The skies were torn apart by fire. Explosions echoed through the shattered 304th fighting district, where metal towers crumbled like paper and the ground bled with molten steel. In the center of the chaos, I fought — face-to-face with a demon from the stars.
It was enormous, its body a monstrous fusion of flesh and machinery. Horns curved like jagged blades, eyes burning with otherworldly hatred. I could barely hold my ground, my breaths ragged, my weapon overheating from repeated use. But I couldn't back down.
I wasn't fighting for myself anymore.
Clutched in my blood-slicked hand was a glowing stone — a device older than time itself. They said it could rewrite the laws of existence, bend time to its will. It pulsed in sync with my heartbeat, as if it knew the moment was now or never.
But just as I raised it toward the sky, the demon lunged.
Its claw sliced through me like I was nothing.
I felt the warmth leave my body. My limbs gave out. The stone slipped from my fingers and shattered into fragments of glowing ash.
And then…
I died.
Or… at least, that's what I believed.
But fate had other plans.
---
The moment my soul slipped from its shell, the stone reacted — not by saving me, but by scanning timelines, frantically searching for another version of my existence. It tore through dimensions, flipping through histories like pages in a book until it found one:
My eighteen-year-old self.
Alive. Innocent. Still untouched by war and death.
The stone did what it was created to do.
It rewound my essence, fused my memories into that younger version, and transferred it — not back to my old world…
…but into an entirely new one.
Everything went black.