The stage lights switched from blue to harsh, aggressive red. The announcer's voice boomed, thick with manufactured urgency: "Tie game, $6-6$! Overtime begins now! This is the decider! Null Set versus Vanguard!"
Aris did not hear the crowd or the announcer. The temporal distortion was now a constant, flickering static around his field of vision. The tiny burn mark on his desk felt searingly hot beneath his fingertip.
His body was operating on pure, desperate adrenaline. He had forced the maximum $6.0$-second Rewind, and the universe was demanding payment.
### The Overtime Round
Vanguard, rattled by Aris's bizarre play, adopted their ultimate safety protocol: a slow, meticulous sweep of the map, eliminating every angle before advancing. They were playing with fear, a variable Aris could usually exploit.
"Let them push B-site," Aris instructed, his voice strained. "We stack A-site. Absolute silence. No movement."
Liam, now too terrified to question the team's unpredictable star, complied. **Null Set** huddled in the dark corners of the A-site, waiting.
The waiting was agony for Aris. He was fighting a war on two fronts: the match, and his own unraveling mind. The boundary between timelines was dissolving. He looked at the wall, and for a half-second, he saw the faint, spectral outline of a hole—a wall that might have been destroyed in a timeline he had erased.
"They're coming for A-site," Aris whispered at the $0:45$ mark, his eyes scanning the impossible overlap of past and present. "Five seconds to engagement."
He had no time to stage a failure. He had no time for a planned Rewind. He had to trust his raw ability, which was now inextricably linked to the decaying Anomaly.
### The Zero-Point
Vanguard breached the A-site. The ensuing firefight was pure chaos.
Aris executed two flawless kills, but in the blur of overlapping vision, he made a fatal mistake: he aimed at the *spectral image* of an enemy who was $3.0$ seconds late, not the living enemy in front of him.
**ARCHON ELIMINATED PARADOX.**
Aris's screen went black, but the defeat did not register. The trigger—the absolute, personal failure—activated the Rewind, not as a controlled jump, but as a **violent, uncontrolled cascade.**
The world didn't snap back; it **shattered**.
The sound was a horrific, grinding screech. Aris saw $6.0$ seconds of the past, then $4.0$ seconds, then $10.0$ seconds. He was looping through tiny fragments of the round he just played, seeing every movement, every kill, every pixel of the battle in rapid, nauseating succession.
He was pinned in a **temporal singularity**, reliving the moment of his death over and over, his brain unable to stabilize the data.
*Archon aiming—Archon firing—Archon aiming—Archon firing...*
His physical body convulsed in the gaming chair. He heard his teammates screaming his name through the comms, but their voices were garbled, stretched, and layered over themselves.
### The Final Correction
In the midst of the temporal storm, one piece of data remained constant: **The Burn Mark.**
Aris grabbed the scorching, physical scar on his desk. The pain anchored him. He forced his consciousness to ignore the endless digital loops and focus on the **real-world failure** he had already corrected.
He found the single, pure thread of the **present** reality and ripped himself free of the loop.
He slammed back into the booth. The round timer was **frozen** at the moment of his death.
But the world was wrong. The monitor was cracked. The light over his head was flashing red and green simultaneously. He was back in the game, alive, but his opponent, **Archon**, was also frozen—standing stock-still, mid-fire, exactly where he was when Aris died. The $6.0$-second loop had not ended; it had simply **paused local reality.**
Aris was the only thing moving.
He looked at Archon's frozen avatar, its rifle aimed at his chest. The victory condition was simple: fire the rifle. End the round.
But Aris stared at the enemy's face—the digital avatar of a genuine, passionate competitor—frozen in time by Aris's own cold ambition. He saw the pure, unadulterated human emotion on the faces of his own frozen teammates.
He had achieved absolute victory. He had the perfect shot. He had the ultimate perfection.
And in that moment of absolute, sterile control, the **Code Heart** calculated a new, highly inefficient data set: **Empathy.**
Aris slowly lowered his rifle. He stepped out of Archon's aim. He walked toward the edge of the virtual arena and looked at the crowd, frozen in mid-cheer.
Then, he reached out and **disabled his own avatar.**
### Epilogue
The temporal stability collapsed. Reality surged forward.
The screens flashed **PARADOX ELIMINATED.**
Archon's bullet, which had been frozen mid-air, slammed into the now-empty space. The round ended.
**VANGUARD WINS THE SERIES, 7-6.**
Aris Kaelen's screen flashed **DEFEAT**.
The stadium erupted in a confused, chaotic celebration. The casters were speechless. Aris had simply… surrendered.
He removed his headset, the silence a welcome relief. The physical burn on the desk had vanished. The flickering stopped. He was exhausted, defeated, and completely, agonizingly **human** for the first time.
When Liam rushed over, tears of frustration in his eyes, he didn't shout. "Aris... why? We had it! Why did you quit?"
Aris looked at his hand, then at his defeated team. The price of the ultimate cheat was the ultimate isolation. He chose to lose the game to save his reality.
"The integrity of the competition," Aris stated, the coldness back in his voice, but now laced with a strange, weary honesty. "It was compromised. I chose **error-correction**."
He knew the Pro League was over for him. His time had run out. He had achieved the ultimate perfection—the ultimate cheat—and walked away with the ultimate defeat. But as he stood up, accepting the total, humiliating loss, he felt a strange, new sensation. It was a faint, warm ache in his chest—the feeling of a life finally starting, imperfectly, on a single, linear timeline.
He was no longer a Paradox. He was just Aris. And the game was finally over.