The rain in Neo-Tokyo was cold, but the steel of the blade in her ribs was colder.
Codename: Viper. She was the apex predator of the global underworld, the strongest female assassin to ever walk in the shadows. She had successfully taken out the top three syndicate bosses in a single night, but the extraction point was compromised. An explosive trap, a collapsing skyscraper, and then—nothing but darkness.
Until she took a sharp, agonizing gasp of air.
Viper opened her eyes, expecting the sterile white lights of a morgue or the burning ruins of a safehouse. Instead, she stared up at a canopy of massive, violet-leaved trees. The air smelled of damp earth and magic.
She tried to sit up and immediately noticed three things. First, the pain in her ribs was gone. Second, the hands covered in mud in front of her were pale, delicate, and entirely devoid of the calluses she had built over twenty years of killing. Third, there was a man with a jagged broadsword standing over her, sneering.
"Looks like the little Lady Aria survived the fall," the burly man grunted, stepping closer. He wore rusted chainmail and a tattered crimson cloak. Two other men, similarly dressed, stepped out from the brush, chuckling. "Shame. The Duke paid us for a corpse, not a hostage."
Viper didn't panic. Her mind, honed by decades of tactical survival, rapidly processed the data. Transmigration. A different body. A different world. Immediate threat: three armed hostiles.
She accessed her new body's memories, which flooded in like a rushed download. She was Aria von Solis, the frail, magically inept eldest daughter of a Duke, betrayed by her stepmother and thrown off a carriage into the dreaded Wyvern Woods to be finished off by mercenaries.
Frail, Viper thought, testing the tension in Aria's legs. No muscle mass. Poor center of gravity. But the human anatomy remains the same. And these amateurs are leaving their carotid arteries wide open.
"Any last words, your highness?" the lead mercenary asked, raising the broadsword.
Viper didn't speak. She moved.
To the mercenaries, it looked as if the terrified girl had simply vanished. Using the spring of her legs, Viper launched herself forward, slipping entirely under the broadsword's arc. She didn't have her custom suppressed pistols or her tungsten throwing knives, but she had Aria's ornate, silver hairpin.
In a fraction of a second, she jammed the hairpin upward, driving it precisely into the nerve cluster beneath the leader's jaw. He dropped like a stone, completely paralyzed, his eyes wide in terror.
Before the other two could even register that their leader had fallen, Viper snatched the dagger from the falling man's belt. She pivoted on her heel, threw the dagger underhand, and buried it into the knee of the second mercenary. As he screamed and buckled, she used his falling shoulder as a springboard, launching herself at the third.
She wrapped her delicate legs around his neck in a flawless flying triangle choke, using her momentum to bring him crashing to the forest floor. A quick, brutal twist, and he went limp.
Silence fell over the violet woods, save for the rain. The entire encounter had taken less than four seconds.
Viper stood up, brushing the dirt off Aria's ruined silk dress. She walked over to a nearby puddle and looked at her reflection. Staring back at her was a beautiful, fifteen-year-old girl with striking silver hair and piercing crimson eyes.
A slow, dangerous smile crept across her new face. In her old world, she was bound by the rigid rules of the syndicates, constantly hiding from satellites and modern surveillance. But here? In a world of swords and sorcery, where people left their throats unprotected and telegraphed their attacks?
This wasn't a second chance. It was a playground.
She retrieved her hairpin, wiping the blood off on a mercenary's cloak, and turned toward the distant, towering spires of the capital city. It was time the Duke learned exactly who he had thrown into the woods.