David woke up in a sweat—he had forgotten to turn on the air conditioning again. Being from the northern states, he wasn’t used to the Texas heat…
For a fraction of a second, before memory, before thought, before fear, his mind supplied the same tired conclusion it always did.
Reset.
He lay there, staring upward, waiting for himself to get fully awake. Instead, the world was gone.
There was no ceiling.
No walls.
No light.
Only text.
White system glyphs floated in absolute darkness, sharp and impossibly close, as if burned directly onto the inside of his skull.
CONGRATULATIONS.
EXAMINER TERMINATED.
NURSERY 2127: CLEARED.
David’s breath hitched.
He squeezed his eyes shut.
Opened them.
Nothing changed.
The text remained. The darkness remained.
“Oh no,” he whispered, voice cracking. “No, no, no—don’t do this to me.”
He sat up too fast, heart hammering against his ribs.
“I went blind?” His hands came up, waving uselessly in front of his face. “That’s it? I kill a goddamn space squid with a nuclear missile and now I go blind?”
The system didn’t answer.
His breathing turned shallow. For the first time in countless loops, real fear crept in—what if I won't regain my vision and it’s permanent!?
“That wasn’t the deal,” he muttered. “You fix me. You always fix me.”
He blinked.
Once.
Twice.
The darkness thinned, like fog burned away by a rising sun. Shapes bled back into existence—the outline of his bedroom, the familiar ceiling, the half-open closet door.
David exhaled so hard it almost hurt.
“…Asshole,” he said weakly, to the universe at large.
He lay back down for a moment, staring at the ceiling, letting his pulse slow. Then his eyes slid back to the notification, still patiently waiting.
REWARD AVAILABLE.
PLEASE CONFIRM.
David swallowed and mentally tapped the invisible button.
“Okay,” he said. “Show me what you’ve got.”
The air in his living room folded in on itself.
Space warped and a vertical slit of light tore open near the couch, and then formed an uneven sphere. The portal was not visible through and looked like a small galaxy.
ENTER PORTAL TO PROCEED.
David stared at it.
Then he laughed.
“Yeah, no,” he said, swinging his legs off the bed. “I’m not walking into a glowing hole five seconds after waking up.”
The portal waited.
David stood, stretched, and rubbed his face.
“Let me guess,” he continued, heading toward the hallway. “New rules, new hell, no instruction manual.”
Silence.
He grabbed his jacket.
“I’m not unprepared anymore,” he said. “But I’m also not stupid.”
Passing the portal without another glance, David went about the motions he’d repeated more times than he could count—fixing the reactor, getting the weapons and programming the robots.
David spent the entire time repairing the reactor with his nerves stretched tight, waiting for the inevitable.
Every cycle before this, the monsters came like clockwork.
First the monster hounds.
This time… nothing.
Stolen story; please report.
His hands worked automatically, tightening bolts, rerouting cables, while his mind counted seconds that stubbornly refused to turn into danger. Each distant sound made his shoulders tense. Each shadow felt like a prelude.
But the attack never came.
“Huh,” David muttered to the empty room. “This is… boring.”
The realization felt wrong. Unnatural.
On the bright side, nothing interrupted him. No evasive maneuvers, no emergency overcharges, no frantic multitasking between combat and repairs. The reactor came online smoothly.
On the downside…
No monsters meant no crystals.
No crystals meant no easy mana recharge.
David wiped sweat from his brow and leaned back. His instincts kept screaming that something should be attacking him right now. The fact that nothing was felt more unsettling than a fight.
Once the reactor was stable, he brought the robots back online, issuing short, efficient commands. They dispersed around the city, methodically collecting weapons, ammunition, and anything useful he found in all of his iteration.
“Alright,” David said quietly, climbing back into his vehicle. “Next problem.”
He pointed the car toward the military base. “The rocket has proven its effectiveness and I'm not going to leave it here.”
As David drove toward the military base, an unease crept in before he could put it into words. The road was the same. The fences were the same. Even the wind felt familiar. And yet—something was wrong.
He slowed down.
Above the base, in the place where the rocket had met the monster, the sky itself was broken.
A vast crack hung across the air like a wound that refused to heal. It looked as if reality had been struck too hard and split open, jagged edges frozen in place. The light around it bent strangely, as though the world was afraid to look directly at the damage.
David pressed the brake.
The car rolled to a stop on the empty road. His hands stayed on the steering wheel, knuckles tightening as a familiar, hard-earned instinct whispered at the back of his mind.
This is bad.
He stared at the crack for several seconds, then a few more. No system messages appeared. No warnings. No comforting prompts explaining what he was seeing.
David exhaled slowly.
“Yeah… no,” he muttered.
After a moment of thought, he turned the wheel and eased the car around, driving back the way he’d come.
Soon David reached the office.
He didn’t linger. Instead, he tapped into the office servers and started digging through archived maps and commercial databases. Specialty stores. Scientific equipment. Anything that was inside the dome. It took a few minutes, but eventually a result surfaced.
"Found you," he muttered.
The drive was short.
David broke in and grabbed a Geiger counter from the shelf.
He went outside and the moment he switched it on…
Click. Click-click. Click-click-click.
The sound escalated rapidly into a harsh, angry crackle.
David froze.
"…Right," he exhaled. "That answers that."
He turned the device off, then on again. Same result. Not a glitch.
“So the system doesn’t rewind time,” he said quietly. “It rebuilds everything. Over and over. Including me.”
“But radiation…” He glanced at the sky. “Yeah. That stuff doesn’t reset so easily, does it?”
David slipped the Geiger counter under his arm and headed back to the car.
Staying inside the dome suddenly felt like a very bad idea.
The bunker doors slid open and…
The robot stepped inside, holding a Geiger counter.
The device crackled sharply.
David had decided long ago not to test his luck by approaching the epicenter himself.
Outside, the readings hovered around 3.6 roentgen. Not great. Not terrible. Inside the bunker, the numbers dipped lower, mercifully so.
His body was far tougher than it had any right to be thanks to the System, but even superhuman health had limits. He wasn’t eager to discover where radiation drew the line.
Using the readings, he began mapping the terrain, marking the radiation “hotspots” with meticulous care. Once he had a layout of the danger zones, he advanced himself.
From a safe distance of about seven hundred meters, he remotely opened the rocket silo’s heavy doors using one of his robots and began the delicate task of extracting the missile using his [Law of Steel].
It didn’t go smoothly. Half of the missile stubbornly remained inside, still anchored to its launch clamps, and the part he had managed to lift—warhead and all—was so heavy that the pickup truck he had positioned to carry it immediately groaned and collapsed under the load.
David muttered to himself, irritated. “I always find a way to complicate things.”
Not one to be deterred, he used the [Law of Steel] to attach himself to the missile, floated home on it, and dropped it into the backyard as gently as he could.
With his main weapon safely stored in the backyard, David returned to the portal.
He couldn’t risk stepping through it and having it close behind him. Instead, he sent a scout robot first.
It approached the shimmering, swirling light, stepped in and… the signal was gone.
“Huh… Wi-Fi doesn’t pass through portals,” he muttered.
Well, he thought, maybe an emergency routine would work—if the robot lost signal, it would return automatically.
He programmed what to do upon signal being lost and sent a second robot. It stepped into the portal… and the same thing happened. Nothing.
David rubbed his temples. “Maybe… tie a cable to it?” An idea started to take shape.
He measured the distance for just enough rope to reach the portal, plus an extra meter, then drove to the nearest shop for a sturdy cable. Back home, he fastened one end to a tree outside and the other to the robot.
With a steady hand, he sent it toward the portal. The rope unwound smoothly until it went taut after the robot disappeared.
After a few tense moments, David began pulling the robot back. It emerged from the portal, dust-covered but otherwise unharmed.
Next, he checked the recording from the robot.
On the footage, two robots stood silently in a small forest clearing just beneath the portal. They waited patiently as David hauled the third scout upward.
The portal hovered a few meters above the ground. No way around it—he would need a ladder.
David realized that if the rope had held, he could run Ethernet through the portal as well. Grinning at the idea, he carefully lowered a small router on the cable, and immediately gained network access to the two robots waiting on the other side. Problem solved—or at least mostly.
He sent the ladder down next, securing it carefully in position beneath the hovering portal.
After that he connected to one of the robots on the other side and began surveying the scene.
The forest stretched around him, bathed in a warm orange glow. Grass, too, was an unnatural shade of amber. Odd, David thought. It looked more like summer than autumn. And he could have sworn pine needles didn’t turn orange by October.
But those were minor details. For now, the priority was practical: set up camp, haul in the essentials, and make sure everything he might need was within reach. Plans first, questions later.
