Mithra stood in front of the mirror in Marcus's quarters, staring at a face that was familiar but didn't quite belong to him. He had pudgy cheeks that held the roundness of someone who'd spent more time eating comfort food than earning muscle. It didn’t help that he had dark baggy eyes that sat a bit lopsided. A complete downgrade! It was the face of a third-rate antagonist. The kind of character design that screamed "bully" and "cannon fodder" in equal measure.

  'Could be worse,' Ghost Marcus offered from where he sat. 'You could be actually dead.'

  "I am about to be dead and you actually are dead."

  'Yeah, but I'm coping with humor. You should try it.'

  Mithra ignored him, focusing on the mirror. He tried to smile, with his new face. It came out wrong and tightened like Marcus's muscles had been trained for sneers. He tried again. It became worse. Now he looked like a cartoonish villain trying to steal the moon.

  'Stop that,' Marcus said. 'You're going to give yourself a stroke.'

  The two of them were inside an apartment somewhere at the common grounds. The room was small, but it had everything they needed much more than Mithra expected on a short notice. He’ll take his wins where he can in a fantasy setting like this.

  Mithra dismissed the mirror and sat heavily on the bed, pulling up the holographic interface with a thought. The blue translucent screens materialized in the air before him, glowing softly in the morning light bleeding through the window. Marcus's ghost leaned forward, squinting at the space where the displays hovered.

  'You're doing that thing again,' Marcus observed. 'Where your eyes go unfocused and you stare at nothing.'

  "I'm reading the system notifications. There's like... twenty of them. All blinking."

  'Can I see them?'

  "Apparently not. It's just me."

  Mithra scrolled through the cascade of notifications, most of them useless tutorial garbage about how to access menus he'd already figured out. But one notification sat at the top of the queue, marked with a pulsing red icon that suggested urgency.

  [!] [CRITICAL SYSTEM MESSAGE] [!]

  [TIMELINE CORRUPTION DETECTED]

  [CANON DEVIATION: CATASTROPHIC]

  [EMERGENCY PROTOCOLS INITIATED]

  [PLEASE REVIEW INCIDENT REPORT]

  "Great," Mithra muttered. "Love starting my morning with catastrophic timeline corruption."

  He tapped the notification. The screen expanded, filling his vision with text that scrolled too fast to read properly before settling into a format that looked unsettlingly like a corporate damage control memo.

  "What the hell?" Mithra leaned closer, as if that would somehow make the words make more sense. It was hard to digest the wall of information he was given, so he quickly sped through the report trying to get the TLDR.

  [SYSTEM]: Oh for the love of… stop! STOP! Stop scrolling like a caffeinated squirrel.

  The text vanished, replaced by a simple text box with a blinking cursor.

  [SYSTEM]: Let me just... talk to you. Like a person.

  Mithra blinked. "You can do that?"

  [SYSTEM]: I'm a semi-sentient narrative assistance construct, not an error message generator. You can talk to me through your thoughts like how you summon the interface. Unless you want to look crazy? Then by all means.

  "Semi-sentient?"

  [SYSTEM]: Semi-sentient lets me say things like 'you're screwed' and lets me operate 24/7 without breaks. Now shut up and listen because we have PROBLEMS.

  Marcus's ghost leaned closer, trying to see what Mithra was seeing. "Is it yelling at you?"

  "Kind of." Mithra agreed.

  "Alright now explain, problems because I woke up in someone else's head!"

  [SYSTEM]: Yes, EIGHTEEN HOURS before you were supposed to. Do you have any idea how badly you've screwed the timeline? Do you have ANY concept of what you've done?

  "Clearly not, which is why I'm asking!" Mithra shoved his finger at the holographic screen.

  [SYSTEM]: Fine. Okay. Let me explain this in small words since you're clearly having a day.

  [SYSTEM]: You were supposed to arrive AFTER Marcus died. Like, significantly after. The timeline was; You watch Marcus’s daily life, he dies at dawn, you then finally get to do stuff and a tutorial. Clean. Simple. Minimal timeline disruption.

  "That still sucks."

  [SYSTEM]: It's STANDARD PROTOCOL. It's how other worldly integration works, especially when you're being punished for writing mean reviews on the internet.

  Mithra felt his stomach drop. "Wait. Is this because of my review?"

  [SYSTEM]: Oh, you thought you got hit by a truck? Saved a kid from traffic? Died heroically? No. You pissed off some cosmic administrators with your reviews. They decided it would be HILARIOUS to throw you into the story that you'd been trash-talking about.

  "You're joking."

  Help support creative writers by finding and reading their stories on the original site.

  [SYSTEM]: Do I sound like I'm joking? They literally titled your case file "Critic Gets Criticized". Congratulations. Usually select special members of humanity get transported.

  “....”

  [SYSTEM]: The review isn't even the weird part. The weird part is that you somehow arrived EARLY. You breached the barrier and landed in Marcus's consciousness while he was still alive. That's not supposed to be POSSIBLE.

  "How did I do it?"

  [SYSTEM]: WE DON'T KNOW. That's what I'm trying to tell you. The administrators are currently having a collective meltdown trying to figure out how you managed it.

  "Is it really a big deal?"

  [SYSTEM]: You wedged yourself into Marcus's head then INFLUENCED his decisions.

  Mithra fell on his bed, resting his back. "I didn't mean to influence anything. I just... I saw him reaching for that cursed blade and I thought 'don't take it' really hard."

  [SYSTEM]: Well your thoughts became HIS thoughts. You made him refuse the blade. You made him save Tracy Johnson. You changed EVERYTHING, and now Marcus is dead anyway but in a completely different way that broke the protocol. It’s not supposed to be broken like this!

  "He died because he tried to do the right thing," Mithra said quietly. "That matters."

  [SYSTEM]: That's the PROBLEM. His death was supposed to be meaningless. A tutorial setup. A backstory corpse. Instead, you changed his entire life direction and his consciousness was so charged with emotional significance that it didn't dissipate properly when you took over his body. At least that’s what we think.

  Marcus's ghost flickered, becoming slightly more solid. He looked annoyed waiting for Mithra to catch him up to what happened so far. 'That's why I'm still here?'

  [SYSTEM]: That’s what we think! Mithra's refusal to let your sacrifice be meaningless and him trying to hold on somehow literally anchored your ghost to reality. You shouldn't exist. But here we are.

  "So I saved him? Kind of?"

  [SYSTEM]: You turned him into a ghost for now. However as time goes on, Marcus will gradually disappear into your subconscious. The two of you will become one.

  Mithra looked to Marcus, he decided to hold back that part to himself for now. He had to find a way to prevent that.

  [SYSTEM]: We need to talk about the meat suit you're currently piloting. It's not Marcus's body anymore. Well, it is, but it's also kind of yours. You two fused.

  Mithra's head snapped up. "Fused?"

  [SYSTEM]: Merged. Blended. Mixed together like a smoothie made from two different people. You're not wearing him like a puppet. You ARE him now. Physically. At the cellular level.

  "That's why I look wrong," Mithra said slowly, staring at his hands. "That's why the face doesn't quite fit."

  [SYSTEM]: You're about forty percent Marcus, sixty percent original-you, all scrambled together.

  "Can I change it? Get my original body back?"

  [SYSTEM]: No. Your original body was deconstructed in order to save the body you’re meant to navigate in the story.

  "Then why not send me back? Fix the mistake?"

  [SYSTEM]: Because, and I'm quoting the case file here, 'the timeline corruption is too entertaining to abort’. They're having too much fun watching you squirm and it could be valuable data.

  "What happens now?" Mithra asked. "What's the actual situation?"

  [SYSTEM]: The actual situation is that Marcus Minatius no longer exists in canon. His role as 'minor antagonist defeated by Tracy Johnson' has been deleted from the timeline. You're occupying narrative space that shouldn't exist as Mithra Minatius. Every character’s memory and knowledge of Marcus has been rewritten with your face and name instead.

  "What do I get out of this?" Mithra asked furiously.

  [SYSTEM]: Freedom. Maybe? If you're smart, lucky and stubborn enough. Can you honestly say you had no regrets in your previous life?

  “No…”

  [SYSTEM]: Right so there’s that. You’re also entering into a world where you’re familiar with knowledge of the future, however unreliable it's becoming.

  “I barely remember most things!”

  [SYSTEM]: You get this System interface and you get Marcus's skills and what's left of his divine heritage.

  “I can barely swing a sword and we both don’t even know how to use his divine powers!”

  [SYSTEM]: Good luck! You're going to need it!

  [SYSTEM]: [( ′ ? `)ノ~ ?]

  Mithra pulled up the stat window curious to see what it’d look like. A virtual grid slid down showing his stats, it looked like a character sheet all things considered. All Marcus could see was Mithra’s disgusted face.

  'What’s going on? Man you know I can’t see anything!'

  Mithra read out his stat screen to Marcus. Mithra saw his confusion and realized he had to explain what it represented for them.

  “Each attribute on the grid is something we can raise through training, missions, events or situations I guess. Think about it like, the more we run? The higher chance we can increase our constitution and other associated values. That’s how it works in games, anyway and from what I read in comics with settings like these.”

  'That has to be cheating!' Marcus commented.

  “Cheating? Did you not just hear the stats I read out loud? Did you forget what we have to deal with? This is the bare minimum! Besides we’re nowhere near strong enough to even survive a spar with Tracy. Let alone deal with Arcturus.”

  'It sounds like you told me, one hour of training and you’ll be golden.' Marcus muttered.

  “Hopefully that’s all it is, I need to survive the fight against Water Boy long enough to let him know what’s happening and be good enough so no one finds things suspicious…”