The first thing Ryan Blake became aware of was the noise.
It came from everywhere at once — a wall of sound so dense it felt physical, pressing against his eardrums like deep water. Hundreds of voices tangled together into a single roar, punctuated by the tinny bark of a loudspeaker and the rhythmic thunder of feet stamping on aluminum bleachers.
He was sitting on a bench. His hands were on his knees. His eyes were open, and he could see a sports field stretching out in front of him — artificial turf under floodlights, a raised arena platform in the center, and row after row of packed bleachers climbing toward a sky the color of faded denim.
None of this meant anything to him.
"Next up — Derek Hartwell from Awakening Class One versus Ryan Blake from Normal Class One!"
The announcer's voice cracked through the stadium like a gunshot. A heartbeat of absolute silence followed — the kind that only happens when a very large number of people all hold their breath at once.
Then the noise came back, louder, threaded with disbelief.
"Awakening Class versus Normal? That's a joke, right?"
"It's not even a fight. It's an execution."
Ryan sat perfectly still. His body knew where it was. His body had been here all morning — had walked through those gates, sat on this bench, waited for this moment. But the mind behind his eyes had arrived approximately four seconds ago, and it was struggling.
I transmigrated.
The thought didn't come with wonder. It came with the flat, clinical clarity of a diagnosis. He was in a body that wasn't his, in a world he didn't recognize, in the middle of an event he couldn't parse. His hands were the wrong size. His center of gravity was wrong. Even the air tasted different — thinner, charged with something he couldn't name, like the atmosphere before a thunderstorm that never broke.
Then the headache hit.
It started behind his eyes and bored inward like a drill bit, white-hot and merciless. Ryan's jaw locked. His vision blurred. And in the space between one heartbeat and the next, eighteen years of memories that didn't belong to him crashed into his skull like a wave breaking against a seawall.
He saw everything.
A thousand years ago, a meteorite had struck the Earth. Not the extinction-event kind — something stranger. Something that rewrote the rules. In the weeks that followed, people began to change. Abilities manifested. Powers that defied physics, biology, and common sense bloomed in ordinary human beings like flowers pushing through concrete.
A thousand years later, awakening was as universal as breathing. Every person on Earth manifested at eighteen. Some awakened actively — their abilities surging to life on their own, often violent and dramatic. These were the prodigies, the gifted, the ones the world bent itself around.
The rest awakened passively. They went to government facilities, sat in sterile rooms, and had their abilities drawn out of them like blood from a vein. Their powers were generally weaker, their futures generally smaller, and society treated them accordingly.
Active Awakeners went to Awakening Class One. Everyone else went to Normal Class.
Ryan Blake — this body's Ryan Blake — was a Passive.
But the memories kept coming, and the picture they painted was far worse than a bad classification.
He hadn't transmigrated. Not exactly. It was more like a second consciousness — his real consciousness, the one that had lived an entire life before this one — had been dormant inside this body for eighteen years, buried under a personality that wasn't his, and had only now clawed its way to the surface.
And the life that personality had been living was a masterpiece of quiet cruelty.
The adoptive parents came first. Dale and Karen Briggs. On paper, they were the charitable couple who'd taken in an orphan. In practice, Dale was a drunk who used Ryan as a punching bag when the bourbon ran out, and Karen was a woman who'd perfected the art of making a child feel worthless without ever raising her hand. They had a biological son — Tyler — and from the day he was born, Ryan's status in the household dropped from "unwanted guest" to "furniture that could do chores."
He remembered sleeping on the balcony in January. He was eight. The temperature had dropped below freezing, and he'd pressed himself against the sliding glass door, watching Karen tuck Tyler into bed on the other side of the glass, in a room that used to be his.
He remembered going to school hungry because breakfast was "for the family." He remembered wearing Tyler's hand-me-downs — always too big, always stained — and the other kids laughing, and the teacher looking away.
He remembered all of it, and every memory landed like a fist.
Then there was the girl.
"Ryan! Ryan Blake! Get over there and apologize to Derek right now!"
The voice cut through the stadium noise like a blade. Ryan looked up.
A girl in a white sundress was bearing down on him with the focused fury of a natural disaster. Pretty face, twisted ugly by rage. Expensive clothes. The kind of posture that came from a lifetime of being told you were better than everyone around you.
Amber Lawson.
The so-called childhood sweetheart.
The memories supplied the context with brutal efficiency. Amber hadn't been a girlfriend. She'd been a handler. She'd kept the old Ryan on a leash — close enough to run errands, carry bags, and absorb her bad moods, far enough that no one would mistake them for equals. She summoned him when she wanted something and discarded him when she didn't, and the old Ryan had thanked her for every scrap of attention like a dog grateful for table scraps.
Ryan looked at her face and felt nothing.
Not anger. Not contempt. Just... nothing. The way you'd feel looking at a stranger's photograph.
"I'm talking to you! Are you deaf? Go forfeit to Derek. Now."
The last pieces clicked into place. Amber had a crush on Derek Hartwell — an Active Awakener, top of his class, and the son of Langston Academy's principal. The old Ryan's pathetic devotion to Amber had annoyed Derek, not because it was a threat, but because it was unsightly. An eyesore. And since Derek's father ran the school, arranging a public beatdown was as simple as making a phone call.
This match — an Active prodigy against a Passive nobody — existed for one reason: to humiliate Ryan Blake so thoroughly that he'd never dare exist in Amber Lawson's orbit again.
If he forfeited, his eligibility for the city trials was gone. If he lost, his reputation was gone. Either way, his future burned.
All because a rich boy found him annoying.
Ryan looked at Amber. Looked past her, really — at the bleachers, the cameras, the arena where Derek Hartwell was probably already warming up. He took in the scope of the thing that had been done to him, and a cold, quiet clarity settled over his mind like frost forming on glass.
He was done.
Not done in the way the old Ryan had been done — ground down, beaten into compliance, too exhausted to fight. Done in the way that a person is done with a chapter of their life. Finished. Moved on. Whatever this body's existence had been before this moment, it was over.
"I'll say this one more time," Amber hissed, her voice dropping to something she probably thought was threatening. "If you don't go forfeit right now, I will never speak to you again."
Ryan met her eyes.
"Do you think I've lost my mind?"
Amber blinked. The question clearly wasn't in the script she'd been expecting.
"...What?"
"I asked if you think I've lost my mind."
She shook her head, confused.
"Then it must be you who lost yours."
For a moment, Amber just stared at him. Her expression cycled through confusion, disbelief, and then something darker — the particular fury of a person who has been obeyed for so long that disobedience feels like a physical assault.
"You dare —"
She swung at him. Open palm. No hesitation. The motion was practiced — she'd hit him before, Ryan realized. Many times. And he'd never once raised a hand in return.
He caught her wrist.
The surprise on her face was almost worth the eighteen years of suffering that had preceded it. Almost.
"For what it's worth," Ryan said, and his voice was so calm it made the nearest spectators lean back, "I'm sorry about this."
He wasn't.
Two backhand slaps. Clean, precise, delivered with the mechanical efficiency of someone checking items off a list. The sound rang out across the stadium, sharp as a starter's pistol, and Amber's head snapped sideways — once left, once right.
And that was when he felt it.
A weight on his wrist. A sudden, solid presence that hadn't been there a second ago — like someone had clasped a manacle around his forearm while he wasn't looking. Ryan glanced down.
A watch sat on his wrist.
It was bulky, oversized, with a dark metal frame and a faceplate rimmed in green luminescence. The design was chunky and alien, like something that had been built for a hand much larger than his. It pulsed once — a slow, deep throb of emerald light — and Ryan's heart stopped.
He knew this watch.
Not from this life. From the other one. From a cartoon he'd watched as a kid, sitting cross-legged on a carpet in a room that no longer existed, in a world that might never have been real.
The Omnitrix.
「Omnitrix loading complete. Energy absorption initiated.」
「First alien hero — Heatblast — has been unlocked. Integrating with local dimensional rules.」
The notifications pulsed directly into his mind — not sound, not text, but raw information imprinted onto his consciousness like a brand. Ryan stood perfectly still, his expression shifting through emotions too fast for anyone watching to track.
This is real. This is actually real.
"You... you hit me?!"
Amber's voice came from very far away. She had one hand pressed to her cheek, eyes wide, staring at him as if he'd grown a second head. She fumbled for her phone, opened the camera, and saw two vivid handprints blooming across her face like stigmata.
The scream that followed was extraordinary. Ryan had heard car alarms with more emotional range. He took an involuntary step back, less from surprise than from a genuine concern for his eardrums.
"You go and forfeit right now, and buy me the newest Extraction Serum, and maybe I'll consider forgiving you!"
Ryan didn't look up. His attention was on the watch — turning the dial with his thumb, feeling the mechanism click beneath his fingertip, his mind racing at a speed that frightened him.
"I'm talking to you! Are you deaf?"
"Sorry." His eyes stayed on the Omnitrix. "I only respond to people."
Amber froze. The words took a moment to land.
An old man in the front row of the nearest bleacher section — white-haired, sun-weathered, clearly enjoying himself immensely — leaned toward the woman beside him.
"He's saying she's not human, dear."
The color drained from Amber's face, then rushed back twice as dark. Her whole body trembled. She pointed at Ryan with a finger that shook like a tuning fork.
"You — you —"
"Take your time."
Her eyes rolled back. Her knees buckled. She dropped.
The old man, moving faster than anyone his age had a right to, caught her before she hit the ground. He fanned her face, patted her cheeks, and after a few seconds of limp unconsciousness, Amber came around — blinking, gasping, and immediately aware of every single grinning face in her line of sight.
She scrambled upright, swaying. The humiliation was worse than the slap. It was total, public, and permanent — already being recorded on dozens of phones.
"I hope they beat you until you're picking your teeth off the ground," she spat, her voice cracking. "Don't come crawling to me when it happens."
"I won't." Ryan was already walking toward the arena. "And I hope that boyfriend of yours doesn't end up on his knees either."
Amber stormed away. Her heels struck the bleacher stairs like gunshots. Her jaw was clenched so tight that the muscles in her temples twitched with every step.
If I hadn't pitied him, she thought, nails carving crescents into her palms, nobody would have even looked at him. Nobody.
Trash.