The first thing he felt was heat.
Blistering, suffocating heat that pressed against his skin like a forge. The taste of iron filled his mouth, thick and bitter. When he tried to move, something heavy clanged against his chest.
He opened his eyes to a sky of blinding white and gold. The sun burned directly above him. Around him lay bodies—men in chainmail, broken shields, and the smell of rot and dust.
"What… the hell?" he croaked, his throat raw.
He pushed himself upright, his fingers brushing over a steel breastplate, dented and bloodstained. A sword rested beside him, its blade chipped, the crossguard etched with a symbol he didn't recognize—a crude cross surrounded by a circle.
And then it hit him.
The banners on the corpses. The clothes. The smell of oil and old leather.
This isn't a dream.
The desert wind picked up, carrying faint voices in the distance—men shouting in a tongue he couldn't understand, the clang of steel echoing faintly from over a dune.
He staggered to his feet, every muscle screaming. His reflection in the polished sword showed a stranger's face—dark hair to the shoulders, a scar across the cheek, eyes that weren't his.
"I'm… not me," he whispered.
Fragments of memory flickered—an office, a subway, headlights—then nothing. His name was gone, or maybe buried beneath the flood of new sensations. All he knew was that he was alive, and that whoever this body belonged to… hadn't been as lucky.
A faint clinking sound came from his belt. He checked it—small leather pouches, one filled with coins, another with a folded piece of parchment sealed in wax. The seal bore the Cross of Jerusalem.
His heartbeat quickened. Jerusalem.
That meant… the Crusades.
The history nerd in him, the part that used to spend nights watching documentaries, screamed with disbelief and awe. If this was real, he was standing in the 12th century, in one of the most brutal eras of human history.
A shadow moved on the horizon—horsemen.
He didn't wait to see whose side they were on. He grabbed the sword, slung the shield onto his back, and stumbled toward the nearest cluster of rocks.
As he hid, his mind raced.
If this was truly the Crusades, then there were only two choices: die as some nameless knight—or use everything he knew to rise above them all.
He clenched his jaw, feeling the dry wind whip at his face.
"Fine," he muttered. "If history gave me a second shot… I'll take the crown this time."
And as the horsemen crested the hill, sunlight gleaming off their spears, the reborn man of the future—now a soldier of the past—tightened his grip on the sword.
The Crusades had just gained a new player.