Chapter One
The jungle pressed in like a living thing, its humidity clinging to Walker's skin, thick and suffocating. He wondered, briefly, how it had come to this. Maybe it was always going to end here—in some nameless stretch of green hell, gunned down where no one would ever find him. After all, Walker no longer existed in any way that mattered. No fingerprints, no dental records, no birth certificate. No family, no loved ones. Just his team—and they were gone now, cut down in an ambush that left him the last man standing.
"God damn it," he muttered, teeth clenched. How the hell did they find us?
A twig snapped. Instinct replaced thought. Walker raised his standard-issue M16, the weight familiar, the magazine almost spent. One last fight, then the knife. That was all that remained.
A glint of movement. He exhaled and squeezed the trigger. A guerrilla soldier dropped. Walker dove behind a tree as answering gunfire shredded the air where he had crouched seconds before.
Shouts in a foreign tongue rose above the jungle's hum. Walker listened, mapped their positions, then burst from cover, unleashing a furious barrage. His rifle spat smoke and fire until the last rounds were gone. Screams and curses cut through the din. Then silence. Then movement again.
He let the rifle fall and drew his combat knife, steel glinting in the dim light. His grip tightened, breath heavy.
Something landed beside him with a metallic clink.
"Oh, fuck—"
The grenade detonated, hurling him to the ground. His ears rang with static. Shrapnel burned into his back, hot knives tearing flesh. Blood blurred his vision, but he forced himself upright, staggering forward.
"You'll have to kill me on my feet, you bastards!" he roared, voice raw, body trembling. Each step was agony, every breath fire. He didn't even realize he'd been shot again until the world tilted and he toppled backward.
But the ground never came.
Walker fell. Down and down, past earth, past jungle, past everything. His body vanished into a bottomless dark, weightless and endless, as though the world itself had dropped him.
Walker jolted upright, lungs heaving like he'd clawed his way out of drowning. His mind spun, fragments of the ambush slashing across his thoughts—gunfire, the grenade, the fall into nothing. For a heartbeat he expected the sting of shrapnel, the reek of smoke. Instead, silence pressed in.
Slowly, unsteadily, he forced himself to his feet.
The place around him was impossible. He stood in a throne room sculpted from pale marble, its polished stone veined with light that pulsed like a heartbeat. Beyond the shattered arches stretched no jungle, no sky—only a vast, swirling sea of red, orange, and violet nebulae, turning endlessly in a void that had no horizon.
His voice cracked the silence. "Where… where am I? What the hell is going on?"
Walker's eyes caught on the massive columns that ringed the chamber. Symbols ran along them in jagged, alien carvings—lines that seemed to shift when he wasn't looking, patterns that breathed. The longer he stared, the sharper the pain behind his eyes. It felt as though the marks weren't meant to be read by anything human, secrets carved into stone to punish the unworthy who tried. He staggered, clutching his head as fire lanced through his skull.
The air tasted of dust and ozone. Somewhere, far off, a low hum began to rise, like the vibration of some vast machine awakening.
"Welcome to the throne of the cosmos, mortal."
The voice thundered through the chamber, resonant and terrible, echoing from everywhere and nowhere at once.
Walker spun, dropping instinctively into a defensive crouch. Knife in hand, breath sharp, he turned in a full circle, trying to anchor the impossible sound. The marble chamber swallowed every movement, every rasp of air, until at last his eyes caught it—
The throne.
It loomed at the far end of the hall, a vast construct of shifting, iridescent light, colors bleeding into one another like oil across water. Upon it sat a figure draped in robes woven from pure void, fabric darker than shadow, darker than death—the very substance of a black hole given form. From beneath the hood, no face emerged—only a brilliance that seared Walker's eyes, a light so blinding and relentless it could have been born from the heart of a neutron star.
The figure leaned forward, and though no features showed, Walker felt its gaze pierce him, stripping him bare, weighing every scar and secret he had ever carried.
"Mortal, you have been called to me." The voice resonated through the throne room, shaking the marble beneath his feet. "Through your ferocious will to survive… through your struggle in death itself… you have been deemed worthy of a second life."
Walker's thoughts reeled, his vision swimming. Dead. The word cut through him sharper than shrapnel. Every battle, every scar, every friend and foe left broken on the ground—it all came flooding back. He saw the faces of his squad, the screams, the blood. His body remembered every loss.
"I'm dead," he muttered, voice hoarse. "Just like that. And now you're saying I get a second chance?" His laugh was dry, bitter. "All the horrors I've seen… all the people I've killed… and somehow I'm the one who deserves a second chance?"
The absurdity of it gnawed at him. He was a ghost even before death—no family, no friends, nothing left of a life except the men who'd fought beside him, and they were gone too. Walker had been a weapon, nothing more. A machine built to kill.
The being's voice deepened, ringing like the toll of a bell across eternity.
"Mortal, though your hands are stained with sin, you have proven, through courage and through honor, that you are more than the blade you once were. You stand as one who may yet be the hero of a world drowning in the blood of the innocent. A world where the last remnants of its people are hunted, driven to the brink of extinction by a malignant evil—one whose hunger stretches beyond a single land, seeking to unmake not just their world, but countless others."
The vast chamber darkened as the words echoed, the void beyond the arches pulsing with violent reds and devouring shadows.
Walker stood trembling, not from fear but from the sheer weight of what he had been told. The absurdity of it all clawed at his mind like a fever dream—yet the sharpness of the air, the crushing presence of the throne room, the brilliance of the being before him… none of it felt like a dream.
"How am I supposed to save an entire world," he muttered, voice breaking, "when I couldn't even save myself?" His chest ached with the memory of his squad, their screams and blood still fresh, as if burned into his skin.
"And an all-consuming evil that's already wiped out most of a world—how the hell can I possibly win?"
The chamber pulsed at his words, the nebulae beyond the arches flaring with violent reds and streaks of violet lightning. For a moment the silence pressed heavy, as though the cosmos itself weighed his doubts.
Then the voice rolled over him, deep and inexorable.
"No one man can defeat such a force. But one man can become the spark that rouses the fallen, the shield that rallies the broken, the blade that strikes when hope itself has fled. You are not asked to win alone, Walker. You are asked to fight when all others cannot."
The words thrummed in his bones, but still he shook his head. His life had been nothing but blood and loss. He was no savior. He was a soldier without a war, a ghost without a name.
And yet—somewhere deep inside, beneath the bitterness and the scars—something stirred.