In the next instant for David—and after weeks of frozen silence in real time—the world lurched awake.

  “—HAHAHA!” David’s laugh tore out of his throat, echoing across the rooftop. The searing beam of lightning he had unleashed guttered out as his mana reserves bled dry. The last panther shuddered, its body collapsing in near-disintegrated state.

  For a second he felt some kind of law in the air around him, but he didn’t have the strength to figure it out.

  The sound of gunfire still rattled faintly from distant corners of the complex, robots exchanging fire with the endless wave of monsters below. But for David, the immediate danger was over—or at least, so he desperately told himself.

  He slumped deeper into the mound of crystal cores beneath him, chest heaving with ragged breaths. His hands shook as he pressed one against his leg, trying to massage away the fire gnawing through his injured shin. Pain pulsed with every throb of his heart.

  “Just… hold it together,” he muttered under his breath, eyes half-lidded, the manic edge of his laughter fading into exhausted silence. The crystals glimmered faintly around him, cold and inert.

  In front of David, a message flickered into existence. He blinked, confused—he hadn’t done anything special to warrant a system prompt. What now? A new ability? [Massage], maybe, he thought grimly, glancing at the leg he was still kneading with his hand.

  But then his focus locked onto the glowing text:

  [An Examiner has been assigned]

  "Examiner?" David muttered aloud. "What the hell does that mean?" His thoughts started racing. Those panthers… had they just been minibosses? If that was true, then what came next?

  The spiral of questions was broken by a new sound: a strange crackling, faint at first but quickly growing louder. A harsh light bled into the rooftop from the far side of the building, painting the shadows in jagged, electric streaks.

  David clenched his teeth and tried to get up. He avoided putting weight on one of his legs, every movement spiking pain through his body. Even with [Pain Resistance], the sensation was sharp enough to make his vision blur. Still, he forced himself upright—wobbling, unsteady, but standing. Something was coming, and he needed to be ready.

  The thing that flew up to roof level from behind the wall opposite was beyond comprehension. Hideous, alien, wrong. This was the examiner? Why in the hells did it need so many tentacles? And—David’s brain stuttered—how could a floating crystal even have teeth?

  The questions spun in his head, numbing him with disbelief. For a moment he forgot the pain in his leg, forgot the battlefield around him. He just gawked. That moment was all the creature needed. The crystalline mass rose smoothly into the air, tentacles writhing with a silent menace, and drifted upward until it hovered at the height of the rooftop. Then it moved toward him.

  Thought returned in a rush. David’s pulse spiked, and he scrambled mentally, frantically sucking mana from the pile of monster-cores beneath him. His lungs heaved as he crushed crystals in his hands, his body devouring the energy.

  The creature’s shadow passed over him. A tentacle lashed downward, reaching.

  David’s hand snapped forward, his voice cracking with fury.

  “Take this!”

  The overcharged plasma-lightning roared from his palms, a brilliant beam that lit up the night sky. It struck the “examiner’s” barrier—and for one fierce heartbeat, he thought it might work. The shield flared under the impact, a web of light blooming across its surface.

  Then his stomach sank. The barrier didn’t weaken. It grew brighter. The damn thing was feeding off his attack.

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  “Oh, you’ve got to be kidding me—” David managed before the last of his mana burned out of him in a rush, his strength vanishing.

  The crystal’s tentacle whipped through the glow, smashing across his face. The blow crushed him into the rooftop with bone-shaking force, the world bursting into white pain as his body carved a crater into the concrete.

  Darkness pressed at the edges of his vision. And above him, the examiner loomed closer.

  David woke up drenched in sweat, the familiar ceiling of his apartment above him, the weight of another loop pressing down like a heavy blanket. He threw his arms behind his head and stared into nothing, trying to untangle the mess of thoughts from his last run.

  “Examiner, huh?” he muttered under his breath. “So that thing—the crystal abomination with too many teeth and way too many tentacles—that was chosen to test me? Does that mean it belongs to the same race as whatever shoved me into this time loop? Or was it something else entirely?”

  The questions wouldn’t stop. Why didn’t it look like any of the monsters he’d fought before? How could the system even assign something like that to him? He’d thought he was still running “ahead of the curve”, keeping just enough steps forward to adapt—but the examiner had been in a different league altogether. If the system was pulling things like that from somewhere… Who exactly was it searching for on Earth? Were there other candidates, people who might pass their exam, hidden monsters living among us?

  So many questions. Zero answers.

  David exhaled sharply, rubbing his face. Sitting here and overthinking wouldn’t solve anything. The loop reset for a reason. If he was alive, then he had another chance. Time to move.

  He swung himself off the bed, planted his feet on the floor, and with a grim smile whispered, “Alright. Eldritch looking thing. You don’t have a chance.”

  A new iteration began, but it felt entirely different this time. David moved with the ease of someone who had already learned the rules of this cruel game. The first stop was simple yet necessary: weapons. He made his way to the police station and the armory, slipping through familiar corridors with the quiet confidence of a man who had done this countless times. In a smooth motion, he tucked a Desert Eagle into the newly acquired holster. He hadn't used it much in previous iteration, but he liked the weight, the feel of it, the way it promised control.

  Next came the reactor. The hum of the machinery was almost soothing.

  Then, attention turned to the robots—not the usual waiter models he used to guard the complex, but the humanoid ones. Programming them from scratch might have been tedious for anyone else, but for David, it was almost meditative. It didn’t feel like coding at all; it felt like reciting a poem memorized long ago, every sequence of commands falling naturally into place. He already knew what needed to be done.

  David leaned back on his chair. The memory of the transformer’s surge still tingled along his nerves, “sparking” an idea.. He chuckled softly to himself, thinking.

  He moved to the kitchen. One glance at the wall outlet, and a mischievous glint flickered in his eyes.

  First, he needed to test his theory. He tore apart an outlet in the kitchen and—(author’s note: children, and not only children, never, ever try this at home, even if you think you have magical powers; call an electrician or a psychiatrist first)—he pressed his fingers against the exposed wires. “Ouch, that stings,” he muttered, smirking. Undeterred, he began weaving miniature arcs of lightning in the air with his hands. When he managed to generate two arcs at once, the breakers tripped. Glancing at his mana reserve, he noted with satisfaction that less than a single percent had been used.

  Alright, he thought, I’ll call that experiment a success, let’s begin building a proper setup, codename “Death to the examiner”

  Two days of tinkering and a couple of charred laptops later, David stood on the office roof with a coil of copper wire wrapped around his ankle. The other end ran into the reactor’s power grid; a laptop at his knee served as a clumsy switch. He wore one rubber glove.

  He pressed the key and quickly took off and threw away the glove. A low, mechanical hum climbed through the wire and settled in his leg like a living thing. A spark flickered at the cuff of his sock. Heat licked through the fabric. He cursed, thought briefly that he should have remembered the sock, and—because he had the Law of Fire—tensed and let the burn concentrate into a manageable sting. The sock smoldered and then went up; he yanked off his boot before the flame also took it.

  At the roof’s edge he planted his (now bare) feet and pictured the examiner-monster floating on the distant horizon. He drew breath and launched lightning from his hands. The pins-and-needles in his leg vanished as it drained into his spell; arcs poured from his palms, faster and cleaner than before. "UNLIMITED POWER," He shouted and checked his mana, confirming his expectations - it was almost not spent from his spell.

  His idea to defeat the last monster was simple: the examiner had absorbed his Overcharge. But what if he could push it further — a ceaseless torrent of lightning, more than it could handle? Maybe it would fracture under the strain. Classic Saturday-morning cartoon tactic, he thought. Let’s see if it works.