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Everything changed after that accident.
Yuu had had a normal life: he grew up in an orphanage and once he got old enough, he enlisted in the army and was now a soldier in training, ready to give his life and soul for the country. True, there were many horrors to face when you are a soldier: the giant man-eating monsters that lived outside the walls, the life-threatening battles with neighboring countries when they fought for resources, the exhaustion of knowing that even inside your own country you could be attacked by people wanting to steal your belongings.
It was not the best time to be alive.
But Yuu had decided to become a soldier because it was the only way he had to escape poverty and a worse lifestyle: he had seen so many people leaving the orphanage to become drug addicts or prostitutes, and he knew he didn’t want that for himself. And Mika, for once, agreed with him and together they went to the army.
He would have thought that everything was fine despite the horrors of the world if he hadn’t had that accident. He remembers volunteering for a small experimentation that, if successful, would strengthen the human body up to seven times. He remembers Mika begging him to reconsider, asking him to stay with him instead because they only had each other in this horrible world. He remembers smiling at Mika and reassuring him that everything would be alright, since there were no known side effects even if it failed. He remembers getting into that tank and getting injected with… something that no one wanted to explain to him. He remembers the pain and the way his body convulsed and how every breath burned his insides.
And then he remembers everything.
He remembers growing up in a different orphanage in a very different world, with no monsters nor wars nor people used to see dead bodies every day. He remembers being sold with Mika to be used as lab rats. He remembers being put into a machine and connected to many wires. He remembers the doctors laughing as they explained to them how they were going to be plunged into an alternative world to collect data, that if they died in that world they would die in the real world as well and that they wouldn’t remember anything from their real selves.
Yuu can’t breathe when the shock of the experiment revives his memories and then realizes that the world Mika and him have been sent to is one of a game he has played, before he was sold to strangers, when his only worry was to think of what did he want to do when he finished school.
The worst is when Mika comes visit him at the hospital, because Yuu remembers that in the game, the character that Mika is playing as now will die a very gruesome and horrible death. He cries and holds Mika close, because he is really scared for the first time in his life and he doesn’t want Mika to die, he doesn’t want to be left alone in any world, fictional or real.
He looks up to Mika and hugs him closer, determined to find a way to escape the horrors of the wars and battles that are going to happen in a few months. To escape Mika’s death. To escape this shitty game and the greedy hands of adults, so they can live together and in peace somewhere far away, where no one can ever find them.
He swears he is going to save Mika.