Time was a cruel god.
Eron Vale knew that better than anyone else. He'd once bent time's currents to save cities, reverse disasters, and snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. But now?
Now, time ignored his screams.
The wreckage of New Axion lay smoldering beneath a blood-orange sky. Blackened steel, shattered arc-glass towers, and bodies—so many bodies—stretched across the horizon. Eron knelt at the crater's edge, shaking, fists clenched so tight they bled. The chrono-core embedded in his forearm sparked erratically, flickering between blue and dead gray.
"I was supposed to stop this," he whispered.
He'd rewound the moment twenty-seven times. Twenty-seven loops, each more desperate than the last. Each ending the same—with failure.
She was still dead.
Ari.
Eron rose slowly, his coat flapping in the embers. Smoke curled around him, and the distorted echoes of sirens in the distance barely registered. His mind was stuck three hours in the past, replaying her smile, the way her eyes had lit up when he said, "Just one more run. I promise."
The promise had broken with her spine.
Behind him, a voice crackled through his comm-link. "Eron, come in. The Council has declared you compromised. Return to base or—"
He ripped the earpiece out.
Compromised?
No. He wasn't compromised. He was condemned.
They had given him the chrono-core, dubbed him the last safeguard of time itself, but when things went wrong—when the paradox gate Ari had tried to shut down collapsed inward and erased half a city—they blamed him. The Hero of Yesterday. The man who failed too well.
He stared down at the core on his arm. Its energy was unstable. He'd pushed it past protocol, past limits, maybe even past reality. It shouldn't have worked this many times.
Then why didn't it work when it mattered most?
He wasn't going to let it end here.
Eron raised his arm. The chrono-core flared again, time fractals spinning violently. He could still feel the echoes of the past, barely tangible threads winding backward through reality.
"You said I wasn't supposed to alter fixed points," he muttered, addressing the absent Council. "But if the point is broken—then I'm unbreaking it."
A pulse of pressure burst from the core, and the world around him bent. Buildings half-reformed, whispers of people flickered in and out of existence, and gravity briefly forgot which direction it favored.
And then—it stopped.
Eron staggered. Blood dripped from his nose. The chrono-core sparked once… then fell silent.
He looked around.
Nothing changed.
Everything was still ruined.
A broken laugh escaped his lips. "So that's it. Even time doesn't want to save me anymore."
Then, something strange happened.
A flicker—no, a silhouette—stood at the crater's edge opposite him. Tall, cloaked in violet with a mask that glowed faintly blue.
"I saw your loop," the figure said. The voice echoed, like it came from every direction at once. "You failed beautifully."
Eron stepped back. "Who the hell are you?"
"Someone who doesn't believe in the sanctity of timelines." The figure's hand extended, revealing a temporal shard—impossible tech that hadn't existed since the First Split.
"I can offer you a new chance," the figure said. "Not to change the past. But to weaponize it."
Eron hesitated.
He had nothing left. No reputation. No home. No Ari.
But he had one thing no one else did—time, broken though it was.
He took the shard.
"Then let's rewrite failure."