River of Time
Location: A winding mountain road near the Gifu-Aichi border, Japan.
Current Date/Time: 2026. Late Night.
Thwack-hiss. Thwack-hiss.
The rubber wiper blades dragged back and forth across the glass, smearing the rain into blurry streaks rather than clearing the view. Sheets of water hammered the SUV’s roof. Rattle-rattle-rattle. The steel frame shook under the deluge. It felt as if the sky had torn open, dumping the ocean directly onto the narrow mountain pass.
Inside the cabin, Soma Kurogane breathed in stale, heater-warmed air. A forgotten cup of black coffee sloshed in the center console. The bitter scent mixed with the sharp, dusty smell of fresh cardboard. Boxes, taped shut and stacked to the roof, shifted in the back seat with every turn of the steering wheel. He rubbed his thumb over his heavy eyelids. The ache settling deep in his shoulders wasn’t the satisfying burn of the gym. It was a hollow, creeping ache that sank straight to the marrow. Twenty-four years old, and he was leaving the city behind. Leaving everything.
He glanced into the rearview mirror. His dark eyes bypassed the blurred storm outside the rear window and locked onto the black silhouette wedged into the backseat.
The hard-shell Samsonite suitcase sat like a vault. Inside lay his rolled blueprints, a laptop, his clothes. Everything he owned, compressed into a single block.
“Just get to the highway,” Soma whispered. His raspy voice was swallowed by the drumming rain. “I have to make the meeting.”
He squeezed the leather steering wheel. His knuckles turned bone-white. His eyes tracked the sweeping blades, breaking the treacherous road down.
The tire tread is losing purchase on this slick asphalt, he calculated, feeling the heavy rear of the car sway. Those rusted guardrails won’t hold the mass if I hit them. The upcoming curve slopes outward toward the cliff.
He eased his foot off the gas pedal. He let the engine slow the car. He held the wheel steady.
CRACK.
Lightning struck without a rumble of warning. The dark pass flashed blinding, violet-white. The blast seared an afterimage across Soma’s vision.
Fifty feet ahead, illuminated in the high beams, a massive, rotting cedar shattered. The timber groaned a deep, agonizing sound. It collapsed across the asphalt. A wooden wall blocked the lane.
Soma slammed the brakes. He drove his foot through the floorboard.
The anti-lock brakes stuttered. Thud-thud-thud-thud. A rapid-fire vibration hammered the sole of his shoe as the calipers tried to grip the slick wheels. But the flooded asphalt offered zero traction.
The SUV didn’t stop. It floated.
The heavy tires lost the road. The car skidded across the water. The rear end kicked out as it drifted sideways toward the crumbling edge of the cliff. Soma braced his stiff arms against the wheel, his stomach dropping as the headlights swept away from the asphalt and illuminated the vast, black void of the drop.
Metal screamed. SKREEECH. A high, tearing screech like ripped canvas. The two-ton vehicle sheared through the rusted guardrail, snapping the steel poles like dry twigs.
The world tilted. Gravity reversed. Soma slammed hard against his locking seatbelt as the stomach-dropping sensation of a falling elevator took hold. Time stretched into weightlessness as the steel cage plummeted into the abyss.
Then came the impact.
BOOM.
The SUV hit the raging waters of the Kiso River like it had struck concrete. The shockwave shattered the windshield into glowing spiderwebs. The sudden stop triggered the airbag with an explosive POP, punching the air from Soma’s lungs and slamming his head back against the headrest.
Freezing, muddy river water blasted through the broken glass and the twisted seams of the doors. The water flooded the cabin. The digital dashboard sparked wildly. Bzzzt. A frantic shower of bright blue and yellow light flashed before dying, plunging him into pitch blackness.
The cold hit Soma’s chest like a swinging hammer. His breath seized. His muscles locked tight, refusing to obey his commands as the icy river rapidly climbed his ribs and swallowed his waist.
Wait for the pressure to balance, his mind demanded, fighting the blinding terror of drowning. The freezing water reached his neck, rising fast. If you try to open the door right now, the weight of the water rushing in will crush you. Wait until the cabin fills. Conserve your oxygen.
He fought through the dizziness and the burning need to breathe, blindly searching through the rising water with trembling hands. He found the cold metal buckle of his seatbelt and hit the release. Click. His fingers felt numb and clumsy. Instead of reaching for the door handle, he allowed the rushing water to push him. He twisted his body and reached back into the flooded rear seats.
His numb hands searched frantically through the dark, swirling water until his fingertips brushed against the cold, hard, ridged plastic of the Samsonite luggage. He locked his stiff fingers around its thick, rubberized handle.
The water level hit the roof of the cab. The last pocket of air vanished.
Soma planted his sneakers firmly against the steering column. He kicked outward against the door with all his remaining strength. The broken driver’s side door groaned, popped open, and was caught and torn away by the rushing current.
Soma was sucked out of the sinking steel cage.
He was thrown into the chaotic, raging undertow. The freezing water tasted foul a gritty mouthful of deep mud, ancient rot, and raw iron. The river tumbled his body end over end, disorienting him in the pitch-black current.
His chest burned for oxygen. His lungs screamed. But his right hand remained locked onto the handle of the Samsonite luggage, using the airtight suitcase’s natural buoyancy to keep his head pointing upward, preventing him from being dragged down to smash against the rocky riverbed.
As he ran out of air, the roar of the rushing water shifted. It turned into a high-pitched, vibrating ringing deep inside his skull. His consciousness began to slip away, the freezing black water pulling him down into a heavy, dark silence.
Location: The banks of the Kiso River, Owari Province. Time: 1559. Early Morning.
The cold hit him not as a chill in the air, but as a heavy, blunt-force blow. It drove the remaining breath from his lungs in a sudden spasm. Water—thick with mud and tasting of ancient rot and raw iron—flooded his mouth, choking him.
Soma gasped. He coughed, his body shaking. He clawed blindly at the wet, slippery stones of the riverbank. His fingernails tore against the rough gravel. He dragged himself out of the raging current. His exhausted limbs felt like lead pipes. His waterlogged denim jeans pulled him down like weighted anchors, and his varsity jacket clung to his skin like a second layer of ice. He collapsed face-first onto the rough gray gravel. His cheek pressed hard against the sharp stones. His chest heaved as his body tried to remember how to breathe.
For a long time, there was only the sound of his own ragged gasps and the careless roar of the river rushing behind him.
He blinked. His eyelashes felt heavy with wet grit. The pouring rain of the mountain pass was gone. A thick, white mist curled around the rocks like living smoke. The air smelled different here, richer, wilder. It smelled of damp pine needles, distant woodsmoke, and the raw scent of an ancient earth.
“Alive,” he rasped into the mist. The word felt strange in his throat, raw and scraped.
He pushed himself up to his hands and knees. His muscles trembled with the sheer effort. The world spun in a sickening lurch. He squinted through the fog, looking for the concrete pillars of the bridge. He looked for the twisted, smoking metal wreck of his SUV.
There was nothing. No paved road. No steel guardrail. There was only the dense, looming wall of a massive forest that looked far too old and far too wild to exist on any modern map he knew.
Then he saw it.
Wedged securely between two moss-slicked boulders a few yards downstream, his black Samsonite luggage rested at a dangerous angle. It was scratched, battered by the rocks, and coated in a thin layer of river slime, but it was intact. The hard plastic shell shined dully in the morning mist. It was a smooth, manufactured rectangle that had no business existing in this wild nature.
Soma crawled toward it on his hands and knees. His limbs felt disconnected from his brain. He reached out, his pale, trembling fingers brushing the cold plastic shell. The familiar, synthetic texture was a lifeline to his sanity. It was locked. It was safe.
SNAP.
The sound of a breaking branch was sharp and dry. It cut through the background noise of the river like a gunshot.
Soma froze. The instinct that flared in his chest wasn’t the calm, logical thought of an engineer; it was the pure, hair-raising panic of a hunted animal. He spun around, his hand searching the wet waistband of his jeans for a weapon that wasn’t there.
A massive horse stood at the edge of the treeline.
It was a beast of shadow, pitch-black like the deep river water. Its heavy breath puffed into the cold air in thick bursts of steam. It didn’t step forward. It watched him.
On its back sat a man carved from the dark, unforgiving wood of the forest.
He was young, perhaps in his mid-twenties, but his presence carried a weight as dense as a mountain. He wore a practical hunting outfit made of rough, dark blue cloth and worn leather, yet he wore it with a dominant arrogance that made the rough fabric look like the finest silk. His dark hair was pulled back into a high, wild topknot. Loose strands escaped the tie to frame a face made of sharp, aggressive angles.
His eyes were the most terrifying feature. They were gold-flecked, wide, and locked onto Soma with the unblinking focus of a hawk that had just spotted a snake in the grass.
This was Oda Nobunaga.
He held a long, uneven wooden bow loosely in one hand, the tip resting casually against his foot stirrup. He didn’t draw the string back. He didn’t need to.
“You are not a fish,” Nobunaga observed.
His voice was a low, deep rumble that seemed to vibrate the mist. It sounded ancient in its rhythm, but it was clear enough for Soma to understand perfectly. It carried a dark amusement, as if the Warlord found Soma’s desperate survival to be a personal joke told by the gods for his own morning entertainment. He leaned forward slightly in the saddle, the thick leather of his riding gear creaking softly.
“And that...” Nobunaga pointed with the tip of his bow toward the black luggage. “...is not a rock. It has the shape of a stone, but the skin of a beetle.”
Nobunaga nudged the massive horse with his heels. The animal stepped forward, its heavy hooves clicking against the river stones with a slow, deliberate rhythm. He stopped just a few feet from where Soma knelt, towering over the modern man and blocking out the weak, gray light of the morning sun.
He looked down. His stare was a suffocating physical weight, sweeping over Soma with a sharp, piercing curiosity. Nobunaga took in the strange, tight blue fabric of the denim jeans, the varsity jacket, the wet cotton t-shirt clinging to the defined muscles of Soma’s chest, and the pale skin that had clearly never endured a single day of hard farming labor.
“You look like a ghost that drowned,” Nobunaga decided. He tilted his head slightly. A lock of black hair fell across his golden eyes. “Or perhaps a foreigner who fell off his ship and forgot his armor. You have the look of a man who has never held a spear, yet your eyes are not those of a terrified peasant.”
He leaned further down from the saddle. The intense smell of him washed over Soma, overpowering the scent of the river—the smell of raw horse sweat, the metallic bite of old iron, and the deep, smoky scent of incense clinging to his clothes.
“Tell me, ghost. What is in the black box?”
Nobunaga’s eyes narrowed, the casual amusement sharpening into a dangerous, hungry greed.
“Is it your soul? Or is it something I can use?”
Soma stared up at the man on the horse. The crazed question clashed against the harsh reality of the freezing water dripping down his spine. He looked at the Samsonite luggage. He thought of the tactical flashlight, the solar-powered watch, the clothes, and the detailed building blueprints tucked safely inside the lining.
He forced his exhausted legs to work. He stood up. He swayed, feeling dizzy, but he locked his knees, refusing to cower in the mud. He met the Warlord’s fierce gaze, forcing his own modern, corporate mask of detachment to slide into place. It was a defensive wall built of modern cynicism to hide his sheer panic.
“It’s... my life,” Soma rasped.
Nobunaga blinked. The simple, bold answer caught him off guard. A slow, dangerous grin spread across his face, revealing bright white teeth against his weathered skin.
“Arrogant,” Nobunaga murmured, the word rolling off his tongue with dark delight. “For a drowned stranger, you have a lot of pride. Most men would offer me gold or beg weeping for mercy. You offer me riddles.”
He swung his leg over the saddle and dropped effortlessly to the ground. His heavy boots hit the gravel with an authoritative, crunching impact.
He walked right up to Soma, invading his personal space until they were standing toe-to-toe. The heat radiating from Nobunaga’s body was shocking in the freezing mist, a furnace burning beneath the dark blue cloth.
“Very well, stranger,” Nobunaga said softly.
He reached out. His left hand, rough, heavily calloused, and incredibly strong, gripped the thick handle of the Samsonite trunk. His right hand shot forward and grabbed Soma’s shoulder. His thick fingers dug deep into Soma’s muscle, testing the reality and the strength of the flesh hidden beneath the strange, wet clothes.
“Let us see if your ‘life’ is heavy enough to interest me.”
The morning mist did not drift; it clung to the earth like a burial shroud. It muffled the roar of the rushing water, turning the world into a tight vacuum. Between the two men, the silence pushed against Soma’s eardrums until they began to ring with a high, thin pitch.
Oda Nobunaga’s right hand remained clamped onto Soma’s shoulder. The Warlord’s fingers, thick pads of skin as rough as cured saddle leather, dug directly through the freezing, wet cotton of Soma’s t-shirt. Nobunaga anchored him to the dirt. Every millimeter of pressure was a physical test. He was assessing Soma like a butcher measuring the weight of a carcass, or a jeweler checking the density of a strange, pale stone.
“You do not tremble like a peasant waiting for the blade,” Nobunaga observed. His voice was a low, resonant rumble. He leaned in closer, his predatory, gold-flecked eyes never once leaving Soma’s face. “Peasants are made of mud and fear. You are made of something... colder. Something that has never seen the brutal sun of a rice field.”
Soma forced his shivering jaw to lock tight, his pale hands balling into fists at his sides. He planted his boots firmly in the wet gravel, refusing to step back. He met that terrifying, golden gaze with stubborn defiance while he tried to process the impossible environment.
His grip on my shoulder is designed to test my physical limits, Soma deduced, using his anger to build a mental shield against the Warlord’s overwhelming presence. Where is the concrete? Where is the rebar of the bridge? I was just driving. It is 2026. April. Soma scanned the dense, untamed treeline and the lack of modern infrastructure. None of this makes sense.
“I’m a structural engineer,” Soma rasped out. He forced his spine straight, actively resisting the urge to flinch away from the towering warlord. “I build things. The rules of how things stand or fall don’t change just because I’m in a different place. Mass is mass. I’m just trying to figure out where I landed.”
“Physics? Variables? Structural Engineer?” Nobunaga’s head tilted slightly. The dark topknot of his wild hair swayed with the movement. The Demon King did not know the strange, modern words, but he understood the confident rhythm of the explanation. It was the speech of a man who looked at the earth and saw its hidden bones.
“You speak in the tongue of ghosts, stranger,” Nobunaga said, a dark amusement settling into his features. Nobunaga shifted his heavy stance, pressing his leather boots into the gravel to physically box the pale man against the riverbank. He watched the stranger fight his own shivering, noting the clenched fists and the hard set of his jaw.
“It’s about logic,” Soma deflected, his breathing becoming shallow.
The sudden surge of energy vanished in a single, sickening drop. Soma forced his shivering jaw to lock, aggressively fighting the panic. He recalled the grueling winter mountaineering expeditions his grandfather had dragged him on across the freezing peaks of Hokkaido. Keep your core heat trapped. Don’t let the wet fabric leech the warmth, he reminded himself, relying on the muscle memory of survival.
The freezing cold rushed forward to claim every inch of his flesh. His teeth began to chatter, a sharp, involuntary clack-clack-clack.
Nobunaga watched the pale stranger fight the freezing air. The Warlord’s golden eyes narrowed with dark, predatory appraisal.
Soma looked up, focusing for one last, desperate query. “Where... exactly where is this?”
Nobunaga’s grip tightened painfully, his sharp eyes narrowing as he assessed the depth of the stranger’s disorientation. “You are in my domain. You are in Owari. You stand on the gravel banks of the Kiso River.”
Kiso River... Soma gritted his teeth. He was unable to connect the wild geography in front of him to his memory of the 2026 Japanese road map. There should be a highway here. Soma focused on the man looming over him, breathing in the raw, ancient scent of him, deep agarwood incense and cold iron. “What... what year is it?”
Nobunaga leaned in closer, his hot breath hitting Soma’s freezing forehead like the draft of an open hearth. The Warlord’s voice dropped into a tectonic growl. “It is the second year of the Eiroku era.”
Eiroku. The historical term hit Soma like a physical blow to the chest. He knew the word from history documentaries he used to watch in Tokyo. 1559. Not 2026. The time coordinates in his mind collapsed. Soma’s breath hitched, a sharp curse hissing through his lips as he realized with horrifying clarity that he had fallen right through the floor of history itself. He was four hundred and sixty-seven years offline.
Soma’s mind hit a hard wall. The staggering weight of the timeline crushed his attempts to rationalize the situation.
His knees, locked in a rigid, defensive stance, surrendered to the impossible load. Gravity took firm hold of his leaden limbs. Soma pitched forward, his center of gravity shifting far past the point of recovery as he blacked out.
The brutal impact of the river stones never came.
Instead, Soma hit a wall of heat so intense it felt like a physical strike. Nobunaga didn’t step back in surprise as the Ghost collapsed; he stepped in. The Warlord’s free arm swept around Soma’s waist in a violent arrest of momentum. His arm was a heavy bar of solid muscle, catching the modern engineer just milliseconds before his knees could smash into the freezing silt.
Soma was slammed directly into Nobunaga’s chest, his face buried deeply in the rough, coarse indigo cloth of the Warlord’s hunting robe. The remaining air was driven from his lungs. It was replaced instantly by the overwhelming, concentrated scent of the apex predator: the raw musk of horse sweat, the metallic tang of old iron, and beneath it all, the deep, resinous sweetness of agarwood incense.
“For a ghost, you have a surprising amount of density,” Nobunaga murmured, his voice a low rumble that vibrated directly through the bone of Soma’s skull.
Nobunaga did not push the wet, shivering man away. Instead, his large, calloused palm slid slowly and deliberately upward from Soma’s waist. He mapped the curve of the stranger’s spine through the wet clothing. The Warlord’s hand finally stopped at the nape of Soma’s neck. His thick fingers tangled firmly into the damp hair, gripping the roots and forcing Soma’s head back an inch to expose his face.
Soma’s eyes fluttered weakly open. The vast distance of five centuries had collapsed into a few inches of shared, hot breath.
He was trapped. Nobunaga was not looking down at him with an ounce of pity. There was only a dark, dilated fascination, the calculating look of a man who had just caught a rare insect and was deciding whether to pin it to a board or trap it in a glass jar.
“You fall,” Nobunaga whispered, his hot breath washing over Soma’s freezing lips. “And you expect the earth to catch you. But here, stranger... I am the earth.”
Soma stared blankly up at the Warlord. The terrifying reality of the Eiroku era settled over him like a heavy shroud. He was no longer a brilliant engineer dictating terms; he was captured inventory.
“I... I don’t...” Soma croaked weakly, his exhaustion overpowering his fierce resistance as his eyes rolled back.
Nobunaga shifted his iron grip to haul the unconscious Soma upright, pinning the deadweight against his sturdy side. The Warlord’s golden gaze shifted from the pale man to the black Samsonite trunk wedged between the river stones.
“You claim that black box is your life,” Nobunaga said to the unconscious man. A slow, cruel smirk curled the Warlord’s lips. “Then I suppose I must take both.”
Nobunaga looked toward the edge of the treeline, where his heavily armed guards had emerged from the morning shadows, their spears lowered.
“Toichi!” Nobunaga barked, his voice snapping instantly back to a register of absolute military command. “Bring a horse. We have baggage.”
Toichi hurried forward through the freezing mist, leading a massive, restless black warhorse by its leather bridle. Nobunaga did not hand the unconscious stranger over to his guards. Instead, the Warlord hoisted Soma effortlessly by the waist, tossing the modern man’s limp, soaking wet body over the high wooden saddlehorn like a sack of captured grain. Nobunaga swung his own heavy frame up behind him, settling firmly into the rigid wooden seat.
“Bring me a heavy hauling strap,” Nobunaga commanded, extending his thick hand.
Toichi quickly unhooked a thick, wide band of cured leather from a packhorse and handed it up to the Sovereign. Nobunaga grabbed Soma’s limp shoulders, hauling the pale engineer forcefully backward until Soma’s spine was pressed perfectly flush against the Warlord’s broad, heat-radiating chest.
Moving with brutal precision, Nobunaga looped the thick leather strap tightly around Soma’s chest, pinning the engineer’s arms securely against his own ribs, and wrapped the excess length around his own torso. He pulled the leather fiercely taut. The stiff hide groaned as it compressed Soma’s ribs, forcefully winching their bodies together into a single, inseparable mass. Nobunaga secured the heavy brass buckle with a sharp yank, anchoring the Ghost’s deadweight to his own center of gravity.
The thick leather bit sharply into Soma’s back. Nobunaga shifted his own thick thighs against the wooden saddle, adjusting the heavy load until the stranger’s spine was perfectly aligned and crushed against his own chest plate.
The darkness finally rushed in to claim Soma. It dragged his mind down not into the freezing currents of the Kiso River, but into the suffocating, inescapable heat of the Demon King’s arms.
