"Oh, F*CK! I died again."
The funny thing about dying is that it never gets easier.
You'd think it would. You'd think that after enough times, your brain would stop caring. That the fear would dull down to nothing, like a tooth that's been hurting so long you forget what normal feels like.
But no. Every single time, there's that same cold spike of panic right at the end. That same desperate little voice going — not yet, not yet, not yet. Then nothing. Total darkness.
Then I wake up and do it all over again.
This time, I was lying flat on a cracked road in what used to be downtown Chicago.
The sky above me burned that same ugly purple it had been for the past ten years. Not a sunset purple or a pretty purple. The repulsive kind — thick and bruised, like the color of a sky that had been torn open and never healed right.
Alien growths climbed the sides of broken buildings, pulsing slow and steady like they had heartbeats. Like the city itself had been swallowed by something alive.
The old world was long gone. All that was left were ruins... And the Chitters.
My rifle was empty. I knew it before I even tried to raise it — the weight expressed everything I needed to know. It was too light, nothing left in it.
My arms felt like they were full of wet concrete. My whole body had just... stopped listening to me. It does that sometimes, right at the end. Like it already knows and it's saving itself the trouble of fighting.
Across the road, the thing that was going to kill me clicked its jaws.
A Chitter Alpha.
It was massive — taller than a truck, its body covered in dark plating that caught the wrong side of the purple light. Pale blue lines ran across it like cracks in ice, glowing faint and steady.
The smaller Chitters circled around it, dozens of them, moving in tight little patterns like they were waiting for a signal. I had killed a lot of them today. Too many to count, honestly.
It hadn't mattered, though. It never mattered because there were always more.
I laughed. It came out weak and rough, more air than sound.
"Guess this is it again."
The Alpha screeched.
The sound punched through the air like something physical — I felt the vibration in my chest, in my teeth. The smaller ones scattered and reformed. The Alpha lowered its massive head.
It charged.
I tried to lift my rifle anyway. Muscle memory, I guess. My hands wouldn't close right. My fingers just sort of flopped against the grip and gave up.
My body had already hit its limit, way back when I'd been running on fumes and adrenaline and stupid hope.
The claws came down.
Pain — sharp and total and everywhere at once.
Then dark.
That should've been the end. But like every Oscar worthy film, it's never the end.
I always come back. That's been the deal for the last ten years. Die, and then snap back to reality — usually a few days before it happened, sometimes a week or two.
Enough time to try something different. Enough time to fail in a slightly new way.
The loop was cruel like that. Not enough time to fix everything. Just enough to watch myself make different mistakes. But this time felt different from the start.
Instead of the usual slow fade — that quiet drift back into my own head, the world rewinding like a bad tape — it felt like I was being grabbed and pulled. Hard. Fast.
My mind got yanked through something like a tunnel with no walls, and memories hit me all at once, out of order, too many at the same time.
Battles. Cities burning down to nothing. The faces of people I'd known and lost and failed to save, over and over, in different orders.
My own deaths, stacked up like pages.
It was too much, too loud, too fast.
Then —
BOOM.
White light filled my sight.
I gasped so hard my whole chest seized. I shot upright and nearly fell off the edge of whatever I was lying on. My lungs burned. I sat there for a second, just breathing, hands braced on the mattress beneath me, trying to figure out if I was still dead.
I was not still dead.
The air smelled clean.
That's the first thing that hit me. There was no rot, burning metal, or chemical bite of alien decay. Just normal air — a little stale, the kind you get in a small apartment with the windows closed too long. The kind of air I had not smelled in ten years.
I opened my eyes to a small apartment with cluttered desk covered in empty cups and tangled cables. A gaming chair with a cracked armrest. Posters on the wall. A window letting in ordinary grey morning light.
I stared at all of it for a long moment.
Then I moved to the window on legs that felt too young and light — like I'd forgotten how much weight I used to not be carrying.
Outside, the cars were moving normally. Not burning, flipped on their sides, or half-dissolved by acid growth.
People were on the sidewalk with coffee, phones, and the kind of loose, bored body language that only exists when you don't think something majorly adversive was about to happen or you're about to die.
There was no sign of the familiar screams, Chitters, and ruins.
I took a step back from the window and sat down hard on the edge of the bed.
My hands were shaking. I turned them over in my lap and stared at them like they belonged to someone else.
Scarless and no missing fingers — I'd lost two on my right hand back in year three and never really got used to it. The skin now was smooth and unbroken. Way younger than I could remember.
My hands looked the way they had before all of it.
I said, very quietly, "This isn't right."
Not in a bad way. Just in the way you say something when your brain hasn't caught up to what your eyes are seeing.
I found the calendar on the wall above the desk. One of those cheap paper ones with a different landscape photo for each month.
October. A picture of orange trees.
The date circled in red marker.
October 31st, 2037.
My stomach dropped straight through the floor.
Day Zero.
The day the Veil fell. The day the sky first tore open. The day the Chitters came through and everything that came after, came after.
I knew this date the way I knew my own heartbeat. I had lived past it and before it and right up to the edge of it more times than I could count. I had spent years trying to get back far enough to matter.
I had never gotten back this far.
Ten years. I had gone back ten full years.
I sat very still for a moment.
Then I started to laugh — real laughter this time, not the broken kind I'd managed on the street. It came up from somewhere deep and surprised me with how good it felt.
"I should probably let a few loose once in a while." I pressed both hands over my face and just let it happen.
"Are you serious," I said, into my palms. "Are you actually serious right now."
I pulled my hands away and looked at the room again.
Every memory was still there. Ten years of war, packed into a body that hadn't lived any of it yet. I knew what the Chitters were weak against. I knew which cities would fall first and which ones could hold if someone pushed them right. I knew what the Veilfall looked like in the hours before it happened — the small signs everyone missed because no one knew to look.
I knew all of it.
And I had a few hours before the first tear opened. Hours before the first Chitters came through, small and fast and vicious, and people started dying because they had no idea what they were dealing with.
But I did.
I stood up. My legs felt steady now after much reflection. My head felt clear in a way it hadn't in years — no exhaustion dragging at the edges, no old injuries making themselves known every time I moved.
I clenched my fists.
"Not this time."
I said it low, just to hear it out loud. To make it real.
Ten years of dying. Ten years of losing ground and losing people and waking up with less time than before. And now here I was, standing in my old apartment on the last normal morning the world ever had, with a head full of everything I'd paid in blood to learn.
I wasn't going to waste it.
First things first.
I needed weapons, and I needed them before the electronics went down. The Veilfall would fry half the grid within the first hour. After that, anything that relied on a signal or a chip would be useless. I had a window — maybe four hours, maybe five if I was lucky — before the sky started doing things that couldn't be explained.
I already knew where to go and what to get. And for the first time in ten years, I actually had enough time to get there.
I grabbed my jacket off the back of the gaming chair and headed for the door.
Outside, the world was still quiet. But it wouldn't be for long.