New chapter is live.
Settle in, take your time, and let’s see what waits in the dark 🖤
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The memories insisted this was exactly the flavor Adrian Voss used to love.
Adrian, the one currently in control, disagreed with every fiber of his borrowed body.
Whatever sat on the plate in front of him was supposed to be steak.
It was also sweet, heavy, and offensive in a way that made his taste buds feel personally betrayed.
Under the restaurant owner’s silent, baffled stare, Adrian gripped the fork and forced the meat down one bite at a time.
His nerves twitched in protest.
His stomach considered filing a formal complaint.
He finished the whole thing anyway.
Wasting food was a sin.
Beer helped.
So did the decision that, starting tomorrow, unless the situation turned truly desperate, he would cook for himself.
He stood, dusted off his pants, and headed for the door.
The owner tapped the table.
“Don’t forget the tab you ran up.”
Adrian did not look back.
He only raised a hand to show he’d heard.
The moment he pushed the door open, a tall man stepped inside.
“An ice-cold beer, please,” the man said, taking a seat with his back to Adrian.
Adrian glanced at him on instinct.
Clean-cut short hair.
Heavy clothes.
A frame so solid the coat barely managed to hide it.
The man had the stillness of a predator at rest, all compressed force, as if one hard flex would split the fabric over his shoulders.
Nothing about him gave Adrian a clear answer, so he walked out.
Behind him, the muscular stranger turned and watched him leave with a thoughtful look.
Adrian had no idea the man had taken an interest in him.
He went to a nearby general store instead, bought pots, pans, dishes, utensils, and enough basic kitchen gear to make his arms ache, then carried the whole mess back to his little den.
The apartment looked better than it had when he first woke up.
That did not mean it looked good.
The mysterious stains on the walls still annoyed him, and the graffiti had not magically stopped being ugly, but at least the place no longer felt abandoned.
He arranged the new cookware in the kitchen, piece by piece, and let out a slow breath.
“At last.
Someone could almost live here.”
The only thing left to think about was the armed escort job a few days from now.
In his previous life, Adrian had been an ordinary civilian.
Armed escorts belonged to news footage, games, and movies, not to anything he had personally done.
The only useful material available was locked inside this body’s memories.
He sat on the couch and let them rise.
Most of them were a mess.
The Adrian Voss of this world had lost his mother early.
His father had been a businessman who rarely came home and kept his money in ventures that did not survive daylight.
On one trip abroad, pirates killed him and left him for the fish.
The father’s so-called friends came next.
They promised the younger Adrian work, talked him out of his inheritance, and threw him into the sea as well.
Unfortunately for them, the kid had a talent for not dying.
A passing ship picked him up.
After that, he drifted through the borderlands of the Golden Triangle for years, surviving ugly work and building the kind of name no decent person wanted.
Three years later, he found the men who had stolen from his father, skinned them alive, and fed what was left to the fish.
That had been satisfying.
It had also insulted people who did not forgive insults.
When the area became too dangerous, the boss he followed made the necessary arrangements and had him smuggled to his next employer.
That man was supposedly a former member of the U.B.C.S., Umbrella’s private response force.
After Umbrella collapsed, the old mercenary lost his steady money and came to unstable Eastern Europe to chase better pay.
Adrian, who could fight and did not ask delicate questions, became his assistant.
They took odd jobs.
Anything, as long as the money cleared.
Two more years passed that way.
The boss had been talking about retiring after a few final contracts when bad luck finally caught him.
Last year, he took work guarding an arms dealer during a negotiation.
The two sides failed to agree, then started shooting.
The client survived.
The boss did not.
A hole the width of a finger opened in his forehead, the back of his skull vanished, and pieces of brain landed several yards away.
Adrian collected the commission and became a man with no one left.
The skills his boss had taught him kept him fed, and he lived from one payday to the next.
“That is…
one hell of a life.”
After sorting through those memories, Adrian meant every word.
This world’s Adrian Voss had been a real monster.
His past could have filled several seasons of television and still had room for a spin-off.
The soul inside him might belong to a softer man from another world, but the body’s combat instincts had not gone anywhere.
Worse, his own peacetime instincts seemed to be picking up some of the body’s habits.
He had been upgraded whether he liked it or not.
He reviewed the escort job again.
The cargo was classified.
A convoy would come through with outside armed personnel protecting it.
The employer had supposedly reached an agreement with local forces.
The route passed through town and continued toward the outer district.
Adrian’s job was simple: as a local guide, he would negotiate with the right people, grease the right palms, and make sure the convoy reached its destination.
They were just passing through.
He did not expect a firefight.
Still, expecting peace was how people got buried.
He went to the storage room, switched on the light, and put on his gear one item at a time.
Belt.
Gloves.
Body armor.
Protective glasses.
Finally, he took the AR-15 off the wall and worked through the setup with frightening ease.
Holographic sight.
Tactical light.
Suppressor.
A collection of small attachments he did not need to name before his hands found where each one belonged.
Magazine in.
Round chambered.
Safety off.
Rifle up.
“So that’s how it is.”
He had never handled a gun in his previous life.
Thanks to the memories in this body, the weapon felt less like a tool and more like part of him.
The movement was smooth enough to be insulting.
Good.
Then there was nothing to worry about.
In a few days, he would dress like this, play his part, collect the remaining four hundred thousand dollars, and live comfortably for a while.
He was not the old Voss, who had spent money as if it offended him by existing.
He stripped the gear off again, kept only a loaded pistol, grabbed a beer from an unfamiliar brand, and dropped onto the couch.
His boots went up on the table.
A cigarette found its way between his fingers.
For a moment, his soul and this body’s memories overlapped.
Hundreds of nights had looked exactly like this.
The old Voss had sat on the same broken couch with smoke in his mouth, beer in his hand, and his head tilted toward the ceiling as if the past might be written there.
The current Adrian was not thinking that deeply.
His body simply remembered the posture and slipped into it.
‘Has my soul really started taking on this body’s habits?
I’m getting colder than I should be.’
Once that thought surfaced, another followed.
If he had crossed into this world, where had the original Adrian Voss gone?
Had they swapped?
Was that cold-blooded mercenary now waking up in his old life with a softer face, no scars, and none of this muscle?
Adrian almost wanted to see the man’s reaction.
Then the thought sharpened.
What about his parents?
If that man had landed in his old body, could he at least take care of them?
Maybe.
If Adrian’s soul could be affected by this body, there was no reason the reverse could not be true.
The old Voss might even become the type who looked cold on the outside but turned out decent underneath.
The idea was absurdly funny.
The next few days passed in the same aimless rhythm as the memories suggested.
Adrian cooked for himself in the new kitchen, and the results were better than expected.
People who lived alone usually picked up a few survival skills.
When boredom set in, he opened the laptop and studied recent news, old reports, and the international situation.
The Bioterrorism Security Assessment Alliance, better known as the BSAA, was making progress in anti-bioterror operations in Africa.
WilPharma was under mounting international pressure after reports of a fatal clinical trial in India.
The year was 2005.
Only seven years had passed since the Raccoon City Incident, and bioterror had already grown from a single regional catastrophe into a global threat.
Humanity really did have a gift for turning nightmares into an industry.
Even many arms dealers who trafficked in death did not fully understand why monsters in cages sold for more than conventional weapons.
They did not need to understand.
If it paid, it was good business.
What happened once those things reached their buyers did not matter to scum like them.
The former boss with the missing head had worked for Umbrella once.
He had served in the Umbrella Biohazard Countermeasure Service, the U.B.C.S.
Officially, they handled lab incidents.
Unofficially, they helped test monster data and died in the process.
Calling them a disposable unit would not be unfair.
When the old man got drunk, he would ramble about his days at Umbrella’s Paris branch.
One year, a laboratory lost an extremely expensive creature.
His unit spent months searching for it, only for the matter to disappear into silence.
As for the supervisor of that department, no one ever saw him again.
Thanks to his knowledge of the Resident Evil series and the scattered memories inside this body, Adrian could see this world from a perspective almost no one else had.
For now, none of that changed his life.
He was a small mercenary in an obscure Eastern European country, trading risk for cash.
The conspiracies outside were still too far away.
All he had to do was finish the job in front of him.
A few days later, the day of the escort arrived.
Adrian sat fully armed on a stone beside the road outside town, one hand on his phone as he waited.
At sunset, the low growl of engines rolled in from the distance.
The sound grew heavier until the road itself began to tremble.
His calm stirred for no clear reason.
Something deep in him began to thrum.
The body had seen battle, but the soul inside it had grown up in peace.
He tightened his grip on the rifle and looked down the road.
At the far edge of his vision, black trucks appeared one after another, moving in a line toward him.
He stood and waved to the lead vehicle.
The convoy slowed, then stopped.
A blond man in a black suit stepped out from the passenger side.
He looked friendly in the polished way expensive salesmen did, one finger adjusting the gold-rimmed glasses on his nose as he studied Adrian.
“Sir, you must be our guide for this operation?”
“That’s right.”
“Wonderful.
Then you must be Mr.
Voss.” After the required identity checks, the man shook his hand with unnecessary enthusiasm.
“Eben Freeman.
You may call me Freeman, of course, though I won’t object to Eben.
When I told Mr.
Agor our convoy needed to pass through Loplers in Edonia, he recommended you at once.
He said you were a reliable guide.”
“Oh.”
Adrian had never been good with men who were this enthusiastic.
Not in this life.
Not in the last.
“In any case, let’s get you aboard.
We’ll ride in the second truck.
I believe we’ll have plenty to discuss.”
Freeman pulled him toward the second vehicle.
The convoy started moving again.
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Want to keep going?
I hope this chapter gave you another reason to stay with the story.
There’s still plenty ahead, and things are only starting to unfold.