, and the ocean he floated in.
This sea defied every law of gravity he knew. It was an ocean, yet it occupied the sky, dreamlike and impossible.
Which raised an immediate problem.
How exactly am I supposed to get down from here?
As a decidedly non-flying "ordinary person," waking up adrift in the Etheric Sea with an entire world looming overhead was less than ideal. One wrong move and he'd plummet straight into... well, a very colorful collection of bruises. At minimum.
Then a butterfly appeared.
It was impossibly blue, impossibly beautiful, and it had no business being this high in the sky. It drifted to a stop in front of him, and from it came a voice, gentle beyond measure.
"Don't worry. I'm here. I will send you to a place that has not yet run aground... Targets confirmed. Initiating... transfer."
"Hm? Targets... there's more than one?"
Unlike the divine girl who commanded Time, this blue butterfly wielded the Authority of Space. It alighted on his shoulder, and light erupted from its wings.
Before he could process what "targets" meant, he vanished from the Etheric Sea entirely.
...
Huanglong, Jinzhou. Somewhere in the Gorges of Spirits.
Vertigo flooded his skull. It felt like drowning followed immediately by a roller coaster, which was more or less what had happened. Even through the haze, though, two voices reached him, close and clear.
"...symptoms of drowning. Strange. How do you drown on dry land? No external injuries... breathing and heartbeat are both stable."
"They should wake up soon, right? But how'd they end up passed out in a place like this? Also... they look so alike. Like, really alike."
"Mm. They do... oh, this one's awake!"
His eyes opened to the face of a beautiful girl with long black hair. Something soft cradled the back of his head. He registered, with dawning awareness, that it was her thigh beneath a layer of dark stockings.
"Oh, Yangyang, look! The one on my side's waking up too!"
He turned his head slightly. Another girl stood nearby, her crimson hair woven into twin braids. Where the girl giving him a lap pillow radiated quiet warmth, this one practically vibrated with energy.
"Who are you two?" they said in unison.
He shook his head, trying to clear it, and looked between them. Everything had happened so fast his brain was still spinning, thoughts refusing to line up properly. And yet, looking at these two girls, a strange sense of familiarity tugged at him.
He'd seen them somewhere before. A game, maybe?
"My name is Yangyang, and this is Chixia. You're in the outskirts of Jinzhou, a city under Huanglong's jurisdiction. This area is called the Gorges of Spirits."
"...Gorges of Spirits? Jinzhou? Huanglong? Doesn't ring a bell."
"Does the country even have places like this? Where the hell did I end up?"
"Um, well, the important thing is you're both okay. This area is dangerous, Tacet Discords have been spotted nearby. You're lucky you didn't run into any."
"Tacet Discords? What are those..." they said in unison again.
About a minute had passed since he'd come to. The dizziness was fading, his body no longer ached, and everything more or less felt functional again. But that was precisely why something odd jumped out at him.
From the very start, these two girls had been saying "you two" and "they." And just now, when he'd spoken, another voice had said the exact same words at the exact same time. He only had one mouth. So where had the echo come from?
He snapped his head ninety degrees to the side.
Right next to him sat a girl with black hair and golden eyes, staring back with an expression of identical shock. Forget just looking alike. They had the same raised eyebrow, the same startled intake of breath, down to the exact same timing.
Yangyang and Chixia blinked. Chixia couldn't help herself. "Yangyang, these two seriously look so alike."
"Mm. They do. Even their expressions and words are the same."
Though the two Rovers had only discovered each other's existence three seconds ago, Yangyang and Chixia had been watching them from the start, and the conclusion was obvious: these two were closely connected.
The same ink-black hair, cropped short. The same brilliant golden eyes, luminous as cat's-eye stone. Even their bearing was identical. Strip away the difference in sex, and they might as well have been stamped from the same mold.
From the moment they'd laid eyes on both of them, Yangyang and Chixia had already formed their hypothesis.
Twins. They had to be twins.
And yet...
"Who are you?!" they both snapped, in perfect unison.
The reaction was a mirror. Wariness, instant and sharp. Both Rovers sprang to their feet, putting distance between them. A pitch-black sword materialized in each of their right hands, conjured from the dark scar-like marks on the backs of their hands, as if by sleight of hand.
Left hands seized scabbards. Right hands gripped hilts, blades drawn three inches free. They dropped low, weight shifting forward, poised to strike.
And the unnerving part wasn't just the identical combat stances, reflections of each other down to the millimeter. It was that even the furrow of their brows and the tight press of their lips matched perfectly.
Yangyang: "???"
Chixia: "???"
Neither girl had managed to react in time, and it wasn't because they were slow. Both were skilled fighters in their own right. But the two Rovers had moved fast, combat-ready in the span of a blink.
"Th-that was so fast. I didn't even see them move."
"Uh... aren't you two twins?"
"...We're twins?" they said together, caught off guard.
The girl pressed a hand to her forehead, brow furrowed tight. A realization hit her. She couldn't remember anything. Not a single thing, not even her own name.
And looking around, the only person who seemed to have any connection to her was this boy who wore her same face. The tension in her grip on the sword loosened, just a fraction.
"I... can't remember anything. Are you... really my twin? My... family?" she asked, hesitant.
Her words startled Yangyang and Chixia both.
"You don't remember anything? You don't know why you're here, or even who you are?"
"...No."
"Baizhi never said anything about side effects like this when they woke up."
While the two girls scrambled for answers, the boy stood frozen, mouth slightly open, mind gone blank. Because his memory was mostly intact. He remembered almost everything.
My head's a mess. Let me think... I finished my homework after getting home on break, figured I'd log in and burn through my stamina in Wuthering Waves, and... wait. Wuthering Waves. I... did I just transmigrate?!
His gaze snapped to the three girls before him. Yangyang. Chixia. And the amnesiac dark-haired girl. He sucked in a sharp breath.
His brain had finished rebooting. The past clicked into place piece by piece. School, home, the game, how he'd gotten here. All of it came flooding back. Everything except his own name. That one detail sat just out of reach, like a word stuck on the tip of his tongue.
But the rest was more than enough. He knew exactly where he was.
He was inside Wuthering Waves.
And he'd become a Rover.
No, to be precise, I became the male Rover. The female Rover is standing right in front of me. Plus Yangyang and Chixia... yeah, no wonder she looked familiar at first glance. I knew she'd be great at writing letters.
He cycled through several deep breaths, steadying himself.
What he felt defied easy description. Excitement, unease, and a thrill all tangled together, because being a player who'd transmigrated into a game he loved? It was the kind of thing that made you wonder if you were still dreaming.
"Nope. Not a dream. This is real."
He stared at the starter weapon in his hand, the Originite: Type II. Its dark blade mirrored his face back at him, and his grip tightened. Those golden eyes burned a little brighter.
As a side note, the male Rover looked exactly the same as he had before transmigrating, because Kuro Games had apparently spent three years studying his likeness to design the male protagonist. What were the odds?
The deal was just to be a reference model. Nobody said anything about actually getting isekai'd into the game and becoming Rover. But hey, I'm here now, so the future is mine to decide. No... wait.
Ours.
His gaze found her.
And hers found him at the same moment.
Two Rovers. One world.
The Wuthering Waves begin.