The scent of Ozone and disappointment clung to the lower levels of Chronos Academy like a shroud.
Kaelen Nox scraped his cloth against the polished concrete of the gym floor, the rough, damp sound grating against his skull. The air here was always frigid, a deliberate design choice; cold floors meant cold heads, and cold heads meant focused Aura training for the high-rank students practicing on the upper balconies. For the Zero-Ranks—the bottom feeders, the Null-Born—it was just another miserable detail of their perpetual servitude.
He wore the white tunic, the garment of humiliation. Every student in the world of Aetheria was born with a Birthright: either a powerful Magical Affinity, the latent command over a Divine Weapon, or an Enhanced Intellect boasting an IQ north of 200. Kaelen had none. No flicker of Aura, no ancestral weapon fragment, and an IQ that was painfully average. He was a zero on the scale, a negative in the ledger.
At ten years old, Kaelen Nox knew his fate: He would scrub the Academy's floors until he aged out, then move on to scrubbing the floors of a minor Hunter Guild, living and dying beneath the feet of those who mattered. His pathetic, singular Innate Skill—the one gift the System had grudgingly assigned him at birth—was a perpetual, biting joke: Minor Spatial Shift. He could move a non-sentient object by one centimeter. Once per hour.
One centimeter. Enough to slightly shift the dust he was already cleaning.
He pressed his knuckles into the mop handle, the wood splintering slightly. It wasn't the work that killed him; it was the suffocating reality of the Rank. In Aetheria, your rank was your worth. It was the absolute metric. And his was nothing.
A shadow fell over him, not the flat shadow of the balcony railing, but a solid, aggressive silhouette that smelled of expensive, high-grade Aura balm and arrogant sweat.
"Look at the dust-eater go," a voice sneered.
Kaelen didn't look up. He didn't need to. He knew the voice belonged to Caius Verridian, a D-Rank talent, a boy whose power—Kinetic Fist—was as simple and destructive as his personality. Caius was the third son of a minor noble family, gifted with an Aura that wrapped his fists in explosive kinetic energy. He was exactly the kind of person Kaelen was destined to serve for the rest of his two lives, current or future.
"I told the monitor yesterday," Caius continued, kicking a bucket that sent a plume of dirty water splashing across the floor Kaelen had just finished. "Zero-Ranks should be restricted to sewage duty. We train to save the world, and you train to… smear filth."
Kaelen slowly straightened, his back aching. His heart was already pounding against his ribs, not with courage, but with the cold dread of inevitability.
"The assignment was to clean the floor, Caius," Kaelen said, his voice flat and thin. He didn't dare meet the bully's eyes, focusing instead on the buckle of Caius's reinforced Hunter boot.
Caius laughed, a harsh, scraping sound that echoed in the vast, empty gym. Two of Caius's lackeys—both low E-Ranks—snickered behind him.
"Insolence. I specifically asked for this section to be scrubbed spotless for our morning drill. And you missed a spot, Zero." Caius pointed to a barely visible smudge Kaelen knew was a permanent stain in the concrete.
"It's a structural flaw, not dirt," Kaelen whispered.
"It's a flaw in your existence, then." Caius's expression hardened. The Aura surrounding his right hand began to glow a dull, aggressive orange. The air crackled faintly. "You think you can question a D-Rank? You, who can't even move a matchstick across a table? I'll teach you the price of disrespect, dust-eater."
The bully didn't wait. He shifted his weight, driving all the gathered Aura in his right leg into a swift, downward stomp—a compressed, D-Rank Kinetic Impact aimed squarely at Kaelen's kneecap. It was a move designed to permanently damage a low-rank body, a casual act of sadism that the Academy monitors would categorize as a "training accident."
This is it, Kaelen thought, a wave of cold finality washing over him. The sharp, unbearable truth of his powerlessness, the core reason for his entire miserable life, was about to be proven one last time.
The Kinetic Impact smashed into his leg.
—And the world shattered.
It wasn't the sound of bone breaking; it was the sound of reality tearing. The pain registered as a blinding, white-hot explosion in his knee, but it was immediately drowned out by a deafening tidal wave of data.
It wasn't a memory; it was a flood. Fifteen years of future history—compressed, categorized, and violently injected into the consciousness of a ten-year-old boy.
The Temporal Cascade. The Year 2038. The sky tears open. The S-Ranks fall like flies. The betrayal of the Chronos Guild Leader. The exact moment the Prime Entity appeared. The Weakness Log of the Dimensional Leviathan. The optimal training method for Minor Spatial Shift...
Kaelen wasn't reliving the future; he was reading it. He wasn't a hero in that future; he was a researcher, a meticulous recorder hiding in the archives, charting every failure, every victory, and every fatal mistake made by the heroes who ultimately failed to save Aetheria.
He watched his first self die: crushed by debris, holding a journal filled with data, whispering the final, fatal weakness of the Temporal Cascade.
—The pain was familiar, the shock of the past was not. The world was ending, and the kick was just the starting line.—
The physical body of Kaelen was collapsing, but the mind was being rewritten. The Zero-Rank, the Null, the lack of any defining Aura, made him the perfect vessel for this raw, unadulterated knowledge.
The white-hot Aura impact on his knee faded. In its place, a crystalline, silver-blue interface slammed into existence behind his eyes, replacing the standard blurry Academy System window.
[SYSTEM FAILURE: ZERO AURA SIGNATURE DETECTED.]
[INITIATING REWRITE PROTOCOL. REPLACING BASE OPERATING SYSTEM.]
[CHRONOS REGISTRY ACTIVATED (ADMIN MODE – READ/WRITE ACCESS).]
[WARNING: DESTINY DEVIATION DETECTED. TEMPORAL CASCADE PROBABILITY: 98%]
Kaelen gasped, but no sound escaped. He was still on his knees, his broken leg searing, but the pain was now a distant, tertiary concern. His vision had shifted. Caius, the bully, was no longer just a boy—he was an object of study, overlaid with glowing, crystalline text that only Kaelen could see.
[TARGET: CAIUS VERRIDIAN]
[RANK: D (INEFFICIENT)]
[BIRTHRIGHT: KINETIC FIST (BASE)]
[WEAKNESS LOG - ENTRY 118A: KINETIC INSTABILITY]
—Caius's technique relies on perfect Aura compression in the limb. During high-impact maneuvers (stomp, jump-smash), the Aura focus shifts to the knee joint for 0.04 seconds before release. A minor spatial distortion at the joint during this phase will disrupt the compression, leading to internal kinetic feedback (Level 2: Severe Joint Sprain).
In his past life, Kaelen had spent three months studying the fighting patterns of the Verridian family heirs. That data, once a dry research entry, was now his cheat sheet. He didn't need to be strong. He needed to be precise.
He had one shot. Minor Spatial Shift was on a one-hour cooldown, and the Registry had just activated.
Caius, seeing Kaelen merely kneeling and breathing raggedly, misinterpreted the silence as fear. He raised his left hand, the Aura beginning to surge into his fist for a finishing blow.
"Aura flow is stabilizing in the left fist. Delay: 2.1 seconds," the Registry noted with chilling clarity.
Time to shift.
The agonizing pain in Kaelen's own knee was irrelevant. He didn't care about the consequences. He had survived the end of the world; a broken leg was a minor inconvenience.
His useless Innate Skill activated. He focused all his desperate intent—not on Caius's fist, not on his chest, but on the right knee joint that was currently stabilizing Caius's weight.
[MINOR SPATIAL SHIFT INITIATED.]
One centimeter.
He didn't move Caius. He moved the tiny patch of air directly inside the protective sleeve of Caius's knee brace. The millimeter-wide vacuum was insignificant, but the Registry knew better. It knew that during maximum compression, even the slightest deviation in external pressure would destabilize the focused Aura.
The result was immediate and catastrophic for Caius.
Instead of feeling the power surge for his attack, Caius let out a sharp, gurgling cry of pain and confusion. The kinetic energy he was compressing violently rebounded inward. Not enough to break bone, but enough to feel like a high-voltage shock ripping through his knee. His right leg buckled instantly, throwing him off balance.
Caius collapsed onto the gym floor with a pathetic shriek, clutching his knee and rolling amidst the dirty water.
"W-what happened?! My Aura… it failed! It recoiled!" Caius shouted, his voice high-pitched and panicked. The two E-Ranks rushed to their master, staring wildly at the Zero-Rank still kneeling nearby.
Kaelen slowly pushed himself up, using the mop handle as a crutch, ignoring the pulsing agony in his own leg. The Registry was already logging the outcome:
[WEAKNESS LOG EXPLOITED: CAIUS VERRIDIAN - ELIMINATED FROM COMBAT.]
[SKILL USAGE: MINOR SPATIAL SHIFT (0.01m). OPTIMAL PATHING SUCCESS: 99.8%]
[CURRENT COOLDOWN: 59 MINUTES, 58 SECONDS.]
Kaelen looked down at the screaming bully, then at his own trembling, silver-tinged hand. The fear was gone, replaced by a cold, thrilling certainty.
He hadn't been saved by a hidden magical affinity. He had been saved by perfect, undeniable knowledge.
The Temporal Cascade is coming in fifteen years, Kaelen thought, the voice of the dead researcher cold and rational in his mind. And the fools in this academy are spending their time learning how to kick, while the strongest hunters in this world are hiding the keys to survival.
He tossed the mop aside. It clattered loudly on the floor, the sound ringing through the massive gym.
He looked at Caius, his eyes—once soft and despairing—now possessing the sharp, calculated gaze of a general planning a decades-long war.
"The stain is permanent, Caius," Kaelen said, his voice stronger this time, devoid of its former subservience. "You shouldn't focus so much on the things you can't change."
He limped away, leaving the D-Rank hunter whining on the ground. Every step was excruciating, a testament to the price of his transformation, but every step was forward.
I am Kaelen Nox. I am the Zero-Rank.
But I possess the blueprints of the world's destruction, and the secret key to its salvation.
My goal is no longer to survive the day. My goal is to rewind destiny. And the first step is finding the man who unknowingly holds the map to my accelerated growth: Master Kael, the retired, disgraced martial arts instructor. He's the only one who can teach a boy who can't use Aura how to fight like a god.
The Chronos Registry flashed once more, a silver glow behind his eyes:
[PRIMARY MISSION: SECURE MASTER KAEL. COMMENCING OPTIMAL PATHING.]
[TARGET LOCATION: ABANDONED DOJO (SECTION Z-12).]
[TIME LIMIT: 48 HOURS BEFORE EXPULSION.]
Kaelen smiled, a tired, humorless twist of his lips. The game had finally started. And he knew exactly how to win.