The humid air of the Papuan highlands felt heavy and thick, clinging to Wijaya Kusuma's skin like a wet blanket as he stood on the edge of a jagged limestone cliff.
Below him, the dense canopy of the rainforest stretched out like an endless sea of emerald, hiding both the beauty of the land and the many dangers that lurked within its shadows.
He took a slow, deliberate drag from his cigarette, watching the thin grey smoke drift upward before it was swallowed by the mist rolling off the mountain peaks.
In his other hand, he held the weight of a standard-issue Pindad SS4 assault rifle, a cold piece of metal that felt more like a burden than a tool of protection these days.
Just a few meters behind him, a medic was frantically wrapping bandages around the leg of a young private who had taken a stray round during their scramble toward the extraction point.
Wijaya looked away from the wounded boy, feeling a familiar bitterness settle in his chest as he thought about the mission that had brought them to this godforsaken ridge.
They were supposed to be scouting a location for a new Forward Operating Base, yet it felt like they were just playing a bloody game of hide-and-seek with no clear objective in sight.
He had never been a fan of this long-standing conflict, which seemed to drag on through the decades without any sign of a meaningful resolution or a peaceful end.
It felt as though the government back in Jakarta was trapped in a repetitive cycle, always choosing the most conservative and short-sighted paths to address a problem that required actual vision.
Every time they made a step forward, the whispering influence of foreign powers and international interests seemed to pull them two steps back into the mud.
Wijaya flicked the ash from his cigarette and sighed, thinking about the politicians and heads of state who made life-and-death decisions from the comfort of their air-conditioned offices.
Their questionable choices trickled down to the mud and the blood, eroding the fragile trust that the common people once had in the institutions meant to protect them.
There was a time, back when he was a young and idealistic cadet at the military academy, when Wijaya truly believed he could be the one to change the course of history.
He used to stay up late in the barracks, whispering to his friends about how he would one day become the president and restore the nation to its legendary former glory.
In those dreams, Indonesia was not a country struggling with internal strife or external debt, but a dominant empire that commanded respect on the global stage.
But as the years passed and the reality of the service wore him down, those grand ambitions began to feel like the foolish fantasies of a child who didn't understand how the world worked.
Now, he was just a lieutenant with tired eyes and a growing sense of cynicism, trying to keep his squad alive in a jungle that wanted to swallow them whole.
"Lieutenant, the transport is five minutes out and we need to move the casualty now!" his sergeant shouted over the low hum of the wind.
Wijaya took one last deep pull of his cigarette, crushed the glowing ember under his boot, and turned his back on the vast landscape of the Papua highlands.
He began to walk toward the waiting convoy of armored vehicles, his mind already shifting to the logistics of the extraction and the report he would have to write later.
He didn't even hear the first whistle of the incoming shells, because the speed of modern artillery often outruns the sound it makes as it tears through the sky.
Then it happened.
BOOOM!!!
The world suddenly turned into a blinding flash of white heat and a roar so loud that it felt like his very soul was being shaken out of his physical body.
The ground beneath his feet vanished, replaced by a violent pressure that tossed him into the air like a piece of paper caught in a localized hurricane.
There was no time to feel pain or fear, only a strange and fleeting sensation of weightlessness as his consciousness began to shatter into a thousand different pieces.
Everything went black, and for a moment that felt like an eternity, Wijaya Kusuma simply ceased to exist in the world of the living.
-
When his senses slowly began to return, the first thing he noticed was that the air no longer smelled of cordite, burning diesel, and damp tropical soil.
Instead, the air was filled with the pungent scent of clove cigarettes, horse manure, and the salty breeze of a nearby harbor.
His eyes snapped open, and he found himself staring up at a high ceiling made of dark teak wood, with a slow-moving wooden decorations moving lazily above him.
He tried to sit up, but his limbs felt heavy and uncoordinated, as if he were trying to move through a vat of thick, warm syrup.
As he looked down at his hands, he realized with a jolt of pure shock that they were not the calloused, scarred hands of a thirty-five-year-old soldier.
These hands were smooth and youthful, belonging to a man who couldn't have been older than twenty, and he was dressed in a simple sarong and a white cotton shirt.
He scrambled out of the low wooden bed and stumbled toward a tarnished silver mirror hanging on the lime-washed wall of the small, cramped room.
The face staring back at him was his own when he was in his prime, yet it was remarkably younger, devoid of the lines of stress and the small scar on his chin from a training accident.
He walked toward the open window and looked out, gasping as he saw a street filled with horse-drawn carriages and men wearing traditional blangkon headwraps or Dutch-style pith helmets.
The signs on the shops across the dusty road were written in a mix of old Malay and Dutch, advertising goods like colonial spices and European textiles.
"This is not Papua," he whispered to himself,
His voice sounding higher and clearer than the raspy tone he had grown used to over the years.
He realized with a sinking feeling in his stomach that he was in the Dutch East Indies, likely in the early twentieth century, during the height of colonial rule.
Just as he was about to panic, a translucent blue screen shimmered into existence right in front of his eyes, floating in the air like a ghost.
[ Military System Initialized ]
[ User: Wijaya Kusuma ]
[ Tier: 1 - 1936 ]
[ Rank: Recruit ]
[ Map ]
[ Summon ]
[ Help ]
Wijaya blinked, reaching out a hand to touch the screen, but his fingers simply passed through the light as if it were nothing more than a trick of the mind.
Below the status text, he saw a menu labeled [Summon].
It has various other sub-menu, including [Weapon]. When he focused his thoughts on it, a long list of historical weaponry appeared before him.
He could see everything from the pistols he used to trained with in his previous life to a legendary heavy machine guns that shouldn't exist for another twenty years.
He focused on the entry for a [Soldier], and suddenly, a list of soldiers were categorized into "Recruit", "Seasoned", and "Veteran".
A slow, dangerous smile began to spread across his young face as the shock of his situation started to transform into a cold, calculated ambition.
The "fantasy" he had once abandoned back in the highlands of Papua was suddenly no longer a dream, but a tangible possibility within his reach.
He didn't know how he had been brought here or why the system chose him, but he wasn't about to waste this second chance at life.
In this era, the people of the Indonesian archipelago were still divided and ruled by a foreign power that viewed them as nothing more than subjects to be exploited.
But they didn't have a leader who knew the future of warfare, and they certainly didn't have a man with an infinite supply of weapons at his fingertips.
Wijaya walked back to the bed and sat down, closing his eyes to better understand the interface of the system that was now linked to his mind.
He could feel the potential of the era, the growing unrest among the locals, and the stagnant arrogance of the Dutch colonial administrators.
He thought about the "Indonesia" of his past—a nation struggling to find its footing—and compared it to what he could build here from the ground up.
He wouldn't just fight for independence; he would build an empire that would never have to worry about the interference of foreign powers ever again.
He took a deep breath, the smell of the old world filling his lungs, and felt a surge of energy that he hadn't experienced in over a decade.
"I will change the future," he murmured.
His eyes glowing with a newfound fire as he stared at the blue screen.