If the universe had a suggestion box, I would leave a very detailed, very profane note about how much I hate its sense of humor.
I sat on the stone slab for ten minutes, just staring at my hands. They were infuriatingly perfect. Smooth skin. No scars. Fingernails that weren't split down the middle or black from dried blood. I felt disgusting. Not because the barracks smelled like a mixture of fungal rot and three hundred unwashed men, which it absolutely did, but because I felt light.
I was used to a bad knee, a stiff shoulder, and the general, crushing weight of twenty years of war. My body was a map of bad decisions and close calls. Now? I felt like a helium balloon. I flexed my fingers, and they moved without a single click or pop. It was miraculous. It was nauseating.
I was back in the tutorial level, but I still had the endgame trauma.
"Hey, Kael. You deaf or just stupid? Chow time."
The voice hit me like a physical slap.
I didn't turn around immediately. I knew that voice. It was nasal, impatient, and belonged to Jaren. A guy who, in my previous life, had died screaming when a mining tunnel collapsed on his legs about three years from now. I remembered digging for him for two days until the smell got too bad to keep going. I remembered the exact sound his ribs made when the rock settled.
I turned my head slowly.
There he was. Alive. Young. Ugly as sin with that crooked nose he hadn't broken yet. He was looking at me with that impatient, slightly dim-witted expression I used to find annoying. Now, it just looked like a tragedy waiting to happen.
"I'm coming," I said.
My voice sounded wrong. Too high. Too hopeful. It lacked the gravel of two decades of screaming orders over gunfire. I hated it. I wanted to punch myself in the throat just to roughen it up.
I swung my legs off the slab and stood up. The vertigo hit me for a second, a residual glitch from the time-travel vomit ride, but I steadied myself against the damp wall. I grabbed my tunic, a ragged scrap of grey fabric that scratched against my skin like sandpaper. I forgot how much the cloth here sucked. In the rebellion, we had stolen Praetor under-armor. Silk compared to this burlap sack.
I walked out into the main cavern. The slave barracks of Sector 4 were basically a hole in the ground that God forgot to fill in. Damp walls dripping with condensation, flickering moss-lights that cast everything in a sickly green glow, and a sea of Solarii shuffling toward the nutrient dispensers like zombies in a budget horror movie.
It was louder than I remembered. Before the war, we talked. We laughed. We had hope. It was sickening. I wanted to grab the nearest guy and shake him, tell him that in two decades, a shiny silver man was going to turn him into confetti because some cosmic CEO decided our quarterly earnings were down.
But I didn't. Because that would get me lobotomized. Or worse, put on cleaning duty.
I got in line. The guy in front of me was scratching a rash on his neck. I knew that rash. It was from the water filters being dirty. I knew that if I went to the maintenance hatch in Sector 7 and kicked it twice, the filter would clear. Useless knowledge. Trivia from a dead life.
Then I saw her.
She was standing near the water station, laughing at something Jaren said.
Lyra.
My breath caught in my throat like a fishhook. She looked... small. In my head, she was a warrior. She was the woman who dual-wielded plasma cutters and took down a mech with a bloody smile. Here? She was just a kid. Her hair was braided back messily, and she had a smudge of grease on her cheek. She looked fragile. Breakable.
And she was going to die. I had watched her die. I had watched her unspool into gold dust less than an hour ago, subjective time.
The memory of the Snap overlaid the reality of her laughing face. I saw her skin dissolving. I saw her eyes turn to static. I felt the bile rise in my throat. I couldn't do this. I couldn't look at her and see the ghost.
"Kael!" she spotted me. Her eyes lit up. "You sleep in? Did you dream about the surface again?"
The surface. That was our big dream back then. To see the sky. I almost laughed. If only she knew. Yeah, Lyra, I saw the sky. It cracked open and deleted us. It was great.
"Yeah," I choked out, forcing a grin that probably looked like a rictus of pain. "Something like that."
"Well, wake up," she said, tossing me a nutrient bar. It caught the air with a heavy thud in my palm. It looked like a brick of compressed sawdust and probably tasted worse. "Shift starts in ten. Overseer Merrick is on a warpath today. Says quota is up ten percent."
Merrick.
The name sparked a different kind of fire in my gut. Merrick was a sadist. A petty, middle-management tyrant who loved the sound of his own whip. In the original timeline, I killed him during the uprising. I strangled him with his own neural-lash while he begged for mercy. It was one of the top five moments of my life, right up there with finding a working shower and eating a real apple.
And now, he was alive. And he was my boss. Again.
"Great," I muttered, peeling the wrapper off the sawdust brick. "Can't wait."
I took a bite. It tasted like chalk, despair, and recycled cardboard. I chewed mechanically, my eyes scanning the room. Everything was the same. The leaks. The moss. The guards standing by the blast doors, looking bored.
They were Tier 3 Volatiles. I could see the faint hum of heat radiating off their armor. In my old life, I would have calculated the vector to snap their necks before they could blink.
I looked at my hand holding the half-eaten bar.
I needed to know. The Praetor had severed my connection to Kinetia. He had snapped it like a twig. But the Celestial... the Celestial had done something else. That golden spark in my chest.
I closed my eyes and focused on the space behind my ribs. Usually, channeling Kinetia felt like pulling on a heavy rope, a deep, grounding connection to the physics of the earth.
This time, it didn't feel like a rope. It felt like a live wire submerged in gasoline.
It was small, barely a flicker compared to the storm I had commanded in the plaza, but it was hot. It was volatile. It felt less like the earth and more like the void I had just floated in. It didn't want to move things. It wanted to eat them.
I opened my eyes. I looked at the nutrient bar in my hand.
Break, I thought.
I didn't move my hand. I didn't tense a muscle. I just pushed a tiny, microscopic pulse of that new, angry energy into the bar.
It didn't crack. It didn't crumble.
It screamed.
For a microsecond, the bar vibrated so hard it made a high-pitched whine that set my teeth on edge, and then it simply ceased to be. It didn't turn to ash. It pixelated into a cloud of golden static and then vanished.
Pop.
My hand was empty. The air smelled like ozone and burnt sugar.
Jaren, standing next to me, blinked. He looked at my empty hand, then at my mouth, then back at my hand.
"Whoa," he said, his eyes wide. "Did you just eat that whole thing in one bite? You trying to choke? Slow down, animal."
He hadn't seen it. To him, it looked like I'd just wolfed it down. But I knew. I felt the absence of the matter. I hadn't moved it. I hadn't crushed it. I had deleted it.
I stared at my palm. There was no residue. Just clean skin. But deep in the meat of my hand, a tiny, glowing gold crack appeared on my thumb, stinging like a paper cut dipped in lemon juice.
I looked up at Jaren, then at Lyra, then at the tunnel leading to the mines where Merrick was waiting.
A slow, cold smile spread across my face. It wasn't a nice smile. It was the smile of a man who just realized he brought a nuke to a knife fight.
"Yeah," I said, wiping my hand on my tunic to hide the glowing crack. "Just really hungry."
New Game Plus, assholes. Let's see if I can break the high score.