The apartment felt colder than usual.
Not because of the weather—it was early spring, and the sun was beginning to warm the city's edges—but because no one spoke.
Kael adjusted the strap of his armor, fingers slow, mechanical. The dark leather creaked against the thin bandages under his shirt. The cracks in his skin were spreading now, pulsing with a low, white-blue glow that even cloth couldn't fully hide.
He caught his reflection in the hallway mirror. Tired eyes. Jaw clenched. Hair messy, untrimmed. And that glow, faint and ghostly under the collar.
A man slowly being eaten by his own promise.
He didn't look like a husband.
He didn't look like a father.
He looked like a warning.
From the kitchen, Senna's small voice drifted, humming off-key. She was coloring again. He heard the scratch of crayons across the page, the rhythmic flipping of her notebook.
Liora stood by the doorframe. Arms folded. Lips pressed into a pale line. She didn't speak.
Not after last night.
Not after she'd begged him to stop—and he hadn't.
Kael cleared his throat. "It's a low-tier breach. I'll be back before dark."
Liora didn't look at him. "Unless you trigger another rollback. Or another patch. Or draw more attention."
He winced.
Senna looked up from her notebook. "Are you going to fight more monsters?"
Kael forced a smile. "Just helping fix a tear. Easy one."
She frowned, tapping her crayon against her cheek. "Don't let the lines take more, okay?"
He froze.
Liora glanced at him sharply, but said nothing.
Kael knelt beside Senna. "I'll be careful."
She handed him something. A small square torn from her notebook. A new glyph—shaky, a child's version, but familiar. Stabilizer script, twisted into a protective loop.
"Put it in your pocket," she said. "So you don't forget where home is."
Kael's chest tightened.
He folded it carefully, tucking it into his bracer.
Home, he thought. The one thing I still haven't patched.
He stood, nodded once to Liora—who still didn't look at him—and left.
Outside, the wind bit sharper than expected.
Across the city, the Ridgeway gate flickered, unstable.
Kael didn't know that this wouldn't be a normal raid.
Didn't know the lines had already shifted.
Didn't know the system had tagged him before dawn.
SUBJECT: VARIN, KAEL – ROLLBACK TRACE: ACTIVE
REAPER CLASS: MANIFESTED THREAT – OBSERVE
CONTAINMENT OVERRIDE: PERMISSION GRANTED
The Ridgeway gate was supposed to be stable.
It sat on the border between outer districts and industrial zones—an old tear, once dangerous, now downgraded to routine cleanup. Low risk. Barely a D-class. Perfect for rookies to get their raid stripes.
And yet, as Kael arrived, he knew something was off.
The sky above the breach shimmered—not the soft ripple of regulated mana, but something harsher. Sharper. Like a lens cracked just beneath the surface.
The gate wasn't humming. It was buzzing, like a swarm of insects trapped behind glass.
Ten raiders were already gathered. Six rookies. Three mid-tiers. One raid captain Kael recognized—Tremas, ex-Eclipse, mostly hands-off, used to smooth runs.
Tremas scowled when he saw Kael. "Didn't know they called in the 'Rollback Man.'"
Kael didn't rise to it. "Didn't know this gate needed anything more than kids with training wheels."
One of the rookies, barely twenty, leaned close to his friend. "That's him? The glitch guy?"
The other laughed. "Heard he cheated a boss timer with just a stare."
Kael kept walking.
Let them talk, he thought. Let them doubt. Keeps them from panicking when it goes bad.
He checked the gate readout. Instability: 43%. High for a D-class.
"Your scanner off?" Kael asked Tremas.
"No," Tremas muttered, looking again. "It was at 15% yesterday."
"Still opening?"
"Any minute now."
Kael's hand hovered near his sword hilt. The cracks in his forearm ticked with pressure—slight but building. Something was threading through this place already.
He looked around the field. Concrete, broken. Old lamp posts bent at odd angles. Air buzzed with static, and every now and then the wind pulled sideways—as if the gate was exhaling time itself.
This isn't a cleanup, Kael thought. It's a test.
Sirens blared.
The gate flared white, then cracked open like an eyelid snapping wide.
From the tear spilled a wave of beasts—scaled hounds, glitch-riddled, their joints bending too far. They skittered across the pavement, leaving scorch trails in their wake.
Kael stepped forward. "Front line, form up. Focus on stun-and-evade. No heroes."
A rookie screamed as one of the hounds leapt, jaws unhinging wider than nature allowed.
Kael moved like instinct. A small patch surged behind his eyes—cooldown override. Glyphs shimmered across his blade.
He struck. The hound shattered.
Another wave came.
Kael twisted reality again. Rewound a burst. Delayed a respawn. Subtly. Clean.
Not too fast. Don't make it obvious. Just keep them breathing.
The system responded. Glyphs danced behind his vision, gently. Contained.
Then the wind stopped.
All at once.
Even the hounds hesitated, mid-motion.
Kael looked up.
The gate—still open—rippled.
A fracture appeared at its center. Not horizontal. Vertical.
And from it, something stepped out.
Not a beast. Not a person.
Something tall.
Thin.
Unreal.
Its limbs were like light forced into bone. Its face—a smear of shifting shards. Its presence bent the edges of the world like a dying hard drive.
One of the rookies whispered, "What the hell is that?"
Kael already knew.
He whispered one word.
"Reaper."
The field snapped into silence.
Even the beasts paused, sniffing the static now leaking from the gate's center.
The Reaper stepped forward — not with weight, but like code compiling itself. Its footfalls didn't make sound. They made… glitches. Pixels that shouldn't exist, flickering in and out, lines of reality skipping like a corrupted file.
Kael's breath caught.
No reflection. No shadow. It's fully here.
He stepped in front of the others without thinking. Sword drawn. Patches ready. Glyphs hovering at the edge of release.
"Form a fallback line," he barked. "Now!"
"W-What is that thing?" Tremas asked, pale as ash.
Kael didn't answer. He couldn't.
Because the Reaper moved again. It didn't walk. It glided—pulling space with it, dragging the background as if rendering it slower than the rest of the world.
A raider bolted—panic overriding training.
He never made it.
The Reaper extended one spindled hand.
The air rippled like water caught in freeze-frame.
And the raider… glitched. His scream broke in mid-sound. His armor cracked, not physically, but in time. Moments bled from him—flashes of his face younger, older, gone. He collapsed into dust and echo.
"No," Kael breathed. "No no no—"
The system blared in his mind:
⚠️ ROLLBACK VARIANT DETECTED.
UNREGISTERED SIGNATURE.
DEBT SURGE: UNCONTAINED.
And then—
You. Again.
It didn't say it.
It echoed it.
Kael's own voice, fragmented, warped — reused like recycled sound bytes from the wrong timeline. The Reaper was pulling dialogue from somewhere else. From him. From the past that shouldn't exist.
"You... always you..." it hissed, face fracturing, reforming.
Kael charged.
His blade slashed the glitch.
Nothing.
The Reaper wasn't solid — it was code pretending to be solid. It flickered around his strike, moved with a logic that broke natural laws. It split into six, then merged back again mid-step, like someone spamming undo/redo on a broken file.
Kael triggered three patches at once. One slowed time. One dampened local heat distortion. One collapsed respawn zones around the gate.
His arm seared. The cracks bled light.
But the Reaper reeled.
It didn't like being patched.
Kael advanced, breathing hard. "You shouldn't be here."
The Reaper tilted its head.
Neither should you.
And then it smiled. Not with a mouth. With the idea of a mouth. A curl of pixels that twisted space.
It raised both hands.
And in a flash, Kael saw Liora's laugh echo from its voice. Then Senna's whisper:
"Papa... you're glowing again…"
His vision went white.
Kael roared, slamming his palm to the ground.
PATCH: TIMELOCK FIELD - EXPERIMENTAL
COST: 300% Base Cooldown
WARNING: INSUFFICIENT STABILIZATION
Proceed? Y/N
Y.
The glyphs burst from his skin, crawling like veins of fire. Blue-white light seared across the fractured ground as the patch forced a dome of compressed time around the Reaper.
Everything froze.
Even sound.
The Reaper stood at the center of the field, limbs twitching in fractured loops, flickering like a corrupted sprite trapped in a broken animation cycle.
Kael collapsed to one knee.
His arm looked like it had been flayed open. Cracks stretched from his fingertips to his shoulder — up his neck, toward his jawline. The light pulsed in rhythm with his heart, frantic and dangerous.
The system in his head trembled.
DEBT BREACH: CRITICAL
STABILIZATION WINDOW: 12 SECONDS
He forced himself to stand.
"Move!" he shouted to the others. "Now!"
The raid team didn't need a second warning. Tremas grabbed a rookie and ran. Others followed, boots pounding over the cracked field. Kael didn't turn to check. His eyes were locked on the Reaper.
Because it was smiling again.
Even frozen, its eyes moved. Watched him.
Mocked him.
Kael stepped forward. Sword shaking in his hand. The patch was already degrading—like holding ice in fire.
"Stay gone," he whispered.
"You can't keep them," the Reaper's voice echoed—
—in Liora's laugh—
—in Senna's sleep-humming—
—in Kael's own dying breath from the Lost Timeline.
Then it moved.
Inside the timelock. Impossible.
The stasis shattered like brittle glass.
The Reaper surged forward, grabbing Kael's wrist.
He screamed.
Light exploded from his arm as the cracks widened, glyphs spiraling like spirals etched in bone. The sword fell from his hand. The system flared red.
Rollback Cascade Initiated
ANCHOR STABILITY: FAILING
USER ID: KAEL VARIN – DESYNCED
GHOST TRACE: MARKED
The Reaper leaned closer, glitching between frames.
And whispered—
"She's next."
Then it dissolved into mist. Like it had never been there.
The raid zone flickered once.
Returned to normal.
The gate closed.
The HUD reset.
No trace. No record. No kill.
Kael collapsed onto the scorched field, coughing blood, bandages black with light. His body twitched from overclocked nerve feedback. The last thing he heard before his vision blurred was a voice — not from the Reaper, but one of the mid-tiers.
"Did he just attack nothing?"
Then—
"...glitch-boy's cracked."
The raid footage should have ended in blood.
Aria fast-forwarded, paused, rewound — again and again — watching Kael's body hit the ground in the Ridgeway clearing. He convulsed once, then stilled. Light pulsed beneath his torn armor. He looked like a man struck by a lightning bolt from within.
But that wasn't what made her skin crawl.
It was what wasn't there.
There was no monster. No Reaper.
Just... Kael. Alone. Fighting air.
Her hands hovered over the console controls, trembling.
Official Guild Logs:
Combatant Roster: Incomplete.
Threat Level: Tier 2 Aberrants.
System Anomalies: NONE.
Raid Status: STABLE TERMINATION.
Outcome: SUCCESS.
Leader: NULL.
Observed Patch Events: 0.
She muttered, "That's a goddamn lie."
Rewinding again, she froze the frame right as Kael slammed his hand to the ground — when the stasis field exploded from him like a nova. In that frame, if you stared hard enough, you could see the faint outline of something else. A distortion. An afterimage.
Something wrong.
She enhanced the frame. Overexposed the light spectrum. Still, it fought her.
ADMIN OVERRIDE – FILE INTEGRITY: LOCKED
REDACTED NODE. ACCESS RESTRICTED.
ORIGIN: UNKNOWN.
Aria leaned back in her chair, jaw tight. "You're scrubbing reality," she whispered. "Not just the logs. The whole damn system."
She turned to her secondary terminal. The independent cam she'd wired into Kael's cloak, back when she started to suspect his anomalies. She hadn't accessed it in a week.
The video played.
This time?
The Reaper was there.
Clear as crystal.
Towering. Fluid. Its face a smeared loop of fragmented identities. Its voice — raw code stitched from every echo it stole — replayed in the feed.
"You. Again. Always you."
Then:
"You can't keep them."
Aria exhaled slowly, as if anything louder would wake the shadows watching her.
"What the hell are you, Kael?"
She closed the feed. Burned the clip onto a private drive. No guild backups. No synced archives. This wasn't something she could show the Council — not yet.
And deep down, she already knew what it meant.
Dominion wasn't just hunting Kael Varin.
They were hiding what he was fighting.