Chapter 1: The Eternal Hours
"Here it comes again…"
Radiz's consciousness murmured in a searing blankness, the familiar dread washing over him like ice water.
Then, deafening roars and heart-rending sounds of tearing metal completely engulfed him.
Excruciating pain.
Boundless, excruciating pain that no human mind should have to endure, let alone repeatedly.
This was the one hundred and eighth time he experienced his body being decomposed, each death carved deeper into his soul than the last.
The flagship, the 'Pride of Cadia', underwent its immolation—a spectacle comparable to the birth of a supernova.
The core of the out-of-control plasma engine melted through the ship's adamantine spine and energy storms swept through every deck at the speed of light, transforming tens of thousands of Cadia's last children, along with their final hope, into the most brilliant handful of radioactive dust in the cold, uncaring universe.
The shriek of alarms pierced his eardrums—Klaxon Pattern VII-Alpha, he'd learned to identify them—and the crimson emergency lights cast madly flickering shadows on the walls, creating a hellish tableau of war.
Radiz was half-kneeling behind the twisted remains of a support beam in Sector G-7, the familiar weight of his Hellgun's stock striking his shoulder blade painfully from the violent vibrations that ran through the ship's superstructure.
The weapon hummed with barely contained energy, its power cell reading 73%—exactly as it always did at this moment.
He was no hero, just an ordinary soldier in the Imperial Stormtrooper Corps, designated 734-Cadia-VII, from his proud but now-dead homeworld. Cadia, which had stood for ten thousand years against the Eye of Terror. Cadia, which had fallen. Cadia, whose sons and daughters now carried its spirit in exile among the stars.
"For the Emperor! Hold the line!" Squad Leader Barick's roar shrieked through the vox-channel, mixed with static and the dying screams of men whose names Radiz had memorized through his endless repetitions.
"The Chaos scum have breached the outer hull! Seventh breach, starboard side!"
Radiz's throat was as dry as ash and the air around him was thick with the acrid smell of ozone from overloaded power conduits, the metallic taste of blood, and the cordite stench of mass-reactive rounds.
The atmospheric recyclers were failing; he could taste the carbon monoxide creeping in.
His comrade beside him was clutching the torn remains of what had been a fellow Trooper . The boy's hollow eyes stared at the reinforced ceiling, his cracked lips unconsciously muttering his mother's name: "Mira... Mira..."
Radiz had tried to save the guy in the fourteenth loop. In the twenty-third, he'd managed to warn him about the incoming shrapnel. In the forty-first, he'd physically tackled the boy to safety. Each time, fate found another way to claim him. The universe, it seemed, demanded its pound of flesh.
This was war—no, this was a massacre.
Three hundred meters away, precisely on schedule, a colossal figure squeezed through the jagged breach in the outer hull.
A Chaos Space Marine, his Terminator armor corrupted and twisted by millennia of exposure to Warp energy, emerged like a daemon from the nightmares of children.
The ceramite plates were covered in blasphemous runes that hurt to look at directly with screaming faces of the damned pressed against the metal as if trying to escape from within.
With each step, the multi-ton weight of ceramite and corrupted metal made the reinforced deck plates groan and buckle under the unbearable pressure. Radiz could feel the vibrations through his boots.
The Chaos Marine raised the Combi-Bolter in his massive gauntlets—a weapon that could punch through a Rhino's front armor, let alone human flesh.
Radiz's heart constricted with familiar dread.
He had seen this scene one hundred and seven times. He knew what came next with the precision of a chrono.
Three seconds: his comrade beside him would look up, finally registering the threat. Two-point-seven seconds later, the first bolt round would take him center mass, the mass-reactive tip detonating inside his ribcage and reducing him to vapor.
Five seconds: Squad Leader Barick would launch his suicidal charge, screaming the Litany of Hate.
The chainaxe would cleave him from crown to pelvis in a spray of blood and bone fragments that would spatter the wall behind him.
Ten seconds: Radiz himself would die, usually from the Combi-Bolter's second magazine. The pain was always the same—a burning sensation as the bolt round punched through his flak armor, followed by the floating sensation as shock set in, then darkness.
But this time, he did not move from cover.
Amidst the desperate prayers to the Emperor and the hoarse battle-cries of his comrades, Radiz's stillness seemed jarringly out of place.
While men scrambled for firing positions or cowered behind whatever cover they could find, he remained motionless like a statue.
Instead, he stared intently at the Terminator, etching every twisted detail of its armor into his memory.
Each death had been intelligence gathering, the only productive thing he could do while trapped in this temporal purgatory.
He'd learned the attack patterns, memorized the enemy's weapons loadouts, noting their weaknesses. Information was the only currency he possessed.
But more importantly, time seemed to stretch at this moment of crisis, adrenaline sharpening his perception to superhuman clarity.
And through the chaos of the battlefield, his gaze was fixed on something far more significant.
There—in the maintenance tunnel that led to the warship's plasma core.
It was there, at the very last moment before the warship's immolation, that a figure always appeared. Not a Chaos cultist. Not a possessed crew member. Not some xenos infiltrator or daemonic entity.
A person wearing the crisp uniform of a high-ranking Imperial Navy officer, complete with rank insignia and service ribbons. The gold braid on his cuffs caught the emergency lighting as he moved through the service tunnels.
Radiz couldn't see his face from this distance and angle, but he could clearly observe the man's actions: the casual way he activated a device—roughly the size and shape of a melta bomb—that glowed with an ominous red light and dropped it into the exposed primary energy conduit.
It was him! The mole! The traitor within their ranks!
Through one hundred and seven cycles of death and rebirth, Radiz had searched. Through one hundred and seven iterations of destruction, he had pieced together fragments of the truth. Each loop revealed new details.
This time, by remaining in position instead of charging futilely to his death, he had finally managed to hold on long enough to grab the tail of that venomous snake.
The officer seemed to sense his observation and, from across the vast space of the cargo bay, slowly turned his head in Radiz's direction. Even through the smoke and chaos, even at this distance, Radiz could see the man's expression clearly.
A sneer. A cold, amused Sneer.
As if the entire massacre, the deaths of tens of thousands of loyal servants of the Emperor, was nothing more than an elaborate jest.
The next instant, the entire world turned pure white.
A light ten thousand times brighter than sun erupted from the power core as the plasma containment failed catastrophically.
There was no pain this time, because the nervous system vaporized before neural impulses could register the agony. The temperature at the center of the explosion exceeded that of a stellar core.
Radiz's consciousness, along with his final, burning obsession, was completely erased in the span of a nanosecond.
…
*"Beep—beep—beep—"*
The monotonous morning wake-up call in dormitory area sounded on time, just as it had for the past one hundred and eight iterations.
Radiz's eyes snapped open as his body jerked upright with a gasp. Cold sweat instantly soaked through his regulation undershirt, the moisture making the fabric cling to his skin.
He lay on his narrow cot—Bunk 734-C, lower tier—feeling the familiar, icy touch of the metal bed frame against his back.
He raised his hands before his face, flexing fingers that should have been reduced to atoms. The flesh was intact, unmarked by the violence he'd just experienced. No radiation burns, no frostbite from exposure to vacuum, no shrapnel wounds.
His shattered carapace armor had vanished, replaced by the simple fatigues of off-duty personnel. His blood-stained fingers—fingers that had clawed uselessly at his torn throat in loop thirty-seven—were clean and steady.
He was back.
Once again, he had returned to exactly twelve hours before the 'Pride of Cadia' was ambushed. Twelve hours before betrayal would condemn them all.
The chronometer on the wall—a simple digital display mounted above the dormitory's main entrance—showed Imperial Standard Time 06:00:00. The seconds ticked forward precisely, each digit a countdown to apocalypse.
Outside the narrow viewport, the calm river of stars flowed in the deep void.
No warning klaxons, no explosions, no Terminator-armored giants.
The 'Pride of Cadia' sailed through the immaterium on its appointed course, its crew unaware that death stalked them through their own corridors.
Everything had yet to happen. Everything would happen again, unless he could find a way to break the chain.
Radiz rolled out of his bunk, his bare feet hitting the cold deck plates with barely a sound.
Radiz walked to the communal wash station—a row of metal basins fed by tepid recycled water—and splashed the liquid onto his face.
The chill gradually cleared his muddled thoughts and helped center him in the present moment. Reality, such as it was.
He stared at his reflection in the polished metal that served as a mirror. The face that looked back was gaunt, hollow-eyed, marked by experiences that technically hadn't happened yet.
This wasn't a dream—he'd confirmed that in the early loops through simple tests. Nor was it post-traumatic stress disorder, as he'd hoped in more desperate moments.
This was a curse, certainly. But perhaps it was also a blessing, though from what dark god he couldn't say.
He was bound to the fate of this ship by chains he didn't understand.
As long as the 'Pride of Cadia' was destroyed, time would rewind to this moment.
He was trapped in a temporal prison of twelve hours, doomed to watch the same tragedy unfold again and again.
He was the only "prophet" aboard this doomed vessel, the sole possessor of knowledge that might save them all. He was also the only prisoner, sentenced to relive this day until either he found a way to break free or madness claimed him entirely.
Hundreds of deaths had transformed him.
The initial despair—watching helplessly as friends died, as strategies failed, as hope crumbled—had given way to screaming rage. Then desperate action, futile heroics, and suicidal charges. Eventually, those emotions had burned themselves out like dying stars, leaving behind a calmness as deep and cold as the void between galaxies.
He no longer wasted time thinking about how to escape this temporal trap. The mechanism was beyond his understanding, possibly beyond human comprehension entirely.
Instead, he focused on the only thing that mattered: how to break this cycle. How to save the 'Pride of Cadia' and the souls aboard her.
And this time—Loop 108—he had finally found the key he needed.
The traitor. The mole who had sabotaged the plasma core from within.
That ambush had never been an accident. From the very beginning, it was orchestrated betrayal, a conspiracy of corruption that reached into the highest levels of the ship's command structure.
The enemy had known their exact course, their defensive capabilities, their patrol schedules. Someone had provided them with detailed intelligence and opened doors that should have remained sealed.
Someone wearing the uniform of the Imperial Navy thousands of loyal servants of the Emperor for... what? Chaos gold? Promises of power? Simple, craven cowardice?
Radiz's eyes sharpened as he stared at his reflection.
The man looking back was no longer a lost soldier, no longer a victim of circumstance. He was a lone wolf who had finally glimpsed his prey through the smoke of burning hope.
If nothing was done, the ambush would occur punctually in twelve hours.
However, he was just a nobody, with little influence.
No one would believe the "prophecy" of an ordinary Stormtrooper.
Any unusual behavior could be deemed heresy or madness, leading directly to an Inquisitor's pyre or a commissar's bolt round. The Imperium had little patience for soldiers who claimed to possess supernatural knowledge, regardless of how accurate it might prove.
But Radiz possessed an advantage that none of them could hope to match—information.
That officer's mocking smile before the final destruction replayed in his mind like a vid-loop, each detail burned into his memory with perfect clarity.
"No matter who you are," Radiz said quietly to his reflection, each word squeezed out through teeth clenched with barely restrained fury, "I will drag you out into the light and cut you open like a pig."
His voice carried the weight of one hundred and eight deaths, the accumulated rage of watching friends die again and again while their killer walked free among them.
"Your game is over."
His gaze swept over his shoulder to the warship's structural diagram that hung beside the dormitory entrance—a simplified schematic that every crew member was required to memorize for emergency procedures. His eyes landed precisely on the power core section, where in twelve hours a traitor would plant a device that would murder them all.