The punch hit me in the face. Again.
Smack.
The world flashed white, then black, then settled back into the ugly, bright lights of the Training Center. The hard floor felt familiar against my back.
"Kaelen! Again?" Leo's voice was a mix of laughter and pity. His face, surrounded by messy red hair, appeared in my view. "You were just standing there. Like a tree."
I groaned and sat up. My jaw hurt. "I was… thinking."
"Thinking about how to catch a fist with your face?" Leo offered me a hand and pulled me up with ease. He was built like a truck. His Echo, "Stone Skin," was simple and strong. A solid C-Rank. He was exactly what the Agency wanted.
My Echo was… not.
"Shut up, Leo," I muttered, brushing dust off my cheap training gear. Across the room, the training drone beeped, its metal fist retracting.
"I'm serious, man," Leo said, slinging a heavy arm over my shoulder. "Your 'Hindsight Glimpse' thing. You get a flash after you're already on the floor. How is that supposed to help?"
He wasn't wrong. Officially, my power was to see brief flashes of my past failures. It was like having a personal highlight reel of every stupid thing I'd ever done, delivered a second too late to be useful.
The system screen floating in the air next to us updated without emotion.
[TRAINING SESSION 78: CONCLUDED]
[SUBJECT: KAELEN]
[ECHO: HINDSIGHT GLIMPSE - E-RANK]
[RESULT: FAILURE]
[RECOMMENDATION: ASSIGN TO VANGAURD UNIT 7]
Vanguard. The fancy name for cannon fodder. The guys they sent into the Temporal Anomalies first, to see what would kill them.
"Vanguard?" Leo whistled, reading the screen. "Ouch. Well, look on the bright side. You'll get to see so many new and exciting ways to fail." He grinned, trying to make it a joke.
I forced a weak smile. "Yeah. Can't wait."
But inside, my stomach was cold. This was it. A death sentence.
The truth was, my power was a liar. What the system called a "glimpse" was something else entirely. When that drone had swung its fist, I hadn't just seen a flash.
For a single, heart-stopping second, my mind had split.
In one reality, I stood there and took the punch. I felt the impact, saw the lights, hit the floor. That was the reality Leo saw.
But in another… a reality that existed only inside my head for a fraction of a second… I had ducked. I had pivoted on my left foot, felt the air from the drone's fist brush past my ear, and landed a clean strike to its core.
I had lived that successful dodge. I had felt the perfect flow of the movement in my muscles. I had known how to do it.
Then the moment passed, and I was back in the "real" world, with no time to act, and I got punched. Again.
My power wasn't to see my past failures. It was to live in two timelines at once: the one where I failed, and a perfect one where I succeeded. The problem was, I was always a second behind, trapped in the failing body.
"Come on," Leo said, shaking me out of my thoughts. "Let's get some food. I'll buy you a protein bar. You look like you need it."
As we walked towards the mess hall, a siren blared through the complex. Sharp, urgent. A red light flashed on the ceiling.
[ALERT: TEMPORAL ANOMALY DETECTED]
[LOCATION: SECTOR 4, TRAINING WING B]
[SCALE: MINOR FLUCTUATION]
[ALL E-RANK PERSONNEL, REPORT FOR CONTAINMENT]
E-Rank. That was me. The cannon fodder was being called to the front.
Leo's joking mood vanished. "Sector 4? That's… that's just down the hall."
We turned the corner and stopped. The hallway in front of us was… wrong. The air shimmered like a heat haze. The walls flickered, sometimes showing their normal grey panels, sometimes showing cracked, moss-covered stone. A low hum filled the air, making my teeth ache.
An Anomaly. Here. Inside the secure facility.
An instructor ran past, his face pale. "You two! E-Ranks? Don't just stand there! The fluctuation is small. Get in there and plant the stabilizer charges! Now!"
He shoved a small metal case into my hands. Inside were three glowing discs.
My blood went cold. This was a suicide mission. The Anomaly was unstable. Going in was like stepping into a blender of broken time.
Leo looked at me, his Stone Skin activating, turning his skin a dull grey. "I'll cover you. Just run in, stick them to the walls, and run out. Easy."
Easy. Right.
I took a step towards the shimmering air. The hum grew louder. My heart hammered in my chest. I was going to die.
And then, my mind split.
Not again. Not now.
A wave of pure, overwhelming information flooded my brain.
I didn't just see myself stepping forward. I felt it. I lived it. A hundred times. A thousand.
In one stream of thought, I took a step and my leg aged to dust.
In another, a piece of ceiling from a different century fell and crushed me.
In a third, I was just… unmade, my molecules scattered across time.
Death. Death. Death.
I gasped, stumbling back. My vision swam with a kaleidoscope of my own gruesome endings.
"Kaelen? You okay?" Leo asked, his voice tight with fear.
I wasn't. I was drowning in a ocean of my own failures. But within that ocean, I saw it. A single, narrow path. A sequence of steps. Duck left here. pause for exactly 0.8 seconds there. Don't touch the wall on the right.
It was a path where I didn't die.
I looked at Leo, my face probably as white as a sheet. I took a deep breath.
And I said the only thing that felt true.
"I think… I've done this before."
Then, before he could answer, I stepped into the shimmering haze.
The world tore itself apart around me. And I started to move, following the ghost of a path I had already walked a thousand times in my head.