A man stands alone on a bridge, a towering construction of wood and stone. He holds a claymore in his hands, the blade dripping with blood. Around him lie what were once other humans, many of the bodies destroyed beyond recognition. The man leans on his sword, his own blood dripping from a myriad of wounds, shivering from blood loss and exhaustion. His blonde hair is slick, from blood and sweat, but his blue eyes hold a grim determination.

As the clattering sound of horse hooves start to sound in the distance, he takes a deep breath, raising his sword before him, the shivering fading as he focuses on what is to come. The horses stop just before the bridge, a tall man leading them on a pitch black stallion. The man on the stallion looks coldly over the bodies on the bridge, as if he has no care about the lives of his men. The soldiers behind him, however, look aghast at the fact that one man has slaughtered so many of their fellow warriors.

“Damien, I respect you, but you will not get in our way. Step away, and let us catch her.”

The blonde man, swaying a little on the bridge, finally raises his eyes to the black haired man, and lets out a snort, clearly not putting the words in his eyes. “You know I can’t do that Zander, I will never betray my lady, not ‘til death.”

“Then I have nothing left to say. Kill him.”

The soldiers look a bit apprehensive about the idea, but once one of them begins charging on his horse, the rest follow. Damien simply stands there as they approach, then raises his sword to an overhead position, far faster than one will imagine considering the size of the blade. As the first horse approaches, he steps forward, just barely avoiding the speartip poised to pierce him, and cleaves the soldier upon the horse entirely in two.

He continues moving forward to meet the thundering charge of the horses, and slashes his blade through the front legs of one of the large warhorses, sending it to the ground with a snap as its head impacts the ground. He moves through them as if he’s dancing, his sword cleaving through soldier and warhorse with ease, until one of the soldiers manages to get a glancing blow on his shoulder.

The blow, supported by the force of the warhorse sends him into a spin, which he barely manages to control, using the force generated to cut off a leg of the soldier who had wounded him. The soldiers, seeing he could indeed bleed, seem to go into a frenzy, each of them trying to claim the last blow, dreaming of the fame and glory from having been the one to kill the swordsman Damien.

Damien starts to falter, making larger and larger movements to avoid the blows, and begins to miss his blows here and there. Even so, the number of soldiers is falling, and eventually, the last falls. Damien nearly collapses, managing to catch himself with his sword, shivering from the blood loss and sheer exhaustion of having swung his blade for so long. Crows circle above, knowing that a feast shall soon begin. Throughout the fight, Zander continued with his uncaring expression, having no feelings for the soldiers he had sent to their deaths.

“It seems your reputation is underrated. I’d expected you to fall quickly, but it seems I’ll have to finish the job myself.”

Zander pulls his lance from its resting place beside the saddle, and spurs his horse forward to finish Damien, seemingly respecting him enough to let him die in a fight rather than finish bleeding out from his myriad wounds.

Damien knows that at this point, with such a skilled fighter attacking him, he won’t be able to avoid his charge, and takes a deep breath, his pale face from all the blood lost only highlighting his determined expression.

He’ll have one chance, and he decides to take it. As Zander approaches, he holds his sword in a position to thrust, and Zander sneers. His lance is far longer than the sword, and he expects a quick ending to this fight.

As his lance speeds towards Damien, Damien rushes forward himself, and stabs forward, entirely ignoring the lance. As the lance thrusts through his chest, he stabs forward, ignoring the pain, lunging forward even as the lance is driven deeper through his wound.

Zander’s face finally shows a change in expression, his eyes widening in surprise and growing horror. He attempts to twist his body to the side, but still has the sword sever almost half his neck, blood spurting from the wound as his expression still shows his horror at his death, never having expected a noble like himself to die in such a fashion.

As Zander collapses, so does Damien. At this point he can’t even speak, but he still tries to put his last thoughts into words. ‘For my lady.’

Just as his thoughts had faded out, they fade in, in a similar manner to how one wakes from sleep, feeling as if an inestimable amount of time had passed. His mind is reeling in confusion, and he puts his hands to his head, a severe pain spiking through it.

He looks around, utterly confused by his surroundings. The bed he’s laying on is tilted up, raising his upper body, and is softer than anything he had ever lain on before. The sheets covering him are softer than anything he’s felt as well, and at a slight pain in his elbow, he looks to see a needle connected to some kind of clear tube stabbed into his arm. His view follows the tube up to a clear bag hanging from a metal contraption, and a beeping sound slowly repeats in the background.

As another spike of pain runs through his head, something else comes along with it, memories of a life not his own. A world entirely alien to him becomes slightly more clear. The needle and tube are a nutrient drip, the bedsheets are simply cotton, and the beeping is from a heart rate monitor. He’s now confused. His name is Damien Hyr, but it’s now also Sen Li, his blonde hair and blue eyes are now both a matching shade of black, and his body has gone from a mature twenty four to the young age of seven.

He spends at least an hour focusing, sorting out his new memories. He has a loving family, something he had never experienced in his previous life, and the world he currently lives in is nothing like the one he had lived in before. Sure, humans are still the same, but there are now wondrous things such as cars and planes, and horrible things such as guns and nuclear weapons. Humanity even reached the stars, though the memories he now has have only basic knowledge of many things.

The world he is currently on is named Alpha, and he’s currently on one of the two continents, this one named Centrum, the other named Iowes. He has no clue if this is the same world he came from, as in his previous life he didn’t even know that there were such things as continents, and as the language is different, the name of the world being different will be no surprise.

He continues sorting out his memories until a slightly round, short woman, and a tall, severe man burst into the room, the woman lunging towards the bed and hugging him tightly, as the man stands in the back, the joy he’s feeling barely showing through his well controlled expression.

Damien, no, He’s decided that now he will be Sen, soon recognizes the two to be his parents, at least in this world or time. The woman is sobbing out of happiness and relief, and the man turns away to hide his expression.

“Hi mom,” Sen says, feeling quite awkward at how to treat a family, seeing as how he’d never had a proper on in his previous life. He raises his hands to hug his mother, Jiu, back, but hesitates, unsure if that’s the right thing to do, before deciding that the part of him that was Sen would have. He feels a faint warmth in his chest, knowing that he now has someone who cares for him. As Damien, the only one who’d ever treated him well, that he hadn’t paid, was his lady.

He worried for a bit at that thought. He wasn’t sure if his lady had gotten away. He’d done all he could to give her time to get away, but Zander had in no way been the only pursuer. He shoves the worries to the back of his head as he holds his mother.

“We didn’t know if you were going to wake up, you’ve been asleep for almost a month.”

Sen starts, the last thing he remembered in this world or era was falling down some stairs. He isn’t sure if Sen had died and Damien’s soul had joined Sen, or if he had always been Damien, and he only now remembers his past life.

Regardless, he is going to do his best at living in this world. His mother eventually calms down, and stands up, wiping her tears. “Let’s get you home as soon as possible, okay honey?”

Sen nods. The next few days he is stuck in the hospital, but his family stays with him, even his sister, Lynna coming to visit with him after school got out every day. He feels terribly touched, as he knows how much his family valued their work, and spending time with him simply showed how much they cared. Eventually, he is wheeled out in a wheelchair after he was given the all clear to go home. Sen is very excited on the drive home. While cars were commonplace to Sen, Damien had never heard of anything like it, especially considering that the car somehow navigated itself home as the family chatted.

Once he got home, his father, Tien, has to drive up the path to the garage, the automated functions of the car not working in the driveway. He parks in the spacious area with enough room for three cars. His home is massive, as his parents are quite wealthy, and painted a bright white, with massive windows throughout the house. As he is wheeled through the halls lined with family pictures, he looks around to see various photos of his family smiling at him. The hardwood floors make for a smooth ride, and he is thankful for the fact that his room is on the bottom floor, as going up stairs in his current condition will be troublesome.

The next few weeks are filled with what his parents called physical rehabilitation. The part of him that is Damien welcomes the physical exertion, but the part of him that is Sen simply thinks it is hell. Every day, he is lifting things, squeezing things, and walking more and more steps as his atrophied muscles slowly regain their former, admittedly rather pitiful, state.

While the physical training goes on, his parents hire some private tutors to teach him. He learns more about the history of this world, math, the common language, and a broad array of sciences.

The history makes him nothing but confused. Humanity had come from space in a colony ship, the first of its kind using a warp drive, but when the warp drive had malfunctioned, we had been sent far, far off course, and had lost all contact with the homeworld, Earth. For the past millennia and a half, we had spread across the entire world, and while we had found out where earth was, we have been unable to contact them, as we don’t have the ability to reproduce the warp drive, and the one on the ship we had arrived in had completely burned out arriving at the current planet we were living on.

Learning the history, he supposes that earth had been the planet he had lived on, though he couldn’t be sure. The tutoring goes on, as his parents had decided to keep him learning at home rather than sending him back to school, and he continues to do the physical training even after he had fully recovered.

He even finds a toy sword his parents had bought him to practice his swordsmanship with. While it is far lighter than he would like, he isn’t able to find anything better. His swordsmanship practice is kept from his parents, along with the fact that he now had the memories of both Damien and Sen.

The days continue in a similar manner, until he discovers something that will change his life forever, and not in a good way, video games. His first experience is with an RPG that his sister had bugged him to play, and he was instantly hooked. He couldn’t battle with swords in real life, as guns had rendered them entirely obsolete, but as soon as he soon found immersion virtual reality games, he could battle to as much as he desired.

Immersion reality games will send you into a dream like state, and you will feel your body actually in the game, which makes his swordsmanship that he had polished in his previous life a massive advantage. He quickly becomes one of the best players, even with a few shortcomings in his playstyle, simply because he actually knows how to properly use a sword well.

While the ones he can currently play are limited to the kiddy versions, censored to the point that they are basically using nerf swords, and only a slight tingle when you get struck, he still starts spending far more time than his parents are happy with playing them. The only reason they allow his bad habit is because the tutors are always happy with him, and he keeps up his homeschooling to the point that he is significantly ahead of his peers in normal schools.

Throughout it all, he makes sure to keep up his physical training, mainly because having too much of a discrepancy in how much power his physical body has versus his virtual body has will lead to tripping over yourself constantly, not using enough force, or using too much force even when doing something as simple as walking.

The games themselves are far from photorealistic. If you got close, you can see the textures, there is no heartbeat, and your virtual body simply doesn’t have all the details that his own physical body has. Even breathing feels somewhat off, and everything feels a bit floaty compared to real life.

Even so, he spends hours every day fighting monsters or other people, and while his swordsmanship is excellent, he finds he isn’t very good at working with things like cooldowns and spells, so he usually sticks to warrior classes, which are often the most simple to play.

A few years pass, and the swordsmanship he had learned in his past life evolves from simply being able to fight humans, to being able to fight monsters of all shapes and sizes. While he spends a lot of time on the more popular MMORPGs, his favorite he discovers is called “Gladiator”, a purely pvp game with no skills, no cooldowns, simply pitting your swordsmanship against other people. He climbs the ladder quickly, and isn’t showing any signs of stopping, but his tyranny is stopped by the announcement of a certain game.

The game is titled “Fifth Dimension”, and the reason it draws his interest is due to the horrific realism of it. While it had a censored version for kids and teenagers, which unfortunately includes him, as he is only fourteen at this point in time, it claims to have a 98% reproduction of reality. Sen is terribly skeptical, until the first videos for it come out. You could literally see the veins in people’s skin, something that no game bothers to reproduce, and you can see the tendons in people’s hands and arms moving as they do, yet another thing every other game neglects.

At this point, he starts to get skeptical in another fashion. While technology is always advancing, this is far, far past what the current technology could produce. After some research, he finds the company had appeared literally from nowhere. No one has heard of them before, and there are people online who speculate that they are aliens who had contacted the government, or that it is a secret military project developed to read your mind, or other silly conspiracy theories that Sen scoffs at.

Even so, he wonders how exactly it exists, though that wasn’t going to stop him getting it. After a lot of begging, and showing his parents how good he had been at learning things from his tutors, he finally convinces his parents to buy the capsule that will be required to play.

A month later, and constant researching online about every crumb of detail that comes out about fifth dimension, the game capsule arrives, and he is surprised to see two of them being wheeled in, but his sister simply grins at him, along with a “You didn’t actually think I’d be missing out on this game, did you?”

Sen grins, he’d played with his sister in quite a few games, and he’d even convinced her to play Gladiator with him. Lynna is quite talented herself, though she doesn’t play as much as Sen, so she isn’t on the leaderboards like he is.

As the techs wheel the capsules into Lynna and Sen’s rooms, they both watch as they hook up the capsules, and are both surprised as they don’t bother hooking up anything to the internet. Full immersion games require an excellent connection, which practically everyone has, but they also require the servers to be very close, as anything over thirty ping will cause a very noticeable delay in moving your body, which causes massive trouble when trying to move.

“How does it connect?” Sen decides to simply ask the techs.

“No fu….” The man paused for a bit and turns red, noticing Sen’s mother in the background glaring at him. “Ahem. No clue. I just install the things.”

Sen and Lynna both frown. First they have the ridiculous realism, now they have some unknown connection method? Deciding that he will just not care about it, they finish watching the techs installing the capsules, and see them out the door. The second the door shuts, Sen and Lynna share a grin, and each run to their own room. While they won’t be able to play the actual game until midnight, there will be a small training room they are allowed to use to get used to their virtual bodies.

Sen can’t keep the grin off of his face as the cabin shuts above him, and everything fades to darkness.