Adrenaline is a hell of a drug. It makes you feel like a god. It shuts off pain receptors, sharpens your vision, and convinces you that you can punch a hole through a tank.
The crash, however, is a bitch.
Ten minutes after I shattered Bront's ego and chest plate, the adrenaline faded, and reality handed me the bill. My right arm felt like it had been run over by a mag-lev train. My shoulder was throbbing with a dull, sickening heat that suggested a severe sprain, and my fingers were trembling so bad I could barely hold my pickaxe.
I leaned against the rough stone wall of the tunnel, gasping for breath, trying to look like a brooding anti-hero instead of a guy who was about to pass out.
System Notification:
[Physical Status: Right Deltoid strained. Lactic acid buildup at critical levels. Recommendation: Cry about it, then hydrate.]
"Helpful," I muttered, wiping sweat from my eyes. "Thanks."
Jaren and Lyra were digging a few feet away. They kept glancing at me. Jaren looked at me like I was the Second Coming. Lyra looked at me like I was a ticking bomb she needed to defuse.
"Kael," Jaren whispered, leaning in close. "That was... I mean, you touched him and he just broke. Is that... is that Kinetia? My dad used to tell stories about the monks who..."
"Dig, Jaren," I cut him off, swinging my pickaxe with my left hand. It felt clumsy, but I couldn't use my right. Not yet. "Merrick's drones are watching. You want to explain to a floating camera why you're flapping your jaw instead of mining?"
Jaren shut up and went back to work, but the grin on his face didn't fade. He was alive. He was happy.
I looked at the chrono on the wall. 09:42 AM.
My stomach dropped.
In my first life, I didn't pay attention to time. Days blurred into weeks. But I remembered this day. I remembered it because it was the day the West Vein collapsed.
It happened at 09:45 AM.
In the original timeline, Bront had bullied Jaren into the deep tunnel, the Slurry Pit. Jaren was down there alone when the seismic stabilizers failed. The ceiling came down. We dug for two days. We found him flat.
But this time, I had stopped Bront. Jaren wasn't in the Slurry Pit. He was right here, standing next to me in the main corridor of Sector 4.
I relaxed slightly. See? Butterfly effect. I changed the variables. Jaren is safe.
Then I felt it.
Thump.
It wasn't a sound. It was a vibration in the floor. A deep, resonant tremor that traveled up through the soles of my boots.
My Seismic Sense, or at least the vestigial memory of it, flared up. I knew that vibration. It wasn't a mining drill. It was the groan of rock under tension. It was the sound of a geological spine snapping.
I looked up. The ceiling of the main corridor was laced with support beams made of rusted etherium. They were groaning.
I looked at Jaren. He was humming to himself, swinging his pickaxe at a vein of purple ore.
I looked at the chrono. 09:44 AM.
Realization hit me like a bucket of ice water.
The collapse wasn't triggered by Bront. It wasn't triggered by where Jaren was standing. It was a structural failure. The mine was always going to collapse today. In the old timeline, it collapsed on the Slurry Pit because that's where the stress fracture was.
But I had fought Bront here. I had used Kinetia. I had sent a shockwave through the floor here.
I hadn't stopped the accident. I had moved it.
"Move!" I screamed.
I didn't wait for them to process it. I dropped my pickaxe and tackled Jaren.
"Hey!" he started to protest.
CRACK.
The sound was deafening. It sounded like the world was splitting in half. The ceiling above us didn't just fall; it disintegrated. Tons of rock, loose shale, and heavy support beams came crashing down.
Dust exploded outward, blinding me. The roar was absolute. I shoved Jaren hard, sending him skidding across the floor into the safety of an alcove.
"Lyra!" I yelled, spinning around.
She was faster than Jaren. She had already dove to the side, rolling under a heavy mining cart just as a boulder the size of a car smashed into the spot where she had been standing.
I scrambled backward, coughing, my eyes stinging. The roar subsided, replaced by the terrifying sound of settling rock.
I looked up.
A massive slab of granite, easily weighing four tons, was hanging precariously above me, wedged against a buckling support beam. The beam was groaning, bending under the weight.
And directly under that slab, pinned by his leg, was a kid. Not Jaren. Not Lyra. Just some random kid, maybe sixteen, a Static I didn't know. He was screaming, thrashing, his leg caught under a pile of rubble.
The beam above him gave a screech of tearing metal. It was going to snap. In about three seconds, that kid was going to be paste.
I froze.
Do I save him?
In the grand scheme of things, one kid didn't matter. I had a mission. I had to kill Celestials. Risking my life for a random NPC was bad strategy. It was inefficient.
Whatever, I thought. Efficiency is for boring people.
I sprinted.
"Kael, no!" Lyra screamed from beneath the cart.
I slid across the floor, scraping my knees raw, and reached the kid. I grabbed his tunic and pulled. He was stuck fast.
"My leg!" he shrieked, his face a mask of dust and tears. "It's stuck!"
I looked up. The beam snapped.
The four-ton slab began to fall. Gravity took over. It was simple math. Mass times acceleration equals a very flat Kael.
I didn't have time to be smart. I didn't have time to calculate a vector. I threw my right hand up, my injured, strained, noodle-armed right hand, and caught the slab.
Kinetia: Impact Redirection.
I didn't try to stop it. You can't stop four tons with human bone. Instead, I tried to catch the kinetic energy of the fall and redirect it sideways, into the wall.
My hand made contact with the stone.
CRUNCH.
Pain. Blinding, white-hot, vomit-inducing pain. My shoulder dislocated with a wet pop. My knees buckled. The weight was impossible. I wasn't a Grandmaster right now; I was a twenty-one-year-old malnutritioned slave.
I screamed, a guttural sound that tore my throat. I managed to divert some of the force, slowing the slab down for a fraction of a second, but it wasn't enough. It was still coming down. I was going to die. I was going to be crushed right here, before I even started.
System Notification:
[Critical Threat Detected. Physical Shell Failure Imminent. Calculated Survival Chance: 0%.]
[Recommendation: Cheat.]
"Gladly," I snarled through gritted teeth.
I closed my eyes. I abandoned Kinetia. I reached into the burning, golden hole in my chest.
Delete.
I didn't try to be precise. I didn't try to be subtle. I pushed the Reality Energy out of my palm, directly into the massive stone slab crushing me.
ZZZ-CRACK.
The sound was wrong. It wasn't an explosion. It sounded like a corrupted audio file.
The weight vanished instantly.
I opened my eyes.
The slab was gone. Well, most of it. A perfect, spherical chunk of the rock, about three feet in diameter, right where my hand had touched it, was simply missing. The edges of the hole were glowing with golden static, pixelating and fading into existence.
The rest of the slab, now essentially a giant donut, crashed down around us. The hole I had created was just big enough to fit me and the kid.
We huddled in the center of the stone donut as the dust settled.
Silence returned to the mine.
I was breathing hard, my chest heaving. My right arm was dangling uselessly at my side, the shoulder visibly out of the socket. My skin was grey.
The kid looked at me. He looked at the perfect, glowing hole in the rock that had almost killed us. He looked at the golden static fading from my fingertips.
"What..." he whispered, his voice trembling. "What are you?"
I leaned my head back against the stone, fighting the urge to pass out. My arm felt like it was on fire.
"I'm the guy who just saved your ass," I wheezed. "You tell anyone about the gold light, and I put the rock back."
The kid nodded frantically, eyes wide.
"Kael!"
Jaren and Lyra were scrambling over the rubble. They reached us, their faces pale under the grime.
"Holy shit," Jaren breathed, looking at the massive slab surrounding us. "How did you... it fell right on top of you! How are you alive?"
"Luck," I lied, clutching my dislocated shoulder. "It must have... caught on something."
Lyra wasn't buying it. She was looking at the smooth, spherical cut in the rock. She touched the edge. It was still warm.
"Rock doesn't break like this, Kael," she whispered. "This looks like it was cut by a laser. Or eaten."
"Structural anomaly," I grunted, trying to stand up. The world spun. "Help me up. And pop my shoulder back in before I vomit on you."
Jaren grabbed my good arm. "You're crazy. You're actually crazy."
"I'm efficient," I corrected.
As they pulled me out of the rubble, I looked around. The corridor was collapsed. Work had stopped. Guards were shouting in the distance.
I checked the chrono on the wall, miraculously untouched. 09:47 AM.
I had saved Jaren. I had saved the random kid.
But I had also used the Golden Void in front of witnesses. And I had created a "Miracle", a hole in a rock that defied physics.
System Notification:
[Timeline Divergence Detected. Factor: High.]
[Warning: Overseer Merrick has been alerted to 'Unexplained Structural Failure'. Investigation Team dispatched.]
[Aggro Level: Rising.]
I let out a shaky breath.
"Butterfly effect," I muttered to myself. "You suck."
"What?" Jaren asked, dusting me off.
"Nothing," I said, looking at the glowing hole in the rock one last time. "Just realized the tutorial is over."