The Tokyo Hunter Assessment Center looked exactly like I remembered it.
Massive. Imposing. Built like a fortress designed to withstand the apocalypse—which, given what Gates could do, wasn't entirely unreasonable. The building sprawled across three city blocks in Shinjuku, all reinforced concrete and steel and glass that could supposedly withstand a B-Rank monster's assault.
I'd only been here once in my original timeline, on the day that changed my life forever. The day I awakened as an S-Rank and became someone important. Someone powerful. Someone the entire country knew by name within twenty-four hours.
Standing here again, staring up at those same imposing walls, felt surreal. Like watching a movie I'd already seen but couldn't look away from.
The plaza in front of the Assessment Center was packed. Thousands of teenagers, all sixteen years old, all here for the same reason. The mandatory Hunter Awakening Ceremony. Some would awaken with useful abilities and become Hunters. Most would awaken with nothing and return to normal lives. A few—a very, very few—would awaken with enough power to matter.
In the original timeline, I'd been one of those few.
This time, I needed to be invisible.
I stood at the edge of the crowd, observing. Analyzing. Old habits from years of tactical assessment kicking in automatically.
The teenagers around me were nervous. I could see it in how they moved—fidgeting, checking their phones repeatedly, talking too loud or too quiet. For them, this was the single most important day of their young lives. The day that would determine their entire future. Hunter or civilian. Power or mediocrity. Relevance or obscurity.
I understood their nervousness. I'd felt it too, once upon a timeline.
Now I just felt tired.
"First time, huh?"
I turned to find a boy about my age standing next to me. Tall, lean, with that kind of effortless athletic build that spoke of natural talent rather than hard work. His hair was bleached an obnoxious shade of platinum blonde, and he had this cocky grin that immediately set my teeth on edge.
I knew this grin. I'd seen it a thousand times.
Kaito Yamamoto.
My breath caught in my chest. For a moment, I forgot how to make my lungs work properly.
He was alive. Young. Whole. No scars from years of combat. No haunted look in his eyes from watching too many people die. Just a cocky sixteen-year-old kid with too much confidence and not enough sense.
In my timeline, Kaito died in the SSS-Rank Gate. I'd watched him burn. Watched the flame serpents coil around his unconscious body and turn my best friend into ash and screams.
"Yo, you okay?" Kaito waved a hand in front of my face. "You're doing that thing where you stare at people like you've seen a ghost."
Because I had. I was looking at a ghost wearing living skin.
"Fine," I managed. "Just nervous."
"Ah, don't sweat it!" Kaito clapped me on the shoulder with the kind of casual physical contact that made me flinch—not because it hurt, but because I wasn't used to friendly touch anymore. "Statistically, like ninety percent of people awaken with at least F-Rank potential. You'll probably get something useful. Maybe even D-Rank if you're lucky!"
He had no idea he was talking to someone who'd awakened as S-Rank. Someone who'd surpassed him in the original timeline by age seventeen.
Someone who'd watched him die.
"Yeah," I said. "Maybe."
"I'm Kaito, by the way. Kaito Yamamoto." He stuck out his hand with that bright, open smile that I'd forgotten he used to have before the world beat it out of him. "What's your name?"
I stared at his hand for a moment too long. In another timeline, I'd shaken this hand hundreds of times. Before missions. After victories. Over promises we'd both failed to keep.
"Ryu," I said, taking his hand. "Ryu Takahashi."
His grip was strong. Confident. The grip of someone who'd never doubted himself a day in his life.
"Cool name! Very protagonist-y." Kaito grinned wider. "I'm calling it now—you and me, we're gonna awaken as powerhouses and start a guild together. Yamamoto-Takahashi Hunters. Has a nice ring to it, yeah?"
In the original timeline, we did start a guild together. After Akira's betrayal, after everything fell apart, Kaito and I had tried to build something better. It lasted three years before the Cataclysm destroyed everything.
"Maybe," I said again, because what else could I say?
The loudspeakers crackled to life, saving me from further conversation.
"All participants for the Hunter Awakening Ceremony, please proceed to the main entrance. Registration will begin in fifteen minutes. Please have your identification ready."
The crowd began moving, a slow tide of nervous teenagers flowing toward the Assessment Center's massive doors. Kaito was still talking—something about his training regimen and how he'd been preparing for this day since he was twelve—but I'd tuned him out.
I was scanning the building. The crowd. The security personnel stationed at regular intervals.
Everything looked normal. Exactly as it should be.
But something felt wrong.
It was subtle. The kind of wrongness that came from combat instincts honed over a decade of fighting things that wanted to kill you. A feeling in your gut that said danger even when your eyes saw safety.
I couldn't pinpoint the source. Everything was proceeding exactly as it had in the original timeline. Same building. Same crowd. Same nervous energy.
But my instincts were screaming.
"—and then I told him, there's no way I'm settling for anything below C-Rank, you know? I've got standards. Hey, are you even listening?"
"Yeah," I lied. "Standards. Got it."
Kaito gave me an odd look but shrugged it off. "You're a weird one, Ryu. I like it. Weird is interesting."
We reached the entrance. The registration process was exactly as I remembered—show ID, get a numbered badge, proceed to assigned testing chamber. I was number 847. Kaito was 846.
"Look at that!" Kaito pointed at our consecutive numbers. "It's fate, man. We're definitely gonna be partners."
Fate. Right. As if fate had ever been on our side.
We were directed to Chamber 12—a massive hall that could hold about three hundred people. The awakening process was done in batches to prevent overcrowding. Our batch would go in together, get tested together, and find out our fates together.
The chamber was sterile. Clinical. White walls, white floor, white ceiling. In the center sat a massive crystal construct—the Awakening Stone. It pulsed with a soft blue light that seemed to breathe, alive in a way that normal crystals definitely weren't.
The Awakening Stone was one of the great mysteries of the post-Gate world. Nobody knew where it came from or how it worked. One day, fifteen years ago, the first Gate opened in Seoul. Six months later, these crystals appeared simultaneously in Hunter Association buildings across the world.
They could detect and activate latent abilities in humans. Nobody understood the mechanism. We just accepted it and moved on because we had bigger problems—like the monsters trying to eat us.
Three hundred teenagers filed into the chamber, forming neat rows. An Assessment official stood at the front—a stern-looking woman in her forties with the kind of face that suggested she'd seen too much and stopped being impressed by anything years ago.
"Welcome to your Hunter Awakening Ceremony," she announced, her voice amplified by speakers. "The process is simple. You will approach the Awakening Stone individually. Place both hands on its surface. The Stone will assess your potential and activate any latent abilities. Your rank will be displayed on the monitors above. Rankings are as follows: F, E, D, C, B, A, S, and theoretical SS and SSS ranks, though these have never been recorded in an awakening."
She paused, letting that sink in.
"Most of you will awaken as F or E-Rank. This is normal and nothing to be ashamed of. F-Rank Hunters still contribute to society through support roles and low-level Gate management. Remember—every Hunter matters, regardless of rank."
It was a nice speech. A lie, but a nice one. The truth was that F-Rank Hunters were barely more useful than civilians. They got the dangerous grunt work, the high-casualty missions, the jobs that real Hunters didn't want to risk themselves on.
I'd seen F-Rank Hunters used as literal bait in Gate raids. Sent in first to test enemy positions. Acceptable losses in the pursuit of valuable resources.
The official continued. "We will proceed in numerical order. When your number is called, approach the Stone calmly and—"
That's when I felt it.
A spike of wrongness so intense it made my teeth ache. Like reality itself had flinched.
My head snapped to the left, toward the eastern wall. The other teenagers were still focused on the official, but I was watching that wall with every combat instinct I had screaming danger.
The air shimmered.
No. No, no, no. Not here. Not now.
"—number 701, please approach the—"
The eastern wall exploded.
Not metaphorically. Actually exploded. Chunks of reinforced concrete and steel rebar erupted inward like shrapnel from a bomb. The blast wave hit the crowd before the sound did, knocking dozens of teenagers off their feet.
Screaming. Immediate and primal. Three hundred voices united in terror.
And through the hole in the wall, reality tore open like a wound.
A Gate.
I stared at it in disbelief. This wasn't supposed to happen. In the original timeline, the Awakening Ceremony had proceeded without incident. No Gates. No attacks. Just a normal day that changed my life.
This was new. This was wrong.
This was the butterfly effect showing its teeth.
The Gate pulsed crimson and black, about fifteen meters wide. Large enough to be a problem. And from its depths, something emerged.
Monsters.
They came fast. Too fast. Goblin-type creatures—low-rank individually, but these were a swarm. Dozens of them, maybe more, pouring through the Gate like water from a burst pipe. Green skin, yellow eyes, crude weapons that looked like they'd been made from scrap metal and malice.
The Assessment official was screaming orders, but her voice was drowned in chaos. Security personnel were trying to establish a perimeter, but they were overwhelmed. The teenagers were panicking, running for the exits, trampling each other in their desperation.
A goblin lunged at a girl near the front. She couldn't have been more than sixteen—same as everyone here. Same as me, technically. She screamed and raised her arms in futile defense.
The goblin's crude blade came down—
I moved.
My body was weak. Untrained. Sixteen years old with none of the muscle memory that would come from years of combat. But my mind was twenty-six. My mind had fought these things a thousand times. My mind knew exactly how they moved, how they attacked, where their weak points were.
I crossed the distance in three strides—faster than my body should have been able to move, adrenaline overriding limitations. My hand caught the goblin's wrist mid-swing. The creature snarled, yellow eyes widening in surprise that something had dared to interfere.
I twisted. The motion was automatic, a joint lock I'd performed so many times it was more reflex than thought. The goblin's wrist snapped with a wet crack. It shrieked and dropped the blade.
I caught the falling weapon, reversed my grip, and drove it up through the creature's jaw. The blade punched through the roof of its mouth and into its brain. The goblin went limp.
Dead. Three seconds from attack to kill.
The girl stared at me with wide, terrified eyes. "T-thank you—"
"Run," I told her. "Exit's that way. Go."
She ran.
I stood there holding a dead goblin's weapon, covered in green ichor, and realized what I'd just done.
I'd revealed myself. Moved like a trained Hunter. Killed with precision that no civilian teenager should possess. In three seconds, I'd potentially destroyed my cover.
More goblins were coming. The swarm was spreading through the chamber, and the security personnel were barely holding them back. Teenagers were dying. I could hear the screams. Could see bodies on the ground.
The quest notification pulsed in my vision:
[QUEST UPDATE: THE AWAKENING DECEPTION]
Status: COMPROMISED
New Objective Detected:[EMERGENCY QUEST - FIRST DEVIATION]
Situation: C-Rank Gate manifestation (unscheduled event)
Casualties: 14 confirmed dead, 47 wounded, rising
Threat Assessment: Moderate to High
CHOOSE:
[OPTION A: MAINTAIN COVER]
Hide among civilians Let security handle the situation Accept civilian casualties Quest: "Awakening Deception" remains active Reward: Stealth maintained, no attention drawn
[OPTION B: INTERVENE]
Use combat knowledge to save lives Risk revealing advanced capabilities Quest: "Awakening Deception" will FAIL Reward: Lives saved, Corruption reduction, ???
WARNING: This choice will have lasting consequences.
Choose wisely, Void Sovereign.
I stood frozen, the dead goblin at my feet, weighing the options.
Maintain cover. Stay invisible. Let them die. It was the smart play. The strategic play. The play that kept me alive and positioned to prevent the Cataclysm.
Three hundred lives now versus ten billion lives later.
The math was simple.
But math didn't scream. Math didn't bleed. Math didn't look at you with terrified sixteen-year-old eyes and beg for help.
I watched a goblin corner a boy against the wall. Watched him raise his crude weapon. Watched the boy—someone's son, someone's friend—realize he was about to die.
I thought about Hana. About how I'd promised to save everyone I could. About how I'd sworn not to become the monster they tried to create.
"Fuck the math," I muttered.
I chose Option B.
The moment I made the choice, something changed inside me. Not physically. Not visibly. But I felt it—like a lock clicking open, like a door that had been closed suddenly swinging wide.
The Void System pulsed, and new text flooded my vision:
[EMERGENCY PROTOCOLS ACTIVATED]
Temporary Unlock: Combat Assistance Mode
Due to life-threatening situation and user's intervention choice, limited system functions are now available pre-Awakening.
Available for 10 minutes:
Basic Skill: [Void Step - Rank F] Basic Skill: [Combat Sense - Rank F] Stat Boost: +3 to all physical stats (temporary) Death Sight: Activated (See enemy weak points)
Warning: Using these abilities will increase Corruption by 2% per minute of combat.
Current Corruption: 0%
Projected Corruption after 10 minutes: 20%
Accept consequences? [Y/N]
Twenty percent corruption. That was significant. That was dangerous. That was a fifth of the way to losing my humanity.
But these people were going to die if I did nothing.
I accepted.
Power flooded through me. Not the overwhelming surge of S-Rank mana—this was a trickle compared to what I'd had before. But in this weak body, it felt like lightning.
My stats jumped from average human to low-rank Hunter. Strength, agility, endurance—all suddenly enhanced. Not enough to match my former peak, but enough to matter.
And then I saw them.
The lines.
Glowing crimson lines overlaid across my vision, marking weak points on every enemy. Gaps in crude armor. Exposed joints. Vital organs. The exact angles and trajectories needed to kill efficiently.
Death Sight. One of the Void System's signature abilities. I'd used it countless times in my previous life.
Now it was back.
I smiled. Not a nice smile. The smile of a wolf who'd just remembered he had teeth.
"Alright," I said quietly. "Let's see how rusty I really am."
I moved.
Void Step activated automatically, responding to my intent. The world blurred. One moment I was standing by the dead goblin, the next I was across the chamber, blade driving through another goblin's throat. The creature didn't even have time to register my presence before it died.
The boy it had been cornering stared at me. "How did you—"
"Don't ask questions. Run. Exit's clear for now."
He ran.
I was already moving again. Void Step covered distance in bursts—short-range teleportation, essentially. My body flickered through space, reappearing behind a goblin about to stab a fallen girl. My blade found the gap between its neck and shoulder. Arterial spray. Dead before it hit the ground.
The security personnel were rallying now, forming a defensive line. Good. Professional. But they were still overwhelmed by numbers.
I counted seventeen goblins in my immediate vicinity. More pouring through the Gate every second. This wasn't a small incursion. This was a legitimate C-Rank threat.
And these teenagers had no combat training whatsoever.
A goblin swarm focused on easy targets. They'd ignore trained fighters in favor of helpless prey. Basic pack hunter mentality.
Which meant they'd focus on me the moment I became enough of a threat.
Perfect.
"HEY!" I shouted, and my voice cut through the chaos with unexpected force. "Over here, you ugly bastards!"
Seventeen pairs of yellow eyes turned to look at me.
Seventeen goblins snarled and charged.
I activated Combat Sense. The world slowed—not as dramatically as Crimson Acceleration used to, but enough. Enough to see their attack patterns. Enough to predict their movements.
The first goblin lunged, blade aimed at my chest. I sidestepped, used its momentum to redirect it into the second goblin. They collided in a tangle of limbs and crude metal.
The third came from my left. Death Sight showed me the line—exposed ribs, badly healed fracture. I drove my blade into the weak point. The goblin's lung collapsed. It went down choking.
Four and five attacked in coordination, trying to flank me. I Void Stepped between them, appearing behind number four. Hamstring cut. It fell. Number five turned too slow. Blade through the eye socket. Dead.
This was the difference between a civilian and a Hunter. Not raw strength—though that helped. But knowledge. Experience. The understanding that combat wasn't about power, it was about efficiency.
Every movement had a purpose. Every strike hit a vital point. No wasted motion. No hesitation. Just the brutal calculus of survival distilled into muscle memory.
I was sixteen years old with the combat instincts of a veteran Hunter.
And these goblins never stood a chance.
The crowd was evacuating now, streaming toward the exits under security escort. Good. My distraction was working. The goblins were so focused on the immediate threat—me—that they'd stopped chasing the easy prey.
Twelve down. Five remaining in my vicinity. But more were coming through the Gate. This needed to end.
The Gate itself was the problem. As long as it remained open, monsters would keep pouring through. In the original timeline, high-rank Hunters could close Gates by destroying their cores from inside. But I couldn't do that. Not in this body. Not without revealing far more power than I could explain.
A goblin's club whistled toward my head. I ducked, felt the wind of its passage ruffle my hair. Counterattack—blade up through the ribs, angled toward the heart. The goblin's eyes went wide. It coughed blood and collapsed.
Four left.
A scream cut through the battle noise. Different from the others. Not fear—pain.
I turned and saw Kaito.
He was on the ground, bleeding from a gash across his shoulder. A goblin stood over him, weapon raised for the killing blow. Kaito was trying to crawl backward, but his injured arm wasn't cooperating.
No.
I'd watched Kaito die once. I wasn't watching it again.
Void Step. The distance collapsed. I appeared between Kaito and the goblin, blade already in motion. The goblin's crude sword came down. I deflected it, used the force to spin inside its guard. My blade found its throat.
The goblin gurgled and fell.
"You okay?" I asked, not taking my eyes off the remaining threats.
"I—yeah—how are you—" Kaito was staring at me like I'd grown a second head. "You just moved—you were over there—how—"
"Adrenaline does weird things. Can you stand?"
"I think so—"
"Then get to the exit. Now."
"But—"
"NOW, Kaito!"
He flinched at the command in my voice. The voice of someone used to giving orders in life-or-death situations. The voice of a guild leader, not a sixteen-year-old civilian.
But he moved. Scrambled to his feet and ran, clutching his injured shoulder.
Three goblins left near me. Another dozen near the Gate. And the Gate itself was pulsing faster now, getting ready to disgorge another wave.
I needed to close it. But how? I didn't have the mana reserves. Didn't have the skills. Didn't have—
The Awakening Stone.
My eyes snapped to the massive crystal in the center of the chamber. It was still pulsing with that soft blue light, completely untouched by the chaos around it. The goblins were avoiding it instinctively, like animals that knew not to approach something dangerous.
An idea formed. Insane. Desperate. Absolutely not guaranteed to work.
But I was out of better options.
The Awakening Stone could detect and activate latent abilities. It was essentially a massive concentration of the same energy that powered Gates. Different polarity, different function, but fundamentally the same type of energy.
If I could channel the Stone's energy into the Gate...
I Void Stepped toward the crystal, cutting down a goblin that tried to intercept me. My hand touched the Stone's surface—
Power.
Overwhelming, crushing, infinite power slammed into me like a tidal wave. This was energy on a scale I'd never experienced, not even at my S-Rank peak. This was the concentrated essence of whatever force had changed the world fifteen years ago.
And it was trying to rip me apart.
My body wasn't ready for this. Wasn't built for this. I could feel my cells screaming, my muscles tearing, my bones creaking under the strain.
But I held on.
I reached for that power, grabbed it with mental hands forged from desperation and stubbornness, and forced it to move. Not into me—I'd explode if I tried that. Into the Gate.
The energy resisted. It didn't want to go where I was directing it. But I'd spent ten years learning to control powers that shouldn't be controlled, to bend reality in ways it didn't want to bend.
I forced it.
The Awakening Stone's blue light flared bright enough to hurt, bright enough that everyone remaining in the chamber turned to look. Energy streamed from the crystal in a visible beam, crossing the space between the Stone and the Gate in an instant.
The Gate shrieked.
I didn't know energy constructs could make sounds, but this one did. A noise like metal being torn apart, like reality crying out in pain. The crimson-and-black portal began to collapse, folding in on itself.
The goblins still inside the chamber panicked. They could feel their connection to the Gate severing, cutting them off from whatever hellscape they called home. They ran toward the closing portal, desperate to return before it was too late.
Most didn't make it. The Gate collapsed with a sound like thunder, like a door slamming shut on the fingers of existence itself.
Silence fell.
I let go of the Awakening Stone and stumbled backward. My hands were smoking. Actually smoking, like I'd grabbed something hot enough to burn. My vision swam. My legs felt like jelly.
A notification flashed:
[CORRUPTION WARNING]
Unauthorized power channeling detected.
Corruption increase: +8%
Total Corruption: 28%
Note: You have crossed the first threshold. Physical changes beginning. Mental alterations possible.
Twenty-eight percent. I'd burned through the predicted twenty from combat and added eight more from that insane stunt with the Stone.
Nearly a third of the way to losing my humanity, and I'd only been back for one day.
Worth it, I told myself, watching as the remaining goblins were eliminated by security personnel. Worth it to save these lives.
I hoped I still believed that when the corruption started taking real hold.
The chamber was a mess. Bodies—both goblin and human. Blood on the pristine white floors. Chunks of wall scattered like confetti. And three hundred terrified teenagers, most of whom had evacuated but some of whom had stayed to watch me fight.
They were staring at me now. All of them. Security included.
I'd saved them. But I'd also shown them something impossible.
A civilian teenager with combat skills that rivaled trained Hunters. Speed and precision that shouldn't exist in an unawakened body.
And I'd closed a Gate using the Awakening Stone in a way nobody had ever seen before.
So much for staying under the radar.
The Assessment official—the stern woman who'd been giving instructions before everything went to hell—approached me slowly. She looked shaken but professional.
"You," she said. "What's your name?"
"Ryu Takahashi." No point lying. They had my registration.
"How did you do that? You're unawakened. That kind of combat ability, that speed, that Gate closure technique—that's impossible for a civilian."
I didn't have a good answer. Couldn't tell her the truth. Couldn't lie well enough to satisfy her.
So I said the only thing I could think of.
"I don't know. Adrenaline? Survival instinct? It all happened so fast, I just... moved."
It was the weakest excuse I'd ever given, and from her expression, she knew it.
But before she could press further, another notification appeared:
[EMERGENCY QUEST COMPLETE]
Quest: First Deviation
Status: SUCCESS
Results:
Gate closed Civilians saved: 286 Casualties prevented: 203 Security personnel saved: 12
Rewards:
Skill Point x3 [Title Earned: "First Responder"] [Trait Unlocked: "Selfless Protector" - Corruption accumulation reduced by 3% when protecting civilians] Special Reward: [Early Awakening Triggered]
Note: Your actions have created a significant timeline deviation. The butterfly effect is now in motion. Future events may no longer align with your knowledge.
Warning: You have drawn attention.
Early Awakening Triggered?
Before I could process what that meant, the Awakening Stone pulsed again.
Not the violent surge from before. This was gentler. Deliberate. Like it was responding to my earlier contact, finishing something I'd started without meaning to.
Blue light engulfed me.
And deep inside my chest, I felt something break open. Like a dam giving way. Like a door I didn't know existed swinging wide.
Power flooded through me. Real power. Mana flowing into reserves that had been empty since my regression. The Void System activating fully, no longer limited by my unawakened state.
My body was changing. Cells restructuring. Muscles reinforcing. Bones strengthening. The weak shell I'd been trapped in since waking up in this timeline was being remade from the inside out.
I was awakening.
But not as an S-Rank. The Void System was controlling the output, keeping it constrained. Appearing weaker than I really was.
The light faded. I stood there, breathing hard, feeling mana course through my veins for the first time in this new life.
A monitor above the Awakening Stone flickered to life, displaying my assessment:
AWAKENING COMPLETE
Name: Ryu Takahashi
Rank: C
Class: Shadow Walker (Void-Aspect) - RARE
Primary Attributes: Agility, Stealth, Spatial Manipulation
Note: Unusual readings detected. Recommend advanced testing.
C-Rank. Not weak enough to be ignored, but not strong enough to draw major attention. A compromise between my true power and the cover I'd been trying to maintain.
The Assessment official stared at the monitor, then at me.
"C-Rank," she said slowly. "With that kind of combat performance. That's... unusual."
"Is it good?" I asked, playing the confused teenager even though I knew exactly what it meant.
"It's very good." She was still watching me with suspicion, but also with something else. Interest? Concern? "Most awakenings are F or E-Rank. C-Rank puts you in the top five percent. And your class—Shadow Walker with Void-aspect—that's extremely rare. I've never seen that combination before."
Because it didn't exist in the original timeline. The Void System was creating a plausible cover identity, something that explained my abilities without revealing the truth.
"What happens now?" I asked.
"Now?" The official pulled out a tablet, already typing notes. "Now you'll be contacted by guilds. Multiple guilds. A C-Rank awakening with a rare class—you're going to be very popular very quickly."
That was what I'd been afraid of.
The chamber was being evacuated now. Medical personnel were arriving to treat the wounded. Investigation teams were setting up equipment to study the Gate manifestation.
And everyone was looking at me.
The boy who'd fought goblins before awakening. The boy who'd closed a Gate using methods nobody understood. The boy who'd saved hundreds of lives.
I'd wanted to be invisible.
Instead, I'd made myself impossible to ignore.
As I was escorted out for medical evaluation, I caught a glimpse of Kaito being treated for his shoulder wound. Our eyes met across the chaos.
He mouthed two words: "Thank you."
I nodded. Couldn't bring myself to respond properly. Because I'd saved him today, but I'd also changed the timeline in ways I couldn't predict.
The butterfly effect had teeth.
And it had just taken its first bite out of reality.
[Day 2 of 3,657 Complete]
[Corruption: 28%]
[Lives Saved: 286]
[Lives Lost: 14]
[Timeline Deviation: SIGNIFICANT]
[The game has changed, Void Sovereign.]
[Are you ready for the consequences?]
[END OF CHAPTER 3: AWAKENING 2.0]