Wave of Existence | A Military Game Tech Fiction Short Story

We wake up drowning.

Not in water, but in flesh—lungs laboring, heart drumming, vision sharpening through a veil of rain. It’s always like this. Sudden. Violent. 激しい。 As a wave claims a swimmer, so too does this new flesh claim them. The initial panic of being swept under gives way to the grim acceptance hooking riptide.  The weight of life smashes down before it fades to instinct.

Indura is the first to adjust. They always are. The black instrument of death potential in their hands is damp and worn, the weight familiar yet incorrect, a rhythm they’ve stepped into mid-beat.

Threading into awareness like a phantom limb reformed, Drift follows a moment later. They are near, close enough that Indura can feel them at the edges of perception, settling into place.

"You’re late." Indura's voice is a ripple across the link.

"Time is relative." Drift, amused, distant.

Thunder rolls low across the coastline. Salt sprinkled cordite atmosphere fuses with dampened earth, air rushes by in volted arcs thrown by the storm’s accelerating charge. Indura breathes, steadying. The body knows what to do. This one has been here a while.

Somewhere beyond the tree infested ridge, movement—figures slipping through mist and foliage, the sharp snap of distant gunfire swallowed by rain. Indura shifts without thinking, adjusting their stance, exhaling slow. A muffled crack.

The shot lands clean. Target drops.

Their pulse doesn’t spike. Their breath stays level. The body reacts as it should, but there’s nothing beneath it. No adrenal surge. Fear not. No satisfaction.

Just the rhythm.

Just the tide.

Nanjo City is drowning.

Rain comes in sheets of tears through papered fatigues, relentlessly repetitive repetitively relentless, dragging the battlefield into a blur of shadowed motion. No projection. Mud cakes footprints at marches marshes. Bodies that fall do not stay long—lost beneath the tide, as if the earth itself refuses to keep them.

A whirlwind of practiced chaos engulfed them. Orders barked, positions shifted, and rain blood. None of them notice the ghosts among them.

Drift settles fully now, awareness aligning. Their presence is light against Indura’s own, like the brief touch of a tide receding before it surges back.

"Where?" Drift asks.

"Coastal ridge. Two klicks from evac." Indura scans, filtering through the haze. There’s a target. There’s a route. There’s an end to this.

"Messy. Feels off."

They don’t need to say it. Indura can feel it too—the delay, the cracked edges, the slight rhythmic missteps. Too many changes, too fast.

Something is slipping.

"Orders?"

Indura doesn’t answer. The body already knows.

They move.

The first time it happened, they did not understand.

Not at first.

It was a shift, a folding of space and sensation, a sudden drop from one world into another. One moment, nothing. The next, a breath in unfamiliar lungs. A pulse against someone else’s ribs. A thought half-formed, lost to the rush of broken waves.

And then—
Nothing.

A return to the quiet.

A tide going out.

"Do you think we were ever real?" Drift had asked, once.

Indura had not answered.

Because there were no answers. There was only the next wave. The next moment. The next breath in another place, another body, another fight.

And yet—

And yet—

Something is slipping.

Something is different this time.

Something is shifting beneath the surface.

And Indura is afraid they know what happens when the tide does not return.

End of Part I.

Part II

Indura moves without thought.

Their feet find purchase in the mud, pushing forward through the downpour. The body knows this rhythm—the weight of the weapon, gear’s drag, pace pulse measure in check. The mind does not question. It follows.

Drift lingers at the cliff of awareness, close but unseen, a presence more felt than heard.

"Three ahead. Two behind cover. One moving."

The words settle into Indura’s mind as if they had always been there, as if Drift had merely uncovered a well-concealed treasure of thought. Indura’s fingers tighten against the weapon’s composite, sight keen.

"I see them."

A pause. Then—

"Are you playing?"

Indura exhales. The rain hardens.

Drift has always called it a game. The way they step into the song of war, moving from moment to moment, body to body, collecting memories like pieces on a board. A strategy played at the edge of oblivion.

Indura has never liked the comparison.

"This isn’t a game."

"Then why do we always come back?"

A shadow shifts ahead. Indura raises the rifle, frontsight aligned. The body waits for the right moment, the right breath. The finger curls. Squeeze.

A shot bites through the storm. The figure stumbles, folds into the mud.

The game continues.

Drift is quiet for a time. Indura moves through the ruined outskirts of what was once a village facing wavy wet blue. The storm turning the roads into rivers, washing away footprints before they settle.

Buildings here are gutted. Cracked insect husks flaking pounded by clenching sweaty air and a peeping sun, left to rot beneath the weight of rain and post-firefight quiet. Windows stare back as empty sockets, shattered glass littering the ground like forgotten stars.

It is always like this.

It is never like this.

Each place is the same, and yet—Indura feels something unspoken beneath the surface, something pressing at the borders of recognition.

"Do you remember the first one?"

Drift’s voice is softer now. Not playful. Not amused.

"The first what?"

"The first time we… moved."

Indura stops.

The body hesitates. Just for a moment. Just enough to feel the loaded rain press down harder, to hear the wind shift between the hollowed buildings.

Do they remember?

A breath in lungs that were not theirs. A fast beating and unsteady heart. A moment of falling—not through space, but through self. A son of dissonance settling, of being somewhere and then somewhere else.

The first move.

Indura had tried not to think about it.

"No."

Drift hums, a sound low and knowing.

"Liar."

Indura exhales, starts walking again.

The body remembers where it needs to go.

They find the target at the edge of the reclaimed village, curled beneath the remains of a collapsed wall.

A soldier. Young. Breathing shallow sucks of half life. Ribs leaking bloodspread into the mud. Fingers twitch weakly, as if not his own.

Indura crouches. The body moves on instinct—checking the wound, assessing the damage. The hands are steady. The mind is not.

This is the part Indura does not like.

The moments before.

Before the movement. Before the shift. Before the tide comes in and pulls something away.

The soldier’s eyes flicker open.

"Who…"

Indura does not answer.

"Are they ready?" Drift’s voice is quieter now, edged with something almost like hesitation.

Indura studies the soldier’s face.

There is something there. Something familiar? It’s shape of their features, the way their brow furrows, the way their breath hitches against pain. He doesn’t like it.

Something Indura does not want to see.

"Indura."

Drift never says their name.

The tide is coming.

Indura feels it pulling at the edges of them, waiting, waiting—

"Make the move."

The soldier’s lips part. Their eyes flash.

They see something.

Indura does not know what.

The tide crashes.

Everything shifts.

End of Part II.

Part III

The tide rises.

It should be seamless. A breath in, a breath out. A moment of weightlessness, of falling, of stretching between places, between selves. The body fades. The rhythm continues, game start.

It always works.

It does not work.

Indura feels it before they understand. The pull is there, the undertow of motion, the slow unraveling of presence—but something catches, something resists, like a rope pulled too tight, unraveling twine after twine.

They don’t move.

They don’t leave.

They are still here.

The soldier beneath them is still here.

The body does not fade. The presence does not dissolve. The moment stretches into something long and unbearable, something raw, something deviant.

Drift is already gone.

Indura can feel it—the absence, the space where they had been, the way the world has shifted to make room for them somewhere else.

But Indura is still here.

Still kneeling.

Still breathing.

Still staring into the soldier’s open, unshining eyes.

The tide has left them behind.

The body reacts before the mind does. Panic.

A sharp inhale. Muscles locking. The weight of existence pressing down too heavy, too immediate, too real.

This has never happened before.

This is not supposed to happen.

"Drift?"

The link is quiet.

"Drift—"

Nothing.

No voice. No presence. No sense of movement. The world feels—empty, somehow stumbled from a step incomplete.

Not a game.

Drift had called it that once. The shifting. The moving. The tide rolling in and out, seamless, inevitable, without consequence.

Indura had never liked the comparison.

And now—now the tide has stranded them.

Now, they are stuck.

The rain slows.

Not stopped, but softened, tapering into a misty light that sheens ruins around. Indura is still kneeling, hands shaking, fingers clenched against the wet fabric of the soldier’s uniform.

This body should not feel this way.

The hosts are tools. They are means to an end, steps on a path that is never theirs to walk. But now—their heart rattles bone bars. Breath goes smoker’s black. Stomach threatens evacuation. Their body rejects wholly, but can’t leave.

They are here.

They are still here.

And they do not know what to do.

A sound—a movement.

Footsteps slop through mud.

Indura lifts their head, slow, unwilling. A figure approaches through the thinning rain. Tall, familiar. The way they carry themselves, the way their stance shifts, the way their gaze sweeps the space—

Drift.

Indura almost collapses in relief. The presence they had lost, the tether that had snapped—here, whole, real.

"Drift."

But Drift does not answer.

Because Drift is not here.

Because Drift is there.

Standing. Moving. Breathing.

In a body that does not belong to them. One that was supposed to be theirs.

A body they can no longer leave.

Indura’s straw-thin breath catches. World tilts. The weight of understanding crushes into them with brutal force.

Drift is stuck.

And so is Indura.

For the first time, Indura feels fear.

Not the distant, detached knowledge of risk. Not the cold calculation of survival.

Something deeper.

Something real.

The rhythm is broken.

The game is over.

And they do not know what comes next.

End of Part III.

Part IV

Drift is breathing.

That should not be possible.

Indura watches them from where they kneel in the mud, the weight of the world pressing in from all sides. The rain has thinned, the last remnants clinging to the broken village around them. The storm is passing.

And Drift is still here.

Not a voice in the ether. Not a presence hovering at the falls of awareness.

A body. Whole. Solid. Stuck.

Drift takes a slow, uncertain step forward, looking down at their hands as if they have never seen them before. Because they haven’t.

They flex their fingers. Curl them into a fist. Open them again.

A sharp inhale. A shuddering breath.

"Indura."

Their voice is different. Not a thought carried across the link, not an acoustic wave in the vast space between. A sound. A voice. A throat shaping words.

Indura flinches.

"Say something." Drift’s voice is quiet, hesitant. Human.

Indura cannot.

They cannot move, cannot speak, cannot breathe past the leaden barbell-like weight pressing against their chest.

Because this is wrong.

Because this is impossible.

Because they were never meant to stay.

Drift crouches in front of them, searching. There is something in their expression that Indura does not want to name. Something fragile.

"It wasn’t supposed to happen like this," Drift murmurs.

Indura lets out a breath. A sharp, uneven sibilanced semi-advance audible.

"No. It wasn’t."

They should be gone by now. Both of them. Moved on. Pulled back into the tide, returned to the waiting silence, the next body, the next fight.

Instead—

Instead, Indura is here.

Instead, Drift is human.

And there is no way back.

The body is unbearable.

Drift keeps shifting, adjusting, moving like they are waiting for something to change. Their movements are too careful, too uncertain—a child’s perilous first steps.

They keep touching their own skin. Running fingers over their arms, pressing against their chest, exhaling just to feel the way their ribs expand beneath it.

"It’s—" Drift starts, then stops. Their hands tremble. "It’s so—"

They don’t finish.

Indura does not ask.

Because they already know.

The weight of existence: Time’s universal trap—the human form. The relentless pull of hunger feeds on soft gut tissue, wasting the mind away. Exhaustion, pulls every limb down until movement becomes a miraculous fantasy, only visible among drug-aided dreams. Pain, cold/warmth, drives desire for something indescribably unphysical, but so well-known to itself it can never be found or possessed longer than a second before being lost to a future of technically meditative explorations rarely discovered.

A body is not a host. A body is not a vessel. A body is a prison.

Drift is a prisoner.

They sit in the ruins of the village as the rain fades into memory.

Neither speaks.

Drift stares at the sky like they are waiting for something to take them back. Indura stares at the ground because they know nothing will.

The tide has stranded them both.

And Indura does not know how to swim.

End of Part IV.

Part V

The tide is gone.

There is no pull. No shift. No unraveling.

Only this. This body. This weight. This moment.

Indura has never stayed long enough to feel it before. The dull ache settling into muscles, the drag of breath, the slow bleed of time against skin. It is suffocating. It is unbearable.

It is real.

Drift sits beside them, arms wrapped around their knees, staring at hands that are no longer borrowed. The way they flex their fingers, the way their conscious breath falters, the way their pulse thrums beneath the surface—Indura doesn’t have to ask.

They know what Drift is thinking.

What Drift is feeling.

“It doesn’t stop.” Drift’s voice is hollow. Human.

Indura swallows against the tightness in their throat.

“No.”

It won’t. Not now.

Not ever.

They should be gone.

They should be elsewhere, slipping into another breath, another beat, another battle.

But they are still here.

Stuck in the pieces they were never meant to hold.

Drift exhales sharply, pressing a palm against their chest like they’re trying to steady something breaking apart inside.

“I can’t—” Their voice cracks, too raw, too real. “I can’t live like this.”

A tremor runs through them. A rift in something that should be unbreakable.

Indura watches, silent.

“How do they do this?” Drift’s hands curl into fists, then beat his legs. “How do they live knowing they can’t leave? That this is all there is?”

The fear in their voice is unfamiliar. It does not belong in Drift’s mouth. It does not belong in this world.

And yet—

It is here.

They are here.

And there is only one way out.

Indura stands. The body is heavier than it should be. The weight of it is wrong, settling into places that do not belong to them.

Drift looks up. Eyes angled scared.

Indura knows what they are seeing.

Knows what this means.

Knows what they must do.

Drift shakes their head.

“No.”

Indura exhales.

“It has to be this way.”

They step forward. Drift scrambles back.

“Wait—”

Indura doesn’t.

This island, the world, is a rhythm. A tide. A pull.

Even without the system, even without the cycle, they know how to move.

And this is the only move. The final one.

Indura reaches out—

And takes Drift’s place.

It happens in an instant.

A shift. A pulse. A folding of space and self.

And then—

Drift is standing.

Indura is gone.

Drift stumbles. Breath shuddering. Hands shaking.

But the weight is gone.

The body is not theirs.

It never was.

They press a palm against their chest, expecting the crushing pressure of existence, the unbearable pull of time—

But there is nothing.

No fear. No ache.

No Indura.

Drift drops to their knees.

The storm has passed. The world is quiet.

But they are not.

Because they know what Indura has done.

They know what it cost.

Drift looks up at the sky.

And for the first time in their existence—

They are alone.

This story is connected to Cereus & Limnic: Escape From Okinawa.

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