Maya's POV
We ran.
Jae-hyun dragged me through the back alley, his hand locked around mine. Behind us, screams erupted as awakened powers activated. Fire. Ice. Lightning. The coffee shop exploded in a chaos of abilities as hunters realized their prey had escaped.
"This way!" Jae-hyun yanked me left, into a narrow passage between buildings.
"Where are we going?" I gasped, lungs burning.
"Somewhere she can't track us." He pulled out his phone, typing rapidly while running. "I have a safe house. Shielded location. But we need to lose them first."
A blast of ice shot past my head, freezing the wall beside me.
"There!" someone shouted. "The targets! Get them!"
I looked back. Five people, all with glowing system interfaces visible, were chasing us. Their eyes had that glazed look—quest-focused, reward-hungry. They didn't care who we were. They just wanted the prize.
"Jae-hyun—"
"I know." His voice was grim. He stopped suddenly, spinning to face our pursuers. "Cover your eyes."
"What?"
"NOW!"
I squeezed my eyes shut. A sound like reality tearing apart filled the alley. I felt heat, cold, and something else—something that made my soul scream.
When I opened my eyes, the hunters were gone. Not dead. Just... gone. Erased.
"You killed them," I whispered.
"No. I sent them somewhere else." Jae-hyun was breathing hard, sweat on his forehead. "A pocket dimension. They'll be back in an hour, confused but alive." He grabbed my hand again. "But that cost me a lot of power. I can't do it again soon. We need to hide."
We kept running, taking random turns, doubling back, using every trick to lose potential followers. My system kept pinging warnings:
[HOSTILE AWAKENED NEARBY: 15][HOSTILE AWAKENED NEARBY: 23][HOSTILE AWAKENED NEARBY: 41]
The numbers kept growing. More and more people were awakening their systems early, hunting us.
"Here." Jae-hyun pulled me into an abandoned subway entrance. The stairs led down into darkness. "This station was closed five years ago. Nobody comes here."
We descended into the black, using our phone lights to see. The air smelled like mold and rust. Water dripped somewhere in the distance.
At the bottom, Jae-hyun pressed his hand against a maintenance door. His system flared, and locks clicked open.
Inside was a small room—clearly prepared in advance. Supplies lined the walls: food, water, weapons, medical kits. A laptop sat on a makeshift desk, multiple screens glowing.
"You've been planning this," I said.
"For a month." He locked the door behind us, then activated something on his phone. A blue shimmer spread across the walls. "Shielding barrier. It hides our system signatures. To anyone scanning, this room doesn't exist."
I sank onto a cot, adrenaline crashing. "Five thousand people. She turned five thousand people into our enemies in seconds."
"More than that." Jae-hyun pulled up his laptop, showing a map of Seoul. Red dots covered it like a disease. "Every awakened in the city got the quest. Some rejected it, but most accepted. The reward is too good to refuse."
"How do we fight that many?"
"We don't." He sat beside me, close enough that our shoulders touched. "We hide. We prepare. And we figure out how to stop the Administrator before the apocalypse starts."
"Two days," I said. "We have two days until the world ends. And we're already being hunted."
Silence fell between us. The weight of our situation pressed down like a physical force.
"I need to tell you something," Jae-hyun said finally. "About the first timeline. About why I came back."
I looked at him. In the dim light, his face was all shadows and sharp angles.
"I woke up one month ago," he continued. "Exactly one month before you. I thought I was alone—the only person who'd returned. So I started preparing. Gathering supplies. Making plans. Building this safe house." He stared at his hands. "But every night, I had the same dream. Your face. Your dead eyes. The way you felt in my arms when I found you."
"Jae-hyun—"
"I didn't understand it then. Why a stranger's death haunted me." His voice cracked. "But now I know. The Soul Resonance. We're connected. We've always been connected, even when we didn't know each other."
"That's why you came back," I breathed. "Not just to save yourself. To save me."
"I didn't know it was you specifically. I just knew..." He finally met my eyes. "I knew someone important was going to die. Someone I needed to protect. And when you appeared, when our systems linked—everything made sense."
My heart ached. "In my first life, I was so alone. Even surrounded by people, I was completely alone."
"Not anymore." His hand found mine. "We're in this together now. Fated Pair. Whatever that means."
My system chimed softly:
[SOUL RESONANCE INCREASED: 23% → 35%][NEW ABILITY UNLOCKED: SHARED SENSES][You can now feel what your Fated Pair feels][Their pain is your pain. Their strength is your strength.]
"Did you just—" Jae-hyun started.
"Feel that? Yes." I could sense his heartbeat, fast and strong. Could feel his exhaustion, his fear, his determination. "We're really connected."
"This is going to take getting used to." But he didn't let go of my hand.
A comfortable silence settled. For the first time since waking up in the past, I didn't feel completely alone.
Then Jae-hyun's laptop beeped. He checked it, and his face went pale.
"What?" I asked.
"The Administrator. She just posted something to the global system chat." He turned the screen toward me.
A video showed the silver-haired woman standing in front of my apartment building. Next to her stood three people: Yiren, Ethan, and someone I didn't recognize.
"Hello, Maya and Jae-hyun," the Administrator said to the camera. "I know you're watching. So let me make this simple." She gestured to the three people. "Your sister. Your ex-fiancé. And Jae-hyun's younger brother, whom he thought died in the first timeline."
Jae-hyun made a strangled sound. "Min-seok. She has Min-seok."
"I'm offering you a trade," the Administrator continued. "Turn yourselves in, let me erase your systems and your memories of the future, and I'll let them live." Her smile was cruel. "Refuse, and I'll kill all three. And I'll make you watch through your system link."
The video zoomed in on the three captives. Yiren was crying. Ethan looked terrified. But Jae-hyun's brother—a young man who looked like a younger version of Jae-hyun—was staring at the camera with defiant eyes.
"You have one hour to decide," the Administrator said. "The location will be sent to your systems. Come alone. No tricks." She leaned close to the camera. "Or I'll start cutting off fingers. One per minute after the deadline."
The video ended.
Jae-hyun stood up, power crackling around him. "She has my brother. My brother who I watched die. Who I've been searching for this whole month."
"It's a trap," I said. "Obviously."
"I don't care." His eyes glowed with rage. "He's my family. My only family. I can't—" His voice broke. "I can't watch him die again."
"And Yiren is my sister," I said quietly. "Even after everything, she's still my sister."
We looked at each other, both understanding what the other was thinking.
"We can't go," I said. "It's suicide."
"We can't not go," Jae-hyun replied. "They'll die."
"They might die anyway."
"But at least we tried."
My system pinged with a new message. A location. An old warehouse by the river. And a timer: 59:47 remaining.
"There has to be another way," I said desperately. "Some way to save them without giving ourselves up."
Jae-hyun pulled up building schematics on his laptop. "Maybe. If we can get in without her noticing. Use your zombie powers and my void abilities together—"
His phone rang. Unknown number.
He answered, putting it on speaker.
"Hello, Void King," a familiar voice said. Dr. Sarah Oh. "I hear you two need some help. And lucky for you, I'm very good at impossible rescues."
We stared at the phone in shock.
"How did you—" I started.
"Get this number? Know where you are? Know what's happening?" Sarah laughed. "Because I'm not just a doctor, Maya. I'm also the person who's been trying to stop the Administrator for three years. Across multiple timelines." A pause. "And I'm the one who sent you both back to fix the mess I couldn't."
My world tilted.
"You?" Jae-hyun breathed. "You're the one who resurrected us?"
"Guilty. Now stop wasting time and listen carefully. I can get you into that warehouse. I can help you save your family. But in return—" Her voice hardened. "—you both need to help me kill the Administrator. Permanently. Before she resets this entire timeline and erases all of us from existence."
"What do you mean, resets the timeline?" I asked.
"I mean in six hours, she's planning to activate a system called 'Timeline Restart.' It will erase the last month—erase you, erase Jae-hyun's preparations, erase everything. We'll all go back to square one. Only this time, she'll make sure you both die before you can return."
The timer on my system ticked down: 58:23.
"So what do you say?" Sarah asked. "Trust the mysterious doctor with a time machine? Or walk into that trap and hope for the best?"