The days had settled into a strange, exhausting rhythm. My life had split in two, and these worlds were as different from each other as night and day.
Every dawn belonged to the Realm of Iron and Sweat.
The invisible wall between Lynx and me was still there. We no longer spoke like friends; we only worked. The cargo bay's dusty, cold atmosphere had become my personal hell. Lynx interpreted Valsera's order for "light training" in her own way. Yes, my pulse never climbed above one-sixty, but Lynx found a way to keep me hovering just below that limit—balanced for hours on the razor-thin edge where muscle failure begins. We drilled technique, balance, pain threshold. By day's end my body was wrecked—yet unmistakably stronger than the day before.
"I don't know where that power comes from," she once said while I lay on the floor gasping, "but if you waste it, I'll finish you myself." That was our new relationship in a sentence: ruthless protection mixed with suspicion.
Each afternoon, the Realm of Glass and Data began.
I washed the grime and sweat away and headed to that cold, sterile lab. It was the hardest part of the day, because in there not only my body but my lies were tested. Valsera studied me with relentless scientific curiosity. Every day a new scan, a new test, a fresh vial of blood. She was a detective and my body was the crime scene.
"Okan, look," she said one day, pointing to a 3-D muscle-fiber model rotating in the holographic display. "This is yesterday's tissue-repair rate. And this is today's. There's a thirty-percent increase I can't account for. What did you do last night?"
"I just... rested. Slept well," I said, keeping my voice as blank as possible.
She narrowed her eyes. For a moment I felt like prey catching the glint in its hunter's gaze.
"A good night's sleep doesn't rewrite cells this fast," she said. "Your body is doing something beyond my knowledge—and that endangers the experiment, because I can't control the variables."
Her tone wasn't angry; it was worse—disappointed.
Then the day came—when I reached the limits of my lies and my body, and everything sped up. As always, I stepped into the Realm of Glass and Data after lunch.
Valsera greeted me as usual, yet a different tension lay on her face. She conducted the tests in silence—drew blood, ran the scan. When the results hit her tablet, her brow creased deeper. She stared at the numbers and graphs for a long moment.
Right then a subtle shift passed through her posture. Her fingers kept moving on the tablet, but mechanically now. Her eyes were fixed on the data yet seemed to look through it, distant and blank.
"She's receiving a call," Yaren whispered in my head. "High-priority, encrypted system-to-system link. Command tier."
My chance. While she fought a battle in her mind, I could forage for ammunition in mine. My heart pounded. Quietly, carefully, I rose and glanced at the bench. At the bottom of her notes I saw a line marked in red:
RESULT / THEORY: The body reacts from within to an unknown trigger, not from any external factor.
SOURCE: Unknown.
SUSPICION: FOREIGN BIOLOGICAL CATALYST. INVESTIGATE.
Foreign. Biological. Catalyst.
The words branded themselves into my brain. She wasn't just studying my recovery anymore. She was hunting the thing inside me.
At that moment Valsera's body twitched; the mental call had ended. I retreated at once.
She turned toward me. New tension rode the news she'd received—but her eyes flicked across the room, as if sensing a change in her absence.
YOU ARE READING
GATE: First Encounter
FantasyA stranger in his own body... An intruder in his own mind... Okan had no idea he was living the last ordinary day of his life. When he opened his eyes, he was no longer in his own bed but a captive on Aetherion-a distant world beyond the stars. How...
