The blinking cursor of the AR terminal froze.
Jae-Won stared at it, hand trembling slightly, not from fear—but from something deeper. Something older. The echo of a memory he couldn't place. Serin's voice had shaken loose a crack in his mental defenses, and now, her face lingered like a glitch in time itself.
Who was she… really?
"I've seen you die before," Serin had said. And not in metaphor. She'd meant it literally.
Jae-Won sat alone now in the abandoned surveillance room of Sub-Level 9, the others checking the corridor ahead. He needed a moment.
He closed his eyes—and the memory came rushing in.
A fragmented vision: the smell of scorched circuits, the clash of steel, and a girl standing over him, blood on her hands, her eyes glowing violet like a storm caught in a loop. Her name escaped him, but her voice didn't. "I'll fix this. I swear."
His eyes flew open.
Serin.
Not just a new recruit. Not just a glitchy anomaly in this shattered world.
A remnant from a past timeline.
"She time-jumped," Jae-Won muttered, eyes narrowing. "Just like me."
The realization struck like a lightning bolt. Until now, he'd believed he was alone—the only one hurled backward into the past by that catastrophic betrayal. But Serin had remembered things she shouldn't. Knew things about him no one in this timeline could.
And if she was here, then maybe… the timeline wasn't stable. Maybe others remembered, too.
Footsteps echoed from the hallway—measured, deliberate. Serin stepped in, her expression unreadable.
"You're remembering, aren't you?" she asked, quiet but firm.
"I don't know what I'm remembering," Jae-Won replied. "But it's starting to make sense. You've done this before."
She nodded, arms crossed. "Not like you. My glitch is unstable. I bleed through timelines—I remember fragments, not whole loops. But you… you're a full reset. That makes you dangerous."
"Dangerous to who?"
"To everyone who thinks this world's fate is sealed."
A silence passed. The hum of old machines buzzed between them like static. Jae-Won studied her—calculating, wary, intrigued.
"I need to know what happened. Why we looped. Who killed me before."
Serin hesitated. "We were part of something bigger. An elite strike group called The Reset Core. Designed to prevent catastrophic collapses of time-broken zones. We had powers. Each one unique. Yours was the core—glitch manipulation. Limited, at first. But it evolved. Too far."
Jae-Won's eyes hardened. "And they turned on me."
"They were afraid of you."
"And you?"
"I tried to protect you. Died for it. I woke up here—months before the loop started. I've been trying to find you ever since."
A chill crept into the air. The idea that someone else had been searching across timelines for him… It both comforted and terrified him.
"But if I've looped completely, why am I only just remembering now?"
Serin stepped forward. "Your glitch resets everything—including your mind. But stress, emotion, pain—those things crack the shell. The more you fight, the more you feel, the more you'll remember."
And suddenly, Jae-Won understood why the betrayal had felt like fire through his skull. Why the rage had been so potent. It wasn't just anger—it was history bleeding through time.
"We have enemies," Serin said. "Ones who remember, too. And they don't want the timeline to change."
"Then they've already lost," Jae-Won said coldly, standing up. "Because this time—I remember enough to win."
Far above them, alarms flared again. The facility was shifting—new security layers activating.
"We've got incoming," Serin said, pulling her weapon from her belt.
Jae-Won didn't hesitate. He summoned the glitch. Time wavered around his fingertips like smoke caught in reverse.
"We move together," he said. "No more dying alone."
And they ran—two fractured memories in motion, carving a new future from the ruins of forgotten timelines.