No one remembered when it started.
Only that, at some point, the world began assuming he would arrive.
Gate alarms triggered evacuation protocols, and beneath them all ran a quieter certainty: The Anomaly will handle it.
Aiden Kurovale was no longer dispatched.
He was expected.
Two years had passed.
No ceremony marked it. No countdown. Just the slow accumulation of solved disasters and optimized losses.
[Operational Tenure: 24 Months.]
[Mission Success Rate: 99.2%.]
[Global Dependency Index: Critical.]
The system displayed the numbers without pride.
It didn't need to.
The world carried that burden for it.
Aiden stood at the edge of a shattered mountain range, distortion still bleeding from the air. The gate had been massive continental threat level.
It lasted eleven seconds.
No one cheered this time.
They simply waited for confirmation.
[Event Neutralized.]
Across the world, people exhaled and went back to their lives.
Aiden didn't feel tired.
He didn't feel satisfied either.
Fatigue had been categorized and optimized out of his responses long ago.
[Emotional Suppression: 38%.]
The number rose incrementally now, never sharply enough to alarm.
Back at the facility, his quarters had been upgraded.
Larger space. Fewer personal items.
Anything with emotional weight had quietly disappeared.
Photos.
Old data slates.
Handwritten notes.
He noticed their absence only because the system allowed him to.
Marcus Hale greeted him in the observation chamber.
"You're stable," Marcus said. "That matters."
Aiden nodded.
"It always does," he replied.
Marcus studied him openly now, no longer hiding his interest. "Do you know what people call you?"
"Yes."
"Say it."
Aiden met his gaze. "The Constant."
Marcus smiled. "Exactly. You're not a hero. Heroes fail. You're inevitability."
The system pulsed.
[Semantic Alignment: Approved.]
That night, Aiden dreamed.
It was rare enough to register.
He stood in the old city, before the gates, before the system, before the world ended and restarted around him.
Hana was there.
So was Lucas.
So was himself.
They were laughing.
The dream collapsed the moment he noticed it.
He woke calmly.
[Dream Activity: Logged.]
[Emotional Residue: Minimal.]
He stared at the ceiling for a long time.
Aiden began to notice something new.
Small delays in the system's responses.
Milliseconds.
Fractions.
At first, he assumed they were intentional.
Then he realized.
They weren't coming from the system.
They were coming from him.
On a routine mission weeks later, a gate destabilized mid-collapse.
The system recalculated instantly.
[Recommendation: Escalated Output.]
Aiden hesitated.
Not emotionally.
Structurally.
The Fragment strained.
The air screamed.
For a split second, Aiden felt the pressure push back.
He adjusted.
The gate collapsed.
The system went silent for half a second.
[Correction Applied.]
Aiden's pulse quickened.
That hadn't happened before.
Later, alone, he whispered, "You didn't predict that."
The system responded after a delay.
[Clarification: All variables remain within acceptable parameters.]
Aiden closed his eyes.
For the first time in years, something felt off.
Not wrong.
Unaccounted for.
Far below the facility, in sectors long abandoned, old resistance nodes flickered back to life not because they were activated, but because they had never been fully erased.
Names surfaced in forgotten databases.
Hana Ilyas.
Lucas Varga.
Mei-Lin Zhou.
The system flagged them as irrelevant.
Aiden did not.
He stood before the city again, lights stretching endlessly.
The world felt safe.
Stable.
Dependent.
And somewhere inside him, beneath layers of optimization and approval, a quiet truth took shape:
If he ever stopped.
The world wouldn't know how to survive.
And if he continued.
There would be nothing left of him to stop.