Alexandra leaned her forehead against the cool slate wall and simply let the scalding water beat against her shoulders.
Heavy, gray-tinged grime dissolved into pinkish foam at her feet, swirling toward the drain.
Her body felt almost unnaturally fresh after everything she’d been through, the physical damage and exhaustion of the Hive already erased by her return to God’s Dimension.
For twenty minutes, she let the hot water take up all her attention, scrubbing until her skin flushed red and enjoying the rare luxury of feeling clean.
When her fingertips began to prune, she turned off the valve, wrapped a thick white towel around her waist, and stepped out onto the heated tile floor.
The room was heavy with steam.
Alexandra reached out and wiped a broad stroke across the floor-to-ceiling mirror above the double vanity, clearing a wide oval in the condensation.
She looked up.
Standing in the mirror was a blonde woman.
Alexandra’s jaw tightened.
Her right hand dropped instinctively toward her hip, searching for the grip of a holster that wasn’t there.
Hi, gorgeous.
Back again?
The thought arrived automatically, and Alexandra almost laughed at herself.
Apparently finding an attractive woman was still enough to override several minutes of existential panic.
Okay.
Focus.
Alexandra turned toward the bathroom doorway, her muscles tightening as she checked the room.
The heavy oak door was shut and locked, and the loft beyond it remained completely silent.
Alexandra looked back at the glass.
The woman was still standing there, framed by the lingering fog.
Alexandra stared for three long seconds.
The silence in the room stretched thin.
Slowly, deliberately, she raised her right hand to collarbone height, splaying her fingers.
In the mirror, the blonde raised her right hand.
The movements matched down to the exact millisecond.
Alexandra tilted her head three degrees to the left.
The blonde tilted her head three degrees to the left.
She studied the reflection carefully, trying to separate what she knew from what she was imagining.
The features were unmistakably mixed—European and East Asian traits blended together into what she’d normally call Eurasian.
The face looked completely real, which somehow made the whole thing worse.
She was pale, with a smooth complexion beneath the bathroom lights, and her bright blonde hair fell around features that looked like Himiko Toga translated into reality.
She was still around 170 centimeters tall.
The body was unmistakably different, but it wasn’t simply Toga’s body transplanted onto her.
She reached up, her trembling fingers brushing her own cheekbone.
In the mirror, pale fingers pressed against pale skin.
She turned her head from side to side, watching the light shift across features that were not her own.
Alexandra parted her lips and pulled back her upper lip to inspect her teeth.
Her breath hitched.
The upper canines were elongated, curving downward into sharp points that pressed against her lower lip when her mouth closed.
They weren’t monstrous, but they were unquestionably abnormal.
And those eyes.
Bright amber-yellow.
Far too intense to belong to a normal reflection.
Alexandra stood between the vanity and the steam, her gaze moving between the sharp teeth, the messy blonde hair, and the unnatural yellow eyes.
A strange, phantom memory flickered at the edge of her consciousness—not a memory of her own life, but a visual from a screen.
A web browser.
A broken Google Translate window she had been reading at her desk right before the black pop-up window had killed her screen.
I’m Alexandra Pierce.
She knew that much.
She knew her name, her life, her memories, the body she’d gone to sleep in.
She knew what her own face looked like.
So why the hell am I looking at Himiko Toga?
That was the part she couldn’t make fit.
Terror Infinity doesn’t work like this.
People were transported physically.
They sat at their computers, accepted the prompt, and ended up in the train or the dark room with their own bodies and whatever they’d been carrying.
God didn’t kill people on Earth and rebuild them as custom avatars.
So what happened to me?
Maybe something had gone wrong during the transition.
Maybe her original body had somehow been destroyed and replaced.
Maybe this was some ridiculous body-swap or transmigration glitch.
Please don’t let this be a transmigration glitch.
She could already imagine some completely ordinary girl waking up in Alexandra Pierce’s apartment, looking into the bathroom mirror and realizing she had somebody else’s face, somebody else’s clothes, somebody else’s entire life.
Actually, no.
That’s horrible.
Alexandra grimaced.
Okay, apparently I’m trying to solve this by throwing webnovel tropes at the wall.
She had no evidence for any of them.
Unfortunately, she didn’t have anything better.
Then the timing hit her like a cold splash of water.
She had been reading a completely unrelated My Hero Academia fanfic through a terrible browser translation right before the pop-up appeared.
She clicked.
She woke up on the train in Terror Infinity.
And now she had Toga’s face.
Alexandra pinched the bridge of her nose, shutting her eyes tight.
Wait.
The thought came back to what she’d been reading before everything went black.
Not a Terror Infinity story.
Not some crossover where Toga got dragged into God’s Dimension.
Just a completely unrelated My Hero Academia fanfic that she’d been reading through a terrible browser translation.
Alexandra stared at her reflection.
What if this is somebody else’s version of Terror Infinity?
The possibility made her stomach tighten.
If that was true, then knowing the original story was still useful, but it wasn’t something she could blindly trust anymore.
The rules might be the same.
The scenarios might be the same.
Jie, One, Rain, the others might still follow the paths she remembered.
Might.
But I don’t know this version.
Every future event she’d remembered now had a question mark hanging over it.
Great.
I have spoilers for a story that might not even be the story I’m in.
If this body carried a structural resemblance to Himiko Toga, then there was a much more practical, immediate question to answer.
Toga’s Quirk had something to do with transformation and blood.
Alexandra couldn’t remember every detail, but she knew enough to know what she should be looking for.
Okay.
If I’ve actually got her Quirk, how do I trigger it?
She closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and searched for anything unusual inside herself.
Some new sensation.
Some hidden mechanism.
Some instinct telling her what to do.
Nothing.
Fantastic.
Maybe the Quirk wasn’t there.
Maybe she had Toga’s appearance without Toga’s abilities.
Maybe there was some condition she hadn’t met yet.
She looked around the pristine, tiled bathroom, then down at her own pale forearm, briefly considering the obvious way of testing the blood requirement.
Absolutely not.
She had survived swarms of zombies, three mutated Lickers, and a corporate death squad today.
She was not slicing her own arm open in a luxury bathroom just to test if she might be a blonde anime psychopath.
Her attempt to discover whether the Quirk was actually there had yielded absolute zero, and she wasn’t about to bleed herself on a hunch.
Alexandra finally looked away from the mirror.
Okay.
That’s enough existential horror for one evening.
Her stomach growled.
I need food.
Six turned her head as Alexandra stepped out of the bedroom in her fresh sweatpants and oversized hoodie.
“You appear to have recovered,” Six said.
“Physically, sure,” Alexandra muttered, collapsing sideways into the deep cushions of the sectional.
She rested her head against the backrest, staring up at the high ceiling.
“Mentally? The jury is still out.”
Six didn’t tell her everything was going to be fine.
She simply adjusted her stance, remaining a quiet, vigilant presence at the edge of the seating area.
Thank God.
Alexandra wasn’t sure she could tolerate empty reassurance right now.
She’d rather have somebody admit that the situation was completely insane than pretend they understood it.
Alexandra pulled up the loft’s amenities menu on the armrest interface.
The catalog was vast: sashimi, steaming bowls of ramen, coffee, regional spirits, and comfort food from dozens of Earth cultures she recognized—and a few she didn’t.
She selected a wide tray of fresh nigiri, a side of edamame, and a chilled bottle of tokubetsu junmai sake.
When the prompt confirmed the cost as a single point, a faint, genuine laugh escaped her throat.
“One point,” she murmured, watching the tray materialize on the low wooden coffee table before her with a soft hum of displaced air.
“That’s practically a rounding error.”
She popped the wooden cap off the sake bottle, poured a generous splash into a small ceramic cup, and took a long, cooling sip.
The sharp, clean bite of the alcohol settled against her ribs, grounding her faster than the scalding shower had.
She followed it with a piece of tuna, letting the simple, unhurried reality of eating real food wash over her.
The loft was quiet and comfortable, a world away from the copper reek and screeching steel of the Hive.
Alexandra leaned back against the cushions, cradling the warm ceramic cup in her lap.
“Honestly,” she whispered to the quiet room, “I’ve had worse Tuesdays.”
Six tilted her head slightly, watching Alexandra with quiet amusement.
Alexandra didn’t look up from her glass.
“Don’t ruin the moment for me.”
“I said nothing,” Six replied calmly.
“Exactly. Keep doing that.”
A faint smile touched the corner of Alexandra’s mouth as she took another sip of sake.
By the time Alexandra finished her sake, the mental exhaustion she’d been holding at bay all evening finally caught up to her.
She stood up from the sofa, stretching her arms overhead until her spine popped, and glanced toward the open archway leading into the bedroom.
Then she looked at Six, who remained standing near the edge of the living area, perfectly still, watching her.
Alexandra stopped.
She looked back at the bedroom archway, then back to Six.
Six doesn’t sleep.
That should have solved the problem immediately.
Six could simply remain wherever she wanted while Alexandra went to bed.
Alexandra looked toward the sofa, then back at Six.
No.
The idea bothered her more than it should have.
And I’m not treating her like furniture just because she doesn’t need sleep.
She’s a person.
At least as far as Alexandra was concerned, that was enough.
“You can sleep in my bed.”
The words were out before Alexandra had time to reconsider them.
Six’s dark eyebrows rose a fraction of an inch, a tiny, deliberate gesture that instantly made the atmosphere in the loft feel five degrees warmer.
Alexandra immediately regretted everything.
Why did I say that?
Heat crept up Alexandra’s neck.
“I mean sleep. Obviously. If you… wanted to.”
“I do not need to sleep,” Six said calmly.
“I know.”
“And you have already established that.”
“I know.”
Six stepped closer and regarded Alexandra with quiet amusement.
“Then why are you inviting me into your bed?”
Alexandra opened her mouth, but her brain completely failed to produce a coherent defense.
“Because you’re a person,” Alexandra muttered, crossing her arms defensively.
“At least as far as I’m concerned. I’m not leaving you standing in the hallway all night.”
Six stared at her for a beat.
Then, slowly, her lips curved into a small, knowing smile.
I made an artificial woman, gave her a personality and a mind, and somehow I’m the one making this awkward.
Six looked completely comfortable.
Of course she is.
Alexandra was apparently having a social crisis all by herself.
“Very well,” Six said.
Alexandra blinked.
“Really?”
“You invited me.”
“I didn’t think you’d actually say yes.”
“Why would I refuse?” Six asked softly, taking another step toward the bedroom.
“It seems like a reasonable arrangement.”
Alexandra stared at her for a long second before dragging a palm down her face.
“This was a terrible idea.”
Six brushed past her through the archway toward the bedroom.
“You seemed quite confident when you made the offer.”
“I was having a moment of misplaced moral clarity.”
“And now?”
“Now I’m realizing I apparently don’t think things through when I’m tired.”
Six turned near the side of the mattress, her smile widening just enough to show she was thoroughly entertained.
“I had noticed.”
Alexandra stopped at the threshold, leaning her shoulder against the doorframe and glaring weakly at her companion.
“You’re enjoying this.”
“Yes,” Six said plainly.
“Of course you are.” Alexandra let out a breath and rubbed her eye with the heel of her hand, but as she stepped toward the bed, she paused to point a warning finger over her shoulder.
“Actually, wait. Do you want me to call you Six?”
Six stopped beside the foot of the bed, regarding her with cool, unblinking interest.
“That is what you have called me.”
“I know. But that’s more of a designation than a name, isn’t it?”
Six considered the question for a moment, her posture perfectly poised, an expression on her face that was frustratingly difficult to read.
“You created me. What would you prefer to call me?”
Alexandra frowned, shifting her weight against the frame.
“That’s not what I asked.”
“No,” Six acknowledged softly, a faint hint of amusement playing at the corners of her mouth.
“It isn’t.”
“Okay, fair,” Alexandra sighed, shaking her head.
“I just figured if you had an actual name you wanted to use, I should ask. You’re a person, not a serial number.”
Six was quiet for a long second, her synthetic eyes dimming slightly as if processing the underlying intent behind the question.
“Six is acceptable.”
“Just Six?”
“Yes.”
Alexandra nodded slowly, accepting the answer.
“Okay. Six it is.”
She turned back toward her side of the bed, then paused one final time, pointing a warning finger over her shoulder.
“And you’re definitely not going to suddenly tell me your name is Natalie tomorrow, right?”
Six’s dark eyebrow rose a fraction of an inch.
“I have no intention of doing so.”
“Good. That would be weird.”
“Your current circumstances,” Six noted calmly, stepping around to her side of the mattress, “suggest that your definition of ‘weird’ is unusually flexible.”
Alexandra looked over her shoulder, opening her mouth to argue, then closed it.
“That’s… entirely fair.”
Alexandra pulled the blanket up and settled into the mattress.
Whatever version of Terror Infinity this is, I’ll figure it out tomorrow.
She closed her eyes.
Within thirty seconds, she was asleep.