Chapter 1: A Foreign World and the Mirror

Warm.

Not the heat of a bullet, but the gentle warmth—like morning sunlight caressing the cheek.

Her eyelids fluttered open slowly. A wooden ceiling. Thin curtains swaying gently in the breeze.
This wasn't a hospital.
This wasn't Tokyo.

She tried to sit up.

“Ugh… my head…”
The voice that escaped her lips—it wasn't the voice of an adult.
It was higher. Younger.
More… like a teenage girl?

She looked at her hands. Pale, delicate, and small.
Her eyes wandered to the mirror hanging on the wall.

A stranger’s face stared back.
A silver-haired girl in her teens, with crimson eyes that glowed like blood.

“Who… is this? Is this… me?”
She reached up and touched her cheek.

But the mirror didn’t lie.

She was no longer Oshino Aoi.
She was… someone else.
And somehow, she knew the name of the girl in the mirror.

Aestrell Laurie.

The name echoed in her mind, as if it had always been hers.

Suddenly, footsteps echoed outside the room, and she jolted.
The door creaked open, and an elderly woman peeked in with a gentle smile.

“Sweetheart, you’re awake? Thank goodness. You’ve been in a coma for two weeks.”

Aoi—or rather, Aestrell—could only nod.

“You can rest for now. I’ll bring you breakfast later,” said the woman before closing the door.

She stared blankly into space.

This wasn’t a dream.
This was a new world.
And she… hadn’t just been reborn.
She had awakened in someone else’s body.

Instinctively, her hand reached under the bed—and touched something cold and firm.

A weapon’s sheath.
A short sword.

Strangely, she knew exactly how to draw it.
Her movements were fluid, as if this body remembered everything on its own.

“Who… am I really…?”

She rose slowly to her feet and stood before the mirror once more.

“I’m… Aestrell Laurie. Or…”

The name surfaced in her mind, unbidden—like a whisper in the silence.

“…Chaos?”

The name Chaos echoed deep within her.
A name dripping with blood and silence.
A name that belonged to an assassin.

And as that name rang in her head, something else stirred within her—
Foreign memories.
Vengeance.
Blood.
And a fire that would never die.