Darkness receded.
Not all at once, but in layers — as if Arjun's consciousness were clawing its way upward from the bottom of a vast, lightless ocean.
The first sensation was pressure.
Crushing, omnidirectional pressure, squeezing against every inch of his body. It felt as though he were submerged beneath kilometers of liquid metal, his chest compressed, his lungs refusing to expand.
Then came the pain.
It arrived in delayed, fragmented waves, each sharper than the last. His nerves screamed in protest as sensation flooded back into limbs that did not feel like his own. Every joint burned. Every muscle throbbed. His skull felt as though it had been split open and crudely stitched back together.
Arjun gasped.
Air rushed into his lungs — thick, metallic, laced with the bitter tang of ozone and burnt insulation. He coughed violently, his throat raw, his chest spasming as he struggled to draw in another breath.
For several long seconds, he could do nothing but breathe.
Slowly.
Shallowly.
Each inhale felt like dragging razors through his airways.
Gradually, the world began to assemble itself.
Dim crimson light filtered through his half-lidded vision, flickering erratically. Shadows danced across curved metal walls, revealing fractured panels, exposed wiring, and scorched alloy plating. The air hummed faintly with residual energy, vibrating at a pitch just below hearing.
Arjun lay motionless, allowing his mind to stabilize.
This was not a hospital.
Nor was it any laboratory he had ever worked in.
The architecture was unfamiliar — industrial, brutalist, and unmistakably mechanical. The chamber around him curved inward, its structure ribbed with layered composite plating and thick reinforcement struts.
He was inside something.
A container.
No — a cockpit.
The realization sent a jolt through his mind.
Before panic could take hold, information flooded into his consciousness.
Not through his senses — but directly into his thoughts.
A sudden, structured data stream erupted behind his eyes.
[Neural Interface Synchronization: 1%]
[Biological Host Detected]
[Cognitive Pattern Match: 99.98%]
[Supreme Mech Architect System — Initializing…]
Arjun stiffened.
A translucent blue interface unfolded before his eyes, hovering seamlessly in midair. Its clarity was absolute, every line and glyph rendered with impossible precision.
Not a hologram.
Not augmented reality.
It was projected directly onto his visual cortex.
His heartbeat accelerated.
This level of neural integration surpassed anything humanity had even begun to conceptualize. Even experimental quantum-brain interfaces were decades — perhaps centuries — away from achieving such fidelity.
Unless…
"I'm not on Earth," he whispered.
The words sounded foreign in his ears.
Before the implications could fully settle, the chamber shuddered violently.
A thunderous impact reverberated through the structure, flinging sparks and fragments of metal across the cramped cockpit. Arjun's head snapped sideways, pain exploding behind his eyes as his temple struck the curved wall.
Warning symbols flooded his vision.
[Structural Integrity: 14%]
[Primary Systems Offline]
[Emergency Ejection Protocol — Disabled]
The mech — because that was undeniably what this was — lurched again, groaning under unimaginable stress.
Arjun gritted his teeth.
This was not a safe awakening.
Through the fractured canopy before him, he glimpsed a sky that was nothing like Earth's.
Ash-choked clouds burned in streaks of crimson and violet, torn apart by cascading energy beams. Towering war machines clashed across the horizon, their colossal silhouettes wreathed in fire and lightning. Explosions bloomed like artificial suns, flattening city blocks and vaporizing entire ridgelines.
A battlefield.
A planetary-scale battlefield.
And he was trapped inside the corpse of a shattered mech.
The truth struck with merciless clarity.
His heart pounded.
Yet beneath the shock, a strange calm emerged.
He was alive.
Somehow, impossibly, he had survived.
Arjun forced his breathing to steady.
If this was reincarnation — and all available evidence suggested it was — then emotional paralysis would only hasten death.
Survival came first.
Understanding could come later.
"System," he whispered. "Status report."
The interface flickered.
[Host Body: Critical Condition]
[Neural Load: Stabilizing]
[Structural Collapse Imminent]
A wireframe schematic of the surrounding mech unfolded before him, rotating slowly in three-dimensional space. Every fracture, every warped plate, every failing joint glowed in pulsing red.
Time to total failure: 96 seconds.
Arjun exhaled.
So be it.
He shifted, testing his limbs.
Pain flared instantly.
This body was young, malnourished, and riddled with microfractures. Calloused hands trembled as he forced them to move. His arms were thin, sinews standing out sharply beneath grime-streaked skin.
This was not his body.
Memory fragments surged into his awareness.
A boy.
Sixteen years old.
Name: Kael Virex.
Status: Scrap scavenger, Outer Ring District, Helios-9 Industrial World.
No parents.
No education.
No citizenship.
Indentured labor contract.
Debt-bound.
Disposable.
The memories were not invasive. They lay quietly in the back of his mind, accessible but unobtrusive — a passive archive rather than a dominating presence.
Kael had lived by crawling through the wreckage of old wars.
Stripping derelict machines.
Selling components.
Avoiding gangs.
Running from patrol drones.
Eating when he could.
Surviving when he must.
Today, he had entered the broken carcass of a downed combat mech, hoping to salvage its power core.
Then the battlefield had erupted anew.
Arjun closed his eyes briefly.
This universe was cruel.
But it was real.
"System," he said, more firmly. "Begin full initialization."
[Command Accepted]
[Supreme Mech Architect System — Boot Sequence Engaged]
Progress bars unfolded, stacking neatly across his vision.
[Neural Link Calibration: 12%]
[Blueprint Archive Loading: 7%]
[Engineering Database Synchronization: 9%]
A sensation unlike anything he had experienced surged through his mind.
It was not simple knowledge transfer.
It was comprehension.
Engineering principles, material science data, quantum field models, structural harmonics, energy-flow matrices — all interlinked, cross-referenced, and dynamically adaptive.
This was not merely a system.
It was a god-tier design interface.
But admiration would have to wait.
The mech convulsed again.
A rupture tore open along the right flank, metal shrieking as atmosphere vented violently into vacuum.
A deafening roar filled the cockpit.
Arjun was nearly wrenched from his seat as decompression slammed into him. Emergency restraints snapped tight, bruising his ribs as they prevented him from being hurled into the expanding breach.
[Hull Breach Detected]
[Oxygen Loss: Severe]
[Time to Structural Collapse: 81 Seconds]
Through the widening fracture, he glimpsed open sky.
Stars.
And falling debris.
This mech was plummeting.
Arjun's thoughts crystallized.
There was no time to escape.
Ejection was impossible.
Life support was offline.
He had only one chance.
Stabilize the cockpit compartment.
He leaned forward, ignoring the agony screaming through his muscles, and tore open the damaged maintenance panel beside his seat.
Exposed circuitry greeted him — scorched conduits, fractured fiber-optic lines, and ruptured power channels.
Arjun's eyes moved rapidly.
Despite the alien technology, the core engineering logic remained familiar.
Energy had to flow.
Signals had to propagate.
Structures had to bear load.
Physics did not change.
His hands flew.
He ripped free a bundle of insulated cabling and rerouted it into the auxiliary control junction. A snapped actuator rod was manually reseated. He tore open the emergency pressure reservoir and slammed the valve open.
Compressed atmosphere flooded the compartment.
Warning lights flickered.
Then stabilized.
He engaged the manual structural clamps.
With a thunderous clang, segmented bulkheads slid into place around the cockpit, sealing it off from the dying mech.
Pressure normalized.
Oxygen levels stabilized.
The roaring wind cut off.
[Emergency Containment Successful]
Arjun sagged back into the seat.
Sweat soaked through his clothes.
His heart hammered violently in his chest.
But he was alive.
For now.
The battlefield continued to rage beyond the sealed compartment.
Explosions rattled the hull.
Energy beams sliced through cloud layers.
Colossal shadows passed overhead.
Arjun closed his eyes, forcing his breathing to slow.
One crisis at a time.
Survive.
Understand.
Then — dominate.
His gaze sharpened.
This universe had made a catastrophic error.
It had given him a system.
And access to machines beyond imagination.
If he survived this day…
He would never again be powerless.