Chapter 1: The Mark of Midnight
The first thing Kairo noticed was the sound — a rhythmic ticking. Louder. Closer. Unnatural.
He jolted awake in the darkness of his small, steel-walled room, drenched in cold sweat. His digital alarm hadn't rung. The city outside was silent — no drones humming, no traffic buzzing. Just the ticking. Tick. Tick. Tick.
He looked down at his left hand. The mark was glowing again.
𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘊𝘩𝘳𝘰𝘯𝘰 𝘚𝘦𝘢𝘭.
A perfect circle with four lines crossing it, like a broken compass. It had appeared on his 17th birthday two weeks ago — painless, but impossible to erase. His foster parents thought it was a prank tattoo. Kairo knew better.
Because each time it glowed, time broke.
Tonight, it wasn't just glowing. It was buzzing.
Then the world shattered.
His walls rippled like fabric. A high-pitched scream of metal echoed. The floor bent and peeled like paper as a glowing crack opened midair — not in the ground, but in reality. From it burst a wave of cold wind and... voices?
"He is marked. The Gate opens."
Before he could scream, the light swallowed him whole.
⊕
Kairo landed hard — gasping on wet earth. Thunder cracked overhead. Cold rain slammed his face as he rolled over, coughing up mud. He sat up, blinking through the storm.
This wasn't the city.
He was in a forest, but the trees were impossibly tall — their roots twisted like metal cables. The sky was a swirl of black clouds and violet lightning. And just ahead, on a hill of glass-like stone, stood a sword stabbed into the earth — glowing blue fire spiraling around it.
He wasn't alone.
A figure cloaked in gray stepped from the trees. A woman — tall, pale, her eyes a strange silver.
"You've finally come," she said.
"Who the hell are you?" Kairo croaked.
"I'm Elira. A Mage of the Broken Loop. And you, Kairo, are late."
"Late for what?"
"Saving time itself."
⊕
She didn't explain much. Just that his mark was real — a Chrono Seal, an ancient brand carried by only one person per age. The last bearer vanished 112 years ago, during the Collapse.
"Wait—112 years? What year is this?"
"That depends. Are you counting from the Old Era, the Reign of the Chrono Lords, or the Fall of the Loop?"
"What?"
She pointed to the blade on the hill.
"That's the Bladestone. The Sword of Collapse. Only you can pull it."
"That's so cliché."
"So is dying. Pick it up."
Kairo staggered toward it. The moment his fingers wrapped around the hilt, the storm stopped. Time itself froze — raindrops hung in midair, thunder halted mid-growl.
Then, he heard it again.
"You shouldn't have come, Kairo."
It was a new voice — deeper, layered with echoes. A man cloaked in black and red emerged from thin air, stepping through a fold in space, like unzipping the world.
"Who—"
"I am Arvax. King of Fractured Time. That sword does not belong to you."
Lightning snapped as the world unfroze.
And everything exploded.
⊕
Elira screamed a spell — the air ignited with white flames. Arvax waved a hand and reversed it. The fire rewound, zipping back into her mouth, choking her.
Kairo didn't think. He lifted the sword. The hilt burned into his palm — his seal matching a hidden symbol on its guard.
The blade came alive — the blue fire erupted outward.
He slashed blindly.
The fire didn't just burn — it fractured.
A wave of blue-light tore through the trees, slicing time itself. One tree aged 1,000 years in an instant, crumbling to dust. Another reverted to a sapling. A bird froze in mid-flight, reversed, and exploded into an egg.
"What… what is this sword?!"
Elira coughed. "ChronoBlade. The blade of paradox."
Arvax snarled. "You child! You've just doomed us all."
He vanished, folding into time.
⊕
They ran.
Through woods that shifted with every step. Sometimes the trees were young. Sometimes dead. Sometimes mechanical.
Elira pulled him through a mirror portal, shoving him into a room that seemed ripped from three different centuries — stone walls, floating screens, and burning torches.
"What just happened?!" Kairo shouted.
"You wielded the blade before you were trained."
"You said to pull it!"
"Not to use it!"
Kairo dropped it. "I didn't ask for any of this."
"Neither did I. But the seal chose you. And now he knows you're here."
"Who is he, really?"
Elira's face went dark.
"Arvax was once the bearer of the blade. He went mad. Tried to rewrite time. We stopped him… barely. But that was centuries ago. He was erased."
"Guess he got better."
⊕
Kairo sat alone later, staring at the blade resting beside him. It hummed softly, almost like it was... alive.
He touched the seal on his hand. It pulsed once.
The room blurred.
Suddenly, he wasn't in the room.
He was in his room — back in the future.
Everything was silent. The city was frozen. Outside his window, a blimp hovered midair, unmoving.
Then he saw it — a symbol on his mirror, scratched in blood:
"Trust no one. Not even her."—You.
"What the hell?!"
He blinked.
Back in the ruins. Elira was knocking on the door.
"Everything okay?"
"Yeah," he lied.
But who wrote that? And how could he write a message to himself?
Unless…
⊕
That night, Kairo dreamed of a war.
A battlefield split across timelines — knights in armor clashing with cybernetic soldiers, dragons tangled in aerial battles with AI drones. The sky bled blue and red. Time shattered like glass.
He stood in the middle. Two versions of himself stood on either side — one with glowing eyes, wearing black, wielding the blade. The other... burned, broken, reaching for help.
A voice echoed:
"You become one of them. The question is — which one?"
Kairo awoke with one thought echoing in his head:
I think I've already done this before.
To Be Continued…