Chapter 1: Awakening in Chaos
POV: Adam
The last thing Adam remembered was the soft glow of Netflix on his laptop screen, the credits rolling on The Last of Us finale. He'd been lying on his couch in Chicago, forty-one years old with gray threading his temples and a surgical residency that had burned him out three years too early. The wine had been good, the pizza cold, and he'd fallen asleep wondering what Joel would do differently if he could start over.
The heart attack had been sudden. No warning, no dramatic chest-clutching scene from a medical drama. Just a sharp pain that spread from his chest down his left arm, followed by the crushing weight of his body failing him. He'd managed to reach for his phone, but darkness had claimed him before he could dial 911. His last coherent thought had been bitter irony—a surgeon dying alone from the most preventable cause of death in his profession.
Then darkness.
Now screaming.
Adam's eyes snapped open to an unfamiliar ceiling—water-stained plaster instead of his apartment's clean drywall. The sounds hit him like physical blows: distant gunfire crackling like fireworks, sirens wailing in layered discord, and underneath it all, human voices raised in terror and confusion.
He sat up and his hands looked wrong. Too young, too smooth. The surgical scars on his knuckles from clumsy residency accidents had vanished. His palms were broader, stronger, with long fingers he'd never seen before.
"What the hell—"
The voice wasn't his either. Deeper, with a slight Texas drawl he'd never had.
Adam stumbled from an unfamiliar bed toward a bathroom mirror, feet moving with coordination his body shouldn't possess. The reflection that greeted him stopped his breath cold.
Twenty years younger. Sharp jaw instead of his soft professor's face. Dark hair free of gray. Brown eyes instead of his pale blue. Everything proportioned differently—taller, broader through the shoulders, with muscle definition his desk job had never allowed.
But recognition hit like ice water through his veins.
He knew this face. Had seen it in fan art, in wiki entries, in deleted scenes. A face that existed only in backstory, in throwaway lines about a brother who died young. Tommy Miller, if Tommy had looked different. Joel's family, if Joel had different family. A face from The Last of Us universe that shouldn't exist.
"This isn't possible."
The screaming outside intensified, punctuated by sounds that made his stomach clench—wet tearing, inhuman clicking. His brain tried to rationalize: dream, hallucination, breakdown from residency stress. But the bathroom tiles were cold under his bare feet. The mirror reflected actual light, actual shadow. The terror in those distant voices carried weight that dreams couldn't match.
Fragments of memory crashed together like colliding trains. His death from cardiac arrest in a Chicago apartment. Waking up in The Last of Us world during Outbreak Day. The impossible face staring back from the mirror. Three separate realities trying to exist in his mind simultaneously.
He was dead. He was alive. He was fictional. He was real.
"I died. I actually died. And now I'm... what? Reincarnated? Transmigrated? In a TV show?"
But even as his rational mind rejected it, muscle memory he'd never possessed flexed through his limbs. Knowledge of breathing techniques that enhanced physical ability. Understanding of spatial manipulation that violated physics. Awareness of enhanced perception that could pierce walls and distance.
Three power sets downloaded into his consciousness like software installations: Stone Breathing from Demon Slayer, Detection abilities, and something that felt like the Ope Ope no Mi from One Piece. All of them were as real as his heartbeat.
The bathroom door exploded inward.
The thing that crashed through moved wrong—too fluid in some places, too jerky in others. Fungal growths erupted from its skull in baroque patterns, clicking sounds emerging from a throat that had forgotten human speech. Its eyes were milky white, searching, and when they found Adam they fixed with predatory focus.
A Runner. Freshly turned, still fast. Still hungry.
"Oh, fuck no—"
Panic triggered something primal. Without thought, Adam's breathing shifted into a pattern he'd never learned—deep, controlled, rhythmic. His lungs filled with air that seemed to carry more oxygen than physics allowed. His body moved through a sword form he'd never practiced, muscle memory downloaded from somewhere impossible.
The kitchen knife appeared in his hand (when had he grabbed it?) and felt like an extension of his arm as he flowed into perfect combat stance. The Runner lunged with infected speed, fungal growths pulsing as it moved.
First Form: Serpentinite Bipolar.
The knowledge arrived complete and perfect. Twin diagonal strikes, one after the other, creating a pincer attack that the Runner's deteriorating reflexes couldn't follow. The knife, guided by technique that belonged to anime he'd watched for stress relief, sliced through infected flesh and fungal growth with surgical precision.
But it was more than just technique. The breath control sent power flowing through his muscles, enhancing speed and strength beyond human norms. The blade itself seemed to carry additional cutting force, as if reality bent slightly around the weapon when wielded with proper form.
The Runner's head hit the bathroom floor with a wet thud. Its body collapsed a second later, dark blood pooling around fungal growths that continued twitching for several seconds before falling still.
Adam stared at his hands, shaking. Blue energy flickered around his fingers—faint, translucent, gone before he could focus on it. He'd just performed a perfect sword technique from Demon Slayer using a kitchen knife to kill a creature from The Last of Us.
Stone Breathing wasn't just martial arts. It was supernatural enhancement that made the human body into something beyond normal limitations. And he could do it instinctively, as if he'd trained for years instead of seconds.
Two impossible things in five minutes.
The headache hit like a sledgehammer behind his eyes.
Vision blurred, then crystallized into something that wasn't sight—awareness pressing through walls and floors, mapping the building in three-dimensional detail. Glowing silhouettes moved through the structure: twelve infected forms converging from three floors down, their heat signatures pulsing red with aggression. Above, six civilians clustered near rooftop access, terror bright around them like halos.
Detection. Enhanced perception that could track living beings through solid matter. Range seemed limited to maybe fifty meters, but within that sphere he could sense every heartbeat, every breath, every movement. The information flooded his brain with intensity that made his skull feel like it was splitting.
Two minutes until the infected reached this floor. Thirty seconds until they found the civilians on the roof.
The vision faded but knowledge remained burned into his brain. He could see through walls. He could sense living things through stone and steel. His head felt like someone had driven a railroad spike through his skull, but he knew where everyone was.
And he could do something about it.
"This isn't real. This can't be real."
But his body moved anyway, grabbing supplies without conscious thought—the bloodied kitchen knife, a first aid kit from under the sink, bottled water from the counter. Training that wasn't his guided every action. Medical knowledge from his actual residency mixed with survival instinct mixed with abilities that belonged in fiction.
Three power sets. Three impossible abilities. All of them real enough to save lives.
Stone Breathing enhanced his physical capabilities through controlled respiration. Detection allowed perception beyond normal senses. And lurking beneath both was something else—spatial manipulation that felt surgical in its precision. The Ope Ope no Mi, granting dominion over space within a defined area.
He was a surgeon who had died and been reborn as something beyond human in a world that had been fiction until five minutes ago.
The infected howls echoed up the stairwell as he reached the rooftop door. Through the metal, he heard panicked voices:
"—nowhere to run, they're everywhere—"
"—my daughter, where's my daughter—"
"—should've stayed in the apartment—"
Adam's hand found the door handle. Six terrified strangers waited beyond it, and twelve infected climbed toward them with clicking hunger. His mind screamed that this was fantasy, delusion, impossible breakdown from the stress of his own death.
His enhanced senses painted every detail in perfect clarity. Hearts racing with terror. Breathing shallow with panic. The infected below moving with predatory focus toward the scent of living flesh.
The door opened to reveal six pairs of desperate eyes—an elderly man, two women in their thirties, a teenager clutching a younger girl, and a mother holding an infant. They stared at him with the hollow hope of the drowning offered a rope.
The infected sounds grew closer. Clicking, scratching, the wet slap of deteriorating feet on concrete stairs.
Adam's mouth opened without conscious decision: "I know a way out."
The first lie of many. Because he didn't know anything except what detection had shown him—an impossible ability that gave him sight beyond sight. But the people in front of him were real. Their terror was real. And somehow, in a world that shouldn't exist, he had abilities that might save them.
"One way to find out if this is real," he thought grimly. "Time to see what Stone Breathing can really do."
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