"Aaaah..."

The first thing Silas registered was a splitting headache. The second was the stench of garbage and cheap alcohol. He was in a dark alley, sprawled in a heap of trash. But there was no time for questions.

He wasn't alone.

Four men, their silhouettes blocking the alley’s only exit, were walking toward him. Their intent was obvious from their predatory smiles. Silas’s mind, a tool honed over a century and a half, went into overdrive, assessing the threat against the sudden, shocking weakness of his new body.

'It seems I succeeded! Excellent.'

'Can't be happy just yet, though.' He thought with a cold, weary pragmatism. It had been a while since he had faced such a threat.

He pushed himself out of the garbage; his movements were incredibly clumsy, and his limbs felt foreign. The men laughed, seeing him stumble. He looked like just another drunk to be rolled for whatever he had left.

They were wrong.

As the first man lunged, ready to pounce on his unsuspecting victim, he was met with a quick, precise stab to the neck using a shard of glass Silas had picked up from the trash. Silas didn't wait for the result. He knew a neck wound wasn't an instant kill.

It generally took more than a minute for a human to be incapacitated after a stab to the carotid artery in the neck. He couldn't give the attacker this much time, so he immediately followed the stab with a hard kick to the man's knee, shattering the joint. The man went down with a scream that was half a gurgle.

One down. But the time it took was enough for the other three to surround him.

So, he ran.

"Coward!" and "Get back here!" echoed behind him, but he didn't care. He was weak, his body still felt sluggish, and judging by the pungent smell, he was drunk. He had to be smart.

He ran as fast as he could toward the narrow entrance of a storm drain he’d spotted nearby. It took him forty seconds to cover the 200 meters, a pathetic speed that laid bare the limitations of this new body. The first of his pursuers was only a few seconds behind him. He had to make this count.

He reached the drainpipe and turned, brandishing a metal pipe he'd scooped up on his way. He feinted high, and as the man raised his arms to block, Silas drove the pipe hard into his ribs. The man yelled, "I got you no—" as he collapsed, the air leaving his lungs in a wet gasp. Silas didn’t miss the chance, bringing the pipe down on the man's head with full force.

This was the finishing blow. The assailant died on the spot.

Two down.

By now, the other two had arrived, knives out. But seeing their colleague die so brutally right before their eyes made them hesitate. It was only for a moment, but a moment was all Silas needed. He lunged forward and jammed the dead man’s knife into the eye of the nearest assailant. Three down.

"Shit. Shit. Shit...." the last one standing stammered, his bravado gone, replaced by pure terror. Just then, a voice came from the street. "What is going on here?" The ruckus had caught people's attention.

The remaining assailant immediately perked up as he heard the distant voice. He thought this was good news. The assailant was relieved because he now had a higher chance of surviving this encounter, but he was overthinking it because Silas was completely out of gas.

He could still regulate his breathing due to a technique he had learned in his previous life, but he knew that he only had one move left in him.

So, Silas pretended to be magnanimous, turned his back on the assailants, and walked away, not looking back. Of course, not before he turned to the screaming man with the knife in his eye and took out the knife jammed in the still screaming assailant's eye. He still needed to show strength at this moment to deter any retaliation.

Of course, he wasn't naive enough to believe that these guys wouldn't come for him. They definitely would, but that was beyond Silas's control. If he chose to kill the last standing assailant now and finish the job, he was certain he wouldn't have the energy to escape from law enforcement.

He could already hear the sirens in the distance.

Finally alone, he slowly stumbled onto the main street. After a couple of minutes, he finally had enough bandwidth to ask himself. 'What the hell happened? Where is the pod? Why do I have different clothes? Where am I?'

He was utterly lost...

Limping through the street, he took in the unique atmosphere—the shiny cars, the chaos, and the gritty, alive city that seemed to pulsate with its own distinct culture—he instinctively knew that this was New York in the 90s—a time and place he particularly enjoyed.

He received quite a few weird looks of contempt and disgust from the few people out at this hour, but he ignored them. He didn't blame them. He was wearing patched clothes with an unkempt beard and hair. His body was dirty, and he smelled like sewage.

He finally stopped, catching his reflection in a puddle of murky water. Seeing his now young skin, he felt a surge of excitement. It seemed he had succeeded.

But the face that stared back at him left Silas shocked. The disheveled hair, the gunk on the cheeks—this was not his face.

"Hmm. It seems there was a complication." He muttered to the almost empty street. "I seem to have switched bodies with someone."

He needed more information. He had no idea what the hell was going on. And the splitting headache was not helping either

He picked up a newspaper from a nearby stand someone had left behind, his eyes scanning for a date, a location, anything.

What he found was the headline.

'New Roman Empire declares war on the White Crescent Empire.'

His eyes widened in disbelief. This wasn't just a new body. It was a new world.

Silas stood frozen on the sidewalk, the flimsy newspaper clutched in his hand. The ink seemed to mock him. New Roman Empire. White Crescent Empire. The words confirmed a reality so far outside his calculations that his mind, for a brief second, went silent.

He stumbled back against the grimy brick wall of the alley he had just exited. 'It seems I am in a different world,' he thought, the conclusion stark and unavoidable. 'But how, and why am I here?' The scientist in him took over, overriding the initial shock with the cold comfort of analysis. He had to get to the bottom of this. He began to mutter to himself, his voice a low rasp in the quiet street.

"Let's list out all the reasons I can be in this universe."

He pushed himself off the wall and began to pace, his steps short and unsteady. "There was an error in my calculations, or I didn't take all variables into account." He stopped and shook his head. Unlikely. He was meticulous. "There could have been an energy surge or an instability in the time machine's quantum displacement engine. That could have caused the quantum tunnel to collapse."

He resumed his pacing. He was supposed to go back in time, but he seemed to have arrived in a parallel universe instead.

"That makes sense," he said to the empty street. "So this all could just be an accident." He paused again, his eyes narrowing. "But what if there's more than meets the eye?" He considered other, less probable variables. "Maybe I died, and this is some sort of illusion in hell where I will continue to torture myself. Eternally torturing myself with my delusions. Who knows, maybe this is not even the first time I've said this."

It could be possible. After all, Silas never found any proof of a hell dimension, but he never found any conclusive evidence of its absence, either.

"Or maybe some omnipotent god liked me or hated me. So he sent me to this universe to fulfill my goals," he mused, the thought distasteful. He was more inclined to believe the next possibility, though, simply because he didn't want to imagine the ramifications of being involved with such a being.

"Maybe it is something more non-scientific. By time traveling, I should have broken the laws of the universe," he concluded, his voice firming with conviction. "So maybe, while time traveling, I was expelled from my universe and arrived here."

"Well, whatever…" Whether real or false, he couldn't do anything about it currently.

A sharp gust of wind cut through his thin clothes, and his body shivered violently. The physical reality of his situation asserted itself. He was weak, exposed, and freezing. With time, Silas was sure he would find out the truth of his translocation. But first, he needed to survive the night.