The Rooftop

The rain wasn't the dramatic, thundering downpour you see in movies. It was something far more miserable: a cold, persistent drizzle that refused to stop. It coated the concrete rooftop in a slick, black sheen, blurring the city lights far below into a messy watercolor of gold, red, and neon. That same dampness clung to Kael's thin jacket, a cheap thing he'd bought on sale, and had long since seeped into the fabric. The chill was so deep it had settled in his bones, but he'd stopped feeling it an hour ago.

Down below, the sprawling city breathed with a tired, electric sigh. It was a constant hum—the drone of traffic, the distant wail of an ambulance racing to a tragedy that wasn't his, the endless white noise of ten million lives. Ten million people he was utterly, completely disconnected from.

He stood near the edge. The low railing, a pathetic safety feature, barely reached his knees. The wind wasn't a violent gust; it was a high, thin whisper that snaked around him, tugging at his clothes like a persistent ghost. It promised nothing but a long, silent drop to the pavement below.

This wasn’t some spur-of-the-moment decision. There was no final, tear-soaked phone call, no screaming rage at the heavens. Kael had used up all of his passion weeks ago. This was just… the end of the line. The final calculation on a ledger so full of failures, there was no space left to write. The debt was a number with too many zeroes for his tired brain to even process. The heartbreak from his last relationship had faded from a sharp, stabbing pain to a dull, constant ache behind his ribs—the phantom limb of a warmth he could no longer remember how to feel. His job? A soulless, grinding loop of spreadsheets, passive-aggressive emails from his boss, and the fake smile he had to wear every single day. He was a broken cog in a machine that was ready to spit him out.

He’d tried. God, he’d really, genuinely tried. He’d worked the overtime that was never paid. He’d swallowed his pride so many times he’d forgotten what it tasted like. He’d apologized for mistakes that weren't even his. He had played the game by all the stupid rules society had set up. But he'd learned the hard way: the game was rigged, and the house always, always wins.

A flicker of a memory, uninvited, surfaced in his mind—the sound of a woman's laughter, bright and real. The faint scent of her shampoo, something like coconut and sunshine. The fragment was worn smooth and colorless, like a piece of sea glass tumbled by the relentless waves of his own misery. He violently shoved it away. Memories were just anchors, and his ship had already hit the seafloor.

He took one last look at the glittering beast below. It was beautiful, in a terrible, predatory way. It glittered with a million promises it never intended to keep. The city didn't care about him. It wouldn't even notice he was gone. He’d be a statistic for a day, a brief traffic delay, and then nothing. The thought didn't bring sadness. It brought a profound and calming relief that washed over him, quieting the noise in his head for the first time in years.

This is it.

He closed his eyes, let out a shallow breath he didn't realize he'd been holding, and took one simple step forward into empty air.

There was no ground. Just the sudden, violent rush of wind screaming in his ears. The city lights below stretched into impossibly long streaks, a collapsing tunnel of fire rushing up to meet him. For a fraction of a second, the weightlessness was pure, animal terror. Then, a strange peace settled in. The noise of the world above—the traffic, the rain, everything—vanished. The only sound was the roar of his own descent.

His last thought wasn't of regret, or fear, or the people he'd leave behind. It was just a single, utterly exhausted word.

Finally.

Then, the world ended.

…But the impact never came. The sensation of falling simply dissolved into an immense, silent, and absolute cold. He had no body, no voice, no thoughts, not even a name. He was just a single point of awareness, adrift and alone in a void of perfect, starless black. Time wasn't a thing here. Hours, days, centuries—they all meant nothing. He was unmade, a single thread pulled loose from the grand tapestry of existence.

An eternity passed. Or maybe it was just a heartbeat.

Then, something changed. The oppressive, soul-crushing cold began to recede, replaced by a gentle, pervasive warmth. It felt like the first rays of sunlight after the longest, darkest night. The absolute silence was broken by a faint, rhythmic thrumming. Thump-thump. Thump-thump. The beat of a colossal, impossibly distant heart. The lonely thread of his being was caught, not by a familiar hand, but by Something Else. Something ancient, vast, and incomprehensible.

It began to weave him back into existence. But it wasn't repairing him; it was reforging him. The frayed, rotten ends of his old life—the crushing debt, the apathy, the despair—were trimmed away and discarded like trash. What was left was the core of him: a cynical, sharp-tongued realism born from hardship, a quiet empathy he rarely showed, and a profound, bone-deep exhaustion with lies and deceit.

The weaving grew faster, the warmth more intense. The cosmic heartbeat grew louder and louder until it wasn't distant anymore. It was inside him. It was his own.

A gasp, ragged and painful, tore through his new throat.

Air, raw and tasting of damp earth, charcoal, and woodsmoke, flooded his lungs. He collapsed into a fit of coughing, his whole body convulsing on a hard, uneven stone surface. The world crashed back into him with a sensory violence that stole his breath. The cold drizzle on his face was real. The rough, gritty cobblestones digging into his palms were real.

He pushed himself up onto his hands and knees, every muscle screaming in protest as if he'd just run a marathon. He looked down at himself. His clothes—the same worn-out jeans and thin, soaked jacket—were still on him. But the rooftop was gone. The city was gone.

He was in a narrow, grimy alleyway. On either side, timber-framed buildings with sagging roofs leaned against each other like tired old drunks. The architecture was like something out of a history book—medieval, foreign, and utterly out of place. There were no electric lights, no neon glow. The only illumination came from the flickering, oily orange light of a single lantern hanging from a rusted iron bracket farther down the lane.

He forced his aching body to stand and looked up. The perpetual grey, smog-choked sky of his city was gone. In its place was a sky of the deepest, clearest indigo. And hanging in it were two moons—a large, brilliant silver-white orb, and next to it, a smaller, sapphire-blue companion.

Kael just stared, his mind screeching to a halt as it refused to process the impossible sight. A dream? A dying hallucination? That has to be it. Oxygen deprivation to the brain. He pinched the back of his hand, digging his nails in hard. A flare of pain, sharp and undeniable, shot up his arm.

He was alive. Somehow, he was alive.

He stumbled out of the alley's shadows and onto a wider street, his eyes wide as he took in the scene. People ambled past, their clothes a strange mix of worn leather, simple homespun cloth, and—impossibly—gleaming steel armor. A burly man with a thick, braided beard and a heavy-looking axe slung over his shoulder shared a loud laugh with a woman carrying a basket of strange, faintly glowing mushrooms. A city guard in a dented breastplate and helmet leaned against a wall, a sheathed longsword resting comfortably at his hip.

There were no cars. No smartphones. No buzzing electrical wires. Just the low murmur of voices in a language he somehow understood, the clatter of boots on stone, and the distant, rhythmic clang… clang… clang of a blacksmith's hammer.

This wasn't his world. It couldn't be.

His cynical mind, the only part of him that felt truly familiar, kicked into overdrive, scrambling for a logical explanation. Okay. I'm in a coma, and this is all a fantasy my brain cooked up. Or it's an incredibly elaborate, multi-million dollar prank. Or I've finally, completely lost my mind. Any of those insane options made more sense than the impossible truth standing right in front of him.

And yet… the night air was too crisp and clean. The rich smell of baking bread wafting from a nearby shop was too real. The persistent, miserable chill in his soaked clothes was an undeniable testament to his own living, breathing body.

The ridiculous, absurd word from all those comics and web novels he used to read popped into his head. Isekai.

He had stepped off a rooftop looking for a quick and final ending. Instead, it seemed, he'd stumbled into a new beginning. Broken, lost, and utterly alone in a world that had no right to exist, the man who had been Kael took his first, hesitant step onto the streets of a city he would soon come to know as Ashvale.