“Beep beep beep beep beep beep. Alert. Beep beep beep beep beep beep. Alert. Agent Ana Amari’s life signs critical. Automated contact unanswered… beep beep beep beep beep beep…”
Qi An’s eyes snapped open in the middle of the shrill alarm.
She’d worked over forty hours straight at high intensity, and even after a short nap she was still exhausted—but the piercing wail of the Watchpoint: Gibraltar alarm jolted her from a dead sleep in an instant.
She lunged for the control console beside her and looked at the monitoring data on the screen above.
The projected ID cards representing each Overwatch agent floated across the big display, pinpointing exactly where each agent was operating.
The one stamped with Ana Amari’s portrait was flashing wildly, its border drained of its usual green and flooded with blood-red instead.
It meant Ana had fallen into mortal danger.
Her life-monitoring device had broadcast a top-priority distress signal to Overwatch Headquarters and every Watchpoint.
“Ana. Ana, respond if you can hear me. This is Angela, Watchpoint: Gibraltar. Respond if you can hear me. Ana—!”
Qi An simply took over the monitoring tech’s station, frantically calling out to her distant comrade.
There was no answer.
Overwatch had been founded in response to the Omnic Crisis, and once the crisis was resolved its reputation expanded enormously.
It gradually became a global peacekeeping organization, reaching into many fields, drawing wide support, and commanding a range of cutting-edge technologies.
Among them was a satellite-based global instant-communications network—the agents’ primary means of contact.
It was extraordinarily resistant to interference, unaffected by weather or magnetic fields; unless the comms satellite and every backup failed at the exact same moment, a blackout was simply impossible.
Qi An called Ana’s name into the comm again and again, and not once got a reply.
Meanwhile, the card bearing Ana’s portrait was slowly being swallowed by red—a sign that her life signs were growing weaker and weaker.
This “Projection-based Location and Communications System” had been Qi An’s own proposal, designed to let each Watchpoint monitor and reach agents scattered across the world.
The shift in an agent’s card from green to yellow to red carried a clear meaning.
Green meant healthy.
Yellow meant injured.
Red meant critically wounded.
Full red meant on the brink of death.
And gray meant contact lost—which, in plain terms, meant “dead.”
Qi An never wanted to watch someone she knew die in front of her again.
Once had been more than enough.
She logged the situation at the Watchpoint, grabbed her weapons, boarded the latest-model smart aircraft, and raced toward Ana’s mission site.
As long as there was a sliver of hope, she would drag Ana back from the brink.
Twenty-three years ago, when Qi An first opened her eyes in this world, she had seen this body’s parents die in front of her.
The two of them had used their own bodies as a shield, blocking the shellfire outside for their little daughter, holding up a sliver of “safe haven” for her in the middle of a war.
Smoke, gunfire, artillery, blood, and death.
It all came down so violently that in an instant it crushed the questions in Qi An’s heart—”Why am I here?” and “What am I supposed to do?”
Because in that moment, the only thing she could do was obey the dying words of this body’s parents: “Live on.” Everything else got shoved to the back of her mind.
Why had she gone from simply playing a game to being inside one?
Why had she become the very character she used to play?
Why was this happening to her?
In air thick with the smell of rust, any question unrelated to survival or combat felt weightless.
When you were fleeing death or rushing onto a battlefield, there was no room for questions like that.
Countless times Qi An had returned to her familiar world in dreams, then smiled and said, “The nightmare’s finally over”—only to wake and find herself still here.
She escaped the war zone, learned new languages, studied entirely new fields, and under the name “Angela Ziegler” became a renowned doctor.
She witnessed the Omnic Crisis unfold, and then, as if it were fate, she joined Overwatch, became a combat medic, and took the codename “Mercy.”
It was all exactly as written in the background story of Overwatch, the game Qi An had once played.
But no one had ever imagined just how heavy a “background story”—one that existed only in a game’s description and cutscenes—could be.
A handful of lines in that background story took Qi An more than a decade to live through.
As time passed, Qi An went from her initial panic to calm, and then, once again, began to panic.
Because this world was drawing closer and closer to the game she had known so intimately—so unreal that it had even manifested a “game system.” She didn’t know how to describe it, but the squad rosters, maps, and teammate-status icons that kept surfacing before her eyes made it hard to convince herself they were all hallucinations.
Especially after she drew her weapon, prompts like the “cooldown timer” left her feeling, in dazed moments, as if she were playing a holographic game.
The more she saw these things that should only appear inside a game, the more Qi An felt out of place in this world.
She felt like a digital lifeform made of zeros and ones, with everyone else being the ones truly alive—or maybe it was the exact opposite, that she was the only living thing here and everyone else was just data, which was why they could so easily “die” and “revive.”
In the game Overwatch, Angela Ziegler’s original Ultimate had been “Resurrect,” later changed to “Valkyrie” in a patch, with “Resurrect” becoming an ordinary ability.
But in this world, even though Qi An had long since created the “Caduceus Staff” based on the principles of nanobiology, she still couldn’t bring the dead back to life—at most she could rapidly heal the critically wounded.
“Coming back from the dead only happens in games, so this isn’t a game—it’s reality.” That was how Qi An talked herself down, and for a time she gave up entirely on the question of whether this world was a game or real.
She made up her mind to set down the past she’d had as “Qi An” once and for all, and to live on under the name “Angela.”
Until a few years ago, during Overwatch’s research into nanobiological treatment, Qi An saw the hallucination-like game prompt “Ultimate ready” and instinctively chose to activate her Ultimate.
Golden light enveloped an agent who had already lost all life signs, and the agent—just pronounced dead—rose to their feet again, bathed in radiance.
In that moment, her life collapsed.
She was neither the simple gamer “Qi An” she’d once been, nor the brilliant surgeon and biologist “Angela Ziegler”—she was a monster who didn’t belong in this world.
And yet everyone clapped and cheered with delight, congratulating her sincerely on finally completing her research.
Even Gabriel Reyes and McCree, who usually kept stony faces, grinned and gave her a thumbs-up.