The training session started with an atmosphere you could cut with a knife. ... All four of us—me, Torren, Zara, and Elara—were in the secure yard. This was the first time we'd attempted a four-way link. The multiplication of power from a three-way resonance had been staggering; Lysara's math suggested a four-way link wasn't just additive, it was exponential. We weren't just practicing; we were handling a live bomb. Master Dren was observing from the platform, his face grim. Kaela and Lysara were at the perimeter, their stances making it clear they were there as containment, not just observers.
The goal was ambitious: maintain a four-way shadow synchronization for ten minutes. We'd never made it past three.
"Ready?" I asked. The three of them nodded, their faces a mix of terror and determination.
We formed a circle. I initiated the connection.
The moment all four of our convergence marks linked, it wasn't a connection. It was a conflagration.
The resonance didn't just multiply—it cascaded. It was an instant, overwhelming feedback loop, our combined power feeding on itself, growing with a speed I couldn't process. It wasn't pain. It was... pressure. Like trying to hold an ocean in a cupped hand. The world outside my own head dissolved.
"Integration levels spiking!" I heard Lysara shout, her voice sounding like it was a mile away. "Ren's at eighty-nine percent! Ninety-one! Ninety-three!"
I tried to pull back, to sever the connection, but it had a momentum of its own. It was a tidal wave, and I was just a cork. The power surged, pushing past every barrier in my mind.
And then, something... broke.
Not like damage. It was... a shattering. Like a seal I never knew existed, a door that had been locked my entire life, suddenly being blasted off its hinges.
The memories didn't flood in. They were.
I wasn't Ren.
...
My name was Takeshi Yamamoto. I was twenty-eight years old, and I was dying in a Tokyo hospital.
The memory was total, immediate, more real than the training yard I'd just left. The smell of antiseptic, the faint, metallic tang of my own failing blood, the steady, rhythmic beep of the monitor that was the only clock I had left. Acute leukemia. Diagnosed too late. Fucking leukemia.
It wasn't the dying that scared me. It was the promise I was breaking.
On the table beside the bed, a photograph. Three kids, maybe eight or nine, all grinning with missing teeth. My kids. My students from the after-school tutoring program in Shinjuku. Kids from rough backgrounds, kids everyone else had given up on. I'd promised them. I'd sworn I'd be there for their entrance exams, that I wouldn't abandon them like every other adult in their lives. And here I was, dying, breaking that one, last promise.
The door slid open. Nurse Tanaka. Her face was kind, which almost made it worse.
"Yamamoto-san," she said gently. "The children... they wanted me to give you this."
She handed me a card. It was covered in crayon drawings and the kind of determined, childish handwriting that breaks your heart.
"Thank you for not giving up on us. We won't give up either. We promise."
The words... they just... broke me. I started to cry, not quiet tears, but the harsh, ugly, painful sobs of a man who had failed. "I'm sorry," I choked out, to the picture. "I'm so sorry... I couldn't keep my promise..."
Nurse Tanaka took my hand. It was warm. "You gave them hope, Takeshi-san. That doesn't disappear. You showed them someone cared. That matters more than you know."
"It's not enough," I whispered, the words raw.
"It never feels like enough," she said, her voice impossibly gentle. "But it's what you could do. And you did it with everything you had."
I died that night, holding the card, my last thought a single, burning, unfinished regret.
Then... nothing.
A formless, timeless, cold not-space. I was just... consciousness. Afloat in a void. But I wasn't alone.
A presence. Not a voice, not a light, but a knowing. A vast, cold, and utterly neutral intelligence pressed into me.
**YOU CARRY REGRET.**
"I failed them," I thought, the words forming without a mouth. "I promised. I broke it."
**YOU CANNOT CONTROL MORTALITY. YOU CAN ONLY CONTROL CHOICE. YOU CHOSE TO HELP. THAT CHOICE MATTERS.**
"It wasn't enough!" I raged, my small spark of regret pushing against the vastness.
**IT NEVER IS. BUT THE TRYING MATTERS MORE THAN THE COMPLETION. YOU UNDERSTAND THIS. BUT YOU DO NOT KNOW IT.**
"I don't... I want to finish what I started."
There was a pause. A sense of... consideration.
**THEN YOU WILL BE GIVEN OPPORTUNITY. ANOTHER LIFE. ANOTHER CHANCE TO HELP. TO TRY. BUT THIS TIME, THE STAKES WILL BE... HIGHER. THE CHOICE, HARDER. AND FAILURE WILL COST FAR MORE THAN PERSONAL REGRET.**
"I don't understand..."
**YOU WILL. WHEN THE MOMENT COMES, YOU WILL REMEMBER. AND YOU WILL CHOOSE AGAIN.**
Then, a crushing, violent pressure. A blinding light. The sudden, shocking cold. The smell of straw and blood, and the sound of a baby's scream that I realized, with dawning horror, was my own.
...
I slammed back into my own body. My Ren body.
I was on my hands and knees in the training yard, gasping, the connection shattered. The taste of dirt and bile was in my mouth.
"Ren!" Kaela was there, her hands on my shoulders, shaking me hard. "Ren, what happened? What did you see?"
"I... I remember," I gasped, the air not feeling like enough. The world was spinning. I was thirteen. I was twenty-eight. I was dead.
"His integration level!" Lysara was yelling, her voice frantic. "It spiked to ninety-seven percent! Then crashed to eighty-two! Ren, what happened?"
"I remembered... before," I managed, looking up at their terrified, familiar faces.
"Before what?" Master Dren was there now, his eyes boring into me. "Before the siege?"
"No," I said, pushing myself into a sitting position. The world felt thin. Unreal. "Before this. Before this life. My name... my name was Takeshi Yamamoto. I... I was someone else. I died. And I was... I was reborn here."
The training yard went completely, utterly silent. The only sound was my own ragged breathing.
"Reincarnation," Master Dren said, his voice flat. He wasn't shocked. He was... contemplative. "It's spoken of in the old texts. But to actually see it..."
"It explains... everything," Lysara whispered, her notebook and pen forgotten. "Your emotional maturity. Your... your instinctive grasp of teaching. Your strategic recklessness. Your..." She stopped, but her eyes finished the thought. Your self-sacrificial martyr complex.
"Who... who were you?" Torren asked, his voice a small, awestruck whisper.
So I told them. Everything. The hospital. The leukemia. The kids. The card. The crushing regret. The promise in the void.
When I finished, no one spoke for a long time. It was Zara who finally broke the silence, her amber eyes seeing right through me, to the twenty-eight-year-old tutor I'd been.
"You were given another chance," she said, her voice soft but certain. "To help vulnerable children. And... and you're doing it." Her gaze flicked to Torren, to Elara, and then back to me. "We're... we're your new students. You're... you're keeping the promise."
It hit me like a physical blow. She was right. The presence in the void. It had given me exactly what I'd asked for. A chance to finish what I'd started. Torren, Zara, Elara... they were the same kids, in a different world, with a different, more dangerous problem.
"This... this changes everything," Elara said, her voice heavy with the implications.
"Does it?" Kaela shot back, her loyalty a blade, her hand still on my shoulder, grounding me. "You're still Ren. You're still the same person we've always known. Memories... memories don't change who you are."
"But it does," I said, looking at my hands, my thirteen-year-old hands that held the memory of a twenty-eight-year-old's death. "It changes why. It's why... it's why I can't abandon them. Why I can't run. It's not just a fight, Kaela. It's... it's a promise."
Kaela and Lysara found me on the rooftop hours later. I had to be there. I had to see the stars, to feel the wind, to prove that I was here and not there. They sat on either side of me, our old, familiar formation.
"So," Kaela said, her voice casual, as if we were just discussing the weather. "A twenty-eight-year-old Japanese tutor."
"Acute leukemia," I said, the words feeling alien and ancient. "Yeah."
"It explains a lot," Lysara said, her voice analytical but... gentle. "Your obsession with responsibility. Your constant assumption of leadership. Your willingness to carry burdens that aren't yours. I had it documented as 'trauma-induced leadership complex.' I suppose 'past-life-promise-induced' is more accurate."
"You're still just Ren," Kaela insisted, bumping her shoulder against mine. "You've always been an old man in a kid's body. Now we just know why."
"Am I?" I asked, the question real. "I feel... split. I'm Takeshi, who died a failure... and I'm Ren, who's in way over his head."
"You're not split," Kaela said firmly. "You're just more. And you're not alone. You weren't then, either, even if it felt like it. And you're sure as hell not alone now."
I told the other kids the next morning. They deserved to know. Their reactions were... them.
Torren was fascinated. "So you're actually, like, ancient? You have all this adult wisdom?"
"I have adult regret," I corrected, ruffling his hair. "Not sure it's wisdom."
Zara was practical. "Does this change our training? Did you... I don't know... remember how to build a radio or something?"
"No," I said, with a small laugh. "I was a tutor, not an engineer. Sorry."
But it was Elara, her eyes filled with a painful, knowing sadness, who saw the real problem. "You're trying to save us," she said, her voice quiet, "to make up for the kids you couldn't save before." It wasn't a question. "We're not... we're not your redemption, Ren."
Her words were a cold, necessary shock. "We're our own people. You can help us. You can teach us. You can fight with us. But you can't... you can't save us to 'fix' your past. You'll destroy yourself. And you'll fail us, too, if you see us as... as ghosts."
She was right. I had been treating them as a redemption. A way to finally forgive Takeshi.
Master Dren, when I told him, just nodded, as if I'd confirmed a minor training detail. "I suspected something," was all he said. "Your emotional intelligence was... misaligned with your age. This explains it."
"Is that... selfish?" I asked him. "Using this... them... to redeem myself?"
"It's human," Dren said, his voice rough. "We all carry our past. Your past is just... bigger. But the girl is right. Do not treat them as a balm for your old wounds. They are soldiers in a new war, not ghosts from an old one."
That night, on the roof, the five of us—me, Kaela, Lysara, Torren, and Zara—were all there. Elara had joined, too. Six of us.
"So," Kaela said, leaning back on her hands. "We're being led by a reincarnated tutor from another dimension, who's trying to keep a promise to a bunch of dead kids by saving a new bunch of magic kids from a death cult. That is... somehow... the most Ren thing I've ever heard."
"I'm not sure if that's a compliment," I said.
"It's an observation," Lysara clarified, a small smile on her face.
"Does it even matter?" Zara asked, her voice sharp. "Past life, this life... you're the one who found us. You're the one who's building this. That's what matters."
Elara nodded. "The cult doesn't care. The void doesn't care. What matters is what you do."
They were right. Takeshi died alone, full of regret. He was a man who had failed his promise.
But I'm not Takeshi. Not anymore. I'm Ren.
And this time, I'm not fighting alone.
That, I realized, was the lesson. The one the presence in the void wanted me to learn. You don't have to carry it all.
This time, I wouldn't.