The sky was no longer a sky. It had become a vast wound in the universe, a rupture in the familiar order of reality. Crimson fissures ran across the heavens like molten scars, branching into patterns too intricate and chaotic to be natural. They stretched from horizon to horizon, and through each fracture, the void beyond bled into our world. Light here had no temperature; it burned not with heat but with the cold intensity of pure entropy. The clouds themselves seemed to recoil, split and splintered as if reality's scaffolding had fractured, leaving the air to hang in a trembling lattice of impossible geometries.
I remember seeing it and thinking, absurdly, that the universe itself was mocking humanity. This was no fire, no flame that could be extinguished with water or foam or any conceivable weapon. It was the final signal of a cosmos gone mad.
Through these rifts came the monsters.
To describe them in familiar terms would be a mistake. They were not creatures of flesh, bone, or muscle. They were distortions, living anomalies given form. Their limbs bent at angles that made the eye ache, their bodies shimmered as if liquid light had been poured into incompatible molds, and every motion suggested laws of physics that no one had yet discovered. Some slithered across the streets on scores of spindly legs, each leg tipped with a fragment of black crystal that reflected the fractured sky in impossible ways. Others flew with wings that resembled torn fragments of starlight, their movement carving new rifts with each beat. And every one of them screamed not in sound as we understand it, but in resonance, a vibration that pierced the mind, an echo of hunger that no human stomach could ever satisfy.
I stumbled through the ruins of the city, clutching my side where the blood of my own imperfection soaked through my jacket. The air smelled of iron and ozone, of burnt electronics and charred flesh. In every direction, the last city of humanity lay in fragments: tanks gutted and smoldering in the streets, drones reduced to twisted skeletal shells, the defense walls shattered and jagged, a monument to futility. And all around me, the dying cried out, only to be silenced as the monsters claimed them.
Somehow, I was still standing. Somehow, by some improbable design or cosmic joke, I had not yet been consumed. My knees buckled beneath me, and I tripped over a fractured piece of concrete. A shard of glass or perhaps something that had once been a window cut into my hand. I tasted iron. And yet, I forced myself upright again.
Ahead loomed the only thing that could still save what remained.
The Rift Reactor.
It was a construct of both human ambition and hubris, a sphere of polished steel suspended in a lattice of supports that had once carried power across continents. Now, those supports were twisted, blackened, humming with the last sparks of dying energy. Thick cables, as wide as buildings, connected it to generators that had failed long ago. Its surface pulsed with unstable light, each pulse like a warning heartbeat, each flare a signal of inevitable collapse. The air around it distorted, bending light and sound, warping my perception so that the ground seemed to ripple beneath my feet.
If it went critical, Earth would not merely die. It would unravel.
I had no weapons. No armor. No command authority. Only the training of a junior engineer someone deemed expendable by the very institutions that had built this machine. And yet here I was, bleeding, trembling, staring down the only device that could hold back the end.
I laughed. A dry, ragged sound that seemed to fracture the air more than the rifts themselves. "Figures," I whispered. "Figures that the universe leaves the job to the weakest link."
Dragging myself forward, I pressed my blood-slicked hands to the console. Sparks leaped from broken panels as the interface flickered to life. Red warning symbols danced across the screen like an urgent language I barely had time to interpret.
[System Failure: Containment Breach Imminent]
[Warning: Catastrophic Rift Event Approaching]
A single timer glared back at me.
[00:00:29]
Twenty-nine seconds.
I forced my hands to move. Each motion was agony, each second a weight pressing against the fragility of my human body. Panels hissed and groaned as I opened them, exposing wires that burned with residual power, circuits that sparked and fizzled. My vision swam, but training took over. This was not about courage or heroism. This was about mechanics. About systems. About sequences and calculations.
"Manual override," I muttered, though the words were almost lost in the chaos. "Come on… come on…"
The console did not answer with encouragement. Its warning signals screamed louder.
[Warning: Stabilization Incomplete. Energy Overload Detected]
I slammed a fist against the panel. Pain shot up my arm, but it was no different than the pain in my chest, the pain of watching a city die in slow motion.
A roar cut through the air, low, thunderous, primal, yet alien. My body froze as I turned toward it.
A Rift beast had found me.
It was enormous, the size of a tank, though it defied all reason. Its body shimmered as if composed of liquid light, colors swirling in impossible patterns that hurt my eyes to track. Eyes dozens of them blinked in patterns that suggested intelligence far beyond human comprehension. Limbs bent and flexed in angles that should have been fatal to any normal skeleton. And all of those eyes were fixed on me.
The ground quaked with each step it took. Its roar vibrated through the air and into my bones. Then it lunged.
I threw myself against the console. My fingers flew across the controls. Instinct screamed to run, but there was nowhere to go. Behind me: the Reactor. Ahead: certain death.
"So this is it," I murmured, more to myself than the creature. "Not a soldier. Not a hero. Just a mechanic patching holes in the universe."
The countdown blinked.
[00:00:05]
The Rift beast struck.
And the Reactor went critical.
The world became pure light.
Agony tore through me, as though every nerve, every cell, every memory of flesh and bone were being unraveled and remade into raw energy. My scream dissolved into the white fire that consumed all perception. The city, the people, the monsters, even the very sky, all coalesced into a single, overwhelming moment of annihilation.
And then, amid the unthinkable pain, a presence manifested. A voice: precise, mechanical, devoid of mercy, yet unmistakably intelligent.
[System Booting…]
[Time Core Activation Complete.]
[Initializing Timeline Rewind.]
I was pulled through a storm of broken realities: my own face, countless others, memories that had not yet occurred. Battles flickered in and out of existence. I glimpsed Earth in every possible state, from thriving to entirely erased. And I saw myself, always dying, always failing.
And then it snapped.
The apocalypse was gone.
I lay on a spotless floor, the hum of air filtration replacing the screaming winds. Fluorescent lights glimmered overhead. Scientists in pristine white coats moved calmly among consoles, discussing test results and reactor readings as if the last five minutes of hell had never happened.
My chest ached. I lifted my hand and tore open my jacket. Embedded in the center of my chest was a crystal of impossibly shifting light. It pulsed with each heartbeat. The Time Core.
A countdown appeared in my vision, precise and unyielding.
[Time Rift Catastrophe: 499 years, 364 days, 23 hours, 59 minutes…]
The numbers were wrong. In every record I had studied, the Rift War did not begin for another five hundred years. Yet here it was one year closer.
I had not just been thrown back in time. I had moved the apocalypse forward.
A cold clarity settled over me. I was alone. Not in the sense of physical isolation, but in the knowledge that the weight of humanity, of all its futures, rested entirely on me. I had survived the end of the world, only to awaken at the beginning of its undoing.
And somewhere in the back of my mind, a question began to form. Not about survival. Not about monsters or machines.
Was I here to save the world? Or had I become the first step in its destruction?