Time had unraveled.
For Kaelen, this wasn't a poetic metaphor; it was a literal, terrifying observation. He watched Lyra, his ally, his only anchor in this world of madness, reset three more times.
With the precision of a clockwork mechanism, her expression of concern would melt into faint confusion.
"What are you doing just standing there?" [Timestamp: -00:04]
"...Were you about to say something?" [Timestamp: -00:02]
Reset.
Her memory was wiped clean, her timeline rewound to a fixed starting point. He was watching a fragment of a recording play on an infinite loop.
Entity: Lyra Status: [Trapped at the Loop's Threshold - Iteration 4 - Resetting...]
He tried to speak to her, to shout her name. His words died in the air, never reaching her, as if broadcast on a frequency she could no longer hear.
He was a ghost to her. A ghost looking in from the future, even if that future was mere seconds away.
The harsh truth settled upon him: he couldn't save her from here. He was standing outside a burning house, and the only way to put out the fire was to go inside.
Leaving her behind, trapped in her repetition, was one of the hardest acts of his life. Every fiber of his being screamed to stay, to protect her.
But his archivist's logic, now his sharpest survival tool, told him the only way to free her was to solve the paradox that trapped her.
With a deep breath that brought no calm, Kaelen plunged the rest of his body through the phantom sewer grate.
The sensation was indescribable, a passage through cold static that made every nerve in his body scream. For an instant, the world dissolved into a torrent of corrupted data, lines of green, red, and blue code flashing chaotically.
Then, it solidified.
He was in a wide sewer tunnel, filthy water flowing slowly in a central channel. The air was heavy with the stench of rot and something else… ozone, the smell of spent magic.
And the sound… there was a constant, low hum, the sound of reality itself vibrating at the wrong frequency.
His Read was in overdrive, but in a different way than The Hatchery. It wasn't the quantity of data, but its quality. Everything was corrupted.
[Timestamp: SYNC_ERROR] [Environmental Condition: Temporal Instability (Mild)] [Entropy Reading: DANGEROUSLY HIGH]
He was in the heart of the problem.
He looked back. The entrance he'd come through was there, the Ouroboros symbol glowing faintly. But Lyra was gone. From his perspective inside the loop, she no longer existed.
He was utterly alone.
Ahead of him, further down the tunnel, there was light.
Magical light spheres hovered near the ceiling, illuminating a scene that seemed frozen in time, an oil painting of a tense moment.
There were two factions. On one side, three figures dressed in the garb of dockworkers, their faces hard and suspicious. On the other, two cloaked figures, their identities hidden in shadow.
They were in the middle of a trade. One of the dockworkers held a small metal box. One of the cloaked figures was extending a heavy pouch, presumably full of coin.
Kaelen activated his Read, his mind focusing to filter through the temporal noise.
Entity: Marco (Dockworker Leader) Class: Rogue (Level 21) Status: [LOOP] Anxious, Greedy. Intent: Complete the deal and leave before the Thieves' Guild finds out.
Entity: ??? (Cloaked Figure 1) Class: Shadow Sorcerer (Level 34) Status: [LOOP] Calm, Superior. Intent: Acquire the artifact. Eliminate the witnesses.
Kaelen's blood ran cold. Intent: Eliminate the witnesses. This wasn't a deal. It was an ambush.
He looked at the metal box.
Object: Dwarven Runic Stabilizer Class: Rare Function: Absorb and stabilize wild magic fluctuations. Status: [LOOP] Active, Unstable.
A betrayal was about to happen. Kaelen ducked behind a stone pillar, his heart hammering. He wasn't watching a memory. He was living inside a moment that refused to die.
"Show me the merchandise," the cloaked figure said, their voice a muffled hiss.
Marco, the leader, opened the box. Inside, a stone the size of an egg glowed with a pulsing, irregular light. The Runic Stabilizer.
"The payment," Marco growled.
The cloaked figure tossed the pouch. It landed on the cobblestones with a heavy thud. One of Marco's men moved to pick it up, but Marco held up a hand. "Wait."
And then, the world stuttered.
For a split second, the coin pouch was back in the cloaked figure's hand. The worker who had moved was back in his original position. Kaelen felt a wave of nausea. Time wasn't flowing forward. It was skipping, struggling to advance.
The scene resumed from that point. The pouch was tossed again. The worker moved again.
But this time, the second cloaked figure, who had remained silent, moved. Their hand vanished inside their cloak and emerged holding a sphere of black glass.
Object: Void Grenade Class: Consumable (Extremely Rare) Effect: Creates a miniature singularity that erases matter and time in a 5-meter radius.
Erases… time.
"Thank you for your cooperation," the first sorcerer hissed.
The second activated the Void Grenade. The sphere began to glow. Marco and his men realized the betrayal far too late. Their faces contorted in shock and horror.
And then, reality collapsed.
There was a sound of shattering glass that seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere at once. A wave of darkness expanded from the grenade. Kaelen shut his eyes instinctively.
He felt a pulling force, trying to delete him. But the Codex in his tunic flared with a warm light, protecting him, anchoring him.
When he opened his eyes, the scene was exactly as it had been when he arrived. The two factions, facing each other. The box in Marco's hand. The pouch in the sorcerer's.
The loop had reset.
The horror and understanding crashed down on Kaelen with the force of a tidal wave.
He was trapped in a three-minute cycle of betrayal and annihilation. The Void Grenade hadn't just killed these people. It had shattered this moment in time so violently that the System couldn't process its end.
The corrupted event was stuck on repeat, generating a colossal amount of Entropy with every cycle.
He watched the loop twice more. Every detail was identical. Every word, every movement. The people trapped here weren't people. They were echoes. Data-ghosts replaying their final actions, unaware of their fate. He felt a pang of pity for them, these souls trapped in the amber of time.
His analytical mind took over, suppressing the fear. He was an archivist facing a corrupted text. His job was to find the error and fix it. He began to catalog the variables.
The Trigger: The activation of the Void Grenade. The Root Cause: The sorcerers' intent to betray. The Failure Point: The explosion that corrupts the timestamp, preventing the event from "concluding" and moving to the next moment.
His mission, as the Moderator had said, was to "debug" the loop. What did that mean?
He couldn't just edit the [Intent] of the sorcerers. That would be a massive, personality-altering edit that would likely send his Entropy level skyrocketing.
He couldn't just delete the Void Grenade from the inventory. That would create a paradox—what caused the loop in the first place?
No. The solution had to be more elegant. He had to intervene within the rules of the loop. He had to stop the grenade from being activated. If the grenade never went off, the singularity would never be created, time would not be erased, and the event could, theoretically, conclude differently.
He was a ghost here. The trapped entities couldn't see or hear him. He could move freely.
During the fourth cycle, he approached the scene, heart pounding. He was walking through living memories. He could see the details on their faces, the sweat on Marco's brow, the fanatic gleam in the eye of the sorcerer holding the grenade.
He needed a distraction. Something to interrupt the precise flow of events. His gaze scanned the tunnel. The walls were lined with rusted pipes.
Object: High-Pressure Steam Pipe Structural Integrity: 22% (Corroded) Rupture Condition: Apply significant kinetic force.
He didn't have the strength to break it himself. But maybe he didn't need to. He looked down at a loose piece of cobblestone on the floor.
Object: Cobblestone Weight: ~5kg.
It was a crude solution. Throw the rock at the pipe, create a burst of steam, cause chaos, and stop the trade. But the timing had to be perfect.
The loop reset for the fifth time. The hum of unstable reality was now familiar background music.
He picked up the cobblestone. It felt heavy and real in his hand. He took his position.
"Show me the merchandise," the sorcerer said.
Now. His mind screamed. But he waited, watching the flow of time, feeling the rhythm of the moment.
"The payment," Marco growled.
The pouch was tossed. The worker moved. The second cloaked figure began to move its hand.
NOW!
With all his strength, Kaelen hurled the cobblestone at the rusted pipe. The sound of the impact was loud in the quiet tunnel. For an instant, nothing. Kaelen felt his heart sink. He'd failed.
Then, with a metallic groan, the pipe gave way.
A deafening, scalding blast of steam erupted, filling the tunnel with a thick white cloud. The figures trapped in the loop reacted for the first time. They screamed in shock and confusion. The sorcerer holding the grenade hesitated, his hand stopping mid-motion, his attention diverted by the sudden explosion.
Kaelen smiled. He had done it. He had broken the pattern.
It was then that his Read gave him a warning that had nothing to do with the loop. A new entity profile had appeared in his vision.
It was on the other side of the tunnel, hidden in the shadows his steam-burst hadn't reached. And it was watching him.
Entity: ??? Class: Paradox Hunter (Level ??) Status: Intrigued. Intent: Observe the anomaly 'debug.'
The Hunter hadn't been drawn to the loop. It was already here.
And it wasn't watching the loop. It was watching Kaelen.