The young man looked down at his phone again. The blue dot representing him was indeed squatting on top of Inori Sushi in Google Maps. There should’ve been a koi-shaped paper lantern hitting him in the face right now.

  But he saw no lantern or any dainty store front covered by paneled noren, and he doubted he’d see anything like that in the vicinity. Standing at the end of an obscure alley, he was greeted by a forest of monstrous high-rises. Polished steel and glass crafted abstract geometric patterns and stretched on without end. Holographic billboards stacked along the reflective surfaces like flyers on utility poles, vying to cover the last patch of open air. This was the kind of city where buildings no longer looked like buildings, but loaded weapons, ready for whatever might fall off the sky. Its residents were expecting at least one first contact in their lifetime, and the next generation would grow in pods—not exactly the place where the young man usually went for lunch, and he had no idea how he’d gotten here. It was like that awkward moment in college physics: you zoned out for one minute, then lost the whole universe.

  The scenery itself did not shock him. Not really. He saw similar designs on his computer every day for sci-fi role play games and visual novels. Nevertheless, when rendered in real life, a view like this still made him speechless because it just seemed to be on the wrong timeline. A timeline that was at least half a century ahead of the city he’d lived in for 28 years.

  This is why you should’ve worked from home, he thought, as he squeezed his eyes shut and massaged his temples with one hand.

  He had come here on autopilot. A week of intense overtime with six hours of sleep in between had shut down the last functional part of his human brain, leaving only the monkey bits running loose. After sitting on his hands for the entire morning and staring at the C++ code with a mysterious bug he couldn’t find, his only solution was to run away from his terminal, and Inori Sushi seemed to be as far as he could get within his break. So he’d clicked the navigation button under the restaurant’s Google overview and let the map take him wherever he’d had to go without thinking twice. Everybody could use a little spontaneity once in a while. Sometimes he wondered if he would’ve been a more accomplished person with a more eventful life, had he tried more of that. What was the worst that a bad lunch could do to him anyway? Food poisoning? Then he’d have a solid reason for some time off.

  In retrospect, that one-star review under Inori’s business profile might have tried to tell him something—

  No sushi here. It’s complicated.

  He took a deep breath and settled on a lazy explanation: No big deal. He’d probably just wandered to an unfamiliar neighborhood with really aggressive urban planning.

  The moment he lifted his face, a bullet train roared across the sky above. At full speed and track-free. It glided over the cluster of high-rises like a whale breaching out of water, then disappeared into the concrete jungle.

  Hm.

  “Did I fall asleep on the side of the road, or is this one of those?” he murmured as he dug his thumbnail into the side of his forefinger. His hand had a numbness radiating from the center of his palm, so the sting was dull, but it was enough to tell him it wasn’t a dream.

  He vaguely recalled swinging a left at the last street corner and strolling past a grizzly bear mascot holding a sign, which he wasn’t sure was an ad or a protest. He turned around, hoping to trace back to the corner and go a different way.

  But there was no street corner or mascot to return to, only more of the same cityscape behind him. He was completely enveloped in this new environment.

  “Ohhh-kay, it’s one of those.”

  At the farthest point his gaze could reach, a tower split the horizon in two. A lot of cities had towers in them, and they often looked like accessories randomly thrown in after the city was finished, just to give the postcards a focal point. This one was different. Punching straight into the clouds, it overlooked the sprawl below like a cosmic sentinel on watch, dwarfing the metropolis to a pile of LEGO pieces.

  And it was that tower that told him where he was.

  Last night before bed, he got started with Wysina Dreaming and flipped through the disjointed brief. This giant was in the intro and every background concept drawing.

  He stared at the scene for a second, then raised his phone to snatch a picture—always the first thing to try when you had no idea how to proceed. That was when he noticed the tiny cross striking through the signal bars. He held the phone farther up, as if that would help, then a bullet shattered the top part of the screen.

  “What the—” He dropped the phone and looked around. His instinct told him that he should seek cover immediately, but his feet seemed to have rooted into the ground. The numbness he’d felt in his hands earlier had become pronounced; his fingers, cold and stiff.

  “Mmm… the smell of fresh foreign objects…”

  The voice came from above and near. Ray snapped his face up and caught a shadow on the balcony ten feet away. It was daytime, but the buildings blocked the sun and dimmed the alley. He squinted and made out a slim figure outlined in a faint halo. Before Ray could react, the figure leaped off the balcony railing and landed in front of him. Black Chester coat over gray hoodie. Motorcycle jeans tucked into combat boots. Curtained by his gray hair, his two eyes gleamed with different hues. One matched the color on his head, the other was the shade of emerald. This stranger seemed too stylish to be just any random NPC, but it was hard to tell which side he was on—that ear-to-ear grin and what looked a lot like a 1911 pistol in his mechanical hand sent out some serious mixed signals.

  “Are you here to guide me or loot me?” Ray put his hands up in surrender.

  “Ha!” The newcomer laughed at the question, then fell silent. They stood face-to-face, exchanging nothing but stares, until Gray Hair bent over to rub his knees and opened his mouth again: “That balcony was higher than it seemed.”

  Ray put his hands down and scanned the ground for his phone. He spotted it a few steps away, surprised that it was still working, then the thing sticking out of the screen caught his attention—what he’d thought was a bullet turned out to be a metal pin the size of a fountain pen cartridge, wrapped in spiral strings of ones and zeros and gleaming green.

  What the hell was that? Was this weirdo in front of him some sort of vampire hunter who needed special bullets? Did that mean Ray was a vampire in this reality? After all, there was no guarantee that you’d get the main character script when you got isekai’d. Being a vampire sounded like it’d involve a lot of running, and Ray hadn’t been to the gym as much as he’d loved to.

  Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  Too many questions, and his sleep-deprived brain was as empty as his pockets. So he stared at his phone and blurted out:

  “My whole life is in there.”

  Gray Hair strolled to the phone, yanked the metal pin off, then tossed the machine back onto the ground. He toyed with the green stick between his fingers for a second before sliding it back into his handgun, then he gave Ray a smile:

  “Sorry about that, but you won’t need it here anyway… You still need legs, though.”

  Ray looked down and gasped. From the tips of his shoes, his lower half began to crumble and peel off. Shards of himself left his body and broke to dust, carried away by the gentle breeze traveling through the alley. Not only his legs. The same thing was happening to his other limbs, and he’d already lost a finger without feeling it.

  “This can’t be good,” Ray said as he watched his left hand disappear.

  Gray Hair chuckled and dashed forward. Pulling Ray close by the collar with one hand, he locked the muzzle of his gun under Ray’s chin. The cold metal sent a chill down Ray’s spine, and those dual-toned eyes harbored a really, really bad idea.

  “You’re welcome,” Gray Hair whispered and pulled the trigger.

  Ray had never been shot in the head before, and he’d never want to try it after this. The pain was blinding, and he felt his skull was being sheared in half. He stumbled backward, then dropped to his knees. The stubs of his wrists couldn’t catch his weight, and he nearly lost a tooth in a passionate kiss with the ground. An hour ago, the biggest worry he’d had in the world was that the player in his game kept getting stuck in a maze he didn’t remember building. Now, about two-thirds of him curled up in the fetal position, cloaked in excruciating pain. He tried to scream, or groan. Nothing came out of his dry throat, and breathing alone was taking all his strength. The darkness behind his eyelids deepened, gaining a depth that swallowed his cries for help. It finally registered that this could be the end of him.

  And the last thing he’d done with his life was try to make a machine-generated figure climb up some walls without losing his pants.

  There was a brief pause in time, then his throbbing limbs stopped shedding. Although he couldn’t see them, he felt his fingers for an instant. Rolling onto his stomach, he pushed himself off the ground with those phantom hands. Inside the empty sleeves, black titanium threads grew out of his elbows and weaved into a pair of forearms, then all the way to the tips, not a single digit missing. He didn’t see what was going on with his legs, but the strength pumping through his veins was real, and within seconds, he was standing again. A steady force pulsed underneath his feet. It felt like floating.

  He held his newly acquired mechanical hands up close, clutching them into fists then letting loose, testing their dexterity. They moved just like his own. A laugh escaped him, then drops of blood dripped onto his palms. At first, he thought he was bleeding from where Gray Hair had shot him, but there was no wound under his chin. The blood came out of his nose and seeped through his knuckles of steel. The next second, a holographic interface unfolded between his hands and lines of neon green text spread across the screen. Meanwhile, an austere female voice that reminded him of his high school prefect echoed inside his skull and read out the notifications on display—

  Instantiation complete

  Environment: Wysina

  Class: Undefined

  Status: Dormant

  “What?”

  Before the interface collapsed to a thin line and disappeared, Ray caught a glimpse of a timestamp at the lower right corner that said “12:00.”

  “Those look nice on you.” Gray Hair approached with a smirk and gave Ray a once-over, then he extended a hand. “Name is Latch. Latch Andor.”

  Without waiting for a response, Latch grabbed Ray’s arm and shoved his own face forward. The tip of his nose was inches away from Ray’s cheek.

  “I’m gonna call you Recursion. Rec for short. You look like a Rec, don’t you?”

  Ray’s gaze bounced between Latch’s overly enthusiastic smile and the gun in his hand.

  “I can be a Rec,” he said.

  “Fantastic! Today is a good day!” Latch let go of Ray-slash-Rec and spread his arms wide to embrace the air around them. “Welcome to the City of Wysina.”

  Another bullet train rushed past from above, stirring up dust in the alley. The place sank back into a vacuum of silence after it passed. Sustaining the exuberant pose, Latch forced a smile that said: say something so I can move on from this.

  “What did you jab me with?” Rec asked and touched various spots at the back of his skull as if to locate the involuntary implant.

  “You can think of it as an ignition key,” Latch grinned.

  “The fire inside me died a long time ago.”

  “That’s unfortunate, but isn’t that exactly why you’d need ignition?”

  “Can’t argue with that,” Rec sighed and let out a soft laugh under his breath. “If you hadn’t put that thing in me, I would’ve been dead by now, wouldn’t I?”

  “Define ‘dead’.”

  “Well, you know—”

  “You would’ve disintegrated to an unknown substance,” Latch said. “And the space that once contained you would be deemed vacant and available for overwriting. But the overwrite doesn’t happen automatically. Some may argue that you continue to exist in an undetectable form until another object claims your space and registers to it, aka when every trace of you is erased and replaced by something else. Hm, that does sound pretty dead, I guess.”

  “I’m not ready for this conversation in chapter one.”

  “You asked.”

  “My bad.”

  Rec flipped his hands over and examined the black titanium. Sturdy. Reliable. These would pack a serious punch when needed. Then he tried to recall the last time he’d wanted to punch anything and drew a blank. He wasn’t an angry person, but certainly not a cheerful one either. There seemed to be a boundless hollow between joy and misery where he wandered, shedding a tiny piece of himself each day while stretching time to patch up what he’d lost, until he ran out of time and became part of the hollow. Even the toughest mechanical limbs couldn’t help with that.

  You wouldn’t fight erosion with fists, and you couldn’t punch the untouchable.

  “Why me?” he asked. “I just happen to be the special chosen one?”

  “Wysina wanted you,” Latch said. “Or, maybe I should say, it knows what you want and it’s willing to give it to you. Do you hear the calling?”

  Rec frowned. Something about that statement irritated him.

  “I don’t remember wanting to be mutilated and turned into a cyborg without notice.”

  “Wants can be deceiving. What you see is not all there is. What you resist the most might turn out to be the one thing you need to do. If you’d just be quiet for a moment and listen.”

  “Look, dude, I’m too old for preaching—”

  “Listen.”

  Rec clenched his jaw and drew a deep breath. To his surprise, he did hear a peculiar noise in the distance. A faint buzz; hovering, lurking. He peered into the cleft of sky above him, scanning for the source. A heavy cloud passed over and stole the sun. He didn’t see a thing, yet the buzz grew louder and closer. When the sun broke through, he finally spotted the visitor over the balcony that Latch had jumped off earlier: a floating fedora with a glass bowl underneath. On the silk band wrapped around the hat, a diamond-shaped emblem was embroidered to represent either flame or light. Inside the black sphere below the brim, an ominous red dot stared at him.

  A drone?