Cheat In Apocalypse

Five

Most people know the feeling of a dream where they fall from an impossible height. Darkness swallows everything, the ground rushes up to meet them, and yet it never arrives. The drop stretches on and on until, without warning, they finally hit bottom.

Ray dreamed of something similar, though his version twisted the familiar pattern. He was not falling at all. Instead, he was rising. He drifted upward through a sky swallowed by endless dark. His body would not respond, but his eyes moved freely as he stared into the vast emptiness around him.

It felt as if his physical form was gone. Only awareness remained, floating upward while the world below grew smaller.

The ascent grew faster. Airless. Weightless. In the distance, he noticed a faint white speck flickering against the black, a tiny star fighting to stay visible. As he drew closer, it swelled in size, expanding with alarming speed until his rushing body collided with it.

A sharp cry tore out of him.

"Argh!"

Ray snapped awake, gasping for breath. Tears blurred his vision. Sweat soaked his chest and back as though he had been dragged out of a fever. The crinkling sound of cheap plastic echoed around him, scraping at his ears until his head throbbed.

"Great. My ears are killing me," he groaned.

When his sight finally steadied, he glanced around the room and froze. Every detail felt wrong, yet painfully familiar.

"This looks like the place I lived in three years ago. Before the Day of Awakening. How am I here? Why does everything look exactly the same after all this time? And wasn't this whole complex destroyed by monsters?" His thoughts tumbled over one another, his confusion sharpening into disbelief.

"How am I even alive? Did those Gifteds manage to kill the red Abyss Gate monsters and save me? But if they saved me, why am I not in a hospital? And where are my injuries?"

Fragments of memory surfaced. He recalled the moment the tentacled monster reached him, the awful crack of bones breaking, the searing pain that had spread through his entire body. A healing potion never would have helped anyway. Without magical affinity, consumable remedies did nothing for him. They never activated.

Something felt off. Deeply off.

"Everything is different," he whispered, a knot of unease forming in his stomach.

The floor beneath him trembled slightly. Objects in the cramped apartment rattled with a soft vibration, but Ray remained calm. After surviving the brutality of a red Abyss Gate breaking open, this gentle shake did not scare him. It was the familiarity of it that sent a strange wave of nostalgia crashing into him.

"This does not make sense," he murmured, brows drawing together as a thought he did not want to believe crept into his mind.

He tried to shake it away.

"Status," he said aloud, waiting for the familiar interface to appear.

Nothing.

His pulse quickened.

"This cannot be right. Something is very wrong."

He stood too quickly and winced as a sharp ache flared in his chest, a pain he remembered all too well. That old weakness had returned. He staggered to the wall and grabbed the calendar. A clock ticked softly beside it.

When he saw the date, everything inside him went cold.

He had gone back in time.

Three years. Cleanly, precisely.

An hour before the system first descended on Earth.

"How could this happen? Even with everything unbelievable that the system and the towers produced, nothing ever involved time travel or regression," Ray muttered. His shock deepened as he struggled to process the possibility.

He would know. For years he had worked for the organization that handled everything related to Gifteds, tower exploration, system updates, dungeon analysis, and monster patterns. He had been part of the team responsible for documenting strange system-related phenomena. If time manipulation were possible, he would have seen records of it.

"Maybe this is not regression at all. Maybe..." He paused, trying to steady himself. "Maybe everything from the Day of Awakening to the red Abyss Gate incident was a dream."

Even as he said it, he felt the idea crumble.

"No. That cannot be right. If it was a dream, then how do I explain the weather? The unstable conditions before the Day of Awakening are happening again." He walked to the window, rubbing a hand over the glass streaked with dirt and dust.

Outside, the sky hovered between extremes. One moment, scorching heat pulsed through the atmosphere. The next, heavy rain fell in sheets while sharp winds sliced between the buildings.

"This is definitely the day. Somehow, it is real. How is something like this possible?" Ray rubbed his chin, trying to piece together the impossible.

"Does this mean I am the only person who knows what is about to happen?" He crossed his arms tightly, grappling with the value of knowledge only he possessed.

"In my previous life, I could not level as quickly as others because I had no talent. I awakened nothing on the Day of Awakening that helped me fight. But there were achievements I could have earned to compensate for that. The achievement system offered rewards that made up for a lack of innate ability."

He remembered the frustration vividly. Even with achievements available, he had been too weak physically to earn them. His sick body held him back before he even attempted anything.

As he stood there now, memories from years of working in the Association resurfaced. Classified files. Hidden records. Restricted access. Only low-level Gifteds were allowed into the data department because they were easier to control. Ray had sorted through more documents than he ever counted.

He could recall almost everything about the days following the system’s arrival. Those first weeks were burned into his memory by trauma and sleepless nights.

"If this is real, then I need to survive this time. I need to cure my illness. And to do that, I need to overcome my lack of talent. The first step is to earn the four beginner achievements."

His gaze drifted to the clock again.

In the life he remembered, he had been standing in front of his office when the first dungeon break released chaos on the streets. This time, he refused to simply wait for disaster to hit.

"I was on my way to the office. I remember that clearly. A few minutes after arriving, the system appeared," he said to himself as he pulled out the small stash of money he had saved for painkillers. The bills totaled eight hundred dollars. All he had.

He put on a half-sleeve T-shirt and a pair of track pants that had not seen proper washing in a week.

"It would be pointless to waste the money on medicine when the system will make it irrelevant soon. It will be better spent on tools. I need things that will help me kill low-level monsters."

He grabbed his backpack, hurried to the door, and stepped outside without bothering to lock it.

On the porch, he searched through old boxes and piles of random junk.

"Here it is," he said softly, lifting a small rat trap that held a trembling live rat inside.

With that secured, he hurried down the street and made his way to a nearby supermarket.

Inside, he chose his items with care. A chef knife. A Nakiri knife. A cleaver. A carving knife. A butcher knife. Several water bottles. And finally, an axe. The cashier eyed him with suspicion, thinking the worst, but said nothing as Ray paid and packed everything into his bag.

From there, Ray visited a plant shop. He purchased a small flytrap sapling sealed inside a transparent bottle.

Holding the bottle tight against his chest, he took a breath, shifted the weight of his backpack, and began running toward his office, pushing through the familiar pain in his lungs.