Chapter 1: A Terrible Way to Die and a Worse Way to Wake Up

Kenji Mori's last coherent thought was that he should have used a fork.

He had not owned a fork. That was the problem. He had owned one chopstick, half a college degree, and approximately four days worth of instant ramen that he had been rationing since Tuesday because payday was not until Friday and Tuesday had been a very optimistic day. He had been eating standing up over the sink because his table had a box on it, and the box had another box on it, and somewhere underneath those boxes was probably a bill he was not ready to look at.

The noodle went sideways. He knew immediately it was bad. He did the thing where you try to cough and swallow at the same time, which does not work, which everyone knows does not work, and yet every single person tries it anyway because the brain panics and stops being smart.

He knocked the cup off the counter. The broth went everywhere.

And then Kenji Mori, age 26, unemployed, owner of one chopstick, died on a Tuesday night in an apartment that smelled like soy sauce and unread mail.

He was not ready.

He had things to do. Not important things, but things. He had been meaning to watch the last season of a show he had not started yet. He had told his mother he would call her back two weeks ago. He had a library book that was already six days overdue and now he supposed it was just going to stay that way, which felt like a bad legacy.

He thought about all of this for what felt like a long time.

Then someone screamed.

Not him. Someone nearby. A lot of someones, actually, which was confusing because his apartment building was not that loud and his neighbors were a retired couple who went to bed at nine and a guy named something that started with T who Kenji had never actually seen in person, only heard through the wall occasionally playing what sounded like lute music.

Kenji became aware, slowly, that he did not have a body.

He had something. He had presence. He had a perspective and what felt like a general location, which was more than nothing. But he could not move and he could not speak and when he tried to look around he found that looking around was not exactly how it worked. He could perceive. He could feel. He could hear, actually quite well, and what he heard was a battlefield.

Steel. Fire. Someone shouting a name. A sound like the world cracking down the middle.

And underneath all of it, a heartbeat that was not his.

Oh, Kenji thought. That's not great.

He felt the body he was apparently living inside of move. Long strides, very confident, the kind of walk that expected things to get out of the way. The ground was uneven, rocky, and from the ambient noise and smell of smoke Kenji pieced together that he was outdoors, nighttime, and adjacent to something catastrophic.

He tried to speak. Nothing came out. He was not connected to a mouth. He was connected to, as far as he could tell, a chest cavity. Specifically the area around the sternum, warm and tucked in like a seed in bad soil.

The body stopped walking. Someone nearby said, in a very shaky voice, "General. The east flank has broken."

General.

The chest Kenji lived in expanded slowly with a breath. When the voice came it was low and even and had the particular quality of a man who had decided long ago that tone of voice was a weapon.

"Then stop the west one from breaking too," the General said. "Or I'll do it myself and you won't enjoy watching."

The soldier said something else. The General did not respond. He simply started walking again and the soldier apparently decided this counted as a dismissal.

Kenji processed this.

He was inside a general. A military general. On a battlefield. At night. In what was clearly not his world because nobody in his world talked like that and also the sky had two moons, which he could perceive in an ambient way even without eyes of his own, like knowing a light is on in the next room.

Two moons.

Okay, Kenji thought. Okay. Isekai. I got isekaid. I died on a Tuesday eating ramen and I got isekaid. Into a general. Not as a general. Into one.

He thought about this for a moment.

Cool. Cool cool cool. That's fine. This is fine.

It was not fine but Kenji had always been better at surviving things than preparing for them, so he filed "not fine" under "deal with later" and started paying attention.

The General, whose name he did not know yet, walked through the battle like it was a mild inconvenience. People cleared paths for him. When they did not clear fast enough he did something with his hand that produced what felt to Kenji like a pressure drop, the same feeling as the moment before a thunderstorm, and whatever was in his way moved.

He was powerful. That part came through clearly even without being able to see properly. The soldiers around him were afraid of him. Not the careful respect-fear of people who admire their leader. The flinching, breath-holding, please-do-not-look-at-me fear of people who have seen something they cannot forget.

Kenji catalogued this. He was trapped inside a scary man. Noted.

The battle wound down. From the sounds of it they had won, whoever they were. The General stood somewhere elevated and people reported to him and he gave orders in that same flat voice and nobody questioned anything. At some point the two moons moved enough that Kenji guessed an hour had passed.

And then it happened.

It started small. A kind of pull, low and insistent, like a tide going out. Kenji recognized it before he understood it because it was his. It was his hunger. The specific hollow ache of a man who has not eaten since noon and it is now past midnight, the particular variety of empty that instant ramen was invented to fix.

He had not eaten since noon. He had died at two in the morning. He had been about to fix it.

The hunger moved through him and because he was not separate from the General, because he was lodged in the man's chest like a splinter, it moved through the General too.

The General stopped talking mid-sentence.

One of his officers said, hesitantly, "Sir?"

A pause. Long enough to be strange.

"Dismissed," the General said. His voice had changed by approximately nothing but Kenji, who was currently sharing a sternum with him, felt the shift underneath it. Confusion. A faint disorientation, like a man who has just heard a sound he cannot place.

The officers left. The General stood alone on his elevated rock or hill or whatever it was and the hunger kept pulling and Kenji almost felt bad about it except that he was dead and homeless and living in a stranger's ribcage so he felt his guilt was somewhat limited.

The General looked down at his own chest.

Kenji could feel this. The angles changed. A hand came up and pressed flat against the sternum, right where Kenji lived.

"What," the General said quietly, to no one, "is that."

Kenji thought very hard. He pushed every piece of himself toward the surface. He had no voice, no body, nothing to work with. But he had been a craving for ramen for what felt like his entire existence, and cravings were insistent things, and so he pushed the only message he had.

Noodles, Kenji thought with everything he had. Broth. Soft-boiled egg. Soy sauce. Please.

The General stood very still.

Then, in the same tone he had used to threaten his officers, he said: "I don't know what that is."

Kenji thought: I know. That's the problem.

Somewhere in the back of the General's mind, in the way that thoughts sometimes arrive sideways, he heard something that was almost a voice, not quite words, more like an impression.

It said: yeah, buddy. We're going to have a long couple of months.

The General looked at his hand on his chest for a long moment.

Then he put it down, straightened his coat, and walked back toward camp, and Kenji settled in and started thinking about how to explain wheat noodles to a medieval fantasy army, and the two moons moved overhead, indifferent to all of it.