1
At some point, the question stopped being "How do I save her?" and turned into:
How far can I push this thing before it snaps my neck?
I'd seen what happened when I interfered with the obvious:
Grab Angel → reset.
Bring cops → reset.
Pull too hard on one of the men → someone else steps in.
The night wasn't fragile. It bent. It adapted. It only freaked out when I tried to punch a hole straight through the middle.
So if I wanted to understand it, I had to stop poking the surface and start kicking the supports.
Stress test the day.
2
First test: remove myself.
Not politely. Not sleep-through-the-alarm style.
Brutal.
I picked a loop and didn't wait for evening.
Morning. Grey light through my curtains, same flicker on my ceiling, same garbage notification about an anniversary article.
I left the apartment without checking the time.
The overpass above the main road was three minutes from my building if I walked fast. The rail was a little too low for comfort and a little too high for safety.
Traffic moved under it in steady flows. Nothing dramatic. Just cars, trucks, buses, all with somewhere else to be.
I climbed up, put my hands on the cold metal, and swung a leg over.
No invisible shove. No sudden dizziness.
Good.
For one second, I hung there, weight balanced on the wrong side of the barrier, thinking:
If I'm not on the board, can the game still run?
Then the soles of my shoes left the concrete.
The road rushed up to meet me.
Impact never landed.
3
I hit 19:38 instead.
Not the pavement.
Not the hospital.
Bank doors. Red digits. Dog. Wrapper. The familiar set.
My heart was hammering like I'd slammed chest-first into a wall, and there was a ghost of pain in my ribs, but my body was whole.
Apparently the loop didn't like me exiting early.
"You're possessive," I told the clock.
The second hand kept ticking.
It wasn't about keeping the timeline intact. It was about keeping me on this particular board until it was finished with me.
Good to know.
4
Second test: erase the stage.
If I couldn't jump out of the story, maybe I could burn down the set.
Different loop.
I went to a hardware place on the edge of town that didn't ask too many questions about teenagers buying containers and fuel.
Got two.
Took them to the factory hours before anyone should be there.
The yard was as empty at dusk as it was later at night. The building sat there, pretending to mind its own business.
I picked a side where no one driving past would see flame right away, and poured.
The liquid darkened the concrete, spread around the base like a stain that hadn't happened yet. The smell climbed into my nose, sharp and oily.
I walked a slow line, making sure the trail led away from the door, so I'd have time to watch.
The lighter felt small in my hand.
I thumbed it open, sparked a flame, held it low, watched it nibble at the fumes until they caught.
Heat licked up the wall as the fire took.
I stepped back.
It was almost beautiful, in a crude way. Orange climbing grey, paint blistering, glass blackening.
I had time to think, Let's see what you do with—
and then my lungs filled with dust.
5
Bank. 19:38.
No smoke. No heat. No scorch marks on my clothes.
My hand still smelled faintly like fuel.
Okay.
So that was too much.
It hadn't waited to see if the fire would reach the corridor. It had yanked me as soon as the structure itself was really at risk.
The system didn't care if men got hurt. It didn't care if I cracked their bones. But it drew the line at irreparable damage to the place where the main event lived.
Centrepiece girl. Centrepiece room.
Everything else shimmered.
6
Third test: steal the centrepiece.
Not from the chair. From the street.
Up until now, all my interference had started at or after 19:38.
I wondered what would happen if I picked Angel up before the night even got to claim her.
Different loop.
Afternoon, just after cram school.
I waited outside her building in this version of the city, pressed against a vending machine, watching kids in uniform spill out.
Angel came through the doors with the same folder and the same tired posture, but different light. Sun instead of streetlamp.
I stepped in front of her.
"Demon?" she said, which was new. In this loop, we'd talked on the street enough times that her brain had filed me somewhere. "What are you doing here?"
"Need to show you something," I said. "Not here. It's about… the night."
Her expression went tight at that word.
"I don't know what you're talking about," she said automatically.
"Sure," I said. "But if I'm lying, you can go home and tell yourself I was crazy. If I'm not… you don't want to walk alone tonight."
I could hear the strain in my own voice and didn't bother to smooth it.
She looked at my face for a long second, weighing fear against suspicion.
Then she said, "Half an hour. I have to be home by eight."
"Fine," I said. "Train station."
We didn't make it.
7
The station platform was crowded. Rush hour kids and office workers, a mix of cologne, shampoo, stress.
I bought two tickets with money I didn't remember earning. We walked through the gate side by side.
As soon as her shoe crossed the yellow line on the floor, the world clenched.
The sound of the crowd pinched inward.
The departure board blurred, every time flipping over itself until only 19:38 sat in the centre of my vision.
My stomach dropped the way it had on the overpass.
Dust hit the back of my throat.
Bank doors. Clock. Wrapper.
Angel was gone.
The afternoon, too.
I stood under the awning, fists tight.
"Not allowed to take her off the map," I muttered.
If there was a radius around the factory, I hadn't found it yet.
But the system clearly had one.
Keep the girl in range.
Keep the building intact.
Keep me onstage.
Everything else was negotiable.
8
Fourth test: change nothing.
It sounds stupid, but after enough loops, "do nothing" becomes just as interesting as "blow it all up."
One run, I decided to be a ghost.
No interventions. No warnings. No bricks or pipes or knives.
I didn't even go to the bank.
I stayed in my room, watched the anniversary show on TV like everyone else, and waited to see if the reset cared whether I'd witnessed anything.
At 19:38, the notification popped up on my phone, same as always.
My chest remembered the usual tightness. My legs wanted to move.
I sat on the bed and watched the numbers change on the cheap digital clock by my pillow.
Twenty-one hundred.
Twenty-two.
Midnight.
Nothing folded.
For a moment, I thought maybe the loop was over.
Then the world made a small adjustment.
Not a full reset. More like a hand on the back of my neck, turning my head toward a specific point.
My vision tipped.
I wasn't yanked to the bank, or to the yard, or to the corridor.
I dropped straight into the 02:24 room.
9
Chair.
Light.
Angel.
Same moment I'd landed in the very first time: blood already lost, breath already high and thin, her eyes locking onto me like I was the only new thing that had happened in hours.
I hadn't moved.
The loop had moved me.
"Someone finally came," she whispered, same as the first time.
I realised, standing there, that it wasn't just about making sure she got tied down correctly or that the men did their work.
It was also about me being here to see it.
Even when I tried to ignore the script, the script dragged me to its favourite line.
The reset finally hit only after the flatline I'd watched on my first visit.
Dust. Bank. 19:38 again.
So the rules were:
I didn't have to fight.
I didn't have to help.
But I did have to witness.
10
Fifth test: call the wrong person.
I'd already tried the cops.
They'd started to move, and the day had thrown me away like a bad take.
I'd tried Guardian as part of earlier experiments—on a smaller scale. A half-formed "come get me" that died mid-sentence when the loop disliked the direction.
So I picked a loop and decided to push that one harder.
19:39. Angel had just turned the corner down the main street. The van was parked where it always parked.
I ducked into a phone booth and dialled Guardian's number from memory.
He picked up on the fourth ring, sounding tired.
"Yeah?"
"It's me," I said. "Listen, I need you to come with your car, right now, to—"
Dust.
Bank.
I didn't even get the street name out.
Next loop, I tried again, earlier.
18:00. Safe time, right?
"Hey," I said when he answered. "Do you remember that girl, the one—"
Dust.
Bank.
That told me two things:
The system didn't just monitor what I did. It monitored which line I was about to cross.
Anything that could plausibly bring an outside adult to the exact coordinates of the crime while it was happening got cut.
Not when the person moved. When my words pointed there.
Fine.
No reinforcements, no exit, no world beyond the one in front of me.
11
It should have felt like a cage.
Most people would call it that.
I sat under the bank awning after the Guardian experiment and waited for my heart to speed up in the familiar ways: anger at being controlled, panic at the idea of being trapped in this single sick day forever.
Instead, my pulse settled.
The more constraints revealed themselves, the smaller the space got.
The smaller the space got, the more I could know it.
At this point, I understood the main street better than my own apartment. I could walk the path to the factory blind. I knew exactly how many steps there were between the side door and the place the chair legs left faint scars.
I started to think of the rules less as teeth biting down and more as rails for a very precise machine.
Rails can be ridden.
Rails can also be bent, if you know where the metal's weakest.
12
By the time I'd run through all the big tests—
Jump.
Fire.
Abduction.
Escape.
Reinforcements.
—I didn't just know what the loop forbade.
I knew what it didn't care about.
It didn't mind me hurting the men, as long as enough of them remained to play their part.
It didn't mind me driving the van, as long as the girl still arrived alive enough to be tied down.
It didn't mind me sitting in the corridor, or stepping into their line for a while, or holding rope in my own hands.
It didn't mind me experimenting with how far I could delay them or how angry I could make them, as long as the outcome landed inside a certain shape by a certain time.
It did mind:
Anyone else with authority taking responsibility.
Physical damage to the room.
Removing Angel from its radius.
Skipping my presence at the crucial moments.
If I wrote it out, it would look less like fate and more like the rules for a very vicious game mode.
I leaned back against the wall outside the bank and closed my eyes for a second.
Angel's footsteps would reach this corner soon.
The van would be in position.
The men would be eating noodles or smoking or arguing about money at the auto place, unaware that hundreds of versions of them were already broken in my head.
"Fine," I told the day. "You want me here, you won't let me out, you won't let anyone else in."
The street buzzed with ordinary life.
"Then we do it your way," I said. "I'll stop trying to smash your rails."
I opened my eyes.
Angel's figure had just appeared at the far end of the pavement.
"I'll learn how to drive on them instead."