Time didn't wait. It fractured.
Jae-Won slammed into a neon-lit wall, sliding across rain-slick pavement in a blur of static. The moment he touched the temporal shard, the world had snapped like a whip—and now he was somewhere between then and now, surrounded by flickers of déjà vu and electric rainfall.
The alley pulsed with a dull hum. Above, holographic billboards flickered:
> WANTED – Jae-Won Seo: Time-Traitor. Approach with Caution.
He spat blood. "Guess I'm back where it all started."
Twelve years ago. Neo-Bastion City. Before the glitch. Before Serin. Before the Division made him their disposable weapon.
But this wasn't just time travel. The shard hadn't sent him back as he was—it had anchored him inside his younger self.
He flexed his fingers.
No glitch. No enhancements. Just the instincts of a fallen fighter shoved into a 21-year-old dropout with anger issues and too much to prove.
"Perfect," he muttered.
A voice echoed down the alley. "That's him! Seo!"
Two Enforcers rounded the corner, plasma rifles raised. Jae-Won's eyes narrowed. He didn't have his glitch—but he had his experience.
He surged forward, sliding under a garbage drone, snatched a loose pipe from the ground and—crack—took the first Enforcer out at the knees. The second fired, but Jae-Won rolled behind a vent tower and whipped the pipe like a javelin. The rifle clattered to the pavement. A heartbeat later, the second soldier followed it down.
He stood over their bodies, panting.
"You'll want to move faster next time," a voice said behind him, calm and amused.
Jae-Won turned, and froze.
It was her.
The masked figure from the crater—the one who'd offered him the shard. But now, she wore street leathers. Her violet cloak replaced by a longcoat stitched with arcwire and pulse-thread.
"Who are you?" he demanded.
She pulled off the mask.
His breath caught.
"Serin?"
But no—it wasn't. Not quite. The face was older. Weathered. A scar cut across her cheek, and the glint in her eyes was colder now. Sharper.
"I go by Kira now," she said. "And you're not the only one who failed."
He stepped back. "You died."
"In your loop, maybe. But I jumped—farther than I should have. I've been waiting for you to catch up."
Jae-Won's head spun. "So… this is a second chance?"
She shook her head. "No. It's a correction. You were never meant to play by their rules. You were meant to shatter them."
She handed him a device—a gauntlet laced with exposed temporal conduits and pulsing filament nodes. The prototype Glitch Driver.
"It's not stable," she warned. "But you'll figure it out. You always do."
Jae-Won slipped it on. The hum of dormant power returned like an old phantom pressing against his skin.
And then it hit him—like a memory crashing sideways through his brain. Not just his thoughts. Others'. Hundreds of timelines—each diverging, each ending in blood, loss, or silence.
He gasped. "This shouldn't be possible."
Kira smiled faintly. "Welcome to the war behind the timeline."
Then—boom. A shockwave shattered the sky. Up in the city's upper levels, beams of anti-time energy lanced downward, carving through buildings with precision strikes. Alarms howled. People screamed.
Kira's expression hardened. "They've found us."
Jae-Won looked down at his trembling hands.
Once, failure had meant the end.
Now it was only the beginning.
"I'm done following scripts," he muttered, clenching the gauntlet. "Let's write our own future."
Kira nodded. "Then we start by erasing the Division's first win—before they ever get the chance."
They vanished into the storm, two broken ghosts in the machine—rewriting destiny, one second at a time.